Marvel Variants is going to hell

Marvel Variants is going to hell. 

For those of you new to this site, Marvel Variants used to be my boss.  That was back before he promoted himself into the stratosphere and put additional layers of management in place between us so that he could spend more time defrauding comic book geeks. 

Here's why Mr. Variants is going to suffer the tortures of the damned:   I usually run our morning production meeting, and go around the meeting room asking the Plant Managers and salespeople if they have anything for the larger group. 

When I asked Mr. Variants if he had anything new to justify his existence in the company, or on the planet, he pulled out a copy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  The front page had a story of a guy who got a face transplant. 

BOSTON -- A Fort Worth man who received the nation's first full face transplant said Monday that the first thing his young daughter told him when she saw him after the operation was "Daddy, you're so handsome."
Dallas Wiens, sporting a goatee and dark sunglasses, joined surgeons Monday at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in his first public appearance since the 15-hour procedure in March.

"It feels natural," said Wiens, 25, who received a new nose, lips, skin, muscle and nerves from an anonymous donor. The operation was paid for by the U.S. military, which hopes to use findings from the procedure to help soldiers with severe facial wounds.
Wiens was blinded and his features all but burned away when he hit a power line while painting a church in November 2008.

No one in the meeting knew where Marvel Variants was going with this story, or why he was reading it out loud in the morning meeting.   

Then he held up the picture and said "Out of all the faces that he could have gotten, why did they have to pick Allen Patterson's???"  And he held up this picture. 

Much hilarity ensued. 

For those who don't know me, I spend much of the winter looking a lot like Dallas Wiens, the burn victim in the picture above, but without that cheerful happy-go-lucky expression that Mr. Wiens has on his face.  See below. 

And since I work with a room full of comedians, the responses to "Why did they pick Allen Patterson's face?" were swift and brutal. 

"Well, his only insurance was through an HMO...."

"There were 5,000 radiation victims from the Japanese nuclear plant accident who all needed new faces, and they all got to pick first."

"The guy asked his doctor when he would start to see improvement, and the doctor told him 'Oh, that thing will rot off in a few months.  THEN we'll give you a real face.' " 

They said things about me that were much, much worse than anything I've ever said about Pelosi, Boehner, Republicans, Harry Reid, or even The Teleprompter Jesus.  I took it like a man. 

But Marvel Variants is going to hell.  A hell fueled by variant-priced copies of Daredevil #132, Scooby Doo #1, and Iron Fist #14.   Oh, and the extremely rare Star Wars #1, graded at a 9.6. 

Testing....1,2,3,....Testing

Something goofy is going on with the Google/Blogspot system.  Can't post regularly. 
Two days worth of comments have disappeared.  (all 8 of them!!) 

Will resume the rants as soon as regular service has been restored. 

Newt Gingrich is running for president.

Newt Gingrich, who has already proven that he couldn't trim the fat from a Shreveport Casino Buffet Prime Rib, proven that he couldn't balance the blocks for a game of Jenga, proven that he couldn't cut cheese with a chainsaw....
Newt Gingrich, the values crusader who is now on wife #3....
Newt Gingrich, whose Republican Revolution of the 1990's inspired my favorite P.J. O'Rourke quote:

"What a feckless, timid, timeserving [Republican] revolution that was in 1994, as if the sans culottes had stormed the Bastille to get themselves jobs as prison guards."

Yes, THAT Newt Gingrich. 
Newt Gingrich is going to run for President. 



Remember John Boehner telling an interviewer that he couldn't think of any government programs he would eliminate?  Much less entire departments? 
Remember when presidents named Reagan and Bush ran up higher deficits than all other presidents combined?  (This was before Obama set a new standard, but Reagan and the Bushes used to hold the record.) 
Remember when he sat down with Nancy "Greater Tuna" Pelosi to record this plea for increased gullibility?




That's what you'll get with Newt. 

On the upside, he did take down Fort Worth's Congressman Jim Wright. 
He's also a good writer, and can talk history better than any other politician.
When he was a kid, he collected snakes a lizards, which shows he's not a total conformist.   
Also on the upside, Newt left the Southern Baptist Church to become something else.  Catholic, I think.  It doesn't matter, just as long as he got out. 

But that's what you'll get with Newt Gingrich. 

