"Day Of The Dank"

DFW NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) threw a party last night.  It was called "Day Of The Dank".  Sort of a post-Halloween fundraiser.  I showed up with a bunch of Gary Johnson For President propaganda, and couldn't give it away. 

Because almost everyone there had already voted for Gary Johnson !!  They had persuaded their neighbors and co-workers and even their preachers to vote for Gary Johnson.  I felt almost NORMAL.  (Pun intended.) 

Bear with me for a few minutes while I get some fun pics out of the way.  I'll eventually get to my usual political point....

According to The Urban Dictionary, "Dank" is now "an expression frequently used by stoners and hippies for something of high quality".  This party was dank.  Dankness permeated the environment.  Lord have mercy, it was a good time. 

Five or six bands played.  They had on-site facepainting. 

I kept seeing people that I thought I knew, but it was hard to tell. 

Brief digression:  We had a Texas Tragedy at the state fair a couple of weeks ago.  An old statue named "Big Tex" caught on fire and burned all the way to the boots before anyone could do anything about it. 

I've now made it to four Halloween parties dressed as "Big Tex".  It's a cheap, low hassle, low maintenance costume, and it got plenty of laughs.  Here's my great friend (and Governor Gary Johnson's Texas Campaign Coordinator) Elizabeth Miller.  She and her friend Roman got their faces painted later, but she looks better as a live person who doesn't have her lips stitched together. 

 
DFW/NORML's deputy director Will Jenkins and I couldn't be photographed together.  Too much danger of ignition. 

This is Shaun McAlister and his lovely friend Andrea Brown.  Shaun and NORML have been working very hard for the Gary Johnson campaign for the last few months.  The LP couldn't ask for a better group of supporters than these folks. 

Throughout the Red Goose Saloon,  Shaun had put up quotes from various public figures about the need to legalize marijuana.  It was a broad spectrum.  Please excuse the quality of my cellphone pics below.  Like I said, the place was kinda.....dank. 

Here's the inevitable one from LP presidential candidate Gary Johnson.

And on the other side of the fence, here's something from Bill O'Reilly.  Yeah.  Bill O'Reilly. 

From mens' clothing guru George Zimmer:

From Melissa Etheridge:

From U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Anon:

And finally, from Texas governor Rick Perry.  Rick Perry has figured out that locking up people for owning or consuming a plant is wrong.  Rick "Oops" Perry has figured it out. 

The "Day Of The Dank" party at Fort Worth's Red Goose Saloon was a great time with great people.  90% of them were marijuana consumers.  Most of the time, if you put 400-plus people into a relatively small bar or nightclub, you'll see some fights.  Not last night.  Everyone was peaceful.  Having a great time.  Mellow.  Dank.  It makes you wonder what our government (and its supporters in the booze industry) is so afraid of. 

The quotes on the wall from Bill O'Reilly and Kofi Anon were there to let everyone know what DFW/NORML and the Libertarian Party are about. Leave people alone to live their own lives.  What they do, as long as it doesn't harm others, is none of John Boehner's or Harry Reid's or Nancy Pelosi's business. 

If Rick freakin' Perry can figure that out, why can't these two guys?

End Prohibition.  Release the captives.  Mind yer own damn business. 
Gary Johnson for president !!!

If this is the prize, what do they do to the losers????

I'd rather eat a can of Spam. 

I'd rather be tied down and forced to be an accountant in one of Nancy Pelosi's low-wage Tuna Factories.

I'd rather be strapped into one of those Clockwork Orange deprogramming chairs with my eyelids pulled open by tiny electronic arms, and made to watch the John Edwards sex tape. 

I'd rather sit through the Director's Commentary of An Inconvenient Truth. 

I'd rather fill a blender with frogs and....

Just who the heck is this Man Of The People trying to appeal to here?  I'd rather win a dinner date with Hermann Goering. 

Not if Joe Biden has anything to say about it !!!!

Some blowhard named "Joe Biden" sent me a very aggressive email a few days ago. 
It's been a while since I've been on the receiving end of so much bluster and unbridled testosterone. 

Whited --


We know who our opponent is, and we know what he wants to do:

Knock this president out of the White House, tear down the progress we've made, and take our country backward.

Not if I have anything to say about it.

How about you?

Pitch in $3 or more today, and welcome our opponent to the race:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Starts-With-You

Thanks.

