This is where Dave's content would normally go

My days right now are like shoving ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag.  Thanks, Drum, for doing the yeoman's work.

Oh Dear Lord

The Dodgers lost, and they're out of the playoffs.

Now I'm going to have to spend my weekend dodging suicidal LA people who downed a handful of qualudes to drown their sorrows before they snorted handfuls of coke to wake up before they got into their cars to drive from where-ever to where-ever.

In other words, it'll probably be just like every other weekend on the roads here.  This place might not be Hell, but you can see Satan's front porch.

Of course he does

And it's not like the courts would actually rely on the plain language used by a bunch of old, white, privileged slave-owners, am I right?

Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for President

I mean, he was born in another country and served as Governor of the most populous State, so why not let him serve as President of all 50?

Well, Article 5, Section 2 of California's State Constitution only requires that the Governor be both a citizen of the United States and a resident of California, for the five years preceding the election.


The United States Constitution is a little more stringent. Article 2, Section 1, Paragraph 5:

No person except a natural born Citizen, ... shall be eligible to the Office of President;

Arnold was born in Austria, so that rules him out. Of course, given that the courts have repeatedly ignored the plain language of the Constitution on multiple occasions, I wouldn't be in the least surprised. And he's been thinking about it for a while, it seems...

Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”

Oh, one other thing. If you cannot run for President, you cannot run for Vice-President*, either, although there have been numerous Senators and Representatives, and even Cabinet members who were foreign-born. (If disaster strikes, and they have to start figuring out who the senior Executive Department Secretary is, they would just skip over who is ineligible.) So he could get to attend meetings in the White House, and maybe even stay overnight a few times, but he won't get to live there...

* - Last sentence of the 12th Amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

I've liked Jeff for years

so I tend to stop by his site a few times a day, even when he isn't posting, just because the comments are so great.

But he posts a wonderful link that will help us keep track of exactly what the Federal Government is doing. To you and I, and everyone we know, if you wanna be picky about it...

I'm not on Facebook, but I imagine a few of you are... Enjoy

One minor quibble is something that geoffb points out:

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.

Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

For all the bluster

It turns out that the Obama Administration is nothing but a bunch of software pirates, after all...

They were using a piece of software that was actually FREE to use, so long as the copyright notice was included in the page(s) where the software was to be used. Not hard, and it is quite easy to post such notices, especially when it's just a case of copy-and-paste.

But NNNNOOOOOoooooooo... they actually DELETED the copyright notice. But, in their infinite knowledge of how we should be doing things, they left in the internal comments that allowed the company to prove that the software is theirs.

Yeah, these yahoos should be handed control of our most private lives... the parts that are so private, it is actually one of the four protected classes of communication (husband-wife, priest-penitent, doctor-patient and lawyer-client). So private, that doctors are actively protected from having to report anything they learn from patients while testifying.

Until ObamaCare, that is.

Burn it down. Scatter the stones.

How long?

Okay, this one will be a little math-intensive, so you can skip it unless you want to skip down to the end, just to see how boned we truly are.

Okay, as of the writing of this column, the running National Debt is $16,963,909,000,000 ($16.96 trillion) dollars.

If we were to suddenly stop borrowing and started spending a million dollars per minute - every minute, round the clock, round the calendar, 24/7/365 - on paying off the principal amount (the interest is handled as a separate expense, so we are just talking about the principal), how long would it take to pay off that amount?

A million dollars every minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 365 days in a year = 525,600 minutes (which is where the song title from "Rent" comes from, btw) x $1,000,000 per minute = $ 525,600,000,000, or $525.6 billion per year. Divide into the number above, and we get... (drumroll, please)

32 years and 14 weeks.

That'a more than a generation... That long ago, Diana Spencer was walking down the aisle at St. Paul's Cathedral to meet Prince Charles... Ronald Reagan had just nominated the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court... The Space Shuttle had celebrated its first space mission...

That's if we stop borrowing NOW and start paying it off at $1 million/minute. Slower means longer. Not stopping makes it worse.

What cannot go on forever, simply won't.

