Twenty Miles of Bad Road

Rollin' My Own, Baby!

2010-04-01T08:58:00.002-07:00

Rollin' My Own, Baby!
Originally uploaded by azlibertarianaz

Dang.....

2009-12-16T15:06:00.004-07:00

(Image swiped from Culture Catch, at the inspiration of Purple Avenger over at Ace's Place.)

I was outside pulling some weeds and trimming some roses, and instead of being productive and shit, instead I should have been inside glued to the TV with a big bowl of popcorn on my lap.

"...Sen. Coburn demanded that the full text of the 767 page Sanders amendment be read by the Senate clerk...."

....followed by (socialist) Bernie Sanders withdrawing his amendment, which itself is questionable (from the Malkin citation above)....

...How Sanders was able to withdraw his amendment is unclear — under the chamber’s rules it appears that a motion to withdraw would not be in order during the reading of the bill. However, the Senate Parliamentarian — in what a GOP aide called “an incredibly bizarre decision” — ruled Sanders’ request was allowable....*

And now, the SEIU--whom Zero has leaned on heavily--has backed away from his Healthcare Reform (sic).

And Drudge is reporting under the headline "Pelosi: No Health Care Deal this Year".

Those weeds aren't going to pull themselves, but that said, I hope I have enough popcorn.

* For as much fun as I'm having watching this whole thing self-destruct, there are serious issues here.

It is clear that Coburn and the Republicans are pulling every trick imaginable to stop this thing. Healthcare Reform (sic) has been at the top of Zero's agenda since the summer, and the more Americans know about the bill, the less they like it. Coburn delivered a shot-across-the-bow with the idea of reading into the record an amendment from a socialist that was never going to pass as a means to test his on-again/off-again threat to have the entire Healthcare Reform (sic) bill read into the record.
This, of course, plays right into Zero's promise to govern with "transparency" and his campaign promise to debate healthcare on CSPAN.
The Left and the D's have long claimed that the R's are the "Party of 'No'", and this action makes that claim more valid.
The R's do risk losing some cred' by slowing the Senate's business to a crawl--even if for a good reason.
But the D's lose cred' too by taking action through the Parliamentarian to prevent the Senate and Americans from hearing exactly what is in a bill of this import.
I expect the R's to attempt to get some clarification on the Paliamentarian's ruling here, if for no other reason than to preserve their ability to pull this stunt when the entire Healthcare bill comes up. But it is important to remember: Sanders pulled his amendment to stop the reading. The D's certainly will not pull their entire bill if Coburn and the R's insist that it be read. The R's still have a bullet left here.
But it's their last bullet, and once it's fired, it cannot be called back. If they do fire it, we should all expect that regardless of which party controls Congress, an insurgent in the Senate can stop the action by simply having everything read into the record.

The lesson here is this: Zero made a fundamental error when he said "I won". He had a chance at true bi-partisanship helping him with his agenda, but with these words, and with the remainder of his actions this year, he has shown no interest in Republican concerns, and the problems he has had all this year show because of this. Sixty seats in the Senate isn't enough. Not nearly enough.

There's just so much wrong here.....

2009-12-14T19:34:00.002-07:00

Background....

As you see in the sidebar to the right here, I am an airline pilot.

And, maybe you haven't thought of it in the past, but occasionally law enforcement officers travel with their weapons. I'm not going to go into any details here, but there is a procedure for them to do this.

Again, you probably haven't even considered any of this, but when a law enforcement officer travels on my plane, the airline makes sure that I am notified of this. I hope this makes sense (and conversely, I hope that it wouldn't make sense if they didn't.).

Anyhoo, one of the things that sort of bothers me is the number of .gov employees who are armed. Case in point: I once had a guy from the Inspector General's office of the Department of Agriculture. This bothered me on two levels: An IG generally works with internal problems. Why would an IG employee need to be armed? And secondly, what is the Dept. of Ag. going to do with a gun anyway? Are there felony meat-packers out there?

Another case that bothered me was an EPA official. Do they envision a scenario where he'll need to shoot a polluter?

Enough of that, though.....

Courtesy of Doug Ross at Director Blue, I see that the EPA Criminal Investigation Division is in need of 40 new Glock 19s.

NAICS code 332994 – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigations Division intends to award a sole source firm-fixed-price Purchase Order to Glock, Inc. under the authority of FAR Part 13, Simplified Acquisition Procedures for 40 Model G-19, 9mm frame handguns with finger grove and rail frames, Tijico night sights, extended magazine catches and 3.5lb/NY1 Trigger magazines. The Glock model G-19 is the Agency standard firearm and is the only pistol that fits our training, certified repair technician contracts, and equipment capabilities without a major change to Agency operations. Our agents are trained with the Glock pistol, and changing to another manufacturer would require transition training for each agent that could range from 1 to 3 days depending on the manufacturer. Additionally, our Agents are outfitted with holsters and magazine clips that are fitted to the Glock model firearm. Furthermore, EPA-CID has a large amount of spare parts for the Glock weapons and to retool these parts would require substantial expenditure for the Government.

I hope that the rest of the EPA (especially their armed officers) are better at their jobs than the contracting officer who requested this order. "Tijico" night sights do not exist. Trijicon night sights, on the other hand, do. Also, I'm wondering if Ms. Lynch knows what a "3.5lb/NY1 Trigger magazine" is. I know what a 3.5lb trigger is. And I know what a NY1 trigger is too. But I don't know what a "3.5lb/NY1 Trigger magazine" is, and I suspect that Ms. Lynch doesn't either. Finally, there are magazines and there are clips. There is a difference, and this contract proposal doesn't seem to know that there is.

So, anyway.....

2009-12-13T15:35:00.004-07:00

I'm not much of a gardener. We generally start out with the best of intentions each spring and plant a full garden. We've got a tree adjacent to our garden which puts too much shade over it, so half the garden generally doesn't grow well. And then the summer starts, and its hot, and it takes effort to keep things alive, and we lose interest. I really need to get my rototiller into the garden soon.

However, one of the biggest reasons that I don't (besides this being low on my list of priorities) is that despite the time of year and the fact that we largely ignore this section of the yard, believe it or not, we still have live plants in the garden.

More surprising is that these plants are still producing!!

There are three bell pepper plants which are at least three years old, and the peppers above came out of the garden today.

Likewise, the Sweet 100's tomato plant planted in the spring is still thriving and producing tomatoes.

Gee. What could possibly go wrong....

2009-12-07T06:08:00.003-07:00

Yahoo Finance....
Senator Dodd to press financial reform ahead: aides

Yes....this Senator Dodd.

Two plus Two....

2009-12-05T10:19:00.002-07:00

A while back, I posted a link to the chart seen here. Its a scary chart, but the thing I just noticed is that it is from almost two years ago...January of 2008.

And today, I was referenced to this chart....

...which I saw via the blog, Calculated Risk. As an Arizona resident, I don't take great pride at having 3% of the nation's Option ARM risk, but man....anyone in California is in for another big hit.

As they say, Read The Whole Thing, and read the links. This ain't over. Not by a long shot.

Sarah Para Bellum...

2009-12-03T09:35:00.004-07:00

[BTW. For some reason, this image is a bit fuzzy here. Click it for a better view.]

I am mostly a Sarah Palin fan. She was absolutely the salvation of McCain's disastrous campaign last year. The Left hates her with a passion that I cannot remember. Tina Fey's rendition of Palin was cutting, and David Letterman is just a jerk (and he's earned my turning away from him).

That said, I don't quite know how to take Palin. She lives her convictions, but I'm often not quite sure what those convictions are. Last year, she was invited/scheduled to be at the NRA convention here in Phoenix, but then decided not to appear. It appears that her treatment by the media (Couric and Gibson, but others too) has made her very controlling of how she meets them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but in some way makes her a politician saying nothing just like all the rest of them.

Anyway, I want to like her, and think that at this point, if anyone can get the Tea Party movement to coalesce in one direction, it will be Palin, if she's willing.

h/t: A blog new to me that is a bit snarkier than I try to be, but being snarky is sometimes fun too. Pierre Legrand's Pink Flamingo Bar.

Another blog post.....

2009-12-02T08:01:00.003-07:00

I've been less-than-verbose here lately, as the Healthcare Reform (sic) debate has quieted down, and America has been focused on the People Magazine story of how a bankrupt polo player and his sorta-kinda cheerleader wife could crash the party at Captain Utopia's State Dinner.

That said, I watched Zero's speech last night at West Point regarding his long-delayed decision on what to do in Afghanistan.

One thing struck me during the speech--the Cadets. Maybe I'm just seeing things through my own prism, but the shots of the audience showed me blank, uninterested faces. I'm certain that the Cadet Corps was ordered to fill the auditorium, and that doesn't surprise me in the least. But during the speech, they appeared to be less-than-enthusiastic about both being there and the message they were hearing. (One caveat: After the speech, Zero did the rope-line thingi, and there were a handful of Cadets who were there shaking his hand, and taking his picture.)

I do like Captain Ed's take on things this morning. He read the transcript, so he wouldn't have the observation that I did, but generally, I have to agree, and especially with this point...

...In defining our mission’s expiration date as 18 months, Obama has undermined whatever good the counterinsurgency strategy will do. For COIN to work, forces have to “flood the zone,” but they also have to build trust with locals and encourage better intel. The only way to do that is to impress on locals the notion that we’re sticking around....

I just love the internet. There are a lot of really, really talented people out there who are not only talented in their fields, but can write about their fields, and we can read their thoughts without the filters of the (largely stupid) media. One blog I check in on regularly is The Captain's Journal. Maybe it was there, or perhaps somewhere else (I also check in with Michael Yon, The Long War Journal, and others) that I saw a point that the Afghans look at our forces there and wonder: Americans build tents. They're not here to stay.

But it was at The Captain's Journal that I saw this point:

“You [Westerners] have the watches, but we Afghans have the time,” Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand province, has been quoted as saying at a recent gathering.

Even as the Americans are proud of the progress made here, there is a sense that all could be lost quickly if the U.S. military leaves prematurely.

“I think we’re succeeding in Nawa, but like the elders say, if we leave, it will all be wasted,” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Reggie Fox, a member of an 82nd Airborne platoon assigned to mentor Afghan security forces. “The insurgents aren’t dumb. They want to outlast the American population.”

And Zero has just allowed the insurgents to set their watches. As Captain Ed said,

Having an 18-month timetable may or may not be a mistake, but announcing one is a terrible blunder in wartime.

and

That’s no way to fight a war.

I agree entirely.

Bumpersticker...

2009-12-01T18:02:00.005-07:00

As I have said a while back, I have been reading Atlas Shrugged. I'm enjoying the book, although I'm finding it a difficult read and it is taking me longer than usual to finish it. I am into the final 100 pages and am right at the point where Rand has John Galt giving a 47 page monologue.

Anyway, the prescience that Rand has been demonstrating with Atlas Shrugged is simply amazing. A book published 52 years ago is full of elements that are relevant today.

And today, I saw this bumpersticker on a car as I was on my way to the Post Office.

Yikes!!

2009-12-01T14:05:00.004-07:00

It looks as though the TSA is gonna have to find a way to see this thing on their x-rays.

H/T: Mxpatriot51 at AR15.com, who has other pictures that you ought to check out, seen via SayUncle.

The last thing you see....

2009-11-24T15:31:00.002-07:00

...if you're a field mouse.

h/t: The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys, companion to one of my old favorites, Sippican Cottage.

Gawd....

2009-11-18T18:19:00.003-07:00

I'm lovin' me my Glenn Beck. Yeah...sometimes he's a little over-the-top, and he certainly has got a Howard Beale vibe going on, but the guy is making scary sense.

So, yeah...I admit it...there's a lot of video here to watch....but do watch it. We're headed into totally uncharted waters.

I owe my h/t to Karl Denninger at market-ticker.org for these three videos. I read him all the time because he scares me worse than Stephen King.

Now let me add my amateur-economist's analysis to a point Beck touches on at 8:15 or so of the last video.

With words to this effect, Beck asks if the other countries in the world aren't going to be in the same sinking boat that we find ourselves in. I think he's exactly right, and underestimates this point. Take a look at yet another video.....

Yes...its al Jazerra....and there is a point to be made there too. But discounting that for the moment, this story illustrates the problem that China faces too.

For the last 30 years, China has been trying to get their peasant Third-World country into the First-World. To do this, they have kept their currency artificially devalued, so as to facilitate the export of the products that they make. What they're most concerned with is jobs...not the products of those jobs. They're quite content to spend money on cities that no one will live in because they need to keep the construction jobs (read: "economic activity") going.

We're not seeing this reported on any of the American (or Western) media because we're beholden to the debt that China holds. al Jazerra, in essence, the media organ of the Arab OPEC states, has a different set of priorities. They can report the Chinese problems in a candor that Western media cannot. However, the OPEC states are not without their own problems. Absent their oil, they have almost no industry. Their people are not far removed from living in the desert, and many are illiterate. They have few skills, and have to import white-collar and blue-collar labor to give them what they now have. They can operate what are in effect, massive welfare states because they are able to poke holes into the ground and pump out the wealth that supports it.

And here's where my fears are headed.....

All wars are economic.

We're broke.

China can't keep inflating their "production bubble".

And since the world runs on oil, the OPEC states will grind to a halt. (Not to mention the crazy-mad religious motivations that they have.).

These three groups all want to keep things going when we can't keep things going. And something's gotta give. Who'll give first?

What a great idea!!

2009-11-17T20:03:00.003-07:00

Since the Democrats in Congress are all about requiring us to buy something we may not want to buy, at a price that we may not agree with, what's to prevent them from going whole hog with that approach?

So [h]ere it is: a modest proposal even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can agree on. If we're willing to require people to buy health insurance, why not require them to buy guns?

h/t Hotair headlines.

Alright: Unlike the last time I did this....

2009-11-17T19:44:00.002-07:00

....I won't completely rip off Ace, but with regard to Zero's penchant for bowing down to foreign leaders, here he makes a very good point.

