Notable Quotables

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
- Hillary Clinton, 2004

"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society."
- Hillary Clinton, 1993

"(W)e understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man."
- Adolph Hitler, 1933

I know, I know, I risk invoking Godwin's Law, but Hillary's neototalitarian rhetoric is such an easy target for this stuff.

Globe: Kerry a "Moderate"

The Boston Globe offers us this observation:

In the same speech, Kerry -- who is running as a political moderate and faces a challenge from the left by independent candidate Ralph Nader -- put aside his centrist rhetoric and zeroed in on traditional Democratic themes, winning nine standing ovations from his predominantly black audience at a meeting of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

Kerry pledged to raise the minimum wage, make health care a right for all Americans, and aggressively enforce civil rights laws. Seeking to energize his African-American voter base, he compared the Florida ballot-box debacle of 2000 with Jim Crow scare tactics to keep blacks away from the polls.

Kerry contended that many young people get in trouble with the law because adults have failed them. He said many girls and minorities need boosts in self-confidence to flourish in school; all-girls' schools would receive money from his proposed $300 million fund.

As the Globe notes Kerry may claim to be "running as a moderate" but he is talking like a socialist. Kerry goes on to advocate federal meddling setting college tuition costs:

The thrust would involve dividing up $10 billion to states that commit to holding tuition increases to a rate of inflation -- in essence giving money for public colleges that have lost funding from their own states and have been raising tuition and fees to replace it.

Now does anyone care to speculate how long it would take the feds to use that money as a club to dictate far more than tuition prices? Within nanoseconds, schools would be told who to admit, who to not admit, what to teach, how to teach it. In short, colleges will be treated just like the public schools are treated already. Indeed, the politicians admit their behaviors can be controlled by dangling a federal carrot in their face:

"If that pot of money was available, the Legislature would jump at the chance, and do whatever we had to do to take advantage of it," (Mass. State Senator) Panagiotakos said.

That's good, independent thinking there, My Big Fat Greek Senator. You be a good little aparatchik and do as you're told.

On the stump, meanwhile, Kerry hasn't been voicing much in the way of specifics, preferring to paint in broad strokes by promising to "strengthen" this or "protect" that. It is instructive that when specific policy proposals appear, they are traditional northeast liberal Democrat big-government "communism light" in nature.

What Next?

My wife opined last night that if our resolve remains strong in the face of the ongoing beheadings in the Middle East, the barbarians will be forced to up the ante. She expects that before too long we will be treated to videotaped castration, dismemberment, disemboweling, and other such atrocities. I sure hope she is wrong, but fear that she is right.

Hillary Revealed

Hillary Clinton, speaking in San Francisco on Monday:

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Now, we all know this is the philosophy of the left, but rarely has it been so plainly spoken.

We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.

Naturally, "the common good" is not defined, because it must be constantly expanded to maintain demand for bigger government and more beurocracy.

If this philosophy were to take hold in a majority of politicians, it would signal the end of all property rights in America. If the government had the power to take things away for such vague platitudes as "the common good," you would only own property until the government said you didn't own it, i.e., until a politician decided they wanted it for their own, for whatever reason they could devise. Welcome to Amerika, Comrade.

6/30/04 Update: As usual, Boortz has it nailed:

There are several basic elements of the liberal faith exposed in Hillary's threat. (And yes, it was a threat.) The two most important elements were that all wealth belongs to the government and that the lives of individuals must be controlled by government. The government demonstrates its ownership of all wealth by determining how it is to be "distributed," and its ownership of individuals by controlling aspects of our private lives.

The Imperial Federal government, under the control of such worthy people as Hillary, decides what portion of the wealth that we have earned it will "give" us. You've heard liberals refer to tax breaks as "giveaways" to the rich. You and I know that a tax break doesn't "give" anything to the rich. It merely allows the high producers to keep more of what they worked for and earned. But to Hillary and her leftist friends, all that you earn actually belongs to government ... so, to them, it is a giveaway. [...]

And now we have Hillary proudly and arrogantly announcing that the government is going to seize property from individuals for "the common good." Don't ignore the message here. You are not a free individual. You exist to serve the state. Hillary is here to show you the way.

A Religion of Peace

Photo Credit: Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

Guess the Dictator or Sit-Com Character

Here's a fun game to play. Give it a shot. If your knowledge of your character or despot is good, the routine does a remarkably good job of picking you out. When I played, it successfully identified Wilbur from Mr. Ed, the maid from The Brady Bunch, and Idi Amin.