To make it even easier

Let's see if we can make the First Amendment a little simpler to understand

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 Simplest terms, brass tacks and bottom line, that means that the Government cannot tell you

1) what to think
2) what to say
3) who to say it to.

They cannot tell you, force you, or coerce you in any of your most personal beliefs, nor can they prevent you from giving voice to those beliefs, and they don't get to decide who you hang out with in order to discuss those beliefs.

They can limit conduct, especially if there is a clear and present danger of harm, and remember that a Democracy has the right and authority to fight back against actions that can harm it (pity the Weimar Republic didn't learn that lesson).

Lots of court cases have defined what limits can be placed on certain dangerous expressions (shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, so-called "fighting words", intimidation, etc.), but absent the clear harm or threat of harm to another, the government does NOT get to tell you what to believe, what to say (or print out), and who your friends are. Those most basic of tenets must be defended.

And if it is a case of my neighbor trying to build a church on his property that crosses over our shared fence line, I would expect the police and courts to limit his expression insofar as it infringes upon my own rights, using force if necessary.

But what if it is the Government that is doing the infringing upon those rights? What fallback position do we have in those cases?

Relax, that's the next Amendment. Our Founders had just used all those "hunting tools" to kick out the most powerful Empire on the planet at that time.

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. -- Justice Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit Court, in his dissent to Silveria v. Locker

and
 

The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government - even the Third Branch of Government - the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. -- Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the 5-4 majority in District of Columbia, et al., v. Heller (2008)

Glendale Boy

Becomes youngest African-American Eagle Scout.

Good on 'im.  Making Eagle Scout is hard.  Doing it by the age of 12?  Unreal.

You want to know what the biggest help for him was?  I spotted it pretty early.

His name is James Hightower the Third.

His father's name is James Hightower the Second.

His mother's name is Lucretia Hightower.

Stable nuclear families produce good kids, as a rule.  Both his parents are active as Scout Leaders, based on the shirts they were wearing for the interview.  A nuclear family, setting good examples, produces good kids.  Eagle Scouts.  Leaders.

Now, compare this family to a majority of the EBT crowd that freaked out yesterday, and hazard a guess at how many of those folks come from families where they all share the same last name?

The Progressive mind in one paragraph

From a comment by Vox Day at his blog.

Phony is clearly one of the rhetorical crowd. He literally cannot learn from new information. That's why "Shut up, Tad" and "Go away, man talk" are valid responses for people like this. They simply have no ability to change their minds on the basis of information, they only change their minds in response to their changing emotions.

Phony will not change his mind on the subject unless someone he recognizes as his authority tells him to do so, and then he would very likely deny that he ever believed otherwise.

Doesn't that just perfectly capture how Progressives process information?  You can explain reality to a Progressive all day long.  You can point out the inherent flaws in their arguments.  You can use logic, reason, deductive reasoning, facts, numbers and statistics, and yet after explaining reality to a progressive you're met with "YOU'RE RACIST!" and they walk away convinced that they're the smartest people on the earth while you're a knuckle-dragging racist red-necked sister-humper.

Facts do not penetrate a Progressive brain.  Which is why they can look at Obama and call him their God, King and Savior, even while the economy tanks, American influence abroad is reduced to tatters, the military is being turned into a gutted, hollow shell of it's former self, our enemies act without any fear, and our former allies use the knives we've shoved into their backs to begin to severing ties to us.  Because you're racist.  And it's Bush's fault.

Seen all over the Conservative side of the web

Because it's that damn good.

A vet still serving his country by giving the barrycades back to the anti-American clown who ordered them put up around the WWII Memorial.

The pic is already going viral.  I'm just helping it along.

Yep

So much awesome in one piece, I don't know what to quote:

But the president who slept through the Benghazi massacre once again forgot that our military is not just an agitprop. Our soldiers really do put their lives on the line, and lose them — as did the one marine and four soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan last weekend. That made it all too real. When bereaved families were suddenly denied death benefits by our government, there was no hiding the fact that the commander-in-chief had, yet again, abandoned those who’d made the ultimate patriotic sacrifice. What’s more, this dereliction was nothing more than crass political calculation — or, as it turned out, miscalculation.