"....Greg Gutfeld (was up late last night) noted the bowing controversy and called it, using Andy Levy's phrase, a "blog issue." By which he meant a topic that gets predictable heat on blogs, but when you try to discuss it in the "real world," the reaction is "ehhh."

That may be so. To be honest, I had a bit of trouble drumming up a lot of passion about this. My real beef here isn't that what Obama is doing is wrong.

My actual beef is that the crap Obama is doing is irrelevant. No one gives a flying fuck if you bow to them, or you say nice things about "working together to reach our collective goals," or this ridiculous conceit that just because of Obama's "personal presence" -- a historic presidency, drenched in drama, topped with butter-baked crumbs of hope -- is going to make a lick of difference. Nations pursue their own policy goals -- period. You change the goals a nation might pursue by offering carrots and sticks, by buying them off or making it so costly to pursue a particular goal they refrain from doing so.

"Diplomacy" is merely a polite manner of announcing these carrots and sticks.

So my point, then, is that what Obama is doing is perfectly trivial, and to get all outraged about it actually invests his empty and feckless symbolism with a power it doesn't have. Obama's bowing to a Saudi king does nothing to improve our relations with the Islamic world. And neither, frankly, does Cheney shaking his hand as an equal. Neither matters -- and the problem here is that Obama is convinced these things not only matter, but are well-nigh determinative.

This malignant narcissist thinks that nations will change their fundamental national goals based simply on the (purported) fact that Obama is charming, nice, and awesome.

It's not so much that he's doing the wrong things -- he is; but these things are utterly trivial. It's that he's investing far too much time thinking about trivialities, convincing himself that the trivial trumps the substantial, that he invests no time or effort at all in substantive manners. Look at Iran. Rather than facing the grim reality he needs to confront Iran and make it too costly for Iran to continue building nukes, he convinces himself that if only he can be charming and nonthreatening enough he will neatly avoid having to face that reality.

He is indulging in fantasy at the expense of reality, and therefore at the expense of US national interests.

Now, all that said, all that acknowledgement that maybe this is a "blog issue," as Greg Gutfeld said, let me note again something that makes it not just a "blog issue" at all: Obama lied. Gibbs lied. White House sources lie. They all denied down the line that they were offering a sycophantic servility -- bowing like an inferior -- to royalty, and they now are forced to admit it was a lie all along.

They were deliberately bowing to royalty, and just lying about it to the American public. Because, I guess, sometimes a lie is "diplomatic."

So it seems while foreign royalty gets deep bows, the American public gets lies and fast-talk about it.

Actually... also taking it out of the realm of "blog issue" is that any symbolic act stands for something concrete and real. And Obama isn't just showing the symbolism of deference, weakness, and appeasement; he's actually practicing deference, weakness, and appeasement. His symbolic gesture then is simply confirmation of objective reality."

Hey....

2009-11-17T06:48:00.002-07:00

Anybody else remember back a year and a half ago when Zero's low-level staffers were being thrown under the bus? Or even when some not-so-low-level staffers were thrown under that same bus (but later, miraculously, recovered from her injuries)?

Point being...Zero has habit of blaming others for things he ought to be standing up for.

Like.....his oft-repeated claim of the benefit we're deriving from his Stimulus-inspired "saved or created jobs".

And now this charade is coming apart too. The numbers he is reporting are outrageously inaccurate. So inaccurate, in fact, as to be claimed from Congressional districts that themselves do not exist. So, who is to blame for the reporting of this inaccurate data? Yeah...you guessed it...

"...Late Monday, officials with the Recovery Board created to track the stimulus spending, said the mistakes in crediting nonexistent congressional districts were caused by human error.

"We report what the recipients submit to us," said Ed Pound, Communications Director for the Board.
Pound told ABC News the board receives declarations from the recipients - state governments, federal agencies and universities - of stimulus money about what program is being funded.
"Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes," Pound said...."
[emphases, mine]

Yes. You, the dumb public, are to be blamed for the bad data being reported by Zero's administration.

I engaged in a little activism tonight.....

2009-11-16T19:35:00.002-07:00

So, anyway....today was yet another "medical day".

Background: I have been battling what I've been lead to believe was a bad salivary gland since late July. It usually begins with what I've been told is a cracked tooth on my lower left side. The pain develops to the point that it is indeterminate where I can't tell if it is on my upper jaw or lower, and then the pain radiates down my tongue. Finally, it settles into the glands.

My initial question regarding this was with my dentist, who pronounced it "pulpitis" or something. When it didn't go away, I went the medical route where the salivary gland thingi was both self- and medically-diagnosed...and they have had me taking steroids to the point that they don't want to give me any more, and have recommended that I have this gland removed.

So, anyway, today I finally was able to get into the ENT doctor...one very highly recommended. WifeofAzlib went with me, so as is my habit when I'm out with my family, I strapped on my CCW. The doctor didn't see the gland problem that I'd been lead to believe I had, and asked that I get a panoramic dental x-ray.

Back to the dentist.....

And guess what? I finally have a diagnosis: An abscessed tooth which will require a root canal on Wednesday. Yeah--me! [Seriously, I am very glad to have a diagnosis, which will hopefully lead to having this thing cleared up.]

In celebration (and because the both of us had wasted most of the day on these medical matters), we decided to go to our local Serrano's Mexican restaurant.

And guess what I found? An A.R.S. §4-229(C) sign prohibiting my carrying my concealed weapon inside their restaurant. One of our favorite restaurants, close to the house, reasonably priced....a family favorite.

Not wanting to ruin the night, I retreated back to the vehicle and put my gun away, but I told my wife that, while I would eat there tonight, I would not be returning.

Moreover, after remembering this post of Kevin's, I was determined to not just disappear from this restaurant's clientele. As we were leaving, I made a point of asking for the manager, and I very politely told him that I'd been in his restaurant at least once a month for the last 19 years, and that I wouldn't be back as long as that sign was in his window. He was polite too, and mentioned that he'd received a number of comment cards regarding their sign. We both made our points.

The family doesn't necessarily agree with me, but I'm not going back.

I don't often do this...

2009-11-13T12:26:00.003-07:00

....(except for the photos which I ~~snatch at will~~ use freely...and which, if I knew how to host them myself, I would do so willingly), but this very good article from Ace warrants a full viewing. View it here, but his comments are worth your time too, so make some time to view it over at his house.

Ace: "Pelosi: It's Very Fair That We Jail You If You Don't Buy Health Insurance"
Seen on Hot Air, Infidels are Cool has this exchange:

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?
Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

The left continues pounding the table, insisting that right-wingers are "paranoid" and "extremist" to call Obama a socialist, or to use totalitarian imagery in posters to protest his agenda. Why, it's just so not true! they bleat. You'd have to be a maniac like Sarah Palin to make these delusional claims! Why, it's like bad science-fiction!

Really?

Socialism never attends a party without an escort of coercive state behavior. It is a historic fact -- indeed, an economic fact -- that as the state seeks to regulate and control more and more economic activity, they must, of course, control more and more human activity.

Economic activity is human activity, after all. Economics is not somehow divorced from humanity. Economic choices are not made of their own volition, passive-voice, without an actor. People make economic choices -- and socialism demands an ever-increasing control over those choices, and therefore the people who make those choices. (Or, more accurately: formerly made those choices.)

Furthermore, apart from the basic definitional aspect of socialism that requires a loss of freedom in exchange, supposedly, for economic security: Socialism has almost never worked as intended, but rather creates new problems and new poverties and new ways to exploit the system (black markets, for one); socialism therefore always requires even additional laws against once-unobjectionable and perfectly-legal behavior. In other words, not only does socialism require a small buy-in, in the form of loss of freedom, but it is always accompanied by unplanned-for (?) additional losses of freedom to "correct" for all the systematic irrationalities and distortions it creates.

And then it gets even worse after that, because it always fails, whenever it's been attempted, and the newly-empowered state will fight to survive, as any organism does, and any organism is willing to do an awful lot of violence when its very existence is threatened.

Note that the third part of that is the scariest step in the socialist takeover of the human condition, but even if that is avoided, the first and second stages are plenty objectionable in their own right. Although socialism has had a pronounced tendency to lead to full fascism and totalitarian control over the increasingly miserable citizenry it supposedly "serves," and that is the point of all those Nazi posters, it cannot be emphasized firmly enough that even if Stage Three of socialism is avoided, Stages One and Two are anti-freedom and frankly anti-human as well.

Just less so.

On a personal level, I go 'round and 'round with myself as to whether Nazi imagery is "civil" or helpful, politically: On one side I know for a fact that socialism tends in this direction. Every. Single. Time. Even in socialist states where fascism is avoided -- Britain, say -- it is nevertheless the case that the citizenry there exists under a much-diminished concept of "freedom" than your average American would find tolerable, or even imaginable.

On the other hand, I doubt the effectiveness of such imagery, for the simple fact that few can imagine such things, they seem too speculative and too impossible to contemplate, and so I usually make the case that rather than talk up the farther-off (yet still quite possible, and not quite so far off as some would like to imagine) possibility of Stage Three socialism, we should talk up instead the quite-objectionable-enough and much more immediate and imaginable defects of Stages One and Two.

Back to this leftist insistence that we're all paranoid to even think this way, to even define "freedom" in an antique, right-wing fashion, meaning "stuff you are permitted to do or not do without penalty and coercion from the state:" It is especially risible to me, in gallows-humor way, that the left continues to call us lunatics for fretting about increasing state control and increasing state coercion and increasing state outlawing of previously-legal behavior and freedoms even as, in their very first bill out of the socialist box, they propose jailing Americans for engaging in unobjectionable behavior which no one ever before dreamt of being a crime.

Think about this.

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn't, after all) to enforce its notions of the "economic good."

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or in terms of "what comes next?"

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they've realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we're paranoid. We're lunatics. We're "extreme."

Used to be in this county when we proposed making an entire category of human behavior a crime, that was cause for debate. Civil libertarians on the left would join those on the right in wondering what has so changed in the past several years to require an entire new category of criminality, an entire sphere of human activity now removed from the column of "freedom" and moved to the column of "forbiddance."

But not this time. Fascism, as they say, tends to come with a smiling face, and there's hardly a face more surgically stretched into smiles than Nancy Pelosi's, quite chipper and blithe as she proposes that she will begin filling America's prisons with a whole new category of criminal, the economic saboteur.

And there is no argument about it, and no debate. We are creating an entirely new type of "crime" that could end up imprisoning millions (or -- very nearly as bad -- compelling behavior and restricting freedom due to threat of incarceration) and the entire left and the entire media (but I repeat myself) blows it off as no big deal.

It's just What Must Be Done. Omlette, eggs, some breaking required.

But I'm a paranoid and extremist to take notice of the fact that what was once my freedom in 2009 shall become a cause for imprisonment in 2010.

I have a very good friend who is a Federal Marshal. He spends his days running around catching some of the very baddest of the bad guys who are out there. And one of my deepest fears, both for him and for me, is that one day he's going to be asked to grab up one of these future healthcare scofflaws, and that one day I might be one of them.

What will each of us do on that day? I don't really know the answer, and that scares me too.

OK, you morons....

2009-11-13T06:17:00.002-07:00

Nobody--and I mean nobody--reads this crappy product I call "my blog".

But if you've clicked through from that comment I left over at Ace's place, and want to look around the place a bit, here is a somewhat larger comment I wrote back when UsAirways 1549 was fresh news.

An Update....

2009-11-12T12:02:00.003-07:00

WSJ: Pfizer and Kelo's Ghost Town

While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other "desirable" elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation.

The taking of the Kelo property was bad enough: The Supreme Court decision on the taking was horrible. And now we see the justification for the taking--the increased tax benefits to the community--has turned to dust.

We should always guard against giving up any of our freedoms--no matter how small, or how slight.

h/t: SayUncle

So.....

2009-11-12T11:57:00.003-07:00

I'm starting to wonder: Would a smart investor be investing in one of those private prison companies?

h/t: Captain Ed over at HotAir.

Another in a series of....

2009-11-11T14:32:00.003-07:00

....Really, really dumb ideas.

Fry's, Safeway gird for strike

I saw this through Kevin at The Smallest Minority, but WifeofAzlib mentioned it last night too.

First of all, being a grocery store clerk isn't exactly skilled labor. As an airline pilot, I know (believe?) that if I ever were to go out on strike, that my company would have some difficulty in replacing me. But a grocery store clerk just runs your items across the scanner. Many grocery stores have installed those self-check-out lanes where you do this yourself. The decision to go out on strike has to be made with an assessment of how easy it is for the company to replace the striking workers.

And that brings me to this point: Unemployment.

None of the charts here are happy charts, but if you're going out on strike in Arizona, you might want to keep these two in mind....

If you're thinking of going out on strike, you had better be thinking of the other Arizona folks who are out of work. You're saying that you're willing to walk off your job for a better whatever-it-is-you're-striking-about, but you ought to remember the folks who are out there who are perhaps getting a little hungry.

And walking off your job now, means you're out of work too. While the grocery-store unions are certainly figuring that the holidays are the right time to have their workers go on strike, the union-members ought to consider that they're about to be unemployed over the holidays too.

A Case For Government Healthcare?--There Is None

2009-11-10T05:41:00.005-07:00

A co-worker wrote this, and I have to say I agree with pretty much all of it. The only changes I made were to remove his name (given that I'm anonymous here, I thought I'd make him anonymous too), and some minor formatting to make things look right here on the blog.

Ask any politician to cite government’s constitutional authority to enact national healthcare. They can’t. It doesn’t exist. The federal government can only do what it is enumerated to do. The fact is there are no provisions in the constitution authorizing the state to interject itself into the healthcare decision-making processes of the American citizenry. None!

Then what business does the government have dictating the terms of private healthcare decisions for our selves and for our families? The government has no business doing this. But Democrats, the Obama administration, and the liberal left are poised to enact legislation that will ultimately enable the government to control every aspect of our lives, and to punish those who do not live in accordance with government’s benevolent standards.

