Kevin Is A Democrat. The dachshunds are Republicans.

Several years ago, my daughter, The Aggie, took in a Labrador Retriever puppy. 
She named him Kevin. 
As a puppy, Kevin was fine in her dorm room.  As a full-grown beast, he was a disaster. 
She brought him home from Texas A&M to live in Fort Worth.  He'll be in Fort Worth until The Aggie graduates - probably sometime during the Rodham administration. 

It took Kevin about 20 minutes to learn that he could jump the fence in our back yard.  So he lives inside my house. 
Yeah.  I have a Labrador living in my house, because my daughter who wants to be a doctor thought that he would be a good idea. 

Kevin chews things.  Garbage.  Clothes.  So he has to stay in the back bedroom during the day, or any time no one is around. 

Here's how I know Kevin is a Democrat. 

To get Kevin into the back bedroom, all you have to do is get a couple of doggie-treats.  He'll cheerfully give up his freedom and mobility to get the little freebies that go along with his regular dog food and water.  I throw the goodies onto the bed, he follows the goodies onto the bed and eats them, and I shut the door on him for the next 8 hours.  He has nothing to do but wait on manna from heaven.  He believes that food wouldn't exist unless his owners brought it to him.  Here he is in full dependency mode, sitting by the mailbox waiting on his check to arrive:

BTW, if you have 20 minutes to kill, I have an epic Kevin story posted here. 

The dachshunds in my back yard are all Republicans. 
Their goal is to keep the back yard safe. 
Border security. 
Day or night, if they see, hear or smell a squirrel, they're going to raise hell. 

If a someone pushes a baby stroller down the street, they're going to bark.  If someone rides by on a bicyle, they're going to bark.  If a jogger goes by, or god forbid, a cat, they're going to bark.  And bark.  And bark.  Until they die.  Intruder alert.  Intruder alert.  Intruder alert.

 
We've had several car and truck break-ins that they totally missed.  No barking.  No noise.  They were totally useless. 
But the dachshunds still go through the motions of doing their job.  Every 6 months or so, one of them will catch a squirrel, and the captor will carry the carcass around for days, acting like Janet Napolitano, saying "The system worked!  The system worked!"  Then they'll ask for more funding. 

The cats are all Libertarians, of course.  I have no idea where they are or what they do.  None of my business. 

Grocery School

I've watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" twice in the last few weeks.  The damn thing haunts me. 

Go here for details. 

Basically, the film follows five or six kids from failing or inadequate public schools in their effort to be accepted in charter schools. 
It comes down to a drawing.  A lottery. Pure, blind luck. 
Imagine being trapped in a public, bureaucratic hell-hole for 12 years, where the only thing that matters is having your ass counted as "present" in a seat. 
Ugh. 

Don Boudreaux likes to make the supermarket analogy.  I'm going to reprint part of it here. 

Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.


Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties. Indeed, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in determining people’s choices of neighborhoods in which to live.

Of course, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.

When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be dismal, the resulting calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers out of good supermarket service – indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families the food that they need for their very survival. Such ‘choice,’ it would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact that these supermarkets are underfunded.

And the small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrition and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket. (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)
….

Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services? To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re nuts.

To those of you who understand that such a system for supplying grocery-retailing services would be a catastrophe, why might you continue to count yourself in the ranks of those who believe that government schooling (especially the way it is currently funded and supplied) is the system that we should continue to use?

Think of the millions of lives wasted in the public school-to-prison pipeline.
You cannot give me a good reason why we're still doing this. 

Obama to observe a moment of silence

Barack Obama will observe a moment of silence in honor of the Boston bombing victims, with no one present, no press, no outsiders, no one except the White House photographer who will be there to document the moment when Barack shut the hell up. 

Go here. 

Tragic moment last week or not, that is funny. 

I don't care who you are, that is funny. 

Picture of Barack using Teleprompters to address 6th graders came from here. 

The Great Debate! On TCU Campus! Guns In Texas !

TCU's Young Americans For Liberty and The Tarrant County Libertarian Party proudly present "The Great Debate - Guns In Texas".


This event will feature the Democratic Party's State Representative Lon Burnam, Texas House District 90 debating 2nd Amendment activist Scott Harmon, National Rifle Association volunteer coordinator.

These two fine men will be debating some of the central issues of our time - Who can carry a gun? What can we carry? Where should we be allowed to carry a weapon? What was the intent of the founders, and what does the 2nd Amendment mean today?

This promises to be the best discussion you'll hear on this important topic. Patrick Dixon, the Texas LP's State Chair, will be the moderator.

Free Admission - Saturday April 27th, 2:00 p.m.

Brown-Lupton Auditorium on the TCU campus, 2901 Stadium Drive, Fort Worth, TX 76129

Happy Earth Day - We'll Leave The Lights Off For You !!

I'll never tire of posting this satellite picture contrasting free-market, hog-stomping capitalist South Korea with its more "enlightened" big-government, top-down, control-freak, regulatory hell, benevolent Big Brother worshipping neighbor, North Korea. 

North Korea - Where Every Day Is Earth Day

The Statist Outrage Generator

I often find myself in website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and bar arguments with the advocates of more and greater Barack'n'Boehner activity. 

They come back at me with the same talking points with a startling degree of consistency.  Especially the "trickle down doesn't work" and Sarah Palin and Fox News responses. 

To save my online opponents a lot of trouble, I've created The Statist Outrage Generator.  It says everything they're going to say, long before they can think to say it. 

Please feel free to share this with your Friends Of Big Brother, but don't overdo it.  We don't want them testing new knee-jerk reactions in between elections.