Be sure to call your senator or representative to urge them to resist costly and nonsensical climate change legislation based on biased science and a former vice-president's lust for the limelight. I guarantee that the enviro-gestapo will be calling today. Hopefully their voice won't be the only one that's heard.
The Hagel Hound puts a new spin on the term "War on Poverty."
From the article:
California’s gasoline prices are 10-15% higher than the rest of the country. Why? It costs more to produce the highly regulated gasoline in California, and there is less flexibility to obtaining supply. In Nebraska today, the ordinary person fills up their tank for $3.45 a gallon. Next time you do that consider that a poor mom trying to get across Los Angeles every day to clean a motel to put food on her table, is paying $4.25 a gallon for her gas that day. And on her way home, by the way, she will pay about 20% more for each bite of food she buys for those kids, because the truckers that haul the food to market pay that 20% premium on fuel costs as well.
Plain and simple: press the environmentalist agenda, and poor kids eat less.
…
In the end, the environmentalist movement implies a class war. Environmentalism at once resists job development and simultaneously encourages increase in the prices of basic human needs: food, heat, transportation. And the poorest among us are hit the hardest. Environmentalists claim to protect the most vulnerable species in nature. When are they going to account for their own attacks on the most vulnerable among us?
Go read the rest of the article, and then come back and tell me where he's wrong. (And please give me something better than "it's the evil corporations, especially Big Oil, that are keeping the poor down.")
From what I'm told, this is an actual letter from an Iowa resident to Senator Harkin. Hopefully he sent a copy to Juan McCain as well.
The Honorable Tom Harkin
731 Hart Senate Office Building
Phone (202) 224 3254
Washington DC , 20510Dear Senator Harkin,
As a native Iowan and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you.
My primary reason for wishing to change my status from U.S. Citizen to illegal alien stems from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of this bill 's provisions is accurate, as an illegal alien who has been in the United States for five years, all I need to do to become a citizen is to pay a $2,000 fine and income taxes for three of the last five years. I know a good deal when I see one and I am anxious to get the process started before everyone figures it out.
Simply put, those of us who have been here legally have had to pay taxes every year so I'm excited about the prospect of avoiding two years of taxes in return for paying a $2,000 fine. Is there any way that I can apply to be illegal retroactively? This would yield an excellent result for me and my family because we paid heavy taxes in 2004 and 2005.Additionally, as an illegal alien I could begin using the local emergency room as my primary health care provider. Once I have stopped paying premiums for medical insurance, my accountant figures I could save almost $10,000 a year.
Another benefit in gaining illegal status would be that my daughter would receive preferential treatment relative to her law school applications, as well as 'in-state' tuition rates for many colleges throughout the United States for my son.
Lastly, I understand that illegal status would relieve me of the burden of renewing my driver's license and making those burdensome car insurance premiums. This is very important to me given that I still have college age children driving my car.
If you would provide me with an outline of the process to become illegal (retroactively if possible) and copies of the necessary forms, I would be most appreciative.
Thank you for your assistance.Your Loyal Constituent,
Donald Ruppert
Burlington , IA
Get your Forms (NOW)!! Call your Internal Revenue Service 1-800-289-1040.
Please pass this onto your friends so they can save on this great offer!!!!
Barack Obama, speaking about sex education:
Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information.
- Ben Smith, emphasis mine
In the same speech, Obama said that women must have the right to an abortion. From the same article:
"This is an example where good people can disagree," the Illinois senator said. "The question then is, are there areas that we can agree to that everybody can get behind? We can all agree that we want to reduce teen pregnancies. We can all agree that we want to make sure that adoption is a viable option."
Yep. We can all agree that reducing teen pregnancies is good. We can all agree that adoption should be a viable option. We can all agree that women should be able to kill babies "if they make a mistake." Wait. Maybe not that last one.
Which "values and morals" BHO is teaching his daughters? Apparently in his "belief system" it is OK to kill a child because its conception was a "mistake." Better to kill a child than for its mother to be "punished" by its existence.
Can someone please explain to me how a Christian could vote for this guy? I'm by no means a McCain supporter, but it blows me away that someone who loves God and studies his Word (Ps 127:3, for example) could vote for this guy with a clean conscience. If you are one such Christian, I really would like to hear your thoughts on this one. I just don't get it.
This article should scare you. It scares me.
What would you do if three armed Sheriff's deputies showed up at your door, demanding that you surrender your six week old child because of a court order that opposes your sincerely held religious beliefs? What if they held him in their custody for six days, and your only recourse was to compromise on your beliefs? What if some enraged judge ruled that he was to be placed in foster care, not because he was in immediate danger (as the law requires), but because she disagreed with your religious beliefs and thought that *she* knew what was best for your own child?
This nightmare scenario played out this week in Omaha for Josue and Maray Anaya and their six week old son, Joel. Their offense, which apparently warranted having their child forcefully taken from their custody by agents of the state, was to refuse to submit their newborn son to the state's mandatory Newborn Screening program. The screening program detects a variety of genetic disorders and requires blood to be drawn from the baby. The Anayas' religious beliefs include a literal interpretation of certain Old Testament passages that state that the "life" of a person is in their blood. Acting according to their beliefs, the Anayas refused to submit their son to the state mandated testing.
This was, at least according to one judge, enough of an "offense" to have their baby taken from them. Furthermore, thanks to grandstanding and agenda-driven actions by Douglas County Juvenile Court Judge Elizabeth Crnkovich, it was enough to keep him away from his family for nearly a week. Continue reading this post »
According to CNN, Condoleezza Rice says that nations must fight climate change like terrorism.