But what is the harm in the government ensuring equal access to healthcare for everyone? Isn’t healthcare good? Healthcare is good. But every program the government enacts results in the same: regardless of good intentions the consequences, intended or unintended, are always: higher cost, reduced quality, loss of personal freedom, and destruction of the private sector.

But a national healthcare option is necessary to eliminate the great disparities in quality and cost of care. And only government programs can ensure equality of access. Wrong! Proponents call their proposals reform, compassion for the disenfranchised, and equality. But in actuality, state healthcare programs, like all government social programs, affect none of those ideals, but always result in the opposite: poor quality; high cost; lack of access; inequality; and equal distribution of misery.

The true aim of state run healthcare goes far beyond seeking equality of access. It would allow the ultimate in government control of its citizenry. It would allow the government to assert control over every aspect of our daily private lives – our diets; our exercise habits; our choice of transportation; our lifestyle, our doctor, our medical treatments… everything. And any behavior determined to be unhealthy or unseemly to the state, the state would have the power to punish or tax - in the interest of healthcare, of course. But far more devious, the government would have the power to employ healthcare as a tool for social engineering. Healthcare would be rewarded to those who are in compliance with government agendas and are in the political favor of the state, but denied to those who are not.

A national healthcare program would only make problems worse. As do other government agencies, healthcare commissions would conduct means testing, ration care, and employ “social justice” by race, gender, income, or creed authorizing or denying medical care on the basis of “fairness and equality”. Treatment for the elderly, disabled, or those who could not provide an adequate “return for the government’s investment” would be denied. If an unborn child is determined to be disabled (or otherwise) the panel would likely fund or even require an abortion, or deny prenatal and pediatric care to that child. Governmental health commissions would employ means testing and affirmative action to determine if individuals are worth the government’s “investment”. If not, treatments will be withheld or denied completely. In other words, government-appointed wogs (or death panels) would implement political policy in making life and death decisions for every American forced into a state-run healthcare program.

The political left has pushed for national healthcare for over sixty years. After all, why should the wealthy have better healthcare than those less fortunate, the less fortunate being the young, the old, minorities, etc… The arguments in favor of President Obama and the Democrat’s current healthcare campaign are emotional and can be difficult to refute without accusations of heartlessness. But conservative sentiments among the American electorate have awakened to the dangers of the government healthcare agenda, which they find to be in direct contrast to their natural desire for liberty.

Throughout the summer of 2009 American citizens across the country stood up to the charges of hatred and selfishness and stunned Democrat congressmen and senators via phone, mail, and email campaigns, and at town hall meetings affectively expressing suspicions of their government and displeasure with current healthcare proposals. They do not want higher taxes, lack of choice, social engineering, or government commissions ruining the quality of healthcare they currently enjoy.

Conservatives are clearly winning this debate, and Democrats have responded by evoking class envy and hatred, and charges of greed, anti-Obama racism, and right-wing Nazism – all charges recently leveled by Democrat leadership toward Obamacare opponents. Initially stunned by the anti-national healthcare sentiments expressed at their town hall meetings, Democrat supporters have countered by loading town hall meetings with their own vocal supporters in an effort to mitigate, and sometimes intimidate the affects of the conservative grass-roots message.

The liberal left is losing the debate on national healthcare. Next, they will back away from an all-encompassing healthcare agenda to one of compromise and repackaging – no doubt they will concede for now and settle for something less with the intention of seeking incremental expansion of state control in the future.

The problem in America isn’t the quality of healthcare. The United States has far and away the finest quality of healthcare available in the world, bar none. Accessibility is not the problem. The elderly, the young, the disenfranchised, and even illegal aliens can walk into any emergency room and receive medical attention twenty-four hours a day. Even Medicare and Medicaid are available.

The problem is not the lack of government involvement in healthcare. The problem is too much government involvement in healthcare, which over-regulates the industry and dramatically decreases accessibility and increases costs.

That isn’t to say there isn’t room for reform. Costs could be reduced significantly by implementing true reform. There are many free market ideas employed already that have shown positive results. Reform could begin with the following: 1.) Mitigate the cost of malpractice with tort reform. To put it another way, reign in ambulance-chasing lawyers. Not an easy thing to do, since the Democrats are in the pocket of the American Bar Association; 2.) Health savings accounts similar to an IRA – your money, your savings, you keep it to spend as you see fit for you and your family healthcare needs; And 3.) Point-of-service payment for healthcare - in essence, medical services are paid for by the patient – not by the cumbersome health insurance companies, and definitely not paid for by the government. Such a system could be likened to going to a restaurant and reviewing a menu before ordering a meal. One can shop for a quality product at a reasonable rate. And healthcare insurance would then be used as intended – to mitigate the risk of a major expense, not to cover everyday healthcare costs. With the patient intimately familiar with costs up front medical providers would naturally try to provide the best value at competitive rates.

These are only a few of the possible solutions to reduce healthcare costs. Many other valid solutions are being implemented throughout the country and are lowering the cost of health care without resorting to additional government intrusion. Reform solutions such as these are the result of basic American capitalism, which functions and succeeds through the competitive free-market process.

The healthcare debate is truly life-or-death. There can be no government healthcare, no low-cost government option plan, and no compromise plan. No foothold. Blue Dog Democrats can not be counted on to hold the line. They only claim to be worried about cost, not liberty or principle. They ultimately seek compromise – a lower cost version of the Obama plan, which too will bring about government intrusion and incrementalism. Continue telling politicians No! No! No! No!

The healthcare industry does need reform, true reform, but not this government “reform” plan. Government needs to act in the interest of free market solutions, not further restricting them. The solution will not be found in the Obama plan, what is certainly a blatant government takeover of our most intimate decisions – the personal healthcare decisions of our loved ones and of our selves.

No matter where government run healthcare has been implemented it has proven to be a deadly heartless failure – increased costs, lower quality, less accessibility. Healthcare costs are high. But the solution does not lie in more government. It lies in less government, greater competition in the marketplace, and competitive solutions brought about by the marketplace of ideas.

The lesson to remember is simple. In any debate - every time government ventures into the private sector the result is always the same: higher costs; reduced quality; loss of personal freedom; and destruction of the personal sector.

An ever expanding government minimizes the individual. This is true for public education, the postal service, AmTrack, General Motors, Cash for Clunkers, you name it. It is true for healthcare. And once the state wedges an opening into the healthcare door (even a compromise government option plan) we are on the road to further government intrusion and further loss of liberty. There is no case for national healthcare – none.

Download this and other articles available for distribution on the subject of INDIVIDUALISM Versus the State at ourobamadrama.com

Also, visit reason.com, and heritage.org for other free-market solutions to national concerns.

A Case for Government Healthcare? – There Is None

Oh, you just know.....

2009-11-07T16:42:00.005-07:00

....That this will not end well.

George W. Bush Secretly Visits Fort Hood Victims

A decent President, and for that matter, a decent man would have made mention of the event at Ft. Hood before giving a "shout-out" to cousin Pookie, or Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, a "Congressional Medal-of-Honor winner" (who, in fact, does not have a MOH, but rather was awarded a Congressional Medal of Freedom), not to mention knowing that the Congressional Medal of Honor is not "won", but rather "awarded".

But Zero has not, now a year after he was elected, found his feet as our Commander-in-Chief, but still acts as our Community-Organizer-in-Chief. A man who was a real C-in-C would have canceled his golf game this weekend, and asked his allies in the Congress to postpone their debate and vote on his key domestic agenda item until next week while he went to Ft. Hood to be the Commander-in-Chief that he was elected to be. As it is, Bush gave Zero ample opportunity to do this, and when he had not, made the proper effort to attend to the troops.

I have to believe that somewhere at Camp David,
Michelle is flinging the crockery.

You know what?

2009-11-06T11:47:00.003-07:00

Pretty soon, we're gonna need a bigger chart.

h/t: As always, the fellas at Innocent Bystanders.

Every now and then.....

2009-11-05T16:33:00.005-07:00

....I get reminded that a place one would consider to be one of the safest places on the planet can, in a moment, turn quite dangerous.

I don't carry my CCW often, and when I do, WifeofAzlib often thinks I'm crazy for doing so. But this event can happen any time in any grocery store, mall or movie theater in America (and frankly, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened more frequently). WifeofAzlib, SonofAzlib, and Dau#1ofAzlib are all old enough to CCW, yet each for their own reasons have chosen to not get their permits. I'm hoping that they each reconsider. SonofAzlib has a nice CCW weapon, a Walther PPS, but he rarely shoots it. Dau#1- and WifeofAzlib each have .380 handguns, but they get to the range even less frequently, and frankly the .380 is a sub-standard caliber anyway. They don't know this yet, but they may be getting something in a 9mm sometime before Christmas.

And I will be carrying my Glock23c more frequently.

BTW, the media are now wondering how a shooter with two handguns could get off so many shots. Its not hard at all. A Glock17 has a standard magazine capacity of 17 rounds, and third-party magazines are available up to 33 rounds. Do this with two handguns and you're at 68 rounds without having to reload....more than enough to kill 11 and injure 31.

Nope......

2009-11-03T13:33:00.003-07:00

You could not possibly make this stuff up.

This is Susan Rice dressed as Goofy.

That would be United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice dressed as Goofy.

And they wonder why they're not getting any respect around the world.

h/t Michelle Obama's Mirror's Blog.

Obama-Weather.....

2009-11-03T09:09:00.002-07:00

Via Gerard, I see that this site offers an Obama which will tell us what to wear for the week.

And for the record, I do have cargo shorts (and pants) that I wear when the occasion suits. I even have casual sandals, although mine are a Cabelas knock-off of Teva's, and there was a day when I wore Birkenstocks. But I have never worn a t-shirt with an Obama image (or for that matter, a t-shirt with an image of any politician).

This, along with another site I found via Gerard, The Art of Obama, are either very clever commentaries on the adulation of Zero, or they are unwitting part and parcel of the same.

Clunker GDP Data.....

2009-10-29T21:38:00.003-07:00

This chart ought to tell you something......

The just-announced 3.5% increase in 3Q GDP is fake. We are not out of the recession. This is not over. In fact, its going to get worse. That spike on the chart above is going to correct lower....much lower.

And when it does, they're going to say that it was "surprising".

They're lying to us. Politicians. Media. All of them.

This is too good.....

2009-10-29T12:41:00.004-07:00

....to not post.

h/t: Mætenloch over at Ace's Place.

Is it premature to ask if....

2009-10-23T17:20:00.005-07:00

....the alternate headline here would be "Dodd Thrown Under A Bus"?

"Oversight panel to subpoena Countrywide info"

"...Oversight Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) issued a statement saying: "It is my goal to work through this matter in a bipartisan fashion and conduct a complete review of the role of mortgage companies in the current financial crisis. As part of this, we need to clarify unanswered questions about Countrywide Financial's VIP program, so I am issuing a subpoena to gather information about how that program worked and whether it provided special benefits to government officials. I am prepared to issue additional subpoenas if other companies fail to respond to our document requests."
Notably, Towns added that "the subpoena to Countrywide covers records that could show special treatment for Members of Congress," and that if such information is produced, the Oversight panel will forward it to the House ethics committee for consideration...." [my emphasis]

And, oh-by-the-way, did you notice that this announcement came on a Friday afternoon? Not that the R's aren't equally good at doing this sort of thing, but Friday afternoon is becoming an important time of the week to be paying attention to what they don't want you paying attention to.

h/t: Riehl World View.

Hoookay.....

2009-10-23T16:17:00.004-07:00

Just when you think you've seen just about the dumbest thing ever, along comes someone else plumbing a new depth.

How to Build a Bluetooth Handgun Handset for your iPhone.

I guess the question of "Why" doesn't occur here.

Darwin awaits, fool.

h/t: hell in a handbasket

Saw this a week ago....

2009-10-23T15:23:00.004-07:00

...And if I had been 'bloggin' then, I'd have remembered where the h/t ought to go (Gerard, perhaps?). As it is, I stumbled on it again over at the videos at Strategy Page. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

A little late at....

2009-10-23T10:12:00.003-07:00

....Getting to this, but Chris Muir nailed things down pretty securely with this one....

[Click image for a better view.]

Geez, Geez, Geez.....

2009-10-15T06:23:00.002-07:00

There are some very smart people out there on the intertubes who can speak of horrors coming our way beyond imagination.

The Virginian: Protection against hyper-inflation. Do read the whole thing, but here are a few quotes....

"...In the middle of 1914, just before the war, a one pound loaf of bread cost 13 cents. Two years later it was 19 cents. Two years more and it sold for 2 cents. By 1919 it was 26 cents. Now the fun begins.

In 1920, a loaf of bread soared to $1.20, and then in 1921 it hit $1.35. By the middle of 1922 it was $3.50. At the start of 1923 it rocketed to $700 a loaf. Five months later a loaf went for $1200. By September it was $2 million. A month later it was $670 million (wide spread rioting broke out). The next month it hit $3 billion. By mid month it was $100 billion. Then it all collapsed...." [Dollars have been substituted for Marks, but the point remains.]

"...People’s savings were suddenly worthless. Pensions were meaningless. If you had a 400 mark monthly pension, you went from comfortable to penniless in a matter of months. People demanded to be paid daily so they would not have their wages devalued by a few days passing. Ultimately, they demanded their pay twice daily just to cover changes in trolley fare. People heated their homes by burning money instead of coal. (It was more plentiful and cheaper to get.) The middle class was destroyed. It was an age of renters, not of home ownership, so thousands became homeless.

But the cultural collapse may have had other more pernicious effects. Some sociologists note that it was still an era of arranged marriages. Families scrimped and saved for years to build a dowry so that their daughter might marry well. Suddenly, the dowry was worthless – wiped out. And with it was gone all hope of marriage. Girls who had stayed prim and proper awaiting some future Prince Charming now had no hope at all. Social morality began to collapse. The roar of the roaring twenties began to rumble. All hope and belief in systems, governmental or otherwise, collapsed. With its culture and its economy disintegrating, Germany saw a guy named Hitler begin a ten year effort to come to power by trading on the chaos and street rioting. And then came World War." [my emphases, obviously.]

