Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

Let's make every Congressional race in November a national race. Make Obama Pelosi and Reid fight for every seat. Make them fight for every seat!

The poll you see above is one small weapon in our battle.

This summer, something beautiful was born in the patriotic blogosphere. Blogger Conscientiously Conservative realized that if she brought her lunch to work twice a week, she would have enough extra in her budget to send $10 per week to a deserving conservative candidate. She posted her resolve on her blog, and one woman's commitment has blossomed into Ten Buck Fridays.

Ten Buck Fridays is a weekly, mini moneybomb project hosted by over 80 blogs. Each Sunday, we post a new poll with a great roster of candidates; people vote for the candidate they'd like to see receive a moneybomb, the winner is announced late Thursday/Friday (depending on your time zone), and folks are encouraged to contact the candidate directly and donate what they can. There is no middleman, and no national party apparatus. The only request is that donors mention Ten Buck Fridays somewhere on the donation form.

More information on each of these candidates can be found at Right Klik, who is doing yeoman's work collecting nominations and putting together the new poll each week.

Ten Buck Fridays: It's Renee Ellmers!

This week was a photo finish between two great candidates, and the winner was Renee Ellmers, running to replace Bob Etheridge in North Carolina's 2nd Congressional District. That's him in the video above, in case you've forgotten his impromptu al fresco reprise of the classic song by The Who, "Who Are You."

If you happen to be in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday, August 27, there's a fish fry reception at Wing Tip Farm honoring Renee Ellmers for Congress, donations are accepted at the door.

If you can't make it to Wing Tip Farm, please visit Renee Ellmers' website and donate what you can to this worthy candidate.

Make Obama Pelosi and Reid fight for every seat in November. Make them fight for every seat.

Let them eat shrimp!

For such a scrawny guy, Obama sure does form a protective crouch over his food. Here he is on the campaign trail in 2008, evading questions about Hamas' recent endorsement of his candidacy by focusing on his waffle:

California declares war on France

California's multi-billion dollar high speed rail boondoggle just got funnier. Assembly Bill 619, which would require companies seeking contracts for California's high speed rail project to disclose involvement in deportations to concentration camps during World War II and subsequent restitution efforts, passed the legislature yesterday and is now on the Governor's desk.

According to the press release from the bill's author, Assemblymember Bob Blumenfield (D-San Fernando Valley), the bill is designed to frustrate involvement by one company:

Blumenfield said the impetus for his bill was one company expected to bid for the high speed rail work, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF), a French rail company that had direct involvement in the Holocaust.

I am no great fan of the French, but SNCF operates a great rail system, and to bar SNCF from bidding on the California project because of something they did 60 years ago while occupied by the Nazis is ludicrous.

Speaking of involuntary transportation during World War II, how many American companies were involved in the transportation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II? Should they be allowed to build a high speed rail in California? Assemblymember Blumenfield, do you have selective memory or did someone who wants to increase their chance of getting the contract by eliminating the French from consideration whisper in your ear?

Calling all Californians: please contact the Governor and ask that he not waste any time on absurd bills like this while California citizens wait in vain for a budget and a solution to the state's pressing fiscal problems.

Did I miss the Resident Evil 5 beer summit?

Capcom, the maker of last year's hit video game Resident Evil 5, pledges "increased cultural sensitivity" in response to allegations that the game is racist. Tip of the hat to Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood for bringing this to my attention, because I was completely unaware of the missed opportunity for a Video Game Beer Summit in the Rose Garden.

In summary, the Resident Evil 5 game requires you to kill lots of zombies, most of whom happen to be, in this iteration of the game, Black Africans. Evan Narcisse at IFC.com writes: "...the bugged-out eyes and animalistic savagery of the zombie attackers in "Resident Evil 5" reminded me of racist imagery used to perpetuate stereotypes and ignorance about black people."

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not play video games. I have enough trouble with the real people in my life to worry about digital people on my screen, and I have not played Resident Evil 5. But having read Evan Narcisse's lament, I surmise that he must be a bigger racist than I, because when I think of bugged-out eyes and animalistic savagery my thoughts turn immediately to zombies rather than black people. In addition, bugged-out eyes and animalistic savagery tend to be the threshold requirements for fictional depictions of zombiehood, and I shudder to think what effect Capcom's cultural sensitivity is going to have on the enjoyable and lucrative cathartic violence of its games. Presumably the chattering classes would be OK if the next Resident Evil video game featured a progressive hero taking out zombies at a Tea Party?