Public anger erupted and even the Associated Press courtiers were reduced to reporting a sharp drop in the president’s approval rating. Congressional Democrats scrambled and a superfluous, face-saving death-benefits law was enacted so the White House could try to pretend the president now had payment authority he’d previously lacked. Administration lawyers continue to mumble about how, though Obama felt really terrible about it, the perfectly clear POMA had been “too vague” to help military families in their time of need.

You know, there’s also a 1996 law on the federal books that makes it a felony to provide material support to terrorists. It’s not vague. In fact, it’s clear as a bell, according to the many federal courts that have applied it in sentencing scores of jihadist-abettors to hundreds of years in prison.

Don’t you find it strange, don’t you think the public at large would find it strange, that in a shutdown Obama has instigated in order to enforce the Obamacare law Americans don’t want, he so skews the rest of our law that his administration says we can fund al-Qaeda but we can’t fund the families of our war dead?

 Read The Whole Thing.

And in the 'Let Them Eat Cake' Department

That scrunt currently using up taxpayer funds on a staff larger than her husband (because we all know that being the First Baby Mama entitles her to a full household of personal servants) has managed to reach an incredible height. Or should I say "depth", since we ARE talking about TFG and his baby mama?

Turns out she is in a bidding war with Kate Moss (yes, THAT Kate Moss) for the services of Adele (yes, THAT Adele) to perform at her upcoming birthday party. The last time Adele was asked to perform at a private function (a wedding), she was asking for £100k a minute (roughly $160,000 - or TFG's entire goddamn annual salary for hearing a single rendition of "Rollin' In The Deep", just to make it clear how much we are talking about).

To sweeten the deal and beat out Kate Moss (who can easily match The FBM's taxpayer-backed checkbook), she has offered to "let her sing alongside Beyonce".

No word on whether Beyonce has to be paid to hang out with The FBM, too, but my question is "who, exactly, will be paying the millions of dollars to a pop star for the entertainment of someone who was, in fact, NOT elected to anything at all?"

Or is it going to be a fundraiser, with tickets on sale to the 1%?

Depths, indeed.

£100k a minute

£100k a minute

£100k a minute

Freedom of the Press does not refer to an occupation

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In no other respect is any other single profession granted special protection under the Bill of Rights, so why would anyone try to argue that someone who claims to be a "Member of The Press" gets something special out of the Constitution? Members of the clergy don't claim that they get special legal protections, even if legal precedence has caused the de facto status.

When the Founders first started arguing about the Bill of Rights, it was their intention to protect the freedom to express opinions. There are several different ways to overtly express an explicit idea, but the two main ones were most in need of protection - either through speaking or by writing it down. The new printing press had managed to start giving the colonists a means of expressing ideas to people who might not be present at its conception and evolution (say, around drinks at a tavern one night), and who would come along later to read the broadsheet pinned up in the public square. And it was the freedom of using your speech to express an idea, or to use the [printing] press to express it.

It was all about expressing the idea, not whether the person was paid to express it. Think of the two different levels of damaging another's reputation, slander and libel. The only difference between the two is whether the damaging expression was spoken aloud or written down and handed around. It's the same with the "Freedom of Speech, or of the Press" (which is exactly how it is phrased - see above), and should give a clue to what the Founders meant when they wrote it down the way they did). The lack of a semi-colon shows that it is part of the same clause, and part of the same thought.

Your right to express an idea, and the reach of that expression is entirely dependent upon your assets. If all you have is a soap box on a corner, then the only ones who hear your ideas will be the people who wander by during the length of your speech. If you happen to have access to a TV network or high-volume blog, you can have hundreds of thousands of people, or even possibly millions, (or merely hundreds if you're MSNBC) see what you have to say every day, and that is perfectly legal. You don't have to belong to any kind of specific union to be able to print out something and hand them out on street corners. And you don't have to have a special ID card just because your printing is actually appearing on a laptop monitor in a Starbucks halfway around the world. It is the expression.

So the next time someone starts saying that one must be an accredited journalist to have protection of that Freedom of the Press, let them know the truth.

If today's workers are screwed, that makes tomorrow's workers....