The folks over at Jihad Watch help us understand what she meant by that:
1.) Being afraid to name the activities and people who are part of the problem.
2.) Insisting that only a tiny minority of vehicles on the road are belching greenhouse gases. Make no effort to verify for fear of offending motorists and car companies.
3.) Continuing to aid parties who pay lip service to helping, but do either nothing, or as little as possible in order to keep up appearances.
I would also add that we need the President to remind us that our cars are "vehicles of peace" with a noble history of peaceful and noble transportation, deserving our respect and admiration. Oh, and prominent senators should start urging us to have negotiations with automobiles to convince them to start emitting daisies instead of CO2.
St. Louis is a strong "union town," and while we were living there I got to see just how out-dated, foolish, and delusional unions are. A couple of years ago the grocery store union (it had a fancy name, I just don't care enough to find out what it is) went on strike because they wanted something like a nickel-an-hour raise for everyone across the board, and they were offended because the grocers were changing their health insurance plan to a $500 per family deductible and 80/20 co-insurance up to $1,500 per family after that.
The grocery workers' strike lasted for almost three months and, frankly, it was a great three months with the management employees working the union employees' jobs. The clerks actually looked at us while they were speaking instead of talking to each other as if we weren't there. They smiled, didn't chew gum, and didn't have piles of visible piercings. It was almost as if they cared about the company they worked for and wanted to see it succeed. A novel concept, I know!
What blew me away at the time was the thought that people would DEMAND a raise of a nickel an hour for a job that I did (and did well) as an uneducated 10th grader. Simple supply and demand forces explain why someone who does a job that anyone else can do won't get paid very much. Bagging groceries? Somewhere near 95% of the population can do this job. Hitting major league pitching? Ask Albert Pujols how many people can do that. If 95 out of every 100 people can do your job, you probably shouldn't walk away from it.
So today I hear that the United Auto Workers have called for a nationwide strike against GM. Brilliant, says I. Their number one reason for going on strike? You're not going to believe this… "job security."
This might be news to the folks who run the machines in Detroit, but there are millions (billions?) of people in the world who are willing and able to build cars. On top of that, many of them live in countries where the idea of HAVING A JOB is enough of an enticement to get them to stand on the assembly line. You want a pension? You want health insurance? You want "job security?" Well, mi amigo, there are plenty of people who will do your *old* job without all that stuff. And, this is probably the excuse GM needed to justify moving their production facilities to Juarez, or maybe even some nice little city in Indonesia.
The good people of the UAW might want to reconsider their little escapade here, especially since it's going to get cold soon. While they're all standing around a burn barrel this fall outside of a shut down factory, they might want to think of the nice, tropical climates around the world since they'll probably have to relocate to one of them if they want to get their old job back.
This might be the first time ever that a messenger has been shot for bringing a message of good news.
- Rich Lowry, The General Meets the Senate
When good news about the success of a country's military is bad news for you, one can only assume that you are, in fact, an enemy of said country's military and, consequently, and enemy of said country.
I was on Adams street, heading West just past Cotner Boulevard. I was on my way to my 8:30am Japanese 101 class when the DJ on KFRX announced that an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. At the time, he said it was thought to be an accident and it was unclear as to what size of aircraft it was, and he and the co-host speculated about whether it was a small single-engine plane or something larger. The tone of the report made it sound like it was just another accident.
By the time I was on my way to my 9:30 class, Econ 365, the second plane had crashed as well. The professor had the CNN coverage projected on the 20-something foot wide screen in the front of the classroom, CBA 143. The professor, Dr. Donna Dudney, turned it off after about 10 minutes and told everyone that class was canceled. I made my way from the CBA over to the Lambda Chi house as quickly as possible, where I found a spot in the TV room with 15-20 other guys. Just a few minutes after I sat down the first tower fell. Nobody said anything for several seconds, before Joel Webber summed up everything we were all thinking by whispering, almost inaudibly, "Holy shit."
Somewhere along the way video started coming in from the Pentagon, with a map of Pennsylvania and reports of another missing plane interspersed regularly. In the half-hour between the collapse of the first and second towers, I remember feeling as if these events on the screen were about 3 million miles away, but also that I was deeply and personally offended and impacted by them. The attitude in the room oscillated between foggy disbelief and acute outrage. An almost palpable blood lust filled the room as words like "al Qaeda" and "bin Laden" were introduced into vocabularies that were otherwise devoid of Arabic-sounding words. Somebody in the house found an American flag, which had probably served as a curtain in some Freshman's room, and hung it from the outside of the house with several strips of duct tape. With the images of the second impact replaying over and over, I headed back home to grab some lunch before work.
I don't remember much about how work went that afternoon. I think I alternated between Yahoo news and the small TV mounted in the conference room that could barely pick up channel 10 if you turned the antennae just right. By then the coverage had been reduced to the same 20 minutes of content being rehashed again and again.
Amanda and I had just started "officially" dating two nights before, and she called me from Hannibal, MO, to make sure that I wasn't somehow secretly involved in the military or FBI or something. I remember thinking that was a really cute question, and I wondered if it was just an excuse for her to call me.
That was six years ago. In some ways it seems like it couldn't possibly have been that long, while at the same time it seems like it's been hundreds of years since Osama and Co. slaughtered thousands of Americans in cold blood. Like the Kennedy assassination, which was before my time, I expect that this event will be the "Where were you…" of my generation.
So, where were you? How do you remember it? What vivid details stick out in your mind? Feel free to leave a comment below.
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