As Jim Sterling at Destructoid noted,

If anything, Capcom's latest in the Resident Evil series proves only one thing -- that we can never have something involving black people that won't cause a race debate. That's pretty fucking sad if you ask me. If we lived in a world that these anti-racist folks claim to want, then we would be working towards having a game like Resident Evil 5 that could be released without the controversy. If only we were mature enough and capable of seeing a game set in Africa without clicking our heels together and hoping to find some juicy racism to be upset about.

Even if we don't find that racism, we'll invent it.

With film-makers and video game designers afraid to have a black character do anything objectionable, black actors will soon be relegated to playing only that infamous cultural trope of White Guilt, the Magical Negro.

Albany takes its cut. Literally.

If you get too cold/I'll tax the heat

---Taxman, by The Beatles

Luckily for The Beatles, they wrote the lyrics to Taxman before the tax authorities in New York State decided that the pass of a knife is a taxable event. Imagine the lyrical challenge: what rhymes with cut? With slice?

New Yorkers, already on edge from the salt poured into September 11th's wound by a media-whore imam and his historically illiterate enablers, now find one of their cultural touchstones under assault from tax authorities in Albany.

In Disney, you don't mess with the Mouse; in New York, you don't mess with the bagel. And Albany is messing with the bagel.

As first reported in the Wall Street Journal, in New York's screwy tax code, whole bagels are not subject to sales tax....unless they are eaten in the store, in which case they are subject to the sales tax. Yeah, how the hell does that work? Sales tax is collected at the register, and bagels are generally received after payment; how does the clerk know whether to charge sales tax or not? Do they grill you about your intentions for the bagel? And under the circumstances, who wouldn't lie? "No, of course I do not plan to consume the bagel on the premises." Step away from the counter, take a bite, and you're a tax cheat! What an opportunity for tax protest: "take a bite out of this tax!"

A law which suggests its own opportunity for civil disobedience through political theater is unlikely to win the respect of anyone, much less a New Yorker.

In addition, bagels that are sliced, regardless of whether they receive a shmear or sandwich fillings, are taxed. This tripped up at least one bagel shop, which was collecting tax on the bagels-as-building-blocks but not collecting tax on bagels that were sliced but otherwise unadorned. This is not an insignificant distinction. If you've ever been tasked with picking up a few dozen bagels, you know how nice it is to have the shop slice the bagels.

So if you leave a New York bagelry with a dozen whole bagels in a bag, you don't pay a tax (unless you take a bite of one on your way out the door, in which case you are a tax cheat). If you have the shop slice the bagels, you pay a tax.

And if you leave a California bagelry with a dozen bagels in a bag, with rare exception they are not bagels at all. They're rolls with holes in them.

Smallest. Frog. Ever.

School of hard knocks

If you've ever spent a Personal Day on the couch watching daytime television, you've seen commercials for for-profit "career colleges" designed to train people for entry-level jobs in medical offices and industrial settings. These career colleges advertise heavily during the day, presumably to reach an audience whose consumption of daytime television is involuntary or financially sub-optimal. Training programs like this are a great idea; vocational education has been eliminated from the public school system in a well-meaning but wrong-headed effort to herd everyone into a liberal arts education, and high school graduates who (for whatever reason) aren't on the college track wake up the morning after high school graduation with very few skills that any employer needs. In addition, career colleges can help older workers acquire skills for new jobs.

At least, in the perfect world career colleges will serve those functions. However, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported that these career colleges have drawn the attention of federal agencies, including the Department of Education and the Government Accountability Office, for their use of student loan money and for "aggressive marketing tactics." According to the Journal, proposed rules will penalize career colleges that graduate students with high debt loads by restricting career colleges' access to federal student loan money. Government aid is the lifeblood of all post-secondary education; cut off the loan money, and the students will stay away.

If there are institutions promising students valuable job skills but sending graduates into the world with heavy debt loads and no skills of value to an employer, that's a problem that might reasonably be looked into, especially if federal funds are being used. However, why confine the inquiry to for-profit career colleges? Why not open a formal investigation into the federal aid directed at non-profit liberal arts colleges, and the debt loads of their graduates?

Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee and Instapundit has blogged and columned about the non-profit higher education bubble, fueled by easy access to student loan money and a belief that a liberal arts education is an investment that will pay lifelong returns. In his recent Washington Examiner column, he notes that families' expenditures on college education have increased 439% since 1982. He also mentioned the case of 26 year old Courtney Munna, who graduated from New York University with $100,000 in student loan debt and a degree in Religious and Women's Studies which does not equip her to earn the level of income necessary to pay off her debt.