Move along please.  Nothing to see here.  Move along, move along. 

This is a test

This is a test. 
The Blogger/Blogspot program just eliminated a post that I spent 30 minutes typing. 
This is a test. 

Let's see if this works......

Note to The Aggie: Aren't you tired of going to school ????

I am trying to get the child known as The Aggie through college. 

College is expensive.  Textbooks, thanks to this idiot, are still incredibly expensive. 

The Aggie wants to be a veterinarian.  She has loved mammals, reptiles, bugs and amphibians ever since she learned to walk. 

During the summers, she works as a lifeguard.  Lifeguard training and certification, if I remember correctly, required that she undergo a grueling series of qualifications, then pass a ten day lifesaving course.  The cost for all of this was $200.00

A degree from Texas A and M will cost you around $16,000.00 per year. 

Until today, I saw lifeguarding as a means to an end, nothing more.  Depending on whose statistics you believe, a good vet can bring home between 75K and 115K per year. 

But wait....Here's the Orange County Register:

High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.


When thinking about career options with high salaries, lifeguarding is probably not one of the first jobs to come to mind. But it apparently should. In one of Orange County’s most desirable beach destinations, Newport Beach, lifeguards are compensated all too well; especially compared with the county annual median household income of $71,735.

It might be time for a career change.

According to a city report on lifeguard pay for the calendar year 2010, of the 14 full-time lifeguards, 13 collected more than $120,000 in total compensation; one lifeguard collected $98,160.65. More than half the lifeguards collected more than $150,000 for 2010 with the two highest-paid collecting $211,451 and $203,481 in total compensation respectively.  Even excluding benefits like health care and pension, more than half the lifeguards receive a total salary, including overtime pay, exceeding $100,000. And they also receive an annual allowance of $400 for “Sun Protection.” Many work four days a week, 10 hours a day.

I don't begrudge anyone whatever they earn, as long as they're not taking it from someone else by force.  But these are government employees, and their compensation is taken from others by force. 
If you live in Newport Beach,  and put your foot down, and refuse to pay your share of this, and say "I'm not going to pay $200,000.00 per year to have Jack Johnson sit on a tower all day, watching damp supermodels frolic in the sand and the surf," the government will show up with guns at  your house and take your assets or put you in a steel cage. 
But all libertarian rants aside, how in the hell can you justify paying $200,000 per year to a freakin' lifeguard?  Is it possible? 
Well, yes.  You just compare the compensation to that of other lifeguards in government jobs, and it all makes sense. 

In a phone conversation, Brent Jacobsen, president of the Lifeguard Management Association, defended the lifeguard pay in Newport Beach: “We have negotiated very fair and very reasonable salaries in conjunction with comparable positions and other cities up and down the coast.” “Lifeguard salaries here are well within the norm of other city employees.” And therein is the problem: Local public worker pay has become all too generous and out of line with private sector equivalents.


On face, the compensation packages for these guards are staggering. But take into consideration the retirement benefits being paid to currently retired lifeguards and lifeguards who will retire at these pay levels in the future and the problem is further compounded. Lifeguards are able to retire with 90 percent of their salary, after only 30 years of work at as early as the age of 50.

Here's a video put out by a California Watchdog group (yes, that's an oxymoron) called Americans For Prosperity - California. 



Note to The Aggie:  Pack your bags.  Pack up Fat Kitty.  Pack up the idiot Labrador.  We're going to California !!!  (The City Of Los Angeles is hiring Duplicating Machine Operators, and I think I could work my way up to Senior Duplicating Machine Operator before retirement time.  Hit the link.) 

South Carolina to produce an alternative to ObamaBulbs?

Fed up with the federal government’s ban of the traditional incandescent light bulb, state representatives in South Carolina are pushing for the state to produce and use incandescents solely for its state.


The Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act, which unanimously passed South Carolina’s Senate panel, would allow South Carolina manufacturers to continue to sell incandescent bulbs so long as they have “Made in South Carolina” on them and are sold only within the state. Other states have floated the idea, and last year Arizona passed a bill that would have done the same thing, but Governor Jan Brewer (R) vetoed the legislation.

This would be a great idea, and a great example of some long-overdue States Rights civil disobedience if it weren't for the ridiculous "Made In South Carolina" provision. 
But why are people getting so worked up and irritated over these stupid ObamaBulbs? 

