It Just Keeps Getting Better

Do you think they'll feature this story on a "Visit California" commercial?  A man was electrically shocked by a park ranger for walking his dogs off a leash and apparently, for failure to provide this ranger with the respect that she felt she was owed.  

I wish I could legally Taser people who bugged me and failed to show me respect.  You there, cutting in line:  ZAP!  Verizon:  ZAP!  Every human being at Wal-Mart last night:  ZAAAAAP!  (I'd make a joke about government officials I'd like to zap, but nobody seems to have a sense of humor anymore.) 

The Royal Presidency

What a buffoon.  The president participated in some sort of online forum and a woman asked a thoughtful question about the H1-B visa for bringing foreign workers to the US to do work when so many Americans -- including this woman's engineer husband -- are out of work.  And basically, the president's response boiled down to "get me your husband's resume".  Huh?  He really does think he's some kind of monarch handing out favors and patronages to his subjects.  It's totally bizarre.

Well, This is Embarrassing

A couple of visiting Brits were detained upon arrival at LAX and then ultimately denied entry to our lovely country and shipped backed home via Paris.  Their crime?  Joking on Twitter with a friend with the following message:  

"Free this week, for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America".

Too bad America doesn't seem to exist anymore.  The joke isn't even on us -- the joke is us.  Are these the kinds of leads that the Department of Homeland Security is tracking down?  Because I'm pretty sure there are actual terrorists still out there, and that our FBI and CIA were twiddling their thumbs in similar fashion to this in the years before 9/11.  What is wrong with us?  Someone should lose their job over this -- what a waste of time and resources.  What an unbelievable embarrassment. 

State of the Union 2012

Just realized what a blunder it was for the Bush administration to label our offensive against radical Islamic terrorists as the "War on Terror".  Of course Obama can't proclaim victory when he brings our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, no president could.  There is no end to a War on Terror.  It's like declaring war on evil.


He's still talking about 2008?  It's the 2012 State of the Union.  I know the last 4 years have seemed like one extremely loooooooooooong year because nothing has changed except to get just a little bit worse each day/week/month/year, like a frog being slowly boiled.


If this guy is touting GM as a success story, then it really is as bad as it seems.  "The American auto industry is back."  Yeah, sure buddy.


"We will do everything we can to help you succeed."  To my ears, that sounds vaguely threatening.  What was that Ronald Reagan said?

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." UPDATE:  Every state must require that students stay in school until they graduate or turn 18?  That means we really are wards of the state.  You are not your own person.  The state owns you. [Something funky is happening with this formatting, but I can't figure out how to stop it.  My apologies.  It bugs.]   UPDATE II:  Any person who serves in our military should be granted citizenship ASAP.  Why we don't already do that is a mystery.  The student issue is much murkier to me.   UPDATE III:  What about Keystone?!   I think he is full of natural gas. "Thousands of Americans have jobs because of [renewable energy]."  That sounds about right.  Thousands of Americans have jobs while millions are unemployed or underemployed. UPDATE IV:  How about you and your wife stop taking separate Air Force 1 flights everywhere?   "Send me a bill that creates these jobs."  Um, bills don't create jobs.  People do.  Seriously. "Nation-building at home."  That is a good line.  I wish he understood how that was done (see above). "Americans who play by the rules everyday."  That's getting harder and harder to do as government creates evermore rules.  UPDATE V:  Still talking about Bush!  It's 20-f***ing-12!  Too bad you were in office when the BP oiled spilled and you didn't do anything about it. We're not bailing you out ever again.  No, we'll just set up the system (as we did before -- and by "we" I mean the government at large, both Democrat and Republican) so that you get preferential treatment in the formulation of our regulations.  UPDATE VI:  Class warfare -- here we go!   Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate because he is primarily being taxed now on his investments, the money he earned to make those investments was already taxed at a higher rate.  People need to understand this. I can and do call it class warfare, sir.  Just because you're picking on millionaires and billionaires (which apparently, people making over $250k are) doesn't mean you're not preying on the politics of envy and penalizing people for their success.  Just because someone can pay something, doesn't mean they should be required to.  Where does that end?  A person making $250k is now a millionaire by Obama's standards, how long until they lower that again?  Like a slowly boiled frog ...  "Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress."  Now, that is good.  Get him that bill tomorrow. Now he's getting into stuff that bores me.  "Ask the Congress to grant me the authority ..."  I don't like much that grants anyone more authority. Let's all stop pretending that Abraham Lincoln is the father of the Republican party of today.  Things have changed so much and both political parties have changed their ideological stripes in the 100+ years since the Civil War that these statements are ridiculous.  We should all take note there have been few, if any, principles which tie our political parties together.  The political parties exist to maintain and grab power in our government.  Their ideology is to get elected.  America is not in decline.  America is not in decline.  If you wish it enough, it might come true.   "As long as I am president, I intend to keep it that way (as the most important country or some such)."  Please let us only have a year left.  Then what he says could be true. I'm only staying up to see Mitch Daniels give the rebuttal in the hope that he announces his candidacy for president.  I realize that I once wished for Rick Perry to get into the race and we know how that turned out.  I think when you're in battle you'd probably look out to where the enemy is, but I know as much about being in battle as President Obama does. UPDATE VII:  Was Hillary Clinton just reduced to "a woman who ran against [Obama] for president"?  She can't be pleased by that. I think he thought he was going to get applause lines after each "This nation is great ..."  But I bet everybody is sitting there thinking about how pissed Hillary is right now. Thank you and good night. PS.  Run, Mitch, run! PPS.  "A government who serves the people, not supervises them."  Just so.  Run, Mitch, run!  For the love of God, man.  Run.