And that is my fear.

Family Traditions.....

2009-10-14T18:31:00.003-07:00

Awright....I'm back to bloggin'.

Such as it is.

The computer is functional. But let me qualify that.....I use Vista. I've still got some "housecleaning" items to take care of, and in a perfect world, I'd have Quicken up and running, and that may take some work to make happen, but mostly, I'm back.

But tonight, we went to LJ's Pizza for dinner.

So, anyway, I've never really liked the pizza at LJs. I don't really like the Chicago deep-dish style, but I do like a more "bread-y" crust than LJs puts out. Its like a big cracker.

And their meats are greasy, which is beginning to become a bigger issue for me than it used to be. Not the best pizza, in my opinion. They've got a crappy salad bar, and they serve soft-serve ice cream for dessert.

However......

It is a family favorite none-the-less. We had a bit of good news to celebrate tonight, and Wifeof- and Sonof-Azlib both like the pizza. Wifeof- went to high school with the current owner, who is the son of the original owner. She's been eating at this LJ location (it has been located elsewhere many years ago) since she was 18. They cater to an older crowd, and being in my 50's, it is sorta weird to be one of the youngest people in the place. The atmosphere is what I call "small-town cheese-y". Not really much interesting in the place, but neither is it overwhelming. Tonight, they had a New Orleans jazz band, The Cats and Jammers, and I enjoyed them quite a bit.

Anyhoo...bad pizza, lame salad bar, cheesy band all made for a good night.

But speaking of....

2009-10-07T09:35:00.004-07:00

The intertubes, and linkery, and my meager readership, I was looking through my readers, and found a guy who came to me through Theo Spark (who has kindly, and inexplicably, included me on his blogroll).

I'm not much of a "totty-blogger". I don't mind looking every now and then, but really don't focus on it too much. That said, I had to have a chuckle at this book shown in a post at Theo's house.

Yes, there are things better than boobs, but damned few. October, of course, is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and who doesn't love breasts? Even bad breasts are good.

I'm not fully....

2009-10-07T09:23:00.003-07:00

...up to speed yet with this computer, but I am making progress. I prefer to use Firefox, so all my bookmarks are yet to be restored, and I've got other improvements to make with this thing.

Other impediments to my active writing here include....

What I believe is either a cracked tooth or inflamed sub-mandibular salivary gland, which is absolutely killing me, and which makes most everything else I attempt to do more difficult than it ought to be.
A very busy first half of the month, followed by a trip to Dallas for a school I need to attend, then a trip to California to see my dad, and ending the month with a trip to NYC to see our daughter run in the New York Marathon (And no: I can hardly believe it myself either).
A growing interest to work up the nerve to actually exercise. I've had the P-90X program for almost a year now, and may finally be ready to start it.

I do, however, remain amazed at even the very few readers I attract here. Dunno what brings you here (usually a picture I've snatched somewhere), but I do hope you enjoy things.

OK....

2009-10-03T20:56:00.002-07:00

OK. The laptop is (finally) back in business, but that doesn't mean I'm back in business yet.

I've got a very short weekend, a ton of stuff to do around the house, a daughter to see for the first time in weeks, a possible trip to an IDPA match in the afternoon, and bunches of stuff to reload on this thing. The best I figure, I've got 36 hours of stuff to do in the next 24.

Prolly not going to get back to this bloggin' thingi in the next couple of days.

I'm pretty sure its a rule somewhere....

2009-09-18T16:07:00.004-07:00

....Anytime you read an article which includes in it's title the words "Tsunami", "Aggressively", "Irresponsible" and "Loans", its not good news.

The Consumerist...
Newsflash: The Next Tsunami Of Aggressively Irresponsible Loans Didn't Magically Disappear

Also, see this really scary chart of our upcoming second wave of mortgage based problems.

Its going to a long time before we're out of this.

In which I try to explain....

2009-09-17T13:55:00.003-07:00

....My recent and (probably) future absences.

Its an old story, but my laptop is acting "hinky", which harkens back to a great TV character, and is one of my favorite, and totally undefined words and as such, is an apt description of this boat anchor I call "My Laptop".

This all began a couple days ago, when I was unable to log onto Blogger. I could read everything, but no logging on. I was able to clear this up by clearing my cache, but then things really started downhill.

I really hate Windows, and specifically, Vista. I don't know that heading to the Apple way would be any better, as doing so would put me in the smug crowd who believe that all things Apple are superior to everything else.

Anyhoo, I've long had problems with this thing. I'd like to use Outlook as my calendar and address book, but I've never been able to get my Palm phone (which was probably a mistake too) to sync right with it, so my calendar and address book are only on the phone. Quicken has never worked right, so I've abandoned using it too. My bidding software now won't boot, and this thing has crashed three times today. I haven't decided if I'm going to take it on my trip this next weekend, but one way or the other, it's headed into the shop.

Oh, by the way....

2009-09-11T07:26:00.002-07:00

I'm sitting here watching Fox News coverage of the memories on 9/11, and one thing just struck me: Once it was clear that airliners were our enemies' chosen asymmetrical WMDs, the decision to immediately land every airliner was just a stunning and completely unforeseen achievement.

Diverting an airliner is no small feat. Before I head off to some divert field, I have to know that I have enough fuel to get there (obviously). Less obviously, there are some airports which are not suitable for some airplanes. The length of the runway, the width of the taxiways, the weight-bearing capabilities of the same, and the available ramp space are all concerns here. Also, given that a divert field may be a suitable divert location for my plane, it is very possible to overwhelm that airport with too many planes.

Once they landed, the questions only then began to be brought. Were they there for an hour? A day? What? Can they get fuel? Are they at a location that has services by their airline? Can they get a flight plan and be dispatched? If they're staying for a while, how do they take care of their passengers? Do they buy them bus tickets? Rent them cars? Find them hotel rooms? Pizzas?

The inside story in the airline industry is that this was simply a stunning achievement, done completely off-the-cuff. The phone lines into our dispatch were melted down. Crews spent days in hotels trying to get a phone call into our scheduling people to see what they wanted the crews to do. Many simply just gave up and rented cars to make their way home. I was at home on 9/11/01 so I missed this confusion, but I did fly the following weekend when they opened up the airspace, and it was still chaotic.

Crimes....

2009-09-11T05:53:00.002-07:00

It is a crime that those terrorists attacked us 8 years ago.
It is another crime that we still have not crushed al Qaeda.
It is still another crime that we elected a man wholly unqualified to lead us in war.
It is yet another crime that 8 years after the attack, the WTC remains little more than a hole in the ground.

My life has changed measurably since 9/11, both personally and professionally. Part of me wishes that I still lived on 9/10, but given that time does march on, I think I am a better man for confronting the world as it is.

Hillary flashes us....

2009-09-09T15:11:00.004-07:00

...Her set.

"...Hillary Clinton is considering stepping down as Secretary of State this fall in order to run for Governor of New York."

h/t for the visual: Commenter Curious at 5:56 here.

A sign of...

2009-09-09T07:34:00.003-07:00

The profoundly inexperienced executive that many of us said he was.

As I await a doctor's appointment this morning, I've been sitting here trollin' around the 'sphere while having Fox News on in the background and, of course, the big story today is what is Zero going to say tonight when he addresses the special joint session of Congress he's called to address the health care debate.

It is now approximately nine hours before he speaks, and we don't know what it is he's going to say. He's used the primetime programming at ABC, and he's devoted a news conference to the topic. He's been talking about reforming health care for months, and other than knowing that he wants Congress to produce something for him to sign, we still don't know exactly what he thinks. He's for a public option, but doesn't think it's necessary. Abortion services have to be in insurance plans, but it won't be funded in a public plan (or some other confusing stance). Point being: The American public is confused about what is, or is not in the plan, and don't have confidence that Zero knows what it is that he wants (other than that he wants to win).

I'm just sayin'....

2009-09-09T07:07:00.001-07:00

Today is September 9, 2009.

09/09/09.

And in two hours it will be 9:09am, which on a military clock is 0909.

0909 on 09/09/09.

You simply must....

2009-09-09T06:25:00.005-07:00

Read both these accounts courtesy of Sean Linnane.

Twin Towers 9/11: A First Hand Account Part 1.

Twin Towers 9/11: A First Hand Account Part 2.

Sean promises more to come, and I'll update this when it appears.

Update: And here is the conclusion.

Twin Towers 9/11: A First Hand Account (Conclusion).

Go. Click. Read. Now.

Yessir.....

2009-09-09T04:55:00.003-07:00

That's my Congressman who went all Chuck Noland on me....

"My diet was coconuts and a lot of crabs. I lit fires with a magnifying glass and a coconut husk, too."

h/t Hot Air Headlines.

Buzz Aldrin: Hip Hop Artist......

2009-09-09T04:46:00.003-07:00

Making of Buzz Aldrin's Rocket Experience w/ Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli from Buzz Aldrin

h/t A couple of clicks past the sidebar at Ace's Place.

VDH....

2009-09-08T08:37:00.002-07:00

Courtesy of Gerard, (although I've skimmed parts of this article elsewhere), I can recommend this Victor Davis Hanson article (although I guess I'd have to confess to rarely not recommending anything VDH writes). A few paragraphs.....

[A]lmost everything Obama had done is consistent with his past associates (Pfleger, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), his past vocation (grievance organizing), and his past methodology (most partisan in the Senate, surrealistic Senate campaign in which foes mysteriously dropped out, the Axelrod/Emanuel Chicago way, etc.).

But Obamacare is not really about medicine. It is rather aimed at absorbing more of the private sector—once more, to create a vast new constituency of government workers and beneficiaries, to ensure an equality of result in treatment and access, and to replace private health insurers with public bureaucrats. (I got a taste of the future of the government octopus when I went yesterday to a California DMV office, and noticed that all the state employees at the windows had on purple union T-shirts with “organize” and “solidarity” emblazoned across them.)

In other words, in the Obama mind, would you want an autonomous family practitioner, entrepreneurial, keen to adopt to patient needs and tastes, juggling 10 employees and a 2-million-dollar family practice budget, grossing $400,000 a year in profits, highly opinionated and self-reliant, using his profits once in a while to ski or buy a BMW—or have him transmogrified into a GS-something, at $100,000 a year, with government benefits, unionized, docile, and waiting to go home when his shift at the dreary government clinic ends, wearing his doctor union T-shirt to work and eager to vote in politicians who ensure him lifetime tenure, generous retirement packages, and guaranteed pay raises?

Well, the post-racial candidate had given us a 95% black monolithic voting pattern in the primaries against a fellow liberal candidate. Add up Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, an exasperated Bill Clinton’s assessment of “playing the race card on me”, “typical white person”, ‘wise Latina’, the Skip Gates mess, the Van Jones’ white polluters, the satraps like Gov. Patterson and Reps. Rangel and Watson reverting to blatantly racist scapegoating, and so on.

I fear that this is the most polarizing administration we have seen in matters of race since the 1920s. If those around Obama, and his supporters in Congress, had just substituted the word “black” each time they have angrily invoked the word “white”, they would have been branded abject racists.
Orwellian

In America of 2009 the following are “true”:

The Arabs invented the printing press, and spurred us on to the Enlightenment and Renaissance. Muslims in Cordoba advised the brutal Christians to show tolerance during the Inquisition. Slavery ended in America without violence. The Berlin Airlift was a worldwide effort. The Americans liberated Auschwitz. There are 57 states. FDR was President in 1929 and gave television addresses. We can either drill offshore or inflate our tires properly.

There are no terrorists or a war on same, but only overseas contingency operations and man-made catastrophes. Those who object to health care are ungodly, and the nation’s children must go to school and see the messiah address them en masse on state-run television screens. Nazis, brown shirts, a mob, insurance lackeys, Brooks brothers elites, etc. all go to Town Halls. Doctors chop off limbs and gleefully take out tonsils for profit. George Bush is our Emmanuel Goldstein whom we must hate collectively each morning for a couple of minutes.

The Public "Option"....

2009-09-07T16:51:00.004-07:00

Scare quotes intended.

Although I don't talk about it much, I'd like to briefly explore what a public option in airline travel might look like.

Imagine after a clamor to bring down the cost of airline travel, we added a "public option" to the private air carriers out there. In addition to American Airlines, Southwest, and all the others, the .gov created an alternative. Call it BarryAir.

So, we would have one branch of the .gov charged with regulating the industry, and another which would "compete" in the industry. Let's ignore the possibility that BarryAir could tap the infinitely deep pockets of the .gov if they got into any financial trouble, and instead ask: Is there any illusion that a government that regulates an industry cannot fairly compete in that same industry?

So here's what brought this to mind....

This morning as I was eating my complementary hotel breakfast o' carbs, I watched the TV set to the local news. And their commercials were the following...

Every one of these institutions* have competitors. Someone is out there trying to get the consumer into their store before one of these four. Therefore these four have to advertise to get the consumer to spend their dollar with them.

* It is a fair point to say that the banks, especially the big banks, are de facto arms of the Fed and/or the Treasury.

And here is the fifth advertiser that caught my eye....

Kaiser Permanente. Their ad, coincidentally, was focused on this website which they claim is a great way to integrate all the care that a patient might be needing.

The point being: They have to advertise. The health care consumer has other choices, and Kaiser has to advertise to get their share of them.

We already have health care competition. Yes--we would benefit by having more competition. But adding a .gov "public option" because we don't have enough competition is the wrong answer to a question that doesn't need to be asked. The better question is: What can we do to stimulate private health care competition?

Jack Webb Schools Barack Obama....

2009-09-06T06:39:00.001-07:00

Lifted whole from Allahpundit.

Sunday morning talk shows.....

2009-09-06T06:13:00.003-07:00

So here I sit in Jacksonville in a hotel I hate with a TV spectrum that does not include Fox News watching Meet the Press (which I can barely tolerate).

