Ethanol. For the children.

U.S. to Scale Back Global Food Aid Amid Soaring Prices

The prices have risen as more of the grains are being consumed by biofuel production and fast-growing markets in China and India, The Washington Post reports.

Yeah. Do I fight global warming or global hunger? Hmmmm, decisions, decisions....

Warning! Tissue Alert! Not for the emotionally weak!

Palestinians: 85 killed since Israeli operation in Gaza began

No word on how many were involved in FIRING ROCKETS INTO ISRAEL FOR WEEKS NOW.
The caption for the photo?

Emergency workers carry a wounded baby after an Israeli operation near Jebaliya on Saturday.

That's right! I said a WOUNDED BABY! Did you get the WOUNDED BABY part? Good, because I'd hate to think that you went through the rest of today completely ignorant of the fate of all the BABIES THAT THE ISRAELIS ARE TRYING TO KILL!!

Look at the poor little tyke. Covered in blood, missing limbs, screaming in agon...oh, wait.

The sources said 85 people, including civilians and children, have been
killed in the Jebaliyah area since the incursion began Wednesday

Ahhh, yes. The Sources. Sounds like something out of an episode of "Lost." You caught the part about civilians and children being killed, right? RIGHT!? Could that be because the Paleswinians have a bad habit of firing their rocket launchers from schoolyards and peoples' front lawns? Or perhaps when a 15 year old "militant" is one of the people loading the launchers, you get to call him a "child" for propaganda purposes?

Heyyyy...waaaait a minute! Isn't that that Green Helmet guy (again!)?

The Future is Now

Six more years, coming up.



Yup. I re-enlisted. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to have some fun today.

Caption Contest

I'm going to hell for this one:




"Hillary prepares to show her skills as a master debater."

Here's another one:

"I find your lack of faith disturbing..."

Iraq vs. Congress

I have to admit, this kind of made me laugh, until I realized that Congress' failure to do a damn thing worthwhile can and will affect this country negatively for quite some time.

As I see it there are 5 completed areas of legislation that have been addressed by the Iraqi Parliament. The other 13 areas are in various stages of progress, but all indications show that plans, implementation and accountability are in place to properly scale each for Iraq.

The Democratic Party coming into power in 2006 had set 6 benchmarks for themselves and have not accomplished a single one, with the first being the most important:

1) Honest Leadership and Open Government

Iraq is, apparently, doing much better with two major ethnicities and a host of minor ones, tribal governments, multiple parties, two major religious sects and a host of minor ones, and having to work their way out of decades of dictatorship and come to means to work things out according the rule of law inside their Nation.

The US Congress can't find anyone that will actually lead it in an honest fashion nor promulgate openness in appropriations, oversight, or even keep to its Oath of Office. Unlike Iraq, the US Congress cannot even pass a budget on time nor pass any major legislation with regards to US security.

It is a failure.

Yer damn skippy it's a failure. And it will continue being a failure while we have the same communists, bureaucrats, hanger-ons, parasites, and other assorted teat-suckers who have been infesting Capitol Hill for decades still sitting in a position of power.

But to get them kicked out, we have to convince the dipshits who keep voting for them that they need to be kicked out. And how can you teach someone that doesn't want to learn?

Found at Ace of Spades.

Whoa.... somebody from HOLLYWOOD said that?

Then it must be even more obvious than I thought!

In Baghdad, I spoke with Army Gen. David Petraeus about UNHCR’s need for security information and protection for its staff as they re-enter Iraq, and I am pleased that he has offered that support. General Petraeus also told me he would support new efforts to address the humanitarian crisis “to the maximum extent possible”—which leaves me hopeful that more progress can be made.

My visit left me even more deeply convinced that we not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis.

Today’s humanitarian crisis in Iraq—and the potential consequences for our national security—are great. Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced people, in the heart of Middle East, won’t explode in violent desperation, sending the whole region into further disorder?

What we cannot afford, in my view, is to squander the progress that has been made.

As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.

Well, let's hope SOMEONE hears it other than the choir.

Passing it on

A history lesson, seen at BabyTrollBlog, from Mostly Cajun. History is to be learned from, otherwise we keep making the same mistakes over and over. So let's learn a little something and see if we can't make the same mistakes twice.

