Midland Co. Sheriff got him a APC:

so he can take down West Texas badasses like this:

Simplistic, sure, but it still makes me want to vomit a little bit. We’re better than that.

Wait one — we were better than that. Well, at least nobody died, like the last time a church got took down in Texas. Probably thanks to the Texas Rangers being involved, and no thanks to Major General Sheriff APC of Midland By-God County.

And I can’t help but giggle at the idea of the Midland Sheriff signing the PO for a fooking Armored Personnel Carrier. Who green-lighted that boondoggledy pile of horseshit? I’m a Thin Blue Line kind of a guy, but that’s just pure stupid.

BACK-UPDATE: Hello, Q&O readers. Must be a slow day on the interwebs, but I’m never not thankful for traffic. So, long as you’re here — last meal, brisket or ribs? Bourbon or scotch with your iced tea? Potato salad or cole slaw?

There’s an mess of Ciccone Youth vids up on YouTube.

Here’s Macbeth:

Definitely not to everyone’s taste, but I’m still completely taken by Moore’s guitar work. This kinda stuff is probably gonna hit it big again in the next few years. Or it’s already re-hit it big, and is now passe. I always had the worst timing in the world.

Greatest get-your-ass-moving evar. I really think this shit works better without a stupid video, but show it to your rebellious kids to let them know that their indie cred has a foundation upon which it rests.

At what point are we allowed to call him a socialist?

He’s part of a long movement that has adopted some of the tools of socialism in an effort to make society better, with decidedly mixed results. [...]

Again, this is mostly, if not all, well-intentioned. [...]

Ideally, we’d be discussing the policy preferences of the candidates and their likely consequences rather than bandying about silly labels. But that’s not how the game is played.

Lookie here…if you ‘adopt[ed] some of the tools of the socialism’, you are simply a socialist. You can’t be a capitalist with a broad mind, or any other -ist…you are a socialist. These are absolutes. If they’re not, we got none, and we might as well skip the whole thing, and just straight into Idiocracy.

And never mind pointing out, unnecessarily, MOST unnecessarily, that they have had ‘decidely mixed results.’ ‘Decidedly mixed results’ is the nice way of saying ‘failure that cost a lot of people a lot of money.’ Well-intentioned or not, those random unnamed socialistic tools are a failure, and they’ve proven so, time after time after time. Refusing to call it such is just childishly political gamesmanship, which I get accused of next.

I’m personally not playing any kind of game with this. You Beltway types can sit around in your parlors and discuss policy preferences all damn day long. Me, I’m much more interested in passing on an American way of life that seems to slipping under the surface of policy preferences and good intentions and mixed results. I’ll be damned if I let a Marxist slide into the White House without raising my voice about it.

Via Instantman…

Nothing will turn you from go-go entrepreneur back into a harried salaryman quicker, than a few hours with Quickbooks.

Tonight, I’m eating the last of the discount $6/lb. porterhouse steaks from Sam’s. These were found on a Sunday morning with the “Reduced for Quick Sale” sticker on them. When I saw them, I felt like one of those women in a cartoon at a Macy’s shoe sale. I almost knocked down another old codger trying to get every single one of the leftover trays.

When I finally got my 9 steaks home (3 per tray, 3 trays at reduced price, only 1 tray got away from me), I lovingly placed them in Freezer Storage Ziplocs and salted them away for nights like tonight. Crikey, there’s just nothing better…even after three months of cold storage, these babies are stunningly delicious.

Bloody steak is a cure for what ails ye.

In a related foodie moment, I had an argument with a young man last night about the necessity for overpriced steakhouses. Yes, we can all cook as good as Ruth’s Chris, but sometimes you just want to sit there and let someone else do the cooking and the cleaning. I’m not talking weekly, or even monthly, but there are times when a steakhouse is the way to go, like your best pard’s 50th, or your daughter’s graduation. For me, it’s worth saving the pennies, just so I don’t have to watch the pennies, and so I can go enjoy a cigar after 16 oz of prime beef without having the goddamned Spurs blaring over me at 100 decibels.

That’s a problem around here. All they have is the Spurs, so they’ve never learned the necessity to living life at the slower pace of baseball. Baseball can teach us all a lot, I says.

This tracking update has been requested by:

Name: ‘not provided by requestor’
E-mail: ‘not provided by requestor’

Great…so one of the tens of distinct items I’ve ordered in the last two weeks is being shipped to me by somebody.

Well, at least I know it’s coming from San Jose…that narrows it down a whole dang lot.

Alan Sullivan:

It’s another piece of evidence for the pile indicating that something happened to the climate system after the climactic El Nino of 1998. Global warming has ended. Both the warming of the past and the cooling of the present are driven by natural forces that over-ride any trivial anthropogenic impact on climate. The Bush Administration should be laying out the evidence for the American people, not yielding to the warmists who would impose vast costs on everyone to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Does it make me elitist to say that they wouldn’t? Beats me…I just look around at all these assholes driving Priuses (mostly pretty fucking slowly), and I guess, No, they probably won’t. It’s a guess — prove me wrong, I’ll accept that.

Retracing steps and missteps of a dire search

Should probably be re-titled ‘…missteps of a dead search’.

I don’t mean to add humor to the story when I call this a bog-standard Keystone Kops routine. I don’t know where the problem is, so I can’t give you an answer, but I can tell you this…Denise Lee stood a better chance against Micheal King by arming herself than she did waiting for the cavalry to ride to the rescue.

Via Billy Beck…

Via JW…