David Axelrod is the guest this morning, and he's spent much of his interview defending the failing healthcare initiative.

He also was asked about Zero's plan this next week to address the nation's school children. And in that vein, Axelrod said that he was a bit perplexed that Zero's message of stressing individual initiative and responsibility was being rebuffed.

I was struck with the contrast between his plan to socialize health care, yet stress individual achievement in academics.

The First Rule of Blogging....

2009-08-31T09:51:00.005-07:00

Kevin reminded me the other day that a decent blogger (which I am far from) will put up something--anything--every day. I found out long ago, that this whole blogging thingi is more work than it may seem. I like it, but I started this thing as a means to both craft my thoughts, and to develop the writing skills to be able to put those thoughts down intelligently on this cyber-paper. I have a long way to go on both fronts.

But in that vein, I present this....

I found this via a scroll through Sean Linnane, who has kindly added me to his blogroll. Sean Linnane is a contributor to Theo's place, who also added me to his blogroll a while back, and I suspect that Sean has taken many of Theo's links wholesale into his place. I check in with Theo every now and then...he has a snarky sense of humor which appeals to me, and he includes pictures of some very lovely ladies (which I can always look at). I think I achieved my place on Theo's blogroll through a comment I put onto one of his posts one day, but frankly, I don't think of myself as worthy. And I am certainly not worthy of Sean Linnane's link. He has a wonderful viewpoint, and I am humbled to be linked on his blog.

I really don't know much about Warren Zevon, other than he was a sort of edgy guy. His music didn't appeal to me much, but the performance of Roland is haunting. He knew he was sick, and Letterman offered him his stage for a last performance. I used to like to watch Letterman...his humor was wry and twisted like mine, but in the last couple of years, he has gone fully into the BDS, and has not found a way out. His jokes about Sarah Palin were unforgivable, and I am one of his former audience members. But I do give Letterman credit for hosting Zevon on this last night.

Fail Blog....

2009-08-29T21:42:00.003-07:00

Funny stuff.....Isn't that an Obama sticker?

In yet another act of rank copying of some else's work.....

2009-08-28T09:24:00.003-07:00

I present this, from Kevin over at The Smallest Minority. Can I say that I am rightly impressed that Kevin would remember and/or have a way of keeping track of a piece by Peggy Noonan from nearly 4 years ago, and be able bring it back into relevance today?

"...Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford's lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It's called "Symptoms of Withdrawal." At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford's mother's apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn't gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. "Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta." Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy "took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

Mr. Lawford continued, "The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of 'maybe we shouldn't go there.' Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on."

Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family--that it might "fall apart." But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . . ."

The Government Can...

2009-08-28T09:21:00.002-07:00

Who said white guys can't dance?

h/t Blob.

As I Mentioned....

2009-08-27T08:38:00.004-07:00

....Here, I am (finally) reading Ayn Rand's classic Atlas Shrugged.

And as I threatened, I am beginning a
Quote-of-~~the-Day~~ However-Often-I-Get-Around-To-It feature.

Page 383-384

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by the leagal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'"

When some politician or talking head or pundit (or Fed Chairman) says that they're seeing signs of a recovery, I have to ask.....

2009-08-26T08:46:00.002-07:00

Really?

Do you even have to look past the cover?

Bernanke...

2009-08-25T18:00:00.003-07:00

...Gets a second term.

Anybody who has been paying attention wonders: Why?

And now....

2009-08-24T06:45:00.001-07:00

Obama has a Torture Czar.

h/t Glenn.

An interesting perspective....

2009-08-22T07:25:00.003-07:00

I saw this first, I think, over at Gerard's place a while back, but then saw it again this morning at Innocent Bystanders.
I can't say I agree with everything he says, but it is refreshing to hear a guy from the typically lefty enviro-wacko wing speak rationally about what we're dealing with now, and how he sees the future.

Thoughts after a colonoscopy.....

2009-08-21T17:57:00.003-07:00

I'll spare you the pictures.

Anyhoo, I've spent way more time in doctor's offices this month than I ever have.

Earlier this month, after having what I initially thought was a cracked tooth, I visited my dentist who diagnosed it as "pulpitis" (or something). He said that the discomfort I was having would dissipate. When it didn't, and I had to call in sick for a trip over a weekend, I then ended up in an urgent care office.

Here's what I learned about urgent care: They don't do anything. The doctor I saw was a Chinese guy who was very nice, but just said the obvious: I had an inflammation along the jawline. He gave me a shot of something and a prescription for penicillin.

With little else to do on Sunday except moan while I was in my recliner, I spent some time on the intertubes searching for stuff on what was bothering me. My self diagnosis: An inflamed sub-mandibular salivary gland.

Since nothing the urgent care guy had given me was giving me any relief, by Monday morning, I was in my family practioner's office. There I saw the nurse practioner and she agreed with my diagnosis. She prescribed a steroid and a holistic therapy (believe it or not: lemon juice) which immediately began to have their effect.

Problem solved.

Then came my colonoscopy. Actually, that's not right. Then came a head cold immediately prior to my colonoscopy. For those who've never had a colonoscopy, it is a two day process. There is a "prep day", then the procedure itself on the following day. The "prep day", naturally, consists of eating nothing but clear liquids and nuclear laxatives. And given the head cold that I was dealing with, I was feeling like crap while I was crapping my guts out.

The procedure itself is a snap. The anesthetic they use is wonderful. It acts immediately and leaves one with absolutely no memory of anything. I remember nothing between rolling onto my left side in the procedure room and the nurse offering me some apple juice in the recovery room.

And then today, I had another trip to the family practioner to deal with this head cold. The other PA gave me a nasal decongestant and suggested I keep up with the Mucinex.

But what I'm really writing about tonight are the personalities involved.

It has been my theory for some time now that those in the medical field find their specialties based on their personality types. Let me explain.....

I have two neighbors who are doctors. They're both nice enough, but very different. The one is kind of odd, though. He's kind of a fitness buff, which isn't all that strange, but he wears a "Bruce Jenner" haircut. He and his wife are also very Christian, which again isn't odd or objectionable, but they've raised their kids without cable TV or the internet (or at least that was the case when their kids were in high school). As a result, their kids are a little odd too (although, I guess anyone could make this claim about anyone's kids). Anyway, this guy is a pathologist, which as I understand it, means that he looks at biopsies and lab specimens and decides just exactly it is that is a concern. I don't think he has much personal contact with his patients, which fits with his personality.

The other neighbor is a much more friendly guy, and we're therefore a bit closer with them. Their kids are spread like ours are, boy-girl-girl, but a couple years younger. I used to be the patient of one of his partners, but because I've always viewed him as more of a friend than a doctor, and frankly, at times I've been suspicious of his common sense, I've never been one of his patients. Anyway, like I said, he's a nice guy, and it fits that he is a family practioner.

Although I can't say I know them personally, my family practioner, and his nurse practioners are pretty much the same...maybe not the smartest in the medical fields, but smart enough, and nice, open people.

My colo-rectal guy, on the other hand, is well-respected, but has almost no bedside manner. When I was wheeled into his procedure room the other day, he was at his desk dictating notes on his previous procedure into a little recorder device. He turned and nodded with a little wave to acknowledge my arrival, but other than that, I had no contact with him. He did explain what he found in my colonoscopy to WifeofAzlib, but even that was quick and cursory. He's technically proficient, but personality-wise, he's a loser. It fits that he has little to do with his patients.

So that's it...that's my theory. Maybe not original thought, but something anyway. Doctors end up in fields that fit their personalities as much as their skills.

These things need to be said.....

2009-08-18T09:39:00.002-07:00

Man carrying assault weapon attends Obama protest

No. It wasn't me. I wasn't even in the state, so don't blame/credit me.
No. An AR15 is not an "assault weapon".
Yes. I own an AR15. I'd like to own another--specifically, a M4 model. I also own other rifles, and those who do not understand guns might incorrectly consider some of them to be "assault weapons".
No. I have never gone to any public political protest or meeting with an AR15 or any other rifle.
Yes. There is nothing wrong with peacefully carrying a rifle in public. Even to a political protest. And even to a political protest when the President is in the state.
No. That's not saying that I would.
Yes. The hoplophobes will shriek to high heaven about this. They're good at that.
Yes. Openly, and peacefully carrying a rifle is no more threatening a political statement than carrying a sign.
Yes. Carrying a rifle is a good piece of political theater. Kinda like those big paper mâché heads, but something you can actually make use of later.
And finally, Yes, this kind of thing has both a good side and a bad side. Which side you see depends on the viewpoint you begin with.

Jumper Cables.....

2009-08-10T09:18:00.002-07:00

So I did a little internet-shopping this morning.

No: Not shopping for internet; Shopping on the internet. But I digress.....

We had a little event last month that I am trying to prevent a repeat of: A dead battery on a 114° day and a faulty set of jumper cables.

When I bought the cables for WifeofAzlib's SUV, I knew they were OK, but given that she's always kept an AAA membership, I didn't opt for the best cables available. The cables were really a backstop for the AAA service.

However, when we came out of a movie on that 114° afternoon to find our dead SUV battery, and with AAA telling us to expect their truck in 45 minutes, the true price of those cheaper cables came into clarity.

So I spent a few minutes on Amazon this morning looking for a better set of jumper cables that we can both be more comfortable with in her SUV.

Here's what I bought....

Nice, right?

They're good, heavy-duty cables, made in America, and at what I thought was a decent price.

However, here's what sold me on these cables: The best product review of a set of jumper cables EVAH.....

I got these jumper cables and they fit perfectly onto my nipples. I walked around my house all night, and they didn't even slip off. They're very comfortable to sleep in as well. Highly recommended!

Some Free Political Advice from a Rank Amateur Firefighter....

2009-08-08T10:47:00.006-07:00

On That-Forum-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I left the following update to a post in a thread basically all about the Democrat's approach to their Health Care Townhalls....

One More Point: What gives you [my liberal opponent] the right to say that the dissent I might engage in today is not sincere, but masquerading as something else? You and Zero, and SanFranNan and all the rest are on the wrong track here. You are going out of your way to marginalize an entire segment of America. You and ACORN and the SEIU thugs may not believe it, but America, as a whole, is seriously unhappy about the course that Zero has set for us. The dissent we're seeing today is far wider and far deeper than any of the anti-war dissent of the Bush years. Look at any of the youtubes out there and what do you see? Middle-aged and older folks who haven't gotten off the couch in years! Zero had--as in the past tense of "have"--a mandate. Personally, I think he could have kept his agenda even with the horrible results that the Stimulus (sic) has brought. But instead, he had to lay down an offering at the altar of Gaia and push his Cap and Tax bill through the House (unread!), followed by this disastrous Health Care reform (again, unread!). The CBO says that Zero's budget deficits (which I will kindly link to rather than attach, again) are "unsustainable". They also say that his Health Care is similarly under water before it starts. That I will illustrate.....

Source.

The Chinese are at the end of their rope, and are beginning to pull on our leash. This is why Zero's flacks are having to answer the persistent questions of whether he will renege on his pledge of no tax increases for those earning less than $250k. Geez, [My opponent's name]. Chinese students openly laugh at Geithner....to his face. Can you imagine? There are two choices here: With the spending Zero has begun and has plans for, he can tax the crap out of the American taxpayer, or he can devalue the currency. And the Chinese, owning our debt measured in our currency, would much rather see the former than the later.

You know what, [My opponent's name]? Zero doesn't need any of this. He can ram through anything he wants tomorrow, if he likes. Call Nancy and Harry and tell them to give their guys an August vacation in a remote location. No Townhalls; No "tele-meetings"; No "One-on-One meetings"; Nothing. Just close down and when they come back in September, they can do anything. But that's not what he's doing. Rather than work with those who have serious, sincere differences with his views, he and Rahmbo immediately go for the Chicago Way...."If we get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,”.

Yeah, that's a great way to win friends and influence enemies.

Sorry for the length. I meant for this to be just a small update, but "one more point" became five or six. I got on a roll. Sue me.

Ok. With that as background, here is my free political advice.....

Zero and Rahmbo and my opponent share one thing: They are East Coast elites.

Which means that they live in urbanized, or at least much more densely populated areas than we do here in the West.....

Which means that all they know about forest fires is what they watch on TV......

Which means they don't know how to put one out.

The key to putting out a forest fire is to look at a fire and say: "This 100,000 acres is ablaze, but if I ever want to contain this, I need to set some backfires out in front of where the fire is now and let it burn itself out."

Zero's Health Care Reform is ablaze. He doesn't know it yet, but it's done. Gone. Smoke.

Everything he's done so far to put out the blaze only intensifies it. The D's believe that those who oppose their plan are "a mob" who are engaged in a "right-wing assault" and while displaying "swastikas". They try to pack the House with their toadies. They scream at their constituents for asking a question. They let loose their SEIU thugs. Their answer: Shut down the Townhalls. Phone it in. Call it a "Prayer Vigil" (points for originality, though). And all of that has just served to make people angrier.

Its as though he is intentionally behind the fire fanning the flames, rather than doing something to put this thing down.

Letters....

2009-08-07T11:47:00.003-07:00

For what it's worth, I live in what has to be one of the most reliably conservative congressional districts anywhere...Arizona Sixth.

I'm sure that, like all politicians, the Republicans who represent me are standing back and enjoying the show this month....were I in their position, I know I would.

That said, I am preparing letters this afternoon to Congressman Flake, and Senators McCain and Kyl on Health Care Reform, Cap and Trade, and their approach to our country between now and the mid-term elections.

I really, really like Jeff Flake. He's a Republican of the Goldwater-libertarian style, and I wish he could find a way to step into more national prominence. Kyl is one of the better Senators, but I do occasionally have my differences with him. McCain is McCain, and I've had many differences with him over the hears. He's certainly better than Obama, but not nearly good enough.

Anyhoo, if you're one of my few readers, I encourage you to join me in keeping up the pressure...even on those who don't need it.

Am I the only one who thinks that....

