Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one - H.L. Mencken

Monday, March 15, 2010

Now this is inspiring:

Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy has a mission—for its students to graduate and succeed in college. Now, for the first graduating class at the high school, it’s mission accomplished.

All 107 seniors were accepted to a four-year college, a significant accomplishment considering they are from one of the toughest neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago.

These are not so-called gifted kids at a private school. The public high school is open to all, choosing students by a lottery.

When they started, only 4% of the kids were even reading at grade level.  So what is the secret of their success?  Something you would not be allowed to do in our “don’t traumatize the kids” public schools.  They made it an all-male school, to eliminate female distractions.  They would not accept excuses, even giving the kids watches so they had no reason to be late to school.  Their schools days are longer and more intense on basic subjects like english, math, science and foreign languages.  The kids wear suits and ties.

And they’re thriving.  Look at the picture in the article, which show inner city kids studying their butts off.  This shows what can be done when you get outside the strictures of the government-run system.  The kids are the same, the teachers are the same.  It’s the culture that’s the difference.  The school is focused on discipline and education, not self-esteem, not the latest technological gizmos and not politics.

Just think what could happen if the millions of dedicate teachers in our country were liberated like this.  It doesn’t all have to be ties and discipline.  With suburban kids, a more relaxed environment might be fine.  The point is freedom, the ability of a school to find what works rather that stick to some Five Year Plan dictated from on high.

On the flip side, we have the travesty that went down this week in Texas.

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

A liveblog of the meeting can be found here.  This is the school board that, until next year, is lead by Don McLeroy, the young earth creationist who has proclaimed that his science vision comes from the Bible and “someone has to stand up to the experts.”

There’s stuff in their changes that I think is appropriate, actually.  The idea that Republicans helped the Civil Rights movement enrages liberals, but it happens to be true.  Before they welcomed disaffected segregationists into the party under Nixon, the GOP was actually stronger on Civil Rights than the Democrats.  A larger percentage voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example.  I also think that it is entirely appropriate that Hayek and Friedman be added to the economics curriculum that includes Marx, Keynes and Smith.  Hayek and Friedman are the two most influential economists of the last half century while Marx is a joke.

On the other hand, the removal of Thomas Jefferson from the Enlightenment and the attempt to expurgate the separation of church and state is simply bullshit.  They are also trying to vindicate Joseph McCarthy because nine of the 159 people he accused of being Communists were implicated in the Venona transcripts.  This has been a pet cause of certain conservatives lately, Mann Coulter in particular.  It is, of course, ridiculous.  McCarthy was known to throw accusations in every direction, especially at political foes, and created a climate of fear in which a mere accusation could destroy someone’s career.  That there were real communist traitors in our midst did not excuse that.  If anything, McCarthy damaged the efforts to root out the traitors by throwing baseless accusations at such as General George Marshall.

But I think people miss the point of this story.  This wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t have such tight government control of the schools.  Granted, some idiots would be teaching their kids garbage in home schools or religious private schools.  But the damage would be limited and the debate far less vociferous.  Some liberals, notably our President, want national standards.  But that just expands the problem.  What happens if some religious nutbag gets into the White House?  What happens if a liberal ideologue like Cornell West or Noam Chomsky gets control?  We had this debate in the 90’s, when Clinton proposed a standard that was highly liberal.  The temptation to inject political views into school standards is simply too strong to resist, especially for the kind of people who gravitate to government.

The Urban Prep Charter Academy shows the best that we can get in education.  Last week’s travesty in Texas shows the worst.  Think about which we should be moving toward.  And think about which our President is moving toward.

Every now and then, when i least expect it,(I should know better) I find a story in the Internet that just make me ashamed to me in the same nation as someone else.
In this case it is Donna Simpson, who is attempting to attain a new world record, in being FAT

Take a good hard look at this fat ass, this woman, is setting the goal at 1000 pounds. 1000 Fucking Pounds! Right at this time she can barely walk and she needs a fucking scooter to mover her fat ass around at the store.

.
Oh yeah that is her kid too, her Husband like’em big and encourages her to eat.

Philippe, who counts watching his girlfriend eat as one of his favourite hobbies, says: “I’ve always been attracted to big women, but Donna is my fantasy. The more she weighs, the sexier she is.”