On Taxing the Rich

Wednesday morning around 9 AM, while traveling on I-95 between Rocky Mount and Weldon, NC, I spoke with the president of my company. She called me from Atlanta, Ga.

She had been on the road for nine days, drumming up new work, executing prior contracts, and ensuring the success of the company. She had flown into Atlanta from Montreal and was headed to California, before meeting me in Raleigh, NC on Thursday. I offered to pick her up at the airport, but she preferred to rent a car so she could stop at a motel for a shower, having not seen either a bath or bed for 48 hours.

Think about this woman's efforts next time you hear John Kerry's plans to tax the so-called wealthy in order provide credits to the poor. He is proposing nothing more subtle than the forcible taking of money from people working as hard as this woman, to be given to people with no more ambition than to sit on the porch and collect entitlements. And then he talks of the "working poor" as if the people whose capital he seeks to confiscate are not working for it.

It is a disgrace that the Democrat party finds itself rewarding slovenliness and penalizing ambition and diligence.

Going Going Gone

Out of town until Friday. Blogging to resume at that time.

A Big Improvement

Campbell Brown is substituting for Chris Matthews on Hardball. Politics aside, wouldn't it be nice to make this permanent on aesthetic grounds alone?

Hurricanes absorb CO2

This article in the Virginian-Pilot outlines the case that the Earth has built-in mechanisms to counter elements of climate change.

Preliminary research, released last week by a national team [...] shows that the Earth has its own green Band-Aids - phytoplankton that bloom and spread across oceans after hurricanes.
The tiny plants absorb carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, and carry it to the ocean floor when they die.

So it seems that hurricanes, which the Greens allege are caused by global warming, serve to reduce global warming.

Babin and his colleagues think that as cooler, nutrient-rich water rises to the ocean surface, it feeds phytoplankton growth. For two to three weeks following almost every storm studied, satellite data showed phytoplankton blooms. [...]

The study suggests a global balance of power.

It will be interesting to see if the Greens call for more study on this phenomenon. My guess is that they won't since their agenda is not anti-climate change as they would have the world believe. It is, rather anti-civilization and pro-global collectivism, as any visit to the Green Party website readily demonstrates.

A Man of the People (as long as they're rich people)

John Kerry on the middle class:

“It’s time to remember a basic truth: a stronger America begins right here at home,” Kerry said. “I believe in building up our great middle class – respecting their work, honoring their values and lifting them up in the toughest of times. [...]

“Working families all across our country are living by the oldest and greatest of American values – hard work, service, and caring for one another,” Kerry said. “And I’m running for President because I believe that our government should live by those values too.”

So how did this champion of the downtrodden spend his weekend? Working hard, caring for one another? Nah.

Thwarted by fog, a flat bicycle tire and a tricky wind, Senator John Kerry spent most of a shortened Father's Day weekend secluded in his wife's seaside retreat here in one of the nation's most exclusive summer playgrounds.

His Boeing 757 campaign plane was grounded in Washington on Friday night when the weather prevented landing at Nantucket's airstrip, which has seen only one jet of such size before. Arriving late Saturday morning, his planned bicycle ride around the island was aborted after he discovered a bubble on his back tire. And on Sunday morning, he sped out to a remote beach in his stepson's powerboat in hopes of kite-surfing, a new extreme sport, only to return home after half an hour without even zipping up his wetsuit.

"The wind died," Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, told reporters as he cruised by on the 32-foot Contender, a gentleman's fishing vessel said to cost about $150,000.

Mr. Kerry and his family did dine out Saturday night at the Pearl, where sautéed yuzu-dusted day boat sea scallops go for $36, with his fellow senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy, his wife, Vicki, and her parents. But on Sunday afternoon, he canceled a beachside brunch at one of the island's most expensive restaurants, with aides explaining that his two adult daughters preferred a quiet meal at home.

Wealthy liberal politicians drive me crazy. They live a lifestyle most can only imagine, while simultaneously calling conservatives that aspire to such wealth and would like to keep the money we earn in an effort to achieve financial independence, "greedy," or the "winner's of life's lottery," or "elitist."

Kerry is nothing more than a two-faced snob, claiming to want to help "middle class" through income redistribution. If he were true to his rhetoric, he would be calling not for income taxes (he only "earns" a little over $200,000), but for wealth confiscation and redistribution. But that would affect him and his wealthy elite friends, and would be so blatantly Communist (as opposed to progressive income taxes, which are more subtly Communist) so that will never be proposed.