Warren Buffett: Obama's Puppet(eer?)

Why do people think Warren Buffett is so altruistic and pure and only interested in helping his fellow Americans?  The man is interested in money -- that's it.  (And there's not necessarily anything wrong with that except that he's trying to pretend otherwise and too many people have fallen for it.)  

He opposes the repeal of the estate/death tax -- do you know why?  Because much of his fortune comes from life insurance companies.  Life insurance benefits aren't taxed, so it's in Buffett's best interest for our country to have an estate/death tax, so that people will funnel more money into life insurance so their beneficiaries can avoid taxes on their inheritances.

You know who is one of the few people to benefit from Obama's rejection of the Keystone pipeline permit?  Warren Buffett.  He's got a railroad out in those parts which will likely be used to haul Canada's new oil from the extraction site to their ports where it can be sent to China instead of to the US.  Funny how that all works out for him, isn't it?  

I thought it was difficult in 2008 to separate fact from fiction while I was reading Atlas Shrugged, but it's only getting harder and harder.  This is the type of crap that the Occupiers are allegedly protesting, but they're too stupid to articulate it and probably too stupid to even realize it.  This is how crony capitalism works and how it leaves out all but the few who have the right connections in Big Government and Big Business.  

My Hero

I think I have a new crush and his name is Rand Paul.  And he is not afraid of the motherf***in' TSA.  We could grind them to a halt if we all followed Sen. Paul's example.  Say no.  Do not submit.  I know it seems a little scary, but isn't it scarier (more scary?) that our civil rights are being so brazenly disregarded by our government? The fear we feel over demanding our rights be respected is real because our government has become almost tyrannical -- and in the limited instance of the TSA, I feel completely comfortable characterizing their behavior as tyranny.  See below -- that first definition there. 

What is the TSA's behavior if not arbitrary and/or unrestrained?  How can the molestation and humiliation of kindergarteners and nonagenarians be anything but arbitrary and devoid of restraint?

tyr·an·ny

  

noun, plural -nies.

1.

arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuseof authority.

2.

the government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler.

3.

a state ruled by a tyrant or absolute ruler.

4.

oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of anyruler.

5.

undue severity or harshness.

Not Something I Expected to Write About

Nevermind how this crossed my path on the internet, but instead focus your mind on why the US government has an official position on douching.  That's right.  At www.womenshealth.gov ("empowering womem to lead healthy lives!"), you can find a "Douching fact sheet" with all sorts of helpful information.  In this day and age when one can find countless websites devoted to all manner of things, why are we as taxpayers spending money for the government to provide information (on douching!) that we can easily get from other places?  Might their time and our money be better spent elsewhere?  

Interestingly, there's no counterpart Men's Health website provided by the government. Instead, "Men's Health" is relegated to a sub-section of the Women's Health website.  I guess men don't have to worry about their health.

Laws, Schmaws

I'm watching Fox News Sunday and Chris Wallace is questioning John Boehner on the "do-nothing" Congress and cited the fact that Congress only passed 80 laws in 2011 as evidence of their lack of action.  Thankfully, John Boehner made the completely valid point that the people don't necessarily want Congress to pass more laws.  There are plenty of laws already!  Amen, brother.

Can you imagine what they would come up with if there was some sort of quota for laws passed each year?  I judge Congress by how many laws they repeal each year.