Her 49-year-old partner Philippe — who she met on a dating site for plus-size people — was encouraging her to reach her goal, she said.

“I think he’d like it if I was bigger ... he’s a real belly man and completely supports me,” she said.

To put on enough weight, Ms Simpson will need to eat 12,000 calories a day, which is six times the recommended daily intake for women.

In order to pay for the enormous amounts of food she is eating — her weekly grocery bill is $815 — Ms Simpson makes money by running a website where men pay to watch her consume fast food.

This waste of oxygen make a living by eating and letting men watch her on her web cam.......... excuse me while i go throw up, maybe i can get some one to pay me to watch that!.
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OK if that was not enough take a good look here.
And here, if you are brave enough.

Its bad enough that there are millions in this nation that are trying to reduce their waist line, while this woman tries to expand hers, with out regard to the health effects or the cost to her family. I wonder who pays for her health care? Any guesses? Then there is the fact that this woman is getting international attention over this, renforcing the views that America is full of fat disgusting blobs, like on the animated movie WALL-E.

She does not deserve attention or encouragement, she deserves scorn.

I really have nothing to say about the Eric Massa mess.  Last week, I kept drafting posts and the story kept getting weirder and weirder.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the guys is a lunatic, a serial groper or a space alien, possibly all three.

But it’s fucking comedy gold!  Here is SNL.  Jon Stewart is after the break:

It may have escaped people’s notice that Massa is, in fact, a lunatic Democrat, not a lunatic Republican.  Our gay lunatics have the decency to confine themselves to airport bathrooms stalls.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Imagine if you will, that you are home, asleep in your bed, when you get a phone call at 3 a.m. No, its not the Joint Chiefs calling to tell you that North Korea has detonated a Atomic bomb over Seoul.  Its not Al gore calling to tell you that the Antarctic ice cap has collapsed and we are all gonna drown. It is your Friendly neighborhood police calling to ask you to step out side for a little talk, about that gun purchase the other day.

WTF?, you ask? well Genital readers, it did happen to one David J. Pyles, of Medford, Oregon. Monday Morning at 3 a.m. the Sheriffs departments of two counties, the state patrol, and officers from the local police and from a nearby town surrounded Pyles home. With SWAT and Hostage Negotiators deployed he was awoken and asked to come outside.
Now all this sounds pretty serious, was Pyle a wanted terrorist?  A dangerous Drug Dealer? a known Obama Hater?
No,
He bought some firearms a few days before.

Concerns about an Oregon Department of Transportation employee who purchased several guns after being placed on leave prompted law enforcement across Southern Oregon to step in.

Negotiators and a SWAT team from Medford police safely took a man — whose name wasn’t released — into protective custody Monday morning in the 500 block of Effie Street, Medford police said in a news release.

He was taken to Rogue Valley Medical Center for a mental-health evaluation.

The man recently had been placed on administrative leave from his job and was “very disgruntled,” the news release said.

Oh yeah forgot that part, he was Disgruntled.  Now why was he Disgruntled?

ODOT Communications Director Patrick Cooney said there were administrative, personnel matters involved that limited what the department could discuss.

They cant say. However ODOT reported him to the State police and then they began watching him and after he purchased 3 firearms they moved in.

Authorities were “extremely concerned” that the man may have been planning to retaliate against his employers, the news release said.

“Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach,” OSP Sgt. Jeff Proulx said.

OK to be fair, workplace violence is a major concern and a disgruntled employee, who buys 3 firearms in 2 days might raise some red flags, but did they have any evidence that he was planning such a action?

After a phone conversation with negotiators, the man — who was alone in the home — agreed to come out, Hansen said.

Police seized the recently purchased firearms, as well as another .45-caliber Heckler & Koch handgun and a 12-gauge shotgun. Police are holding the weapons for safekeeping, but no criminal charges have been filed

They took the man in to custody and then entered his home and seized his firearms, all of which were legally purchased. Oh they also to him to the shrink at the local hospital for a mental evaluation.

Now my friends, if this sequence of events had happened to you, how do you think your mental evaluation would go, at that time?

Well there is more to this story.

Kevin Starrett, director of the Canby-based lobbying organization — which also has a foundation for protecting gun rights through court cases — had been monitoring the incident that landed Pyles in the hospital for a mental health evaluation and resulted in five of his guns being held by police for “safekeeping.”