Better to go after those working their way up.

hat tip: Betsy

Narcissism 101

My wife and I talked last night about Bill Clinton's "I did it because I could" confession on the Lewinsky mess. She added a perspective I hadn't fully appreciated: what a dehumanizing way to describe the whole sordid affair.

He could have demonstrated his personal weakness without ignoring the other person in the room. He could have said "She was so young and vibrant, and I was weak." He could have said, "We were alone, I hadn't noticed her, but she was so charming and persistent I couldn't ignore her."

Instead, Monica Lewinsky isn't even part of the equation. "I did it because I could. Wasn't about her. It was all about me. How must that little confession make Monica feel? She's still alive, you know, Bill.

100% Pure Self-Serving Clinton. What a sorry piece of humanity.

Say what?

Mansoor Ijaz on Fox News just blew his credibility in my eyes. He opined last night that al Queda had operatives learning to scuba dive but not come up. That can't really be done; that is like saying they are learning to skydive without parachutes.

Ijaz is usually a believable commentator, but he demonstrated his ignorance last night.

Clinton Speaks

Bill Clinton, speaking at the opening of a movie purporting to document the vast right wing conspiracy, as well as to Dan Rather, has a lot of interesting insights on his impeachment.

"I stood up to it and beat it back," Clinton says of the impeachment process. [...]

"The whole battle was a badge of honor. I don't see it as a stain, because it was illegitimate."

He "Beat it back?" He didn't "see it as a stain?" The mind reels with off-color jokes. He goes on:

Clinton sees the Lewinsky affair as "a terrible moral error" whose disclosure to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, put him "in the doghouse."

Now most married guys I know end up "in the doghouse" for things like forgetting anniversaries and birthdays. Diddling around with a girl young enough to be your daughter would land most guys in the Econolodge, not the doghouse. The Clinton marriage, however, is not like most marriages. To them the real sin here is that Clinton endangered their joint grip on power. He goes on:

"I did something for the worst possible reason. Just because I could," Clinton says of his infidelity.

Think about that. Here we have a man who occupied the most powerful office in the world admitting that he is so impulsive, he committed adultery "just because I could." What else did he do "just because he could?" Bomb Belgrade? Bomb aspirin factories? Appoint Madeleine Albright Secretary of State? Raise taxes? If this doesn't demonstrate once and for all that the Clintons can't be trusted with power, I don't know what will. Bill went on to speculate that the VRWC focused its sights on him because of - wait for it- the failure of Communism!

"When the Berlin wall fell, the perpetual right in America, which always needs an enemy, didn't have an enemy any more, so I had to serve as the next best thing," Clinton said.

I know that's what went through my mind as I watched the wall come down. "Hmmm. Now that we've finally taken care of the commies, we can focus all our ire on the next self-absorbed, impetuous, lying, adulterous, southern Democrat that becomes President."

The Last Resort

So, the 9-11 commission is now investigating whether the hijacked airplanes could have been shot from the sky.

"NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) officials have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down United 93. We are not so sure," the report said.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that shooting a plane full of innocent civilians out of the sky with a sidewinder missile is the "last resort." How, then, could anyone argue that the pilot of the airplane should not be mandated to carry a sidearm as the "next to last resort." If I were a passenger, I would prefer the opportunity to risk a couple stray 9mm bullets before I have to face off with an F-15.

@#%&*!

The Wall Street Journal Wednesday had an interesting piece on the history of swearing. I don't have an on-line subscription, so I will have to transcribe by hand.

Linguists have traced some of Americans favorite four-letter words to the 11th century. [....] By 1785, an English scholar, Capt Francis Gross, had enough material to assemble a Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. According to Gross, "fusty luggs" referred to a "sluttish woman," and a man's sexual organ was known as a "plug tail." Women's breasts were variously referred to as "apple dumplin' shop" and "Cupid's kettle drums."

The piece goes on to describe words coined as substitutes for taking the Lord's name in vain: "golly," and "gosh," arrived in the 1740s, "jiminy" in the 1830s, followed by "Jiminy Crickets," "gee wilikins," and "jeez."

A curse described as the "oedipal polysyllable" originated in the west in the 1800s. Equally impressive are the substitutes society used for words we today would not consider objectional

Acceptable expletives included "drat," "dern," or "dash!" Yet sexual terms remained out of bounds in polite society. Pantaloons were called "unexpressibles," and syphillis was referred to as "blood poison." Such words as "stallion," "sow," and "bull" were banned - "bull" sometimes replaced with "gentleman cow."