SOME OF YOU ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT NEARLY EVERY FAMILY IN AMERICA WAS GROSSLY AFFECTED BY WW II. MOST OF YOU DON’T REMEMBER THE RATIONING OF MEAT, SHOES, GASOLINE, AND SUGAR. NO TIRES FOR OUR AUTOMOBILES, AND A SPEED LIMIT OF 35 MILES AN HOUR ON THE ROAD, NOT TO MENTION, NO NEW AUTOMOBILES. READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD REACT TO BEING TAKEN OVER BY FOREIGNERS IN 2008.

Sixty-four years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America taking food and war materials.

At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, who had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing; we had few allies.

France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers, Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia.

Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe.

America’s only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East) was already under the Nazi heel.

The US was certainly not prepared for war. The U.S. had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WWI because of the depression, so that at the outbreak of WWII, Army units were training with broomsticks because they didn’t have guns, and cars with “tank” painted on the doors because they didn’t have real tanks. A huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor. Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England (that was actually the property of Belgium) given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact).

Actually, Belgium surrendered after one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could. Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering losses and the near decimation of its Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later. Hitler first turned his attention to Russia in the late summer of 1940, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse.

Ironically, Russia saved American’s butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.

Russia lost something like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad alone . . . 99% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than 1,000,000 soldiers.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. If that had happened, the Nazis could have won the war.

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. Now, we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants, and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in kaffiyehs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. All who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra and their goal. There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not yet known which side will win, - the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies.

The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the educated, more rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. Do you want gas in your car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything? You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We can’t do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing . . . in Iraq, not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we have done two important things:

First we deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than 1,000,000 Iraqis and
2,000,000 Iranians.

Second we created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there we won’t have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

WWII, the war with the Japanese and German Nazis, really began with a “whimper” in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for 14 years before the U.S. joined it. It officially ended in 1945 - a 17-year war - and was followed by another decade of U.S. occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again . . . a
27-year war.

WW II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year’s GDP - adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WW II cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The cost of not fighting and winning WW II would have been unimaginably greater - a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost New York. It has also cost about 3,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

This is not a 60 Minutes TV show, or a two-hour movie in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the U.S. can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like England, in the Middle East, a platform from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates to conquer the world.

The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons . . . unless somebody prevents them from getting them.

We have four options:

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran’s progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and possibly most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilizations should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-peace militants kill them.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America’s schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold War lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; 42 years!

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany!

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten- year occupation, and the U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than
100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The U.S. has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq. The U.S. took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.

In WWII the U.S. averaged 2,000 KIA a week - for four years. Most of the individual battles of WW II lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

The stakes are at least as high. . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

It’s difficult to understand why the average American does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.

“Peace activists” always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it’s safe. Why don’t we see peace activists demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most? I’ll tell you why! They would be killed!

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity.

Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy!

Please consider passing along copies of this to students in high school, college and university as it contains information about the American past that is very meaningful TODAY — history about America that very likely is completely unknown by them (and their instructors, too). By being denied the facts and truth of our history, they are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking through the issues of today. They are prime targets for misinformation campaigns beamed at enlisting them in causes and beliefs that are special-interest agenda driven.

Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and lawyer living in Northern California.

Orange Ribbons for Al-Qaeda

Remember the Hollywood smear:

Hollywood smears the troops again

First clip is the troops, second clip is from five minutes later, in which the winner of Best Documentary — a film about American soldiers beating a man to death in Afghanistan, natch — pays his own little tribute. -- AllahPundit

Well now it turns out

Hollywood And The Trendy New “Terrorist” Ribbon

The hot fashion accessory [at Sunday’s Oscar ceremony] was apparently orange ribbons and bracelets in solidarity with terrorist suspects in Guantanamo...
...
The Hollywood Liberal wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a red, white, and blue ribbon, which makes one wonder why they had our troops in Iraq present an Oscar the other night when their hearts are really with those poor sexist, racist, homophobic, theocrats who wear orange jumpsuits.