Joe

Just a regular, hard-working, two-fisted guy, that Joe.  He's not going to put up with any crap from someone wanting to tear down the progress (sic) that we've made in the last four years. 
Unemployment below 5%? 
A national debt under 16 trillion dollars? 
Just a couple of undeclared wars at a time? 
Two dollar gasoline?
No way.  Not if Joe has anything to say about it. 

We'll never go back.  If that's what you want for your nation, send Joe some money. 

Have dinner with Gary Johnson !!!!

This is going to be great !!!
I can't yank 1K out of The Aggie College Fund to attend right now, but I'm going to enter 1/20th of that amount for the drawing.

Gary Johnson was governor of New Mexico for eight years.

He boasts that in that eight year period, the government didn't create a single job. Why? Because that's not the government's job, and when government tries to get involved in job creation, we get....well, what we're currently getting.

He was nicknamed Governor Veto.   As governor, Mr. Johnson maintains he worked overtime to do just that, issuing an astonishing 685 vetoes in his eight years in office - more than the combined total of vetoes by the nation’s other 49 governors in those same eight years.  “Any time someone approached him about legislation for some purpose, his first response always was to ask if government should be involved in that to begin with,” said former New Mexico Republican National Committee member Mickey Barnett.

He laid off 1,200 state employees.

He's on the Advisory Council of "Students For A Sensible Drug Policy". 

He supports gay marriage. 

He left the state of New Mexico with a large budget surplus. 

His small government credentials are impeccable. 

Can you imagine getting this guy onto a debate stage with Barack and Barack-Lite? 

Let's make it happen !!!!

Noted gay marriage opponent holds fundraiser at home of lesbian couple !!

Go here. 

Makes you wonder why they didn't hold a fundraiser for Mewt or Santorum. 

The Libertarian Party is THE party that wants to get government out of the marriage business.  If you care about gay and lesbian rights to marriage, we're the only way to go.   End of story. 

The protest against Obama's discriminatory politicies happened in Beverly Hills.  Pic came from here. 

You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need

This ultra-wholesome missive from Jim Messina, campaign manager of Obama For America, showed up in my inbox the other day:

Whited --

June 30th at 11:59 p.m. is the first big deadline of this campaign. At that moment, we'll close the books on this financial quarter and begin preparing our fundraising report to the Federal Election Commission, the press, and the public.
Our opponents are chasing Washington lobbyists and special-interest PACs for big checks ahead of the deadline. To them, and to most of the pundits, campaigns are all about how many millions of dollars each candidate can raise.
We disagree. Of course we have a budget and financial goals. But we believe that the true strength of our campaign is the number of everyday people owning a piece of it.
So we refuse money from Washington lobbyists and special-interest PACs. And rather than setting a goal of millions of dollars, we're setting a goal of 450,000 people owning a piece of this campaign by the June 30th deadline.
This report will serve as the definitive record of who was there to build this campaign from the very start, and you should be part of it. Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford and help us hit our goal.

Ok, all you retirees getting by on $8.00 per day, stop sending your money to Jimmy Swaggart.  Obama is trying to restrict his donations to only the most grassroots, non-connected, Washington outsiders possible.  Any widows with mites (Google it), please send them to Barack. 

A lot of people out there are wondering whether this campaign can inspire the kind of grassroots support that has been the foundation of our success. A lot of people out there are already saying we can't.

So we've got something to prove.
What happens between now and Thursday will shape the story of how the 2012 race began.
Help write that story with a donation of $5 or more here. 

Who the hell are these people who keep saying that Barack can't raise money?  Do they not read the newspapers or have access to the internet? 
And you gotta love the "we're only wanting $5.00 business.  It makes him sound like he's selling Girl Scout Cookies. 

And now for something completely different.  Remember, the Democrats are the party of the people, the party of the working class, the party that is protecting you from the fat cats and the lobbyists.  This is from The New York Holy Times:

President Obama’s $35,800-a-plate fund-raising dinner was the talk of Wall Street last week.


Held at Daniel, the Michelin three-star restaurant of Daniel Boulud on the Upper East Side, the event was seen as a test of the president’s popularity among the deep-pocketed financiers he has often vilified but has long relied on to finance his campaign. The tables were filled with moneymen like Marc Lasry, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Avenue Capital; Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

I'm sure those guys are flukes.  Hey, if flying fish are jumping into Obama's boat, it's hard to blame the guy.  But wait....

