Skye Puppy

Clark Judge on the State of the Union

2012-01-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

Clark Judge's Monday post at Hugh Hewitt's site hits a home run. Here it is in full:

SOTU: Did I hear that right?
By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute.

It sounded like such a soft, even conservative speech.

But let me get this straight:

1) banks will be punished (do I understand this right, by a committee headed by Eric Holder?) if their lending is too risky,

2) and they will be required (by the same committee) to give more home loans (meaning, it must be, to people who would otherwise not qualify for the loans, or else the government would not have to be involved) at lower rates (which means rates that do not compensate them as much as the market says they need to be compensated for the risks they are taking, all of which sounds like a new edition of the policies that brought on the financial collapse),

3) which must mean that they will have to pull back on risky lending someplace other than homes,

4) the only place that most banks would be able to pull back on riskier customers would be loans to small and new businesses,

5) but these are the businesses that have created just about all the jobs over the last 20 years and he said early in the speech he wants to encourage them,

6) so maybe their growth capital will come from selling stock to the kinds of people who invest in new and small businesses,

7) but through the Buffet Rule he’s going to double the tax rate on investment income for those people, meaning that, like the banks, they can’t be fully compensated for the risk of backing small and new businesses,

8) so they will not invest more in small and new companies but in big established firms,

9) so more of those small and new firms will have to turn to the government for capital,

10) which luckily he said would up its investing in early stage businesses with “the best” ideas,

11) “the best” ideas meaning, I guess, as with Solyndra, ideas that advance his agenda through companies whose owners support his candidacy),

11) (sic) or maybe it would be companies that agree to invite unionization (since the unions have failed to organize the new and dynamic sectors of the economy, which is why they have been shrinking),

12) but then with the big businesses, he wants to punish American companies if they invest overseas,

13) and he wants to increase exports,

14) but being competitive in the global markets often means having part of your production near your markets, which is why many companies have opened production facilities abroad and many foreign companies (BMW and Honda, for example) have opened their facilities here,

15) so he’ll make these companies less competitive, meaning less able to export anything that might be paired with some other product the company makes abroad in order to attract buyers,

16) and it also means he’ll have the U.S. ignoring many of the international trading rules of which we have been the principal sponsor since the end of WWII, rules that have led to an incredible growth in widely shared wealth all over the planet,

17) which means that, if he follows through, he’ll blow up the post-WWII global economic system,

18) which in the very short run may help the uncompetitive American labor unions but in the not-so-long run would devastate every economy on earth,

19) but it would also mean he would be in a position to decide where big companies could invest, and when, just as he’ll be in control of all new and small businesses, too,

20) meanwhile he is going to tell states and localities what their budget priorities should be,

21) and make them adopt his policies for running their schools, leaving me to wonder, when he’s through, what won’t he control?

I believe that’s what I heard the president advocate last night. But one term I didn’t hear, maybe I missed it: “The Constitution.” Then again, wasn’t he suggesting that, in brave times like these, we need to put aside those old rules. Do I have this straight?

Yes, I think he does.

1000 Days

2012-01-24T20:01:00.000-08:00

I saw this at Power Line:

Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, notes that the last time the Senate passed a budget, “you had never heard of the iPad, Tiger Woods was only known for his golfing abilities, General Motors had never declared bankruptcy, you had never heard of Swine flu. And the national debt was $4 trillion smaller than it is today.

Here's his point in a quick visual:

The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires the President to submit the annual budget to Congress each year by February 1st (see p. 6-7), and it requires Congress to pass a budget before the new fiscal year begins on October 1st. Every year. It's required. By law.

The Democrats in the Senate have been defying federal law for 1000 days now, and the press isn't doing a thing to hold them accountable. It's discouraging seeing what's happening to our country. I don't really want to watch...

Back Again

2012-01-24T08:14:00.000-08:00

One weekend when I was 20, my husband and I were working on the bicycles. I reached over my bike, grabbed the frame, and lifted it to turn it upside down. My lumbar region felt as though it had been blasted by lightning, and I spent the rest of the day flat on my stomach in bed.

That was the moment my back troubles began.

I can go years without having any back pain, and then one day I'll twist or bend funny and WHAM! My back screams at me again.

A couple weeks ago I walked into the bathroom at night to brush my teeth and felt a little twinge in the back of my waist. No big deal. But later that night I felt a few more twinges, so I decided it wasn't a bad idea to get the chiropractic gel-pack out of the freezer and lean against it while I sat in my spot on the loveseat and watched some streaming TV shows on Netflix. Just in case, really.

By morning, though, my back was in full-Psycho mode, and for the first time in the two and a half years at my job, I took a sick day. I spent the day alternating between icing my back and giving the gel-pack a chance to re-freeze. By the next morning, my back had improved to a steady band of lightning across my waist, so I headed off to work with my gel-pack and walked around the office like an old lady.

It's been a slow recovery, but every day has been an improvement over the previous one. Sunday I wore heels to church without any ill effects. (Yay! I hate flats! I feel frumpy when I wear them.) So this week it's heels again at work. Life is good.

But I have a new BFF (sorry, girlfriends!). It's my gel-pack. She and I still hang out together a few times a day. I don't have the courage yet to end that relationship.

An Inauspicious Beginning

2012-01-01T17:49:00.000-08:00

This morning when I left for church, I put the key in the deadbolt on the outside of the door, locked the knob on the security screen door, pulled the door shut, and then shut the screen door. With my keys still in the deadbolt. Locked inside the screen door.

And this was not the first time I've done that.

All my keys are on the same key ring, so I couldn't go anywhere in my car. My roommate had already gone to her church an hour before, so I called her and left a message asking her to call me right away to let me know when she'd be home. But since I hadn't reached her, I called my daughter.

She was home and was happy to hang out with me. I sat outside reading my Nook until she arrived, and then we headed for the movie theater. On our way there, I got a call from my roommate, who hadn't listened to my message. She was worried, because she got home from church and found my keys in the door. I assured her I was fine.

My daughter and I went to see Mission Impossible VIII or whatever number they're on now. It was good (much better than Sherlock Holmes II), except I couldn't quite handle the window scene in Dubai.

After the movie, we went out for lunch and then stopped at home to pick up my keys so I could take them to Home Depot to get duplicates made of the two house keys (screen door, front door). Now that I've locked myself out twice, it's no longer a fluke but a pattern. And patterns must be addressed.

When I was finished getting the extra keys made and tested in the doors, I dropped them in a zippered spot in my purse. If I ever lock my keys in the door like that again, I'll be able to get them unlocked, since I never go anywhere without my purse. Problem solved!

But it's not the best start to the new year, because not only was my first real action of the year such a boneheaded one, I also missed church entirely. It's a good thing I don't believe in omens, or I'd be facing an absent-minded, heathen year. Instead, I see it as a sign that things will only get better.

Have a very happy 2012!

Final Punctuation Quotes

2011-12-31T21:56:00.000-08:00

My Page-a-Day calendar at work, from Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is at an end, and I wanted to share a couple of the last quotes, which summarize our punctuation situation quite nicely.

From December 29th:

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated. All our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places.

From December 31st:

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

So, please, use your punctuation the right way. We wouldn't want to have to face the unimaginable.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late posting something for Christmas. I had nursery duty during the first service at church this morning and then attended the second service. But it's good that I didn't post anything yet, because they showed this video at church, and I love it:

For a special bonus, here's a nice Christmas song for you, Francesca Battistelli's "You're Here."

Have a wonderful Christmas!

Engrish

2011-12-16T13:20:00.000-08:00

It's been said that learning English as a second language is very difficult. English borrowed grammar and spelling rules from all over the place, and most of it doesn't even make sense to those of us who grew up speaking it like a native. We just know when it's right, except of course for sometimes when we haven't got a clue.

Probably the language groups that have the most trouble with English are those in Asia. When people over there translate important information for English-speaking tourists, it can be a challenge, and some of those challenges are showcased at Engrish.com, one of websites I visit when I need a good chuckle. Here are just a few that have given me a giggle lately:

Danger warning:

Helpful information:

Menu clarification:

Restroom help:

Shopping:

Lakeside instructions:

Friendly people:

Be sure to look around, especially at the Popular Engrish link.

What favorite websites do you have?

Question

2011-12-12T07:56:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning on my back, and my lumbar region was a little achey, so I hit the snooze button and rolled over on my side to sleep in the fetal position. It usually helps ease the aching in my back.

Nine minutes later the alarm went off again, and my first thought was, "Time to wake up and face the music."

Now, I know that phrase means that you have to face the consequences of your misdeeds, but the worst "misdeed" I have is that I forgot to turn on the Out of Office Assistant in Outlook for my day off Friday. There won't be much music to face for that.

So here's my question: Where did "face the music" come from? In what part of life, way back whenever, was there music playing while you paid the penalty for your crimes?

In movies set in the Revolutionary period, they always play snare drums as the prisoner waits his last moments while the hangman or the firing squad gets ready. But drums aren't "music." Music is music.

So what exactly is the music we face?

Miscarriage

2011-12-09T15:43:00.000-08:00

The Duggars, from the show 19 Kids and Counting, announced recently that they were expecting their 20th baby. Today, however, I heard on the radio that Michelle miscarried during the second trimester. They'll be having a memorial service for the baby.

It's sad, because when you're that far along, the baby has already become a member of the family and you're just waiting to find out what he or she will look like and and be like.

The whole time I was growing up, my grandpa (my mom's dad) always talked about being one of ten kids. They didn't all reach adulthood, though, with what life was like back in the early 1900's, and my grandpa was the only one of the ten who carried the family name to the next generation.

One brother drowned when he was 16, and a sister married, so of course her kids had her husband's name. And Uncle Andy never had children.

When I was getting my Bachelor's degree in Psychology, we had to do a project that required getting some of the family history to create a genogram. I went back a generation further than we were supposed to for the project, because there were issues on the other side of the family that I thought had bearing on my generation. I called my mom to find out about her dad and his siblings, and what she told me rocked what I had known all my life.

My grandfather's mom had ten pregnancies, but four of them ended in miscarriages or stillbirths. Only six of the babies survived. And yet my grandfather said he was one of ten children the way we say we have two arms and two legs. Those four lost babies were as much a part of the family as the six.

So when someone you know miscarries, don't dismiss the loss. They may not have seen and held the baby, but they felt it growing and moving. They had hopes and dreams for the person the baby could become. It is cruel to assure them they'll have another or to remind them of the children they already have. First give them time to grieve the loss of part of the family. It will be easier on them in the long run if they're able to work through the pain before moving on.

Christmastime Fun

2011-12-08T19:16:00.000-08:00

A long time ago I had this one boss, and he was really great to work for. He was the guy who knew what every single one of the See's candies had inside. For someone like me, who hates nuts and hates the taste of coffee, this boss was a lifesaver when a box of See's showed up. And if there was fun to be had, you could bet he'd be in the middle of it.

One Christmas he told me what his favorite thing to do was for that time of year. He always saved his Christmas cards from the previous year, as long as they didn't have the date written on them and they weren't from Mom or Uncle Harry or someone like that.

Most of his family and friends lived in California. But he had this old college buddy who lived in Omaha, and that's what made it all possible.

My boss would send Christmas cards to all his contacts. And then he'd get the cards from last year, the ones that said nothing more than, "Merry Christmas. Love, Jeff and Betty," and he'd get fresh envelopes and stamps and choose a family member or two and a few of his friends and write out their addresses on a separate piece of paper. And he'd put all the cards and envelopes and stamps and addresses in a manila envelope and send it to his buddy in Omaha.

Mr. Omaha would address the envelopes, put the Jeff and Betty cards in them, and mail them back to my boss's friends in California.

My boss took infinite delight in imagining his friends getting a card and asking themselves, "Who on earth are Jeff and Betty?" And I couldn't help but laugh with him until my cheeks hurt, because his laugh was so contagious and it was just so funny.

I've never had the nerve to try it. But I think about it sometimes when the Christmas cards start coming in the mail...

Life

2011-12-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

Friday was my sister's birthday. I had tried to find a card I'd seen a couple months ago, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen it and it seems to have disappeared completely. And with something in particular in mind, I couldn't find any other card that felt right. So I didn't send one.

This is the card:

The front says, "They dared Mittens to do it, and Mittens never turned down a dare."

Inside, it says, "Here's to living life on the edge! Happy Birthday."

I called my sister instead.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I didn't call her until after work.

Just as I was wrapping up my work day, my roommate called to tell me that her BFF Forever - her son's mother-in-law, a wonderful Christian woman and the glue in her family - had just passed away. She'd been battling stomach cancer for several months, and we knew she might not survive to see Christmas. Still, it came too soon, and the news brought me to tears.

After work I struggled with how to handle my sister's birthday call. I didn't want to dampen her spirits, but it was hard to think about being happy when this family that I love was suffering. Finally, I decided to save the news until the end of the call and followed it by telling my sister how very, VERY much I love her.

Life is difficult. And it's rewarding. And good. It is a gift from God that fills us with joy and sorrow, sometimes at the same time.

Today, right this minute, there are families watching as their loved one slips away from this life. And there are families rejoicing at the arrival of a new life. Today people are celebrating a birthday (and I know who one of you is) and others are facing defeat and regret. Today little children can't contain their excitement as they stand in line to talk to Santa, and old people in senior communities take their lapdogs out for a walk, alone. And all of it (and so much more) happens at exactly the same time.

What amazes me when I try to comprehend it all (and can't) is that God is able to weep and rejoice and strengthen and celebrate and comfort and convict and draw people to Him. He is all we need - and some days we need it all.

Life is more fleeting than we realize, so we need to make sure to tell people we love them so we don't have any regrets. And when we've done that, when all of that is settled, we need to get on with life.

We need to come out from the shadows, out from our hiding places, to stop shrinking back from the challenges of life and start living a little more on the edge. We need to be more like Mittens.

Mail Mix-Ups

2011-11-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

I'm taking the week off, sleeping in and doing those things that I never seem to have time for otherwise. Exciting stuff like replacing the front porch light when the sun is up and taking my recycling to get redeemed when they're actually open.

My roommate loves to get the mail and checks the mailbox every evening when she gets home, before she even unlocks the door. Me, I couldn't care less. But because I know she likes it, I went out to the curb in the middle of the day and got our mail. It was the Pennysaver, with a few pages of ads tucked inside, and a mass mailing of some sort on glossy paper. I checked the name to see if it was for me (unlikely), my roommate, her late father who died two years ago, or her late husband who died in 2004. About half the time, the two men get more mail than the two of us women do.

But that other piece of mail had somebody else's name on it, so I checked the address, and it was the neighbors two doors up the hill. I went over there and opened their mailbox, but they must like the mail as much as my roomie does because it was already empty. Then I noticed somebody was in the car in the driveway, so I walked up to her (startled her) and told her that they gave us her mail. As I handed it to her I said, "Looks exciting," in that way that, combined with the eyebrows lifting, says it looks nothing of the sort. She chuckled and said she'd get right on it, and I went back home.

On the short walk, though, I was reminded of my childhood. That was the time when only rural streets had the mailboxes all the way out by the curb. Normal people in town had the mailbox mounted on the house by the front door, and our mailman parked his modified-Jeep vehicle on some other street, filled up his bag on wheels, and walked down one side of our long, long cul-de-sac and up the other.

Most of the moms on our street stayed at home raising the kids, and they got to know the mailman pretty well (my brother and I were summertime friends with the garbageman, too, but that's another story). Every Christmas, my mom baked banana bread and put a loaf, wrapped in aluminum foil with a red bow on it, in the mailbox for him.

Our mailman was a friendly man, and he would chat with my mom and her friends on the block, and every once in a while, he would decide that the ladies hadn't visited each other enough lately, so he would intentionally mix up the mail. That way they'd have to take the mail to the other neighbor, who would invite the delivering neighbor in for coffee.

We knew he did it on purpose, partly because he said he did, but also because it was always the same few friends who had their mail mixed up. He never gave us the mail for the family down the street who had the juvenile-delinquent kids. Our mailman knew who the nice people were, and he didn't subject us to the others.

While I doubt today's mix-up was intentional, it gave me a chance to meet another neighbor, and it brought back a happy memory from my childhood. Just that is enough to make this a good day.

Occupy Bagram

2011-11-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

Love it!

I found this at Michelle Malkin, and she found it at Black Five, and they stole it shamelessly from Steven T's Facebook page.

Herman Cain on Foreign Policy

2011-11-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

Herman Cain is fading in the polls. First there were the sexual harrassment allegations, and then there was the Libya gaffe, which was reported widely as Cain's not being ready for prime time. These things take their toll.

Today, though, a friend sent me an email with Herman Cain's response to the foreign policy question (the text can be found here), and I was impressed. Here's some of what he said:

A few days ago, after coming under criticism for my answer to a question about Libya in an interview, I made a lighthearted comment that reflected all this – that I’m not supposed to know everything (most of the media quoted me as saying “anything”) about foreign policy.

