Fred The Dachshund's Excellent Adventure

I recently got a call from the Cleburne Texas Animal Control Facility. They were asking if they could remove Fred, my dachshund, from their “Most Wanted” list. There’s a story there, of course.

It began several months ago when my friend Tanya called, inviting me to “Dachshund Day” in Cleburne. She knew that my back yard was full of the little beasts, and she thought I would enjoy the dachshund races, the dachshund costumes, and all the other events ill-suited for that particular breed.

First, some background on Tanya. She is probably the worst person I’ve ever known. Within six months of my starting a website, she dreamed up a parody site complete with caption contests, ill-tempered rants, and all the other things that I was doing online at the time. She posted under the name “Fembuttx”, probably because the name “Demon Spawn From Hell” was already taken. She and her band of harpies commented beneath every post that I wrote, doing their best to shift any discussions to their own voracious, perverted appetites.

That’s what she did when she was sober. Whenever she was in her natural drunken state, she posted countless pictures of male butt cheeks.

Although we no longer work for the same company, she now stays in touch by sending me unspeakable insults on Facebook Chat.

Tanya is also a Methodist grandmother.

For Dachshund Day, I selected Fred from the pack of varmints in my back yard. Fred has a good disposition, doesn’t bark much, and is named after the great French Economist Frederic Bastiat. Fred was the dachshund most likely to enjoy Cleburne.

For reasons that now elude me, I also took The Aggie’s yellow Labrador, Kevin.

Now a few words about Kevin…. Kevin is the only reason that I don’t believe in Darwinian Evolution. I refuse to believe that the collection of fur, slobber, enthusiasm and urine collectively known as “Kevin” is the end result of millions of years of natural selection, survival of the fittest, or gradual improvement. I think God created Kevin as a joke.

Maybe I thought that Kevin and Tanya would be a nice match for each other.

Kevin, Fred and I got in the truck and headed to Tanya’s house, where we were supposed to meet briefly before going to Dachshund Day. When I got there I discovered that…. a) there was a box truck in Tanya’s driveway because she was in the process of moving to a new home, and b) most of the people there were already drunk. I had anticipated the drunkenness, but not the moving van, and immediately wrote off all hope of making it to anything other than Tanya’s driveway.

I put Kevin in Tanya’s back yard, where he amused himself by marking every vertical surface as his territory. Since Kevin can climb a standard chain link fence in about three seconds, I was lucky that Tanya’s back yard had a very high wood fence - probably so her family can throw her back there to recover from serious drinking bouts, a safe place where Tanya won’t hurt herself or anyone else. Near the back door there was a concrete slab with a water hose, perhaps so they can strip her down and hose her off before allowing her back in the house to sleep it off.

Kevin kept trying to get through the fence to join us under the carport. He eventually wedged his head between some of the planks and got it stuck there, looking exactly the way he’s gonna look after he dies and I have his head taxidermied on a wood plaque over the television.

I met Tanya’s boyfriend Shawn, a nice guy who could probably do better. I met Tanya’s oldest son Jeffery and his wife Ashley. Jeffery is a bassoon player. (More on that later.)

Tanya’s youngest son Trevor was fascinated with Fred, so I told him they could go for a walk. As you might expect from a dachshund named after a libertarian demigod, Fred can’t stand being on a leash and doesn’t like being restrained. Trevor and Fred went off on a long, long walk. (Trevor’s walk was going to be a lot longer than Fred’s. More on that later.)

Tanya spent the next thirty minutes insulting me (unjustified) and Kevin (totally justified) because he had his head stuck in the fence.

Eventually Trevor wandered back up to the carport. He was holding Fred’s leash and Fred’s collar, but not Fred.

“Fred didn’t like the leash and he slipped out of it,” Trevor said. “He’s somewhere out in THE FIELD.”

At this point, I had been trying to catch up to Tanya’s and her moving crew’s beer consumption for at least 30 minutes. Catching Fred seemed like an easy task, best delegated to the young. I told Little Trevor that Fred was scared and that if he watched carefully, Fred would come back out, assuring Little Trevor that the dachshund’s loss was not his fault, but that God and all the angels would be very angry if Fred wasn’t located soon. Little Trevor ran back to THE FIELD to wait on Fred to appear.

Thirty minutes later, Trevor reappeared in the driveway, Fredless. But he had a little girl named Alissa with him. I patiently explained to Little Trevor that Alissa looked nothing like Fred, and described what type of animal I needed him to be looking for.

“This is Alissa,” Trevor said, looking at me like I was unworthy of dachshund ownership. “She lives near THE FIELD and she’s going to help us find Fred.”

Since we had recently spent a large chunk of money getting Fred fixed, and since the rest of my family claim that they can distinguish one dachshund from another, I decided I’d better go help Trevor and Alissa find Fred. To prepare for the journey I filled two hands and two pockets with Bud Lights so Tanya wouldn’t waste them on her own selfish self. I thought Fred might come out of hiding to see Kevin, so I undwedged his idiot Labrador head from the fence and let him come with us on the Fred hunt.

We walked several blocks and then we got to THE FIELD. THE FIELD is an unlikely 8-acre piece of land in the middle of Cleburne, covered with briars, weeds, stickers, brambles, impenetrable vines, and enough sand burrs to fill up a grain bin. It's not that different from the rest of Cleburne, really. There was a tree line on the far side of the field, and I knew that if Fred made it to those trees we’d never see him again. We went stomping across the devastation, calling Fred. Kevin was overjoyed to be in an unmarked 8 acres, obsessively urinating on every weed. I started cussing Tanya, Fred, Fred’s collar, dachshunds, Cleburne, Kevin, and THE FIELD.

We searched the whole thing as best we could, and then started criss-crossing all of the residential streets between THE FIELD and Tanya’s Den Of Iniquity, calling for my little dog. No luck. No dachshund. And my socks collected every cocklebur and sticker that they touched.

Trevor, Alissa and I gave up and went back to Tanya’s. Tanya had reached the bottom of the beer bins, but thankfully everyone was still fully clothed. I explained that we still hadn’t found Fred. Trevor looked like he was about to cry. Alissa told us how she would be willing to look for Fred all night if necessary. Tanya made snarky comments about what kind of person can’t come to Cleburne without losing his dachshund, but she eventually agreed to start a new search party.

“Allen….” Tanya said, with an evil twinkle in her jaundiced eye, “I hate to ask this, but….where is Kevin?”
I looked around, mentally going through every old Anglo-Saxon curse ever hurled onto a small Texas town. I had no Kevin. How in the heck was I going to explain the loss of not just one, but two dissimilar dogs under different circumstances within an hour and a half?   Don’t get me wrong….when The Aggie first told me that she had acquired a yellow Lab puppy (because no Texas A and M dorm room is complete without one) and then when Kevin wore out his welcome at every residence in College Station, and then when Kevin had to come stay in Fort Worth and live in the bathroom because he can climb fences, well….I’ve survived the loss of better things than Kevin.