The article kind of drifts away for a couple paragraphs before finishing with these quotes from Mark Twain:

"Under certain circumstances profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."

"If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there."

With the understanding that our communications are re-presentations of our thought processes, I don't swear much. It reflects poorly on thinking. That said, I will throw a choice word in at certain times with emphasis, to express that I have thought about something and it outrages me to the point of profanity.

What Goes Around Comes Around

Three years ago, Mitzi Nichols of Virginia Beach donated a kidney. No big story there, except that she donated it to a stranger, giving Calvin Saunders a new life.

When I see the difference it made it his life,” Nichols said, “it makes me want to help everyone get off dialysis.”

On Tuesday, Mitzi collected a $500,000 prize from the Virginia Lottery. And what does the gift shop cashier plan to do with the money? Amongst other things, she is going to pay for Calvin Saunders car repairs and visit her husband overseas during his upcoming Navy deployment. The whole article can be found here

Go Jugs!

It came to my attention over the weekend that there is a "major league" fast pitch women's softball league. Of further note is the existence of the New York area team, the New York New Jersey Juggernaut.

Question: If the Yankees are often called the "Yanks" and the Phillies are often called the "Phils," does anyone suppose that these women are sometimes known as the "Jugs?"

Green Failure

The Virginian-Pilot on June 16th reported on the Cape Charles Sustainable Technology Industrial Park, a $9.1 million facility in rural Cape Charles, Virginia (The full article can be found here). Like most "green" projects, it is an abject failure. After five years, the project has generated nine jobs. Nine.

"This thing has won all sorts of awards for being the best sustainable development park in the country," Whener said. Then, noting the lack of progress, he added: "I guess it must be the only one."

Further proof that economic development cannot be achieved by adding regulations and obligations for the sake of social engineering.

Will this slow down the Green's? Nah. They've already identified the problem. It's not that there are all sorts of regulations and restrictions on how potential tenants do business. The problem, it seems, is only that the facility is in the wrong location.

Question 1: If this green concept is so powerful, why does location matter?

Question 2: If these "green developers" are so smart they can create an entirely new business model under which an array of industries are expected to flourish, why are they too dim to take into account location as an element of success in the real estate business?

Top News Article | Reuters.com

Reuters is is reporting on an effort by environmentalists to get lights on skyscrapers turned off to avoid distracting birds.

Chicago leads U.S. efforts to reduce migration casualties. About 30 major city-center buildings turn out their lights.
[...]

New York lags Chicago in its efforts to turn out lights, although its bird death toll has declined since the Sept. 11, 2001 destruction of the twin towers, said Rebekah Creshkoff, founder of Project Safe Flight bird-protection group.

Oddly enough, or perhaps not, Ms. Creshkoff in discussing the bird death toll after September 11th has no apparent opinion about the human death toll on September 11th.

Kerry Revealed (again)

From The American Spectator>:

According to a John Kerry campaign staffer, the candidate, who made much of his visit to the Reagan Library in Simi, California, on Tuesday afternoon, had to ask aides what behavior they felt would look appropriate. "It was like, 'Should I kneel? Should I greet people in line? Should I say a prayer? What?'"

Kerry ultimately was given VIP access to the area where the former President lay in repose, going beyond the rope line to stand alone with Reagan's coffin. Kerry made much of the making the sign of the cross, then visibly moving his lips in prayer.

Prior to visiting the Reagan Library, Kerry told reporters that he had visited and met with Reagan many times during his time in the White House.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence of that at the library, where records show that Kerry never privately met with Reagan, and the only time spent with the Gipper was when Kerry visited the White House as part of a Democratic Senate delegation.

What. A. Freaking. Phony.

My wife and I watched the Reagan processional last night with lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes. What a moving ceremony, and they put the whole thing together in four days. Hundreds of military personnel, ceremonial cannon, 21 jet flyover, police and emergency vehicles, security, horses, horses, and more horses.

We have finally found the one thing the Feds can do efficiently.

Striking too, were the Democrats assembled in the Rotunda. Carl Levin looked like someone had taken an all-day sucker out of is mouth. The best way to describe Daschle's demeaner is "ruefull," but one could argue that Daschle is always ruefull as an element of his deep concern. Nancy Pelosi was strangest of all, with a clown-like grin. My wife speculated that plastic surgery has prevented her face from assuming any other expression.