When it set up its bulb program in 2006, PG&E Corp. thought its customers would buy 53 million compact fluorescent bulbs by 2008. It allotted $92 million for rebates, the most of any utility in the state. Researchers hired by the California Public Utilities Commission concluded earlier this year that fewer bulbs were sold, fewer were screwed in, and they saved less energy than PG&E anticipated.


As a result of these and other adjustments, energy savings attributed to PG&E were pegged at 451.6 million kilowatt hours by regulators, or 73% less than the 1.7 billion kilowatt hours projected by PG&E for the 2006-2008 program.

One hitch was the compact-fluorescent burnout rate. When PG&E began its 2006-2008 program, it figured the useful life of each bulb would be 9.4 years. Now, with experience, it has cut the estimate to 6.3 years, which limits the energy savings. Field tests show higher burnout rates in certain locations, such as bathrooms and in recessed lighting. Turning them on and off a lot also appears to impair longevity.

But but but....don't the legislators (many of whom actually helped General Electric write this mandate that we use their new product !!!), don't the legislators (who actually proof-read the bill that G.E. wrote, in some cases), don't the legislators know best?  Aren't they the ones who can best tell us how we should conform to Jeffrey Imelt's desires???  You know, the Jeffrey Immelt who is now Obama's business advisor??

Well, no.  The regulators don't know shit.  Here's David Kreutzer, from the same link, explaining why different government/G.E. divisions have mandates to "save" energy by different methods.  Helping in one area sometimes hurts in another. 

My 1993 Maytag dishwasher used nine gallons of hot water and took 84 minutes to clean a normal load of dishes. The current model Maytag dishwasher uses seven gallons of hot water and takes 120 minutes to clean a normal load of dishes. This increase to a two- to three-hour cycle is typical and is the result of efficiency mandates that are met by using fewer gallons of water with much longer cycle times.


The cost of two gallons of hot water is less than a dime. For many people, the additional cycle time of an energy-efficient dishwasher will be an inconvenience greatly exceeding the 10-cent savings. Some people would alter their behavior (sometimes washing their dishes by hand, for example), which could entirely offset these gains. However, the regulator’s calculation of savings ignores these costs. Markets, on the other hand, do not.

Remember this the next time you're forced to buy an ObamaBulb.  They're dim.  They're convoluted.  They're hard to get rid of. 

California - fighting fitted bed sheets !!!

California, whose debt is so great that I fear it will soon sink into the Pacific, just can't find enough evils to legislate against:


BILL NUMBER: SB 432 INTRODUCED
BILL TEXT


INTRODUCED BY   Senator De León

                        FEBRUARY 16, 2011

   An act to add Section 6714 to the Labor Code, relating to
workplace safety.
 
LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST


   SB 432, as introduced, De León. Workplace safety: lodging
establishments: housekeeping.
   Existing law establishes the Occupational Safety and Health
Standards Board within the Department of Industrial Relations and
requires the standards board to adopt and enforce all occupational
safety and health standards. Under existing law, a knowing or
negligent violation of any standard is a misdemeanor.
   This bill would require the standards board to adopt a standard
relating to housekeeping in lodging establishments, as specified.
   Because this bill would create a new crime, it would impose a
state-mandated local program.   The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local
agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the
state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that
reimbursement.
   This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this
act for a specified reason.
   Vote: majority. Appropriation: no. Fiscal committee: yes.
State-mandated local program: yes.


THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

  SECTION 1.  Section 6714 is added to the Labor Code, to read:
   6714.  (a) The standards board shall, no later than September 1,
2012, adopt an occupational safety and health standard for lodging
establishment housekeeping. The standard shall apply to all hotels,
motels, and other lodging establishments in California. The standard
shall require all of the following:
   (1) The use of a fitted sheet, instead of a flat sheet, as the
bottom sheet on all beds within the lodging establishment. For the
purpose of this section, a "fitted sheet" means a bed sheet
containing elastic or similar material sewn into each of the four
corners that allows the sheet to stay in place over the mattress.
   (2) The use of long-handled tools such as mops or similar devices
in order to eliminate the practice by housekeepers of working in a
stooped, kneeling, or squatting position in order to clean bathroom
floors, walls, tubs, toilets, and other bathroom surfaces.
   (b) The standard established pursuant to this section is not
subject to a permanent variance pursuant to Section 143.
  SEC. 2.  No reimbursement is required by this act pursuant to
Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution because
the only costs that may be incurred by a local agency or school
district will be incurred because this act creates a new crime or
infraction, eliminates a crime or infraction, or changes the penalty
for a crime or infraction, within the meaning of Section 17556 of the
Government Code, or changes the definition of a crime within the
meaning of Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California
Constitution. 