See Dubya notes

Record, film industry still backing antiwar horse (or, maybe just beating its corpse)

Nope... they are not kidding...
Gateway Pundit notes

ACLU Behind Orange Gitmo Lapel Ribbons At Oscars

Allison Walker, the entertainment industry liaison for the ACLU, which sponsors the Close Guantanamo campaign and distributes the ribbons. Walker is a former talent agent who once worked at William Morris.

I read about a bunch of gay activists that gleefully went to New York to march in solidarity with their oppressed Palestinian-Arab "brothers" and got the sh*t beat out of them when those same "brothers" realized they were a bunch of "gay activists". I am reminded of that because it illustrates why I despise the LibRules. They're hypocritical advocacy for preferential treatment for their special victim classes boils down to anyone who isn't a straight white-male is "oppressed" and deserving of tax-payer subsidies.

Well... Males are less then 1/2 the population, Whites are about 3/4, and straights are about 98-99%... so do the math. Straight White Males are only 1/3 of the population and that makes us a true minority.

If we oppressed straight white males own everything maybe we're just better then you?

Now... consider what happens if Islam wins out and the USA converts to Sha'aria law tomorrow? For a member of the "establishment" like myself I just put a bag over the wife's head, maybe pick up 2-3 additional underage "wives", go through the motions at the local Mosque with my fellow misogynists and studiously look the other way as all the Gay men, Lesbian women, academics, artists and rape victims are rounded up and stoned to death.

The Quran doesn't have a "useful idiot" exception for orange ribbons.

You can play this game at home... simply compare the "special victim classes" demand to the actual consequences of that Leftist's successful indulgent support of the Jihadists, either by active support, selective outrage or apathetic acceptance.

Lets start with "Gay Marriage", that statistics demonstrate homosexuals don't even want, which would result in death by hanging.

Or how about abortion? Oops... sorry... you'll be buried up to your neck and stoned until you bleed to death out your eyes.

Universal Health Care? Nope... sorry... if you examine the economically self-crippled Islamic economies you'll notice they can't steal from the tax-payers for any social services at all.

That's because all of the state's funds, however little that is, will be dedicated to expansion of the military.

Expect to see drilling anywhere the state cares to throw up a drilling rig too...

Freedom of Speech goes out the window along with academic freedom as every school is converted to study of the only book not worth burning, the Quran.

How much "Separation of Church and State" is there in an Islamic theocracy? Ah... not so much.

But don't complain to me... unless you want to be denounced as an apostate and hanged... with an orange rope.

Cross Posted at DANEgerus

WFB Jr., 1925-2008

William F. Buckley Jr. has passed on.

I can't say that I agree with the direction NR has taken lately, WFB had an effect on American politics that the most people can only dream of. It's safe to say that much of the modern conservative movement owes it's existence to WFB.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Buckley.

And by the way

The snowfall at my parents' house reached record levels in January. They started keeping records in Cd'A around1885 or so. That means that ever since they started keeping records, they've NEVER had as much snow on the ground as they did this winter.

Now, to keep things in perspective, back in 1993 we had so much snow that we had to shovel it off the roof to keep the house from collapsing. We used a ladder to get onto the roof. But by the time we were done, we walked off the roof, onto the piled snow, walked down the staircase we cut into that piled snow, and through the tunnel we had to dig to get to the front door.

They have more snow than that this year.

Seems like quite a bit of the globe is experiencing the same thing. But I've got $10 riding on the fact that someone will blame it on global warming.

DANE, you should have cross-posted this one

Bashing Manliness - anti-Heinlein writers. People know that I'm a big fan of Heinlein, especially his early works. As he got older, his science-fiction drifted more into "fiction" than "science", but still, he's a good writer. My signature line from my email is a Heinlein quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Notice that nowhere in that quote does he say that a man should whine, cry, bitch and moan until the government comes to pay money out to some jack-ass who couldn't take care of himself if he wanted to. Now, I'm not going to insist that everyone be able to conn a ship, but the spirit of the quote is that you should be able to handle things YOURSELF, whether it's clearing a clogged drain or dealing with any of the various hardships that always crop up in life. There are two kinds of people in life - those who see the hardship and deal with it in some form or another, and those who see the hardship and bitch until someone else takes care of it for them. The former are conservatives. The latter are "liberals". The former either deal with the problem, or in the case of the clogged drain they call a plumber, pay the guy, and go on with their lives. The latter demand that someone else deal with their problems because they're either too damn lazy, too damn pathetic, and too damn chickenshit to deal with it themselves.