2009-08-07T11:28:00.002-07:00

...When these guys call me part of "the Mob", that they are offering high praise?

Also, I've gotten out of the habit of reading Peggy Noonan--she's become a bit too squishy for me--but she is spot on with this column. I have a hard time believing that the internal polling operation that I imagine any political party to have, would so miss the pulse of America so badly on a topic like Zero's Health Care Reform (sic). They haven't prepared their Congresscritters at all for what they're facing, and for now, they're making worse.

Busy today.....

2009-08-06T09:08:00.003-07:00

I spent far too long on the intertube machine yesterday, and got far too little done around the house...the grass and the weeds keep on growin' whether I attend to them or not. In addition to that, Daughter #2 is beginning to move into the dorm, and that requires some of my attention.

So, my presence here today will be light.

Manufactured Conspiracies....

2009-08-05T14:20:00.003-07:00

A thought occured to me while watching Glenn Beck....

The Democrats are doing a kind of weird combination of back-pedalling and hard-selling at the same time regarding their failing Health Care Reform initiative.

Someone somewhere on the 'sphere mentioned the other day that Zero's Cash-for-Clunkers is turning out to be a self-induced Katrina.

Zero's press flack, Robert Gibbs, said that the folks who are angrily meeting with their Congresscritters during the August recess are displaying a "manufactured anger".

The DNC is out with their "Mob" youtube....

The thought that occurred to me is that, in 2009, calling your opposition an "Angry Mob", expressing a "manufactured anger" may come to be remembered as Hillary's complaint in 1998 that the Clintons were faced with what amounted to a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy".

I am honored.....

2009-08-05T08:27:00.002-07:00

....to have been selected as Kevin's Quote of the Day.

Kevin, this blog is a pale imitation of those from whom I learn so much about how the world works, thinks, and expresses those thoughts. I've learned so much from your much more capable thoughts, and the idea that you have included mine on your much better blog, deeply humbles me.

Thank you.

The Game We Now Play....

2009-08-05T06:24:00.002-07:00

Somebody, a very clever somebody, has begun to put up these posters in the Los Angeles area.

Here is the NewsBusters article on the posters, complete with images of their location. I'm told that they've also appeared in Atlanta, and I have to guess they'll appear elsewhere.

The Left, being not used to this sort of thing, are not happy about it.

LA Weekly wonders why the noose is missing. The Village Voice says that this is more of a viral internet thingi, rather than something actually being pasted on walls (without wondering if the Right is a little more circumspect than the Left about ~~Urban Art~~ defacing someone else's property).

Big Hollywood notes the selective outrage, which I'd like to explore a bit further.

Firstly--the idea of placing these posters in public spaces.

It is important, I think, to remember that Shepard Fairey, the guy who created this iconic Obama image,

...is also the Shepard Fairey who is responsible for these posters and stickers seen on lampposts and public spaces all over the country.

Fairey explicitly discusses this image and his philosphy of it's distribution in his "Manifesto". [Am I "PARANOID" or "CONSERVATIVE" or both? Does Fairey see a distinction?]

But let's look at a couple of other Fairey images....

Big Brother

Angela Davis

Edgy. Hip. Urban. Left.

But here are a couple of more political Fairey images.

fearbush2

hugbombs

And then there's this....

I guess I can't be sympathetic, either to the idea that political images don't belong on public property, or to the idea that this image of Obama is so unflattering as to be not fitting for public view, when these complaints come from the Left. You guys have started this method of public debate.

Now....what about Zero as The Joker. Is that fitting?

A Caveat: I haven't seen The Dark Knight. It was released right after Heath Ledger's unfortunate death, and the hype around his death drifted into the movie. I'll take that its a good movie, and I plan to see it (someday), but it was that hype that kept me from going when it was in release.

But, via a comment at HotAir, I was referred to this scene. [Sorry, embedding not available.]

Moreover, here is a segment of dialogue from The Dark Knight (via IrishSamurai in the previously noted HotAir thread)...

“Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. you know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught one. I just DO things. I’m a wrench in the gears. I HATE plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans, Gordon has plans. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I am not a schemer. I show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So when I say that what happened to you and your girlfriend wasn’t personal, you know I’M telling the truth”*Gives Dent Gun*”It’s a schemer who put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. Look where it got you. I just did what I do best-I took your plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple bullets. Nobody panics when the expected people got killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds!! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I AM AN AGENT OF CHAOS. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey. It’s fair.”

So now. Go back and read that again and tell yourself that it is Zero who is saying it.

Is it really such a stretch to see Zero as The Joker?

And then there's the issue of other images of right-wing politicians done as "art", (or whatever).

Jill Greenburg took this image of John McCain for The Atlantic Monthly....

....this became the cover photo.

Gerard, of course, did a wonderful job of illustrating this while issue.

And then there was the Halloween decoration in West Hollywood which included a Palin-mannequin hung in effigy.

So, are we to take that political art, when done from the Left, is thought-provoking (or whatever), but that when it is done from the Right, that it is unacceptably offensive? Really?

Lately, I have had a shift in my approach to politics.

I still appreciate the value of a well-crafted argument against one's political opponents. It still is very possible to debate politics and policy in a civil way.

However, it is also clear to me that the Left does not necessarily always bind itself to that idea. Many of the Left, have adopted some or all of Alinksky's Rules for Radicals.

Rules for Power Tactics:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Rules to test whether power tactics are ethical:

1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

I am having an increasingly difficult time in not seeing the value of these rules to the Right as well.

The Left may be learning that "What goes around, comes around".

Some Thoughts On The Growing Discontent.....

2009-08-04T20:33:00.002-07:00

Congressmen of all stripes, but most especially the Democrats and supporters of Zero's policies, are taking it on the chin right now during the August recess.

Health care is the topic today, but the general tone is all about the deficit, the Stimulus (sic) program that isn't working, the missing jobs, the stupid Cash-for-Clunkers program, etc. Instapundit, and Ace, and the guys at HotAir are just the start of the places where you can see videos of the flack that these Congresscritters are taking. I'm sure none of them thought they'd ever see the day when meeting their constituents became such a difficult chore. It's not going to get any easier. America is angry.

So, here's what I think must be happening behind the scenes.

Zero and the D leadership have to be desperately searching for a way to get out in front of this thing. Right now, I think that they believe their only hope for success for any Health Care proposal will be to water it down far past anything resembling anything they've talked about thus far. But that will only work until their liberal wing begins to rebel (they are already rumbling). He'll need to walk an awfully thin tightrope to make it work.

If I were an insider, here's what I'd be watching: When the second- and third-tier staffers begin to quit, we'll know that they sense that their ship is beginning to sink. The first-tier staff will have had enough invested with their guy and/or the party that they'll stick through till the end, but the lower staff will have more mobility, and may take advantage while they can.

Zero has bitten off way more than he can chew. He allowed SanFranNan and Dingy Harry to stuff every liberal pipedream into that Stimulus Package, and he, as the inexperienced executive that he is, is now stuck with it. His Cap-and-Tax is in trouble in the Senate, his Cash-for-Clunkers is becoming a self-made Katrina, and he's losing on the central plank of his domestic campaign agenda--health care reform. Chinese students openly laugh at his Treasury Secretary.

[None of this should be taken to mean that I think all would be peachy if we had a President McCain. It wouldn't. Our economic troubles were building for many years, and are systemic. No president could solve them. Zero has made things far worse than they need to be, but McCain wouldn't have been a walk in the park.]

Über Comment meant for FL 390....

2009-08-03T20:47:00.002-07:00

My favorite story about DCA came on a flight I wasn't even flying.

At the time, I was based in DFW as a F/O on the Maddog. Our contract at the time required that to be paid for the trip, a F/O had to actually fly along on the trip when he was paired with a Line Check Airman who was giving an Initial Operating Experience to a new guy fresh out of school.

So, I got one of these trips, which included an overnight in DCA, and had to tag along for the entire trip. I brought along a big book, and planned on doing little more than the walk arounds for the two captains.

I was spending all the time except my walk arounds in a seat in the back. However, on the leg into DCA, the LCA asked me to come up to the cockpit to be a third set of eyes. No problem.

The airplane we picked up in DFW had some sort of issue with air conditioning smoke. [This usually comes off as much more dramatic than it really is. On the Maddog, there is a bottle which captures hydraulic fluid overflows. If not emptied regularly, this bottle will overflow into the intake for the A/C packs, and this causes smoke in the cabin. Don't mistake me--Smoke in the cabin is a big deal and you and I shouldn't assume that it's just a little whiff. But the maddog had a known problem with this issue (since solved).]

Right before pushback, we got the inevitable cabin smoke after the APU was started and the packs put on, and there was some guy up in 2C who was making a huge deal about it. I had picked him out a mile away....a big shot in a power suit, power tie, and a big briefcase headed to Washington. Right away he got really loud about how the smoke was keeping him from all this important legal work he was doing, and asking if was it cancerous, and what not. Putz. The smoke cleared, as it generally does, and the Flight Attendants did a really good job of calming this guy down. Off we went.

I forget the details now, but as I recall, runway 19 (which was then runway 18, IIRC) was NOTAMed to be closed at 10pm or so...right about our arrival time.

Anyway, as we got 150 miles or so out, we picked up the ATIS which had them landing on 18. Once we got over to approach control, they asked if we could land on 15. Our procedures don't allow 15 landings, so we said "no" (buildings in Rosslyn or some such thing). They then started vectoring us towards runway 1. And once on final for runway 1 and we were handed off to Tower, they cleared us to land on 33.

So, to sum up, in the span of about 12 minutes, we had had to think about landings on 4 of their 6 runways (the other two being completely out of the question).

And, as you've suggested, DCA isn't like anywhere else in the country. There's a restricted area just north of the airport, and they're serious about it. Violations are handed out there, and there is always the threat of those Secret Service missiles. They have very unique procedures there...I call it my "trick flying".

And, yeah, let's not forget, we had a brand new Captain in the left seat. Literally, this was his first post-school flight in the left seat.

That said, the LCA decided early on that he'd be the one flying into DCA. Good decision.

Anyhoo, once we finally did get onto the final for 33, the LCA landed with a perfect runway 33 landing...meaning he had the autobrakes set on Max, and he landed firmly....really firmly. [Runway 19 is too short for my taste, but runway 33 is even shorter.] The second the nosewheel got on the ground, he got right into the reverse thrust. It wasn't the most comfortable landing from the passengers point of view, but knowing what I knew, it was perfect.

Soooo, time marched on.

Four months later, I got a letter from the Chief Pilot asking me to come in and tell my story of what happened that night in DCA...a flight I was only on the jumpseat for.

It seemed as though one of our huge, big-time customers--the kind that know our system in and out because they fly millions of miles every year with us--was with this flight from start to finish. He had been on the flight coming in to DFW, where we picked up the plane.

And he didn't like anything that he'd seen.

I assumed right away that he was Mr. 2C Putz. Not so. It turns out he was some completely anonymous guy sitting in coach who didn't say boo to us one way or the other (not that he should).

Do everything right, under challenging conditions, and people will still complain.

Parenthetically, (and finally, in conclusion) I think one of the biggest mistakes we made after 9/11 was in not closing DCA. If you ask me, it is far too short for major airline operations, and is way, waaaay too close to Washington, DC.

9/11 was a good opportunity to turn DCA into what it really ought to be....

A train station.

Alternative Fuel Clunkers....

2009-08-01T08:20:00.002-07:00

I'm going to go back and tell a story from 10 years ago....

May, 1999.
I had just upgraded to my first Captain's job, which, of course brought me a bigger paycheck than I had been getting as a First Officer. Also, I had been driving a 1983 GMC S-15, which looked a lot like this....

...except that it was a 4WD, and I had added a shell to the back. With the youngest of our three kids then almost 10 years old, I could only squeeze three of the five of us in the cab, and the motor was exceptionally underpowered. At that point, it was not much good for anything beyond an airport car, and even then, it wasn't that good. The air conditioner was shot and it didn't go into 4WD anymore.

It was time to upgrade my ride.

About this same time, Arizona was launching into an experiment with alternative fuels. The idea was to simultaneously clean the environment and wean some of the Arizona vehicles off foreign oil. But how to do this became the question.

Enter Jeff Groscost and the Alt Fuels industry.

Their idea was to both stimulate the demand for these vehicles and alt fuels as well as the supply of both.

To generate an instantaneous demand, here is my memory of what they proposed....

The idea was to have consumers buy a vehicle, and add an alternative fuel conversion to that. The state would then, depending on the emissions of the conversion, rebate between 30 and 50% of the total cost of the vehicle and the altfuel system.
Also, the cost of the altfuel system would be applied as a credit to one's income taxes.
There would be no state sales tax on the purchase.
Rather than being taxed as a function of the vehicle's value, an altfuel vehicle would have a flat VLT of $5 a year.
And you could drive around in the HOV lanes all day all by yourself.

In my case, I paid sticker price for my truck, a 2000 Chevy Silverado Z71 (more on this later)....$33,000 as I remember. To that I added a $8000 Compressed Natural Gas conversion, making the vehicle total $41,000.

But, if memory serves, I got back $17,000, making my effective cost $24,000 for what was then one of Chevy's top of the line trucks.

On the supply side, there were plans for similar stimuli. They had envisioned that gas stations would, with these incentives, install the additional plumbing and tanks to make supplies of alternative fuels (primarily CNG and propane) available to meet this new increased demand.

This was a great deal.

The problem being....I wasn't the only one who thought so.

The Legislature, when they proposed this program, thought that they'd have to rebate $3-4 million to fund this whole thing. When the governor's office looked at it, and she eventually signed it, they believed it was going to be more like $10 million.

They had to put the brakes on the program when it was clear that it was going to go past $600 million.

They over-stimulated demand and it was going to bankrupt the state. And here are a couple of related anecdotes from memory....