Mr. Obama’s dinner last week raised $2.3 million, outpacing an original projection of $1.5 million. And the Democratic National Committee raised $10.5 million in May, surpassing the Republican National Committee, which raised $6.2 million. The second quarter, which ends on Thursday, will give another glimpse of how the early fund-raising is shaping up.

Wow.  A whole lot of people have given the Dems five dollars (or more in some cases).

Here's Mick and Keef and The Stones.

Well, THAT shut 'em up !!

Go here.  See comments. 

Have you taken in a Climate Change refugee family?

I have taken in a climate change refugee family of four.  They were driven out of their home in the Mekong Delta because of the flooding from the melting polar ice caps. 
We are working to place 8 other families, and I hope you can spread this appeal to everyone on your email list. 
In the meantime, please pray for the people in the Southeastern U.S. as they begin abandoning their homes in a quest for higher ground. 

Oh.  Wait a minute.  None of that happened.  False alarm.  Chill out.  Never mind. 

Back in 2005, the U.N.'s Chicken Little Climate Outfit put out an alarm designed to scare the crap out of everybody living less than half a mile above sea level.  We were going to have 50 million climate refugees by 2010. 

Fifty million climate refugees by 2010. Today we find a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource use, and continued rural and urban poverty. There is general agreement about the current global environmental and development crisis. It is also known that the consequences of these global changes have the most devastating impacts on the poorest, who historically have had limited entitlements and opportunities for growth.

Why the screen shot, instead of a link? Well, the representatives of truth at all costs decided that their predictions were a bit embarrassing and scrubbed the site.  We still have this Inconvenient Truth of a relic thanks to the miracle of Google cache. 
The also tried to delete the delightful map that showed which parts of the world would most likely be under water by now.  With that many climatologists leaning all over each other at the U.N., you'd think that one of them would know that this stuff stays out there on the internet forever....

And in the words of Anthony Watts,

And here it is in full-sized hi-resolution glory, suitable for printing, slides, or coffee mugs…wherever it might be appropriate to show the folly of these boneheads.

You can hit this link and get a larger version. 

I'm emailing this trophy to our graphics department today to have it posterized.  And I'm talking a really huge poster.

This non-crisis is about fund-raising through fear. 

It would've been interesting to live with one of those flooded-out refugee families, though. 

Some thoughts on the Itasca Texas speed trap

I was thinking about the (local) cops from a little hamlet called Itasca Texas, who are always handing out speeding tickets on (federal) Interstate-35, and decided to link to this bit o' greatness by Victor Davis Hanson.  (The city of Itasca has absolutely zero responsibility for safety on I-35.  It's where the Itasca cops go fishing for funding.) 

Here's Mr. Hanson, explaining why we're becoming a nation of speed traps, red light cameras, and desperate policemen trying to hit their quota:

California in the Balance.

We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.

We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.

I see California in terms now of the razor’s edge with disaster not far in either direction. A postmodern affluent lifestyle hangs in the balance here without a margin of error. Let me give some examples.

The examples are worth reading.  Hit the link.  It seems that stopping a genuine criminal activity is a huge administrative hassle and bother, and is a net minus for revenue.  But some dude driving while talking on a cell phone?  Cha-Ching !!!!
And in case you're wondering, the Itasca cops haven't caught me in a year and a half. 
If I ever win the lottery, I'm renting "Speed Trap Ahead" billboards to put on either side of Itasca so everyone on I-35 can watch that corrupt little 'burg struggle with living off legit revenue for a few years. 

Red Light cameras are working exactly as intended: They're making money

Check out Radley Balko's latest post on Red Light cameras. 

They reduce the number of accidents at intersections, if you only count the number of side-impact collisions. 
The number of accidents caused by someone getting rear-ended from a driver slamming on the brakes at the same intersections? 
Those are conveniently dropped from the stats. 

And the revenue keeps a'flowing.....

Nick Gillespie's latest fund-raising ploy for Reason magazine. Brilliant.

Why you should support Reason magazine:

September 11th as Architectural Reform

During the unpleasantness of last November, I signed up as a supporter on all the political websites (Demoblican and Libertarian). and I still get mail from both. President Obama left this gem in my inbox sometime last night.

Whited --

This evening, at 11:15 p.m., the House of Representatives voted to pass their health insurance reform bill. Despite countless attempts over nearly a century, no chamber of Congress has ever before passed comprehensive health reform. This is history.