Bizarre things happen when you run for president, one of which is that statements like this go viral, with people claiming I had somehow made the case that no knowledge of world affairs is required for the job.

I obviously don’t think that, but I’m also quite willing be honest about my strengths. My background is in the business world, and my greatest strength concerns the economy. My motivation in running for president is to apply my leadership skills to all issues – foreign and domestic. But clearly, as I have met with foreign policy luminaries like John Bolton and Henry Kissinger, I have done a lot more listening than talking – because they know a lot more about it than I do, and it would be absurd for me to claim otherwise.

That said, a man taking the oath of office for the presidency must have a sense of America’s place in the world, and must have a clear idea of the challenges, threats and opportunities that present themselves. Otherwise, success on the economic front likely goes for naught, as mistakes in the international arena tend to be costly both in the short term and in the long term.

My approach to foreign policy is to apply a general set of principles to each situation we face, and I have summarized these principles as peace through strength and clarity.

[....]

What does this mean?

In a broad sense, it means that I would not retreat on initiatives that strengthen America’s strategic standing in order to buy some sort of accommodation with those who do not have an interest in our security. For example, I would not have welched on America’s commitment to install a missile defense system in Eastern Europe because the Russians didn’t like it. The security of the U.S. and our allies would take precedence over the concerns of a nation whose strategic interests are often contrary to ours.

[....]

Peace through strength and clarity means there is no doubt about where we stand, for what we stand and with whom we stand. We stand in support of free nations who respect the rights of their people and do not threaten their neighbors. And we treat our allies like allies.

[....]

The most effective application of strength is that which is rarely used. Our troops are already overstretched and our financial resources are limited. An America that is capable and ready, and backs up what it says, won’t have to take action all that often. The world’s bad actors will know we are serious.

I think it’s clear by now that I am not going to score the best of all the candidates on media pop quizzes about the details of current international events. Some have claimed that I take some sort of perverse satisfaction in not knowing all these details. That is not true. I want to know as much as I can. But a leader leads by gathering all the information available in a given situation, and making the best decision at the time based on that information, and in accordance with sound principles. As president, I would not be required to make decisions on the spur of the moment based on a question from a reporter. I would make them the way I made them as a CEO – based on careful consideration of all the facts and the best advice of the best people.

But it is crucial to understand that my foreign policy decisions will always be based on the principles I have laid out here. That will not change, because these are the principles that best represent America’s heritage, and best advance our interests, as well as the interests of all freedom-loving nations and peoples.

I don't know if Herman Cain is even going to be in the running when Primary Season comes around, but I love his guiding principles for foreign policy. This is where I want the eventual GOP nominee to stand, and if he or she does, then I will be able to vote for that person and not just plug my nose and vote against the other guy the way I did in 2008.

America has been a great nation, but President Obama has hung a giant "Kick Me" sign around her neck. With a foreign policy like the one spelled out by Cain, America can go a long way toward removing that sign and having her greatness restored.

Occupy Wall Street - A Parable

2011-11-07T20:24:00.000-08:00

Occupy Wall Street started out as a supposedly peaceful protest by a bunch of clueless, radical '60s wannabes. And as this type of purposeless leftwing gathering tends to do, OWS degenerated into whining, filth, and finally rioting. Just like the Tea Party. Or not. Michelle Malkin has a pretty good roundup filed under her "Moonbats" category.

Over at Power Line, Scott Johnson posted this video. Its title is "Just After Halloween, 2011."

Johnson's comments following the video are perfect:

Given that citizens of lesser means always outnumber the rich, the classic political philosophers held that government based on majority rule was untenable. They were of the view that it would lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. Aristotle observed in The Politics, for example: “If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city.”

The Founders of the United States were deep students of politics and history, and they shared Aristotle’s concern. Up through their time, history had shown all known democracies to be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” James Madison and his colleagues held that the “first object of government” was to protect the rights of property.

They understood the protection of property rights to be bound up with freedom itself. “In a word,” Madison explained, “as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights….” The Founders thus incorporated numerous provisions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights to protect the property rights of citizens from the power of the government.

Whatever else might be said about him, President Obama operates on a different philosophy of government from that of the Founders. His credo is reflected in the proposition: “I think at some point you have made enough money.” By contrast, the Founders thought that at some point the government had enough power. They created a system of government that was meant to establish protections against the likes of President Obama and the OWS crowd.

I'd say that 2013 can't come soon enough, but the politicians who have a track record of actually slashing government spending aren't the ones who are running. And the ones who are in the race have been ever so eager in the past to take away our candy and give it to Barry and the other kids in the neighborhood. I can't say I'm optimistic.

Games Men Play

2011-11-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

I went on a date last weekend. It's been a while, since before the trip with my mom, and I'd forgotten some of the dynamics involved. Of course, I've had a few reminders because my roommate has been seeing a wonderful man (Hi, my roomie's gentleman friend!) for a few months, so I've been able to do a little observing. It's been nice seeing how well he treats her, so my protective instincts haven't been needed at all.

Men, in general, like to talk about how women, in general, play games when it comes to dating and relationships. We have a bad reputation in the eyes of the opposite sex, who conveniently forget all about their favorite Post-First Date Game. I'm in the middle of that one right now.

The PFD Game doesn't get played every time, to be honest. One time I went on a first date with a guy I knew from the Singles group I attended. We went out for dinner and a movie and had a great time, but we both knew it wasn't going to go anywhere. There wasn't any chemistry. He didn't call me back for another date, for which I was thankful. And we continued to be friends without any awkwardness at all.

In contrast, there was another first date I had with a man I didn't really know very well but who, in the course of conversation, said he was a Christian. He brought me flowers and took me to a nice restaurant and let me know that he was hoping I would go away with him on weekends to the different resorts owned by the company he worked for.

Ummm.... No. I told him there was no way that would happen. He called me later that week, which I didn't want him to do, and I told him nicely at first that I wasn't what he was looking for. When he didn't get the message, I said point-blank that I didn't want to see him anymore. After the phone call, I felt such great relief that I didn't have to go through that again.

And then he called again the next week! And I had to go through the agony of telling him all over again, because he didn't understand me any better the second time than he had the first. He finally stopped calling, but I was afraid to go out with anyone for a long time after that.

There's a message I tried to drum into my girls (my daughter and the two of her friends who each lived with us for a while): If a man will pressure you to give him what he wants before marriage, he's not the right man. The kind of man who will put his own desires ahead of your best interest before marriage is the kind of man who will put his own desires ahead of yours and the kids' best interest after marriage. You must read that kind of relentless pressure as a giant red flag and RUN, not walk, away from the relationship.

But, of course, you should never bring up that or any remotely related topics on the first date. Which I somehow managed to do last week.

I knew this guy before he asked me out about as well as I knew the first guy I mentioned above. He's a very nice man, and we went to a restaurant. I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that I said something that might have been OK, except that the conversation just kept going into the Territory That Must Not Be Discussed On A First Date. And all those things that your mother or grandmother or favorite aunt (or The Rules, if you didn't have a maternal-type to explain this) told you not to bring up, I said those things. And he was really sweet, but my goodness! I stuck my foot in my mouth so far, it came out my ears.

As we parted (again, no details), he kicked off the PFD Game: He said, "I'll call you."

The Game has rules that women aren't privy to and usually only learn the hard way. When he says he'll call, he does NOT mean tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. He means not before Wednesday at the absolute soonest.

It's a test. You. Must. Not. Call. Him.

If you call him, you lose. Game over. Buh bye.

You must wait. Longer than you can stand, and then wait some more. And the whole time, you're wondering if you said something stupid (OK, I'm not wondering that - I did say it) that turned him off or if there was some deal-breaker that flashed like a neon sign in his mind, and you alternate between feeling defeated because he's not going to call and trying to convince yourself that he really will call just as soon as whatever is keeping him busy gets cleared up.

But what keeps him from calling usually isn't what you said. It's the Cave Time portion of the Game. This begins the moment he finishes saying he'll call.

Cave Time is something men need that women can't comprehend. Men withdraw into their cave to process what just happened. They don't talk things through with their friends the way women do. He'll stay in his cave as long as he needs to, and when he's ready he'll come out and give you a call. Or not.

Where am I in the PFD Game? He hasn't called, so I'm alternating between being sure he saw some deal-breakers and trying to convince myself of the perfectly good reasons why I shouldn't expect a call before this coming week. I'm busy not getting my hopes up so I don't get disappointed too badly if he decides my foot-in-mouth condition is way too unattractive.

What I'm not doing is calling him. By not calling, the Game is still on. I still have that small shred of hope to hang onto, because it's not game over. Not yet.

Are You Freakin' Kidding Me?

2011-10-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

I apologize for being incommunicado for so long (and for the strong language in the title). I've been busy.

But this is enough to get me out of the fast lane, because I'm absolutely apoplectic about it. First, a little background:

Earlier this week the Justice Department divulged that they had foiled a plot (which they knew about for six weeks) on the part of Iran's government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador on American soil. To normal people who understand foreign policy and national sovereignty, this constitutes an act of war against both America and Saudi Arabia by Iran.

To President Obama, however, it constitutes a reason for giving another strongly worded response, letting Iran know that they really, REALLY need to start behaving now or somebody's going to be upset with them.

Now that he's lectured Iran's President Ahmadinejad, President Obama has announced that we're sending troops.

To central Africa to fight the Lord's Republican Army.

Why? Because "[t]he LRA continues to commit atrocities across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan that have a disproportionate impact on regional security."

Iran is actively destabilizing the Middle East and the West, and we do nothing but scold them.

I'm at a complete loss for the right words to describe how I feel. Instead, you need to watch the newly released video of the Administration's War Council.

Saving Israel

2011-09-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson is a mensch, about as sharp as they come. His latest Townhall column is, "Can Israel Survive?" Here are his concluding paragraphs:

The Arab Middle East damns Israel for not granting a "right of return" into Israel to Palestinians who have not lived there in nearly 70 years. But it keeps embarrassed silence about the more than half-million Jews whom Arab dictatorships much later ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, and sent back into Israel. On cue, the Palestinian ambassador to the United States again brags that there will be no Jews allowed in his newly envisioned, and American subsidized, Palestinian state -- a boast with eerie historical parallels.

By now we know both what will start and deter yet another conflict in the Middle East. In the past, wars broke out when the Arab states thought they could win them and stopped when they conceded they could not.

But now a new array of factors -- ever more Islamist enemies of Israel such as Turkey and Iran, ever more likelihood of frontline Arab Islamist governments, ever more fear of Islamic terrorism, ever more unabashed anti-Semitism, ever more petrodollars flowing into the Middle East, ever more chance of nuclear Islamist states, and ever more indifference by Europe and the United States -- has probably convinced Israel's enemies that finally they can win what they could not in 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and 2006.

So brace yourself. The next war against Israel is no longer a matter of if, only when. And it will be far more deadly than any we've witnessed in quite some time.

Also at Townhall is the indication that, as vacuous as Obama's speech yesterday to the UN was, at least there's still a smidgen of dignity left in his administration because our delegation to the UN walked out during Ahmadinejad's diatribe before the UN General Assembly. Good for them!

Unlike Obama, however, I hold out no hope for peace. "Peace is hard work," the President said at the UN, and it's true. But only if both sides are willing to do the work. And right now, the enemies of Israel aren't willing.

Random Questions

2011-09-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

Bekah at Bekah's Bits answered some questions she found in a magazine, and I can't resist this kind of thing, so I'm going to answer them too.

Has anyone ever thought you were pregnant when you weren't?
No. But I did that to my boss one time, and she was horrified. I kept my job, but ever since then I never say anything to anyone about their pregnancy until I know for certain that's what the belly is all about.

What level of SPF do you wear?
70. I hate the stuff on my face, because it makes me break out. But that's much better than burning to a crisp.

What is one lesson you learned in school that you'll never forget?
I took a Shakespeare Extensive class in college, and in Shakespeare's day, they had a concept called Right Reason, which was the perfect balance between using your emotions and using your reasoning. All decisions should be made using the proper balance and should never be based on just one or the other. Unfortunately for King Lear, he made the biggest decision of his life based solely on emotion, and because he failed to use Right Reason, he went mad. It was the appropriate result of what he did.

What's always in your refrigerator?
French Vanilla creamer. I just bought more because I was getting low. Must. Not. Run. Out.

What is the craziest thing you've done while sleep deprived?
I'm always sleep deprived. And I don't really do crazy, so probably the craziest thing was going upside-down on the Mickey roller coaster at Disneyland's California Adventure. Three times. Once with my daughter. Once with my now-roomie. And once with my very good friend the astrophysics major (who has now graduated and is a space cadet or something). I hated the roller coaster every time and only did it for them. I believe they appreciate my sacrifice.

What do you do to make your mornings less hectic?
That's not possible.

TMI Update

2011-08-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

Following my overly personal TMI post, I came to a conclusion:

The slippy straps were slippy because they're made of fabric and not elastic. Elastic has gripper qualities that smooth fabrics don't have, so that was the problem. The exploding bra had elastic straps, so they stayed up better.

Following the advice of a couple of the commenters, I went to Nordstroms over the weekend and received some terrific help with my strapitude challenges. All is now well in TMI Land.

'Nuff said.

Punctuation Without Verbalization

2011-08-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Victor Hugo, when he wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, reportedly telegraphed his publisher with the simple inquiry "?" and received the expressive reply "!"

--Lynn Truss

From my Page-A-Day calendar that has excerpts from Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

TMI

2011-08-08T22:41:00.001-07:00

But I have to tell the story, because there really hasn't been much else exciting going on in a while.

I've mentioned before that I have difficulty keeping my bra straps from falling down, especially on the left side. So whenever possible, I wear a racerback bra or (now that those are hard to find) a criss-cross style, because the straps actually stay where they belong. Unfortunately, because of the way the straps lie, the straps would show when I wear certain tops, which is really tacky (not that it isn't tacky to go fetching the strap after it slides down my arm).

I found some dress tape at Target a while back. You tape one side to your skin where you want the straps to stay, and then you stick the straps on top of the tape. It works really well, unless you keep the tape there all day. Then it blisters your skin. This is not a good option.

Yesterday I wore a really cute top to church, but this top has a wider neckline that requires the slippy-strap bra, and I opted to forego the dress tape. Church went fine, other than the frequent annoyance over the strap situation, and I came home to find my roomie and a mutual friend getting ready to watch Season 6 of "24," so I joined them.

Sitting there, the Annoyance Factor got too great, and I remembered a bra I hadn't worn in a long time which wouldn't show and which had straps that stayed in place better than the one I had on, so I changed into the other bra and went back to watching Jack without the worry of strap-fetching.

My roomie made us some sugar-free banana splits (sugar-free ice cream with sugar-free caramel sauce on them), and they were wonderful. But shortly after I finished mine, I noticed a wet spot on my shirt above my waist. It wasn't watery, and my first thought was that I must have spilled some of the caramel sauce on myself, so I tasted it but it didn't taste like caramel.

I went in my room to check on it and change tops. By the time I got there, the wet spot was bigger. I took off my top carefully so I wouldn't get anything on my face or my hair, but my belly was wet and slippery where my shirt had been.

Then I figured it out. The bra I was wearing - the one that gave me freedom from errant strapitude - had gel cups (I had needed that bra to help me fill out the top of a dress that fit in the hips but was a bit too big on top, but I don't have the dress anymore). One of the cups must have sprung a leak, and whatever it was filled with was oozing out all over me. Just when I had found straps that stayed up!

I took the traitor off and threw it in the trash and took a shower to wash the gel off myself so I could get dressed in something dry. But I didn't know if the gel was safe (goodness, I had TASTED it!).

Then I remembered that I had another one of those gel bras buried way down under everything else. I found it in a plastic bag with other things I don't wear anymore. Wouldn't you know, that bra felt slimy too. But I found the tag that says what it's made of, and the gel is mineral oil and water. Reassured about my continued survival after having ingested the stuff, I threw the second bra into the trash with its partner in crime.

And when I had to go out for a couple hours later in the evening, I used the dress tape on the slippy straps without suffering any harm.

Sometimes, underneath it all, life is more challenging than we're ready for.

Flashy Thing Update

2011-08-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

A few days after the traffic camera flashed at me, when I got the mail, I saw the City name on the return address of one envelope, and my heart sank. Then I checked the addressee, and it was my roomie. Probably the water bill.

That's the closest I came to getting a ticket, so they must have recognized the long time I spent at a complete stop after they flashed me and done the Emily Litella routine.

I'm very happy about that.

