"No... nothing really matters... even the RCMP"

Drunk Canuck covers Queen. Instant viral classic.



Rhapsodic, eh.

Earl Scruggs 3

Farewell, Mr. Scruggs.

Earl Scruggs 2

Earl Scruggs 1

A sense of humor

One thing which is critical to possess in this world is a sense of humor. Bill Donohue has been blessed with a superb one. He skewers KKT, but oh, so gently:

I spent my St. Patrick’s Day marching in the parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue, and then drank beer with my friends. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend spent her St. Patrick’s Day at a conference attended by homosexuals, lesbians, and men/women with new genitals. I had a good time.

Kathleen is confused. She says the Catholic Church’s teachings “encourage bigotry and harm.” She doesn’t cite a single example, so she obviously meant some other religion. She also says that the conference was put on by a Catholic organization called New Ways Ministry. Again, she is confused—there is no Catholic group by that name (on St. Patrick’s Day last year the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops reaffirmed that New Ways Ministry is not a Catholic organization). To top things off, she says that two female priests gave her a special blessing at the conference. More confusion: my religion does not have female priests. All three errors of fact were made in the first six sentences, which is why I didn’t go any further.

I am at a loss to know what the source of Kathleen’s confusion is. This wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t have that sterling Kennedy name.

Love that photo. Too funny.

To lack a sense of humor isn't so much to be sad as it is to be angry. Someone has been trying to get me to fight with her on Fbook over Obamacare. She is someone who has been on the left her whole adult life, and she knows where I'm at; she knows I'm conservative. So I don't know why she is bothering to try to get me to argue. She is not married, has no kids, and I really feel bad for her. There is anger and bitterness behind the confrontational language in her direct messages to me and in her indignant tone over Scalia's remarks which I posted over on Fbook.

All the "defenses" of Obamacare which I've heard from committed lefties are pretty weak. "You're a racist" is, of course, both the silliest and the most impossible to refute, along with "why do you hate poor people?", which is analogous to the famous wife-beating question/accusation. A more challenging charge is "Well, WE HAD TO DO SOMETHING!", but in the end still an assertion devoid of substance. Maybe this is why the Solicitor General had such a hard time defending it.



We're done making arguments. It's time to fight it. It's time to beat Obamacare to death by any means. And we will do it with joy, hope and a raucous sense of humor. "And they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them."

They don't really care about the victims

Juan Williams starts off his sensible piece about the Trayvon Martin over-reaction like this:

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has sparked national outrage, with civil rights leaders from San Francisco to Baltimore leading protests calling for a new investigation and the arrest of the shooter.

But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?

Where is the march against the drug dealers who prey on young black people? Where is the march against bad schools, with their 50% dropout rate for black teenaged boys? Those failed schools are certainly guilty of creating the shameful 40% unemployment rate for black teens.

Well, it's just like the SNAP people. Bill Donohue has shown time and time again that they don't really care about the victims of child abuse. They are just going after priests. Or else SNAP would stand for Survivors Network of Abused by Perverts and they'd be targeting dozens of public school teachers in big cities like New York.

And it's the same thing with the Black Panthers and the other race-baiters trying to score points with this case. They don't care about the kid who lost his life. That kid is purely symbolic. They just want to get the honky and make an example of him. It's all about portraying the non-black as the aggressor. And you can see why a sensible black man like Williams is appalled by it.

Listen to Williams here:

The race-baiters argue this case deserves special attention because it fits the mold of white-on-black violence that fills the history books. Some have drawn a comparison to the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was killed in 1955 by white racists for whistling at a white woman.

The Martin case is very different from the Emmett Till case, in which a white segregationist Mississippi society approved of the murder of a black child. Black America needs to get out of the rut of replaying racial injustices of the past.

It's very different. Juan Williams is saying "stop it" to the Black Panthers and others who want to paint our society of approving of white on black violence. This Zimmerman guy seems a little trigger happy to me, and if he is found guilty and does time then I'm going to shrug and continue cutting the lawn along with most other white people. There's a huge difference between our time and 70 years ago and to ignore it is to play the white racist culture card in a deadly way. They are setting the stage for LA Riots part II if Zimmerman gets less of a sentence than the race piranhas are hoping for.

Hitler's shampoo

This comes by way of Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer's excellent site. I guess in Turkey they think there was really nothing offensive about Adolf Hitler.



Spencer comments:

The popularity of Hitler in Turkey and Egypt indicates the pervasiveness of Islamic antisemitism and its affinity for mass-murder and genocide. This is yet another indication of the rapid de-secularization and re-Islamization of Turkey. "Turkish TV Ad Features Hitler to Sell Shampoo," from Spiegel, March 26.

Der Spiegel gives us the translation from the Turkish:

The 12-second commercial shows black-and-white footage of Hitler delivering an impassioned speech, dubbed with a high-pitched voice screaming the following words in clipped Turkish:

"Why are you using woman's shampoo if you're not wearing a woman's dress? Now there's the hundred percent men's shampoo Biomen. A real man uses Biomen."

So in Islamic countries Hitler is seen as a macho man, a real man. Not a mass murderer. Of course, we've known that the radical Muslims liked Hitler for awhile now.