Yep, Religious and Women's Studies sounds near the top of any list of college majors predictive of future employment at Starbucks. Others would include Philosophy, Peace and Justice Studies, (really, any major which ends with the word "Studies,") and English.

If the Department of Education and the General Accountability Office are serious, they will not pretend that for-profit career colleges are the only institutions taking students' money and providing no marketable skills in return. The real scandal is the extent to which the educational-industrial complex has seized the narrative and made a liberal arts education seem to be a precondition for respectability and success, focusing attention and funds on college prep (read: liberal arts college prep) and shortchanging students whose talents and interests lie elsewhere.

What has your government done for you lately?

Answer: They've made the interest rates on your credit cards go up.

Up until recently, banks could tailor the cost of credit to the risk
of default by raising or lowering interest rates on customers based on
the customers' credit-worthiness and financial condition, and
assessing steep penalties on customers who breach their agreements by
paying late or not paying at all. And why shouldn't they be able to?
Credit cards are collateral-free lines of credit, tremendously
valuable to the customer and potentially very risky to the bank; in
order to ease access to credit on the front end, and allow people to
obtain cards without the time commitment and document production
required for other loan products such as, say, mortgages, banks made
the entry barriers low and then slammed you when you broke the
agreement. And that's the way it should be. The greatest possible
number of customers benefit from easy access to credit, and the
greatest possible share of the systemic costs of customer default are
borne by the defaulting customers themselves.

At least that's the way it used to work. Last year, in response to
scattered customer complaints and a general desire to impose
communitarian versions of "fairness" on the financial sector, Congress
passed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure
Act (Card Act), which reduces banks' ability to accurately price risk
and penalize default. As a result, banks have less flexibility to
raise interest rates on customers once they've opened a credit card
account, and less ability to impose meaningful penalties on customers
who default.

What happens when banks can't recover the cost of default from the
defaulting customers? Bingo, they recover the cost from all customers,
including those who use credit wisely and comply with the terms of
their agreements. Banks started raising their credit card interest
rates before the Card Act's interest rate provisions took effect in
February, they've been quicker to reduce credit lines, and access to
credit is becoming more difficult. Card Act provisions limiting the
imposition of penalties took effect this past Sunday, so the
tightening of consumer credit is only going to accelerate.

The Card Act's sponsor, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), remarked: "Better that
consumers should know up-front what the interest rate is, even if it
is higher, than to be soaked on the back end by tricks and hidden
fees." In other words, let's spread the wealth around; people who
read agreements before entering into them, and who keep their
financial bargains, are going to bear the financial burdens of people
who default. Because in the Left's twisted version of fairness,
making everyone suffer equally is only fair.

I've never been "soaked on the back end by tricks and hidden fees" by
a credit card company; I'm not lucky, I read and save the disclosures.
But thanks to Carolyn Maloney, American financial illiteracy has been
codified by an act of Congress, which has eliminated what used to be a
very strong motivation to understand and remember the terms of any
financial agreement we freely enter into.

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

Ladies and gentlemen, the campaigns will begin in earnest after Labor Day. Although the generic polls suggest a strong possibility of substantial Congressional conservative victories, in order to stop the Obama-Pelosi-Reid juggernaut we've got to make them fight for every seat.

Make them fight for every seat. Leave them no quarter.

Therefore, it is my pleasure to present you with this week's Ten Buck Fridays poll, with which we will all select a candidate most deserving of our weekly mini-moneybomb. Remember, there is no middleman; when the winner is announced on Friday, you are encouraged to donate what you can to the winner, but it's entirely between you and the candidate's campaign.

More information about each of these candidates can be found at Right Klik.

Thank you for your interest and participation.

Jobs saved, created...or borrowed?

On Wednesday, Obama showed us why "good enough for government work" is
not good enough at all.

Obama used his visit to the Columbus home of architect Joe Weithman to
sing the praises of the stimulus program, noting that Weithman's
workplace, Mull & Weithman Architects, received $300,000 in stimulus
funds to work on "a new police station."

A stirring story, except that the project is not funded with stimulus
funds at all. It's funded by a Congressional earmark.

I don't expect the Administration to walk this back. Rather, look for
the Administration to start claiming more and more non-stimulus-funded
jobs as stimulus success stories by deploying a new, more inclusive
term: jobs saved, created, or borrowed.

Kudos to the Columbus Dispatch for tracking down and publishing the
facts; further evidence that the media are recovering from their Obama
swoon.

