Brokeback Hunting
Certain people are raising questions regarding certain discrepancies in the Cheney hunting mishap story. These questions touch on the topics of sex, alcohol, hunting safety, and more.
I reflexively started a post with hard questions of my own regarding the general sanity and national identity of these haters of Dick, but, sadly, I now must confess that I, too, have come to question the nature of the hunting trip and the handling of the crisis.
It started with little more than a slight twinge as word spurted out that our Mr. Cheney had injured another man with a reckless ejaculation of shot. I didn't realize it at the time, but what was bothering me was the emasculation of Vice Presidential powers as the news was released by a woman.
Then, as time wore on with no word from Cheney, as rumors started to swirl regarding mistresses and drinking and other carryings on, loyal partisans such as myself were left with mouths agape as our number two raised a real stink by continuing to hide behind the skirt of the handsome rancher woman from Texas.
Like some kind of turncoat, I actually started to question the bona fides of the Veep. I did something I have often promised myself never to do: I turned off Fox news and examined the facts objectively. And I found myself asking more than a few bothersome questions.
Was Dick drinking more than the single beer that he admits?
Has Dick's gun always been so small and girly?
Was the performance of said gun affected by Dick's drinking?
Did Dick Cheney have a mistress in the hunting party?
Is it possible that homosexuality is genetic? (Note – this particular question has deep personal implications for myself. More on that later.)
There were more questions, but these are the only ones I feel like writing down.
Hmmmm... Lonely nights on the ranch lead to reckless experimentation, games of domination, cowboy boots, maybe even some spurs.
Later, a lover's spat, fueled by flowing liquor and countless doses of prescription meds, strengthens into a full fledged cat 5 disaster as the jealous one flies off into one of his well known tantrums. Except this time, instead of punching the wall or throwing some plates, he decides to really teach his bitch a lesson.
It all became crystal clear when Harry Whittington, much like a spouse who has endured decades of abuse at the hands of the man he loves, came out and apologized to Dick for having stupidly walked in front of his gun just as it was about to go off.
The contrition, along with a bunch of buckshot, was etched in his face but it had somehow become impossible for me to believe the 'clumsy spouse' talking points that my brethren in the conservative blogosphere were parroting. I knew the truth, and, for once, the cognitive dissonance was too overwhelming to ignore.
Thankfully, I've since had time to reflect. Oh, and I turned Fox back on.
Fact: If, indeed, the weekend went as the known facts would suggest, then Dick is obviously the dominant partner.
Fact: As the Dominant, or 'Top', Dick would play the role of the male. Dick was always the shooter, never the target. Therefore...
Fact: Dick, like Charlie Crist, is not a homosexual.
Phew. I'm glad we managed to put that controversy to bed.
Saving America’s Children
This LA Times article speaks for itself. Go read the whole thing. I just want to add that, as illustrated by the excerpted bit below, even kids who are getting the right upbringing – homeschooling, bible study, faith based healing, et al. - can fall prey to the wicked secularist rantings of science based theorists.
As the session ended, Nicole Ableson, 34, rounded up her four young children. "This shows your kids that there are other people who are out there who believe what you believe, and who have done the research," she said. "So they don't think 'This is just my parents believing in fairy tales.' "
Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham's presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. "They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that's how it could happen," she said.
Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham's mantra: "The Bible is the history book of the universe."
So, why do we keep insisting on stocking our libraries and schools with so-called encyclopedias and other false texts? This child was almost lost. Next time, it could be your daughter, and the outcome might not be so right.
Troops Supporter Unceremoniously Ejected!
Thankfully, the hard working people whose job it is to protect our leader from any exposure to dissent were on the ball last night. Rabble rouser Cindy Sheehan thought it would be cute to wear a brazenly anti-Bush t-shirt to the SOTU address.
Cindy Sheehan finally got her invitation to see President Bush again, but before she set eyes on him at the State of the Union address, Capitol Police removed her from the gallery overlooking the House chamber.
The offense: her shirt, bearing an anti-war message and other "unlawful conduct," police said.
Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq who reinvigorated the anti-war movement, was handcuffed and charged with unlawful conduct, according to Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. The charge was a misdemeanor and Sheehan was being released on her own recognizance, Schneider said.
Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to Tuesday night's speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed in the House chamber, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.
Good. The shameless hussy has no right to speak her mind unless she's ready to apologize to Our Leader for all the hell she's put him through – rudely camping out near his house and shrilly calling for policy changes that she is in no way qualified to have an opinion about.
