Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed. - George Burns

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Obama has finally been given something other than the usual fluff stuff interview he has been getting away from the MSM for the past 2 years, and it is no surprise it happened to be done by Fox News (video1, video2). He finally sat down with a reporter that was interested in the facts, and Bret Baier grilled his ass. We finally got to see the great orator at work when he wasn’t being handed some softballs by people that get tingles in their legs about him, and Obama, in addition to getting pissed he was not being allowed to just skirt questions with stupid and meaningless talking points, scored, as I expected, a clear F- with his idiotic answers.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

That Obama and crew are again being shown to have lied while campaigning, or the muted and low-key reporting by the few MSM outlets to carry the story that Obama’s team is more secretive than the Bush team ever was? Their actions are finally giving meaning to what they meant when they told us they were about “hope and change”, I guess.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal agencies haven’t lived up to President Barack Obama’s promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office. An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October. Among the most frequently used exemptions: one that lets the government hide records that detail its internal decision-making. Obama specifically directed agencies to stop using that exemption so frequently, but that directive appears to have been widely ignored. Major agencies cited that exemption at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period.

Right!!!! Obama told them not to, but they then went ahead and used it with such frequency - it’s almost double the number - that they set a new record! Either that means they think Obama a weakling moron and simply don’t care what he has ordered them to do, which is bad thing for the country in general because it projects the image that the executive has no control over it’s own government agencies, or the more likely truth, that Obama was saying this stuff during the campaign, but didn’t mean it at all, and the MSM, as they are wont to, is giving him cover with this kind of stupid writing in this article, which IMO is a much worse thing. My bet is - and this is based on the other promises not kept so far - that it is a combination of both, with the later being the bigger driver. And before you claim that these exemptions are happening for national security or military reasons, look at this:

In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request. The AP examined the 2008 and 2009 budget year FOIA reports from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Federal Reserve Board. Other FOIA exemptions cover information on national defense and foreign relations, internal agency rules and practices, trade secrets, personal privacy, law enforcement proceedings, supervision of financial institutions and geological information on wells.

Now, before you rabid libs get all mad at me and say I am inconsistent or did not call the Bush administration out when they did the some of the same, know that I have no problem with the government’s legitimate use of exemptions to FOIA. I am writing this to point out how differently the MSM reports a much broader and intensive use by government of the FOIA exemption depending on who is running the government. Even more important, I am writing it to point out that Obama and the demcorats, yet again, lied to us during their campaigning. If anything, this government is more secretive, and less concerned with your freedoms, than the one BDS infected liberals accused of being fascists, and yet, we now get tepid articles that actually defend the same practices that a year or two ago sent these morons into a frenzy.

Much of the Obama administration’s early effort on FOIA seems to have been aimed at clearing out a backlog of old cases: The number of requests still sitting around past the time limits spelled out in the open-records law fell from 124,019 in budget year 2008 to 67,764 at the end of the most recent budget year over the 17 agencies, the AP’s review found. There is no way to tell whether those whose old cases that were closed ultimately received the information they sought.

I wonder how many of these back-log items were filed by liberals when they thought they could use it to hurt the Bush Administration, but now would if revealed would be inconvenient to them since they are the ones in charge. Nice when it hurts and hampers the fascist Bush administration, bad if we have to live by the same standards and rules we hoped to use against them. If anything, that should make you wonder how seriously these people take our security when they so callously and easily play political games with information that when someone else was running the country they wanted disclosed, even if it endangered us, but now that they are in charge, feel should no longer be disclosed. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a democrat tell you how much worse others are and especially when they promise you something.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

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.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Read this story about a man who broke into Auschwitz.  It’s inspiring.

(H/T: Radley Balko)

Monday, March 01, 2010

A while back on one of the discussion topics someone brought up the Antrax attacks that happened after 9-11 as proof Bush and his administration had no iead what they are doing. Recently the DOJ colsed its probe on this case and while the MSM did its best to hide some of the more juicier things, those that seek shall find. I am not surprised to discover two things: this idiot was a super freak obsessed with “TheWon” and fearful of Darth Cheney. This guy was unhinged bigitme. And how insulting is it that he commited suicide by Tylenol overdose, when he screwed so many with his little Anthrax thing. I am not usually one to judge people on what they do in the privacy of their own home or bedroom, but it is interesting to me how many of the sickos out there seem to also be into real sick things.