Ten Buck Fridays: It's Delia Lopez!

Friends, it's about to begin. Summer is almost over, and as soon as we're done with our Labor Day picnicking the politicking will begin in earnest for the November elections. Make Pelosi Reid and Obama fight for every seat. Make them fight for every seat.

The winner in this week's moneybomb is Delia Lopez, running in Oregon's 3rd Congressional District. Please visit Delia Lopez's website and donate what you can to this worthy candidate. Please don't forget to mention Ten Buck Fridays somewhere on the online donation form, in the occupation field or under "special instructions to seller" if you are using PayPal.

A new poll will be up on Sunday. Thank you for your participation and support.

Environmental purity for thee, but not for me

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the city of San
Francisco is going to seek a legislative exemption from the strict
rules of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in order to
host the America's Cup yacht race.

Back in February, Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison's BMW
Oracle Racing Team won the America's Cup, and Ellison wants to defend
the title in San Francisco. The city has a limited time frame in
which to put together a proposal to host the Cup, but compliance with
CEQA review and standards will make it impossible to meet the
deadline, if not scuttle plan to bring the Cup to San Francisco
altogether. Of course the exemption is going to framed in terms of
jobs, jobs, jobs; 9,000 jobs and $1.4 billion in economic activity
will allegedly result from hosting the America's Cup.

Funny that San Francisco is going to seek an exemption from burdensome
environmental regulations in the name of jobs, when California's
environmental policies have been driving jobs out of California for
decades. California environmentalists and energy policy-makers (as if
there is a difference between the two) triumphantly proclaim that
California's per capita energy usage has remained flat while the rest
of the nation's usage has grown; what they omit to mention is that
we've kept energy usage flat by driving heavy industry out of the
state. When heavy industry relocates out of state, it takes a lot of
jobs with it.

Remarkably, it's about to get a lot worse in California. Under the
guise of protecting the environment, California's elected officials
and unelected bureaucrats are going forward with a burdensome version
of the same cap and tax energy policy that even Congress has had the
wisdom to shun, and as a result it's about to become even more
expensive to live in the Golden State. With the web of different
industrial, zoning, and energy policies taking effect in California,
all of us little people are going to have to pay more to heat and cool
our homes, renovate our homes, buy cars, drive cars to and from our
homes, and sell our homes when we come to our senses and decide to
flee the state. We are promised a double-whammy of benefits from
these policies, both a cleaner environment and clean energy jobs for
Californians, although so far the Chinese manufacturers of solar
panels and wind turbines seem to be the main beneficiaries of our
policy. Increasing amounts of Californians' money is about to be
redistributed to favored industries by government bureaucrats, and
unless you work for one of the favored industries, are Larry Ellison,
or are a Chinese manufacturer, California's policies are going to make
you worse off.

California energy policy seems inspired by Josef Stalin, who said that
one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic; the
thought that we might lose the temoporary economic boost from the
America's Cup is causing some Californians to favor jettisoning our
strict environmental rules, while the enforcement of those same rules
against more anonymous businesses and citizens day after day is
causing economic hardship for millions of Californians.

New Discovery series on elite military training programs

Set your DVRs for Monday nights at 10 pm.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to be an Army Ranger or a Marine Sniper? A new Discovery Channel series, "Surviving the Cut," will take us inside the training programs of some of the military's elite units. Assuming none of McChrystal's media liaisons were involved, this series promises a fascinating glimpse inside the crucibles where our warriors are made.

This post 100% marriage and mosque free

As widely reported, and against express U.S. wishes, Russia will begin fueling Iran's controversial Bushehr nuclear power plant next week.

What will Israel do? Will there be a Israeli military air strike, a raid on the sun* like the one against Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981? If Israel is going to take out the facility, she needs to act soon, before the fuel is loaded; we won't have to wait long to find out how this story ends.

(* I highly recommend Raid on the Sun, Rodger Claire's excellent account of the Israeli air strike against the Iraqi nuclear plant. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who perished aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, was one of the pilots in the 1981 air strike.)

Must see video from Bill Whittle

Thanks to TheOtherMcCain for drawing attention to this devastatingly insightful commentary from Bill Whittle on PJTV. Whittle identifies parallels between the appeasement leading up to WWII and the appeasement currently practiced by the West with respect to Islam, and takes us somewhere we all need to go.

Update: available on YouTube as well as PJTV!