“It’s chilling,” he said.

“I don’t know if this is just a gun case,” Starrett said. “It’s about whether your freedom can be taken away without a criminal case or charges against you.”

So what did Mr Pyle do to spark his leave from work and the resulting police use of “protective Custody” and to seize his Arms? Well even My Pyle is vague on this.

Pyles told Starrett that he had a conflict with a superior at work, but was working to resolve it through union processes.

The Oregon Department of Transportation confirmed that Pyles has worked there as a planner since February 2004. ODOT Communications Director Patrick Cooney said the department couldn’t discuss personnel or security matters

ok that doesn’t sound to serious, and if it was, should not the ODOT say so?
Well lets look at the rest of the story.

Pyles told Starrett he initially thought the early morning call must be a prank, but looked out to see his yard surrounded by police.

“They asked him to come out and said they wouldn’t handcuff him, arrest him or take him off the property,” Starrett recounted.

However, Pyles said, he then was handcuffed and taken to Rogue Valley Medical Center for evaluation.

“Because we had information that he could be a danger to others, we wanted a medical professional to evaluate him,” Medford police chief Randy Schoen said.

Police have maintained that Pyles’ surrender was voluntary, but Starrett noted that an intimidating presence of officers with rifles and SWAT gear can force people to agree to things they wouldn’t normally do.

“The thing that is really troubling to us is that this was not an arrest,” he said. “People in protective custody don’t even have the rights a person who has been arrested does.”

When undergoing a mental health screening, a person doesn’t have a guaranteed right to an attorney, for example, he said.

The evaluation took several hours and Pyles was released before noon on Monday.

Is anyone bothered by what the police promised not to do, but then did? Hey We got protections against this kind of crap in this Country. The ACLU should be allover this as a clear case of violation of the 4th Amendment, the 5th and maybe the 6th, not to mention the 2nd.

David Fidanque, executive director of the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization wasn’t likely to get involved in an incident of this type, but said Pyles could have a case against police if he were taken into custody improperly.

If a Cop Farts on a suspect, the ACLU is allover them like stink on shit, and they are not interested in this case?
What has Mr Pyles said about this?

“To justify my being taken away in handcuffs, forced off my property, my real property as a Medford resident, as a citizen of Jackson County and a United States citizen, legal and all respect, it is most troubling what happened to me on Monday,” Pyles said.

Pyles has contacted the Oregon Firearms Federation for possible legal assistance.

But the good news is that the shrinks didn’t find cause to arrest him and the police have to return his arms to him
And they have apparently, and it is a closed case as far as the police are concerned.
So now i do have to ask.
IF this man was considered a danger, why where his purchases approved?
Why was he confronted at his home at 3 am?, did they WANT a standoff?
Why did they place him in custody and then seize his arms? The “threat” had been neutralized, why go into his home?
Did they have a Warrant to do that?

Now some would argue that the police was just being on the safe side by doing this, preventing a possible bloodbath, that the media would lap up.
however, with the fear of a possible criminal action one can now be ordered out of your home at night, oh and at gunpoint, taken to a hospital where they will give you a mental evaluation. You know just to see if you are cracked and that the guns you have are a indicator that you intend to raise violence upon your employer because , well you are cracked!
This Whole case bring up a number of issues. One of which is how far can the police go to be proactive in preventing crime. How far can they go? in the face of such flimsy evidence, I cant see why they took it on them selves to conduct such a operation,without investigating Mr Pyle first and try to determine if he was a risk or not.
To me this is more of the Police Run amok, im sure that they felt that they were protecting everyone else, but never once considered how they were trampling another mans liberties in the process.
But HEY!  You know its for the Greater good we oppress you so other can feel more relaxed.

I am not sure what to make of the claim by LaRhonda Pettit that her Father James Brown’s corpse is missing from his crypt.

LaRhonda Pettit, 48, alleges the body of Brown, who died in December 2006 aged 73, is being hidden to prevent a full autopsy being carried out. Ms Pettit said the official cause of death, which was said to be a heart attack brought by pneumonia, is not the real reason behind the Godfather of Soul’s passing. She said: ‘My daddy’s body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where. ‘I’m convinced his death was suspicious and I want the people responsible brought to justice.