Great App: TuneIn

If you have $0.99 and an iPhone/iPod, check out TuneIn, a great app for listening to radio stations on your device.

I bought it because the free apps I had to listen to WHK1420 and KRLA870 just quit working after I upgraded to iOS 5.1. But this app is even better than I*Heart*Radio, imho. It does background playing, plus it immediately starts playing the station when you select it--there's no delay. Plus you can record audio, which is something you can't do with iHeart, as far as I know. Great app.

Children...

Learn something. When you overstate your case, you lose credibility. When you overstate your case, you lose authority. And often you sound desperate, like this guy, who is already sounding like an also-ran even before he trudges off the campaign trail.

USPS finally getting with it

The US Post Office in my area has three new cool services that are immensely helpful to anyone with a PO Box. First of all, there's Real Mail Notification, a service that basically sends you an email if you have mail. That saves you from checking your box and having it be empty. Ever.

The second service is called Signature on File which allows you to leave a signature image on hand so you never have to actually sign for anything you get. Some people wouldn't dig this, especially those in the tin-foil hat crowd. But listen, folks, the Federal Government runs the post office and they can screw you if they want to already. So leaving them an image of your sig isn't really a big deal in my book.

The third is Street Addressing which provides for UPS and FedEx to deliver to your PO Box. So if your PO Box is 1234 and your post office is located at 567 Main Street, your street address becomes 567 Main Street, #1234. It's that simple. All on one line instead of PO Box 1234. But the old PO Box 1234 address will still work the same as always for regular mail.

These were all free to me so I signed up for all of them. They've already saved me mucho time. The USPS site has a page that talks about these here. Hopefully this will allow the USPS to lay more people off or at least get them doing something besides providing substandard window service.

Donald McClarey pwns Jimmy Carter

On Saturday over at the American Catholic blog, Donald McClarey skillfully disassembled what he rightly calls Jimmy Carter's "latest mind droppings". Mainly he is reacting to the recent bilious remarks that Carter made about Blessed Pope John Paul II along the standard liberal lines, referring to the late Holy Father as a "fundamentalist". I encourage you to read the entire thing, but here is an excerpt:

Jimmy, here is a clue for you. No one cares a rat’s nether regions about what you think about anything. You were a completely incompetent president and the American people have tried their best to forget you. You were such a wretched president that even in your own party you are a non-person, and it difficult to embarrass Democrats over anything. Pope John Paul II was a magnificent pope. Here is a list of just a few of his accomplishments, although it will take centuries for historians to fully assess his almost 27 year-long papacy, but here are some of the factors that I think they will note.

Then Donald goes on to discuss some of JPII's accomplishments, like ending communism, keeping the church from descending into Anglican-like irrelevance, etc. Next to these, Carter looks pretty much like a sorex longirostris fisheri¹ in comparison. So he merely concludes thus:

This list only touches some of the main features of the papacy of John Paul II, a papacy that will be discussed endlessly as the centuries pass. In the far future Jimmy, if historians will recall you at all, it will probably be because you were president at the start of the pontificate of John Paul the Great.

There are a lot of comments there worth reading as well, notably this one from Martial Artist/Keith Töpfer:

Professor Esolen,

Thank you for responding to C-Veg with the facts. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi went into exile on 16th January 1979, in the middle of the following a series of militantly anti-Shah demonstrations the first of which occurred in October 1977, in the middle of the Carter administration. He did not come to the United States until late October 1979, and was allowed into the country to undergo surgical treatment.

On a related note, as a former enlisted submariner in the U.S. Navy, subsequently commissioned, I would have to rate Mr. McClarey’s assessment of Mr. Carter as a bit on the generous side. Carter repeatedly demonstrated an inability to think beyond a limited set of fixed policies and procedures.

Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer, LCDR, USN [ret]

Also, just today, Donald reports that he received awesome "fan mail" for his efforts. I'm totally jealous. Good job, Donald.

-----

1 - Dismal Swamp Southestern Shrew.

"That's not enough for me."

One can imagine Jimmy Dimora being advised to take a plea deal a year ago and responding "That's not enough for me." He wanted it all and so he bet that when the roulette wheel stopped spinning, the ball would land in a hole marked "innocent". Too bad he lost.

In the conclusion to this great article by Robert Samuelson, "Obama's Ego Trip" we see another ego trip at work, and perhaps Obama's ego is even fatter than Dimora himself.

Considering the ACA's glaring -- and predictable -- economic and political shortcomings, why did Obama make it his first-term centerpiece? The answer seems to be his obsession with securing his legacy as the president who achieved the liberal grail of universal coverage. In his book "The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery," Noam Scheiber recounts a telling incident. Obama's advisers tell him he can be known for preventing a second Great Depression. "That's not enough for me," Obama replies.

The ACA is Obama's ego trip, but as a path to presidential greatness, it may disappoint no matter how the court decides. Lyndon's Johnson's creation of Medicare and Medicaid was larger, and he isn't deemed great. And then, unlike now, government seemed capable of paying for bigger programs.

What can we do now? Maybe say a Rosary for Justice Anthony Kennedy. That's what I'm going to do.

Then, I will pray to Mr. Kennedy this little prayer I adapted:

Tony, Tony, come around!
Save us from this Obama clown!