Power Line Prize Winner

2011-08-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

Justin Folk was the $100,000 prize winner of the Power Line Prize for the best creative depiction of the federal debt crisis. Here is the winning entry, “The Spending Is Nuts”:

New Look!

2011-07-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

No, you haven't come to the wrong place.

I've only been blogging for six and a half years with the same green background as the day I started, and I would have kept my faithful green except for one thing: I got tired of the videos I posted not fitting right. That green template wasn't adjustable, so I couldn't widen my posts to fit a standard video. Bummer!

So that meant change. "Change" is a bad word--not a four-letter word but a bad word just the same. I like knowing where things are, what they look like, and how to find them. Change means I don't know those things anymore, at least not for sure. And that messes with my comfort levels. And that means I really, REALLY don't like chopped-off videos more than I don't like change, or this change wouldn't have happened at all. Probably ever.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look. Chances are good that you're going to be seeing it for a very, very long time.

Goldfish

2011-07-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

The Power Line Prize has been awarded, and this one didn't win. But it's great.

The prize was designed to encourage depictions of the national debt in ways we can understand. This video is called, "Goldfish."

Are They Crazy?

2011-07-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

I was driving home from work today and saw this kind of sign over one of the buildings along the freeway that has trouble staying occupied:

This. Is. Still. July.

Whoever made the decision to open the store now ought to have his head examined. Or lobotomized.

Movie Quotes

2011-07-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

There are times that movie quotes are exactly the right thing for the situation. Two movies come to mind:

Star Wars (the first one, and probably all of them)

"I have a bad feeling about this...."

Exactly. I have one of them.

Men In Black (the first one)

"Did you ever flashy-thing me?"

I think they may have.

Here's what happened:

Tonight at 7:45 pm, I pulled up to a major intersection where I needed to turn right. Just as I was almost at a stop, I saw the flashy light on the yellow-light traffic camera flash. I didn't notice anyone who was obviously violating any traffic laws, and I think I may have had the nose of my car slightly beyond the painted stripe where you're supposed to stop.

Now, before you go accusing me of doing a rolling California stop (which I don't do, even though there's a huge risk that I'll get rear-ended someday by someone who thinks I shouldn't have actually stopped at a STOP sign), let me point out that there were cars going across the intersection on their green light, so I couldn't go if I wanted to not get hit. I waited at the light until about five or six cars had gone by and there was a gap in traffic.

So I was stopped. For a good long time. But that doesn't mean the insidious traffic light camera people won't be sending me a ticket in the mail with my face in it. And how can I prove that I was stopped? I can't. All I have is the fast-food napkin that I grabbed so I could jot down the details of how I wasn't in violation of any laws. As if my notes on a napkin will have much pull in a court of law (or in front of some highly biased "third party" mediator at the City).

Dang! "Whoever wrote this episode should DIE!"

A Thousand Words

2011-07-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

Unemployment Rate 2000 - 2011

The chart and the data behind it can be found at Portal Seven.

Getting Meaning from Classes

2011-07-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

I got my first real job as a computer programmer at a bank in Spokane. Before that I had temp jobs. One of the nice things the bank did was send us to workshops. We learned about time management, stress management, goal setting, Banking 101, and other topics I've forgotten since then.

The goal-setting class is the one that gave me what I needed to fulfill my dream since junior high of seeing the châteaux of the Loire Valley in France. The instructor told us to think of a goal, give ourselves five years from the day of the class, write it down, and post it where we could see it every day. I wrote, "I will visit the Loire Valley of France by November 19, 1985." Then I pinned it to the front wall of my cubicle at work.

We (my then-husband and I) got there in May, 1983.

At another class I took, I think it was the stress management class, the instructor was talking about morale in the workplace (in general, not ours in specific). He said the progression goes from good morale, where the workplace is pretty quiet. There's no grumbling or sabotage. People are happy.

Next comes discontentedness, and that's when the grumbling starts. And that's when management notices a problem and tries to fix it. They might bring the staff together and hope someone will tell them what's bothering everyone, but it doesn't usually work too well, because unhappy people don't have much desire to help the source of their unhappiness. So management tries something to fix what they think the problem is.

Unfortunately (and this comes from observation and discussion with my peers, not from the instructors), upper management is not made of the same cloth as the peons who populate the ranks of the workers. Peons are normal people. Upper management is full of defective types who believe that achieving power within the organization will make them feel fulfilled. They are not normal people. So, what upper management thinks is the problem is never the problem, and the things they try tend to make things worse not better.

Back to the instructor: When the managers implement their solution (or do nothing, hoping things will improve), they tend to notice that things get quiet again, and they're self-satisfied with what they've accomplished. But what they don't know is what the instructor told us: On the downhill slide of morale, after the grumbling comes the silence of discouragement and defeatism. What would be the point of saying anything when you have no hope that things will get any better? There's no point to complaining. All you can do is just bide your time with your nose to the grindstone while you look for a better job to come along, and when it does you bail. Fast. And management doesn't have a clue.

I hadn't thought about those classes in a long time, and they don't apply to my job at all--it's a happy place to work. What it applies to is my blogging. The light went on for me that the morale slide into the silence abyss is the reason I haven't been motivated to comment on what's happening in our country lately.

Once upon a time I grumbled. Issues that made my blood boil also made me hit the computer keyboard to give the world a piece of my mind. When President Bush and his RINO friends in Congress (Senator McCain, you know who you are) tried to open the borders under the guise of "comprehensive immigration reform," I had plenty to say. When Robert Mugabe made new inroads into the total destruction of Zimbabwe, I had plenty to say.

The outcry about Bush's immigration reform scuttled that monstrosity of a piece of legislation. And while nothing has been done about Mugabe and what he continues to do, World Vision still offers hope in Zimbabwe one child at a time.

Lately, though, I haven't had as much to say. Oh, my blood still boils, but I don't have much hope anymore that if I say something there might be a chance someone would listen. Michelle Malkin speaks to this in her conclusion to her latest column:

As always, however, this administration’s problem is that it hears but doesn’t listen. It makes lavishly funded gestures toward engagement while remaining divorced from economic and political reality. The core failure of Team Obama is not a failure to communicate, but a failure to comprehend.

The people running our country right now are like corporate upper management. They're defective types who want power over other people's lives, while the rest of us are just normal people who want to be left alone to live in peace. Not the ideal combination, for us regular folks anyway.

But this all reminds me not just of my old bank-funded classes but also of something we talked about in Bible study at church: God did not give us discouragement, so any discouragement I feel is not from Him.

I'll do my best in the future to let my boiling blood get my fingers typing.

Quote of the Day

2011-06-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

"Before I begin, I must point out that behind me sits a highly admired President of the United States and decorated war hero while I, a cable television talk show host, have been chosen to stand here and impart wisdom. I pray I never witness a more damning example of what is wrong with America today."

--Conan O'Brien

Here's the background, courtesy of Scott Johnson at Power Line:

Dartmouth College awarded President Bush (41) an honorary degree at commencement over the weekend.... Harvard alum Conan O'Brien was Dartmouth's commencement speaker this year (the text and video of the commencement speech are posted here.) Bad things could be said about the choice of O'Brien, but I will say that he was a far better choice than Stephen Lewis, last year's commencement speaker. Lewis paid tribute to Dartmouth's president in fulsome terms that would have embarrassed an ordinary mortal. And O'Brien actually had something worthwhile to say.

Given O'Brien's preface to his speech, I might actually want to tune in to his show sometime (if I can figure out when he's on and what channel that is).

Judge Richard Leon for Supreme Court

2011-06-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

I wish!

Of course, under President Obama, there's not a snowball's chance that Judge Leon would ever be considered for the US Supreme Court. Kathleen Hartnett White reported today on the slapdown of the EPA by Judge Leon.

At last, a federal court has sharply rebuked the EPA for exceeding its statutory authority. On May 26, 2011, Judge Richard Leon of the federal district court for the District of Columbia ruled that the agency’s regulatory process cannot trump a clear Congressional mandate, nor override judicial authority to compel EPA’s compliance with the law.

The issue at stake is the statutorily [one-year] maximum timeframe for EPA’s final decision to issue a Prevention of Significant Deterioration air-quality permit, a fundamental authorization for large industrial sources such as power plants and refineries....

Thankfully, Avenal Power Center, L.L.C., an electric utility in California, was willing to stand up to the EPA. After waiting over two years on a permit for its planned state-of-the-art combined-cycle natural-gas-fired power plant, and before the EAB process had even begun, Avenal sued. It challenged EPA’s delay in granting the permit under section 165(c) of the CAA.

The EPA argued that, because they created an internal review board that added extra time to the approval process, they didn't have to comply with the deadline.

“How absurd!” responded Judge Leon. “It is axiomatic that an act of Congress that is patently clear and unambiguous — such as this requirement in the CAA — cannot be overridden by a regulatory process created for the convenience of the Administrator. . . . Administrators of regulatory agencies derive their power from Congress’s statutory enactments — not from their own discretionary regulatory pronouncements that are drafted for their assistance and convenience.”

...Judge Leon responded to the EPA’s claim that the statute’s one-year deadline was ambiguous with deft nonchalance: “Horsefeathers!” Calling the EPA’s argument “too clever by half,” he noted simply, “That dog won’t hunt.” Mark one for limited government under the rule of law.

...Permit timeframes may seem a humdrum matter, but it is through clever procedural maneuvering that agencies continually expand their powers well beyond the confines of their enabling statutes.... The administrative probity by which federal power is asserted makes all the difference between regulation by fiat a là Venezuela or limited government under the rule of law.

...The stakes are too high, and EPA’s recent actions far too legally questionable, not to challenge the agency. May Judge Leon’s stout riposte to the EPA be one of many decisions to come in what now may be over 500 lawsuits challenging EPA decisions over the last two years.

When Judge Leon is done wiping up floor with the EPA, there are plenty more agencies that could use some slapping around.

Quote of the Day

2011-06-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

Global warming alarmists with private jets and mansions are like cardiologists preaching healthy diets to their patients while walking through the waiting room smoking cigarettes and eating pork rinds.
-- Doug Powers

Memorial Day

2011-05-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

Michael Ramirez says it all (HT: Power Line):

We owe what liberty we have to those who gave their lives to preserve it. God bless the US military.

Pre-Memorial Day Thoughts

2011-05-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

I realize that Memorial Day is not about our living service members, but is a day for remembering those who died in service to our country. This column, however, by a former Marine who served in Iraq, captures the heart of many of the men and women who volunteered to put their lives on the line to fight those who would destroy us if they could. He writes a thank you to Islamic extremists:

As I write this, I can't help but think how ironic it was that your attacks on September 11th took place during my economics class. Further reason I am so compelled to write you now. I watched the second plane crash into the World Trade Center live from my school's computer lab, as well as the ensuing chaos and massive loss of innocent life. Little did I know, your attacks proved to be the foundation to save my guilty soul...

With my grades in the gutter and graduation approaching I had planned to stick to the standard script of an American youth at that time. I was going to go to college. Now I know I said my grades were in the gutter, and they were, but in this great country even the worst student with a high school diploma or G.E.D. is given the opportunity to better himself through attending a community college. I told my parents that was what I was going to do, and that if I was unsuccessful at community college then I would join the Marines. It did not work out exactly to plan. Over that summer, my best friend died in a senseless car accident, no doubt attributed to the irresponsible behaviors we were practicing. This was a wake-up call not only to me, but also to those who today are my best friends. I was not going to waste my time nor my family's money on community college when I now knew I needed to change my life and do so immediately. And thanks to you, my country needed me, it needed my brothers, and it got us.

I would end up serving three tours of duty totaling 19 months and 21 days in Iraq. I witnessed firsthand an uneducated, close-minded, poor populace led by a twisted ideology, and realized just how lucky I was to be born in the great nation of America.

Thank you, Islamic extremists, for opening my eyes.

You have declared us your greatest enemy, but you are not ours. In fact, you are an unworthy adversary. America's greatest enemy is itself. America's greatest enemy is the complacency that we tend to have because we have it so good here. But you woke this sleeping giant on 9/11 and reinvigorated generations of Americans to answer the call in any and every way they could. Thanks to you, an increased percentage of my generation has voluntarily served in the greatest military to ever exist. Meanwhile in your countries, young boys are forced to fight, impressed into service after being snatched from their villages. The young women whom you [would] deny education and personal freedoms through Islamic Sharia law throughout most of the Middle East continue to serve America honorably and excellently throughout the ranks of our military.

And there is still more I would like to thank you for, Islamic extremists. You cannot break the will of this country, or that of its people, and while you won't stop trying, you will only succeed in making us stronger. With every sand-lot plot of yours we foil, every amateur video you shoot with our thrown-away camcorders spouting your anti-American propaganda, millions of Americans are taking it personally, and doing something about it. You have given us something to fight for together. You've taken selfish, lazy youth like me and turned them into great Americans, great people who are physically and mentally equipped to deal with anything you throw at us. With the constant threat of your cowardly attacks the people of my country are ever diligent to protect each other and the morals that bind us together. Without you and your actions in the past, present, and future, I promise you our focus would not be so clear as we set our sights on you.

I thank you for showing me your disgusting, degenerate, and devolutionary hate for us. It has made me realize how beautiful, gratifying, and important is love for thy fellow man. Everything you stand for is wicked, and everything you fight against is true. The very principles you dedicate every waking hour to destroy are made 1,000 times stronger for each attempted pass you make at them. Your closed-mindedness has opened the minds of all mankind, and long after you are gone, dwelling in my God's basement for eternity, good men such as I will prosper. Through your weakness, you have made The United States of America stronger, and I will be forever thankful.

-Andrew Kirkland, Sergeant, United States Marine Corps, October 2003 - October 2007

These are just excerpts. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Telling All About Palin

2011-05-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Power Line has this on the recently released "tell-all" book about Sarah Palin.

The Associated Press is excited that a former aide to Governor Sarah Palin has written a "tell-all" expose[.]

It may be a tell-all, but Mr. Bailey evidently doesn't have much to tell. In paragraph 13, we finally get to a specific claim: that in 2006, Palin's campaign for governor "coordinated with the Republican Governors Association, or RGA, in violation of campaign rules." The purported violation apparently consisted of Palin being filmed entering an Anchorage hotel. Whatever. This is what the AP calls "scathing?" Surely Mr. Bailey's "tell-all" has hotter stuff than that.

No, actually, it doesn't:
Mr. Bailey said the final straw for him came in the summer of 2009, when Mrs. Palin didn't attend a rally he believed she repeatedly had agreed to attend, for supporters of a voter initiative to require minors get parental consent for an abortion.
Wow, you can really see how that pushed Bailey over the brink, coming on top of Palin's being filmed walking into a hotel. In reality, it is a testament to Governor Palin's rectitude that a former aide who wants to get rich by writing an expose can't come up with anything better than this.

Boy, it sure must stink to be a Palin aide. No juicy gossip to sell to the highest bidder. Just clean living and clean air.

Priceless!

We're Still Here

2011-05-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

It's going on 8:00 at night. The world was supposed to end by 6:00, and we're still here.

Did the world start ending somewhere else and it's taking a while to get to California?

Did the Rapture happen and my roomie and I got left behind? I doubt that one, because I didn't see any accidents where cars were unmanned and had crashed into buildings and other things, causing chaos and mayhem.

Hmmm... Could Harold Camping have been wrong? Again?

1000 Words

2011-05-02T19:59:00.000-07:00

Another great one from Michael Ramirez:

Birthday Tea Party

2011-05-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

It seems like only yesterday that I had a birthday. Probably because it was only yesterday...

But before that: A couple weeks ago I arrived at the movie theater earlier than my friends and I had scheduled, so I wandered around the shops nearby. One of them is Clay 'N' Latte, where you can go to paint ceramics with your friends, and they had pink flyers announcing their Mother-Daughter Tea Party special event, which just happened to be on my birthday.

The party consisted of mother and daughter painting a little tea set while drinking tea and eating scones and other tea-compatible delights. When I told my daughter about it, she loved the idea as much as I did. This is the set they had on display to show us how cute it could be.

We were assigned to a small table at the front window, and our blank tea set was waiting.

The first order of business was to wipe each piece down with a damp sponge.

Next was choosing paint colors. The paints look different from the way they'll be on the finished product, so you have to go according to the finished samples on the yellow wall. Each color shows what it looks like with one, two, or three coats.

We decided to make our set look like the sample, because it was so adorable, so the girl prepared our base colors and we were set. Of course, we got some tea and goodies to fortify ourselves for the task.

These are the purple items with three coats of the base color. The white parts still needed the darker contrast color.

The party was scheduled for two hours, but we took a lot longer. Our conversation was punctuated by "Oops" quite a bit, followed by either grabbing a paper towel to wipe off the messed up spot or by painting over the splotch if it wasn't too far out of the lines.