Shocker

The TSA in Dallas missed a gun in a little old lady's handbag.  When I read the headline, I thought that their super-duper scanners had malfunctioned in some way and failed to detect the gun.  But no, the gun showed up on their screen, the scanner just took his (or her) sweet time in detaining the woman.  Ninety (90!) minutes, in fact.  And she was actually already on her plane and away from the gate.  

What purpose does the TSA serve?  I have said it before and will say it again, if we are relying on the fools at the TSA as our last line of defense against a 9/11-style attack, then we're toast.  The people who work for the TSA will do anything for a paycheck.  They strip search and molest their fellow citizens on the orders of some government bureaucrat, just so they can collect their paycheck.  They humiliate us and strip us of our 4th Amendment rights and it seems as though they kind of like it.  

If they had any honor, they would refuse.  And if we still had any honor or remembrance of the freedom and liberty we used to have, then we would refuse.  But we're sheep, so we stand in line, we put our makeup and our toiletries into government-approved bottles, we remove our tweezers and nail clippers and nail files from our suitcases, we take off our shoes and humbly shuffle along to either possible exposure to radiation or a violation of one of our most basic rights.  What a $%&*ing country!

Great! Now Where's the Rest?

Rand Paul has returned $500k to the treasury department.  The article states that this money comes from his operating budget and represents 16% of that budget.  Only 16 percent!  I did the math and that means that his budget as one senator is $3,125,000.  Ka-ching.  Assuming that each senator has an equal budget (and I'm not sure that's true because they seem to be real big on seniority and other perks in that body and Rand Paul is a newbie), that means that the senate has an operating budget of roughly $312,500,000.  Over 300 million dollars.  What the &%$# do they do with all that money?  Seriously.  And don't forget that's our money.  We earned it and they took it.

What a country!

Disturbing

This is a very sad and disturbing story about police misconduct and abuse that led to a man's death.  The district attorney, of course, decided not to press charges against the police officers involved.

Growing up, we're taught to respect the police and honor them for doing a dangerous job -- and probably a majority of officers are honorable men and women.  But they aren't superheroes and they aren't infallible.  They are human beings and are just as capable of cruelty and evil as the rest of us.  It doesn't help our society to put our police officers and other public servants up on a pedestal, safe from scrutiny and criticism and above the law.  When we create a protected class of citizens like that, then people who are prone to misdeeds and criminal behavior will seek -- and often succeed -- to be part of that protected class.  (Which, incidentally, is why I think the Catholic church had such an issue with pedophiles in its priesthood, but I digress.)

If our great experiment in democracy is going to work, then we the people must pay attention and scrutinize the behavior of those in power, whether they're police officers, city councilmen, congressmen,  or the president (among many others).  Democracy requires the responsibility and participation of the governed.

Back to the story at hand:  the cops involved should be charged with murder.

Compare and Contrast

I had a conversation with a dear friend recently -- a friend who is almost certainly more liberal than I am, but also probably more apolitical than anything else -- and she made an off-handed comment comparing the Occupy Wall Street crowd with the Tea Party as though they were cut from the same cloth.  Obviously, I personally hold the Tea Party in much higher esteem than I do the Occupy Wall Streeters just based on my politics.  But let's take a moment to compare (or rather, contrast) the behavior of these two groups and the ludicrousness of thinking they are anything alike.

In the Occupy movement, we have a man pooping on a police car, reports of assault (both regular and sexual), rape and attempted rape (and I believe this just covers the actual protest in NYC), there was also that incident of arson that I blogged about here, and finally the news this week of a baby being found alone in a tent at the Occupy DC protest.

For the Tea Party, we do have an alleged incident of protesters spitting at my congressman John Lewis and yelling racial slurs -- I don't think it happened, but others can and certainly do disagree (but in the age of near ubiquitous video by phones, it's telling that to date, no video has surfaced of this alleged incident).  There was some violence in Ft. Lauderdale when the ANSWER folks staged a counter-protest to the Tea Party and rallied their troops with the all-too-familiar charge that people who hold conservative beliefs must be racists.  A man named Kenneth Gladney was also beaten at a townhall meeting in St. Louis where many Tea Partiers had turned out to protest the healthcare act -- except that he was beaten up by union thugs, not by the Tea Partiers.  There were also general reports that those attending Tea Party protests picked up after themselves and left behind little trash, in contrast to the major cleanups needed for the Occupiers.

So, to recap:  comparing the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is like comparing apples and rotten apples.  Or comparing oranges and oranges that rape, assault and poop on other oranges.

What frightens me about my friend's comment is that for people who don't pay a lot of attention to these things -- but who still vote every four years -- the Tea Party and OWS are one and the same.  It's depressing.

