Happy Constitution Day!

A law passed in 2005 that requires all U.S. schools receiving federal funds to teach about the Constitution every September 17. Laughably, "every one of the estimated 1.8 million federal employees in the executive branch" are to "receive "educational and training" materials about the charter" as well. How about starting with handing an annotated copy to Good King Barack himself?

Congress could stand to have it read to them, too.

It's worse than I thought.

I'm pretty much Bob here (except I couldn't find a quote in WI less than $420/mo, even explicitly requesting pregnancy not be included, and that's waaaaaaay more than I spend out of pocket in a year)--I'm going to be fined a couple months' rent and still have no health insurance (which is not the same as "no health care"...but that confisicated money would certainly come in handy when I see a doctor or a dentist, assholes).

Worse, if I start making more money and decide to purchase health insurance, insurers won't be allowed to sell it to me. The public option is the ONLY option.*

How the hell am I a criminal requiring punishment for not purchasing a product no one is legally allowed to sell to me?!

I got "unfriended" on Facebook this week when I pointed out to someone complaining that his doctor's office charged him for filling out and mailing some paperwork that office overhead needed to process his request--the woman who took his call, the woman who dug out his records (and/or the computer system that holds his records--for a one-doc practice, that software run high six-figures) and copied his info into the form, the phone, the copier, the electricity, the postage to mail his paperwork, not to mention the malpractice insurance--was not free. Apparently this guy is one of those assholes who thinks doctors and their staff should be providing their services to him for free, at a loss to themselves.

And that's where I'm getting stuck. How did we get to a point where everyone believes they deserve free services at a loss to everyone else, and believes punishing people who don't want to pay other people's way is just?

*Now taking bets on how long it will be before hospitals and clinics are legally forbidden from seeing uninsured patients in exchange for cash, thereby forcing everyone into buying the public option or leaving the country to be seen (or, in case of an emergency, being left to die on the street). If I was a doc with a private practice, I would totally be financing an MRI machine and relocating to the Bahamas.

So much for creating or saving

Congress steps up to deliver another job-killing, economy-stifling totalitarian regulatory bill to The Won for signing--and it will be pushed through partially-read so Nancy and Barry aren't late for their vacations, like that $787B fail in February was.

Imagine trying to explain to any Founder that the government is going to fine him percentage of his income unless he purchases a specific product (...and some of them will be fined anyway for the crime of "household income over the NFL league minimum").

I am depressed.

Walt Whitman, "Song of the Road":

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

...until this time next year, when gas is $10/gal and everything made or grown or sold in America has sky-rocketed in price, including little tin cans with golf-cart engines. And I'm in a camp somewhere for treason or terrorism or just being too fat.

Everything comes down to I just can't believe how fucking stupid people are.

Yet Another Porkulus Fail

The waste, the fraud, the whole un-thought-through-ness of signing a bill no one even read...it's been obvious for months now that the stated purpose of the "stimulus" bill as creating jobs was at best a joke and more likely a lie, but another data point to hammer it home...

New York state expects to spend 84 percent of its $26 billion in federal money on Medicaid, unemployment benefits, school aid, nutrition, public health programs, one-time Social Security payments, Head Start, college grants, and other social and school support.

I'm not sure whether to call it a "wealth transfer" or "welfare bloat"--it's waste AND fraud!--but it looks like the only jobs created will be in the bureaucracy and social-work industries.

I mention this because it's borrowed federal dollars--aka, the money they'll be taking from me for the rest of my working life, no matter where I live. And you, too, if you're stupid enough to be working and/or have retirement investments instead of collecting government checks...

Idiots.

Yesterday I saw this bit about a baggage cart operator falling down on the job. I've been thinking about it at work today while I try to make sense of the math involved in predicting runway incursions. I had a professor back at engineering school who told us not to bother making every design completely idiot-proof, because nature is constantly designing bigger idiots.

I'm also mulling over the clip I accidentally heard this morning of Obama speaking at ASU, exhorting students not to pursue their own dreams of success if they involve a nice house, a respected occupation, producing goods or services that improve the lives of others, or enough money to take care of yourself instead of waiting for the government to do it, but instead to pursue his dream of them becoming servants of the state.

But...what if my professor is correct, and no matter how clever President Camacho* there thinks his system is, there are enough idiots out there to screw it all up?

We're probably all doomed, since the vast majority of idiots are eager to fuck themselves over doing his bidding, but maybe there's a little tiny nanovolt LED of hope.

* Everytime he takes a podium, he gives the audience a hearty "fuck you." Best analogy yet.

How...imperial.

Remember when the Taliban destroyed pre-Islamic Buddha statues so future generations wouldn't know there was any religion in Afghanistan before Mohammed, and liberals were (rightly) outraged at "erasing" history so it wouldn't interfere with official government propaganda?

White House Permanently Deletes Bush-Era Twitter Archive

Presumably, destroying White House records violates some sort of law about national archives, but hell, no one cared when Clinton officials did it, so why start now?