We had planned on meeting my son for lunch, but our lunch time came and went while we painted multiple coats, so my son came to sit with us while we finished. It was great just hanging out over paintbrushes and dot-making bottles.

And here's the final product of the day.

They'll be firing everyone's tea sets during the week, and we'll be able to pick them up next weekend, just in time for Mother's Day.

It was a great start to a wonderful birthday.

The Tornado

2011-04-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

Michael Ramirez nails it. Click to enlarge.

Quote of the Day

2011-04-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

"I've come to New Hampshire today because I'm very concerned. I want to see the original long-form certificate of Donald Trump's Republican registration."

-- Rand Paul

Some notes on Donald Trump's politics, first from John Hinderaker of Power Line:

Donald Trump has no history as a Republican. In the past, he has contributed mainly to Democrats. He was as bitter a critic of President Bush as he now is of President Obama, and his policy positions--support for universal health care, protectionism--are, in key respects, more liberal than conservative.

Then there's this look at Trump by Michelle Malkin:

Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run — first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea party event in South Florida. He touts his business experience, “high aptitude” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard-bearer of conservative values, limited government and constitutional principles than the cast of “Jersey Shore.”

Too many mega-developers like Trump have achieved success by using and abusing the government’s ability to commandeer private property for purported “public use.” Invoking the Fifth Amendment takings clause, real estate moguls, parking garage builders, mall developers and sports palace architects have colluded with elected officials to pull off legalized theft in the name of reducing “blight.” Under eminent domain, the definition of “public purpose” has been stretched like Silly Putty to cover everything from roads and bridges to high-end retail stores, baseball stadiums and casinos.

While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private property rights. In the 1990s, he waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City that stood in the way of Trump’s manifest land development. The real estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limo parking lot — Coking’s private property be damned. The nonprofit Institute for Justice, which successfully saved Coking’s home, explained the confiscatory scheme:

“Unlike most developers, Donald Trump doesn’t have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property, because a governmental agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority or CRDA — will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell."

So, despite the Trump-induced media circus about Obama's birth certificate, Donald Trump is neither a conservative nor a free-market businessman. Instead he's an opportunistic leech on the taxpayer in capitalist disguise.

I'm willing to let him keep pushing for the release of more of Obama's documentation (in particular his college records), but don't want to let the guy anywhere near the GOP nominating process.

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T09:16:00.000-07:00

It's very simple:

Jesus wins.

Satan loses.

Read the Book.

Navy Medicine

2011-04-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

Great video.

My roommate works at a Navy medical center in patient care. I'm very proud of her.

You can also watch it at YouTube here.

Quote of the Day

2011-04-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

Today's quote is from an email I was copied on from one of my friends to our mutual friend, who had said she agreed with her daughter: This daughter posted on her Facebook status that Turner Classic Movies had ruined her by giving her unrealistic expectations of men.

"Unrealistic expectations of men, huh? You should socialize as much as I do, my friend. You won't have unrealistic expectations anymore. You will expect them all to be clods, ask inappropriate questions, not call back, lie, expect sex on the first date, drop you for someone younger, thinner, and stupid, who will then get knocked up and trap them...

Remeber, men are like parking spaces: all the good ones are taken, the rest are handicapped."

-- My friend the astrophysics major

Rescued Again!

2011-04-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I had some "special" challenges with my computer. A virus pretending to be antivirus protection invaded my laptop and tried to destroy it. But I stopped it with a little help from my friends in India.

All was good until Friday night just a little after midnight (that would be Saturday morning for those of you who get nit-picky about such things). A little box popped up from my taskbar, telling me that I might have a virus and should click on it to check.

Not having been born yesterday, I ignored it and double-clicked on McAfee to make it go find the virus and destroy it, but it said a crucial module was missing, so it didn't open. The virus must have stealth weapons that attack and disable the real antivirus software. I shut down my computer by holding down the power button and didn't turn it on again all weekend.

My daughter brought her laptop to my house yesterday, so I used it to sign up for my India buddies to clean up my system. Just after midnight I called and within a half hour, my new favorite friend Dinesh had my computer in tip-top shape again. Even better than before, because after the time I had to have my operating system re-installed, it couldn't find the icon for Internet Explorer, so I've been clicking on a generic icon to get to the internet for over a year.

Now the proper icon is back, thanks to Dinesh, who probably had no idea he was fixing that problem for me for free. It's good to be back.

Eating Budget Cuts

2011-04-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

When you're talking about real money, like billions or trillions of dollars, those numbers are so big we have no clue how much that really is. So they give us analogies, like if you stacked dollar bills on top of each other, a trillion dollars would go to the moon and back and halfway to the moon again. But we still don't get that.

We do understand food, though.

Back in March, John Hinderaker at Power Line explained the $6 billion spending cut in that continuing resolution in terms of a Big Mac Value Meal.

Hinderaker gives the math, but I'll just cut to the chase:

So, consider: if you were to go on what the Democrats consider a starvation diet, and "slash" your calorie intake to exactly the same degree that the Republicans' $6 billion cut has "slashed" the federal budget, you would do the following. Go to McDonalds and order a Big Mac Extra Value meal. Eat the Big Mac. Drink the Coke. Eat 86 of the 87 french fries. Carefully take the last fry and bite off two-thirds of it. Put the remaining one-third of one fry back in the bag.

Yep. I understand that.

But that was then. This is now. Now they're talking budgets for whole years, not just continuing resolutions for three weeks. A year is over 17 times bigger than three weeks, and the proposed budget cuts are only 10 times bigger than the continuing resolution cuts. It feels as though we're going backwards, while Washington is screaming either that we've really done a Great Thing (the Republicans) or that we're Killing Babies and Old People (the Democrats). How do we make sense of it all?

With more food, of course. Leave it to Michael Ramirez to make understanding the budget cuts as easy as pie (HT: Power Line). Click to enlarge:

Now isn't that clear? They're all full of beans, soon to be followed by a lot of hot air.

And we're not swallowing any of it anymore.

Obama's Inner Bracket

2011-04-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

There's a sport that people follow, but I don't because I'm not a sport. They call it basketball, but I don't believe that's really what game it is.

When I was in junior high, they taught us basketball, and there was this rule that I've never seen enforced in the professional version of the game. The rule is that if you're moving and you have the ball, you have to keep the ball bouncing. If you don't, you get called for traveling, and there's some dire penalty that you have to pay that I don't remember because it's been way too long since junior high.

They don't have that rule in the professional game that they pretend is basketball. The men with serious pituitary problems who play the game make a show of bouncing the ball once or twice, but who are they kidding? That's why I don't watch this sport, because I get too frustrated by the lack of ball-bouncing enforcement.

And there's another part of the sport that I have trouble understanding. There are two seasons each year that are devoted to "basketball." There's the Regular Season, and then there's the Tournament Season which lasts longer than Regular Season. And if you're a betting man (which I'm not), you pick the team you think will be the winner of Tournament Season, but it's not that simple. You can't just say, "I think this team will kick everybody's butt." You have to say exactly how you think the butt-kicking will happen by picking the butt kicker of every game and how that all works to having YOUR team be the top kicker of the other butt-kicking team's butt. All that kicking is written down in a format known as a bracket. And everyone who's a betting man (which I'm not) has his own bracket.

Got that? Me neither.

So what does this have to do with President Obama?

Much has been made in the news about Obama's 2011 bracket. This is for college basketball, but I don't know enough about how they play it in college to decide if it's fake basketball like the pros or if it's real basketball like high school. Even people I otherwise respect pay attention to college Tournament Season (Bekah's comment is what gave me the clue that people actually take ownership of their brackets), so it might be real.

The President has been criticized for playing the fiddle and not noticing that Rome is burning. Or something like that. But this isn't the point I'm trying to make.

Obama really likes having a bracket. So much so that he took time out of his busy presidential schedule to make not one but two: Men's and Women's.

There are other people who like brackets too. People who like to make brackets about things that aren't basketball (real or fake). One of those people is Zombie, who made a bracket about Presient Obama's inner cranial workings (HT: Power Line).

That’s all very well and good, but one wonders: Don’t we all have what is essentially an “inner bracket” which delineates our personal hierarchy of priorities, beliefs, behaviors and traits? If there was a bracket which revealed the inner workings of Obama’s mind, what would it look like? And what trait would emerge dominant?

Here's what she came up with. I think she came pretty close. (Click to see full size.)

Educating Afghanistan's Children

2011-03-01T20:37:00.000-08:00

America's Marines are making it possible (HT: Mark Hemmingway at the Weekly Standard).

Don't let Corporal Lottering's South African accent fool you. He's one of ours.

If you want to donate, go to the Spirit of America's site here.

Quote of the Day

2011-02-28T15:20:00.000-08:00

The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

--Lynn Truss

From my Page-A-Day calendar that has excerpts from Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Apparently, I am the average stickler. You don't want to be around when I see that someone has used the wrong "its" or "it's."

Who's Your Daddy?

2011-02-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

You can tell by people's actions exactly who they owe their allegiance to. On my job my schedule is pretty flexible, so I can run quick reports for people in other parts of the organization. But when there's a conflict with my time, I'm answerable to my boss. She gets what she needs from me when she needs it, and everybody else has to wait. The other people understand, because that's the way of things everywhere.

The Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature have shown by their actions this week who they're accountable to, and it certainly isn't the voters who elected them. They're bought, paid for, and completely owned by the public employees' unions.

This is how the AP reported the reaction of the Democrats:

Faced with a near-certain Republican victory that would end a half-century of collective bargaining for public workers, Wisconsin Democrats retaliated with the only weapon they had left: They fled.

The Wisconsin state Senate needs one Democrat to be present in order to hold a vote. If they stayed in the state, they'd be subject to being arrested and brought back to the Capitol to vote for the losing side. So they did the scaredy-pants thing and ran off to Illinois in a desperate attempt to save the unions from having their chokehold on Wisconsin pried away.

In 2009, when Democrats were busy ramming Obamacare through Congress, they loved to say things like, "Elections have consequences." But since Democrats were turned out of office in 2010 in large numbers, they've stopped repeating that mantra. Just because they don't say it anymore, however, that doesn't stop the consequences of elections from happening.

It's 2011, and 2008 is nothing but old news. The election of 2010 is the one we're dealing with now. Last year voters overwhelmingly demanded fiscal responsibility by tossing Democrats out of office and replacing them with Republicans. Even in Wisconsin.

It's time for Democrats to face the consequences of the most recent election. In spite of what they may believe, their Daddy isn't the union bosses. Their Daddy is the voters, who won't be forgetting what a slap in the face the Democrats delivered. I see the back of a very big woodshed in the Democrats' future...

Why You're Not Married

2011-02-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

This was posted Sunday. The day before Valentine's Day. On (you'd never guess) the Huffington Post. It's remedial help for feminists who find themselves suddenly wanting to be married. If you're a regular reader of my blog, this does not apply to you. Here are her top six reasons why "you" the feminist are not married (tasteful editing of bad words is mine):

1. You're a B***h.

Here's what I mean by b***h. I mean you're angry. You probably don't think you're angry. You think you're super smart, or if you've been to a lot of therapy, that you're setting boundaries. But the truth is you're pissed. At your mom. At the military-industrial complex. At Sarah Palin. And it's scaring men off.

The deal is: most men just want to marry someone who is nice to them. I am the mother of a 13-year-old boy, which is like living with the single-cell protozoa version of a husband. Here's what my son wants out of life: macaroni and cheese, a video game, and Kim Kardashian. Have you ever seen Kim Kardashian angry? I didn't think so. You've seen Kim Kardashian smile, wiggle, and make a sex tape. Female anger terrifies men. I know it seems unfair that you have to work around a man's fear and insecurity in order to get married -- but actually, it's perfect, since working around a man's fear and insecurity is big part of what you'll be doing as a wife.

I'll just list the rest. You'll have to read the article to see the details.

2. You're Shallow.
3. You're a Sl*t.
4. You're a Liar.
5. You're Selfish.
6. You're Not Good Enough.

OK. On second thought, I'll explain that last one. She means that "you" the unmarried feminist don't think you're good enough, so that affects your relationships.

My overall take on her assessment of this kind of never-married women is that she's exactly right. Men don't marry angry, shallow, sl*tty, lying, selfish women who think they're not good enough. Men of good character (which is the kind of man a woman wants to marry) marry women of good character. Which I suppose can be kind of a shocker for women of low character.

And the comments aren't nearly as apoplectic as I expected.

Going After Issa

2011-02-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

Darrell Issa (pronounced "EYE-suh") is my congressman. When the Republicans took over the House, Issa became the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (aka the Oversight Committee), and he promised to do plenty of investigating.

Funny thing, but the likely investigatees don't see Issa's promise as a good thing. So their friends have started what Politico calls an "anti-Darrell Issa crusade." (Can they say, "crusade"? I mean, Issa is Lebanese... you know, Arabic.... Isn't that hateful, racist, beyond-the-pale rhetoric? Just asking...)

But a handful of liberal political operatives in California — including a former Hillary Clinton hand — are taking their anti-Issa passion to a whole new level, launching a nonprofit group, a website and even paid media advertisements aimed at undermining and investigating the rabble-rousing chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

I didn't know my congressman was a genuine rabble-rouser.

The launch of this group — which calls itself The Third Lantern, and is naming the website the Issa Files — is remarkable because it’s wholly focused on the activities of one lawmaker who has no immediate plans to run for higher office. The purpose of this new group is to make public documents more public, make life difficult for Issa and sow seeds of doubt on his investigations.

They plan to run TV advertisements and other paid media in the future, saying they already have a “significant commitment” of cash.

The structure of the organization does not require that it disclose its funding.

But the goal is clear: Newman, Smith and the third partner, Sean Clegg, want to raise enough questions about Issa’s background and personal history that anything he turns up in probes of the Obama administration will be immediately discredited.

You can read about Issa's background and the kinds of incidents they're going to "expose" in the Wikipedia article about him.

Frankly, this smells of desperation on the part of the Left. They wouldn't want anyone to find out about the culture of corruption that's running rampant in the Obama administration.

Just be forewarned. When you read hit pieces about Rep. Darrell Issa, it's really about trying to keep the curtain shut that's hiding the truth about the man (Obama) behind it.

Gutenberg and Grammar

2011-02-14T15:01:00.001-08:00

It's really about punctuation, but "Gutenberg and Punctuation" loses the alliterative effect, so I opted for taking alliterary license this time.

This year my boss gave a Page-A-Day calendar to each of us in our group. The lady next door got a Brevity calendar like the one I had last year, and I got Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which is all about the joys of proper punctuation.

Today, Lynne Truss quotes from the Oxford Companion to English Literature: "There never was a golden age in which the rules for the possesive apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people." I must not be "most educated people."

I already knew, from my days trying to become a romance writer, that printers were responsible for the rule about the period ALWAYS belonging inside the ending quotation marks. The typesetting machines had a doohickey with a period-quote on it but a quote-period doohickey did not exist. Hence, the period always goes inside the quote. Same for the comma.

The last several days of my calendar trace the evolution of the use of the apostrophe, and all of the changes were the result of decisions made by printers.

First, in Shakespearean times, printers started using the apostrophe to substitute for missing letters. That's all the tiny apostrophe did. Possessives were on their own without any special punctuation.

In the 17th Century, printers started using apostrophes for singular possessives. In the 18th Century, printers added them for plural possessives as well.

If you've got your eyes open at all, you can see the trend. It's because of Gutenberg the Genius and his Marvelous Invention that we have apostrophes in use today, if only most of us could remember the right way to use them:

1. When letters are missing (gov't).
2. When it's a non-pronoun plural (the girl's dress, but NOT the dress is hers / the girls' dresses, but NOT the dresses are theirs).

And maybe there's a morphing of the language again, because people often choose to use it for plurals of acronyms or numbers (RUS's or 100's) because sometimes it looks funny without the apostrophe. But these haven't become hard-and-fast rules yet. Personally, I'm for using the apostrophe with plural acronyms but not with plural numbers.

Given a little more time, though, I'm guessing the printers will let us know what's correct for sure.

Handshakes

2011-02-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

While I was blogging about my Lazy Saturday, I naturally went to IMDB to get links to the movies I was mentioning in the post. They had a banner across the top inviting me to watch a clip (not a trailer) from the upcoming thriller Black Death, starring Sean Bean. The clip is about two and a half minutes long.

There's a moment toward the end of the clip where the spokesman for the town offers his right hand to Sean Bean, who hesitates...

And during that offer of a hand and the hesitation, I wondered if people really shook hands in the Middle Ages, or if it might be a more recent cultural invention.

... and then decides to shake hands. Then he shifts his sword, which has been in his right hand in readiness for whatever danger the village may have held, to his left hand and shakes.

That's when I realized that a handshake is much more profound than a "Howdy, good to meet you."