What the ... ?

I flipped past this story on the news the other night and have only now understood what a magnificently horrible idea this was:  "Georgia School Math Assignment References Slavery, Beatings".  Who are the teachers that came up with this doozy?  Are these the kind of teachers we're supposed to revere and respect because they're so smart and noble?  Because these teachers are dumbasses -- plain and simple.  I doubt they're racists, just possibly too dumb to function in 21st century America.

“We’ve been working with human resources to determine what staff development is needed for the teachers and what actions may be warranted,” [District spokewoman Sloan] Roach said. 

Staff development?  I believe that ship has sailed.    

“If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

That's Frederick Douglass they're talking about.

Pardon Me, Homes

Microsoft patents its "Avoid Ghetto" feature for GPS systems.    Awesome.

Justice

Two stories in the news this week should give all lowlifes, punks and other criminals pause.

In Naples, FL we have a young man (a 14-year old boy, actually) who killed the bully who attacked him by stabbing him with a pocket knife 12 times.  The judge dismissed the case citing Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law which allows you to use deadly force to defend yourself against harm.  It's a sad story -- the bully was 16 years old and certainly wouldn't have been punished by death for the attack on his victim, but I can't say that I'm bothered by the message that if you seek to do harm to others, you are putting your own life in danger.  If this kid hadn't instigated the fight against his would-be victim, then he'd be alive today.

In Oklahoma, a woman successfully defended herself, her baby and her home against two intruders by blowing one of them away with a 12-gauge shotgun.  Well played, madam.  She called 911 for help and the operators seem to have done their job and helped her as best they could.  It took the cops over 20 minutes to get to her.  You know what they say:  when seconds count, the cops are only minutes away.   This story ends awesomely with the second intruder -- the one who got away that night -- being charged with first-degree murder of his fellow criminal because if a death results from the commission of a burglary, that's felony murder.  Tough luck.

Georgia in the News

Georgia has been in the news quite a bit lately for a wide range of stories.  Where to begin?


How about with state Rep. Judy Manning?  Quoted in my hometown newspaper, she says the following:

“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. ..."

For the record, I personally find the Mormon religion to be strange.  I say that with the recognition that many people find the Christian religion to be strange -- along with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and pretty much any religion to which one is not an adherent.  I also don't think it's necessarily bigoted to vote for a candidate based on his or her religion.  The presidency is an important job and if your faith is important to you, I'd imagine you'd want someone of similar beliefs in the Oval Office.  That being said, I would not have characterized my reservations about Mitt Romney's religion so carelessly in a newspaper article.  "It's better than a Muslim" -- that is quite a tag line for Mitt Romney's campaign and I'm completely sincere when I say that he should use it, he needs a little pizzazz.

Up next:  Georgia's war on fat kids.  There was an article in Salon this week about the anti-fat kid billboards that have popped up all over the metro Atlanta area recently.  This is apparently an effort by Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) to let us know that "fat isn't cute" and fat kills and being fat is awful and unhealthy and just sucks all-around.  I think a better use of the money CHOA  spent on this marketing campaign ($50 million!) would have been a lobbying campaign to the state Board of Education about restoring recess (and lots of it) to elementary and middle schools.  Or what about going all Jamie Oliver on the people who set the menu for school cafeterias?  Doesn't that seem like a better way to promote healthy eating and practices in kids than to put up a bunch of billboards calling kids fat and telling them to be embarrassed and ashamed about it?

Georgia has its very own Solyndra with a failed ethanol venture costing US taxpayers $64 million and Georgia taxpayers an additional $6.2 million.  Sweet.  Do you see how easily the government throws money around?  Do you see how careless they are as stewards of our hard-earned paychecks?  It should make you sick.  We fought a revolution for transgressions less egregious than this.  Bring back George III!

And finally, the Birther debate continues in the Peach State.  A Georgia judge is allowing a case to move forward that would prevent President Obama from being listed on the ballot in November because he's not a US citizen.  Okay.  I'll admit that I thought something was funky with his birth certificate based on the fact that he refused to release it, but I always thought it was a stretch that his parents had an inkling at his birth that he might want to be the President of the United States one day, so they needed to hide the fact that he was allegedly born in Kenya (that's what the Birthers think, right?).  I'm not a constitutional scholar, so I'm confused about another part of this saga as well:  Obama's mother was a US citizen, doesn't that make him automatically a US citizen regardless of where he was born?  If I had been born when my parents were traveling out of the country, does that mean that I couldn't be president?  Seems a little unfair.

To top all of this off, the Dawgs lost their bowl game for the second year in a row.