If it is really missing, and my guess is that this young lady s either trying to capitalize on those 15 minutes of fame or looking for some kind of pay day, my guess is that it is more likely to be because some kids stole it to make a bong out of his skull.

She is one of 12 people who came forward following Brown’s death claiming to be one of his illegitimate children. Brown’s body is said to have been sealed in a temporary crypt at his daughter Deanna’s South Carolina Home while arrangements are made for his permanent burial.

Yeah, OK. I am going with the “she is looking for a pay-day” scenario.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Matt Welch has one of the better lines I’ve seen on the budget crises going on all over the country.  Responding to an NYT article that asks if school taxes can be cut in a district with an average teacher salary of $97,000, he cries out:

Let’s see, is this mic on? Can I get a little more reverb? Good. WE ARE OUT OF MONEY, ASSHOLES.

Not only that, but we are out of money because YOU STOLE IT, FROM THE CHILDREN. And the rest of us.

According to the linked story, activists are claiming that the local school district spends $27,500 per student. While we don’t know whether that’s precisely true (shoot, why would you print the real per-student cost, in the newspaper article about controversies over school spending?), even if that number is half the size it’s a big blinking neon WTF.

He goes on to point out the perpetual budget cycle, which works like so:

(1) Economy does well, tax revenues boom;

(2) The government spends all the new money, raising the budget to unsustainable levels;

(3) Economy turns down, revenues fall (both 1 and 3 are exacerbated by our heavily progressive tax system);

(4) Even tiny cuts in bloated budgets are decried as “draconian”; raise taxes.

(5) Wash, rinse, repeat.  Occasionally wonder why businesses and rich people are leaving the state/country.

I must say, I am getting closer and closer the primal scream Welch makes.  And I think a lot of Americans are getting there, too.  I recently was talking to my mother, who asked if Obama knows that there’s a limit to the amount of money he can spend.  I don’t think he does.  I don’t think any of them do, Republican or Democrat (but especially Democrat).  They are so used, since the Long Boom began under Reagan, to government revenue always being there.  The idea that we could run out of money is something that simply doesn’t compute.  It’s like watching cave men trying to understand quantum mechanics (no, Oog, use the Schrodinger equation, not the spear).  They are vaguely aware of some concern about this “deficit thing” out there.  But they don’t really grok it.  If they did, we wouldn’t be having debates about the brutality of one quarter of one percent salary cuts.

That’s where these people should go:

Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and his partner Choi Mi-sun, 25, fed their three-month-old baby only on visits home between 12-hour sessions at a neighbourhood internet cafe, where they were raising an avatar daughter in a Second-Life-style game called Prius online, police said.

Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in the virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level.

The pair became obsessed with nurturing their virtual daughter, called Anima, but neglected their real daughter, who was not named.

Eventually, the couple returned home after one 12-hour session in September to find the child dead and called police. The pair were arrested on Friday after an autopsy showed that the baby died from prolonged malnutrition.

There is no emoticon to describe what I’m feeling right now.  I put this in the queue for 12 hours to try to calm down and it still fills me with rage.

The usual “Ah! Internet!” types are making a lot of fuss over how this proves we’re losing to the virtual world.  I don’t think so.  The internet is just one more way that truly vile people can neglect their kids.  If it wasn’t the internet, it would be drugs or booze or TV or something else.

Update: I’m sure some dipshit is going to try pass a law to prevent this sort of thing.  As it happens, there a great article in the times on the endless attempts of do-gooders to punish everyone else for one person’s stupidity and/or evil.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Here is how the economics behind government takeover of healthcare proposed in the current monstrous bill congress is going to pass against the will of the people by means of a gimmick, works. Obama’s congress proposes a monster that will cost close to $2 trillion over 10 years and gives government absolute and total control of all things healthcare. Even more frightening, the bill is set up in such a way that by that decade’s end everyone will have been funneled into a government controlled plan. People freak out. So Obama then tells congress they need to find a way to make it happened for a measly $900 billion to make the number more palatable. The congress then proceeds to concoct a scheme that charges you taxes over 10 years to come up with some $1.8 trillion dollars the CBO projected optimistically will be the cost of their behemoth takeover plan, but then offers no care whatsoever for the first four or five years. This then allows them to collect some $850 billion dollars in extra cash during that first 10 year stint, leaving us with a plan that they tell us will now only cost us a measly $1 trillion! Presto, healthcare costs are under control! I should mention that this $1.8 trillion CBO score is for the best case scenario cost of a government healthcare takeover, but we all know that as things go, these collectivist scams usually cost orders of magnitude more than was projected by the biggest pessimists, when they go live.