But how was I going to explain to The Aggie that Kevin had gone to live with Puumba? (Read the Puumba story when time permits. If you’ve made it this far, you probably won’t mind wasting more of your life on the Puumba story.)

I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. I started rummaging through the empty beer coolers, looking for something, anything, anything alcoholic at all to take the edge off of the day. Against all odds, Tanya’s house was suddenly under Shariah law, with not a drop of alcohol to be found. I would’ve done the 1930’s wino trick of straining a bottle of shoe polish through a couple of loaves of bread. I would’ve fermented some persimmons if drinking the stuff could take me out of that horrible place and that horrible moment.

Alissa saved me from sniffing some cans of paint thinner. “There’s Kevin !” she said proudly.

Yep. There he was across the street, frantically writing “Kevin was here !” on all of my truck tires.

Alissa involved, problem solved.

So Tanya the nemesis, Alissa the little girl, Jeffery the bassoonist, Ashley the bassoonist’s wife, Trevor the Tanya larvae, Kevin the Labrador and I went back out into THE FIELD looking for my dachshund. If memory serves, Shawn the boyfriend followed behind us in his pickup, like the guy who walks at the end of the circus parade, cleaning up behind the elephants. If he was walking with us, I doubt that he admits it. I can’t remember.

I can only imagine what the neighbors thought, with that crew walking down their streets screaming “Fred, Fred, FRED !!!!” at the tops of their lungs. Night Of The Living Dead, but with less graceful zombies. Tanya continued her insults about dachshund loss and Kevin’s danger of dehydration from over-urination. I tried to insult her back, but throwing vitriol at that woman is like throwing snowballs at Frosty. It only makes you tired, and your victim grows stronger.

I was incredibly frustrated. I needed to be somewhere else in a few hours, I couldn’t find my dachshund, and it was all beyond my control. I couldn’t take it out on Tanya, for the reasons stated above. I couldn’t pick at Trevor for losing my dog – he was already in a blind panic. So when the going gets tough….pick on the bassoon player. I dipped into my deep reservoir of musician jokes.

Hey, Jeffrey, do you know the difference between a bassoon and a clarinet? No? Well, bassoons burn longer.

We got to THE FIELD and fanned out, trying to cover as much ground as possible, stumbling through the wasteland calling Fred. Bear in mind that this patch of Cleburne real estate was covered with briars and weeds and stickers. To avoid ripping our shins to shreds we had to lift each step about twenty inches off the ground. Cleburne looked like it had been invaded by Monty Python’s Ministry Of Silly Walks.

Tanya made fun of my walking method. I responded like the Communists did, not by attacking my enemy, but by attacking the children.

Do y’all know the difference between a bassoon and a trampoline? People take off their shoes before they jump up and down on a trampoline.

Neighbors started showing up with 4-wheel drives and pickups, leading me to believe that the Fred Hunt might be the highlight of the Cleburne Social Season. Tanya would introduce me as her co-worker who couldn’t keep up with his damn dachshund. Lord have mercy, she is one tiresome woman.

Do you know what you call two bassoons playing in unison? A minor third.

Jeffery the bassoonist took it all in stride, but seemed to be wondering what sins he’d committed in a previous life to deserve that kind of abuse. Ashley looked at Jeffrey like she was expecting him to do the right thing and kick my ass all over THE FIELD.  Little did they know that “the sins of the Mothers are passed on to the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:7) It was all Tanya’s fault.

What do you call a professional bassoon player who has broken up with his girlfriend? Homeless.

What’s the first thing a bassoon player says after he starts work? “Would you like fries with that?”

How do you make a bassoon player’s car more aerodynamic? Take the Domino’s Pizza sign off the roof.

How do you get a bassoon player off of your porch? Pay him for the pizza !

We walked THE FIELD a few more times over the next couple of hours. Kevin was joyfully urinating everywhere, claiming land like Columbus claiming the New World for Ferdinand and Isabella. Tanya never ran out of ways to enjoy my dilemma, or insult my dachshund containment skills.

How do you get two bassoonists to play in tune? Shoot one of them.

Define “perfect pitch”: The ability to throw a bassoon through a basketball goal without hitting the rim.

We got into nests of briars that could slow down Sherman tanks. Various Cleburnites criss-crossed THE FIELD in their SUV’s and pickups without luck. Because of them looking and sounding like a Mad Max dress rehearsal, and Frederic Bastiat’s legit fear of going back on a leash, I figured that Fred was putting as much distance between himself and that Methodist Scavenger Hunt as he possibly could.

It didn’t matter. Osama Bin Laden, a 6-foot, 7-inch diabetic Muslim in a turban, could’ve been sitting in the middle of all that Johnson County devastation, and we would’ve driven, hopped, stumbled and leg-lifted right past him.

We eventually abandoned THE FIELD in favor of canvassing the neighborhood some more. (If this had been an episode of “24”, we’d be at about the 2:30 mark.) I went up and down the residential streets hollering “Fred fred Fred fred! Fred!!!” with no luck.

And then I saw not one, but two dachshunds. Two of ‘em. One had a collar, and one didn’t. They were playing in a yard about three blocks down from Tanya’s house of ill fame. I sprinted down the block before they could run out of sight. One of them (the one with the collar) looked almost exactly like Fred, but on closer inspection, he wasn’t. Dang it.

But both of them were males! I could remove the collar from the brown one, Fred’s near-twin, put it on the blackish one, and take this brown one with me back to Fort Worth!!! I was sure that after a few days this beautiful new dachshund could be taught to answer to the name “Fred”.  If the real Fred were to turn up someplace in Cleburne, I was certain that he would eventually be taken to this lovely home since they would be the only people in Cleburne looking for a lost brown male dachshund. Fred would be joyfully accepted there. I almost got teary-eyed thinking of the possible ecstatic reunion this fine imaginary Christian family would possibly have with a dog that they had never seen before.

Hey, I don’t usually think that way, but at this point there was lots of beer involved.

That’s the plan that was going through my head when a pleasant elderly lady walked into the front yard of the dachshund house. The two of us shared an awkward moment, like when Cindy Lou-Who goes downstairs and catches The Grinch stealing all the Christmas presents. We discussed the merits and demerits of dachshunds for a few seconds before we got to the inevitable topic of why my shins and ankles were bleeding so badly. I gave her a capsule version of the Fred story, a shorter version I wish I could remember because it would’ve saved me from pounding most of the previous 2,715 words of this story (so far) into a laptop.

I limped back toward Tanya’s, totally defeated until some helpful soul told me of a rumor that Cleburne Animal Control had picked up a brown dachshund. This was great news. But until that moment, I had forgotten all about it being Dachshund Day in Cleburne, Texas. With my luck, there could be multiple lost Freds running around the Crystal Meth Capital Of North Texas, each with a Grinch-like owner more than willing to take Fred as his own.

