Thoughts On A Sunday

The humid air is gone, the temps have moderated some (80's rather than 90's), and the winds have died down, making it one of the more beautiful summer days in a while.

Deb and I had hopes of hitting the lake late in the day after the weekenders have left.

*******

I don't know how it happened, but somehow I ended up driving down to the NH-SPCA in Stratham, New Hampshire with Deb and we ended up with yet another feline member in our household and two for the WP In-Laws.

I told her in no uncertain terms that there would be no more additions of the four-footed kind to the number of inhabitants at The Manse.

I can't wait to see what our curmudgeonly Bagheera is going to write about the whole thing. I can safely say that he isn't pleased that there's yet another interloper with which he'll have to share the supper dish.

*******

It does not surprise me that the KosKids are showing their true colors at the YearlyKos convention. A couple of critical posts and comments about Jon Soltz's moves to silence dissent have mysteriously disappeared from The DailyKos.

*******

A friend of ours one town over has felt the wrath of the “summah people.”

She called us today to inform us that she's being evicted from her lakeside apartment because the neighbors, “summah people” that had bought the house next door, complained about a number of small events that, quite frankly, are something that anyone living on the lake should realize is normal.

Apparently they took exception to the fact that our friend had a couple of friends over to visit; that her son stopped by to pick up his kids after they had stayed with her for a couple of days; that we had the audacity to tie up at the dock that belongs to the house she rents when we visited her a couple of weeks ago.

What it comes down to is that they don't want anyone living next to them that might have a normal life. They want complete peace and quiet. But if that's what they wanted, they chose the wrong place. If it's peace and quiet they want then maybe they should have bought a camp out on one of the islands. Instead, they bullied our friend's landlords into evicting her.

Because of their 'needs', our friend has 30 days to find a new place to live.

I hope that whoever the next tenant might be will be the neighbor's nightmare, with late night parties attended by lots of people with loud Harleys.

*******

When it comes to Mother Nature and endangered species, some folks just don't get it.

*******

I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg on this one: most Americans are too uninformed to vote.

It's always surprising how many people I talk with have no understanding about how our government works. Many of these same folks have no understanding of what the Constitution actually says.

How is it that these folks think that they're informed enough to vote on important issues or the candidates that support them?

That's the crux of the problem: they aren't.

*******

Victor Davis Hanson has a thoughtful post, asking the Middle East to “grow up.”

He points out that the radical Islamists are nothing more than hypocrites, calling the West on things which they themselves indulge.

Radical Islamists love to scream about the "decadent" West. Everything from our operas to our attitudes about women outrage these loud pious critics.

As part of their condemnation, fundamentalist Muslims say they put a higher premium on family values and reverence for the past than crass modern Americans and Europeans do. But that is hardly true.

Recently on a British Airways flight to London, members of Qatar's royal house were outraged that its princesses had been seated next to male passengers who weren't related to them. Was this a clash of civilizations?

Not quite. The entire entourage was, in fact, returning from an all-day shopping spree in Milan, Italy. The angry members of Qatar's royal house may claim outrage at gender equality, but they seem to have no problem with the libertine West when it comes to splurging their kingdom's wealth on luxury items.

This type of hypocrisy in the Muslim world is not limited to supposedly devout oil-rich Gulf sheiks who cherry-pick Western sin. Terrorists -- with one foot in the 7th century and the other in the 21st century -- want it both ways, too.

I guess it's yet another case of the pot calling the kettle black.

*******

Man, I love Ted Nugent!

*******

Bruce has the right of it when it comes to the Dems trying to repeal the “super-evil Bush tax cuts.”

Despite the "inconvenient truth" that federal tax revenues have been pouring into Washington at a record pace in the years following, these idiots will insist on reading from the same bullshit talking points memo, telling us how the country simply "can't afford" to keep those tax cuts permanent.

Yeah, like we can afford to have hundreds of billions of dollars sucked out of the economy all in the name “soaking it to the rich.” Of course we have to remember that to the Dems anyone with a job is, by definition, rich.

*******

And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summer folk have returned in droves, traffic on the roads has tripled, and where “summah folk” are making a nuisance of themselves big time.