So after the first 10 years of Obamacare comes to a close, and we roll into the next decade of this wonderful collectivist experiment, we suddenly have government controlled healthcare that is at a minimum underfunded by $850 billion dollars for the next ten years, and likely to be behind a couple of trillion already too. Yet they and the MSM are all claiming this bill will save us money! Maybe they know that the collectivists elite in charge and pushing this plan through even though we don’t want it plan to confiscate our paychecks in their entirety and then distribute to us each according to our needs eventually, and then this stuff wont matter much. Barring that, you can fill in the gaps how they plan to deal with the vanishing of the “savings” they are now tauting sooner than later.

The recent revelation that came out, after some massive stonewalling by the WH which obviously knew it was damning, that many of Obama’s top legal appointees, including Eric Holder over at Justice, seem to have a conflict of interest when it comes to terrorism, seems to have lit a fire in the legal community. Whether you feel that there are issues with the whole terrorists are enemy combatants that purposefully avoid any uniforms or identifications vs. terrorist are just criminals, you can not fail to grasp that there is something problematic with having the very people that are now in charge of preventing another terrorist attack being sympathetic to that cause. And before you lambaste me for saying this, remember that, as this Andrew C. McCarthy article points out, these attorneys chose to go represent people that wanted to destroy this country, and we should be able to ask why. Especially when, as I pointed out, several of these attorneys are now the ones making critical decisions on how to handle not just captured terrorists, but how and how timely we get intelligence from these captured terrorists that can protect Americans from another attack. Here is the money quote:

The Justice Department lawyers who represented al-Qaeda were volunteers. Of all the causes to which they could have donated their services, they chose our enemies. They are no doubt sincere in claiming they sought to vindicate principles, not terrorists. But the other stubborn fact is that, since they took the helm at Justice, counterterrorism policy has become much more terrorist friendly.

Anyone that tries to make the case that those people asking for clarifications and pointing out the conflict, are just ushering a new era of McCarthyism, demanding we ignore the consequences and impact of the policies implemented by, and the actions taken by these lawyers now making the decisions to treat terrorists like common criminals, or worse tries to make the case that these policy shifts have made us safer, is an outright liar or moron. Maybe even both. I can guarantee you that the people that say this is much ado about nothing and that anyone that points out that these lawyers once chose to defend terrorists, would be singing a different tune if we had a clear conflict of interest like this with some government appointee that had links to the private sector. There is no excuse, and this is based on their won words and actions, even when you think that capitalism is a bigger threat than terrorism, to pretend that there isn’t a clear issue here. The truth is that these lawyers have made us all less safe. We have been lucky so far, but that luck won’t hold.

Update: It now looks like Holder wasn’t as forthcoming about his whole role in this and is now being looked at for failing to turn over briefs that would have been cause for concern. Oh, I am sure they will say it was an oversight, in fact they already are, nut what a convenient oversight huh? This is the mastermind that wanted to bring the terrorist show trials to NYC after all. The point is that Holder and his posse have an agenda, and that agenda makes plays havoc with our security. The left’s way of silencing those pointing this out is to accuse them of wanting to slime the lawyers for defending terrorists when the point is that these lawyers chose to defend the terrorists to undermine those that took terrorism seriously and treated this like a war and them like combatants.

Here’s a quick question.  Suppose you run a business and you’re not terribly moral.  Would you be in favor of legislation that:

(1) forces people or their employers to buy your product;

(2) forces people to buy the more expensive versions of your product;

(3) give them money to help buy your product; and

(4) creates a closed market so that they can only select from you and a few other companies?

Of course you would.  Who wouldn’t want that?  I mean, besides free market zealots.

Well, this is precisely what is happening with health insurance under Obamacare.  As Jacob Sullum points out:

If Obama’s plan works as advertised, it will be a huge boon to insurers. As he himself notes, “they’re going to have 30 million new customers” thanks to the government’s mandates and subsidies.