I swapped numbers with The Dachshund Search Team, thanked them for their help, and Kevin and I drove to the Cleburne Animal Control Department. After a few minutes talking to the girl in charge, I understood that Cleburne Animal Control hadn’t picked up any lost dachshunds, despite it being Dachshund Day. No dachshunds. They had a ridiculous assortment of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Great Danes. The rumor of Animal Control picking up dachshunds was obviously a clever ploy to get relief from searching THE FIELD, to get me out of Tanya’s driveway, and to make the bad bassoon jokes stop.

I imagined Tanya loitering around a replenished beer chest, bandaging bleeding shins and laughing at the thought of Kevin and me looking on the far side of town for a lost dachshund on Dachshund Day. After giving the Animal Control girl a description of Fred that was probably interchangeable with half the dogs in town, Kevin and I made the lonely trip back to Fort Worth. Fortunately, I was the only one home and didn’t have to explain my Fred deficit. I went to a party that night, totally distracted by thoughts of Frederic Bastiat lost and lonely in wilds of Cleburne.

Sunday morning, 7:00, Tanya left a message on my answering machine.

“Hey, douchebag ! Alissa found your damn dog. Call her. You won’t see my ass there because I’ll be at church.”

I called Alissa’s house and got her father. “Yessir, you wanting the dog that all the fuss was about yesterday?” he said. “She was up half the night trying to call him in. That’s a whole lot of work for not much dog. Yessir, Alissa’s got him for you.”

I thanked him at great length and told him that he had raised a fine daughter. Kevin and I got in the truck and drove back to Cleburne. Tanya’s house looked as empty and dark as her blackened soul, so we drove on to Alissa’s place. She ran out to meet me in her yard.

Alissa waited until I had thanked her multiple times before she let loose this bombshell: “I don’t exactly have Fred anymore. I caught him last night, but he didn’t like the collar I put on him and he got away again.”

How much of my weekend was going to be tied up in locating a dachshund? How many people were going to devote the rest of their lives to this project? It was amazing, simply amazing. My face probably betrayed my internal cussing, prompting Alissa to hurriedly add….

“But I know exactly where he is,” she said. “I’ve seen him twice this morning.”

“Wonderful. Thank you so very very very much. Where did you see him?”

Alissa glanced toward the undercarriages of all the vehicles in the yard, as if Fred might crawl out from doing an oil change. She gave a looked toward the house, an old pier and beam affair that might have a Fred-sized crawl space under the floor. She looked at a tree in the yard, as if Fred might pop out of the trunk like Minerva squeezing out of the mind of Zeus. Then Alissa proudly looked at me and said….

“THE FIELD !”

There comes a point in every difficult event in my life when I give up on accomplishing my goal, and concentrate on remembering all the details of the downward spiral so that they’ll make a good story. This was that moment.

Alissa, Kevin and I, the three remaining hardcore Fred hunters, went back into THE FIELD. All I wanted was my little dog. Keeping company with Kevin for 24 hours had confirmed Fred as my favorite. I knew that if Fred was nearby he could see me, even if I couldn’t see him. But he was afraid of the leash and wasn’t coming out. We spent another hour combing the Cleburne devastation, and then sat down on a fallen tree to take a breather.

That’s when I saw a brown spot bobbing up and down in the brambles off in the distance, 75 yards from the treeline. Could it be? I yelled for Alissa and Kevin to follow me and started running through the Johnson County wilderness toward the tantalizing little ball that was expanding and contracting over the tops of the vines and weeds. Every few feet, one of us would step off into a hidden stump hole or ditch and go tail over teacups into the vines and stickers. We didn’t care. It was Fred!!!

Do you remember the old cartoons of Snoopy jumping above top of the high grass, taking a quick look around, and then falling back to earth? That’s how Fred was negotiating the impenetrable vines and weeds. He was taking a running leap at each row of plant life, flinging himself over the top like a pole vaulter, snagging himself in the upper reaches of the vines and then falling to earth on the far side of the obstacles. He was getting closer and closer to the treeline, where he knew that his liberty-loving soul would be safe from the restraints of the Statist leash. We Three Amigos were at least 75 yards away.

I was stumbling every few steps and leaving Alissa behind, but didn’t care, closing the gap between The Quick Brown Dog Jumping Slower Than The Lazy Old Fox. Kevin was so excited that he kept up with me, which means he was leaving some tree stumps unmarked. But there was no way I could catch Fred in time. No way. I felt years, briars, and Bud Lights dragging me to earth. There was no way I could catch him.

We were 30 yards from Fred, but Fred was just 15 yards from the treeline and freedom, executing flawless weiner dog high hurdles. I was totally winded, thinking about giving up, and then….

In my mind, time slowed to a crawl. All I had to do was control the time/space continuum long enough to catch a dachshund. I could see individual gnats and mosquitoes hanging in the air, and if someone had fired a bullet in my direction, I could’ve reached out and grabbed it.  I was The Redneck Keanu Reaves in The Texas Matrix.  I saw Fred in slow motion, thrashing through the final row of briars, just a few feet from open territory in the Mythical Free State Of Cleburne. I went horizontal and launched myself at him with one final adrenalin-fueled effort, slowly floating above the stickers as they clawed holes in my shirt.

I reached for Fred’s back legs and caught them.

Time immediately shifted from “slow-motion fantasy” to “210-pound guy thumping to the ground” with his arms cradled around a dachshund. I pulled Fred to me and he gave me some obligatory licks on the face. He was covered with sand burrs and stickers, with a few vines were wrapped around his neck. The final indignity was a tiny wreath of vine “crawlers” perfectly wrapped around his little dachshund manhood.

I just deleted 4 consecutive bad puns about the wiener dog’s wiener. Be grateful.

By the time I carried him out of THE FIELD, Fred was asleep.

I thanked Alissa profusely, loaded my two mismatched dogs into the truck and headed back to Fort Worth. Unlike a lot of my favorite stories, this one doesn’t have a good punch line. I got my little dog back.

Well, there’s this. Flash forward about 6 months. One night Kevin and I had a running accident. Here’s what I posted on Facebook the next morning:

I took my daughter's idiot Labrador, Kevin, on my run last night. He saw another dog, tangled the leash in my legs and skidded me down the road about 5 yards. I've got road rash on both legs and I think I broke something in my left hand. Anybody want a dog?

This was Tanya’s immediate response:

At least when you don’t let go of Fred's leash, he just slips it and runs into briars. You have at least two stupid dogs. Was there a bassoon player?

I’m so sick of that woman. It’s too late now, but if I’d thought of it, I would’ve responded with the following:

Hey, Tanya !! Do you know why the Labrador and the Dachshund crossed the road?
To get away from the bassoon recital.