Where to begin, where to begin..... Let's start with the way we use the word "reform". If you destroy something, are you reforming it? Were the 9-11 attacks "Architectural Reform"? In 1941, did the Japanese Air Force carry out a policy of "Naval Reform" at Pearl Harbor? Did Jack The Ripper carry out a policy of Prostitute Reform? Yes, this is history.

But you and millions of your fellow Organizing for America supporters didn't just witness history tonight -- you helped make it. Each "yes" vote was a brave stand....

Brave? Person A takes money from person B to give to person C, so that C will support A in the next election? That's bravery?

.... backed up by countless hours of knocking on doors, outreach in town halls and town squares, millions of signatures, and hundreds of thousands of calls. You stood up. You spoke up. And you were heard.

Speaking of knocking on someone's door, reaching out in a town hall, and making a few thousand phone calls, Joe Cao of Louisiana was the only Republican who voted for this abortion, mostly because it won't allow federal funds to be used for abortions. Please contact Joe, and let him know how you feel about him voting to give government control of the medical industry (because it will keep government out of the abortion industry).
Thank God for Louisiana. Their politicians make those of Texas and Mississippi look like the Founding Fathers.

So this is a night to celebrate -- but not to rest. Those who voted for reform deserve our thanks, and the next phase of this fight has already begun.

Like I said, hit the link. Thank Joe.

The final Senate bill hasn't even been released yet, but the insurance companies are already pressing hard for a filibuster to bury it. OFA has built a massive neighborhood-by-neighborhood operation to bring people's voices to Congress, and tonight we saw the results. But the coming days will put our efforts to the ultimate test. Winning will require each of us to give everything we can, starting right now.

Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford so we can finish this fight.

I suggest you hang onto your $5.00 and start hoarding penicillin.

Tonight's vote brought every American closer to the secure, affordable care we need. But it was also a watershed moment in how change is made.

I just woke up the Sepulchral Wife, half the neighbors, and all 12 dachshunds, banging my head through the refrigerator door. Can ANYONE name something that our government has voluntarily made more affordable? (Note: spreading the costs around to people still in diapers doesn't count.) Your share of the national debt is already near $40,000.00 Your share of the unfunded future liability is somewhere between $350,000.00 and $400,000.00

Safe. Secure. Affordable. As long as you die within 5 years. Everyone after that is screwed.

Even after last year's election, many insider lobbyists and partisan operatives really thought that the old formula of scare tactics....

Here's Thomas Sowell, on the use of scare tactics: What is so wrong with the current medical system in the United States that we are being urged to rush headlong into a new government system that we are not even supposed to understand, because this legislation is to be rushed through Congress before even the Senators and Representatives have a chance to read it?

....D.C. back-scratching and special-interest money would still be enough to block any idea they didn't like. Now, they're desperate. Because, tonight, you made it crystal clear: the old rules are changing -- and the people will not be ignored.

Here's some more from The Good Doctor Sowell: All this makes a farce of the notion of a "public option" that will simply provide competition to keep private insurance companies honest. What politicians can and will do is continue to drive up the cost of private insurance until it is no longer viable. A "public option" is simply a path toward a "single payer" system, a euphemism for a government monopoly.

In other words, the D.C. back-scratchers and special interests are buzzing around this thing like green flies swarming over a fresh cow patty. (That additional commentary is mine, not Dr. Sowell's)

In the final phases of last year's election, I often reminded folks, "Don't think for a minute that power concedes without a fight," and it's especially true today. But that's okay -- we're not afraid of a fight. And as you continue to prove, when all of us work together, we have what it takes to win.

Yep. Anyone robbing Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul. And Joe Cao. Here's Cao going home to read what he voted for. This YouTube is actually on his website:

Please donate to OFA's campaign to win this fight and ensure that real health reform reaches my desk by the end of this year:

https://donate.barackobama.com/History

I'm tempted to hit the link and send the damn fool some money. If he sends out emails this funny for free, no telling what I can get for $5.00.

Here's Jerry Pournelle: With Detroit a ruin and manufacturing industries on the ropes, small business is the only possible engine of recovery from what they don't call a Depression; so the Congress is going to add an 8% tax on employing people. We already have the longest period of increasing unemployment since the Great Depression; I presume we are going for a really big record setting period of increasing unemployment.

What incentives people have to invest and create new jobs in this environment is pretty murky now; with the health bill there will be fewer incentives to invest in new jobs in the US. The incentives are now to the job black market -- hire illegal immigrants who don't have to have health insurance -- or to export the job if that can possibly be done.

Let's keep making history,

President Barack Obama