I found this at Overlawyered. 





 

A Libertarian walks into a bar....

Does it surprise anyone to learn that a libertarian can go into a bar, knock back a few, and then find himself in some political arguments? 

Yes, strangely enough, it happens.  And I have a new strategy for winning.  Winning these disagreements before they even become a disagreement.  WINNING at the Sheen level.  It's not about converting the person you're arguing with, but trying to convert other people who hear your conversation. 

I call it "evangelism through misunderstanding".  You intentionally misunderstand someone's statement, and flip it around to the libertarian position on the topic. 

- A bartender says "I support a woman's right to choose".  Most people who make this statement say it with a level of conviction and righteousness that implies you are a misogynistic oaf if you dare think differently. 

Turn to the bartender and say "You're damn right a woman has a right to choose.  Look at the sorry schools here in zip code _ _ _ _ _.  A woman should have a right to choose which school her kids attend.  It shouldn't be based on the zip code where she happened to buy a house.  Her kids shouldn't be a slave to a system dominated by the teacher's unions.  Give her a choice, and the schools will either improve or go under.  And anybody who disagrees with me hates women." 

If the bartender tries to steer the conversation back to abortion, the intended topic, act as if the fate of one- ounce blots of protoplasm is irrelevant.  Take it back to our lack of choice in numerous government programs.  "Seriously, dude, why don't we have a choice in schools?  You mean, you support the right to choose in abortion, but not schools?  Why?"   

Here's another one, probably my favorite.  The guy down at the end of the bar says "We need to cut out all of this foreign aid." 

Lift your glass or bottle upward, and begin your rant. 

"Precisely.  Exactly," you say.  "We've got 60,000 troops in Germany, and the f-ing Krauts don't pay us a dime for them.  We should bring every one of them back to the house.  30,000 in South Korea, and they're costing us a fortune.  We don't charge the Koreans a thing for defense.  25,000 soldiers and sailors and marines in Japan.  My taxes don't cover the expense of even one single soldier, and we've got 25,000 people defending Japan fergodssakes.  You'd think they could provide for their own defense, but no.  Barack Obama has to defend his empire."
"Now if someplace is having a famine or an earthquake or a typhoon, yeah.  We should help them out.  But that cost is just a drop in the bucket compared to what we're spending on our overseas empire." 

If your victim tries to get back to the relatively small amount that we send to places in dire need of relief, divide the dollar amount in question by $125,000.00 (that's the approximate amount we spend per soldier/sailor) and take the conversation back to our "Free For Everyone Who Asks" military services.  Chances are, the dollar amount we're spending on real aid is less than the amount we still spend defending England from Hitler.  (We have 6,000 people stationed in England.  I swear to God, we do.) 

Here's another one.  My friend Mike Coyne got me thinking along this track.  I've used this twice, and it's loads of fun....
If some loudmouth is holding court at the bar or the next table, and lamenting the number of illegals who are coming into the U.S. and taking American jobs, you should agree with him that it's a low-down dirty shame.  Tell him that you've got friends who lost computer programming jobs to foreigners from Toronto.  You know someone who lost an accounting position to an immigrant from Quebec.  The head of your company's software department is from Serbia. 
Without fail (for me in Texas, anyway) your new acquaintance will make it clear that he was talking about Mexicans.  Illegal Mexicans.  He'll say we should put up a fence with guards and dogs, all along the border. 
Look surprised. 
Say "Oh, I misunderstood you.  Hey, if one of those poor Mexican bastards can swim the Rio Grande and do your job?  You're already screwed."
Go back to your seat and don't say another word to him.  Can you imagine how little there would be in the Social Security fund if illegal Mexicans weren't paying into the system? 

Remember, we're libertarians.  We'd rather be right than popular. 