How to stop Global Warming

Global Warming Skeptics (and even some foot-washing snake-handling True Believers) have noted that there hasn't been any increase in earth's temperature for about 10 years. 
It's been incredibly frustrating for those who are trying to make money off of fluctuations in the weather. 
The planet just won't cooperate with the computer models. 


And now we know why....


Here's Gerard Wynn, writing for the Reuters news service:

Reuters) - Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.

Where to begin, where to begin....
First of all, we have the National Academy of Sciences acknowledging that Climate has stopped Changing, and that the Globe has stopped Warming. 
Next, we have a theory that pollution is helping to solve the problem. 
Let's complicate matters further by acknowledging that emerging economies take care of their own pollution problems once individual income hits the $6-$7,000 per year level. 

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

Wait a minute....What? 

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.


Wait a minute....What?

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.


I thought that's what they said.  Just wanted to be sure. 
The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

Sulphur allows water drops or aerosols to form, creating hazy clouds which reflect sunlight back into space.

"Anthropogenic activities that warm and cool the planet largely cancel after 1998, which allows natural variables to play a more significant role," the paper said.

Natural cooling effects included a declining solar cycle after 2002, meaning the sun's output fell.

So should we encourage 3rd world countries to continue pumping sulfur?  It seems cheaper than giving Al Gore tax money for perpetual motion machines, cheaper than giving tax breaks for painting machinery green, and cheaper than godawful carbon rationing schemes. 

The study said that the halt in warming had fueled doubts about anthropogenic climate change, where scientists say manmade greenhouse gas emissions are heating the Earth.

"It has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008," said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

It's also unclear why Jesus didn't return to earth on May 21st, despite Harold Camping doing bulletproof interpretations of ancient prophecy.  Harold Camping took another long look at his failed prophecies and kicked the can down the road to October 21st.  He's still in business, and he's still respected by his followers.  His revenue stream survived the May 21st disappointment.
 
Whether or not the Climate Change Cult can last remains to be seen.  I hope so, because as long as they don't get too much power, they increase my website traffic without doing too much harm to anyone else. 

How well do you know the Declaration Of Independence?

I only got 9 out of 12.  This thing is tough. 

Happy July 4th !!!!!!!!!!!

Happy Independence Day !!!

Our president has blown 3/4 of a trillion dollars in a failed Keynesian scheme (pardon the redundancy) to create employment.  The enterprise cost $278,000.00 per job saved, according to White House economists. 

The TSA, which for some reason I don't understand is providing security for private companies, recently made a 90-year old cancer patient remove her adult diaper before she could complete their security check. 

Because of minimum wage requirements, black teen unemployment has now hit 46%.  See previous post. 

I can't find anywhere to purchase gasoline that doesn't contain somewhere around 10% ethanol (which is required as a fuel additive not for environmental reasons, but for early Iowa caucus reasons). 

I can't stop purchasing an employee's labor without proving that I didn't do it because of his racial, demographic, political or sexual identity or preferences. 

Our president is illegally bombing Libya. 

Your newborn children are already $47,000 in debt.  That's $129,000 if they're dumb enough to contribute to the economy by becoming a taxpayer. 

The QT convenience store where I purchased gas last night had at least 20 "permits" on the wall, proving that our government has graciously allowed them to sell certain products and perform particular services. 

Gay and Lesbian marriage is still illegal in Texas. 

Marijuana prohibition is working exactly as planned.  We now have more black males in cages than The Confederacy every dreamed of.  A vast host of jailers, counselors, cops, narcs, border patrol agents, soldiers, pilots, prison-builders, union guards, drug-testing companies and other leeches are profiting nicely from their misery. 

Happy Independence Day !!!

Why white people should love the minimum wage laws

Please excuse me while I bet the crap out of this dead horse....one....more....time....with some help from the Wall Street Journal.  This is from an unsigned editorial that ran a few days ago:

Perhaps you've already noticed around the neighborhood, but this is a rotten summer for young Americans to find a job. The Department of Labor reported last week that a smaller share of 16-19 year-olds are working than at anytime since records began to be kept in 1948.

We've had stimulus packages, bold new initiatives, bailouts, TARP's, and an increase in government spending that would be the envy of every corporatist/fascist since Mussolini.  How in the heck can we have the lowest level of teen employment since 1948? 

Only 24% of teens, one in four, have jobs, compared to 42% as recently as the summer of 2001. The nearby chart chronicles the teen employment percentage over time, including the notable plunge in the last decade.

So instead of learning valuable job skills—getting out of bed before noon, showing up on time, being courteous to customers, operating a cash register or fork lift—millions of kids will spend the summer playing computer games or hanging out.

The lousy economic recovery explains much of this decline in teens working, and some is due to increases in teen summer school enrollment. Some is also cultural: Many parents don't put the same demands on teens as they once did to get out and work.

I respectfully disagree with The Wall Street Guys on this one.  I've been getting in about 65 hours a week since the first week of June.  Mrs. Sepulchre easily logs in the same number.  The Aggie, our offspring, has been putting in 70.  Yes, 70. 
Every summer, I get a cycle of calls from parents that I know, and they're always wondering if I've got a spot for their Jason, Jeremy, Justin, or Josh. 
If things go as planned, Dr. Ralph's youngest kid might be coming to work with us this summer. 
While there might be some parents who don't want their delicate little snowflakes to be stunted by premature labor, I've not met many.  There's something else going on in these unemployment numbers.  Back to the Wall Street Journal:

...But Congress has also contributed by passing one of the most ill-timed minimum wage increases in history. One of the first acts of the gone-but-not-forgotten Nancy Pelosi ascendancy was to raise the minimum wage in stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007. Even liberals ought to understand that raising the cost of hiring the young and unskilled while employers are slashing payrolls is loopy economics.

Yeah.  Well.  Their battle-cry is "It's not fair !" or "Corporate greed !!" or "Would you want to work for $5.15 an hour?"
But it is indeed loopy economics. 

Or maybe not. The Center for American Progress, often called the think tank for the Obama White House, recently recommended another increase to $8.25 an hour. Though the U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%, the thinkers assert that a rising wage would "stimulate economic growth to the tune of 50,000 new jobs." So if the government orders employers to pay more to hire workers when they're already not hiring, they'll somehow hire more workers. By this logic, if we raised the minimum wage to $25 an hour we'd have full employment.

Think about that for a moment.  Enjoy it.  Roll that sentence around in your mouth like a fine wine. The ironically named "Center For American Progress" is going to increase the sales of something by raising the price. 

Back on planet Earth, the minimum wage increase has coincided with the plunge in the percentage of working teens. Before the most recent wage hikes, roughly seven million teens were working. Now there are closer to five million with a job and paycheck.

So why in the hell would anyone in his right mind continue to defend these arbitrary minimum wages?  Could it be that The Sepulchre Family has benefitted at the expense of some of the unemployed?  Is The Aggie racking up overtime because she's gotten some advantages over those who are less skilled because they didn't get onto the employment ladder at an earlier age? 
Yes. 

