{"id":17581,"date":"2015-10-13T14:34:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T21:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17581"},"modified":"2015-10-13T14:35:57","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T21:35:57","slug":"tuesday-bag-o-yaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17581","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Bag o’ Yaks"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a tweet<\/a> from China’s Xinhua News Agency, troops patrol the border area in Xinjiang Province, where elevations exceed 14,700 feet above sea level, astride\u00a0banthas.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

This reminded me of our trail scouting adventure Sunday morning, when Donna was forced\u00a0to dismount to negotiate a steep mountain pass at 2,600 feet above sea level. A bantha would have made short work of that crag, let me tell you.<\/p>\n

\"12080362_10153637318802346_5868418613360618269_o\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We were scouting trail for next Sunday’s Pedalfiles Bicycle Hash House Harriers<\/a>\u00a0ride, which will start and end in our neighborhood. Now that we have a trail for our friends, all that remains is to set up the logistics.<\/p>\n

Speaking of rides, the\u00a0next mini-gypsy\u00a0tour is\u00a0Death Valley,\u00a0second week of November. I’ll travel with a couple of Goldwing buddies\u00a0and\u00a0overnight in Lone Pine, California, and Lake Havasu, Arizona. I considered\u00a0peeling off for Las Vegas after Death Valley to spend a night with the kids, then riding home by myself the next day, but Donna and I are driving\u00a0up later in the month for\u00a0Thanksgiving, so I’ll\u00a0hang with the\u00a0hoodlums\u00a0this trip.<\/p>\n

No doubt\u00a0all right-thinking Americans will tune in\u00a0the Democratic presidential debate\u00a0tonight. We’ll be watching, if for no other reason than to see how the\u00a0candidates\u00a0hold up under questioning and attacks. I’m not betting\u00a0on Joe\u00a0Biden coming in, and will be surprised if he shows\u00a0up at the last minute tonight, but what do I know? I haven’t paid much attention to the news today. I think Joe will definitely\u00a0step in\u00a0if Hillary stumbles, but I don’t\u00a0expect her to do that.<\/p>\n

With apologies\u00a0to fellow travelers everywhere, Bernie ain’t doin’\u00a0it for me. What kind of socialism does he bring to the race that Hillary doesn’t? I’m assuming, of course, that by “socialism” we mean centrist\u00a0policy proposals, which is mostly what I hear Bernie saying. I think Hillary has staked out some positions to the left of Bernie, not that you can trust any of these birds to keep a campaign promise. But it comes down to this for me: Hillary can and probably will win;\u00a0Bernie can’t and won’t.<\/p>\n

There’s always the second season opener of Fargo<\/a><\/em>, taped last night to watch later. If the debate proves too tedious, I know what we’ll be watching instead.<\/p>\n

It should be obvious to everyone now that the\u00a0House Benghazi Committee\u00a0is a partisan sham<\/a>, created for the sole purpose of digging\u00a0up\u00a0dirt on Hillary Clinton, the only Democratic presidential candidate the Republicans truly fear. My question is this: why didn’t the\u00a0Democrats on the\u00a0committee\u00a0speak up sooner? Okay, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democratic member, has been sounding the alarm<\/a>, but what about the rest of them? And what about their boss, Nancy Pelosi?<\/p>\n

They\u00a0knew what was going on when Darrell\u00a0Issa chaired the first investigation. They knew what was going on with the second and current investigation, the one chaired by Trey\u00a0Gowdy. It’s well known they\u00a0didn’t want to be a party to\u00a0either witch hunt, but Nancy Pelosi ordered them to. Why didn’t Congressional Democrats\u00a0speak up sooner? Why did they wait for that idiot Kevin McCarthy to spill the beans<\/a>? Would they be speaking up today\u00a0if McCarthy hadn’t<\/em> spilled the beans?\u00a0I wonder. There’s some evil\u00a0going on here we haven’t even scraped the surface\u00a0of. And I say fuck the lot of them, Democratic and Republican congressmen alike. Except for Elijah Cummings.<\/p>\n

You know who I’m sorry for, though? Not Hillary Clinton, who has weathered worse attacks. No, I’m sorry for Bradley Podliska, the Army reserve officer and Benghazi committee staffer who\u00a0took his concerns about the partisan\u00a0nature of\u00a0the investigation to Congressman Gowdy. You can probably guess what happened when\u00a0he tried to change things in-house, going through proper channels. Right, Gowdy fired him. So now he’s going public<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maybe he never heard\u00a0what happened to Scott Ritter<\/a>. Ritter was\u00a0the former UN weapons inspector (and former Marine officer) who went public after Bush and Cheney ignored UN\u00a0reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Oh, brother, they got him good<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If I were Bradley Podliska, I’d be very careful who I chat with online, and I’d take an industrial demagnetizer to all my hard drives now, before law enforcement “discovers” child porn on them.\u00a0And then I’d hop on my bantha and head for the mountains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No doubt all right-thinking Americans will tune in the Democratic presidential debate tonight. We’ll be watching, if for no other reason than to see how the candidates hold up under questioning and attacks. I’m not betting on Joe Biden coming in, and will be surprised if he shows up at the last minute tonight, but what do I know? I haven’t paid much attention to the news today. I think Joe will definitely step in if Hillary stumbles, but I don’t expect her to do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,40,10,4,555,2,8],"tags":[1982,1980,1981,190,1983],"class_list":["post-17581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bicycling","category-critters","category-current-events","category-hash-house-harriers","category-local-color","category-personal","category-politics","tag-benghazi-investigation","tag-chinese-yak-troops","tag-democratic-debates","tag-hash-house-harriers-2","tag-retaliation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17581"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17594,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17581\/revisions\/17594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}