Monday Morning Smile

High diving giraffes.

It was 20 Years ago Today

A U.S. citizen blew up a Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

From the link above: Carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, causing at least an estimated $652 million worth of damage.

An estimated 646 people were inside the building when the bomb exploded. By the end of the day, 14 adults and 6 children were confirmed dead, and over 100 injured. The toll eventually reached 168 confirmed dead, not including an unmatched leg that could have belonged to an unidentified 169th victim. Most of the deaths resulted from the collapse of the building, rather than the bomb blast itself. Those killed included 163 who were in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, one person in the Athenian Building, one woman in a parking lot across the street, a man and woman in the Oklahoma Water Resources building, and a rescue worker struck on the head by debris.

The victims, including three pregnant women, ranged in age from 3 months to 73 years. Of the dead, 99 worked for the federal government. Eight of the victims were federal law enforcement agents; four from the United States Secret Service, two from the United States Customs Service, one from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, and one from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nineteen of the victims were children, 15 of whom were in the America's Kids Day Care Center. The bodies of the 168 victims were identified at a temporary morgue set up at the scene. A team of 24 identified the victims using full-body X-rays, dental examinations, fingerprinting, blood tests, and DNA testing. More than 680 people were injured. The majority of the injuries were abrasions, severe burns, and bone fractures.

McVeigh later justified his killing of children in the bombing: "I didn't define the rules of engagement in this conflict. The rules, if not written down, are defined by the aggressor. It was brutal, no holds barred. Women and kids were killed at and Ruby Ridge. You put back in [the government's] faces exactly what they're giving out.

Never Forget.

Never Forget

April 20th is a date I cannot forget, for two reasons:

In 1999 , two students murdered 12 people at Columbine High School and injured 21 others

It's one of those incidents where we will always remember where we were when we heard about it. The sadness that it brings to our hearts: all those innocents killed or hurt for no reason. The shootings that followed Columbine .

In 2010 11 humans and countless denizens of the Gulf of Mexico are gone or severely affected.

Five years later, oil is still washing up on shore,, bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles are still being affected,an oil chemical from the spill has been shown to cause irregular heartbeats in the embryos of bluefin and yellowfin tuna and thousands of sea birds have died and those that survived show abnormalities.

The lives of people living on the Gulf Coast are forever changed.

We'll never forget the photos of oiled birds (I cannot bring myself to post pictures, it's just too tragic), the smell of the oil burning in the Gulf (yes, we could smell it when the winds were right), our beaches unaccessible after the spill, finding tar balls on the beaches when they opened again. So many bad memories.

These are two April 20th memories I'll never forget.

Definition of Bitch

Every day we watch newscasters, weathermen and sports commentators on TV and wonder what it would be like if you could meet them in real life?
True, we've seen some that are down to earth, some that are downright crazy and some that are self-centered and rude.


Here's a video of Britt McHenry, soon to be ex-ESPN reporter, berating a cashier at a towing company in true bitch fashion.

I mean look at this photo; it screams phony

Color Blind

Monday Morning Smile

How Many?????

At about 9:30 a.m., North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, who is white, pulled Walter Scott over near the auto store for allegedly driving with a broken tail light. Within minutes, a routine traffic stop had escalated into a pursuit. “Chasing on foot down Craig Street,” Slager called into his radio. “Black male, green shirt, blue pants.”





Scott, who is black, had a family court warrant out for his arrest. He owed back child support, the family’s lawyer, Chris Stewart, told The Washington Post. That may have been on his mind, his brother Anthony Scott told the New York Times. And so he allegedly fled and was killed by an officer that morning.

As you can see in the video, Scott was shot SEVEN TIMES. Now I'm no cop, but I would think that if Office Slager wanted to stop Scott, couldn't he just shoot him in the legs?

This abuse is just the tip of the iceberg. My thanks to whomever is responsible for putting together a wiki of police brutality by state. This list is not complete, and has the ability for readers to add brutality that they know of to the list. The address of the website is: at this website.

Monday Morning Smile

To New Orleans

matthew mcConaughey recently visited New Orleans and left this love letter to her:


Dear New Orleans
"First of all what a big, beautiful mess it is. Cheers to that.