Think I'm kidding? Then why do so many liberals demand that the government, i.e. SOMEONE ELSE, take care of their responsibilities?

Oh, and just because the DANE cross-posts here every now and then is no excuse for you not to visit his website daily. I do. Bookmark that sucker.

Math? We don't need no steenkeen Math!

But if you're a math type person, I suggest you check this out.

I must admit - I did OK in algebra. Loved Geometry. Got to advanced algebra and my eyes started crossing. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn't see any real-world applications for it that I would use. I mean, geometry, yeah, I use that all the time, even today. But you got into some of the more abstract rules and formulas, and unless I could see a way to use it my my life, my brain just didn't accept it. Maybe it was the teacher, maybe it was just the way my brain works.

I'll still give it a whirl. What the hell, let's see if I can still remember half the crap I've learned from decades ago.

Oh, Kee-RIST!

Folks, it can be boiled down into one sentence:

It's not how much money you have, it's what you do with the money you have. Compare and contrast:

A photo gallery of American Vagabonds. Notice the tattoos. Notice the piercings. I can tell you from experience that both can be expensive to get done. A decent sized tattoo can cost upwards of $200 or more. Hell, just getting the color done on my wife's armband was $250. And that was JUST TO PUT COLOR INTO AN OUTLINE!

My tattoos cost quite a bit as well. It was money that I chose to spend, but it was rather expensive. When you pick and choose a tattoo artist, you tend to put out a large amount of cash. Why? Well, because I didn't want any back-ally jackass fucking up something that was going to be in my skin for the rest of my life. I wanted to make damn sure that when it was done, it was done right. You only get one chance at it. So I found the best damn artist that I could. But the best artists cost money. But even a back-ally jackass costs money. So a vagabond wandering around with large tattoos on their arms are not going to get much sympathy from me. Piercings can be more expensive, depending on what you get pierced.

There's at least one picture of a guy toking pot out of a soda can. At least, I think it's pot, but it could be just about anything. Hmmmmmmm..... illegal drugs aren't exactly the cheapest thing around, are they?

Look at all the people smoking cigarettes. Even the el cheapo crap sticks are running at around $2 a pack depending on what state you live in. But still... suppose you never left a state where the smokes are cheap. Say, $1 a pack for the cheap ones. That's still $30 a month.

There's one picture of bottles of booze. Now, let's say that they're making their own booze. You still have to buy the grain, you still have to have a still, you still need to buy supplies. That's money, folks.

They want me to feel sorry for them? Hell no.

Now the contrast. You've probably seen this already, but if you haven't, let me quote a bit for you:

Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor's degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charles­ton, S.C.

But Shepard's descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents' home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

It ain't what you have, it's how you use it. A bunch of drugged out vagabonds with tats, piercings, and cabinet full of booze just makes me scoff. Folks, THEY CHOOSE TO LIVE THAT WAY. I've been flat ass broke before. You look at what you're bringing in. And you look at the bills you have to pay. You then pay the bills with what you have. Does it suck? Yeah, it does, but I made it work, on a MINIMUM WAGE JOB. So what does this mean?

Well, you don't go out and buy drugs. Drugs just eat up your money and your brain.

You don't go out and buy a new car. I've never owned a new car. And guess what? I haven't had to pay $20,000+ to drive around either.

You don't go out and buy the biggest damn TV you can find. Until we found a kick ass deal on a 27" TV, we just grabbed what we could from thrift shops and garage sales. So we don't have the newest TV. So what? We don't have thousands in debt!

If you're struggling to pay the bills, you do NOT go out and get tattoos, piercings, or other body modifications that eat up cash. I got my tats when I could afford them. As in, I had disposable income. NOT when I was deciding what bargain meat to buy for dinner.

If you're struggling to pay the bills, you don't get a bottle of booze.