So, good job on ejecting the wacko non-conformist peacenik, but, unfortunately, in their zeal to protect Our Leader from ideas that hurt, the Thought Police seem to have targeted an innocent Republican, a strong supporter of the war and, of course, the troops.
Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Indian Shores, said she was ejected from the House gallery during Tuesday night's State of the Union address because she was wearing a T-shirt that said "Support the Troops - Defending Our Freedom."
Young said she was sitting in the gallery's front row, about six seats from first lady Laura Bush, when she was approached by someone from the Capitol Police or sergeant-at-arms office who told her she needed to leave the gallery.
She reluctantly agreed but argued with several officers in the hallway outside the House chamber.
"They said I was protesting," she said in a telephone interview late Tuesday. "I said, "Read my shirt, it is not a protest.' They said, "We consider that a protest.' I said, "Then you are an idiot."'
She said she was so angry that "I got real colorful with them."
They told her she was being treated the same as Cindy Sheehan, an antiwar protester who was ejected before the speech Tuesday night for wearing a T-shirt with an antiwar slogan and refusing to cover it up.
Young, 50, said her shirt was not a protest but a message of support for U.S. soldiers and Marines fighting for their country. She often wears the T-shirts when visiting her husband at the Capitol and during her visits to see the wounded at military hospitals.
Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the Capitol Police could not provide details about the incident but said, "She was not ejected from the gallery. She did leave on her own."
Young's husband, a Republican who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee on defense, was unaware she was removed until after the speech. He said he was furious about the incident.
"I just called for the chief of police and asked him to get his little tail over here," Rep. Young said late Tuesday. "This is not acceptable."
Beverly Young said, "Wait until the president finds out."
Yeah, there's gonna be hell to pay if Our Leader ever finds out about this. Folks should be able to enjoy the right to express their lockstep support of Our Leader's policies, and everyone knows that the best way to support the troops and show fealty to Our Leader is to wear an uberjingoistic T-shirt. Or put on a campaign bumper sticker. Same thing.
Anyway, my point is that training obviously needs to be improved, because ejecting someone for expressing the correct point of view simply wont do.
Spirit of Horatio Alger stronger than ever!
RL here.
The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled "Waking Up From the American Dream." The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.
......Let's talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.
Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.
......It is true, however, that America was once a place of substantial intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers. A classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent. In other words, during the first thirty years or so after World War II, the American dream of upward mobility was a real experience for many people.
......Put it this way: Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do?
One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. You'd also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more broadly still, you'd try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes, shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes.
Meanwhile, on the spending side, you'd cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.
And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you'd do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you'd privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees.
It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?
Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually create "a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can't compete." If he's right--and I fear that he is--we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.
Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream.
Goodbye Horatio Alger? I think not. Today's news has an item which proves that the Horatio Alger spirit is alive and well in America and that hard work combined with the proper deference to authority will always result in success.
Like a modern day Ragged Dick, a homeless person risked his own life and welfare in order to assist a stranger who is obviously a far better person. And, like the famed Alger characters, this homeless man was handsomely rewarded for his hard work and personal risks.
William Dominick had stopped at a Waffle House in Bradenton, where armed robbers smashed out the windows of his silver Mercedes sedan while he sat in the driver's seat, according to the Manatee County Sheriff's Office.
Popping open the trunk, the robbers grabbed two steel cases plus a briefcase and ran toward a black luxury car with tinted windows. An intervening homeless man hit one of the robbers, who dropped and left behind the largest case, reports show.
"It had $700,000 to $800,000 inside," Dominick said Thursday of the recovered case. The contents included an 1879 U.S. gold coin worth $150,000 and a $10,000 bill valued at $75,000, he said.
"The blessing is that that homeless guy was there," said Dominick, who gave the man a $100 bill.
The missing briefcase and the second steel case, which weighed about 30 pounds, held $250,000 in merchandise, Dominick said.
"I've offered a $100,000 reward," said the dealer, who runs Westwood Rare Coin Gallery in Naples and a New York suburb. "I'll do whatever's needed to get these guys in jail."
Now, naysayers like Krugman will hear about this generous coin dealer, the courageous victim of a horrendously violent crime, and loudly exclaim that a $100 reward for thwarting the robbery of $800,000 worth of goods is hardly magnanimous, especially when the same dealer is offering $100,000 for the return of merchandise worth far less, but that's just old-fashioned class warfare.