One lady bought a $17,000 Ford Fiesta. POS. To that she added a $33,000 fully electric conversion for the thing, in effect giving her a $50, 000 Ford Fiesta. One would think only a crazy person would buy such a thing. But, the electric conversion qualified her for a 50% rebate, plus the credit on her income taxes for the conversion cost. Fifty percent of her $50k gives her $25k back in her pocket, plus she got a credit for $33k. New car, plus cash back. Niiice.
One of the homebuilders on the Phoenix west side ordered 600 trucks under this program. He justified this by saying that he had a constant need for construction trucks. I happen to believe he was planning to put a new altfuel truck in the driveway of every house he sold, but that's just conjecture. In any event, 600 trucks is a large order.

Anyway, there was a huge, huge demand for getting in on this stimulus. On the weekend I bought my truck, there were no Chevy dealers with any Suburbans in the Phoenix metro area. In the fifth largest city in America, every dealer had sold every Suburban. Anybody who was anybody was trying to get in on this program. I was very lucky to find the truck that I ended up with. And when I did find my truck, the only way to get it was to pay sticker price for it. The dealers, knowing the rebate I'd be collecting, were in no mind to negotiate down on any vehicle on which I might put one of these conversions.

Some of this was due to the over stimulus, but another part of this was due to, frankly, fraud.

My neighbors--nice people, really--were one of those who bought a Suburban on this same weekend. And the CNG conversion they installed included a 3 gallon CNG tank.

Here's the thing about CNG....the amount you can get into the tank is inversely proportional to the temperature, and you can never fill the tank completely. I have a 9 gallon tank, and in the winter I can--maybe--get 7 gallons into it. In the summer, its less...usually a little over 6 gallons. And given the 15-17 mpg that I get with the fuel, this means that I have a range of 100-110 miles. Its not enough to start out on some great trip with, but certainly enough for around town. With a 3 gallon tank, you wouldn't have enough CNG to get home, much less anywhere else. There is a CNG fill station at the airport, and I generally fill up before I drive home.

And I haven't given up my unleaded system....it is a bi-fuel truck. So when I can't get to a CNG station, any old unleaded station will do.

They had similarly generous plans for the supply side. My initial plan was to buy a home fill station. The natural gas which is compressed to become CNG is the same stuff that is delivered to your house. When it comes to your regulator, it is delivered at 30 psi or so. You really wouldn't want a leaking gas line at 30 psi in your house, so in addition to acting as a meter for your gas, the regulator serves to step that pressure down before it gets to your house. The gas to your house is delivered at 6-8 psi.

But my truck fills at 3600 psi. A home fill unit would essentially be a boost pump. It might take all night to fill up the tank, but who cares, really? The home fill unit would run another $6k or so, but again, they had plans to rebate most of this in a similar way to the demand stimuli.

So, why did I write all this?

I like my truck. Really. I do.

I like the CNG. I use it all the time. Its cheaper, performs about as well as unleaded, and I have the advantage of using the HOV lanes while emitting less pollutants.

But, I wouldn't do it again.

Here is what I've learned out of all this.....

Anytime a government has to offer an incentive for folks to do what they otherwise would not choose to do, then, in effect, what they're doing is saying that some folks will be taxed for the benefit of others. When the .gov gets in the business of incentivizing private decisions, they don't know what they're doing. A retailer knows how much he can discount his products. He knows that when he's planning a sale, he had better have a greater supply of whatever he's discounting. He knows that if his discount is too generous, he'll go broke, run out of supply or both.

The taxpayers of Arizona bought me a third of my truck. Nice if you can get it, but the state can't stay in business this way.

So, why is this relevant today?

Here's why....The Cash for Clunkers program is going broke. They overstimulated. They're having to add money to keep a program meant to last until October make it last beyond its first week.

In short, the fed.gov is doing today what the Arizona state.gov did 10 years ago. For their own reasons, they believe they're smarter than the Invisible Hand, and it isn't working.

Again.

A Confession....

2009-07-28T10:23:00.002-07:00

On That-Forum-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I once confessed to this vision of a dream-date.

And here, courtesy of Glenn, we see this advice for those who believe men want princesses.

Give us Sarah Connor in a black cocktail dress pumping a shotgun any day.

Amen, Brother. Amen.

Passing Fancy.....

2009-07-28T10:16:00.002-07:00

Its been some time since I seriously posted stuff here, and I have to admit to a summertime fling.

I am reading a book.

No. That's not right.

I am reading a novel.

A thousand page (of fairly small print) novel.

Atlas Shrugged.

As has been my habit for many years now, when I find a book I enjoy, I often make notes in the last few pages of interesting parts of the book, and I've been tempted to copy Kevin and post Quotes of the Day. Maybe I'll get caught up and organized and get this done.

Does anybody remember how many times....

2009-07-20T12:45:00.002-07:00

...We heard Al Gore use the term "lockbox"?

I'm beginning to get the same feeling every time I hear some wonk or O-bot say "bend the curve".

Pastor Manning and...

2009-07-19T04:21:00.001-07:00

...The Long Legged Mack Daddy.

h/t Gerard's Sidelights.

Random Thought #739....

2009-07-18T16:44:00.002-07:00

Took a walk with my copilot this evening past the United Nations building in Manhattan, and I wondered:

How different would this world be today if one of those planes had been aimed at the U.N. building?

52% of America thought....

2009-07-16T18:49:00.003-07:00

Joe Biden was a smarter VP pick than Sarah Palin. Amazing. They mocked her as "Caribou Barbie".

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.”

Biden is a certifiable, friggin' idiot. Zero is an even bigger idiot for picking him as his Veep. If they had any honor, the 52% of America that voted for the Zero/Biden ticket ought to be pushing for an impeachment, if for no other reason than to regain their integrity.

Told ya' so.

Don't these people know we're in economic trouble here?

2009-07-15T18:12:00.002-07:00

I'm out on a trip and on a layover. Today, I'm downtown in Atlanta.

And what do I see as I returned from dinner?

The hotel is hosting a convention from the United Federation of Doll Clubs, Inc.

There are a number of folks here, primarily middle-aged women, who apparently have not grown out of playing with dolls.

The idea that some of these folks would come together to form a club so they can talk about and show their dolls is odd enough. But, moreover, that these clubs would feel the need to band together to form a Federation just boggles the mind.

This country is in the deepest economic trouble in decades, and these people are playing with dolls.

A Tale of Two Tails....

2009-07-11T07:48:00.004-07:00

From ABC

h/t Ace.

Not for nothing, but Zero is doing something that every male does (and especially Sarkozy). The problem here is not that he looked at an attractive young woman, but that he got caught. ABC ought to be ashamed of the lengths they go to explain what is plainly a glance at the young woman.

Moreover, Michelle Obama gets far too much credit for her looks. The left and the media (but I repeat myself) still fawn over Jackie Kennedy, and Michelle Obama is their current incarnation of her. You would think that someone on her staff would know a way to diplomaticly ask The Most Beautiful Woman Evar if she really wanted to be in a position to be photographed wearing this ensemble....

Also, Michelle, famous as she is for her own Arms Race, appears to be putting on weight. Perhaps Zero is noticing too.

OK. So I went to a Tea Party yesterday.....

2009-07-05T07:45:00.005-07:00

There were two Tea Parties in the Phoenix area yesterday: One, which included a half mile "protest march" at 4:30 in the afternoon in downtown Phoenix, and the other, at 8:30am on the lawn of the Municipal Building in nearby Gilbert. Guess which one I went to?

Some observations, in no particular order.....

It's hard to tell, and I'm certainly no expert, but I'm guessing there were a couple of thousand people in attendance.
The media were there too. Channel 3 and Channel 12 had TV trucks there, and I have to imagine the print media was there too, but I'll be damned if I can find a mention of it at azcentral.com.

[Edit: At one point, I had an embeded video here from one of the local news outfits. I have removed it though, because it was one of those videos that starts on its own, and every time you opened this webpage, the damned thing would play. I've decided I hate that.]
Some thoughts on crowd composition...... It was almost exclusively, at least to my eyes, white. This will lead the real racists of the world to again shout "Racism!", but it is really more of a racial, rather than racism point.

A white crowd is both good and bad. But first, a caveat: This is the East Valley we're talking about here. The Phoenix metro area has a black population, but compared to other areas, it is relatively small. We do have a hispanic population, but neither were represented at the rally. On the all-white crowd I saw, the good: That mainstream middle-class Americans--the Silent Majority--are inspired to take to the streets is an expression of the frustration this otherwise sedentary group. The bad: Having a broader appeal is necessary. That the liberals and the Democrats have succeeded in dishing deals to their constituent groups is a problem this movement needs to address.

The crowd was also largely composed of middle-aged (and older) folks. This too has a good and bad view. Older folks are more reliable voters, and the politicians know this. But it would be better to have a coalition (Hey! A Lefty word!) across the age groups.

I wasn't thrilled with some of the groups that were there. The NRA had a table there, which I obviously don't mind, and there were a scattering of "Sign My Petition" tables and folks selling t-shirts, etc. But there was also a group there who are pissed off about the speed cameras (which, as I understand it, issues fines but not points), and the John Birch Society. When a fringe movement has its own fringe elements, it is easy to paint the whole thing as nutty.
Taxes are a high interest item. Given that this was Gilbert, there was more than a little discussion of a Gilbert (sales?) tax under consideration. The politicians had better know that more taxes are going to be a difficult sell. There were many signs opposed to Cap and Trade.
The message the Republican party ought to be listening to is this: The conservative segment is done watching you compromise with the liberals. The support we gave to the big government "compassionate conservatives" is over. Sen. McCain was boo-ed (no surprise there), and Rep. Flake--who is otherwise a very fiscally prudent representative--was damaged by missing the vote on Cap and Trade. By design, no elected representatives, at any level, were invited to speak.
Lots of folks made homemade signs--there was even a table set up for you to do it there. My favorite: "Chains You Can Believe In" (I don't mean to imply this was taken at the Gilbert rally....I got if off the web.)

I never was much of a Republican. I left the party back in the 90's when George H.W. Bush reneged on his "No New Taxes" pledge and began the Assault Weapons Ban bandwagon rolling. I voted for Ross Perot, and for my sins, we ended up with Bill Clinton. I only re-entered the party last year in order to vote for Fred Thompson in the Republican primary. But I'm pretty well convinced that I'll be leaving the Republicans again. I understand that the political parties have a stranglehold on things, but I'm hopeful that a third way can find success. I'll explore the Constitution Party, but will probably re-register as a Libertarian.

Somehow you had to know this was coming.....

2009-07-04T13:36:00.002-07:00

Mrs. Obama bringing glamor to Moscow this weekend

This Independence Day weekend, if you hadn't noticed.

Sarah Palin's Resignation....

2009-07-03T20:22:00.003-07:00

Back when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, I thought: "Perfect. Someone who is a real conservative--not some 'Maverick'--and who actually lives her principles." Then, when McCain suspended his campaign over the economic crisis, I thought that it was over (and I think I commented somewhere to that effect.).

[As a digression, and on later reflection, based on this very open and compelling video, maybe suspending the campaign was prudent. Note the timeline here...the run on the bank Kanjorski speaks of happened Sept. 15, and McCain suspended his campaign Sept. 24.]

Anyway, I remember thinking that when McCain pulled that stunt, prudent or not, that he was done.

Regarding Palin's future, I was really pumped when the NRA announced it was honoring Palin with a specially made .50Beowolf M4. I thought: "That's it. She's running, and she's running as an in-your-face conservative." However, after she demurred from attending, I then thought "OK. Maybe that's a smart move. Why make half of America suspicious of you?"

So anyway, today, when Palin announced her resignation, I had that same sort of feeling that I had when McCain suspended his campaign. Maybe she's just trying to put an end to these ceaseless and baseless attacks on her and her family. For that reason alone, I can understand the resignation. But as a political move, I'm not so sure. Maybe this is a totally out-of-the-box approach that she'll find that this will work for her--I certainly hope so. But she may have shot herself in the foot here too.

Exactly the healthcare we don't need.....

2009-07-01T19:48:00.002-07:00

IBD: Where will Canada send its preemies and other critical patients when we adopt their health care system?

h/t Kevin.

Guess who?

2009-06-28T10:47:00.003-07:00

....Neal is on his Soapbox over?

"....This man has no idea of what it means to be an American. He cares nothing for the principles which made this country what it is. He shows no respect for the sacrifices made by our servicemen in the defense of our freedoms and liberty. And he cares less than spit about the document that he swore an oath to uphold...."

OK. Its not that hard.

h/t Theo.

On The Occasional Perks of a Bad Schedule

2009-06-28T09:35:00.004-07:00

I don't often write about my work life. If done well--or at least as I define "well"--being an airline pilot is boring and lonely. I like the work, but am tired of the travel, if that makes any sense. If I ever find myself making a call to my wife to tell her about my exciting day at work, it will be the last thing either one of us wants. And because she is my best friend, not seeing her half the month brings a sense of aloneness.

The system by which we bid our schedules was changed recently. "Change" may be too harsh a verb..."tweak" might be better. I had had my bidding strategy pretty much on "automatic pilot" month-to-month, and have gotten used to a schedule which fits my needs. I haven't put the time to understand these new tweaks well enough to make use of their strengths...maybe next month. Anyway, this new change/tweak, in combination with the regular seasonal variations of an airline schedule (summers are always busier than winters) and the industry trying to react to a declining economy has left me with lesser quality schedules than I have been used to. I'm not complaining, mind you, just noting that things aren't as good as they once were.

Anyway, this month has been especially taxing. I have a flying schedule of 16 days...which is about normal. On top of that, however, I was away for 4 days for our annual recurrent training. I spent the two days immediately preceding that recurrent in a financial seminar. (And I finally came to understand the material well enough to think that I am done going to these seminars. Now to translate that knowledge into my trading accounts!) And rather than go home after recurrent, I spend the Father's Day weekend with my ailing father for what I believe may be his last Father's Day. Immediately following that, I launched off on another trip.