Neighborhood Squawk

The Virginian Pilot reports that neighbors in the Larchmont section of Norfolk are at odds over what to do with band of feral parrots.

In the more than a decade that followed, the colorful, conversational birds became popular neighbors to the street’s human residents, and built a communal nest of twigs, which grew to the size of a beanbag chair, on a roadside utility pole.
[...]

Last month the birds may have caused a fire and power outage here. At the least, their nest fueled the blaze.

And that has sparked a dispute among the street’s homeowners, some of whom insist that the rebuilt nest be removed as a fire hazard, others equally adamant that the birds be left alone.

It seem, however, that the Final Solution for the parrots will be up to the local power company rather than the residents.

Dominion halted the nest’s destruction, though it harbored little doubt that the parrots had caused the outage. “They chewed through some of the insulation,” utility spokesman Chuck Penn said Tuesday, “causing some of the wires to come into contact with one another.

“We’re going to be keeping very close tabs on what those birds are doing,” Penn said. “Our approach to it is that we’re going to do everything we possibly can to work around these parrots so as not to disturb what they’ve made their habitat.

But if we continue to have problems in providing service to our customers, we’ll have no choice but to turn to a third party to remove the nest.”

One neighbor, however, seems to have the whole thing in proper perspective:

“Oh, fiddledee dee,” Eunice “Cookie” Pittman , a neighbor who has lived in her house for 63 years , said of such worry. “Squirrels chewed my telephone line. So what are we going to do, go through the neighborhood and kill all the squirrels? While we’re at it, we can kill all the bees and wasps, because they build nests in my awnings. Oh, and children yell and scream and play all the time, and that annoys me, so let’s get rid of the children.”

Sage advice indeed, Mrs. Pittman.

MLB All-Star Voting

Evidence of how ridiculous fans voting for the baseball All-Star teams can become, this article reports that Derek Jeter has overtaken Boston's Nomar Garciaparra in voting for the starting AL shortstop in next month's All-Star game.

Jeter, who slumped for much of the first two months of the season, has 488,815 votes to 479,814 for Garciaparra in totals released Tuesday by the commissioner's office.

Garciaparra, who has been on the disabled list since the start of the season, is on a rehabilitation assignment at Triple-A Pawtucket and could be activated soon.

Got that? Jeter, who is hitting all of .233 leads Garciaparra by a few thousand votes. And Garciaparra hasn't played in a single game yet this year! They must be stuffing those ballot boxes in New York and Boston.

Ronald Wilson Reagan - I

October 27, 1964:

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

We found this car parked in front of our office one day, so a bunch of us jumped at the photo opportunity. That's Miker the Biker of Daily Sketch and Blog in the Fog fame in the center, looking decidedly less squirrel like than his profile.

'I Love It'

KATU television has a report about a wounded Guardsman from Oregan.

A U.S. soldier who lost an eye and had his jaw wired shut after being hit by shrapnel says he wants to go back to Iraq.

"I love it," 20-year-old Simon Garcia told KATU-TV in Portland, Ore. "It's a great feeling going down there and seeing the people and helping them."

KATU is an ABC affiliate, but you can bet Peter Jennings won't be picking up the report.

Yesterday I visited this project site, an apartment complex for over 1200 students on the NC State campus.

We spent the better part of a year discussing, planning, designing, and detailing the eight buildings and complex site on which they sit. Over the course of that time, we created countless drawings, sketches,and study models in order to understand how the facility will look and function. Over that time, one gets used to seeing all the various parts, details, and elements of the design on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, as little cardboard cut-out models, and ultimately, as details on contract documents. So it's always startling to arrive on site and see these things you know so well as little vignettes now existing in full scale.

That little bracket represented by a dozen lines and a couple notes on a 6" detail? It's now several hundred pounds of steel, hung like a six-foot outrigger and holding up a balcony four stories up.

That screenwall detail you threw onto a left-over corner of the sheet? It's a 20 foot square enclosure 8 feet high, with 2 foot thick walls.

That bay window you studied as a flimsy 10" cardboard model? A two story high Kynar-finished aluminum window-wall, with room for two people to curl up on beanbag chairs on the window sill.

This dichotomy happens to some degee on every project, but the contrast startles me every time.

Dennis Miller Wednesday night had a report (including actual video footage) on a new golf course that recently opened in Afghanistan. The toughest hole? The par four fourteenth, a goat-leg left. Miller said the two best local golfers are Osama bin Crenshaw and Camel Woods.