Despite the failure of that WH PR stunt around the government takeover of healthcare last week, it looks like, at least to Pelosi, the donkeys are thinking they should move ahead and force that monstrosity on the people. According to Nancy, the problem is the republicans, not the fact that the majority of the people do not want this thing.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday that Republicans have left their mark on the healthcare bill and should accept that the bill will go forward. “They’ve had plenty of opportunity to make their voices heard,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning. “Bipartisanship is a two-way street. A bill can be bipartisan without bipartisan votes. Republicans have left their imprint.” The public option, for example, has been stripped from the bill because Republicans were so adamantly against it, she said. “They’ve had a field day going out and misrepresenting what the bill says,” Pelosi said. “But that’s what they do.”

I especially loved that bipartisan bit. As I have always contended, to democrats bipartisan means “you choose to do it my way”. Queen Nancy has decreed that the problem isn’t the cost or all the lies from the people pushing this disastrous proposal, and it certainly isn’t the objection by the people to it and other costly and insane collectivist policies pushed by congress and the WH, as the last 3 elections culminating with the Scott Brown victory for what once passed as a given democrat senatorial seat, but the republicans! They have had their say. Heck, the left even gave up the immediate government takeover option – the public option – and settled for a long term approach that will produce the same anyway. So there!

These collectivist have literally calculated that while this move will crush them in November, that nobody will dare roll this crap back. Thus in the end, they win, as the social expansion takes the biggest jump it has in decades and even more people become accustomed to the “free ride”. I think the idiot donkeys forget that this monster isn’t supposed to do anything but steal more of our money for the next 4 years before it delivers a single service. If they lose big enough though, that assumption might prove erroneous. But they are gambling that they are not going to lose big enough, and that even more importantly, there will be nobody with the guts to roll this back in the next 4 years, especially with Obama c*ck-blocking for them, it looks like. Lets hope they fail either way. Not because I hate this sort of colelctivist crap, but for the sake of the American people which have already beeen badly screwed over by these demcorats in but 1 year.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Chile just got hit by an 8.8 earthquake, one nearly 800 times stronger than the one that hit Haiti, with tsunamis expected to go all the way across the Pacific.

While they will certainly need some help, the country remains functional and I predict that they will weather this far better than Haiti did.  I’ve been to Chile many times and been impressed by its people and its productivity.  Each time I have visited, new developments and business were going up.  Their government has privatized their social security system and is very pro-free trade (although they still have some issues with building roads that last more than ten seconds).

Draw your own conclusions about the difference between the awful kleptocracy that runs Haiti vs. the capitalist democracy that runs Chile and how that translates in the safety and survival of their respective peoples.

Update: Amazing pictures of the devastation in Concepcion.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

I was just having a discussion with some immigrant friends of mine and remembered this wonderful post from our late resident genius.  Enjoy his revelation on a stint of jury duty.

I’ll tell you one thing, though.  As part of voir dire everyone had to give a basic personal history, including your name, where you live, your marital status, the occupation of you and your spouse, your children, and any occupation your children may have.  In the room were a number of immigrants—like any major city, LA is full of foreigners—and a number of minorities (blacks and Hispanics) who were probably not that well to do.  Most of these immigrants were from third world nations, Africa and Asia and the Middle East, but they were all citizens.

When they listed their jobs the immigrants listed the usual litany of immigrant-level work.  They were security guards or worked in catering at a hotel or did janitorial work, mostly unskilled labor, or had started as unskilled labor and moved into supervisory positions as they got experience.  Most of them were older than me, with grown children.  Almost without exception their kids were substantially better off than their parents, listing jobs like doctors or lawyers or nurses or graphic artists or software engineers, all highly-paid, educated, skilled labor.  A couple of them mentioned that their kids were enrolled in PhD programs.  And I thought, ‘What a great country America is.”

This is the American dream.  You’re not going to come to this country with no skills or education and make a million dollars (though that does occasionally happen).  The American dream is that you can come to this country with nothing and within one generation your kids can be solidly in the middle class.  There are very few societies where this is likely, or even possible.  In much of Europe this isn’t the case, immigrants end up ghettoized and isolated from mainstream society.  But not in America.