A handshake is a disarming of oneself, a laying oneself bare to the risk of fatal attack. Sean Bean left himself undefended by his own sword (yes, he had his men as backup) when he gripped the right hand - the sword hand - of the stranger.

We speak about certain people having a "disarming smile," and this moment in the movie captures what that term means: someone whose smile is so warm and reassuring that you would willingly put down your defenses before them.

I don't know anything more about this movie, except that IMDB called it a thriller. So I suspect that this village has one or two secrets that the clip didn't reveal. But it taught me something already, that sometimes the little things in life have much bigger stories to tell.

I'll be shaking hands in the future with a fuller understanding of just what that means.

Lazy Saturday

2011-02-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

It's one of those wonderful Saturdays when I have nothing I have to do. I had a smoothie for breakfast, something I don't have time to make - or eat - during the week:

1-1/2 cups frozen berries (I have about 1 cup strawberries & 1/2 cup mixed berries and usually end up with closer to 2 cups, but who's counting?)
1 cup non-fat milk (or a splash more if I went extra on the berries)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp ground flaxseed (optional)
Blend. Eat. The whole thing counts as ONE serving! It takes a long time to eat.

I had planned to help a friend, who moved recently, put her kitchen stuff away today. But when I called her to arrange a time, she said she couldn't sleep a couple nights ago, so she got up in the middle of the night and got it done. Her furniture is arriving this afternoon, so we'll see what she needs help with tomorrow. And that frees me up today.

One of my Lazy Saturday favorite things I do is to follow the rabbit trail of internet news and commentary links on the sides of interesting articles I read. Last night I followed a link from one of the Working Group websites (Hugh Hewitt?) to an article on one of Breitbart's sites (I forget which one off the top of my head and don't want to back my way into it right now), and that had a link to a video of MSNBC's Chris Matthews hyperventilating over Sarah Palin's not-really use of "WTF" and contrasting that to Matthews completely agreeing when Sen. Grayson really used "STFU." To paraphrase Sarah Palin, if Chris Matthews didn't have double standards, he wouldn't have any standards at all. Well, I was too tired to watch it last night, so I left that video up on my computer when I put it in Stand By mode before I went to bed. So this morning I watched it.

But over on the side of that video was a link to some wonderful news for California. A California judge stopped the implementation of the state Cap-and-Tax law, because an extreme environmental justice group filed suit because they didn't think the law did enough damage to the business environment in the state, or something. Useful idiots can actually be useful once in a while.

And that article had a link on the side to Big Hollywood's Countdown of the Top 25 Christian Films, which turned out to be a plea for nominations for a list that will be announced this Easter.

Imbedded in the plea was a link to someone else's list of the Top 25 Conservative Movies. I have a lot of these movies. Things like, We Were Soldiers (Did you watch the video of Randall Wallace's keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast? Amazing!), 300, The Incredibles, and Groundhog Day, as well as the reasons for each choice.

Watching movies is one of my other favorite things to do on a Lazy Saturday. My roommate has Netflix, and this week the movie we got is The Edge. It's on the Top 25 Conservative Movies list. Now that I don't have other plans, we can watch the movie today. So as soon as my roomie gets back from the bank, I'll be in my spot on the loveseat watching a movie I now know will be safely conservative.

Have a happy Saturday!

Education Agenda

2011-02-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

The light went on for me today. It's subtle but oh so clear.

Today's Page-A-Day calendar (daily excerpts from the book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves) has this quote:

The trouble with grammar books is that they are read principally by keen foreigners; meanwhile, native English-speakers who require their help are the last people who will make the effort to buy and read them.

I showed it to my next-desk office buddy, and she mentioned that they're not used by schools either. That's what flipped the light switch on.

The education establishment is dominated by people on the Left. People on the Left value "fairness" above all, with fairness meaning (to them), equal outcomes for everyone. Then-Candidate Obama said as much with his "spread the wealth around" comment to Joe the Plumber.

So what does that say about education?

It says that if America is on the top worldwide, that's not fair. After all, traditionally we have the biggest, best military (well, maybe China has more people in their military, but we're still the best); we have the biggest, most robust economy; we have the best advances in medicines and health care techniques. The Left just can't handle having all that best-itude in one place. They have to "spread the wealth around."

And they've decided to start with education. They don't teach our kids spelling and grammar and punctuation, but instead let them figure it out for themselves eventually. Which doesn't translate well onto the achievement tests.

A while back, my Page-A-Day calendar said that in the UK, by the age of 8 schoolchildren have been taught the three major uses of the comma (in lists, before dialogue, to set off a clause). So I asked my office buddy if her 9 year old has learned any of that. He hasn't. And the teacher is letting him spell things any way he wants to. There's some sort of psychobabble term for letting them keep their self-esteem over their spelling.

It's all part of the agenda. Make American kids do poorly so some other country's kids get a chance to shine. It's only fair.

Spilled Milk

2011-01-31T22:12:00.000-08:00

Holy cow! Thomas Sowell's column tomorrow raises the issue of the EPA's latest power grab. Yes, it really is about spilled milk.

We all understand why the Environmental Protection Agency was given the power to issue regulations to guard against oil spills, such as that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or the more recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But not everyone understands that any power given to any bureaucracy for any purpose can be stretched far beyond that purpose.

In a classic example of this process, the EPA has decided that, since milk contains oil, it has the authority to force farmers to comply with new regulations to file "emergency management" plans to show how they will cope with spilled milk, how farmers will train "first responders" and build "containment facilities" if there is a flood of spilled milk.

Milk has oil? Who knew???

Oh wait. I guess the EPA knew. And now their regulations will raise the price of milk, butter, cheese, yogurt, whipped cream, and ice cream. But it'll be worth it, because we'll be safe from... I'll let Sowell explain:

Does anyone seriously believe that any farmer is going to spill enough milk to compare with the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the BP oil spill?

Do you envision people fleeing their homes, as a flood of milk comes pouring down the mountainside, threatening to wipe out the village below?

It doesn't matter. Once the words are in the law, it makes no difference what the realities are. The bureaucracy has every incentive to stretch the meaning of those words, in order to expand its empire.

A long time ago, probably in the late 1970s, I saw the movie, The King of Hearts. It's set during World War I, when a British army private is sent into a French town to disarm a German bomb, and the Brits speak English, the Germans speak German (with English subtitles), and the French speak French (with English subtitles). But what the hapless private doesn't realize is that right before he entered the town, it was evacuated. Except for the insane asylum, whose inhabitants leave the asylum and pose as the regular townspeople. He has no idea, so he interacts with them as though they're normal.

That sort of thing is delightful to watch on a big screen. Throughout the madness, in the back of your mind you know it will end and you'll be going home where sanity reigns.

But it's distressing to know that the lunatics now have the power to regulate and control, to coerce and punish. If they have the power to regulate milk as though it's crude oil, there's no telling how far the draconian regulations will spread into all areas of our lives.

Stop the madness! (I just wish I knew how.)

Hu Disses America (Updated)

2011-01-24T21:11:00.000-08:00

I first read about The State Dinner Incident at Power Line over the weekend when Scott Johnson quoted this report from the Epoch Times:

Lang Lang the pianist says he chose it. Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set,< v="kroEprEpvtA"> Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie "Battle on Shangganling Mountain."< v="2-aTpkd6-P8">

The film depicts a group of "People's Volunteer Army" soldiers who are first hemmed in at Shanganling (or Triangle Hill) and then, when reinforcements arrive, take up their rifles and counterattack the U.S. military "jackals."

The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. CCP propaganda has always referred to the Korean War as the "movement to resist America and help [North] Korea." The message of the propaganda is that the United States is an enemy—in fighting in the Korean War the United States' real goal was said to be to invade and conquer China. The victory at Triangle Hill was promoted as a victory over imperialists.

The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, "When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle." The "jackal" in the song is the United States.

Very nice. So glad we could throw a State Dinner for these charming people.

Today, though, Power Line's John Hinderaker followed up with this, quoting from Jay Nordlinger's post at The Corner providing a fuller descripton of the insult to America:

Last week, I had a note in this space about Lang Lang, who has become a kind of court pianist for President Obama and the Chinese leadership -- the Chinese dictatorship, to put it more bluntly.

He played at the Beijing Olympics. He played at Obama's Nobel ceremony. He played at the White House event for Paul McCartney -- the one at which McCartney made a ridiculous anti-Bush crack, which caused Lang Lang and the Obama crowd to laugh like hyenas. And he played at Obama's state dinner last week for Hu Jintao.

What did he play? Most notably and significantly, he played a famous anti-American propaganda song. Famous in China, that is. Wei Jingsheng, the great Chinese democracy leader, exiled in the United States since 1997, wrote a letter to Congress and Secretary of State Clinton. He said, "I listened to that music with a big shock." Wei explained that the song, "My Country," or "My Motherland," comes from "the best-known Communist propaganda movie about the Korean War," depicting the Chinese army's fight with the Americans. The movie is called The Battle of Triangle Hill. Wei said that the movie is as well-known in China as Gone with the Wind is here.

The song refers to the Americans as "wolves" or "jackals," and says that the Chinese will use weapons to deal with them. Wei commented, "Is that not an insult to the USA to play such . . . music at a state dinner hosted by the US President? No wonder it made Hu Jintao really happy." Yes, no wonder. As Wei pointed out, Hu is not ordinarily given to public emotion, but he emotionally embraced Lang Lang. ...

The Epoch Times quotes a Chinese psychiatrist living in Philadelphia, Yang Jingduan: "In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the U.S. It's like insulting you in your face and you don't know it, it's humiliating." In his letter, Wei said that so-called patriotic Chinese -- supporters of the Communist party and the dictatorship -- were ecstatic over "My Motherland" at the White House. One such "patriotic Chinese" exclaimed, "The right place, right time, right song!" (This is a phrase with roots in CCP propaganda, as the Epoch Times article explains.)

Either President Obama knew about the insult and approved - how could he, really, unless some Chinese person told him? - or he sat there and enjoyed the music, oblivious to the import of its meaning. Neither possibility speaks well for our president, his State Department, his advisors, or our nation.

The honor shown to the leader of a human-rights violating, oppressive, communist dictatorship by throwing him a State Dinner is bad enough, but to have that dictator and his loyalists insult our country in the process is beyond the pale. I'm not holding my breath, however, that President Obama will have any response at all. Just more of the same kowtowing to countries that want to destroy us.

Heaven help us all.

Update:

The White House did respond. They "insist[ed]
the song, 'My Motherland,' was no insult to the United States."

Oh. If they say so.

Think about it. When you hear the melody of "America the Beautiful," the lyrics never start running through your head. No. Not at all. And Sunday during communion, when the pianist started playing, "I Stand in Awe of You," my friend sitting next to me and I didn't start singing very softly with the music. No, that was just random squeaking we were doing, not singing the words!

The White House is either stupidly clueless or lying because their lips are moving. This was an insult to America, Hu enjoyed it, the White House is trying to cover it up, and there's no escaping any of that.

Debating Obamacare

2011-01-19T07:16:00.000-08:00

In Congress they're debating the repeal of Obamacare. At the same time, a milestone in the national "debate" has been reached. Over half of the states are involved in lawsuits to escape Obamacare. One of the regular commenters at Michelle Malkin's blog, 123upnorth, a Canadian, had this to say about Canadacare, which is where Obamacare would take us:

I realize the constiutional argument is strong and should be fought and won. However, I want to implore Americans to fight the battle against healthcare not only on a consitutional basis, but based upon the grounds that the quality of healthcare within a publicly-mandated system will S.U.C.K. beyond explanation, whether or not the constiution allows for it.

I live in Canada and regularly have to travel to America for healthcare. In Canada, people don’t have adequate quality of health services, nor do they have access to it. For example, approximately 15% of Canadians are without proper access to a family doctor. The majority of patients, once referred to a specialist, wait anywhere from 3 to 6 months to see the specialist.

After waiting for a specialist, a patient then has to go on a waiting list to get diagnostics, then wait for a follow up appointment with the specialist, at which time the patient will be instructed as to whether other tests are needed. If surgery is scheduled after the first round of tests, the wait for this too can be extensive. Because of the extensive waiting times, patients become more sick than otherwise would be the case if they were seen faster and their chances of beating their ailments is reduced.

In the end, to go through the process of seeking help and getting full treatment, the duration can often exceed one year. And that is if everything goes well. If tests are inconclusive, if a patient needs a second opinion etc., the total duration can exceed 18 to 24 months.

Even more depressing is the fact that we don’t get to choose specialists for the most part because each family doctor only works with a few specialists in each field of treatment in their geographical region. Because there is such a shortage of family doctors, you can’t switch between them to get access to another group of specialists. If you receive inferior treatment from the specialist you are directed to, it is much harder to go elsewhere and get the needed referral.

Lastly, because there is no incentive for doctors and specialist to invest in better medical treatment technologies, advancements that are introduced in the ‘for profit’ system in America and elsewhere aren’t made available to Canadians because they don’t have to be made available. Think about it, why would a public system that has a monopoly ever invest in doing things better if they are the only option for patients?

A public system is a death trap and the only players in the trap that can side-step it and get adequate treatment are members of the privelaged class that have the connections to do so. You can already see evidence of this with all the wiavers that are being granted.

Commenter bjc added this to the conversation:

I am from Canada, with many family members still there, and all that 123 says is factual; It was deplorable 15 to 20 years ago, and worse so now; My parents have no good options to maintaining quality of life under such a system; It has been painful to watch them suffer in a supposedly first world country!

I realize the House doesn't have the power to completely repeal Obamacare at this time, but they do have the power to defund its implementation. I pray the Republicans in the House have what it takes to actually do it.

What's With the Motorcycles?

2011-01-13T19:43:00.000-08:00

I have a friend (no, it's not me) who has been on the online dating sites like eHarmony or Christian Mingle or something, and she gets matched with different men (because that's how it works).

Every. Single. One. Of. Her. Matches. Had a profile that said how much he loved riding his motorcycle. These are men in their sixties.

She's been matched to about ten motorcycle-riding men now. And my friend HATES motorcycles!

So what's up with men in their sixties and motorcycles? Is it senile dementia? Help me understand!

Brood of Vipers Falsify Autism Research

2011-01-05T20:02:00.000-08:00

Power Line posted today on this CNN report of a story in the British Medical Journal.
CNN describes it this way:

A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May.

Why on earth would a physician, a medical researcher, falsify data? Power Line's John Hinderaker explains:

There is a lot of blame to go around here; the media deserve some of it for repeating fraudulent claims uncritically. But the genesis of the hoax had a straightforward motive: money. Plaintiffs' lawyers who hoped to make a fortune by suing the manufacturers of vaccines funded the fraudulent research...

Most people don't realize it, but many of the scientific "studies" that have given rise to consumer hysteria and product liability litigation have been funded by plaintiffs' lawyers. The strategy has worked, I believe, more often than not. It is disturbing to understand that scientists can be bought; that, in fact, it is often not particularly difficult to buy them.

The misdirection caused false hope and false anger. And it resulted in a lot of unvaccinated children as well, followed by an increase in measles cases both in Britain and the US. Autism research, meanwhile, may have found more promising avenues if efforts hadn't been sent in the wrong direction by Wakefield's study.

It's repulsive that plaintiffs' lawers have been funding bogus "studies" for their own gain, but it's even more repulsive that there are "scientists" willing to go along.

Eclipse

2011-01-04T18:02:00.000-08:00

If you subscribe to Spaceweather.com's email news, you've already been told about this.

In the Sultanate of Oman, Thierry Legault managed to capture the partial eclipse of the sun - at the same time the International Space Station was in transit across the sun.

Amazing photo!

Waking Up (Updated)

2010-12-31T13:21:00.000-08:00

You know in the movie, Casablanca, early on when they're in Rick's club and the Nazis start singing their Nazi German song and then the French people stand up and sing La Marseillaise and the camera focuses on the pretty young French woman... that scene, right?

Well, this morning when my alarm went off, I got up and smacked the snooze button and crawled back in bed. And while I was snoozing, I was vaguely aware of my roommate (who has the day off) getting up, and then I heard the sound of a lot of water running, like she had turned on the shower, which is what I do as soon as I get up after I'm done hitting the snooze button. Well, that water noise got me jolted out of bed one minute before the alarm went off again, and I found my roomie in the kitchen with the faucet running and not in the bathroom starting a shower, thank goodness. I didn't want to be late for work.

But La Marseillaise was running through my head, and I had these flickers of images of the pretty young French woman singing, and I don't know why, except I must have been dreaming about the movie when the water noise woke me up, only I don't know why I'd be dreaming that because last night we'd been discussing which movie we want to see tonight, and Casablanca was definitely not on the list.

I'm not sure what it means. Maybe I have a battle to fight in the coming year, a war for freedom. Perhaps victory begins with a song...