Barack Obama: Killing Machine

From Caroline May at The Daily Caller:

To date not only has the President authorized the hit on Osama Bin Laden, but also provided for the killing of numerous other threats, including but not limited to: 3 Somali pirates; Baitullah Mehsud; Najmiddin Jalolov; Saleh al-Somali; Abdallah Sa’id, Hakimullah Mehsud; Kaddafi’s youngest son and three grandchildren; thousands via his large increase in drone attacks; and has ordered the assassination of the American terrorist Imam Anwar al-Awlaki.
Obama intensified the Bush administration’s effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, increasing troop levels and number of stealth drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That's pretty good for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. 
The rest of May's article is pretty good, where she gets around to Obama butchering and slaughtering the U.S. economy. 

Ron Paul on your right to do things that I don't like

The Los Angeles May Day rally, featuring the SEIU and Communist Party

Let's look in on our Commander In Chief's buddies at the Service Employees International Union, shall we?

The SEIU is the union outfit that gave Obama lots of help in the ObamaCare battle.  Their president, Any Stern, has made more White House visits than any other non-government employee.   

All pics below came from this site, and were chosen by a Mr. Zombie.  (I don't know if his name is an intentional reference to what our Commander In Chief has done to our economy.)
Here's a sampling of Mr. Zombie's fine work:

A May Day rally in Los Angeles, co-sponsored by the SEIU and various communist groups, as well as other unions, reflected yet another step in the normalization of self-identified communist and socialist ideologies in the Obama era. Not only did the SEIU help to organize the rally in conjunction with communists, they marched side-by-side with communists, while union members carried communist flags, communists carried union signs, and altogether there was no real way to tell the two apart.

I'm currently reading a massive tome called "The Black Book Of Communism".  The authors of this massive black doorstop attempt to outline all the deaths, destruction, and misery caused by that godawful doctrine.  Their estimate is that the communists, those wanting to "spread the wealth around"  (to quote our Commander In Chief once again) by means of force, killed more than 94 million people. 

The Nazis were amateurs.  To really do some damage, you need to display a concern for fairness and equality.  At gunpoint, with gulags and re-education centers if necessary. 

Here's a useful idiot with her red commie flag, and her worse-than-Nazi sentiments.  God, I don't understand this mindset.  Have these people never read a book ????

Here's the breakdown of the body count, according to The Black Book Of Communism:

65 million in the People's Republic of China

20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."

The Black Book is documented to the point of being ridiculous.  Communism is the worst thing to ever happen to this planet, and I bet half the U.S. population couldn't tell you anything about the tragedy outlined above.  That estimate probably includes this booger-eater. 

And here they are, your government's employees, putting on their purple SEIU shirts and proudly carrying their red Chairman Mao flags. 
I have friends in China whose parents were sent out to the countryside to be "re-educated" during the Cultural Revolution by these socialist assholes.  Some of the parents didn't make it back. 

Just out of curiosity, are the Marxists/Communists/Socialists supposed to be better than Nazis because their intentions were mistaken for "just" and "noble"?  Is bending everyone to the will of the state supposed to be a good thing?   

According to Zombie, the SEIU employees are the ones in purple.  The Communist Party members are all in red.  And "Obama is closely linked with the SEIU.  The SEIU is closely linked with communists."

Is there any doubt in your mind why our economy is in the tank? 

Once everybody started mingling, the colors helped identify the players. 

Here's some video from the march. Enjoy the brief images of child murderer Che Guevara:




This makes me ill. 

Worst. Debate. Ever.

Stephen Green of Pajamas Media drunkblogged the Republican debates last night.  Green's best line was about the libertarian-ish Gary Johnson:

As a semi-recovering member, I can tell you: He’s a typical libertarian — great on the facts, snoozy/geeky/awkward on the delivery. If you loved the Atlas Shrugged movie, you’re totally digging him right now.



I Tivo'd the debate, and watched about 2/3rds of it this morning.  A few observations:

1) Fox News hosted it, and set it up as a series of "gotcha" questions to each candidate, rather than bringing up an issue and letting all 5 participants address the same question.  Therefore, the debate had the exciting feel and flow of channel surfing in a hotel with 5 TV stations. 

2) Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum are two incredibly dull people.  I actually found myself yearning for the 190 pounds of wind, shit and excitement known as Mitt Romney. 

