Cleaned and scrubbed

The yard stud worked yesterday for six hours power washing the house to get ready for Divo48. It looks FABULOUS on the patio, and the fence between the garage and the house looks like new!

While waiting for him, and while waiting for my internet connection to come back up (he got the cable connection wet,) I read a bunch of blogs that I think you should be aware of .. just in case you're feeling like being better informed.

Here's the list:

This one describes the administration's war on reports that reflect anything contrary to the political message devised by the administration.

This one sums up George Will's paid shilling for Wal-Mart in the press and on punditry shows.

This one was something that made big waves in my circle this weekend - describing growing up gay in a fundamentalist family as being like a hate crime.

Then, we have the empty tradition of celebrating Labor Day after thirty years of eliminating labor as a political force, and fifteen years of cramming down worker pay and benefits.

This one is kind of surreal - the guy who rescued the WTC flag from the 9/11 wreckage was denied medical benefits and compensation, because he "couldn't prove he was there," and then uncovers the severe health risks that were hidden by the EPA, FEMA and the City of New York and is then raided by a SWAT team for his effort to reveal the truth.

Here we have a cool website by someone who's more in love with the Phaeton than I am; it's a virtual love fest of why it's probably the world's coolest car, ever.

Lastly, Guy showed me a great article about how you have to think yourself thin before weight loss will truly work for you.

By the time I went to bed (0200) my little brain manager was shutting systems down. I slept through the alarm, and got up .. late .. and barely made it out the door for church, which was AWESOME again.

Had lunch with a client, drove home, fiddled, talked to Chuck on IM some more, then Curtis from the Days of Yore came by with a friend of his and his little (and I mean LITTLE) brother. They trimmed up the sheetrock hole in the dining room ceiling, and sanded down the texture that needs to be blended, hung the outside garage light (which is FABULOUS) and his friend installed the five gang switch plate cover that's been annoying me for months. And, they fixed an under-counter lamp that had burned out.

All good stuff.

Just to make sure that you're all keeping on your toes, I found THREE MORE ARTICLES that you just simply must have a look at -

If you're one of the 46 Million Americans (not Canuckistanians, but USers) who have no health insurance, then you may find this article interesting about how to present the concept of universal health care in a more appealing way.

He's baaa-aaa-aack!! It's another Contract with America! Newt Gingrich (whose re-emergence in the world proves Nixon right that the American voting public has the memory of a hamster and the attention span of a gerbil) has for your conservative pleasure that New (!) and improved (!) ways to make America better, brighter and safer! These methods include stripping the Supreme Court, and, well, hell - all of the courts, of the obligation to oversee the operation of the executive, putting all power squarely in the hands of white Christian people, and other fun, amazol-a ideas.

Just to keep things light, you may have been wondering what tricks the Administration has up their sleeves to keep and secure power in the mid-terms in just a few weeks .. well, it seems that information is burbling up to the top. No, it's not the collapse of gas prices. It's .. attacking IRAN!

Here, re-posted, is a synopsis of the Time magazine article that reveals that .. we're going to war AGAIN! WHOO HOO!

The first message was routine enough: A "Prepare to Deploy" order sent through naval communications channels to a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two mine hunters. The orders didn't actually command the ships out of port; they just said to be ready to move by Oct. 1. But inside the Navy those messages generated more buzz than usual last week when a second request, from the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), asked for fresh eyes on long-standing U.S. plans to blockade two Iranian oil ports on the Persian Gulf. The CNO had asked for a rundown on how a blockade of those strategic targets might work. When he didn't like the analysis he received, he ordered his troops to work the lash up once again.

What's going on? The two orders offered tantalizing clues. There are only a few places in the world where minesweepers top the list of U.S. naval requirements. And every sailor, petroleum engineer and hedge-fund manager knows the name of the most important: the Strait of Hormuz, the 20-mile-wide bottleneck in the Persian Gulf through which roughly 40% of the world's oil needs to pass each day. Coupled with the CNO's request for a blockade review, a deployment of minesweepers to the west coast of Iran would seem to suggest that a much discussed—but until now largely theoretical—prospect has become real: that the U.S. may be preparing for war with Iran.

Does anyone remember the post I made about eight months ago discussing Iran's powerful and deadly Russian made anti-ship missles that can kill a Nimitz class aircraft carrier with one hit?