Update:

Here's the clip from Casablanca.

I leave it to you to decide how the symbolism of the two groups of singers applies to today's world.

O Holy Night

2010-12-25T00:37:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite Christmas song. I blogged about it four years ago. It was written by a Frenchman, and the literal-ish translation from the French goes this way:

Christian midnight
It is the solemn hour
When the God-Man
Has descended unto us
To erase original sin
And by His Father stop corruption

The entire world trembles with hope
For this night that gives it a Savior

People to your knees
Await your Deliverance

Noel, Noel
Here is your Redeemer
Noel, Noel
Here is your Redeemer

You can listen to it in English. My daughter's friend who loves Josh Groban (and actually met him!), this is for you:

And for all of you, may your Christmas be blessedly filled with time spent with loved ones.

P.S. Happy 24th birthday to my baby girl!

Who's On First

2010-12-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

A little viewing fun for Christmas Eve (HT: Power Line)...

Priceless!

I've Been Shopping

2010-12-19T17:13:00.000-08:00

If I could work my will, every fool who goes about with "Happy Holidays" on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!

My apologies to Charles Dickens.

So what holiday could they possibly be wishing me to be happy for? Let's see...

Hannukah is over.

And all the Muslim holidays are over until February.

I suppose there's Kwanzaa, but one look at my pasty-white face would tell them that one's not very likely.

So that leaves the federal holiday that falls on December 25th every year, which somewhere along the way became a Really Bad Word that we must not name in public for fear of offending people who get the day off, even if they don't celebrate it. What's that one called?

Bueller...?

Weekly Republican Radio Message

2010-12-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

It doesn't make much sense to me that they have a video for a radio address, but I guess that's one of the reasons I'm not a mover and shaker in the political world.

Krisi Noem is the newly elected Representative from South Dakota (one of those sparsely populated states that have more Senators than Representatives), and she was picked to give the weekly radio address for the GOP. I like what she had to say.

Quote of the Day

2010-12-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

"There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets."

--Robert G. Ingersoll

White House Wants To Hear From You

2010-12-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

But only if you're 21 years old or YOUNGER.

Some commenter on some opinion column I was reading at lunchtime had a link to something on the White House website, and while I was reading it, I saw a headline over on the right. It said, "Your Chance to be Heard at the United Nations Security Council."

Cool! I like giving my opinion, so I followed the link and found this instead:

Are you 21 or younger? Keep reading.

Bummer! If I were more obedient, I would have stopped there. But I didn't.

The United States is setting the agenda for the United Nations Security Council during the month of December, and Ambassador Susan Rice wants to bring your voice into one of the world’s most important decision-making bodies. From December 2-14, you have a chance to call attention to an issue that you care about. What’s the most vital challenge to international peace and security facing your generation? Send your answer in a one-minute video or in written form to youth@state.gov, keeping your submission to fewer than 250 words. If selected, your answer will become a topic of debate at an innovative Security Council event that will be hosted by Ambassador Rice and broadcast live on December 21 at www.un.org/webcast.

This is pretty annoying on its face. The US ambassador to the UN wants to know what incredibly immature people think. But they don't give a rip about the thoughts of people who have worked for a living or raised a family or built a business from scratch or grown the food that feeds the world. No, grown-ups don't matter to the movers and shakers in the Obama administration.

So they don't want my opinion? Fine. They can have my kids' opinions. Except that at 23 and 25, my kids are way too old!

It gets worse. If you listen to Rice's video, it says more than just what's written. Here's a transcript of the opening:

On December 21st, the US is going to lead an important event in the UN Security Council, and today I want to ask for your help and participation. As you know, the UN Security Council works to resolve conflicts and pursue global peace and security, and we always have a very full agenda. But this month we're doing something a little bit different. No matter who you are, no matter where in the world you're from, if you're 21 years old or younger, we want YOU to tell us what issue is most important to you. You have the greatest stake in the future, and your voices deserve to be heard. So the question I'm posing to you is this: What is the most vital challenge to international peace and security facing your generation? Tell the UN Security Council what issue YOU believe deserves more attention and explain why it's important.

The rest of the video gives information on how to submit your Important Issues for them to consider.

It hurts. The US wants to represent the entire world's youths, not just American youths. It wants to plumb the depths of minds that believe the most pressing issues are things such as, "Um... Like, I think iTunes downloads should be free. And, yeah, college should be free too. Yeah."

It's maddening to read stuff like this and have it confirmed that the adults left DC in January of 2009, and the perpetual adolescents are now in charge.

Get the US and our cash out of the UN, put Ambassador Rice on 99 weeks of unemployment, and send the entire United Nations packing for some third-world backwater where it belongs. Then maybe we can sell the UN building and use the proceeds to apply as a the first drop in the bucket towards paying down the national debt.

Reflections

2010-12-04T22:29:00.000-08:00

Having the roommate that I have has been very enlightening. She and I are so VERY different, and those differences have caused me to reflect on the way I'm wired and my upbringing and the effects these things have had in my life.

I've blogged already about sorters and stuffers. My movie-going friend in the post is now my roomie, and I addressed the issue again in this post as it relates to the kitchen.

My roommate goes to bed early because she has to get up way before dawn to go to work. She even gets up early on weekends. I don't get that, but she says it's because she's had to have this schedule for so long it's part of her nature now.

On the other hand, I like to stay up late and love to sleep in in the morning. I don't get to sleep in on weekdays, and I've had this schedule forever too, but it hasn't made me wake up early on my own. In high school I used to stay up reading until 2:00 or 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, especially in the summer, so I believe night-owlness is hard-wired. It's certainly not anything my parents encouraged me to do!

This early bird/night owl difference works for my roommate and me, though, because we almost never need the shower at the same time.

Another difference is our learning styles, although I think "learning styles" is a misnomer, because even when we're not learning, we still use our styles. I mentioned before that I'm visual and auditory, but that post was about the auditory side. Here at home, it's the visual side that comes out.

My roommate is NOT visual. Oh sure, she has her sense of vision, but she doesn't seem to see much. I notice the difference between us the most in the kitchen. My roomie leaves doors open. I've told her that sometimes I feel like Vanna White as I go through the kitchen reaching up and then down to shut cabinet doors and drawers. There have been some mornings after she's left for work and I get up before dark, that I've found a faint glow of light coming from the kitchen. It means she left the microwave door open again.

I find it entertaining. One day I even counted the open items I shut: 6. I reported that number to her. And yet I'm sure that she can't begin to understand why I would even care about doors being left open and food items out of order and pictures that aren't straight. Those things aren't important at all. It's just that I feel peace when things are in order, and I feel stressed at the sight of chaos.

Another thing I've realized is how much of what I do is because I hear my mom's voice in my head. Washing dishes by hand is one of those times.

My roommate likes to wash dishes by hand. I don't get that. When I moved in, her diswasher was broken and had been for some time. If it had been my house, I would have had a repairman over in a heartbeat or had a new dishwasher installed yesterday. Not her, but with two people's dishes to wash, she finally decided that a functional dishwasher was a good idea. Hallelujah!

But there are some items that still need to be washed by hand. The stainless steel frying pans are that way, and because I have a fried egg as part of my breakfast every day, I wash that pan almost daily (sometimes my roomie gets to it first). I've discovered myself doing that finger motion my mother instilled in me when I was a girl having to take turns doing dishes with my sister. My mom would run her fingers around the "clean" dishes and pans, and if she found any residual food that I'd missed, back it went into the dish water for me to do it RIGHT this time.

I mentioned to my roommate about remembering my mom's dishwashing demands, and she said when her mother found food stuck to the clean dishes, her mom would empty the cupboards of every pot, pan, plate, and cup and make her wash everything. Starting when my roommate was 7. Yikes!

When I look at what my roommate suffered as a child at the hands of various family members (this is just the tip of the iceberg), and when I look at the wonderful woman she is now, I am amazed. God has done an incredible work in her.

I am a visual, purse-sorting night owl, and she is a non-visual, purse-stuffing, warm, generous early bird. We get along just fine, and I am truly proud to call her friend.

Copy Cat Crimes Continue

2010-12-04T18:56:00.000-08:00

Mob rule. Disturbing the peace. Anarchy. They're running rampant, and there's nothing you can do to stop them when they strike near you.

First it was rogue dancing interrupting commuters in Europe.

Then a 650-member choir disrupted shoppers at Macy's in Philadelphia.

And now the copy cats are at it, singing the same song. In a food court, no less. How is a person to eat?

Bah! Humbug, I say.

No, I mean, PLEASE do it near me!

Vulcan Terrorist Attacks Portland

2010-11-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

A Vulcan terrorist was caught Friday in an attempted attack on Portland's Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Disguising himself as a Somali native, the Vulcan took pains to cover the pointy tips of his ears, but he neglected to also disguise his eyebrows, a mistake that tipped off authorities to his true origins.

The attack didn't go through as planned due to undercover efforts by Romulans, who substituted a non-functioning detonator into the bomb-making supplies provided to the terrorist. The Obama administration has been unwilling to speculate as to a possible motive.

If I Could Make Them Pass a Law

2010-11-19T13:28:00.000-08:00

I'd make it illegal to drive a VW bus during rush hour.

Nancy Pelosi Has Dementia

2010-11-10T21:44:00.000-08:00

Or maybe it's schizophrenia, because the woman is seriously delusional. Her column in USA Today yesterday is proof positive.

President Obama and this Congress were job creators from Day One, saving the country from the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. The Recovery Act created or saved more than 3 million jobs, and America is moving forward. October marks the 10th straight month of private sector job growth.

Congressional experts have called the 111th Congress the most productive Congress in a half-century. Our Democratic members took tough votes to support America's working families, putting the American people before politics and thinking of the next generation, not the next election.

Pelosi goes on to list the Democrats' "accomplishments." They passed Wall Street Reform so those bad apples in the Big Apple won't "cause joblessness." As though it's not Congressional recklessness causing the joblessness in the country.

And they passed a bill that lets small businesses borrow money that they'll have to pay back from the revenues that they're not getting because people aren't buying because the economy is in the toilet because of Congressional recklessness (I mean, Congressional "accomplishments").

We made the largest investment in student aid in our nation's history, reducing the cost of loans to families and reducing the deficit.

Pelosi thinks we don't know that an "investment" by Congress is really your money that they taxed so they can spend (and spend and spend) it on sending somebody else's kids to college when you can't even afford to send your own kids to the local junior college. How that reduces the deficit is beyond me.

We achieved more progress over the last four years for our veterans and military families than any time since the passage of the original GI Bill in 1944. And we did all of this while restoring fiscal discipline to the Congress by making the pay-as-you-go rules the law of the land.

Usually when the word, "progress," comes out of the mouth of a politician, it's a bad thing. But I'm not really sure what kind of progress they inflicted on our military and veterans. But let's assume that this time it's a good thing. Notice that she goes back four years, not just the last two. Could it be that President Obama hasn't been progressive for our military? Could it be that President Bush was beneficial? Could it be that the Democrats want to take credit for anything good that happened during the last two years of the Bush Administration but want to place all the blame for the bad things on Bush? Pelosi's got a lot of nerve on that one.

But the one that really frosts my chaps is the part about "restoring fiscal discipline" by passing pay-as-you-go rules. Riiiiight! They waived the Pay-Go rules for the Stimulus bill and used some neat tricks and carved out plenty of exceptions, so that the federal debt limit is over $12 trillion and the deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.42 trillion. If that's "fiscal discipline," I'd hate to see what happens when Congress runs amok with our money.

So now, after two years of shutting Republicans out of the decision-making process, the Democrats suddenly want to "work together" with Republicans. In fact, they "welcome Republican ideas about job creation." How truly selfless of them. Because Pelosi assures us that she and her fellow Democrats are fighting for us - the people - for our jobs, for the economy, and for the middle class.

And she thinks we're going to believe that. Like I said, Nancy Pelosi is demented.

Election Results (Updated)

2010-11-03T00:18:00.000-07:00

I was hoping that California would finally wake up and smell the manure and get rid of it. But apparently not. State offices are going to a straight Democratic ticket with just under 50% of the precincts reporting.

If the results continue this way, we're so screwed.

Update (Wednesday):

They did, and we are.

British Imam Tells the Truth

2010-10-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

This is a clip from CNN's Parker Spitzer show in which they interviewed British Imam Anjem Choudary (I'm not sure when it aired). Choudary explained the beliefs of Islam and how he expects his fellow Muslims to live that out. Greg Hengler at TownHall posted the video.

I don't know why TownHall included the clip of Obama at the end. It doesn't belong.

Here's the key exchange:

SPITZER: Mr. Choudary, are you communicating with individuals within the United States and encouraging them to participate in attacks of this sort?

CHOUDARY: Of course I am. You know I am participating in communication with people all around the world. As you know, the internet makes the world a very small place....

SPITZER: Mr. Choudary, based upon your answer I believe, and I'm sure many prosecutors will listen to your answer. You violated US law. You deserve to be arrested, prosecuted, jailed for the rest of your life. That is what you, sir, deserve. You are a violent and hated terrorist. You could speak it from behind prison bars as far as we're concerned, sir.

CHOUDARY: My invitation is a peaceful one to people to embrace Islam and to warn them obviously of the consequences of occupying Muslim land. I think that's a very decent thing. If we said to you, "Look, there's not going to be any consequences by people attacking Muslims," I think that would be not a very honorable thing to say.

Yes, the imam's invitation is a peaceful one. But if you don't accept it, be prepared for violence. Oh, that sounds fair!

I find Spitzer's reaction surprising, considering his Democrat background and his employment by CNN , but he handled Choudary's answer perfectly. If he worked for NPR, though, he might have been fired by now.

Moving to Mexico

2010-10-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

A commenter named Oracle1 in Atlanta, over at Town Hall had this to say in response to Virgil Goode's column, Who's Really Dividing the Country?

Dear President Obama:

I'm planning to move my family and extended family (a total of 20 or so) into Mexico for my health, and I would like to ask you to assist me. We're planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico , and we'll need your help to make a few arrangements.

We plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws. I'm sure they handle those things the same way you do here.

So, would you mind telling your amigo, President Calderon, that I'm on my way down? Please let him know that I will be expecting the following:

1. Free medical care for my entire family.
2. English-speaking government bureaucrats for all services I might need, whether I use them or not.
3. Please print all Mexican Government forms in English.
4. I want my grand-kids to be taught Spanish by English-speaking (bi-lingual) teachers.

5. Tell their schools they need to include classes on American culture and history.
6. I want my grand-kids to see the American flag on one of the flag poles at their school.
7. Please plan to feed my grand-kids at school for both breakfast and lunch.
8. I will need a local Mexican driver's license so I can get easy access to government services.

9. I do plan to get a car and drive in Mexico , but I don't plan to purchase car insurance, and I probably won't make any special effort to learn local traffic laws.
10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memo from their president to leave me alone, please be sure that every patrol car has at least one English-speaking officer.
11. I plan to fly the U.S. flag from my housetop, put U S. flag decals on my car, and have a gigantic celebration on July 4th. I do not want any complaints or negative comments from the locals.
12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, or have any labor or tax laws enforced on any business I may start.

13. Please have the president tell all the Mexican people to be extremely nice and never say critical things about me or my family, or about the strain we might place on their economy.
14. I want to receive free food stamps.
15. Naturally, I'll expect free rent subsidies.
16. I'll need income tax credits so that although I don't pay Mexican taxes, I'll receive money from the government.

17. Please arrange it so that the Mexican Government pays 4,500 dollars to help me buy a new car.
18. Oh yes, I almost forgot, please enroll me free into the Mexican Social Security program so that I'll get a monthly income in retirement.

I know this is an easy request because you already do all these things for all his people who walk over to the U.S. from Mexico. I am sure that President Calderon won't mind returning the favor if you ask him nicely.

Thank you in advance for your kind help in assuring that Mexico does for us what you and the Left are doing for their citizens who come up here illegally.

American Citizen John Doe

The oracle is on target. If a principle is right and good one way, it has to be right and good when it's reversed. If it's wrong in the reverse, maybe, just maybe it's wrong no matter which way you look at it.

Beltway Adventure

2010-10-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

Oh my goodness! This is priceless.

IowaHawk writes satire. Friday's post is written in the form that many of you may remember. For you youngun's, this is what computer games used to look like back in the days before computers had any graphics. Here's how it opens:

WELCOME TO ADVENTURE! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

>YES

YOU ARE SOMEWHERE IN BELTWAY FOREST, WHERE SOME HAVE FOUND TREASURES OF GOLD ALTHOUGH SOME HAVE ENTERED AND NEVER BEEN SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE FOREST. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH SIMPLE COMMANDS.

YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. THERE IS SNOW OUTSIDE. YOU ARE BEHIND A DESK. ON DESK THERE IS A BUST OF CHURCHILL.