3) Herman Cain is a lot of fun.  I'd work for that guy.  (The businessman, not the potential president.) 

4) Gary Johnson, when he starts to awkwardly explain something, reminds me of....me. 

5) Can we all, for the good of our Republic, pull together as a nation and RENT a new suit for Ron Paul? 

This debate was a total waste of time.  Fox News shouldn't be allowed to host a post-baptism family luncheon at East Fork County Line Baptist Church.  If Pawlenty and Santorum are supposed to be the "establishment" candidates, the Republicans need a new establishment.  Paul and Johnson, the two libertarians, could both use a speech coach.  Herman Cain probably gained the most ground from this event. 

Here's who I'd like to see as debate moderators next time.....

Denny from The Grouchy Old Cripple. 
Rachel Maddow from MSDNC.
Don Boudreaux from Cafe Hayek (and, incidentally, George Mason University)
Nick Gillespie from Reason magazine.
Keith Olbermann from Al Gore's TV station. 

Each presidential candidate would be allowed to ask one question during the two hour debate.  The moderators would discuss the question for 10 minutes or blood flowed, whichever comes first. 

Lord have mercy, that thing last night was dull. 

I want to purchase 5 tires from China

From Industry Week:

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) is pointing to Continental Tires' announcement on April 28 that they are building a new plant in the U.S. as an example of trade laws working.


In September, 2009 the Obama Administration imposed duties on surging imports of subsidized tires from China. The three-year plan was designed to provide relief for U.S. tire manufacturers under Section 421 of U.S. trade law, the first time the law had been used since its inception, the group noted.

Only one year after the import duties were applied, a study by AAM found that the U.S. tire industry had already reversed a significant decline. Sales were up, and workers were being hired.


I need to buy some new tires for the truck.  Two would be nice, since the ones up front are about a month away from having steel belt poking through. 
A sane person would go ahead and replace the back ones also.  They would never pass an inspection. 
Most normal humans would go ahead and purchase a new spare.  Don't ask about the condition of my spare. 

Most of my tire budget is going to Texas A and M University, in College Station, where my little Aggie is laboring to become a critter doctor.  So I need a really good deal on tires. 

China makes some good tires, and is willing to subsidize my purchase of their tires.  China wants to get me the best possible deal on five tires !!! 

China's government subsidizes Chinese manufacturing in a number of ways.  As far as I can tell, they don't go so far as to cut checks to manufacturers, the way our silly government does for ethanol producers, farmers, or producers/researchers of ridiculous "green" products, but they help out with manipulating the RMB, import/export laws and quotas, and the like. 

I think I should be allowed to purchase five Chinese tires at the lowest price possible.  I want to call one of my friends in Xiamen, tell him what I'm looking for, and have him throw five of those bad boys on the next shipping container coming my way.  I want to swap some pieces of paper with Benjamin Franklin's picture on them for five tires.  The deal doesn't need to involve Barack Obama, George Bush, John Boehner, Goodyear, Firestone, the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Commerce, or a gaggle of theologians asking "Where Would Jesus Shop?"

And those pics of Ben Franklin?  There's only one place where they eventually come home to be spent.  Trade deficits are based on totally bogus numbers.  I run a huge trade deficit at the Starbuck's where I'm writing this, BTW.....

I also want to purchase a new suit.  And if The Men's Wearhouse sells a suit for $800, but Joseph A. Bank has decided to take a loss on the same suit and sell thousands of them at a loss for $400, I'm going to buy the suit from Joseph A. Bank. 

But what of the jobs lost at The Men's Wearhouse? 

Most of us would say that The Men's Wearhouse needs to change its ways, or get ready to go out of business.  Or we would purchase $400 suits from Joseph A Bank until Joseph A Bank went bankrupt. The health of either organization is a secondary consideration to getting a good deal on some clothing. 

When I shop in Dallas, I don't worry about the impact of money not being spent in Fort Worth. 
Ditto for when I shop in Mississippi.  I don't want to pay an extra import tariff on things I bring across the Vicksburg bridge, just to keep it fair for East Fort Worth.  
If I want to bring a bottle of tequila, a silly hat, three tasteless T-shirts and a box of Cuban cigars back from a vacation in Mexico, its nobody's business but mine. 
The same thing goes for Chinese tires.  They should cross borders at the same tax/duty rate as everything else produced anywhere else. 