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

Another week, another opportunity to bring you the roster of worthy candidates under consideration for this week's conservative moneybomb. To recap:

Ten Buck Fridays is a small-d democratic moneybomb project of the patriotic blogosphere. Back in May, a blogger called Conscientiously Conservative declared her intent to donate $10 to a different worthy national Congressional candidate each week, and the concept is spreading across the web. Each week, voters decide which conservative Congressional candidate needs their support the most, and everyone is encouraged to donate what they can to the winner. There is no middleman, no national committee; anyone motivated to donate sends their support to the candidates directly. There's even a Facebook page! This is real grass roots stuff.

Votes are cumulative across all blogs hosting the poll. Results will be announced late Thursday/early Friday, depending on your time zone.

This year, let's make every Congressional race a national race; let's make the Pelosi-Reid-Obama axis fight for every seat.

Rule 5 Sundays

With apologies to The Other McCain, and with thanks to the Cheezburger Empire, here is your Rule 5 cute animal picture.

Well, it's either cute or ominous. The cat is either cuddling his bunny friend or forming a protective crouch over his dinner. Talk amongst yourselves.

I actually did vote for the Ground Zero Mosque, before I voted against it

In the oratorical tradition of Senator John Kerry, who voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it, here are the Leader of the Free World's decisive words on the question of the proposed Ground Zero Mosque:

On Friday, August 13, at a White House dinner to break the Ramadan fast, Obama stated in relevant part:

“As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

And on Saturday, August 14, Obama stated to reporters:

"I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding."

I don't know about you, but this semantic gamesmanship would have made a great Brady Bunch episode. Young Greg Brady, feeling his oats, claims that a certain act is his "right," and quotes a state statute to his parents. In return, Ma and Pa Brady and spunky housekeeper Alice begin treating Greg in a manner that they have the right to treat him, e.g., taking away his bell-bottom pants and LPs, in order to drive home the lesson that doing something does not become right just because you have a right to do it.

Of course, many pressing issues of our time were anticipated by forgotten 80's bands. To wit: The Pursuit of Happiness, in "I'm an Adult Now," which explicitly contemplated the difference between rights and right behavior when it sang: I can sleep until noon anytime I want/Though there's not many days that I do.

Unfortunately, that distinction between rights and what's right has been lost in the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque. Of course they have the right to build the Mosque there; and of course it isn't right for them to do so. It ought to be common sense that if an effort undertaken in the name of cultural reconciliation results in public outcry, you withdraw.

A modest proposal to resolve the gay marriage debate

A bill permitting unilateral no-fault divorce has passed the New York state legislature. With Governor David Patterson's signature, the last holdout will fall, and every state will permit no-fault divorce in some form.

And that right there is the heart of the problem with the gay marriage debate. At the hands of straight couples, marriage has already ceased to be the institution that opponents of gay marriage are trying to defend.

Proponents of traditional marriage are fighting an uphill battle against the damage that has already been done to the institution of marriage by 24-hour wedding chapels in Nevada, Liz Taylor and Larry King, the cult of single parenthood, and, most importantly, no-fault divorce. Although there are still (and God bless them) couples who believe the words "until Death us do part" as they utter them, the idea of marriage as an institution is extinguished when one party can end the marriage clinically and without consequence via a stack of documents presented to a judge.

I therefore submit this modest proposal to resolve the gay marriage debate in a manner that preserves the institution of marriage while putting gay couples on parity with straight couples:

The only couples who are "married" are those whose union is performed by a religious institution which does not recognize no-fault divorce, and the state will have no authority to end the marriage by no-fault divorce. Everyone else, gay or straight, whose union can be ended by no-fault divorce, has a civil union. Because, when you get right down to it, an agreement whose conditions and boundaries are determined by legislative and bureaucratic fiat is a government dictat, not an institution.

Ten Buck Fridays: It's Joel Demos!

Gotta give a guy props for an ad like this.

This week's winner of the small-d democratic moneybomb is Joel Demos, who is running against Keith Ellison in Minnesota's 5th Congressional District. Please visit Joel's website and donate what you can to this worthy candidate, and don't forget to mention Ten Buck Fridays in the online donation form; the occupation section provides a handy spot, or under "special instructions to seller" if you are using PayPal.

Keith Ellison receives donations from all over the country, let's level the playing field and support Joel Demos for Congress. H/t Just a Conservative Girl:

We can see November from our houses!

Ten Buck Fridays: This week's poll

The small-d democratic moneybomb project of the patriotic blogosphere returns; the poll for the week of August 8 is above. For additional information on each of the candidates, please visit Right Klik.

