Listen…and understand! The Frogette is out there. She can’t be bargained with! She can’t be reasoned with! She doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And she absolutely will not stop, EVER, until the blog is hers!

— Kvatch Reese

5 years ago yesterday, a frustrated amphibian—who hadn’t even really developed his online persona yet—wrote the first of what would eventually become almost 1500 posts for a blog called Blognonymous. Then, when that venue seemed to have worn itself out, that same amphibian switched to a new blog, this blog, and did another 300 or so posts along with a talented crew of malcontents.

Many things have changed since then. My writing has improved…a lot. I’ve made a bit of money from ads, I’ve developed a following on Flicker and in the Blogsphere for my political paste-ups, I started a movement, I’ve made some friends…and a whole bunch-o-enemies. The Frogette and I pulled up our lily-pad and took it on the road, which BTW we’re still doing having traveled 12,000 miles (in three countries) since last October. Unfortunately, what has not changed is the corrosive nature of our government and and the evil, greedy, corporate drones who laughingly refer to themselves as “public servants”. We know who runs this country, and if we were at all unsure before the Obama Administration took over from those idiot crooks in Bu$hCo, we can be sure now since our new president has proven himself to be just as much a fluffer for Goldman Sachs as his predecessor was.

I’d like to believe that in my own small way I pushed back against the powers that be, maybe bloodied a few noses, pissed off some important people, but really…that’s just bullshit posturing and wishful thinking. I could go on shouting at the wall, but the plain fact is that I’m getting older and need to focus on other stuff…like survival…like protecting what little the Frogette and I have managed to scrape together. And perhaps, this is just what those f*ckers in power want: A populace so afraid, so harried and overwrought that they can’t do sh*t about the wholesale looting of what’s left of the US middle-class.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I surrender. 5 years is enough, and I’m through. Perhaps I’ll blog again. Perhaps not. I guess we’ll see, but I can’t leave this stage, even temporarily, without mentioning a few bloggers who have touched my life:

The Ragebot Crew: The Station Agent, Mr_Blog, Cartledge, and most especially my dear Frogette!

All the bloggers that were there in the beginning, and who gave me comments and clicks in the early days: The Comandante, Blogenfreude, Fred, Peacechick Mary, Neil Shakespeare, Windspike, Enigma, Polishifter, Lily Branford, Snave, Lew Scannon, and Rex Kramer

The Barbarians: Tom Hilton, Deb, Generik, and everyone else in San Francisco.

All in all, I don’t regret a single word written nor the time I spent doing the writing. It was a great experience, and I hope that it had some value. I appreciate every comment, every click, every voice, and every single person who stopped by.

Thanks…and farewell.

I am the first one to say that this industry does not want or need bailouts. But this crisis is not the result of running our business badly. … Governments should help carriers recover the cost of this disruption.

— IATA Chief, Giovanni Bisignani

When airlines step up and help their passengers recover the costs they’ve incurred due to this “disruption”, then and only then do airlines get to start whining about a government bailout!

— Kvatch

Though it’s pretty safe to say that the violence plaguing Mexico hasn’t spilled over the border quite yet, Texans are preparing themselves as if the second coming of Santa Anna is nigh.

In response to concerns recently raised at a Fort Hancock town meeting Arvin West, the sheriff of Hudspeth County, advised the local citizens to get a gun. He then followed up with a quintessentially Texan observation:

You farmers, I’m telling you right now, arm yourselves… As they say the old story is, it’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

Echos of Judge Roy Bean (“The Law West of the Pecos”).

The Pope embodies moral truths that aren’t accepted, and the shortcomings and errors of priests are being used as weapons against the church… It’s not a bishop’s fault if one of his priests is stained by grave wrongdoing. And certainly the pontiff is not responsible.

— Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals

There’s only one thing to say to such nonsense coming from the mouths of religious leaders who should really know better… WRONG-F*CKING-ANSWER!!!

Let’s get one thing absolutely clear, the Catholic Church is not a society. It is not a democracy. It is a theological order—a top-down, hierarchically structured dictatorship, where the man at the top has absolute authority over every single member of the clergy, from Cardinal Sodano to the lowest monk. And as such, his so-called “Holiness” has the power to judge, punish, and/or dismiss anyone who preys upon the church’s members. Is Benedict responsible for every instance of sexual abuse? No, but his authority over the clergy makes him absolutely responsible for every case where a pedophile priest could have been stopped…and wasn’t and every case where the church covered up the problem.