This would cause some discomfort for American politicians and bureaucrats who earn their living by selling exemptions and exceptions to the rules. 
This would eventually bankrupt China.  Or China would quickly learn not to imitate the U.S. - subsidizing pet political constituencies.  Whichever came first. 

I choose Kroger over Albertson's whenevr Kroger has the best deal on Campbell's soup and Michelob Ultra. 

All this, despite Kroger NEVER EVER using my shipping and freight services.  I have a massive trade deficit with Kroger, but I still shop with them.  Am I a silly person, or what? 

Why are we not allowed to make the same choice with everything else? 

The picture of the worn out tire came from here. 

Why Osama bin Laden won

As usual, Radley Balko has the best perspective on the events of the last couple of days:

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
• The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
• The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
• Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
• The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
• The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
• Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
• American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
• Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
• The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.

Hit the link at the top to read the rest of the piece.  It's excellent. 

Osama Bin Laden has gone on to collect his reward

Yep.  They got the s.o.b. sometime last night, and he now sleeps with the fishes. 
He is now about to lift the veils and burkhas of his first couple of virgins (with 70 more to go). 

The picture of Gretrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas came from www.FamousLiteraryLesbians.com.

Why the tornadoes hit Alabama and not Canada

I knew that the Global Warmists would pile on to the tornadoes and storms that recently hit Alabama and Mississippi, but I wanted to find the perfect example before posting anything about it. 

As all right-thinking people know, Jehovah/Yahweh/Zuul/Gaia doesn't like it when we tolerate gays and lesbians.  So He/She/It sent a hurricane to New Orleans to punish the offending parties. 

If our crops fail, it's because there are witches in our midst.  After we burn a few of them, the Gods are appeased and prosperity returns. 

I'll never forget going to my uncle's house in the early 1970's and hearing a farmer question whether or not our space travel was causing an uptick in hurricanes. 

Well, guess why we had tornadoes in the South last week? 

Bad legislative karma.  Yep.  Certain regions have legislators that don't bow at the foot of Saint Albert, The Goracle of Music City, Tennessee.  The Gods sent the tornadoes to those exact places as payback. 

Here's Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”
The congressional delegations of these states — Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky — overwhelmingly voted to reject the science that polluting the climate is dangerous. They are deliberately ignoring the warnings from scientists.

So there you have it.  If the congressional delegations of 'Bama, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Georgia, Virginny, and Ol' Kentuck had just voted to let Al Gore buy Carbon Credits from himself, if we had just started using CFL bulbs a little sooner, if we had just built a few more idiotic windmills in West Texas, if we had implemented an economy-destroying carbon tax, if we had carpooled, starved a few more brown people by using grain as ethanol, used a push mower, minimized packaging, put on a sweater, bought a bracelet, air dried our clothes, and done other things to conform to some bureaucrat's Luddite fantasy.....

If we had turned our lives over to the government, crucified the evil Koch brothers, voted Democrat, and listened to the warnings from totally disinterested scientists whose research funding and prestige doesn't depend on government funding at all....

Then the earth-goddess Gaia would have been pleased.  Alabama would have been spared.  The tornadoes would have hit Canada, where the natives are well known for violating the Christian Sabbath.  And consuming alcohol.  And wearing clothing made of blended fabrics.  And not wearing Burkhas.   

Or it's possible that ThinkProgress needs to learn that correlation is not causation.  

Why bother with taxes? Why not let Ben Bernanke print all of it?

Seriously. 

Why bother with a debt limit?  We've raised it 75 times in the last 50 years.  What does a debt limit do?  Who does it fool?

Which leads to the next point....Why bother with collecting taxes at all?  If we're going to let Ben Bernanke and The Federal Reserve print an arbitrary amount of money at will, why not let him print up a massive $14 trillion dollar batch, bring in some forklifts and shipping containers, load up the entire press run, and send the whole batch to China and get it over with? 
Then print another 3 trillion or so to keep the TSA crotch-gropers paid, and the Department of Transportation parasites paid, and the borders of South Korea and Germany and Iraq and Afghanistan and England guarded with our armies.  Let's get it done !! 

