Bud horses honor victims of 9/11

Hairstylists and others weigh in on canceled Koran burning

I thought this article was interesting, especially since it was from the perspective of people living in Gainesville. My favorite quote was from a 25-year-old Hair Stylist:

"I go back and forth," said Chris Leggett, 25, a hair stylist who grew up in Gainesville and was between customers at Hair Hunters, a mini-mall salon about a mile from the Dove church. Although he said he thinks Jones is "an idiot" for the Koran-burning plan, Leggett found himself in recent days wondering what the big deal was about an isolated incident that the whole community had rejected? A girl he knew burned the U.S. flag right after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and it was a big controversy in Gainesville for a couple days, but it blew over.

"What's the big deal? He might have a point," Leggett said. "We allow people to do whatever they want, why can't he? People do whatever they want to us, burn flags, why can't [Jones] strike back? Why can't we just let him do his thing in the corner?"

Another stylist, 59-year-old Mike Bennett, said he was disturbed that Dove was being presented as a face of Gainesville Christianity. Both men were annoyed to hear chat on talk radio that "makes Gainesville look like a bunch of rednecks," Bennett said.

I'd argue that Pastor Jones wasn't really doing "his own thing in the corner." He was trumpeting the thing far and wide. But Mr. Leggett's remarks are still worth noting in that the formula he uses is the same one that ACLU and other libertine fanatics use to justify many types of subversive behavior. Flag-burning is, of course, the common analogy, and Mr. Leggett provides a personal example. Did the ACLU step up to defend the proposed Koran burning? The answer is yes, but with added remarks of it being ugly, disgusting and vile. I don't know if they do that when they defend flag desecration and gay pride exhibits, but I'm guessing they don't. It's sort of a bonus you get if you're on the same side of the ACLU politically that you don't have to suffer their obligatory derision.

Union Re-fluffers

Scott Ott is too funny. Loved this part:

Due to the anticipated public reception of the Obama roads stimulus, the White House will reportedly announce next week a plan to increase taxes on airline tickets to fund a massive project to ‘re-fluff the clouds’, employing tens of thousands of unionized fluffers.

Rebellion, LRS style

Once again... hilarious.

Great idea for protesting "Big Tobacco"

Here’s my great idea. In order to protest the many abuses of the tobacco industry (aka “Big Tobacco”), we will publicly burn their most popular product: the so-called tobacco cigarette. We will stand in PUBLIC and light the cigarettes on fire, breathe in the smoke and blow it out into the air. Then when we are done, we will throw the cigarettes on the ground and stomp on them so they are utterly destroyed, after which we will throw them in the garbage. We’ll make a video about this and put it on Youtube so everyone knows where we stand with regards to the evil tobacco companies. Then we’ll do it again in several hours. We will keep doing this until everybody knows where we stand, or until we run out of cigarettes and have to bum them from people in restaurant parking lots.

We have been told by some that this will be playing into the hands of the tobacco industry and will just give them an excuse to produce more cigarettes. They say it will just enable big tobacco to recruit more people engaged in a dangerous practice known in the Tobacco World as "smoking". BUT WE DON’T CARE! WE WILL DO IT ANYWAY!!

What do you think? Good idea?

No More Unicorns, or Disorganization Equals Good News

Americans do best when they remain in a state of general disorganization with regard to politics. Yes, that's an assertion, that's my opinion. So I am as happy as Dan McLaughlin over at RedState as he reports on this Time article re: "Obama's Army": Excerpt from the RedState piece:

Ah, the perils of treating politics as a substitute for religion. George W. Bush never had that problem; nobody really came to politics for the first time in 2000 because they thought voting for Bush would make them feel personally fulfilled, would end politics as we have known it, would end the nation’s racial divisions and make the world love us, or that he would pay their mortgage and car payments. Bush got elected because he seemed like a guy who could be trusted to do the job. And of course, that’s before you get to Obama’s actual job performance:

WHY, asks a Democrat leading a training session for fellow activists, doesn’t “Yes we can” work as a slogan any more? “Because we haven’t,” a jaded participant responds.

TIME notes that the Obama team is now trying to rebuild OFA in time for 2012, but that’s cold comfort for Democrats across the country who never did have Obama’s personal glamor.

Here's an unsurprising revelation from the Time article:

So earlier this year, when the White House gave OFA a whopping $30 million — more than half of the party's entire budget for 2010 — senior Democrats suspected a hidden agenda. Several tell Time that OFA boss David Plouffe, who ran Obama's 2008 campaign, is using the cash to rebuild an army for 2012 under the cover of boosting turnout in 2010. OFA is putting staff into such states as Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona, which have few close statewide races this fall but which are all prime targets in an Obama re-election campaign. "This is totally about 2012," Cook says.

It's all about the Big Guy.

David Warren: "Insofar as we are adults, we have never required comprehensive daycare"

Now here's a Tea Party-friendly man north of the border with a great prescription, eh. Excerpt:

The closest thing I can see to hope is currently invested in the tea party movement of the U.S. Notwithstanding the slanders heaped upon it, this movement is good-willed, riot-free, indeed situationally non-urban, and under the leadership of basically sane people. Of course, there is no guarantee that any movement devoted to genuine political change can remain so, under the inevitable provocations.

But something must be done, and here is the closest thing, anywhere in the West, to a political movement committed to the only measure that can possibly save us from riding over that cliff. Merely slowing down won't do it.

That measure is, quite frankly, the complete dismantlement of the Nanny State, and the restoration of the status quo ante -- governments focused on the provision of national defence, and domestically on the machinery of law and order. Full stop.

Krauthammer on the Middle East talks

Krauthammer's predictions on what will happen based on history and the science of human nature and the nature of Palestinians. Here's the money line:

Indeed, this week Abbas flatly told al-Quds, the leading Palestinian newspaper, "We won't recognize Israel as a Jewish state." Nice way to get things off on the right foot.