To distract us from the favor he is doing for insurers, Obama claims to be getting tough with them by demanding that they take all comers and charge them all the same rates, without regard to health. While abolishing risk-based pricing contradicts a basic principle of the insurance business, the industry has to weigh the loss of that freedom against the gain of government-guaranteed revenue.

Despite his talk about reining in “excessive” premium hikes, Obama’s plan commits him to keeping insurers financially sound so they can provide the coverage he is promising. Federal regulators, like their state counterparts, will find that “you can’t separate the underlying solvency of companies from the rates they charge,” as Wisconsin’s insurance commissioner recently told The New York Times. “From a consumer protection standpoint,” Kansas’ insurance commissioner agreed, “the most important thing we do is ensure the solvency of companies.”

This is why I could never be a Democrat.  This is why I sometimes get so angry listening to these jackasses on TV and the radio.  They are completely selling out our healthcare to the insurance companies on the one hand.  And then they turn around and say shit like this to established their liberal bona fides.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concedes that Democrats allowed the health care reform debate to be “hijacked” by insurance companies and other interests set on killing the bill.

Yes, Nancy.  It’s the evil insurance companies you are beholden to that “hijacked” the bill, not your fractious dim-bulb party and the understandable nervousness Americans feel about government intrusion into any industry.

Of course, insurance companies, for all their demonization, are not the real problem with healthcare anyway, as Jeffrey Anderson points out:

According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?

One thing at a time, my friend.  Once the Democrats have control of the insurance companies (partly by delaying the Medicare SGR fix and buying off the AMA), they will then explain the inevitable cost over-runs as the result of greedy doctors and drug companies and reign them in.  Divide and conquer.

In all, the combined profits of the 14 largest American health insurers (the ones who crack the Fortune 1000) are $8.7 billion. That’s less than 0.4 percent, or 1/250th, of overall U.S. health-care costs, which are $2.5 trillion.

The Democrat are like a football team run by morons.  They really only have one play in the book—envy.  Greedy rich insurance companies, greedy rich doctors and greedy rich Republicans are the enemies. Democrats are the nobel gallants standing between us and exploitation.  And even as they climb into bed with insurance companies, unions and “green energy” interests, they continue to peddle this myth.

Whatever works, I guess.

(In other news, the Senate Parliamentarian has limited what the Dems can do with reconciliation.  Expect outrage and bombast and demonization of man who’s just doing his job.)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Man, are they getting desperate, or what?  via Mish:

A federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia landed a total of 6996 traffic tickets this weekend. The blitz, dubbed “Operation Air, Land & Speed” coincided with frantic efforts by state officials to close a $2.2 billion budget deficit. Supervisors ordered state troopers to saturate Interstates 81 and 95 to issue as many tickets as humanly possible over the space of two days.

Jesus--the state police actually treated this like a got-damn military operation, and all because the state government has a hole in their budget the size of Obama’s ears. 

This is sheer desperation, plain and simple.  When you have to resort to traffic tickets to shore up your budget, it’s game-fucking-over.  And the most grotesque aspect of this whole mafia-style skim is that it was federally funded.  In other words, our tax dollars went to pay for this. 

Why are they resorting to measures like these?  A quick reminder:

Watching these states try to grapple with their underwater budgets is like watching a car wreck in real time.  You know it’s not going to turn out well, but you can’t look away.  Ponzi government is coming home to roost, kids.

Yesterday, while the AE-35 was on the fritz, I went out to check my snail mail and found something most curious—a letter from the Census Bureau.  I figured I’d take it in, write down “we got three here” with one of my daughter’s crayons and send it back.  But it was not my census form.  It was, instead, a stupid letter telling me to expect my census form soon.

Dear Resident,

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail.  When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly.

Your response is important.  Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need.  Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,
Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Emphasis mine.

This little letter probably cost the Feds about $42 million.  That estimate is based on just postage, paper and labor.  But the government can’t wipe it’s ass for less than six grand, so I’ll assume that’s a lower limit.

To be honest, the cost doesn’t me.  $42 million is about what the government spends every five minutes.  Obamacare will probably spend ten times that much designing their logo.  The Census is already budgeted at ... holy shit ... $14 billion (three times the cost of the 2000 census) so complaining about the cost of this letter is like complaining about the font on the Stimulus Bill.