What kind of finesse about printing money are we attempting?  The Chinese are dumping dollars as fast as they can.  They're not loaning us any more.   

Go here for a complete discussion with Mark Steyn. 

This picture (being developed for a Bernanke Buck) came from Dan McCall's Facebook page. 

TRIP. Tonight. Rahr Brewery. 6:30.

I'm playing guitar and singing with Mike Coyne and Big Daddy John Spivey at the Rahr Brewery in Fort Worth tonight at 6:30. 
It's a fund-raiser for TRIP, the Trinity River Improvement Partnership.  You also get to see a documentary called Up A Creek, detailing the history of the Trinity River and the dangers of the current Trinity River development plan.  TRIP was set up as an alternative to the billion-dollar Trinity River Vision boondoggle set up by and for JD and his mama, Kay Granger.  I'm sure that I'll be posting more about this group as I learn more about it.  Hell, the Granger outfit has already doubled the size of the original budget.  (It's now up to something like 900 million.) 

I'm going to be doing some Buffet tunes, some Jerry Jeff Walker, and a few originals.  Spivey will be singing an original composition called "Mama Tried".  (Guess who that one is about !!) 

Here's the lyrics to one of the songs I'll be doing.  There was an old guy named James Cook who worked on my father's farm, and about three times a year he'd tell me about a little dog that helped his family get through the Great Depression.  I wrote this in honor of Mr. Cook, and his dog, and to get in a slam at Franklin Roosevelt. 
It's called "The Dog That Knew". 

"Back in the Great Depression, I made fifty cents a day,
Just digging ditches, picking cotton, or whatever else would pay.
Had a house full of kids, and couldn't keep 'em fed,
Every night we'd go to sleep, afraid we'd wake up dead. 

Well, one day here's this little dog like I have not seen since,
As if God had crossed a beagle with some kind of barbed wire fence,
And that little dog did something that I've never seen before,
He went and caught a rabbit, and then laid it at my door. 

Well, Daisy took that rabbit and she threw it in a pot,
Then we sat down at the table, thanked the Lord for what we got,
We thanked the Lord for sunshine and them children in the yard,
And we thanked God for little dogs that knew that times were hard.

Had that dog for seven years and Lord, he fed us well. 
That dog could bring a rabbit back straight from the gates of hell,
You see those rabbits ran like lightning up and down that river bank,
Sometimes they ran through gulleys that could scare a Sherman tank. 

And Mr. Roosevelt he said "It's only fear itself",
Well I bet Mr. Roosevelt had groceries on his shelf. 
They said it was a brand New Deal, that's all that some folks had. 
We had us a little dog that knew that times were bad. 

Well, Daisy took that rabbit and she threw it in a pot,

Then we sat down at the table, thanked the Lord for what we got,
We thanked the Lord for sunshine and them children in the yard,
And we thanked God for little dogs that knew that times were hard.

It's been forty years, I guess, since I first heard it said,
About that old man's dog and how it kept his family fed -
You see, my back yard's full of dachshunds, those useless weiner dogs;
Never caught a rabbit, and Lord they eat like hogs. 

Sometimes I'll take 'em huntin', and Lordy what a sight,
There's a man whose little dogs are scared that rabbits bite.
So if y'all see me looking like I don't eat enough,
It's because my little dogs don't know that times are tough. 

So y'all bring me a rabbit, and I'll throw it in a pot,
I'll sit down at the table, and thank the Lord for what I've got.
I'll thank the Lord for sunshine and those dachshunds in the yard,
But I'll wish I had some little dogs that knew that times are hard. 

Hope to see some of you tonight !!!

Ummmm...We don't believe that our neighbors deserve a choice

Here's Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie laying into assorted idjits who don't want to allow their neighbors to have a choice in department stores.

The Hope And Change Sticky Note Campaign

There's a new Facebook campaign for people who are tired of Ben Bernanke/Barry Obama releasing all of their newly printed money into the environment. 

It's called the "Hope And Change Sticky Note Campaign". 

Next time you see a higher price on milk, eggs, gasoline, rent, Coca-Cola, detergent, bacon, or anything else you purchase with your Bernanke Bucks, stick a "Hope And Change" Post-It note beside the price. 

Take a picture. 

Mail it in. 

Do your part. 

Hope.  Change.