Black teens have had the worst of it, with their unemployment rate rising to 41.6% in April from 29% in 2007, faster than almost any other group. A 2010 study by economists William Even of Miami University of Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University found that as a result of the $2.10 increase in minimum wage, "teen employment dropped by 6.9 percent. . . . For the teen population with less than 12 years of education completed, teen employment dropped by 12.4 percent." For teens priced out of the labor market, their wage fell to zero.

Whew.  Thank God my family is white, and can avoid the burden of government regulatory help of this kind. Perhaps if the Center For American Progress can get the minimum wage raised to $10.00 an hour, black teen unemployment will hit 75%, guaranteeing better employment opportunities for white folks like us. 
(Seriously, for more info on the racist origins of the minimum wage laws, go here.) 

The great tragedy is that even discussing the role of the minimum wage in teen unemployment seems to be a political taboo. The other day we saw ABC's George Stephanopoulos baiting Michele Bachmann on the minimum wage, as if refusing to raise it would be some epic political gaffe. Ms. Bachmann didn't back down from saying that the minimum wage has contributed to unemployment, though she didn't explain why.

The great tragedy is that even discussing the role of the minimum wage in teen unemployment seems to be a political taboo.

Yeah, thanks to our public school system, which does a great job of teaching victimology but a lousy job of teaching cause and effect, if you discuss anything about repealing minimum wage laws in public, you're painted as an evil, uncaring, slave-driver. 
And the people who arbitrarily increase these wages above the market level are painted as heroic champions of the people.  Go figure. 

What she or another candidate should do is stop playing defense and ask why Mr. Stephanopoulos doesn't seem to mind a black teen jobless rate of 41.6%. Someone truly brave would come out for a teenage sub-minimum wage of, say, $4 an hour. In certain circumstances employers can now pay teens a minimum of $4.25, but only for 90 days. This makes employers reluctant to hire at all. Make the case on moral grounds that a mandated wage that is too high blocks the young and unskilled from grabbing a place on the economic ladder.

Teenagers who work part-time while attending school generally make more money and have more successful careers as adults than kids who never work. As a 2006 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago put it: "The drop in teen labor force participation may also have implications for future productivity growth. In general, labor market experience tends to raise subsequent earnings."

The U.S. has long had a labor market flexible enough that when the economy grows, the jobless rate falls smartly. This time has been different, and the great danger is that Obamanomics has moved the U.S. to a permanently higher jobless rate as in so much of Europe. For America's teenagers this summer, that reality is already here.

But not at my house.  My kid is doing great, pulling in overtime pay with both hands and a shovel.

Her employer could take a risk and spread the wealth by hiring some of those black kids in the neighborhood where she works, but why bother?  Why take the risk on a new hire at a high rate when you can hire an experienced white girl who has been doing the job for two years already?

It's because of the minimum wage, one of the few Federal programs that has worked exactly as intended.  It guarantees full employment for whites at the expense of others.  I keep expecting it to show up on on the "Stuff White People Like" website. So thank you, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party.  Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

On Families And Nations And The Difference Between The Two

"The idea that the nation is one big family that must pull together translates in practice to the idea that the politicians are our parents and we are dysfunctional children who can't be trusted to spend our own money or make our own decisions."   - Harry Browne

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.

Rod Blagovich - a symptom, not a disease

Rod Blagovich, former Illinois governor, was convicted of trying to sell the former senate seat of The Teleprompter Jesus to the highest bidder.  There was plenty of other stuff involved, but that was my favorite of the indictments. 

He's the 4th Illinois governor (see: Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, and George Ryan) to be sent down the river in about 35 years. 

So why do people want to keep giving more money and power and responsibility to politicians? 

It costs far, far more to win the election than the job pays.  In return for their contributions, most supporters of a candidate are going to be wanting far more than they've contributed. 

What results are we expecting?  Who are these angels that we apparently believe are going to flap down into these roles and govern honestly after spending millions to get a job that pays in thousands? 

The only solution to this problem, IMAO, is based on libertarian principles:

1) Institute a Flat Tax, with no exceptions for saving the environment, employing more people, growing wheat for ethanol, or saving the whales.  Anyone granting a tax break to a constituent can be assumed to be corrupt, and gets to go live with the Illinois governors. 

2) Shrink the size of government to the size of an infant dachshund.  They're going to spend about two billion on the next presidential election campaign.  Why?  Because it's worth it. 
If the government were to be involved in roads, infrastructure, the court system, defending the borders, and nothing else, (see: U.S. Constitution) the opportunities for graft would shrink exponentially.
Any politician wanting to get the government involved in activities in which government sucks (education, energy, housing, literacy, nutrition, changing the weather, etc.) can be assumed to be corrupt, and gets to go live with the Illinois governors.   

3) There is no #3. 

Michele Bachmann - Corporate Welfare Queen

From the L.A. Times:

Reporting from Washington— Rep. Michele Bachmann has been propelled into the 2012 presidential contest in part by her insistent calls to reduce federal spending, a pitch in tune with the big-government antipathy gripping many conservatives.


But the Minnesota Republican and her family have benefited personally from government aid, an examination of her record and finances shows. A counseling clinic run by her husband has received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, money that in part came from the federal government. A family farm in Wisconsin, in which the congresswoman is a partner, received nearly $260,000 in federal farm subsidies.

And she has sought to keep federal money flowing to her constituents. After publicly criticizing the Obama administration's stimulus program, Bachmann requested stimulus funds to support projects in her district. Although she has been a fierce critic of earmarks — calling them "part of the root problem with Washington's spending addiction" — the congresswoman nonetheless argued recently that transportation projects should not be considered congressional pork.

Next time you get one of those chain emails about the black lady with 8 kids in the supermarket paying for steaks and lobster with her food stamps, remember Michele Bachmann.  Send this link back to all the recipients.  Here are some details:
 
Yet despite her broadsides against "socialized medicine," Bachmann's husband, Marcus, applied for public funds for his counseling clinic, Bachmann & Associates. Since 2006, he has received nearly $30,000, according to Minnesota state records. The bulk of the money — $24,041 — came in the form of grants from the state Department of Human Services to train staff how to deal with clients suffering from chemical dependency and mental illness. That program was financed in part by the federal government.


Michele Bachmann lists the Lake Elmo, Minn.-based clinic — which aims to provide "quality Christian counseling in a sensitive, loving environment," according to its website — as one of her assets on her financial disclosure forms.

Another of Bachmann's assets — a family farm owned by her late father-in-law, Paul Bachmann — received nearly $260,000 in federal money between 1995 and 2008, largely from corn and dairy subsidies, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization that scrutinizes such subsidies. Paul Bachmann died in May 2009, but the congresswoman retains a partnership in the farm.

Bachmann said in December that the subsidies went to her in-laws and she never received "one penny" from the farm, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. However, in financial disclosure forms, she reported receiving between $32,503 and $105,000 in income from the farm, at minimum, between 2006 and 2009.