What a fantastic statement on what this country has to offer the world.

This will remain true, no matter what our politicians do.  It’s ingrained into our society to a depth that no political scrub brush can reach.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

All of us know the people of Haiti are suffering, but some are doing more about it than others:

Scantily clad dancers were the draw at a downtown men’s entertainment club over the weekend for an event that raised nearly $1,000 for victims of the earthquake in Haiti.Marilyn’s on Monroe, 715 Monroe St., billed Saturday’s affair as “Lap dances for Haiti.” Although the billing may be misleading - lap dancing is illegal in Ohio - the intention isn’t. General Manager Kenny Soprano said Sunday the club donated all the money from the day’s regular $10 cover charge to International Services of Hope, or ISOH/IMPACT, of Waterville.

Now, I am not surprised to see the name Soprano as the manager of a strip joint - it would have been kharmic if it was called Badabing - and I am glad they raised money to help the unfortunate. Maybe they can take it a step further, and take the dances to the poor people of Haiti. After all, after Katrina, one of the biggest morale boosters was the $2K government credit cards so many used to get themselves some lap dances. Lap dances work....

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates why he’s my favorite liberal blogger. He’s talking about physically disciplining kids and throws out some wisdom that I think people of all political stripes can agree with.

This is hard for a lot of people to hear, but in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my community this is what part of what parenting meant. If you weren’t feeling the edge of the sword on your ass, then you were responding to the possibility of it. One thing I learned, while touring for my book, was that a lot of people consider this to be child abuse. It really was news to me and ultimately unthinkable. Almost everyone I’d ever known had come up the same way. My book editor would joke, while reading, the manuscript about his grandmother coming up from the South and making him go search for a switch. In Harlem.

Which isn’t to say I, or people who came up like me, are without a critique. I smacked my son’s hand until he was four. And then spanked him until he was seven. Most of this was about him sucking his teeth at his mother, or some such. We’re done with that now, and at least in my presence, he doesn’t exhibit that kind of disrespect.  When he’s staying with my people in Baltimore he doesn’t earn any immunity, and he’s subject to the same threat of the sword as his cousins. I get the argument against corporal punishment. But there’s something elemental in me, that recoils at modern parenting. I was on the train the other day and watched a kid repeatedly say to his father, “Daddy, you’re a jerk.” Wow. I confess that my immediate thought was, “that kid need his ass whipped.”

Read the whole thing, which talks about his relationship with his father.  Ta-Nehisi is making the important point that it’s far more important for your kids to respect you than to like you.  And that respect has to be earned; it doesn’t just magically appear.

I’ve said this many times, but I do feel we’ve gone too far on the sensitivity side in this country.  Corporal punishment (which a recent study has show is likely beneficial to younger children) is just one example.  There’s also the repugnant self-esteem movement, which is producing legions of kids who are ignorant and lazy, but feel good about it.  And far too many parents and teachers are concerned with their charges’ opinions and feelings than their morals, their knowledge and their discipline.

We’ve talked about all that before, of course.  But I’m going to riff on this in a different direction. It is my opinion that this molly-coddling is one of the reasons our political culture has become so diseased.  We have generations of Americans, including me, who have rarely seen real evil, who have never really experienced bad times. Their schools have told them how wonderful they are no matter how lazy or stupid they get. And their parents aren’t willing to smack them when they starting whining and complaining.

The result?  Anytime something bad happens, we completely lose our shit.  As Gregg Easterbrook notes:

The Haiti earthquake, all too real as a crisis, ought to remind us how often the word “crisis,” and its synonyms, are overused. “Obama Takes Oath, and Nation in Crisis Embraces the Moment,” read the 48-point-type New York Times headline on the morning of the 2009 presidential inauguration. Crisis? America’s current problems are quite moderate by the standards of history, including of recent economic history—things were worse in the late 1970s. “The nation faces a calamity,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said last winter. “We are on the verge of complete collapse,” David Obey, chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, said last year. The United States faces “an economic crisis, a health care crisis and an environmental crisis,” prominent columnist Paul Krugman declared last spring. Environmental crisis? In the United States, except for greenhouse gas emissions, all environmental trends are positive. The United States faces “catastrophe,” Obama said not long after taking office. In his first State of the Union address, Obama used the word “crisis” 11 times; Bill Clinton used this word an average of once per State of the Union address. America faces “an unprecedented crisis, the worst in our history,” Minnesota senator Al Franken said last year. Worse than the Depression? Worse than the Civil War? The word “crisis” has been so trivialized that a recent Times head read, “Crisis Stings Britons in France and Spain.” The “crisis” was that British citizens who own vacation homes in France are being inconvenienced by the pound-Euro exchange rate.