The winner will be announced at the end of the week, and everyone is encouraged to send a donation in whatever amount they can directly to the candidate.

Let's make every Congressional race in 2010 a national race!

A Million Deaths with Honor

65 years ago today, the United States dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Japan.

I visited Hiroshima in 2004 when the cherry trees were in bloom. The photo above is Ground Zero, formerly known as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall but now known as the Atomic Bomb Dome.

It was a beautiful, sunny day. There were small clusters of people with peace signs, and garlands of folded paper cranes, but my most unshakeable memory is of something I read on a display in the Hiroshima Peace Museum:

A Million Deaths With Honor.

Those were the words of the Emperor to his subjects in the waning days of the war in the Pacific Theater, that was the sacrifice he expected from military and civilian alike. A land war was coming to Japan, and the Emperor was telling a million of his subjects to die with honor.

Visitors are invited to sign a guest book as they leave. I stood there reading the entries of visitors before me, most of which were written in English. I lingered there for a while, thinking of what to say. My words would be a feather on the wind, but I was an American in Hiroshima and I felt the weight of history in that moment. It's funny, the things you remember; I can still see the pen in my hand and the lined page before me. And my thoughts, then as now: we mourn for every life lost, but if we had it to do over again, we would do it all over again.

Ten Buck Fridays: It's Donna Campbell!

The poll has closed in this week's small-d democratic moneybomb project, and Dr. Donna Campbell* has won with 27% of a record-shattering 3400 votes.

Please donate what you can to this worthy candidate. As Donna Campbell notes on her website:

Q: I can’t give much – is (whatever amount mentioned) even worth it?
A: Yes! If enough people each gave even just ten dollars, I could get my message to every voter in the 25th District through advertising, signage and mailings. Also, having lots of individual contributors helps reinforce the broad support I’ve been lucky enough to earn during the campaign.

And please don't forget to mention Ten Buck Fridays in the occupation section of the online donation form, or under "special instructions to the seller" if you are using PayPal. h/t Just a Conservative Girl:

I can see November from my house!

(* that's right "Doctor Who" fans, Doctor Donna!)

Rule 5.1 funny video

It's been a rough day. Kevin James was confirmed, and will become our next Supreme Court Justice (Paul Blart: Constitutional Cop?) Obama wants to wipe out a portion of the mortgage debt of people who have nicer houses than me. I need a laugh, do you need a laugh?

No child of any age or species can resist the allure of a muddy puddle. Enjoy.

I thought that I should never see a life worth taking o'er a tree

Ladies and gentlemen, Muslims are now killing Jews over landscaping.

Tensions flared on the Israeli-Lebanese border this week when the Lebanese military, objecting to Israel's tree-trimming activities on the border, opened fire on the Israeli soldiers. Israel fired back, but has since spoken carefully in an obvious attempt at de-escalation. In a remarkable turn of events, the United Nations has not issued a condemnation of Israel's aggressive gardening techniques, instead noting that the tree in question was on Israel's side of the border.

I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever between the Lebanese soldiers' itchy trigger fingers and the fact that the investigation into the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is almost complete, and the report will implicate Shi'a Muslims. Only the most cynical observer would note the fact that Rafik Hariri was a Sunni, and that his assassination by Shi'a will probably plunge Lebanon into a civil war, and that one sure-fire way to bring Muslims together and avert a civil war is to set up a strawman of Israeli aggression and have everybody coalesce around the idea of killing Jews rather than killing each other.

Fortunately, Israel did not take the bait this time.

Muslims are now killing Jews over landscaping, and Muslims will soon be killing each other when the festering national wound of Hariri's assassination is ripped open.

Is the world a safer place yet, or has Obama just not apologized enough?

Charity Focus: Soldiers' Angels

Today, MaryAnn Phillips, a Soldiers' Angels volunteer, was awarded the 2010 Presidential Citizens Medal for her work with wounded American service members and their families at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

MaryAnn is a tremendous woman, and Soldiers' Angels is a tremendous charity worthy of our support. From the Soldiers' Angels website:

To date, our volunteers have sent hundreds of thousands of care packages and letters to deployed service members; we have supplied the wounded with our First Response Packs directly at the Combat Support Hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan and the major military hospital in Germany, as well as provided care and comfort to those in stateside military and VA facilities; we have provided emergency aid to military families in need; we have partnered with the Department of Defense to provide voice-controlled/adaptive laptops to nearly 3,000 severely-wounded servicemembers, as well as other technology that supports rehabilitation; we have provided flights to soldiers on leave or in emergency situations, and to their families wanting to be with them upon return from overseas; we have provided Level III KEVLAR armored blankets to give personnel extra protection in their vehicles when it was needed; we help to honor and uphold the families whose loved ones have paid the ultimate price for our freedom and safety. With the assistance of our generous supporters , the many volunteers of Soldiers' Angels have accomplished this and much, much more on behalf of the grateful citizens of the United States of America.