Publicly, Bachmann has objected strongly to federal farm payments.

When she voted against the 2008 farm bill, a $307-billion package that would govern federal agriculture policy for five years, Bachmann declared that it was "loaded with unbelievably outrageous pork and subsidies for agricultural business and ethanol growers." She was one of two nays cast by Minnesota's eight-member delegation.

Well, good for her on that one.  If the government is going to throw your money at Michele Bachmann, she'd be a fool not to take it. 
But isn't it sorta sickening to see how much of your money the government gives to just one millionaire?  And then to realize this particular millionaire is just one recipient among several million others who get a big payout from Uncle Sam? 

*******************

The pic of the Welfare Queen came from here.  The Corporatism poster came from here.  Looks like Dan McCall's fine work, but I'm not sure. 

This is what happens when the government decides to get tough on the Mexican onion-pickers who are taking American jobs

Are you irritated by people who were born outside of the lines of latitude and longitude that you think of as your own? 
If someone was born on the oppositite side of an insignificant river from you, do you support laws to keep them from working on "your" side of the river? 
Do you want to get tough on our nation's onion-pickers, blueberry harvesters (and my forklift drivers) because their mothers birthed them in places that maps paint in a different color from your place? 
Do you want to keep Mexicans from doing jobs that you personally would try to avoid? 
In short, are you an asshole? 

I believe that the governor of Georgia can answer "yes" to all of these questions.

 
Here's Jay Bookman:

After enactment of House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
The resulting manpower shortage has forced state farmers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal was forced to order a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

Well, if the Massey-Ferguson, Case, Kubota and Ford tractor dealers ever convince some government bureaucrat to outlaw John Deere tractors, we're going to have a tractor shortage.  If the bureaucrat is surprised by the "unexpected" shortage, you shouldn't be surprised - they generally have the density of cinderblocks.

(Go here for a glorious compilation of headlines using the word "unexpected" bureaucratic misunderstandings of cause and effect.)

So what solution did Governor Deal propose for those having to deal with his crisis? 

“The agriculture industry is the number one economic engine in Georgia and it is my sincere hope to find viable and law-abiding solutions to the current problem our farmers face,” Deal said in announcing the findings. In the meantime, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia.

I propose that Governor Deal try out a few of those 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers in his own workforce, and let us all know how that works out for him.  1,500 of them were probably locked up because of his anti-marijuana laws.  Trying to solve the farmers' labor problem with the victims of his Drug War problem is nothing but a recipe for another problem. 
If you're going to harvest crops like onions and blueberries, you have to be in incredibly good shape. 

Governor Deal would probably get better result by putting the ex-cons to work in the Georgia Department Of Motor Vehicles or the Georgia Highway Patrol.  Ex-cons, at least the ones who work for me, are usually very polite. 
Here's where Jay Bookman goes off the rails:

It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

Bookman is deeply and profoundly wrong.  That's not a bug, it's a feature. 

New York legalized gay'n'lesbian marriage yesterday.  Because of its Southern Baptist infestation, Georgia is unlikely to do so anytime soon.  New York companies wanting to hire talented workers who just happen to be born gay or lesbian now have an advantage over Georgia companies.  The solution is for Georgia to get rid of its handicaps, not inflict similar disadvantages over New York. 

Texas doesn't have immigration laws as "tough" as those in Georgia.  Texans wanting to hire talented Canadians or Albanians now have an advantage over their Georgia counterparts.
 
Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, seems to be mentally stable.  Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, doesn't.  Indiana now has that advantage over Texas. 

Giving states the ability to try things out and experiment with different policies is a good thing.  When voters see that their policies have unintended consequences, they can change those policies. But without a "control group" in another state, they can't see the differences. 

Bookman gets back on track in his last few paragraphs.  His last sentence is brilliant:

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.


In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

Ok, that's all for today.  I have a crew of 30 bad-assed Mexicans to keep busy.  They are great, great people.  Georgia's loss is my gain. 

The picture of the Mexican migrant workers stealing American cucumber-picking jobs came from here.   The map showing the arbitrary lines and coastal borders where immigrants aren't welcome came from here.   The "No Deal" pic came from this Facebook page.   My boss who wants me to work on this beautiful Saturday morning came from Juarez Mexico. 

Gary Johnson didn't create ANY jobs as governor of New Mexico !!! Read the shocking story here !!!

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson gets it. 
He came out with the following shocking statement in an interview with Reason magazine:

“The fact is, I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor.”...


“Don’t get me wrong....We are proud of this distinction. We had a 11.6 percent job growth that occurred during our two terms in office. But the headlines that accompanied that report—referring to governors, including me, as ‘job creators’—were just wrong.”

He claims that all he did was keep the path clear and keep government in check.  Compare Johnson's glorious statement to all the idiotic hand-wringing going on in D.C. about how Congress should do something to create jobs.  All Congress would have to do to create jobs is repeal their previous 50 years of work.  We would then have enough work to keep half the planet employed.

Finally.  A politician who understands the difference between the cheerleaders and the quarterbacks.

Ben Bernanke is puzzled

We've allowed the government to spend almost a trillion dollars on make-work projects to stimulate the economy. 

We've destroyed almost 3/4 of a million automobiles so we could recycle the metal and make new automobiles (see: Cash For Clunkers)

We've introduced ObamaCare, a program that has scared the living shit out of anyone foolish enough to consider hiring new employees. 

The Federal Reserve is printing new de-valued money faster than McDonald's prints Happy Meal boxes.

We've elected a president who would have to study for 5 years to rise to the level of "economic idiot".   

The National Labor Relations Board is now telling companies where they can and cannot build factories. 

The Democrat Party is floating all sorts of potential policies to raise taxes and punish success. 

And Ben Freakin' Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve, says he doesn't "have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting".   

I swear to God, he said it. 

Nice work if you can get it

James Hansen, one of the more famous of NASA's global warming/cooling/changing alarmists, has been milking the AGW cow in double shifts.  In addition to his government salary of $180,000.00, he's pulled in the following:

-- A shared $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation for his "profound contribution to humanity." Hansen's cut ranged from $333,000 to $500,000, Horner said, adding that the precise amount is not known because Hansen's publicly available financial disclosure form only shows the prize was "an amount in excess of $5,000."

-- The 2010 Blue Planet prize worth $550,000 from the Asahi Glass Foundation, which recognizes efforts to solve environmental issues.

-- The Sophie Prize for his "political activism," worth $100,000. The Sophie Prize is meant to "inspire people working towards a sustainable future."

-- Speaking fees totaling $48,164 from a range of mostly environmental organizations.

-- A $15,000 participation fee, waived by the W.J. Clinton Foundation for its 2009 Waterkeeper Conference.

-- $720,000 in legal advice and media consulting services provided by The George Soros Open Society Institute. Hansen said he did not take "direct" support from Soros but accepted "pro bono legal advice."