What, exactly?  Measured in Gold, the story of American wages is an ugly one.

The bottom line is that, in terms of gold, wages have fallen by about 87 percent. To get a stronger sense of what that means, consider that back in 1965, the minimum wage was 71 ounces of gold per year. In 2011, the senior engineer earned the equivalent of 63 ounces in gold. So, measured in gold, we see that senior engineers now earn less than what unskilled laborers earned back in 1965.

That’s right: today’s highly skilled professional is making less in real, comparative terms than yesterday’s unskilled worker.

When measured in dollars, wages and prices appear to be rising and, comparing wages to prices, we see only a small loss of purchasing power. However, prices do not tell the whole story, because they reveal nothing about costs. Costs also fell and this explains why the apparent drop in the real wages seems small.

But measured in gold—and this is crucial to understanding why we need a gold standard—we see reality with clarity. Incomes are about one tenth what they were in the 60’s. Prices are down too, but not as much.

Reminds me of something I read recently.....

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

A little Catholic Humor

Two Irish nuns were sitting at traffic light in their car when a bunch of rowdy drunks pulls up alongside of them. "Hey, show us your tits, ye bloody penguins!" shouts one of the drunks. The Mother Superior turns to Sister Immaculata, "I don't think they know who we are - show them your cross." So Sister Immaculata rolls down her window and shouts, "Screw off ye little fookin wankers, before I come over there and rip yer balls off!" Sister Immaculata looks back at the Mother Superior and asks, "Was that cross enough?"

Andouille

Just finished up a batch of andouille sausage.  The Mrs. and I use lamb casing, because with it's small size we can cook the sausage entirely with just smoke.  True andouille uses a larger casing, but we don't have the facilities here to properly smoke a larger sausage the way it needs to be smoked.  So we use lamb casing.

I had forgotten just how badly lamb casing stinks.  Sheep are truly some of the most foul smelling animals on the planet, both inside and out.  I've helped butcher one before.  I often wonder just why we ever domesticated them.  And then I put on a wool sweater on a cold day and go "Oh, THAT'S why!"

So, Saturday we fire up the smoker.  Some friends of ours have given us plum wood from a tree they had to fell; we'll see how that makes the sausage taste.

Today's stolen post

Is not safe for work.

Sean Duffy destroys Andrea Mitchell

Sweet Jeebus, I enjoyed watching a Republican actually fight back against a media that has gone the full fellatio on Obama.



The sooner that Republicans realize that the media is not their friend, the sooner they can have an impact on how their message gets out.  Thank God there are GOPers who get it.  Watching that anti-American stretch-faced progressive cow get her ass handed to her was a thing of beauty. 

He's not just...

TFG isn't just an incompetent, he is actively and knowingly anti-American. If he were just a fucking idiot, he would get some things right from time to time, but when he deliberately sets out to target disabled veterans, retired seniors and now, brand-new widows, that is a vindictiveness and contempt for this country and its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.

Evan Sayet said, in his wonderful speech, "Regurgitating The Apple", at the Heritage Foundation several years ago, that his eyes were opened when he saw the liberal response to 9/11:

Imagine being in a restaurant with an old friend, and you're catching up, and suddenly he blurts out, "I hate my wife!"... and you kind of chuckle to yourself, because he says that every time you're together and you know he doesn't hate his wife, they've been together for 35 years. He loves his daughters, and they are just like her, no, no, he doesn't hate his wife.

And you're having some dinner, and you look out the window, and you spot his wife out the window, and she's being beaten up. So you grab your friend, and say, "C'mon, c'mon, let's help her, let's help your wife!" And he says, "Nah, I'm sure she deserves it."

At that moment, it dawns on you that he really does hate his wife.

This is going to be the point where some people realize that TFG really does hate the military.

They are Sowing the Winds

and they are about to Reap The Whirlwind...

Presented without further comment (because if I say what I really think, I'm likely to get the blog yanked for vulgar language):

http://instagram.com/p/fMKBmWhmvs/#

Veterans arrested for refusing to leave the memorial built to honor the very battles they fought in.

Lock and load, folks.