Soldiers' Angels is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit; learn more by visiting their website.

May no soldier go unloved.

Our judges know best

Earlier today, United States District Court Judge Vaughn Walker struck down as unconstitutional California's 2008 voter-approved ballot initiative defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman.

I'm so glad we have unelected judges willing to step into the breach and short-circuit messy national soul-searching and dialogue on contentious social issues. Judicial intervention has worked so well in the past; see, e.g., abortion, which remains a festering sore in American political discourse nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade.

This will ultimately be resolved in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, both sides will shout at each other from behind placards and barricades, positions will harden, and California will become an even more polarized and uncivil place.

It's the culture of grievance, stupid

Some members of the Racial Grievance-Industrial Complex are crying raaacism and suggesting that the ethics probes of Congressmen Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters are racially motivated. It's an astonishing allegation; the offenses alleged against Waters and Rangel, if proven true, are serious breaches of the public trust, and there must be a full accounting.

However, my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that Black elected officials are running afoul of the law in numbers disproportionate to their representation in Congress. Waters, Rangel, Senator Burris, and of course William "Cold Hard Cash" Jefferson; what's going on? Racism? A statistical fluke? Or could the fall of Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel be a natural consequence of the Culture of Grievance?

Does anyone remember Eddie Murphy's classic SNL sketch, White Like Me? I can't find it on YouTube, but it's available here, on Hulu. Murphy begins by observing that there are two Americas, one Black and one White; with the aid of whiteface makeup, and after studiously preparing by watching Dynasty and reading Hallmark cards (!), he sets out to experience America as a White Man. As a White man, Eddie quickly discovers that when White people are alone, they give each other things. Merchants refuse his money; there's liquor and music on city buses after the Black passengers disembark; and bank managers hand out bundles of cash to White loan applicants.

It is said that all comedy contains a grain of truth; the truth in White Like Me is that some Black people believe that being born White is the equivalent of hitting the lottery, and that the deck is irreversibly stacked against Black folks. People raised in a Culture of Grievance to believe that society is engaged in an economic Cold War against them because of the color of their skin might be tempted to engage in some economic guerilla warfare of their own, and what better place to steal money from other people than the United States Congress?

Is this what's happening to a disproportionate number of our Black elected officials? Elected on a platform of grievance, have they so internalized grievance's lessons that they regard the public trust as just another racist institution to be plundered? Is the Racial Grievance-Industrial Complex beginning to eat its own?

Morie Yohai, may his memory be blessed

If you've ever found yourself coated in bright orange dust and
afflicted with a curious sense of euphoric satiety, you know Morie
Yohai, who passed away last week at the age of 90.

Morie was a World War II pilot, a poet, a devotee of Jewish mysticism,
and an associate business school dean.

Morie Yohai was also an inventor. Morie invented Cheese Doodles. Or rather,
Morie received the revelation of the Cheese Doodles. Colored like the heart
of a flame, and shaped like a crescent moon; only someone with the
soul of a poet and a love for ecstatic religious experience could have
deduced the transcendent snacking experience of Cheese Doodles from the
fabric of the universe and shared it with humanity.

Father of Doodles
With an orange-tinted smile
I bid your soul peace

Hey Mullahs, leave those kids alone!

According to Blackfive, Roger Waters gave permission for the classic Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall to be turned into a protest video by two Iranian brothers in Canada and their band, called Blurred Vision.

Scenes of the band playing alternate with scenes of the street violence which followed the 2009 Iranian elections.

Kudos to Roger Waters, who has now done more than the Obama administration to aid the cause of freedom in Iran.

Eating to Live, or Living to Eat?

"Eating to Live, or Living to Eat?" is the title of an interesting column by Melinda Beck in the July 13 Wall Street Journal. Beck looks at the latest research concerning two different types of eating behavior: those who eat because they are hungry, and those who eat regardless of hunger.

It seems that the pleasure and reward circuits in the brains of obese people respond much more strongly to the stimulus of sweet foods than do the same circuits in the brains of healthy-weight people. The vector of the connection is uncertain; it isn't necessarily the case that obese people are innocent victims of their own faulty neurological wiring, it could as easily be that the obese people have eaten their way into disordered neurological signals. In any case, obesity is an expensive and growing problem, and the researchers are hoping for insights that will either lead to ways to help people adjust their disordered eating patterns or lead to drugs that will do the heavy lifting for them.

