Rock the shantytown

Live from Shantytown in Springfield on West 6th street. One of my favorite places. One of the five best places to have a beer in Jacksonville.

The Rick takes aim at The Starlite

He was also taking aim at his playing partner, the young lady pool player.

For those still checking the blogspot

For those of you fine souls who still find this page, please visit the new and inproved The Sunshine Empire. We have all the great politics, music, sports, random rants, and cussing you want. What more do you want? What more, do you NEED? So check out The Sunshine Empire free standing blog for all of your asistimtary needs.

Behind the bar at Starlite

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Thesunshineempire.com

Starting today www.thesunshineempire.com is up and running. We'll be posting some material from this blog and some new material in the next few days. We'll be getting many things that you are used to in this space going on the mothership. Thank you and remember, the future is tomorrow.

www.thesunshineempire.com

We are pleased to announce that we are moving on up. Today the URL www.thesunshineempire.com has been registered and hosting has been set up to move our blog to it's own freestanding site. We'll continue to provide political commentary, humor and music for those who have an open, and disturbed mind. We'll be updating you on when to make the switch and we hope you will follow us there. We also would like to thank the good people at Google and Blogger for our time here. We will continue to write here, and will move all of our content to the new site. Thank you and we look forward to the dawn of a new age for The Sunshine Empire.

Kim Jong Il and the Oninon News Network

In The Know: Kim Jong-Il's Approval Rating Plummets to 120%

God Bless America

"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

-Hunter S. Thompson

The still unanswered question of the WMD

I was scanning The Huffington Post and I noticed a very small headline that caught my eye. "Four years later, the search for WMD ends." But is it the rantings of an insane liberal to ask the question, why did they get off on this one. This may be the central reason that we are all barreling headlong into irrelevancy as a republic. The government of this nation told us that we needed to invade a sovereign nation because they had mountains, "tons and tons" of chemical and biological weapons that they were going to send halfway around the world in attack aircraft no more complicated than Cessnas to rain death and hellfire on us. We as a nation, with the exception of the Sunshine Empire editorial board, willingly trusted our leaders and committed ourselves to this endeavor, and lo and behold there were no weapons.

It was not so much that this happened, it was that our questions where met with, "fuck, our bad, but whatever WE WON!" Our reaction as a nation was to pay more attention to the winner of American Idol than we did why we caused such a fucking cluster fuck in the most dangerous part of the world. But most who blindly protect the President in this regard most often say that the whole world thought that he had weapons, and that is a bald faced lie. The Germans gave every bit of information stating that they really did not want to give any validity to what they had found. Their double agent, "curveball" has since said everything he told interrogators was a lie. Good that we committed the full force of the United States Armed forces on the word of a high strung ex patriot Arab. If William Jefferson Clinton had lead us into a war promising to find something and it never appeared he would be in a bunker fearing for his life right now. Yet nary a peep out of those same people. They are just being held down by the big bad liberal media. Liberal media just means anything that is not currently or will not probably be owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Many conservatives also state that the WMD where never the main reason for the invasion. The HELL they were not. Why would Condi Rice be talking about a mushroom cloud as proof? The media has basically said, "that's old news," and the Administration has said, "just move on." But why is it so out of line to still ask, did George W. Bush lie to the American public? And if lying to a grand jury about a blow job is impeachable, they why is lying about a war not? And if lying to a grand jury about a blow job was worth millions and a year and a half of investigation, then why is lying about a war not?

Late in the day

How times change

"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PPs.'"

-Kurt Vonnegut

Lewis Black talks of bias in the media

Another debate, again, for the first time, for the last time

I watched the Democratic Candidates forum on PBS this evening and I have to say some things became clear. Bill Richardson's campaign staff must be a bunch of Republicans trying to screw him, because the man has good positions and a resume that puts them all to shame. Yet in these debates, and especially tonight, he looked lost and confused. Christopher Dodd continues to be brilliant at saying nothing at all. I've read this week that John Edwards is taking a turn that will take on right wing sources with direct attacks. This is unheard of in a party that is just discovering it has balls. The right wing media is aghast at this, because they grew up during the age of Bush. Dennis turned a question about education into an anti-Iraq speech, and Mike Gravel is still crazy. I will say Gravel does do this valuable thing, he constantly reminds the candidates and the crowd that they are not all blameless for all the insanity of the last six years. These things are really going to drive people to gouge their eyes out by November. The sad thing is I'll be watching.

A Side Note From Dutch

I may be the only one on this one, but I've got a little rant that I have to express. I'm getting a little tired of being directed to do obvious shit in public. I don't carry cash as a practice, mainly on the advice of my accountant. But I use my check card a great deal every day. After making a purchase of a Red Bull, or some cheddar Sun Chips, I go to the register and present my card. I indicate that I wish to pay debit, and as I reach for the PIN device I hear the attendant state, "now enter your PIN sir." I don't know why, but that aggravates the shit out of me. I go to the same gas station every morning and I have even developed a method to have my card back in my hand and begin entering the PIN on the device even before the words have left her mouth. If you don't know the deal with debit yet at this late stage, and you need to be prompted for that, you need to have all of your accounts liquidated and invested in a minor's checking account, a piggy bank, and some coloring books.

Grammer in this age

What is it about our society that we train our young in the ways of writing? These people grow to be lawyers and business owners. They write eloquently, but then open up an email message and then proceed to abandon about 95 percent of the training and experience in the English language. Some of us have decided even that punctuation is optional. One is supposed to assume where the breaks in thought are.

The Sunshine Empire '80's Retrospective: RHCP on Arsenio

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The Swamp Sleeps

On being right

"The worst tempered people I have ever met were those who knew that they were wrong."

-David Letterman

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