Liberals are, of course, the masters of “crisis” mentality.  But conservatives aren’t exempt.  The past year has seen Obama’s standard and stale liberal platform, the likes of which we’ve been seeing for forty years, greeted with hysterical claims about socialism, terrorism and fascism from the Right.  Maybe, now that the GOP has drawn a little blood in an election, the rhetoric will calm down.  Cooler heads need to prevail if we’re going to fix our nation’s problems.

The good news is that I feel like we’re turning the corner, culturally.  Attitudes like Ta-Nehisi’s are far more common among my generation and the subsequent ones.  I have had several long nights with fellow parents arguing about raising kids.  Typically, the ones who favor more discipline and less coddling were the younger ones.  And during the recession, I’ve noticed that people—of all ages—were a lot less scared and panicky than the media and our politicians.

I increasingly feel—and maybe I’m deluding myself—like we’ve passed the peak of the Age of Whining that started in the 70’s.  I don’t know if this will translate to politics, which always trails the culture and has never, in any age, been the domain of calm disciplined people.  But it’s possible that the constant sense of CRISIS and OUTRAGE that has characterized our political system is in a slow retreat.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Watch and be proud

And yes, that’s the Haitians shouting “USA!” More inspiring video from the LA firefighters here.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

I wonder if all those haters that took it serious when the French and other losers accused the US of being invaders will take note of the fact that despite their claims Obama would fix it all the French are now accusing the US again of being invaders? Yeah, yeah, I know. Bush was an evil bastard and he invaded, while Obama is a great guy and he means well. Spare me the stupid. I get enough of that from these French. Anyway, why are the French siding with Chavez and making this ludicrous claim? Check this out..

France accused the US of “occupying” Haiti on Monday as thousands of American troops flooded into the country to take charge of aid efforts and security. The French minister in charge of humanitarian relief called on the UN to “clarify” the American role amid claims the military build up was hampering aid efforts. Alain Joyandet admitted he had been involved in a scuffle with a US commander in the airport’s control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight. “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti,” Mr Joyandet said. Geneva-based charity Medecins Sans Frontieres backed his calls saying hundreds of lives were being put at risk as planes carrying vital medical supplies were being turned away by American air traffic controllers.

If Bush was in charge I am sure he would be accused of having ordered this to kill black people, but I wonder why the complete silence on this stuff for Obama. Puts things into perspective though. My personal opinion is that we should just tell the French Haiti is their baby anyway, and leave it all up to them. The French are already, as this ridiculous accusation points out, looking to lay blame elsewhere and to make themselves look better, so why not just let them run with the ball? The French have no logistical capability to deal with this and would crash and burn. The Haitian people would end up screwed hard, but then again, that’s been their lot in life for the existence of their country.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

CNN has a heart-breaking story from Haiti.  Open question: what should we do, long term?  Haiti simply does not have the medical facilities to deal with even a tiny portion of this tragedy.  If we park a navy ship of the coast, it will be the most advanced medical facility available, probably for decades.  How long do we stay?  How much authority do we take?  How much money do we spend?  Is this going to end up like our last occupation and last for twenty years?  Maybe it should so we can set that ruined nation to rights.  What do you guys think?

The real horror in Haiti was caused not by the earthquake but by a crushing poverty created by decades of incompetent government.  What do we do about that?  Prop them up until the next tragedy hits?

Oh, well.  At least Newsweek is on the case, publishing puff pieces from politicians. You see how CNN humanized this tragedy with that little girl being pulled from the rubble?  That’s reporting, assholes.

Friday, January 01, 2010

Looking back over the past year, I think it’s apropos that the most succesful film of the year is likely to be Avatar.  For our Congress, our pundits and our President seem to be living in their own virtual reality.  The world in which they live is no more real than Pandora; their image of themselves about as realistic as the Na’Vi.  The only problem is that their fantasy isn’t make money; it’s costing it.