Too many rights?

Who is allowed to have "too many rights"? Not Christians serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, that's for sure. Bill Donohue explains in his piece about how the Obama Regime opposes a Religious Liberty amendment in a National Defense Authorization Act. Excerpt:

When it comes to those who elect to mutilate their genitals in transgender surgery, we are told they can’t have too many rights. When it comes to suspected Muslim terrorists, we are told they cannot have too many rights. When it comes to pre-teen girls seeking to get birth control pills behind their parents’ back, we are told they cannot have too many rights. But when it comes to the religious rights of the Armed Forces, we are told they already have too many rights.

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View From My Chair

This was the view from my chair at Panera today. This is not the "view from my table". The "view from my table" would be my bulging eyes and drooling mouth. So I don't know why anyone would want to see that.

So we can see on the right the Spinach Power Salad which is comprised of "Fresh baby spinach, roasted mushrooms and onion blend, diced eggs, applewood-smoked bacon, frizzled onions & smoky Vidalia® onion vinaigrette." On the left is a cup of Low Fat Vegetable Soup with Pesto which allegedly contains "water, tomatoes, yellow wax beans, zucchini, onions, barley [may contain wheat], cauliflower, red bell pepper, Swiss chard, seasoning [modified corn starch, sugar, autolyzed yeast extract, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, natural flavors], tomato concentrate [roasted tomatoes and tomato paste, salt, sugar, natural flavoring, and cilantro], tomato paste, basil), basil pesto (basil, canola oil, water, romano cheese [pasteurized cow's milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes, powdered cellulose], extra virgin olive oil, chopped garlic and salt."

I washed it all down with a small plastic cup of water with a lemon and three non-cubic ice cubes. You can see the cup in the background with that cute, black plastic swizzle straw. The food tasted pretty good and cost $8.40.

I know you guys were simply dying to see this. So you're welcome.

Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

Snowden

The excerpts below are from Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt email, which I highly recommend, BTW. He first links to John Yoo's piece on NRO's The Corner which begins "Edward Snowden should go to jail, as quickly and for as long as possible," a statement with which I agree. But I'm in more emphatic agreement with Geraghty's subject line: "Don't Come Crying to Us, NSA; You Guys Are the Ones Who Hired This Goofball."

Yoo also points out that Snowden's claim to noble motives is muddied quite a bit by his decision to run to Hong Kong. (By the way, the last guy to run to Hong Kong, certain that he was beyond the reach of American law enforcement and extradition treaties, was Mr. Lau, the money-keeper for the Gotham City mob. And we all remember how that turned out.) When Snowden declares, "Hong Kong has a reputation for freedom in spite of the People's Republic of China. It has a strong tradition of free speech," we have to wonder if A) he's already working for the Chinese or B) he's an imbecile.

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn't recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he's the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national-security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over -- completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation -- and concluding, "Yup, looks like a nice kid?"

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego -- one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex)

My position on this is no doubt driven by my being a security hawk before I'm any type of civil libertarian. And what frustrates me most by this story is how it is taking time away from the IRS scandal.

I'm perplexed that Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh have spoken favorably about this character. To me, he's a typical paranoid, head-in-the-sand Paulistinian who—like Geraghty points out—obviously has an enormous ego. What on God's green earth he was ever doing working in National Security is completely beyond me.

Well, it's not really beyond me. He is handsome, and there are a lot of middle-aged women working in human resources departments. That's how I'm guessing one otherwise unemployable friend of mine keeps getting good jobs. Now it is revealed that he is dating a pole-dancer. Say "bye-bye" to everything, Prince Charming; prison will not be fun.



Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

Paul Ryan delivers clarity as always

From the National Organization for Marriage's Blog.

Personality Crisis

Check out the girl in the front who knows all the lyrics, around 2:15. She even does the wolfman howl. Awesome.

He used to look more normal

Check out the picture here. This is from two years ago. Doesn't he look more normal without the 'uge spectacles? My 9-year-old has glasses almost exactly like that.

Some people just get weirder and weirder as the years roll on. I hope I'm getting more and more normal. If I'm more boring as a result then, hey—small price to be counted as sane in this crazy cosmos.

Liberals dislike of good news is telling

Bill Donohue shows how liberal Catholics dislike good news about their own church.

Peter Steinfels, who wrote the obituary on Father Andrew M. Greeley in today’s New York Times, notes that “there was resistance among liberal Catholics to his [Greeley’s] positive findings about Catholic schools.”

This is striking. Steinfels, himself a liberal, is writing about Greeley, another liberal (on most subjects), about the way liberal Catholics react to good news about Catholic schools. Which raises the question: Why do liberal Catholics treat good news about Catholic schools as bad news? Would they prefer they fail?

Steinfels went on to say that Greeley’s “research debunked the received view at the time that Catholics had low college attendance rates. He found instead that white Catholics earned bachelor’s degrees and pursued advanced degrees at higher rates than other whites, and he attributed their success to the quality of education in parochial schools, a controversial assertion in a time of public-school ascendancy.”

Conservative Catholics cheer such news. Apolitical Catholics cheer such news. So what’s wrong with liberal Catholics that they resist such news? Is their craven need for acceptance by secular elites so debased that it drives them to resist good news about Catholic education?

Of course many of them also dislike good news about the abuse scandal in the church. The proposition that there are a finite number of child abusers in the church or that the problem is at least under control disturbs them for some reason.

Maybe I'll try to go get a picture

Judge Pinkey Carr strikes again.

A man who threatened police was expected to hold a sign calling himself an "idiot" as part of his sentence today, but Richard Dameron, 58, did not show up at the scheduled time of 7 a.m.

Dameron was found guilty of making threatening 911 calls to Cleveland Police. In addition to a 90-day jail sentence, Dameron was sentenced to hold up a sign of apology across the street from the Second District Cleveland Police station for three hours beginning Monday morning.

The sign was to reportedly read: "I apologize to Officer Simone, his family, all law enforcement officers and Ms. Adkins for threatening to kill them. I was being an idiot and it will never happen again."

I like her idea. It sort of hearkens back to the Order of Penitents in the Early Church who I've heard were sometimes required to hold a sign relating the nature of any public sins. But that wasn't on the Wikipedia page.

Wait... here's a picture of the idiot sign.



I hope Pinkey is only the Judge's nickname and not the result of her parents being Happy Days fans.