You make your choices, and you live with them. Period, end of story. The people in those pictures choose to live the way they do. And I bet if you tried to get them to get a real job and pay real bills, they'd bitch and complain to beat the band. They don't want the responsibility. Well, fine and dandy, but that is THEIR CHOICE. And I do not have ANY RESPONSIBILITY to support them in their choice of lifestyle.

They could improve their life if they wanted to. But they don't.

It's rather hard to type right now

There's a flag football league on post that I'm a part of. I play center on offense and linebacker on defense. The league was put on hold for a bit because of a contract dispute between the post and the refs. Basically, the refs weren't getting paid at all, so they had a pretty damn good reason to be upset.

Anyways, the contract got taken care of, and we're playing catch-up games so that we can get into the playoffs. So my team had a double-header last night.

I told you all that so I can tell you this:

Sometime during the first game, I jammed my thumb blocking a defender. Sometime during the second game I did it again, only harder. I woke up this morning, tried to grab a cup of water, and damn near cried. My thumb hurts like a bastard. It's not broken. I did a check on it, moved it, felt the joint, and it's just jammed real bad. But guess what finger I use to hit the spacebar?

Yep. My right thumb. So it hurts to type right now. But don't worry, I'll still try to post for my ten regular readers. Hell, after taking a weekend off, I can work through the pain for y'all! Heh. In the meantime, I'll going to get caught up on everything I missed this weekend. When your only connection to the world is through your modem, it sucks to have it go out suddenly. Since I don't have cable or a dish, my only way to get news is online. So gimme a while to see what I missed.

Oh, and we won both games, by the skin of our teeth, and we're now in the playoffs. But if we play that shitty against the other teams, we're going to lose our asses.

Two things fixed

As you can see, I got my modem fixed. So I'm back on the intarwebs.

I also got the motorcycle running. I'm stoked. Took it for a ride last night when I got home from work. Damn, I missed riding. I'll be doing a lot more of it in the future.

Newsweek Jumps The Shark for Good

Has Newsweek given up all pretense of objectivity whatsoever? Guess who is getting loving, front-page caresses from Newsweak?

None other than Michelle "I can finally be proud of my country" Obama. The last female/politician to get such the dedicated front page spotlight? Hillary Clinton. Her tag line? "I Finally Found My Voice."

So what is Michelle's trademark? "Barak's Rock" and "I Can Only Be Who I Can Be." {{The preceeding must be stated while looking off-camera, upwards at a roughly 30 degree angle, a wistfully far way, yet confident and noble look in your eyes.}}

Here's a juicy quote:

If his {Barak's} loftiness can set him apart from the crowd, her bluntness draws them in. Standing up before large audiences wasn't easy at first. "I've never participated at this level in any of his campaigns," she told NEWSWEEK last week. "I have usually chosen to just appear when necessary."

Let there be no doubt. She is not campaigning FOR Barak, she's campaigning WITH him. And apparently, her "bluntness" is what "draws people in." This only solidifies the growing perception that, even moreso than will Billary, Michelle and Barak will be a package deal, as she works to "keep him real" and "not forget what we are fighting for." Without her around, it's beginning to sound like ol' Barry would be prone to drift into indirection, suffer numerous gaffes or get too full of himself. What a gal!

It's almost as if Michelle Obama is being billed as Barak's keeper. His handler. She keeps him centered and on track. {{sniff, dab}} Or, translated another way: she's running the show. I almost have to ask who exactly we'll be voting for on election day if "he" get's the nomination?

We haven't seen such a kid-gloves, soft-coated approach to "journalism" since...since...well, since Bill Clinton was in office.

Michelle Obama makes endearingly "blunt" comments, manages to piss-off or otherwise alienate a large chunk of the American voting populace...and she gets the front page of Newsweek. Nice.

Oh, and check the header graphic at the top: "The End of The Conservative Age."

Newsweak has clearly decided who is going to win the culture war, and thrown its unabashed support in that direction.

Internet out

My modem bit the big one late Friday night. I'm writing this from a friend's house right now. I should have the new modem up and running by tomorrow night, but that's not a guarantee. So, if I don't post, you know why.

See you when I'm back online.