As long as the weather continues to get either warmer, cooler, or changier, Hansen will be able to claim that 1) he predicted it, and that 2) it is your fault, and that 3) taxpayers should continue to give him more money. 
Nice work if you can get it. 

The pic of Hansen traveling to a protest to speak out against traveling came from here. 

You can program The Teleprompter Jesus, but you can't program its audience

Last week, some of the spokesmodels for The Teleprompter Jesus got booed and jeered at the lefty-ish Netroots convention. 
Now people are starting to laugh at the content of the programs that are projected through The Teleprompter's neural interface, also known as Barack Obama. 

According to Politico, The Teleprompter and its Obama hardware were sent to a fundraiser and programmed to broadcast the following statement:

"Over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs."

Granted, this is an idiotic statement.  For instance, I now employ about 20 good temp employees.  But because of their dismal public school educations, I've had to go through about 60 temp employees to find these 20 decent workers.  40 of them either couldn't read, couldn't write, or couldn't remember the "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" rule for using an end wrench.  I had to release those 40 people back to the marketplace. 

The Teleprompter Programmers are counting situations like those 40 short-term jobs, some of which ended at 10:00 a.m. on the day they began, as a "job created".  (That's what they did with census workers who were re-hired for the same job multiple times.)  This is total bullshit.  The "jobs created" statistic doesn't matter.  The unemployment rate is all that matters. 

Sorry for the digression.  Back to my point....

Programmers, for the most part, are very literal people.  If you ask them to write lines of code that will cause one of the animatronic Barack Obamas to recite sentences like "Over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs", that's what you'll get. 

And dammit, if you ask them to record the reaction to the speech in an official White House transcript, that's what you'll get.  This is from the official transcript of Monday's fundraiser, which went out to the press around 11:30 Monday night:

"Over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs. (Laughter.)"

Whoops. 

According to Politico 44, this brought on a frenzy of wagering amongst the White House Press Corps, many of them betting on how long it would take the programmers to correct the reality-based transcript of the event. 
Whoever wagered closest to 4:04 p.m. Tuesday won the bets; that's when the program was altered to state "applause" instead of "laughter". 

I came of age hearing the following mantra from computer programmers:  "Computers cannot make a mistake.  People make mistakes". 

In this case, who made the mistake?  The programmers, by allowing The Teleprompter Jesus to display and broadcast an idiotic statement?  Or the audience, with their inappropriate laughter? 

Dammit, why aren't people following the program?  When can they be replaced with voters whose software doesn't have a "laughter" glitch? 

I had some really cool pictures selected to accompany this post, but the Blogspot software I use has a programming problem this morning.  Either that, or the White House programmers are already intervening and working on the "inappropriate laughter" bug that has infected the citizenry. 

The New York Times has felt a disturbance in The Force

From Nate Silver, writing in The New York Holy Times:

Libertarianism has been touted as the wave of America’s political future for many years, generally with more enthusiasm than evidence. But there are some tangible signs that Americans’ attitudes are in fact moving in that direction.
Since 1993, CNN has regularly asked a pair of questions that touch on libertarian views of the economy and society:

Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your own view?
Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?

A libertarian, someone who believes that the government is best when it governs least, would typically choose the first view in the first question and the second view in the second.
In the polls, the responses to both questions had been fairly steady for many years. The economic question has showed little long-term trend, although tolerance for governmental intervention rose following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The social libertarian viewpoint — that government should not favor any particular set of values — has gained a couple of percentage points since the 1990s but not more than that.
But in CNN’s latest version of the poll, conducted earlier this month, the libertarian response to both questions reached all-time highs. Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008. (It was the first time that answer won a plurality in CNN’s poll.)



Whether people are as libertarian-minded in practice as they might believe themselves to be when they answer survey questions is another matter. Still, there have been visible shifts in public opinion on a number of issues, ranging from increasing tolerance for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization on the one hand, to the skepticism over stimulus packages and the health-care overhaul on the other hand, that can be interpreted as a move toward more libertarian views.
The Tea Party movement also has some lineage in libertarian thinking. Although polls suggest that many people who participate in the Tea Party movement have quite socially conservative views, the movement spends little time emphasizing those positions, as compared with economic issues.

May this trend continue !!!

Under God ?

NBC is facing an internet firestorm because they deleted "Under God" from a depiction of The Pledge Of Allegiance. 
Here's Newsbusters:

NBC on Sunday decided to cut the words "under God" from the reading of the Pledge of Allegiance that accompanied the beginning of its coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Championship.
In fact, this happened twice during the show's introduction (video follows courtesy Mark Finkelstein with partial transcript):



Here's a picture from a 1943 yearbook, depicting the flag and the pledge. Notice anything missing?

"Under God" wasn't added to the Pledge Of Allegiance until 1954, during the Red Scare era.  How the nation survived before then remains a mystery. 

We were not founded as a nation "under god". 
The British Empire was, or at least thought of itself that way.  The king ruled by divine right, and to go against him was to go against god's established order.  When Jefferson, Paine, and others started questioning this system, they were reviled as filthy atheists or worse.  We forget what a radical departure from the norm it was for Jefferson to declare that "All men are created equal" in the Declaration Of Independence. 

One other thing about pledges, vows, loyalty oaths, and promises of eternal servitude....   No American should ever pledge total, unquestioning allegiance to anything political.  End of freakin' story. 

Our Pledge Of Allegiance was written by a freakin' Socialist. 

The motivation behind it was to train kiddies to follow their politicians into whatever battles the politicians chose for them to fight. 
Pledging obedience to a piece of cloth, no matter how many people have died for it, is un-American.  Dying for a flag, sacrificing your income for a flag, and proclaiming your unquestioning loyalty to a flag is a leftover relic from the Divine Right Of Kings era. 
Seriously, would you pledge allegiance to Barack Obama?  Mitt Romney?  Anthony Weiner?  The Department Of Motor Vehicles? 
Here's a pic from the 1920's that sums up my argument nicely. 

Pledging allegiance to your government isn't American.  It's Fascist. 

 

The new anti-Obama bumperstickers

Don Surber, a blogger whose typing I usually love, has posted some of the new anti-Obama bumperstickers. 
Some of them are funny, some are kinda harsh even by my jaded standards, and a few of them raise more questions than they answer. 
Mr. Surber blogs from a more or less Republican point of view.  Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that these bumperstickers will be found on Republican bumpers. 
Here's the first one.  Let's call it "ObamaZombies". 

The idea behind this one is that Obama's remaining supporters are an unthinking, brain-dead group.  Fair enough.  Unless you're a defense contractor, a federal employee, or a gay soldier (not that there's anything wrong with that), things are probably worse for you than they were two years ago. 

But wait a second....You can go here and learn that a Tea Party spokesperson is claiming that the Tea Party will support any Republican nominee against Barack Obama.  Any Republican?  Seriously?  Donald Trump or Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee?  Rick Freakin' Santorum?  Who are the brain-dead zombies here? 