YOU HAVE A CONGRESS.

YOU HAVE A SENATE.

YOU HAVE A MEDIA.

YOU HAVE A TELEPROMPTER.

YOU HAVE A MILITARY.

YOU HAVE A BIG JET.

YOU HAVE $3 TRILLION OF GOLD.

YOU HAVE 82% APPROVAL HEALTH.

THERE IS 7.2% UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE FOREST.

YOU HAVE A RACE CARD.

YOU HAVE INAUGURAL PARTY LEFTOVERS.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

>EAT LEFTOVERS

>RETURN BUST

YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. YOU ARE BEHIND A DESK. ON DESK THERE IS NO BUST OF CHURCHILL. THERE ARE NO MORE LEFTOVERS. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

>GIVE SPEECH

Read the whole thing. It just gets better.

Quote of the Day

2010-10-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

"It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious."

-- Thomas Sowell

He said this in reference to the intelligensia's failure to recognize the problems inherent in multiculturalism.

Smarter Than a Fifth Grader

2010-10-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

I saw this at Michelle Malkin's blog. Sweet Justice!

The Los Angeles Times reported today on a speech Sarah Palin gave in Reno at a Tea Party Express event. In it, the Times quoted Palin as saying they "couldn't 'party like it's 1773' until Washington was flooded with like-minded conservatives."

Of course, that launched a thousand left-leaning ships proclaiming to the world that the stoopid doofus Sarah Palin is, well, a stoopid doofus when it comes to knowing her history. Cuffy at the Perfunction blog has the run-down of the big-name opinionators who felt it was their citizenly duty to point out Palin's abject ignorance. People like Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, and Presidential Debate Moderator Gwen Ifill, people whose job it is to know things and be accurate. Because EVERYBODY knows NOTHING of interest happened in 1773. Right?

Oh snap!

The Palin-bashers are backpedaling, now that they've obviously been handed a fifth-grade history lesson. "Just satire, ha-ha. No, really!"

And I bet Sarah Palin didn't even have to write "1773" on her hand...

President Obama's Health Challenge

2010-10-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

Vice President Joe Biden, who can always be relied on to blab things that shouldn't be known to the general public, has let slip the news of a serious challenge to President Obama's health:

If the president's brain is bigger than his skull, that means he's suffering from intracranial pressure, usually caused by a head injury. Based on the fact that President Obama's judgement has been very impaired (Obamacare, Cap & Tax, GM takeover, etc.), I suspect his injury was caused by beating his head against the wall so many times over Biden's gaffes, slips, foul-ups, and general oratory ineptitude. The frontal lobe is the portion of the brain that controls rational judgement and decision-making. It's just so sad.

Here's how Wikipedia describes the implications of the president's injuries:

An increase in pressure, most commonly due to head injury leading to intracranial hematoma or cerebral edema can crush brain tissue, shift brain structures, contribute to hydrocephalus, cause the brain to herniate, and restrict blood supply to the brain.

Goodness! It could even get worse.

The "Ignore Us" Ad

2010-10-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

This is the perfect political ad for this year (HT: Power Line). All the candidates who weren't in lockstep with the Pelosi-Reid legislative full-court press should run it.

Watch it over and over. And send it to your friends.

And be sure to vote! (Unless you want more Pelosi-Reid 2000-page legislation. Then just stay home on election day.)

Obama Warns the Nation

2010-10-07T19:02:00.000-07:00

The Hill reported yesterday that President Obama warned of the dire consequences we face if Republicans are elected.

President Obama warned Wednesday that his agenda will be stuck in gridlock for the next two years if Democrats lose control of the House.

“Unless we are able to maintain Democrats in the House and Senate, then we’re going to be stalled for two years or four years, and we’re going to start going backwards,” Obama said in remarks at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in New Jersey, according to a pool report.

Gridlock and stalling are good. Going backwards is even better!

Obama said the struggling economy and high unemployment is hampering his party and giving the GOP momentum.

And that's a problem how...? Our country needs a shift in momentum to stop us from going even deeper into the tank than we've already gone in the last two years.

“Now when unemployment is still at 9.5, 9.6 percent that gives an enormous advantage to whoever is not in power because they can simply point at the status quo and regardless of causation say, ‘You know what? It’s the folks who are in power that are at fault,’” Obama said. “So that gives a natural momentum” to Republicans, he said.

I love that part about "regardless of causation." Just as President Obama can't quit smoking, he also can't quit his Blame-Bush addiction. Of course, I don't think he's really trying to quit.

Rather than taking this as a warning, I'm hoping it's a promise.

I can see November from my house...

Let That be a Warning

2010-10-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

Fire is an ever-present danger. My roommate never leaves the dryer running after she leaves the house or goes to bed, because someone she knows came home to a burned-up house that started from a dryer left unattended. So I only leave the dryer running when I go to bed if it's set on Air Fluff. Nobody's dryer ever caught fire from cold air, at least that I'm aware of.

But house fires are caused by other things than dryers. There's the cigarette or cigar left smoldering in the sofa, which catches fire after everyone has gone to bed.

Pattern: Never go to bed. This will prevent most fires.

No, wait. That's the wrong lesson. Because about 10 or 12 years ago, my ex-husband's house caught fire in the afternoon right after my son had used the old electric typewriter (circa 1970) on his bed then turned it off and left the room. The fire department blamed the typewriter.

I mention this, because I saw an article in the Las Vegas Sun that said somebody's candle was left unattended, at which time it decided to run amok and catch the house on fire. It caused $180,000 in damage. That's a very expensive candle.

Pattern: Never be inattentive. This will prevent most fires.

Actually, the candle issue isn't a problem for me. I know people who love candles. There are whole industries and businesses built around selling nothing but candles. But for some reason, I never seem to get the candles to work right. I smell the scented ones more when they're NOT lit than when they are. One candle (was it gardenia or camelia? I don't remember, except that it ended in "-ia") was so powerful unlit that I had an allergic reaction to it and had to keep it in a gallon-size Ziploc for my protection. But mainly, what I smell is the aroma of a freshly blown-out wick when I'm done, and what's the point of giving my house the dead-wick smell? I just don't do candles.

However, the article reminded me of one of my favorite Dave Barry columns: The Pop Tart story, in which Dave conducts a scientific experiment on Pop Tarts and their generic equivalents, following the story of a man whose kitchen was burned down by Pop Tarts left too long in the toaster.

No matter what it is - dryers, cigarettes, electric typewriters, candles, Pop Tarts, or some other fire hazard waiting to surprise you - let that be a warning to you. Don't light things up, don't type, don't toast, and for heaven's sake, don't go to bed. You may wake up to more heat than you can stand.

Quote of the Day

2010-09-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

--Agatha Christie

Quote of the Day

2010-09-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

"Brett Carter, the Democrat nominee to fill the 6th District seat in Tennessee for the ougoing Bart Gordon — a seat once held by Al Gore — is trying to fulfill his lifelong dream of waking up next to the severed head of a horse."

-- Doug Powers

OK, a little background: Carter is urging Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi NOT to seek the speakership next year. (via Michelle Malkin)

Not Working

2010-09-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'm working. That's not the problem. It's the things around me that are the issue.

First, it was the lamp in my room. It's a pole lamp with the main bulb on top, hidden by a nice upward-facing shade, and a reading lamp halfway up the pole, which I keep turned off. The main bulb has been getting dimmer, and I figured that just meant it was close to burning out. That seems to be the way those fluorescent twisty bulbs work. Then, earlier this week, the bulb went out.

No problem. I turned on the reading lamp and made the darkness flee again. But that only lasted about 20 minutes, and then that bulb went black.

So I went outside my room and flipped on the hallway light switch, but nothing happened. I deduced that the circuit breaker must have been tripped. At the box, none of the switches had tripped, not even the one marked "Bedroom lights & outlets." Hmmm... The outlets were working, just not the lights. I gave up and went to bed.

The next morning I put a new bulb in the top socket (it was incandescent, not fluorescent) and tried again. Nothing. Put the old bulb back in and went to work.

After work, when I came home, out of habit I flipped on the light switch in my room. The light came on. I checked the light in the hallway. It was on too. Much happiness!

I ran some errands (turned the lights off when I left), came back, and my lamp was dark again. Hallway too. Later, the lights worked again and have ever since.

Meanwhile, we have an alarm system in the house. Over a month ago, it woke us up in the middle of the night with the slow beeping that tells us the battery is running out of steam. Unfortunately, the battery is in the attic, and neither one of us wants to go up there. Creepy things like spiders probably live up in the attic. Uh-uh. No thanks. Not me. No sir.

But after beeping at us now and then over the course of a week or so, it must have figured we knew already, and it hasn't done that anymore. Instead, this week it decided that it wasn't going to let us set the alarm. It tells us when we open a door (beep, beep, beep), but it's as though the thing doesn't have the strength to go on patrol.

My roommate scheduled the alarm company to come out and check things out, but then the alarm started working again. When it let us set the alarm when we left the house and unset it when we came back home, she canceled the appointment, because it wasn't worth spending the money for something that was working.

Yesterday morning she left for a long weekend visiting family. Shortly after her departure, I tried setting the alarm when I was heading to work, but it wouldn't go into alarm mode. Great! No alarm and no appointment.

Last night before bed, I tried again, and this time it worked just fine. I was protected from bad guys for the night.

Until 4:00 am, when a scary loud beeping woke me up. I punched the "I'm home and everything's fine" code, but it wasn't paying any attention to me at all. It just kept beeping while I tried all kinds of combinations of setting the alarm then disarming.

Then after about five or ten endless minutes, it stopped. I went back to bed. I couldn't get to sleep. I finally got up and turned on my computer.

It started beeping again at 4:30 am. I punched buttons again, hoping to shut it off, and then I tried calling the alarm company, but it said it was the customer service number, so I hung up. And then the beeping stopped.

Back to bed. Try to sleep. Start to doze off. Beeping again at 5:00.

This time I called the alarm company and finished listening to the message. It said to hit '4' if it's an emergency. It was for me, so I hit '4.' After giving the secret password and other locater info, I explained to the guy what was happening. He had me try stuff, while the beeping continued, but nothing worked. Then he said he'd have a Tech guy call me.

The beeping stopped by itself again, and a while later a very sleepy-sounding Tech guy called. After I described what had happened, he said that the only fix was to find the main box where the battery is, remove the battery, and unplug the alarm system. Oh. The attic. No. I thanked him, we hung up, and I went back to bed. It beeped at 5:30.

This time, I tried pushing buttons again. No dice. Then I thought of smothering the thing. I grabbed a big, fluffy throw blanket from my room and held it over the buttons in a homicidal embrace. The sound was muffled. Bingo!

I got a broom from the garage and propped up the blanket on the end of the handle, but the broom wanted to slide on the floor. A kitchen chair shoved against the broom kept it and the blanket in place, and I went to bed in peace. I dreamed that my roommate came home, and I told her what happened with the alarm, so she went out to the garage to turn off the circuit breaker to the alarm system, but I noticed my alarm clock start flashing from losing power and having it returned, and I thought that I should get up and reset my clock so I wouldn't be late for work, but I slept...

My alarm clock went off, and I looked at it, and it said 6:06. I thought it would say sometime after midnight from my roommate having flipped the power off... Oh... It was really my roommate's clock going off, because she must have accidentally turned it back on before she left for the airport yesterday. I got up to turn it off and realized the house alarm hadn't beeped at 6:00. So I pulled the blanket away, and it let me disarm it to say I was happily at home and not in danger. Then I went back to bed for another half hour until my clock woke me up to get ready for work.

My lamp and the hallway light were still working and the alarm system was still silent when I left the house this morning.

Hanging Out in Texas

2010-09-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Cisco Saturday night. It was an uneventful trip until about half an hour before I got there, probably somewhere around Clyde. I was driving about 5 or 6 mph over the limit, when I saw a law enforcement vehicle's lights go on. There was nobody else on the road near me who could have been the target, so I pulled over.

The officer was nice-looking with a strong jawline reminiscent of the evil terminator in Terminator 2. It left me unsure what to expect. He told me I was driving a bit fast and asked me where I was headed, and I said, "Cisco." Then he asked me why I was going there, without conveying any sense of surprise that anyone, especially from California, would choose to go there. I told him, "Family."

He took my license back to his car to check to see if I was a wanted fugitive from the law, then he returned with my license and a small piece of paper. "I'm giving you a warning. There's no cost." I thanked him and drove away at slightly under the limit and then got to my mom's house.

When I told my family about my warning, they all agreed that Clyde's speeding enforcement is brutal, and it's usually the local cops, rather than the state troopers, who are patrolling the interstate in that area. Duly noted for my return trip.

I had expected my arrival at my mom's house to be announced by her little dog Misty, but I managed to get there while Misty was away for her every-other-month grooming. Not long after I arrived, Misty was delivered by her groomer, who lives only a block away from my mom. Small towns sure are different from city living!

Misty had two bows on her head, one of which she lost almost immediately, and a pink and blue bandana around her neck. She started biting on the end of the bandana, and soon it was her newest tug-of-war toy.

Unlike Scooter, who kept my mom and me entertained on our big trip together, Misty doesn't play by herself. Scooter's favorite toy was one of my dad's old socks with a knot in the middle, and he would shake it until it was dead. And then he'd kill it some more. Scooter chewed on balls, but he didn't chase them.

Misty, on the other hand, loves nothing more than to chase a ball and bring it back so you can throw it again for her. She allows the variety of occasionally playing tug of war with her rope or her grooming scarf. This is Misty:

And here she is in the back yard yesterday morning, when I was trying to wear her out so she'd be calm in the house (she still, at just over a year old, has puppy levels of energy and relentlessness). Going for a catch:

Successful capture of prey:

Coming back for more:

My efforts were rewarded when Misty took the ball with her through the doggie door, dropped it on the kitchen floor, and drank lots of water. Then she found a spot in the living room to take a nap.

I was without internet access for over a day, because my mom's modem konked out since the last time I was here, and she had a new one with a new secret code that nobody knew. Only my nephew, who is the computer guy of the family, knew what the code was because he set it up, and he couldn't come over right away to give his sister and me access to the wireless. We're good to go, now.

Yesterday, my mom and I went over to Eastland to get groceries at Wal-Mart. The countryside around Cisco is mostly flat with occasional slightly rolling hills. Here are a couple shots from road to Eastland:

Once we got to Wal-Mart, we spotted this truck parked near us, and I snapped a picture right when the owner was coming back. "You like my truck?" she asked. We chatted for a bit.

Yes, I like her truck.

I also like how friendly people are here, although I can hear myself starting to drawl a little. It's one of the hazards of coming to visit Texas.

This morning, we had planned to drive to Abilene to go to Target and maybe Best Buy, but the new day gave us rain sent by Tropical Storm Hermine. The rain should clear up by Thursday, so we'll go then.

For the next couple days, I'll just be hanging out with family. My nephew (the computer guy) will be coming tonight with his wife and little daughter (who won't be nearly as little as she was the last time I saw her). And so far we have no plans for tomorrow. That's the way I like it on vacation.

Halfway There

2010-09-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

I made it to Deming, New Mexico about 8:30 local time tonight. I had forgotten about the time change I'd have at the New Mexico border, making it an hour later. That'll happen again tomorrow when I get past El Paso, Texas.

It was eleventy-one (111°) when I was outside waiting in line for the lone restroom at a gas station someplace beyond Yuma. And no, Bekah, I didn't sweat. Not at all. That's why it's called a dry heat.

When I was driving along the stretch of road between Gila Bend and Casa Grande, the place where the smuggler warning signs are supposed to be, my car said it was 116° outside. I didn't see the smuggler signs, but I did see an actual "Miss Me Yet?" sign with GW Bush on it, and right after it was a sign with Reagan's picture and the message, "Remember real Hope and Change?"

Not far from there was a yellow diamond warning sign that said, "Do Not Follow Trucks." I have no idea what that was about.

I had brought snacks with me, so I wouldn't have to stop for food too much and could make good time. But when the temperature outside was 116° and the sign for Dairy Queen magically appeared up ahead, I made a decision to splurge. When I pulled off the interstate, I recognized the exit as the one by Picacho Peak, where my mom and I waited for AAA to come and replace the motorhome tire that blew out on our trip. I ate a chocolate-dipped cone, refilled my water bottle, and hit the road again.

Just as a note, the gas prices in Arizona are about 30¢ cheaper than in California. I should drive to Arizona to buy gas more often...

Vacation Coming!

2010-09-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

I'm getting my ducks in a row, getting ready for vacation.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Texas to visit my mom and my sister. It's a two-day drive if I can get at least as far as Deming, New Mexico, which is within ten minutes of the half-way point.