The actual content has been permanently erased. So if you're a Communication scholar or historian studying early Presidential uses of social media technologies, you're screwed. Because fuck you that's why.

I've been wondering what it will be like to be an historian in a hundred years--if they will mistakenly think the contemporary newspapers are a reliable primary source of information about 2009 (especially "papers of record" like that NY Times) because that's what they learned from their historical research methods professors. The media's [insert sexual metaphor here, I'm too tired to think one up] of Obama and the Marxist left is going to have repercussions well past our lifetimes, even if they don't manage to "completely remake America" over in the next 3.6 years.

Is there any aspect of life Democrats don't want the government to control?

W. Va. Lawmaker--party affiliation actually given in the news report!--wants to ban Barbie.

I've read enough feminist "research" about Barbie and I'm profoundly indifferent. I didn't get one until I was eight. Most of her clothes were made out of double-knit polyester scraps by a lady in a nursing home, and she spent most of her time roller-skating, so I missed the whole consumerism angle as well as the feminine beauty skills girls are supposed to learn from dolls.

I also had space Legos. Much more fun.

I don't recall getting any "body image" messages from the doll, possibly because I was getting them daily from my mother and my peers, who spent as much time belittling my "intellectual development" as they did telling me my hair and body were wrong and ugly.

I realize that the experiences of normal women are probably different.

That said, I'm fascinated in this concept that people with children are so stupid they need Democrat lawmakers to make every decision for them. If you don't want your daughter to have a Barbie, don't buy one (hey, that's what mainstream feminists used to say about abortion, back when they wanted it to be "safe and rare"...). If you can't figure that out, you ARE too stupid to raise your own kids.

I want to believe Americans aren't that stupid, but I keep seeing proof to the contrary.

No wonder no one read it...

Randall Hoven at American Thinker went through the Communist Party USA's 2008 platform and found that the porkulus bill enacts half of their planks and gets another 47% started.

Nikita Khrushchev has to be feeling smug.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Bush was pilloried for supposedly hyping al-Qaeda in order to create a security state. Obama trumped that by proclaiming that the present recession is a catastrophe, a disaster, a Great Depression. He ceased his scare-mongering only when he had exhausted the vocabulary of doom. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” bragged Rahm Emanuel, reminding us that the envisioned Obama socialism could take root only if a climate of fear was created.

...and it worked.

Where's the band? The Titanic had a band...

Good grief.

Youngsters of both genders avoid careers that involve math and science because they lack confidence in those topics, "despite the fact that the largest number of kids ranked math and science as their favorite subjects."

All told, 85% of kids say that they are not interested in an engineering career, according to a survey released Monday from the American Society for Quality.

The headline the J-S puts on this is "Girls shun engineering careers, ASQ study shows". As if anyone needed a survey to know that, or we already know why. But why don't boys want to pursue engineering careers? What are they being told to do instead? What's changed in the past 20 years?

ASQ cited numbers from the National Science Foundation, which projects that the U.S. shortage of engineers will reach 70,000 by 2010*, even as the nation's employers court talent from China and India.

Who cares what an engineer has between their legs if they're qualified and capable? Seriously, why does it matter? China and India don't make a big deal out of forcing women into science...

I suspect the "lack of confidence" in math and science has something to do with a) how it's presented in classrooms, in the seven minutes left in the school day after all the multicultural feel-good self-esteem social-services stuff by b) K-6 teachers who have no mathematical interest or ability. (In my weekend with Facebook, I've noticed a strong positive correlation between "couldn't pass pre-algebra without cheating on the homework" and "employed as a teacher.")

* In January 2009, there seems to be a glut of software engineers. Next life, I'm majoring in Lesbian Latina Deconstructionist Studies.

Obama Voters

Two anecdotes from my day, illustrating (along with the stuff I posted at Badger Blogger) why I will spending most of the next four years drunk as a form of self-preservation.

1) At the office after lunch, five O-bots were giving each other high-fives, and then they realized none of them knew who the governor of WI was. Not a single fucking one of them. The Palin-bashing vegan knew her Congressional representative was "Gwen Something...something long and complicated" (that would be Moore...I can see how such a foreign-sounding a name with so many syllables can be hard to remember), and one of them thought there was a Sentienthauser involved somewhere (Sensenbrenner, who doesn't represent any of them). They never got around to wondering who their Senators were.

Oh yeah, you're enlightened, superior beings, smarter and better than me. I'm so glad your ilk are running the country. Assholes.


2) At the gym, two women (I think they were women...I don't like to belittle fat people because I look like Jabba the Hutt from the neck down, but these creatures outweighed me at least 100 pounds apiece, maybe even 150, and it was kind of hard to tell what biological sex they were since they had crew cuts, but I was in the women's locker room so that's as good an assumption as any) swooning--NAKED--over the TV, which was showing the coronation. And then, they talked:

Being 1: Oh my God! It's so awesome!
Being 2: Like, this guy at school said they should just cut spending. And I was like, duh! Rich people should pay for it!
Being 1: People are so suh-STOO-pid! [Yes. She made it three syllables, which is worth a bitch-slap right there.] You can't fix anything without spending! I mean, you can't cut anything! You have to spend!
Being 2: I know! Thank God Obama's smarter than that!

