Maybe it's just me

Jennifer Rubin says that Obama caved, Republicans won the tax battle of 2010.

There really is no other way to say it: the Republicans won, the liberal Democrats lost, and the president sided with the Republicans. The subject, of course, is an agreement to extend all the Bust tax cuts. The president tonight announced a "bipartisan framework" for agreement on, among other things, to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years. A Republican House aide tells me tonight it is "a damn good deal." And so it is, from the perspective of conservatives.

Come January, we need to do better.  However, kicking the tax debate can down the road until 2012?  Friggin' Brilliant.  Let's have that debate right before the 2012 elections!  The only way to get taxes more on the minds of voters is to move Income Tax day from April 15th to the Monday before elections.  So on that we got a win.

December 7th, 1941

Is the day the Empire of Japan attacked, without provocation, the US at Pearl Harbor, and Schofield Barracks, and Wheeler Field, and Hickam Field, and Kaneohe, which later became Kaneohe Marine Air Base, which is where my father was stationed when I was a kid.

I've been to the USS Arizona memorial.  It's still leaking oil, one tiny drop at a time, blossoming on the water's surface bit by bit.

Do I blame modern day Japan for this?  Of course not.  The Japanese of today have as little to do with that war as I do.  But I bring it up because it shows the folly of sitting around while violent men with hostile intentions plan to attack you.  A lesson that quite a bit of this country seems to have forgotten.  And we've forgotten it before, to our detriment.

I wonder how many of our high school students in America today even know why December 7th happened?

Webster Wept

Megan McCain had to look up what "blue bloods" meant?

No wonder the Democrat Media loves this woman; she's a fucking imbecile.  I caught one tiny bit of some speech she had done on a TV show.  Some radio host was just having a field day with her statement "as a twenty-nine year old woman...."  and that's all I heard, because the radio host would only play that much.  Just that little bit of speech, seven words, she sounded like Paris Hilton with body fat.

Yeech.

Mistake, corrected

I've had Mind Numbed Robot in my personal bookmarks for a while.  Now he's finally on the blogroll.  Sorry that took so long!

Sausage

Since several kind-hearted strangers have donated venison to the Ragin' Household, my hunting season being ended before it ever started, the Ragin' Mrs. and I have started experimenting with recipes.  Two kinds of hunter's sausage.  An Italian Wine and Cheese sausage.  And a merguez which should be hot enough to blow my sinuses out my ears.

Oh yeah, baby.  It's good eats time.

Snowfall

After the light dustings that we've had over the past week, Mother Nature finally decided to dump a bunch on us at once.

I think that freshly fallen snow is one of the most beautiful sights on God's earth.  I'll have to find a few good photos of it before I shovel it off of my sidewalk.  And they just lit the Christmas lights in the park last night.  It'll be beautiful tonight.

Your Sphincter-Puckering Chart of the Day

Is here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, like it or not, the days of our wild spending have caught up to us.

In case you missed it -

The Deficit Commission just admitted to America what most of us already knew - those Obamacare cost savings don't exist, and never will.

Repeal Obamacare.

Today's Must Read

Transfers by Francis W. Porretto.

The United States operates several transfer programs at the federal level, and many more at the state, county, and municipal levels. Transfer programs, and the bureaucracies that operate them, consume over half of all governmental revenues at this time. Of the $3.6 trillion federal budget for 2011, about $1.8 trillion is consumed by transfer programs.

They who argue for a transfer program usually invoke the mantra of "compassion." it's to "help the poor," or to "feed the elderly," or to help the handicapped," or some such. Sometimes it's to "prepare our children," though what "our children" are being prepared for mostly looks like habituation to dependency in a thoroughly amoral society based on State-mediated theft.

And that's before we get to the question of efficiency. The statistics are unambiguous: governmental transfer programs invariably divert more than half of the money allocated to them to bureaucrats' salaries and operational overhead. In 2001, the most recent year for which I have figures, 72% of the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services went to bureaucrats' salaries and overhead; only 28% of its funds reached its supposed beneficiaries.

The least efficient of the large private charities, the United Way, averages an 85% rate of conversion of inputs to benefits. Only 15% of the funds it collects goes to salaries and overhead.

Must I state plainly that usually, when we refer to a government transfer program's "beneficiaries," we're thinking of the wrong bunch? Is it simply too obvious?

You have to read the rest.

Still Got Nothing

We're hitting another one of those balls-to-the-wall cycles at work, where I'm essentially running from the moment I get up until I come home and collapse on the couch.

One of the Chaplains I worked with in the past sent me an email that contains an op-ed full of fail.  I'll have to pull it up and post it later, because I'm being kind of lazy right now, but the whole gist if the piece is that Americans need to be more "sexually liberated".

My pop-off question:  Since sexual liberation has given us an epidemic of STDs, AIDS, broken families, single parent families, teen-age pregnancies, and a breakdown of societal morals, just why do we want MORE of it?  Can anyone out there name one good thing that sexual liberation has done for society as a whole?

Anyone?

Snow, Finally

We should normally have snow by Thanksgiving.  This year it took until the last day in November.

And no, this isn't "global warming".  Two years ago we had snow in mid-October.

And as for global warming, if you haven't seen this video of all the Global Bullshit Artists partying it up in Cancun, take a moment and watch it.  And then realize that the most recent glow-bull warming message to come out came from this group.  This band of hypocrites who all flew to CAN-FUCKING-CUN to party and eat and drink and tell us not to consume too much.

They can all choke.