All told, I have been able to be home 6 days this month. Wifeof- and Sonof- and Dau#2ofAzlib have been wonderful for me. The chores I normally take care of--the yardwork, the pool care, the ironing--have been taken care of by my family. If you're a reader who works 5 days a week and has 8 or 9 days of "weekend" a month, then 6 days may not sound like much, but my life is structured on 14-16 days off each month. Six days of down time hasn't been enough.

And because I'm not bidding well, the trips I've flown this month aren't particularly great either. By that I mean I am flying all-night trips. Some guys totally hate this type of trip, but I'm not one of them (yet). We have a "Quiet Room" where I am based, and I've found that if I can spend an hour or two in a recliner in a dark room with my earplugs in, then I can function for an all-night flight. Its not easy: That nap is crucial, and I have to drink coffee, and plan to eat and stand up to get my blood flowing in order to stay awake, but it is "do-able". I've had three of these all-night trips this month which have had me leaving my west coast base some time between 10pm and midnight and arriving in New York between 5:30am and 8am.

Anyway, last night we found ourselves watching the sun rise in the last hour of our flight. I'm not much of an astronomer, but I have flown enough at night to recognize some of the bigger constellations, as well as Venus and Mars. But last night, right before sunrise, and as we were over western New York, we were able to see what we took was the International Space Station. You can track it here.

A busy month half-full of crappy trips does have it's opportunity for a perk.

Count me as more than a.....

2009-06-26T18:24:00.002-07:00

Little pissed off.

My congressman, Jeff Flake, missed the vote on the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill.

Not that it matters, as the bill passed 219-212, so his vote would have made it 219-213.

But.....

I took the effort to call his Arizona office this morning to speak out on this issue. The woman who took my call was receptive, but as is usually the case, she didn't offer anything back.

And tonight I found out the reason: Flake was watching his daughter compete in the America's Junior Miss competition.

Don't get me wrong: I really, really like Jeff Flake. Everybody likes their congressman, but I don't just like him because he represents me. He has been one of the best guys around for quite some time.

[A personal point: Flake lives in my neighborhood. This daughter is a senior at the high school that my three kids attended. I see him at our neighborhood gym. And Flake selected a drawing my oldest daughter did when she was a high school senior for the Congressional Art Competition. Her drawing hung in Congress for a year, and it was a high honor for both her and our family.]

I'll give the guy his due....family is important, and I have no doubt that this Junior Miss is a big deal. Being there for his daughter is something any father would want to do.

But this Cap and Trade bill is important for all of us--his daughter included. It will crush our economy in a misdirected aim of saving our environment. There are too many loopholes to be effective as a environmental tool, making the whole thing a stupid exercise.

Flake is still a good guy, but he should have voted. Even given that the bill apparently has a slim chance in the Senate, he should have found a way to be there for the vote. I'm going to remember this.

"Stop spending our future"....

2009-06-24T03:19:00.002-07:00

Ummm, Yep. Can't argue with one word.

h/t Sine Nominee, seen via Glenn, so he doesn't need my traffic.

Hard hats and tie tacs.....

2009-06-23T20:35:00.007-07:00

I guess there are occasions where a hard hat is seen with a tie tac...an architect visiting a work site perhaps...but they usually don't have much in common.

However, on a visit through Drudge's site, I saw this story on some hard hats distributed by the AFL-CIO on Capital Hill to make some pro-union point. The problem being: the hard hats are made in China. The union tried to excuse this with....

"Obviously our policy is to only use union vendors and it was a mistake by a new staffer who ordered them and unfortunately wasn't caught before they went out."

[Hmmmm. "New staffer". That has a familiar ring.]

So how the connection to tie tacs?

As you can see from the upper left, I am an airline pilot. With that, I am also a union member....in my case, the Air Line Pilots Association.

And for an airline pilot union member, wearing a union tie tac is important to many of us. For those who don't know, in the build up to a contract, a great deal is made of solidarity among the union, and getting everyone to wear the tie tac is one of the favored methods of measuring and demonstrating that solidarity.

The ALPA tie tac comes with numbers denoting the number of years you have been a member. 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.

I may have written about this long ago....if I did, I didn't tag it, so its back in the archives somewhere. Anyway, when I went through 20 years, the union sent me a nice note with my new 20 year pin.

And here it is.....

Click the image for a larger view.

I wrote the union making the same "You've-got-to-be-kidding-me...sending-me-a-union-pin-made-in-China" complaint and got pretty much the same response--Mistakes are made.

I hope you can see why I don't--and won't--wear my union pin any longer.

Ok....here's the thing.......

2009-06-22T16:42:00.004-07:00

Like everybody else in the world, I've got a couple of gay acquaintances, and even a distant relative who is a lesbian.

That said, I'm as straight as the day is long. Not a gay bone in my body. [Awright, awright... I'll dispense with the double entrendes.]

But if ever I was to have a man-crush, it would have to be with this guy.

And yeah, it turns out to be a pitch for somebody, and I'm real close to becoming a gold bug myself, but the rant is beautiful, man. Beautiful.

h/t Gerard.

Good Gawd.....

2009-06-12T20:16:00.003-07:00

I had one of these as a kid.

Yep. That was one fine Christmas, I'll tell you.

At one point, I also had a toy meant to be a version of one of these.....

No wonder I'm a bit twisted (like the barrel of a rifle. I keed! I keed!)and have a gun-safe full of metal.

However, those were the days when boys did not play with dolls, so for as macho as they were, Dad didn't allow my brother and I have any G.I. Joes. They were little more than Barbies, and I think I have to agree. It is better to emulate adult life with toys than to imagine toys playing with other toys....if that makes any sense.

I guess that today's video game generation makes that point even more pointedly....what with middle and high schools using the Wii platform in their gym classes, we have accepted the idea that we can simulate doing something as well as actually doing it. I mean what's better: Handing a kid a tennis racket and a ball, or handing him a video controller so he can simulate playing tennis?

Anyhoo, this trip down memory lane is all thanks to a small item I saw at DirectorBlue having been pointed there by Gerard.

A(nother) random thought....

2009-06-09T10:17:00.006-07:00

On my way back from grabbing my lunch today, this picture popped into mind. Lots of folks on the intertubes and the blogododecahedron were talking about it the other day. Glenn got it from Drudge. Ann ran a caption contest. Pretty much everybody spoke about it. I dunno know why it came to mind today. It just did.

Now, I'm on long record here has being less-than-impressed with Michelle Obama. She strikes me, more than anything, as an angry woman. I've felt that way all the way back to her days of "not being proud of her country", and her admonishment that "Barack Obama will require you to work." The extravagant inauguration ceremonies--which cost far more than the previous record did--and last week's "date night" to NYC strike me as things that Michelle had her hand in.

I get many of my viewers here through images searches for Michelle Obama wearing what I call her "Black Widow" dress. [The image I ~~used~~ stole for that purpose is now gone into the internet black hole, but you get the idea.]

I wondered then, and still wonder: Why would she wear this dress? Especially after we had previously asked: "What's So Scary About Michelle Obama?"

Anyhoo, what popped into mind today was the flash that there is a bit of history between Carla Bruni (wife of French President Nicholas Sarkozy) and Michelle Obama.

"...Carla Bruni will stay away from the summit, preferring to meet Michelle Obama in Strasbourg. The Élysée Palace told The Times that Ms Bruni would not be among the 16 spouses who will accompany their partners to London for events hosted by Sarah Brown and a reception at Buckingham Palace.

Instead the first ladies of the United States and France will meet at a European summit on Saturday, in what inevitably will be seen as a snub to London...."

Lots of readings of the meanings behind the fashion and body language here, here and here.

I'm thinking that that look--like her "not proud" comment and her belief that Barack will drive us from our cynicism,--reveals more about the inner Michelle than she would like us to know.

I'm guessing that...

2009-06-09T08:05:00.005-07:00

...The Secretary of the Treasury will create a new
"Bureau of How-Much-You-Ought-to-be-Paid".

How long before this Bureau is not limiting itself to executive compensation? How long before companies find a way around their limitations? How long would it be before we'd see companies' talent pool go John Galt because of these limitiations? How would the Bureau be better than the Boards of Directors, the stockholders--the Market for executive talent--at determining how someone should be paid?

In short: What could possibly go wrong?

h/t OptionArmegeddon

O/T: The NYT link to the SecTreas plan to regulate executive compensation has on its sidebar this story from the "Moral of the Story" column entitled "Give Women Guns". The author, Randy Cohen, we're told has 5 Emmys, one of which he "received [...] as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it." We're also told his Moral of the Story column is one where "he will examine a news story from an ethical perspective." He is also--no kidding--a humorist.

One question: How is it ethical to keep an item gained through a clerical error? Or is that supposed to be humor?

And were I less busy this week, I might try to fisk this thing, but right now I'm overwhelmed.

Obama in Cairo on Islam....

2009-06-05T20:10:00.002-07:00

I confess to not having watched His (sic) speech in its entirety, but I've seen enough to know that I'm not impressed.

Neither is Amir Taheri of the New York Post. A snippet.....

President Obama's "address to the Muslim world" was a masterwork of equivocation and political naiveté.

Lots of commentators have already debunked Zero's acknowlegment of "civilization's debt to Islam"--"the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing." However, what caught my eye was when Zero repeated one of the reliable canards of the Left: "Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world."

The war in Iraq was not a "war of choice". We brought the matter to the U.N. and were able to get the U.N. Security Council to vote unanimously that, among other things, "the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations".

The Congress fully debated the question of going to war with Iraq. The Iraq War Authorization passed the House 297-133 (including 82 Democrats voting in favor) and the Senate 77-23. More Democrat Senators voted for the Resolution than voted against it (29 voting for; 21 voting against). Included in those Senators voting for what Zero calls a "war of choice" are his Vice President, who was "perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that oil-rich country" and Zero's Secretary of State, who, in her then-capacity as a Senator, also voted for the Resolution.

It is an outrage that Zero would go onto foreign soil (not to mention Islamic foreign soil) and cast the Iraq War as a little-debated question, decided upon rashly, and without adequate consideration for other methods of solving the Iraq problem. The world and this country fully looked at the problem we faced in Iraq, and openly decided on a course of action.

That Zero disageed with that decision, and was in the minority at the time, does not make it now a "War of choice".

Humbled....

2009-06-02T08:09:00.002-07:00

I left a comment over in Cowboy Blob's weekly caption contest, and frankly, what with our anniversary trip and everything else going on right now, I'd forgotten about it.

And lo, and behold, I won! Thanks, Blob!

You and me both, Baxter....

2009-05-29T20:03:00.002-07:00

Oh, yeah. One of my secret aspirations is to one day grow me one of those awesome mustaches. It'd prolly look like hell on me, but if Wilford Brimley can pull it off, I don't know why I couldn't too.

H/T Gerard.

Shooting Goals....

2009-05-29T17:27:00.002-07:00

In which I totally rip off the idea from ExurbanKevin.

Here are mine....complete with my excuses pre-attached.

Get to a match once a month....minimum. I enjoy the Tuesday night Sundowner IDPA match over at Phoenix Rod & Gun Club, but it always seems as though there is something that keeps me from my once-a-month ideal. A year ago it was $4/gallon gasoline. My schedule as an airline pilot generally allows me to select one or two days a month that I am guaranteed to be home for, but by the time you put in birthdays, holidays, and other events, making a "Me" day sometimes seems kinda selfish.
Improve my shooting--which would be the result of any or all of these. My motto, if you will, is: "Surround yourself with excellent people, and then hope one day to be average." With that, I don't mind being among the last guys at the IDPA match. I figure most of these guys are shooting at least one match a week, and given that I show up once a month (if that), then I'm doing OK. But I still would like to improve. It sucks to be last. I went to the state IDPA match last year and despite a more rigorous preparation, I still sucked and was disappointed that I did.
Related to getting to a match and improving my shooting is that I should get to a IDPA classifier. June would be good, but it will probably have to be later than that. I've got recurrent in June and still need some serious preparation to finish for that, so a June filled with shooting prolly ain't gonna happen.
And Kevin is right: Losing weight would help. In my case, I should be 25 pounds lighter than I am. This too requires a dedication to the gym that I have spent the last 52 years avoiding.
Dry firing would be good too.
Start reloading. Ammo is getting very hard to find. Couple that with part of me that believes we may be headed to very difficult times (Data point #1, data point #2, data point #3. I could go on, but you get the idea.) and I'm left with the dilemma that every round I practice with today might be a round I might need to shoot tomorrow.

Not long after I got my press, I managed to score some small pistol primers and a small supply of bullets, I just ordered some powder, and of course, I've got tons of brass. But putting it all together and actually doing it is just Another-Thing-To-Do.

I've had a standing request (along with about every other shooter) for 10k small rifle primers since last December, but I don't really have a hope that they'll be delivered. [And I certainly don't have enough .223 ammo to begin the habit of regularly shooting my AR-15.]

I really ought to get started with the reloading...the last .40 ammo I bought was outrageously expensive at the time, and lead bullets. I have found that these leave traces of lead in the polygonally rifled barrels of my HK USP (and will probably do the same on my Glock). I've got copper-clad bullets for the reloading, but only a thousand, so keeping a supply of more of these should become a priority.
Oh, yeah. I would like to start Three-Gun and get to a formal course too. Not gonna happen anytime soon though.

MIA....

2009-05-29T08:20:00.002-07:00

WifeofAzlib and I are away celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary.

We've been in Napa for the last couple of days. While we're neither wine conniseurs nor even much of wine drinkers, we've had a great time. We toured the Castello Di Amorosa, and enjoyed it very much....even bought 6 bottles of their wines. Yesterday we had a fabulous time and a wonderful meal on the Napa Valley Wine Train...highly recommended. We've stayed at the Vino Bello Resort, which appears to be a timeshare, but have had a wonderful room....fireplace, full kitchen, large jacuzzi bath, enormous shower and comfort everywhere. It doesn't look like much from the outside, and the location isn't the best, but we've enjoyed the place thoroughly.

Today, we're headed down to Monterey and Carmel where we will meet with some friends for lunch and are looking forward to our stay at the Intercontinental Clement.