Coincidentally, three new blockbuster weight loss drugs are awaiting FDA approval. Contrave combines an anti-depressant with a drug used to treat addictive behaviors; Qnexa combines two appetite suppressants; and Lorcaserin creates a feeling of fullness or satiety.

Given the mixed results of prior silver bullets for weight loss (can you say "random anal leakage?"), and their tendency to have devastating side effects even worse than the health consequences of obesity, I am less than enthusiastic about the three weight loss drugs in the pipeline. I predict utter failure for the last two, the ones that focus on satiety and appetite suppression, because I don't think the average American eating pattern has anything to do with hunger or satiety, it has everything to do with proximity to food and whether or not it is "time" to eat. The first one, the one with the anti-depressant/anti-addictive focus: maybe. Emotional eating is a huge problem for a lot of women, although I still bristle at the notion that it is better to treat an emotional issue with a pill rather than with behavioral therapy. Even hypnotherapy helps, and it doesn't cause random anal leakage.

Why do I care? Obese people make my private health insurance rates go up, and under Obamacare, they are going to make my taxes go up. Already, communities in America's urban cores are blaming their weight problems on the retail mix in their neighborhoods and demanding a government solution. As healthcare consumers increasingly regard their healthcare as "free" and a government right, health issues within our own control (e.g., obesity) will increasingly be seen as someone else's responsibility to address. It's the cycle of governance by extortion: give me a pill, give me bariatric surgery, give me a health club membership, because it will be cheaper for you than the amount you'll have to pay for my care if you don't give me those things. (Every budgetary line item in California's state budget has an advocacy group doing the governance by extortion dance, which is why we have a $20 billion structural deficit.) Of course, if we got rid of first-dollar health insurance and exposed healthcare consumers to the medical costs of their behavior, the extortionist rationale would evaporate, but that's a topic for a future blog post.

In the meantime, I think I'll lace up my sneakers and go for a walk.

Deeply creepy ad campaign

Professor Jacobson over at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion has an interesting post concerning the eerie similarity between the awful marketing for the Chevy Volt and the old Soviet ad campaigns for the Lada. Remember, the people who are building your cars now will soon be the people who are in charge of your health care....

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

The small-d democratic moneybomb project rolls on, and we've got another slate of candidates under consideration for this Friday's wave of donations from the patriotic blogosphere. Additional information on these worthy candidates (and many other topics) can be found over at Right Klik.

Remember (h/t Just a Conservative Girl:)

I can see November from my house!

The end of privacy

Toby Considine has an interesting opinion piece at the Automated Buildings website (and who doesn't read the Automated Buildings website?) concerning our increasingly internet-connected lives and the end of privacy.

He begins by noting that in the early age of the internet, there was a presumption of privacy; the ability to conduct business anonymously was the raison d'etre for many early online businesses, if they revealed their customers' information they would quickly cease to have customers.

There have, however, been a couple of changes; first, the cost of digital storage has plummeted, so there is no longer any reason to throw out any of the data you ever collect on anyone. Second, with the government-mandated switch to "smart" energy meters and "smart" electrical grids, and the corollary development of internet-connected appliances designed to communicate with the smart grid and visa versa, the amount of digital data that we're all going to be transmitting during the course of an average day has skyrocketed. Considine notes:

Without privacy, the social contract is changed. Zero tolerance combined with no privacy removes every civil right we have. The CEO of Google has stated “Privacy is dead, get used to it.” On the other hand, the German high court recently mandated early deletion of all cell tower data, web traffic, IM tracking, and other “personal acts.” The battle for privacy is already publicly engaged. The more people know, the more people are going to care.

....

I write this a few days before the Fourth of July. The US has always been the land of the frontier. “Go West, young man!” Horace Greeley famously spoke. West was where you could make something of yourself, perhaps a new something that was not what you once were. The West was where you went to start over. The west was the creator of a classless world, one where your parents did not matter because no one had a past. Failure to protect privacy is the final closing of the frontier.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." If the concept of privacy is dumbed down to the concealment of a shameful or illegal act, we all lose.

Rule 5 Sundays

(turn the volume up)

In honor of The Other McCain's Rule 5 Sunday, I present you with: Snoring Duckling.

Soon to appear as a menu item at Brandy Ho's.