See, Krugman and his crowd just wont admit the fact that this homeless person, if truly deserving, will take that $100, make some shrewd investments, say in rare coins, and become another Horatio Alger success story. Why, the homeless person might even be able to buy a name. Fred. Or Joe. Or some other nice name.
Anyway, the point I'm making is that $100 is all the homeless man needs. Giving the homeless man anything more would simply be coddling, ultimately weakening the character and determination of the homeless man and dooming the the homeless man to a life of handouts.
Kudos to William Dominick, and I'm sure that his homeless hero will soon have a moniker of his own!
Government Kidnaps Christian Children!
Lori Allain, victim of sinful persecution!
RL here.
Well, the fascist army of the godless government is at it again. First, we had Waco and Ruby Ridge. Now Tom's River will forever be invoked with the same prayerful short intake of breath.
On Wednesday, God's soldiers Arthur and Lori Allain were unlawfully apprehended in a Tom's River, N.J., motel room along with several of their offspring.
Their supposed crime: child abuse!
That's right – the 'authorities' have once again ignored the will of God and have manufactured evidence in order to take these righteous folks into custody and kidnap their natural children.
A fugitive wanted along with her husband in Hernando County, Allain is accused of starving a 10-year-old girl to 29 pounds and locking her in a back room in the couple's Royal Highlands mobile home.
......After two and a half months of searching, authorities captured the elusive Allains in Room 150 of a Quality Inn motel on Route 37.
......Lori Allain, 49, and Tommy Allain, 47, are scheduled to appear before an Ocean County judge at 1:30 p.m. today to determine when they will return to Florida to stand trial. If they waive their right to a hearing, the couple could be extradited to Hernando County within a week, said Robert Gasser, of the Ocean County prosecutor's office. Otherwise, it could take about a month.
No Bail On Return
The couple face charges of aggravated child abuse in Florida. The Allains have testified the girl in their care had an eating disorder and that she and her older brother were severely abused by their mother, prompting them to lie and steal food.
An independent state investigation found Department of Children & Families caseworkers repeatedly missed warning signs and should have removed the children from the Allain home.
......Hurricane Wilma hit South Florida Oct. 24, delaying the trial until the next day. The couple have said in previous interviews they weren't notified of the change. They ran from the law, Lori Allain has said, to protect their sons from going into state custody.
Lori, whose tribute to the lord on her chest reads 'Only God Can Judge Me' in reverential script, vigorously refutes the charges.
"I'm going to tell you what. . . . Get up off my family. Got it? And you can quote me on that."
"I have no fear in this case."
"I would like the truth to be out there. To me, the truth comes out, and then me and my husband have no fears."
"You've got to understand. The biker world is a very, very big organization, and they're all over the U.S. and the world. When they know you're right . . .
you're not going to find us.""People tend to judge us because we have tattoos and wear leather. Everyone keeps referring to this tattoo (across her chest that says "Only God Can Judge Me"). That's been on my chest since 2000. It doesn't come from this case. That's my belief. They stereotype you. All these people can judge me. Guess what? I don't care. On the final day God's going to judge me. And he knows my heart. He knows I'm a good person."
"I didn't agree her weight was 29 pounds. I think her weight was 34 pounds."
"I'm a people person like you wouldn't believe."
Obviously, this God fearing couple have been set up by the secular leftist homosexual agendists, but those forces may well have miscalculated, and when the Christian bikers get through with Hernando County... well, let's just say that the Sheriff up there better find Jesus pretty soon.
Voucher Decision Shows Need for Court Reform
Well, the activist judges on Florida's Supreme Court are at it again. This time, they've decreed that Jeb!, our beloved leader, can't help kids get a decent education. Why do these judges hate children?
Some people might say that it's better to fully fund public schools and to provide basics like textbooks and working bathrooms, but that kind of thinking simply empowers the atheists and homos who dominate our public school systems.
Jeb! saw a better way. A way in which children could learn about Jesus and abstinence while pledging allegiance to God and country.
Several people agree with Jeb!, and some parents are aghast that their kids might have to once again mingle with the unwashed, yet the brainless 'judges' on Florida's Supreme Court have taken it upon themselves to ruin everything.
It's high time to abandon this system of checks and balances. Jeb! needs to follow the lead of his (figuratively) Big Brother and bypass the courts entirely. Well, criminal courts should still be used to lock up scary brown people, but this whole antiquated notion that unelected activist judges can somehow overturn the decrees of a sitting Republican governor is absolutely ridiculous!
-RL