Let's look at some of the other bumperstickers: 

1.  If this one is a reference to the birth certificate controversy, it is lame.  The man has produced a legit birth certificate  End of story. 
If this is a reference to Obama's asking "What would Belgium do?" when confronted with economic problems, the Republicans should examine the mote in their own collective eye.  They've voted for almost as many subsidies, price supports and corporate welfare schemes as the evil scheming socialists on the other side of the aisle. 

2. I totally agree. Nobody owes you crap. Let's end ethanol supports today. How about it, Senator Grassley (R-Iowa)?

3.   100% ANTI-OBAMA?  Well, it's good to have you in the Libertarian Party !!!!   Obama supports the War On Drugs and the Libertarians don't.  Obama is opposed to Gay and Lesbian marriage, and the Libertarians aren't. 

4.   If you look at the spending sprees of Bush Major, Bush Minor, and Ronald Reagan, this one will make you downright giggly.  Our current debt was caused by both factions of our government reaching across the aisle in a spirit of bi-partisan cooperation to work together and get things done, i.e. - screw you over.  Yes we can ! 

5.   Yes, we've all had enough.  We've had enough expensive wars, to use just one obvious example.  We don't want new wars, though.  We want the good ol' kind, like the ones against Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Republicans who will always wear a flag lapel pin.  No more new ones, though.  We've had enough. 

6.   This all depends on the next president, doesn't it?  The Republicans really might nominate a Global Warmist like Mitt Romney, who will probably continue the green giveaways.  Or a theocrat like Mike Huckabee or Michelle Bachmann.  How much longer are we going to support nominees because of their Republican or Democrat label?  Which party struck the match that Obama used as justification for burning down the house?   

7.   This one is kind of funny.  Mr. Hope'n'Change Nobel-winner has found new wars, bombed new countries, kept up the illegal wiretaps, carried on the rendition policies, and Gitmo is still open for business.  If we put in a Republican on January 20th, I'm going to buy one of these.  The corporate giveaways will continue, the military-industrial complex will continue to grow, and the debt ceiling will get raised a few more times.  Hide and watch for even more of the same. 

8.  Jimmy Carter was a deficit hawk compared to Reagan, Bush, and Bush.   Lordy, I'm tired of pointing this out. 

9.   This is another funny one.  I kinda like it.  Obama plays a lot of golf and he takes a lot of vacations.  What the hell do you want him to do?  Create more stimulus packages, bank bailouts, wars, and economic recovery plans?  If someone else could put The Aggie through college, I'd volunteer to caddy for Obama all day every day, if that's what it takes to keep Obama (or the next Republican nominee) from going to work on any more of the nation's problems. 
Please, please, please just leave us alone.  Stay out of the economy.  Stop trying to create jobs.  Please. 

10.   Or how about "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Tractor"?  "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Combine".  "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Bombs".  "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Child's Jail Cell".  "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Husband's Substance Abuse Counselor".  "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Tank".  "Honk If I'm Paying For Your Drug War". 
All of these are worthy bumperstickers.  May they spread throughout the nation.  How about it, Republicans?

11.   Of course it's all hype.  The next president will be elected because of hype.  In the libertarian view of things, electing a president shouldn't involve much hype.  If an election requires hype, then the government has grown too large. 

12.   This one is greatness.  It's perfect.  So as an alternative to ObamaCare, please give me a choice of who I can go to for medical care, drugs, or anything else that doesn't harm someone else.  If I want to go to a low-cost doctor or nurse, in the form of someone who didn't complete med school, is it anyone's business but mine?  Are the Republicans going to allow me to go to Ray Lewis to get stitches and a tetanus shot?  (He runs our wood shop, and is a former Marine medic.) 
It currently costs around a billion dollars to lawyer-proof a new medication.  Let me sign something stating that I want sue the supplier, and then allow me to try any new medication that I choose. 
I don't think this will ever happen.  It would piss off the trial lawyers too much.  And the Republicrats and Demoblicans are owned by the trial lawyers. 

13.   For those of us with low expectations, and who are aware that presidents are just like the rest of us (sometimes lazy, sinful, lying, grasping, Weiner-texting, and fallible) human beings, we're never disappointed or bummed out by presidential behavior. 
Our next president will not meet expectations.  That's why he should have very little power.  We shouldn't trust him, or Congress, any further than we can throw them. 

14.   See commentary on #13. 

15.   And voting for someone just because he's a Republican is just as dumb as voting for someone just because he's a Democrat.  You don't get a prize for guessing the winner, people. 

16.   This one is too big for a bumpersticker.  I don't know why Surber included it.  For those reading this in Europe and Asia, we have a series of commercials in the U.S. featuring a guy who dresses in a suit covered with dollar signs.  He sells a book about how to get money from government.  I don't know if it includes a section on selling them border fences, bombs, ethanol, soybeans, helicopters, and machine guns.  I don't know if the book has any info on boondoggles like George Bush's TARP program. 

17.   I can't argue with this one.  But doesn't it make you consider the need for another party to be represented on this scoreboard? 

18.   Yep.  He blows.  So did Nixon, Carter and Bush Jr.  So did LBJ.  Ford didn't have enough sense to stop inflation (all you have to do is quit printing money).  One could argue that the majority of Democrat and Republican presidents have sucked. 
Let's consider some other alternatives, alternatives that aren't so entangled with lobbyists, giveaways, and the status quo.  The Libertarian Party awaits. 

19.   Oh for the love of God, what do we have here?  The only thing missing is Pro-Marriage and Pro-Flag.  Is there anyone out there who believes that, say, Newt Gingrich spends a lot of time with God? 

20.   This one, considering the failure of Obama's "Shovel-Ready" projects, is just downright funny. 

21.   I don't like this one, even as someone who dishes out more than his fair share of snarkiness.  We don't have stupid voters; the current governing factions allow nothing but stupid choices and we've grown accustomed to it. 

22.   I don't like this one either.  The black slang seems kind of racist.  Plus, the Republican party serves up "small government" Kool-Aid in massive vats and buckets and pipelines and supertankers while doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to shrink the size of government. 

23.   Nah.  That would be Richard M. Nixon or FDR.  Nixon implemented wage and price controls that were outrageous enough to cause my political forefathers to form the Libertarian Party.  Then he started the National Endowment For The Arts. 
FDR planted the seeds that of most of the programs that got us 14 trillion in debt.  He outlawed private gold holdings.  He locked Japanese citizens into internment camps. 

24.  Well, yeah. 

25.   I'm not going to comment on this one.  I'm just going to follow it with a chart showing increases in the national debt by president. 

Now THAT is your brain on drugs. 

If you really want a smaller government, less debt, and more personal freedom, please consider the Libertarian Party in the 2012 elections. 

How about this for a bumpersticker?