I said this years ago. A friend of mine asked what is New Orleans like? I said New Orleans is like a giant flashing yellow light. Proceed with caution ... but proceed. It is not an overly ambitious place, and that's being complimentary. It has a great identity, and, therefore, it doesn't look outside itself for intrigue, evolution or labels of progress. People here are proud of their home. You're proud of your Crescent City. You know your flavor. You know it's your very own. And if people want to come taste it with you, you welcome them with open arms. But you do not solicit.

"The hours trickle by here. Tuesday and Saturday are more similar here than any other place I've ever been. The seasons slide into one another without any status quo. Yes, it is the Big Easy, home of the shortest hangover on the planet, where libation can greet you on Monday morning with the same smile as it did on Saturday night.

"OK, (it's) home of the front porch. I don't know if y'all recognize this: it's home of the front porch. Not the back porch. Everyone everywhere else has back porches. The back porch is something different. The front porch is an engineering feat that lends itself to the sense of so much community around here and fellowship. Private property and lines of demarcation all land across borders. Here you relax facing the street. You do not retreat into the seclusion and privacy of your backyard. No, you engage with the goings-on of the world that is in front of you. It's a great engineering feat that you've pulled off here. It really is.

"What's my alarm here? My alarm here is church bells, sirens and a slow-moving, $8-an-hour carpenter nailing windowpanes two doors down. That's a good alarm. Do not honk your horn in a traffic jam here.

"You do not sweat the misdemeanors, and, since everybody's getting away with something, the rest of us just want to be on the side of who's getting away with it. And if you CAN get away with it, good for you. You love to gamble. Rules are made to be broken, so do not preach about abiding. And, hey, if (they) don't get away with it, you're probably gonna let them slide anyway.

"Where else do the dead rest eye to eye with the living? New Orleans is a right-brained city. Do not come to town wearing your morals on your sleeve unless you want to get your arm burned. Yes, it's oil and vinegar, but somehow they mix. The poverty, the humidity, they both gracefully suppress all the rationale. And if you're crossing a one-way street, it is best to look both ways.

"Mother Nature rules around here. We all know that. (She's) the natural law queen who reigns supreme. She's a science to the animals, yet she's an overbearing and inconsiderate b---- to us bipedal humans. But here you forgive her and you forgive her quickly. You have to. You know any disdain for her wrath is going to reap more wrath, more bad luck, more voodoo and more karma, so you roll with it, ... actually you meander rather slowly forward taking it in stride and never sweating the details."

"See, the art is in the overgrowth here. Mother Nature wears the crown around here. Her royalty rules. And unlike in England, she has both influence AND power. And, like the most authentic European cities, you guys don't use vacuum cleaners to give structure to anything, you use brooms. You use rakes to manicure, because everything here lends it soft edges.

"Where it falls is often where it lays, the swerve around the pothole, the duck beneath the branch, the poverty, the murder rate, all of it is just how it is and how it came to be. Just like a good gumbo, the medley is in the mix.

"Thank you, New Orleans; thank you, Louisiana. Cheers."

More Wacko Politicians

Arkansas Senator Tom Cottonheld a town hall meeting in his district in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The meeting was organized primarily to discuss the Affordable Care Act, most specifically the mishaps with the websites governing the health insurance exchanges.

At one point, a constituent submitted a question mentioning that her insurance plan had been cancelled and she refuses to utilize the exchanges that Obama, who she calls a liar, set up.

Rather than telling her that she has an obligation for her own health to seek insurance, Cotton goaded her on, telling her that he himself wouldn’t use the exchange website because “Russian mobsters” may steal his identity.


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Ted Cruz:



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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (via Daily Kos)

As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed the so-called "right to work" bill on March 9, making Wisconsin the twenty-fifth right-to-work state in the country, labor advocates braced themselves for the stream of anti-worker bills that were almost certain to follow. Many assumed the first target would be Wisconsin's 1930s prevailing wage laws, which require that workers on public works projects be paid the established going rate for their labor, rather than allowing contractors to try to outbid each other by lowering workers' wages. Few, however, expected the legislative cluster bomb that is currently being referred to committee by a pair of Republicans: a bill to repeal the weekend.
(snip)

A similar version of this bill was introduced last year at the urging of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state's largest business organization. But the legislature was not able to vote on it before the end of the session. However, Representative Born's office was "optimistic" of the bill's chances in this session.

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Monday Smile