Yesterday I checked the weather reports, only to discover that tomorrow will be Phoenix's hottest day (107º) of the next 10 days. My route takes me near Phoenix without hitting any of the city's normal traffic. Depending on the time I go through there, I could hit some Labor Day weekend traffic leaving the city, so I'll try to drag myself out of bed earlier than I want to.

The weather report for Cisco says that I'll be there in time to enjoy thunderstorms. I'm sure that means I may learn how to read all those satellite images on the Weather Channel. People in Texas like that channel. People in California barely know it exists.

Another fascinating development in my vacation preparation came in the form of a news item I saw at Michelle Malkin's blog. It seems the Obama administration's answer to border security is to post signs warning the gringos that Arizona isn't safe.

The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.

The signs were posted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, a major east-west corridor linking Tucson and Phoenix with San Diego.

They warn travelers that they are entering an "active drug and human smuggling area" and they may encounter "armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed." Beginning less than 50 miles south of Phoenix, the signs encourage travelers to "use public lands north of Interstate 8" and to call 911 if they "see suspicious activity."

Perfect! That's where I'll be driving at 107º tomorrow. I'll have to look for the signs.

But once I get to Texas, I'll have fun. And the fun starts just east of El Paso, where the posted speed limit is 80 mph. Love it! Then, when I get to my mom's house, I get to meet her new little dog Misty. (My mom had to put Scooter down a while ago - He had liver cancer.) I've heard Misty already, because when I call my mom, Misty starts barking to say, "Hey! You stopped paying attention to me!"

When I come back, I'll be bringing my telescope with me. I didn't have enough room for it in my car when I came home from The Trip with my mom.

So tonight is serious packing, followed by serious sleeping, followed tomorrow by serious driving. I have some books on tape checked out from the library to keep me company. Life is good!

A Classic

2010-08-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

I think I might be getting old.

This brings back fond memories of going to the movies when I was in high school:

Abusive Behavior (Updated)

2010-08-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

It's hard to know exactly what's going on. A month ago, I fell down and hurt my knees. Those injuries have healed now, except for a few spots that are still a bit pink. I was able to get back to praying on my knees within a few days of the Shameful Incident, and I wore my jeans to work that Friday (and every Friday since) without any pain to my band-aid covered wounds.

I had even begun to believe that perhaps the SI was just a strange aberration, a freak of nature that randomly struck an otherwise steady person.

I was deluded.

Last night, my daughter and a friend of hers and mine came over to play games. I went into my roommate's room (she was out for the evening), where the games were, and turned on her light so I could read the names of the games. After calling out the names, we decided to watch movies instead, and I walked toward the bedroom door. As I did, the door to one of the under-the-bed compartments was slightly open, and I walked right into the top corner, which smacked my kneecap and then banged into the fleshy part below it.

I said, "Damn it!" about five times, with the last one properly spelled in all caps, and this alarmed my daughter, who knows that I don't swear unless I'm really hurt.

She came in the room, and I pulled up my sweats to inspect my knee and check for bleeding. Swelling had already started, but I didn't see blood. She did, though, and mentioned it, and on my second look, I could see one wide drop trying to form.

I washed it, dried it, and applied a band-aid. Then I grabbed the gel pack out of the freezer (I got it from my chiropractor to use on my back when I feel a twinge) and put it on my knee for a while.

The ice didn't help much, and all night my knee had the look of a beluga whale with its bulging forehead. The swelling was about the size of a plum that had been cut in half and attached under the kneecap. I iced it several times while we watched Camille and then the Brothers Bloom.

At one point during the movie-watching, I glanced into my roomie's room and saw that the very door which had attacked me, AND WHICH I HAD CLOSED, was open again, waiting for another victim!

I gave it no quarter. Throwing off my ice pack, I went into the room and rearranged the stuff in the compartment until the evil door acknowledged that I was boss and stayed shut.

By this morning the swelling was down to the size of a large apricot. It doesn't look like there will be any lasting effects, but I can't help but wonder what is going on in me that my walking has suddenly become a danger to my knees.

Maybe I should consider attaching curb feelers to my lower legs as a protective measure...

Update (8/30/10, lunchtime):

I mentioned my new injury to my boss, and I told her I need curb feelers. She suggested rubber pads.

In retrospect, I think this is what she had in mind:

But this is what I thought of when she said it:

One on each knee. It'll look great with a dress.

The Truth About Your Congressman

2010-08-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

I found this over at Power Line. Classic!

Zebras on the Loose

2010-08-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

KGW News reported today about two zebras who got loose in Northern California. (Slideshow here.)

A pair of zebras on the way to Oregon got loose in traffic on a busy California road and it took hours to capture them.

The zebras were getting loaded into a horse trailer in Carmichael, Calif., a small suburb east of Sacramento, when two dogs apparently spooked them and sent them running in opposite directions. Much of the scramble was caught on camera.

Authorities said the zebras darted in and out of traffic and one of them was hit by a car but continued to run. Confused residents reported zebra sightings throughout the downtown area for next five hours.

Both were eventually caught and the animal that was struck by the car was checked over by a veterinarian and given a clear bill of health with just one superficial cut. The second zebra was found in the pool of an apartment complex.

Their owner, Michael Mastagni, was able to finally load the animals onto the trailer and transported his entire herd of seven zebras, including the two runaways, to the ranch in Bly, Ore., on Sunday.

I love that one of them found its way to a pool. It is summertime, after all...

Dereliction of Duty by ICE

2010-08-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

Power Line reported Wednesday on a vote by the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents ICE agents and employees. The rank and file unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the agency's leadership.

Did you get that? The vote was unanimous. Every single person voted against the leadership.

The union "stated that ICE has 'abandoned' its core mission of protecting the public to support a political agenda favoring amnesty. "

The union denounced John Morton, who heads ICE, and Phyllis Coven, assistant director for the agency's office of detention policy and planning. It stated that the integrity of the agency "as well as the public safety" would be "better provided for in the absence of Director Morton and Assistant Director Coven."

Among the other points unanimously agreed to are these:

• The majority of ICE's enforcement and removal officers are prohibited from making street arrests or enforcing U.S. immigration laws outside of the jail setting.

• Hundreds of ICE officers nationwide perform no law enforcement duties whatsoever because of resource mismanagement within the agency.

• ICE detention reforms have transformed into a detention system aimed at providing resortlike living conditions to criminal aliens based on recommendations not from ICE officers and field managers, but from "special-interest groups."

• The lack of technical expertise and field experience has resulted in a priority of providing bingo nights, dance lessons and hanging plants to criminals, instead of addressing safe and responsible detention reforms for noncriminal individuals and families.

• Unlike any other agency in the nation, ICE officers will be prevented from searching detainees housed in ICE facilities, allowing weapons, drugs and other contraband into detention centers -- putting detainees, ICE officers and contract guards at risk.

• Senior leadership ignores reports that ICE internal investigations by the office of professional responsibility conceal agency and supervisor misconduct and are used to retaliate against employees who make whistleblower-type disclosures or question inappropriate policies and procedures.

As Paul Mirengoff, the Power Line writer, says, imagine if this vote had happened during the Bush administration. Imagine if it was only a handful of ICE agents voting against Bush's ICE leadership. Every single paper and every single left-leaning news outlet would be trumpeting the news 24/7.

But under Obama, it's only the right-leaning Washington Times that ran the story.

Boys Will Be Boys

2010-08-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

I spend an inordinate amount of time in and around parking lots in my daily life, and it's given me the opportunity to observe people and what they do.

A few weeks ago, there was a family gathered outside one of the doors of a building I was at. They may have been waiting for someone who was still inside, but one little boy about age 3 had separated himself from the rest. He had found a tiny puddle in the parking lot, the only spot of water in the dry, barren reaches of inland Southern California, and he was playing in it.

There must be something in the DNA of the Y chromosome, a gene that homes in on standing water and mud and compels the male to approach it, stick his hands in it and then stomp around in it until his mother lets out a horrified shriek and comes over to whisk said miscreant away. Being a girl, I don't completely understand.

There's another male gene that I see on display the parking lots, and this one afflicts older males, those of driving age. It's the Backing Into Parking Spaces gene. Although I'm willing to consider that this one may be an effect of the prenatal washing of the brain by testosterone that occurs early in the development of males and some rare females. By my estimation (not just at work but everywhere), about 90% of the vehicles that are parked for easy exit were parked by men. I think it's the modern manifestation of the same thing that caused Wild West men to sit in saloons with their backs to the wall. A lady doesn't normally think about that unless her man has drummed it into her over the years.

The other day I was looking out a window, and I noticed motion out in the parking lot, and I looked to see what it was. A pickup truck was starting to back into a spot. Naturally, my brain registered: Pickup = male; reverse parking = male. But then the truck pulled forward because the driver had miscalculated the proper trajectory. (My brain: Lack of awareness of surroundings and vehicle direction = potential female driver.) I watched more closely and saw that the driver didn't turn the wheels the right way to allow for a better approach, so he or she ended up in about the same position as the first time. Attempt number 3 was slightly improved, just enough to allow for full access to the parking space, but the driver wasn't sure how far back to go, so the truck moved forward a little then backwards again, and then it stopped.

I watched for confirmation of my conclusion that the truck was being driven by a rogue female, one who probably had to borrow hubby's truck because her little, maneuverable car was in the shop. The driver's door opened, and a man got out.

Hmmm. He parks like a girl when he's parking like a man. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

Missouri Rejects Obamacare

2010-08-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

"The God of Israel spoke. The Rock of Israel said to me: 'The person who rules righteously, who rules in the fear of God, he is like the light of the morning, like the sunrise bursting forth in a cloudless sky, like the refreshing rains that bring tender grass from the earth.'

But the godless are like thorns to be thrown away, for they tear the hand that touches them." II Samuel 23:3-4, 6

It looks like Missouri has started throwing the thorns away, by nearly 3 to 1.

America is willing to be governed. But. We. Will. Not. Be. Ruled.

Falling Down on the Job

2010-07-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

It's probably not what you think...

Yesterday. I needed to get to work (to my desk, actually) ON TIME. Which means I have to clock in on the wretched time clock system on my workstation no later than 8:07 a.m. so I can take not one minute less than a 30 minute lunch so I can leave work at 4:30 so I can make it home to grab a few things for an appointment at 5:15.

I set my alarm clock about 20 minutes earlier than usual and got up after hitting the snooze button only once. The only problem was that my roommate's family was here, and everyone was still getting ready for Disneyland. The daughter (the one from Florida, who you may remember from the trip my mom and I took a couple years ago) was in the shower when I dragged myself out of bed. That was OK, because I got my clothes out and readied my breakfast stuff and was generally efficient with my waiting time. Then it was my turn.

The granddaughter took her shower while I was having breakfast, and then the son-in-law needed a shower, but since I hadn't finished my breakfast yet, I let him go ahead, rather than try to brush my teeth mid-breakfast. Eeeww!

But he took longer than I had counted on (I hadn't really given it much thought). When he finished, I brushed my teeth, grabbed everything, said my goodbyes (and told them I knew they were going to be SO JEALOUS of me being at work while they were suffering their way through the Happiest Place on Earth), and got in the car. That's when I noticed I was cold. I had forgotten my jacket. So I turned off the car, ran back inside ("Are you done at work already?"), grabbed my jacket and ran back outside to my car.

I ended up leaving with just enough time to get to work and still be able to clock in On Time, provided traffic wasn't bad. It wasn't, but my timing was close. I parked my car and walked very quickly to the entrance, and that was where my foot didn't quite clear the curb, and I went down.

My knees took the worst of it. I was wearing a dress, so it was skin on cement. Hard. My hands hit next, my left hand grazing the knuckles closest to the nails on my thumb and two middle fingers, because that's the hand that had my lunch in it. My right hand hit on the heel of the palm after letting go of my purse and sending some of the contents spilling, including my cell phone which opened up as if to mock me. And then, because I'd been walking so fast, my momentum kept me moving until my right cheek touched the cement, fortunately without any injury or pain. If it hadn't been for my knees taking the brunt of the damage, my face could have been.... no, I don't want to think about it.

One of the ladies at work was right behind me, and she asked if I was OK, but I had to be OK, because I had to clock in first and then survey the damage once that task had been accomplished. I walked quickly, without tripping up the stairs, and checking as I went to make sure I didn't feel any blood running down my shins, to my desk and clocked in at 8:06 a.m. Success with a minute to spare! Then I went to the restroom and washed my injuries with soap and water.

It's bad enough that I felt like a dope for falling down like a little kid, but my job includes tracking unusual occurrences and typing up some of them when they're reported. And this was definitely an unusual occurrence. I asked my boss if I had to write it up, hoping that I wouldn't have to immortalize my shame, but she said yes, I needed to do that. And I also had to send a copy to HR.

Later, my knees started screaming in pain at me, so I went to the mailroom and looked in the first aid kit, but all it had was teeny band-aids and some purple gloves. Nothing for pain. I walked down the hall to where the head pediatrician was in his office, and I asked him if there was something I could put on the abrasions to make them stop hurting but that would let me pretend that I wasn't seeking medical care (pediatricians see more of this type of injury than adult physicians do or I would have asked an adult provider). He told me to ask the nurse.

The nurse, whose office was right next door, told me that if I put some antibiotic ointment on it, it would keep the air from getting to the wounds, and it was the air that was making my knees hurt. She dug out a box of antibiotic ointment from a desk drawer and informed me that it was expired, which was why it wasn't in the first aid kit. As a nurse, she would NEVER suggest that I use expired ointment. As a friend, though, she was letting me know that it was an option should I decide I wanted to use it. But it was expired. Just so I know.

I didn't care. I took several of the little foil packets and used one to put some ointment on my knees and also my thumb knuckle, which was still bleeding slightly. I had just enough band-aids in my Bag of Tricks that I keep in my purse for my knees. My thumb got a red crayon-shaped band-aid.

The hardest part of the day was at night when it was time to pray. I do that on my knees with my elbows on my bed, but there was no way I was going to put my knees on the little rug I keep by the bed. So I climbed into bed and prayed sitting up straight, and even though I felt farther away from my prayers that way, it was still better than not praying at all.

Today I wore another dress to work, so my knees wouldn't have to rub against pants, and tomorrow it'll be a skirt and jacket. On Friday, Jeans Day, I'll have to see how I'm doing, because I'd absolutely hate to miss out on a Jeans Day just because I fell down on the job on Tuesday.

Obama Bumper Sticker Removal Kit

2010-07-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is from NewsBusters, via Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's blog.

Doug Powers helpfully points out that the BS Removal Kit can also be used to remove the "McCain" half of your McCain/Palin bumper sticker.

I don't have any bumper stickers to remove, but I'm always happy to help a friend find something useful.

Then again, you might just want to keep those stickers on for posterity. I used to commute long distances to work and would frequently see another commuter with a really old Dodge Dart that had a Nixon/Agnew sticker on his car. Together, the sticker and car made a nice time capsule of another era. Something to consider before you plunge headlong into the BS Removal decision...

Happy Bastille Day!

2010-07-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

Today's French phrase on my Page-A-Day calendar is:

La liberté à tout prix.

Liberty at all costs.

It's in honor of France's Bastille Day, their independence day. It's not a day I celebrate, although I remember, after having had 5 years of French in school plus various conversational French classes, that it falls on July 14th. But it got me thinking about France's revolution compared to ours.

Liberté. Liberty from what? The French liberated themselves from monarchy, a monarchy that oppressed them and left most of them starving in the streets. In return, they gained the Reign of Terror. Some liberty!

Égalité. Equality of what? The French are still basically ruled by elites. It may not be the monarchy anymore, true, but it's still a class system of the lessers being subject to their betters. I described the French school system, which fosters this class structure in this post from 2005. Yes, the French people all get to vote, but the elites still rule.

Fraternité. Fraternity with whom? "Disaffected" (Muslim) youths? The Jews who are being beaten? Fraternity seems to be only with other pasty-white French people. Outsiders need not apply.

The American Left loves to look to Europe, to France, for inspiration when they try to transform our country into something "better." But America, for all its faults, is the better place.

We gained liberty from the ruling monarchy without the bloodbath that followed France's revolution. Granted, geography had a lot to do with keeping King George III's head on his shoulders. But we had a peaceful transition to a new power structure that ensured liberty in the fledgling nation.

Within the context of the times, America promised equality in a way that hadn't been seen before. Property rights, the vote for free men, and equal opportunity were available to all.

Fraternity is what America does best. All who would subscribe to America's ideals and become citizens are welcome. It doesn't matter where you're from. It doesn't matter what color you are or what language you spoke in the Old Country. If you want to be an American, you can. Nobody is outcast. Nobody has to take the back seat. And anyone who wants to apply him or herself can succeed.

We're even seeing, this election cycle, a resurgence of would-be citizen-legislators.

America is a great country. Let us celebrate her greatness this Bastille Day.