The Working Poor

Thomas Sowell cuts through the BS about the so-called "working poor:"

The front-page headline on the May 31st issue of BusinessWeek says: "One in four workers earns $18,800 a year or less, with few if any benefits. What can be done?"

Buried inside is an admission that about a third of these are part-time workers and another third are no more than 25 years old. So we are really talking about one-third of one fourth -- or fewer than 10 percent of the workers -- who are "working poor" in any full-time, long-run sense.

[...]
This is an agenda article and facts that get in the way of the welfare state agenda get little attention, if any. Meanwhile, notions that have no factual basis are asserted boldly.

A worthwhile read

American Group: World Trade Center Conditions Even Worse

"Islamic Group: Prison Conditions Inhumane" - headline, Associated Press, May 27

Shamelessly lifted directly from James Taranto's Best of the Web Today, permanent link to the right.

Debbie is a soldier in Iraq, and she has posted a gallery of pictures. She prefaces them with this heartwarming note:

Look--this gallery was put together so that my friends and family could see what I was seeing and doing in Iraq. It was never meant to turn into a political forum. I have been in Iraq for a year now and have seen so many different things and have learned an incredible amount. What we (soldiers) are doing for the people of this country is so amazing and I am so proud to have done my part. This is an experience that I will never forget and will hold in my heart forever all the smiles and hugs and laughter I have seen, felt, and heard. Please respect what I have done and what all my fellow soldiers have done for these people--keep your shitty comments to yourself. You haven't been here so you don't know how it is. Enjoy the pics and thank you to all those who have supported us in our endevours.

Hat Tip: Bill Hobbs

Kerry's Energy Plan

Justin Darr, writing over at Things You Should Know, has a terrific analysis of John Kerry's energy "plan:"

Presidential Candidate John Kerry has announced his sure fire plan to end our dependence on foreign oil, save the environment, and lower energy prices. You ready? Somebody has to invent something.
[...]

Americans are suffering with high gas prices for many reasons, however, one of the chief culprits is Liberal Environmentalism. As I stated before, the United States has not built a new oil refinery in over 30 years. Why? Because whenever an evil oil company tries to get the permits and approvals to build, Charlie Sheen shows up and chains himself to a tree. Massive oil reserves off the Gulf Coast, California, Florida, and in Alaska are not allowed to be tapped because the Greater Northwest Hairless Snot Rat might have to walk around them.
[...]

Speaking of a failure to understand concepts, John Kerry’s plan to place our energy hopes into the hands of some mystery scientist’s hypothetical invention of a new wonder fuel shares much more in common with a bad joke than an actual policy proposal. Does Senator Kerry actually believe this, or does he just think that we are gullible enough to buy it? The fact is that America’s ending it dependence on fossil fuels in favor of any new alternative fuel source is decades away no matter what the circumstances.

Read the whole thing, it is right on the money.

Dispatch From the Religion of Peace

A Christian was beaten to death in a hospital by a police officer in Lehore, Pakistan.

Samuel Masih was buried in Lahore, Pakistan, yesterday following injuries he received from a Muslim policeman who beat the 27-year-old Christian with a hammer as he lay in his hospital bed recovering from a bout of tuberculosis.

[...]

He had been held in the Lahore Central Jail for nine months when he had a severe tuberculosis attack and was transferred to a local hospital. According to reports in the Lahore Daily Times, the constable assigned to guard the prisoner's room at the hospital, Officer Faryad Ali, savagely beat Masih with a hammer used for cutting bricks after learning he had been accused of strewing garbage near the mosque's walls.

Faryad Ali, who has been jailed and charged with murder, reportedly told investigators it was his religious duty as a Muslim to kill the Christian man. According to Voice of the Martyrs, he is reported to have said, "I have offered my religious duty for killing the man. I'm spiritually satisfied and ready to face the consequences."

Until Islam manages to transform itself from religious commandments to spiritual guidelines, we will be faced with this kind of nonsense on an ongoing basis.

You Could Kill Someone with That Thing

A schoolteacher in Arkansas is in trouble for giving her students fish-shaped water pistol. Nothing remarkable about that, but the mother behind the complaint merits note.

Apparently, Karen Young feels that guns are unsafe because she accidently shot her boyfriend when the gun with which she was beating him went off! This woman beats a man with a loaded gun and then declares the gun to be unsafe. I have more fear of people like Karen Young than I do of my .38 revolver, but unfortunately there is no mechanism for instituting "common sense Karen control."