Moreover, the Bureau claims that these letters could save up to $500 million. The reason is that even a small increase in response rates will erase the need to send actual people out to chase up respondees, a process that is very expensive at government labor rates (they’re already hiring 750,000 people for it).  We all know how reliable the estimates are for government money-saving efforts, but this actually doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me.

So, no, I’m not bothered by the cost.  What got my boxers in a bunch was the phrase I’ve highlighted in bold.  I’m not happy with the Census Bureau telling us to fill out the form because it’s the only way to get out “fair share” of government lucre.  That is classic liberal redistributionist trope.

It’s also bullshit.  As we have seen with the stimulus and with the buying of healthcare reform, government money gets out doled based on politics, not need and certainly not the damned Census.  Did Louisiana get a $100 million payout in the healthcare bill because the filled out their Census forms?  No, they got it because Mary Landrieu sold her healthcare vote.  Are two-thirds of the stimulus jobs going to public education because of the census? No, they’re going there because education is the province of the nation’s most powerful unions.

Now this is my first time filling out a census form.  I was living with my parents in 1990 and was a vagabond grad student in 2000.  Perhaps the letter has always said this.  But even if this is standard Census boilerplate, I don’t like it.  We should not be encouraging people to think of government as giant bag of money from which you get your “fair share”.

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

I’ve not posted much of the reconciliation issue and whether Congress will use reconciliation to bypass the filibuster on healthcare reform.  I’m not overly fond of fillibusters, but this seems like a sneaky way to get an unpopular bill through.  I’m fully aware of the political games going on.  The GOP wants a victory over the Democrats.  The Democrats want a bill passed, no matter what’s in it.  And if the roles were reversed, I’m sure the Republicans would be screaming about the minority “thwarting the will of the people” and the Democrats would be sobbing about our “sacred Senate traditions”.  To me, the most important fight right now is in the House.  If Pelosi can’t even muster a majority—and it’s iffy—this thing is deader than Michael Jackson.

Still, it’s nice to have some facts on the subject. And for all the Democrat screeching about how Republicans have used reconciliation “all the time”, the facts belie this claim:

Almost every act passed under reconciliation (8/15) has in fact been a budget bill.  And most of those that weren’t (5/7) were tax bills.  The two outliers:  The 1996 welfare reform act and the 2007 student aid package.  Why those were passed under reconciliation isn’t made clear.

What’s also interesting is that the vast majority of these bills were absolute slam dunks.  Most (8/15) were passed by filibuster-proof supermajorities, meaning that reconciliation wasn’t used as an end-around to avoid a cloture vote.

There are only seven times in the last thirty years that reconciliation has been used to bypass the supermajority requirement and all seven were budget bills.  Those bills were:

(1) Ronald Reagan’s 1982 budget, which raised taxes and cut Medicare spending.

(2) George Bush’s 1990 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending.

(3) Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending (passed on Gore’s tie-breaker).

(4) George Bush’s 2001 tax cut (which was supported 58-33).

(5) George Bush’s 2003 tax cut.

(6) George Bush’s 2005 spending cut bill.

(7) George Bush’s 2005 tax cut.

The Lefties are mad because reconciliation was used to pass tax cuts they didn’t like.  And maybe ... perhaps ... they have a point on that.  But Bush did not use reconciliation to pass Medicare Part D or to start the Iraq War or to reform Social Security or pass the Patriot Act or anything else.  They have been crowing that welfare reform was passed by reconciliation.  But welfare reform was supported 78-21 in the Senate and 328-101 in the House.  It could easily have gotten cloture.  The most likely reason reconciliation was used was to fix the Medicaid budget adjustments and get a bill through that Clinton wouldn’t veto.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Remember my little spastic post about the IRS getting new shotguns?
Well now it seems that the Department of Education has decided it needs 27 more Remington 870s’.
And before y ou ask what does the Depeatment of Fucking education needs with combat shotguns, read the requirements part of the solicitation.

LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.

Existing Shotgun inventory.
Certified armor
Combat training
WTF, i know some of the inner city schools are bad, but just WTF, do they need their own SWAT teams for?
I thought the purpose of the department of Education was to, you know educate?