So… The more the Catholic hierarchy rallies around Benedict, the more we hear about how attacks on the pope are an orchestrated hate campaign against the church, the more we come to the realization that perhaps the Catholic Church deserves to be hated. If these hypocrites won’t take responsibility, they deserve to reap what they have sown.

Washington (f-A-ke. P.) —

Today in Washington, the Obama Administration announced a new initiative designed to reform the energy industry and fundamentally change US energy policy:

We’re going to call this critical policy change (B)ig (OIL) Refor(M) or “BOIL’M” for short and it will do for ‘transportation poor’ Americans what our administration’s recent health-care initiative did for the millions of uninsured in this great country.

President Obama

A centerpiece of BOIL’M is the so-called ‘play-or-pay’ requirement mandating that all Americans buy a minimum amount of gasoline per month or pay a set of government fines that will increase yearly through 2020. Americans who don’t own cars will not be exempt from ‘play-or-pay’ on the assumption that it will encourage them to “do the right thing”. The administration has stated that these mandates are necessary to ensure that, “…we use all the new oil we’re going to get from drilling the crap out of the Gulf and Atlantic“.

‘Senator Helmet Hair’, the former cheerleader and news anchor—a senator whose career has been so undistinguished, she has not managed to produce a single major bill in 17 years—Big Oil’s fluffer, whose campaigns float along on a sea of industry money, and a politician who famously stated back in 1993, when term limits were fashionable, that she would serve no more than 12 years in the Senate…now repeats herself.

After an embarrassing loss to Rick Perry in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Hutchison has announced that, rather than retire from the Senate as she had promised, she’ll stay on till 2012. Gee like we couldn’t have seen that coming a mile away.

In a move that will be remembered for its stunning level of cynical political calculation, the Obama administration has stated that it will restart oil exploration and drilling in the eastern Gulf, in the mid-Atlantic, and off of Alaska.  For those of you who may have forgotten, Bu$hCo did exactly the same thing on the cusp of the 2004 election except back then it was California and the Pacific Northwest that were going to be “re-opened” to oil exploration, ending almost 30 years of California having the final say over drilling off its coasts.

Now, setting aside issues of whether or not the US needs more oil, and focusing solely on the politics of this policy move, consider the states most affected by Bush III’s decision:  Alaska, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.  All are states that Obama can probably afford to lose in the next election.  In fact, with the exception of Florida, there’s little chance he’d carry any of them.  So why not tell the citizens of these states to “go f*ck themselves”.  It’s not like you’ll lose any electors over it, right?

Way to go “Third”!  Yes we can…screw the Red States, further f*ck up the environment, retard America’s movement toward a more energy-efficient, more sustainable society, and scratch the Big Oil’s back…all at the same time!

You know…it’s time we stopped screwing around when it comes to sentencing in murder cases that involve cars and trucks. It boils down to this: If you’re stupid enough, arrogant enough, or irresponsible enough to use a multi-ton vehicle as a weapon, then when you’re convicted you should spend the rest of your life in jail…PERIOD! No appeal, no extenuating circumstances, go straight the clink and rot there for the rest of your f*cking life!

Take the case of Monica Mercado, recently given a 32 years to life sentence in Compton, California for running down a pregnant rival for her boyfriend’s affections. This bitch will probably be out of prison and back in an SUV in 15 or 16 years—not even enough time to serve as a decent deterrent.

Frankly, if it were up to me, I’d take ever case of vehicular manslaughter and prosecute it as murder first, letting the circumstances as presented at trial dictate whether or not the charge should be reduced. That would deal with two big problems we have with how cagers treat pedestrians: 1) The fact that most people exercise no more restraint—no more responsibility—with their cars than they would if they were on foot or even on a bike; 2) The fact that most states have ludicrous and complex sets of rules about when the use of a car as a weapon constitutes murder and when it does not. Plain fact is, if every pedestrian/car encounter that results in a death is treated as a potential murder, cagers will have to think twice about how they drive.

…and an overburdened network?

Make you pay $150.00 for a range extender that also shifts your cellular data traffic onto the Internet. Way to go AT&T! Great solution for your inability to estimate capacity and being completely inept when it comes to building out infrastructure.