There was probably more, but the whole world turned misty red and I put on my boots without putting on pants so I could get the fuck out of there without screaming "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW FUCKING IGNORANT YOU ARE?!" because it's generally a bad idea to get in a fight with 600 pounds of deadweight even if you haven't overworked your arms out of sheer adrenalinic pissed-offed-ness. All they would have had to do to incapacitate me was fall on me...

I should have asked them if they had any fucking idea what sort of spending Obama would be rubber-stamping, because I'm sure they couldn't name anything more specific than "health care for poor babies!" (without mentioning it would only be for the babies that weren't murdered on the taxpayers' dime) but it wasn't until after I was halfway home that I remembered "$350 million for fucking appliances."


I woke up today ready to give Obama and his supporters the benefit of the doubt, and they were all assholes (I won't even mention the whitey-bashing, because I can't do it in a half-way civilized manner) and imbeciles. The hell with them all.

Heh.

Michelle Obama tells teens and tweens at kids' concert they 'are the future'

I'm sure they've never heard that before.

Check out the AP reporting:

"For many of you, they're you're[sic] moms and dads, right?" Obama said.

I might not resent the "elite" superior tastemakers who went to fancy-schmancy J-schools telling me what to think and who to worship nearly as much if they could write English as well as I could when I was 8. (Not faulting Mrs. O for this--transcribing her remarkers is ALL on the "reporter" and "editors".)

That paid "sick" leave thing is going federal

Too bad for the businesses in Milwaukee's suburbs who wanted to avoid getting sucked into this madness--Congress is taking it up.

Businesses with 15 employees will be required to give paid "sick" leave--up to 3 consecutive paid days off with no advance notice and no doctor's explanation needed, 7 days/year total. The "sick" person doesn't have to be the worker or even a relative, just someone with "close association."

Of course, that's less than one paid hangover/booty call per month. Seems unreasonable that employees can't take as much time as they need and still get the same check at the end of the pay period. *scoff*

Something you won't hear Tuesday

From Reagan's first inaugural address:

The business of our nation goes forward. These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

The third sentence of the first paragraph seems to be the only anachronism...

Continuing on, boldface mine, I expect we'll hear the exact opposite on Tuesday:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.

From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

All the inaugural addresses can be found at bartleby.com.

We're doomed.

At Ace, check out what's lurking under the cute reassuring titles of Henry Reid's plans for the Senate.

I particularly loathe S.3, Homeowner Protection and Wall Street Accountability Act of 2009, which will assure I will never ever be able to afford a house. And S.5, Cleaner, Greener, and Smarter Act of 2009, has us all starving to death in the dark to Save Teh Planet from Global Warming.

And no one knows what's in S.4, Comprehensive Health Reform Act of 2009, but with a name like that it's gotta be bad.

Back to doom and gloom.

I never understood why "the Queen's Christmas message" needs a rebuttal. Especially when the only mention of Jesus is that he was a kind, unselfish man that some people find inspiring. Feel free to clue me in.

The irony of Britain's channel 4 giving Ahmadinejad the pulpit in the name of free speech is that as he was speaking, Iranian authorities raided and closed down the BBC's Tehran offices and, separately, in the spirit of goodwill to man, ordered Christmas trees banned from Iranian kindergartens.

By the time the tastemakers and public opinion shapers figure out that celebrating multiculturism only goes one way, is there going to be any "multi" left to celebrate?

I guess it's not all gloom; Her Majesty seems to wearing her mother's hats. I do love anachronistic millinery.

Pass the brain bleach.

Why is this photo making the rounds of blogs today (not safe for anyone who thinks "hawt" is not a qualification to be POTUS)? It was 4 degrees today. Aren't we suffering enough?

And who decided that scrawny, jug-eared, snobby, and uh uh uh effete were attractive qualities for men?!? Western Civilization is doomed.

Brain bleach, courtesy of Chele. Also, this is a nice palate cleanser.

"bowel-stewing self-indulgence of elite liberalism"

If you're reading this, you will enjoy Jonah Goldberg's latest column.

Wasn't there a war--a real one, with guns--fought at some point to rid America of an incompetent self-serving hereditary aristocracy? I saw a documentary about it once.

No one ever suspects the butterfly*

Of all the people in the world Barack Obama could (will?) be taking orders from, Nancy "the children are in charge" Pelosi?

In talks with Emanuel, Pelosi has “set parameters” for what she wants from Obama and his staff.

Obama rubber-stamping the House has the potential to be far worse than Obama fumbling around on his own, and yet, it's entertaining. Like a clown act (imagine all the Congressional Gorebots climbing out of a Prius). And O brings a water-squirting lapel flower to the seltzer bottle fight.

We're going to starve to death in the dark, but until then at least we won't be bored.

* Come For The Funerals, Stay For The Pie