Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been nice weather up here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, with highs in the mid 70's yesterday and today. The warmer and more humid weather arrives on Monday, bringing with it the chance of thunderstorms later in the day.

We had tried to get out on the lake late this past Thursday and Friday, but high winds made it less than nice out on the water. Yesterday BeezleBub finished work quite late, not getting home until after 8PM, meaning a trip out onto the lake wasn't in the cards. The weather didn't cooperate today either, with clouds coming in around noon and a list mist starting around 2PM.

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BeezleBub outdid himself on the farm yesterday. The reason he didn't make it home until 8PM because he was busy catching hay bales as they came off the baler and stacking them in the hay wagon. During the day he caught 687 bales of hay. Not bad for a 15-year old.

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It appears Democrats can't seem to come to grips with the idea that the anger they're seeing at town hall meetings meant to promote Obama's health care reform is spontaneous, not some organized campaign by GOP activists.

Many Democratic lawmakers say these protests against health care reform have been ginned up by right wing groups that are arming people with agressive (sic) tactics and talking points. But Matt Kibbe, the president of Freedomworks, one of the groups organizing the movement, says there is a double standard.

"It almost seems to me like when the left does this it's celebrated as the best of democracy, community organizing," he says. "When conservative, free market activists show up, they're called mobs."

Looking at the comments to the ABC piece one can see the double standard as it applies to this issue.

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Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) has a lot of support from voters when it comes to health care reform. Unfortunately those voters supporting her efforts are from Massachusetts. Her own constituents aren't nearly as supportive of the idea.

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Why should we believe anything Obama says? So far he's broken a large number of major campaign promises and done so blatantly and with little or no explanation. It shows us the contempt he feels for the American body politic.

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It's bad enough Congress wants to lay even more taxes, fees, and control of our lives upon us, now there's a bill that would require GPS tracking systems on every vehicle in order to assess taxes based upon the miles driven rather than depending on fuel taxes.

There are at least two big problems I can see with this:

First, there's no way the government would merely replace the fuel taxes with mileage taxes. We'd end up with both, meaning we'll be hit twice for the same thing.

Second, it's yet another step towards a totally controlled population, allowing the government to know exactly where you go, and with some modifications, allow them to hear everything that's said in the vehicle, to shut down the engine, lock the doors and disable the windows.

That's too damn much control for anyone.

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It's bad enough when reporters fail to report the whole story. It's worse when they're too lazy to even research what they're writing about. Sometimes all it takes is a phone call or an e-mail. Instead they depend upon the narrative from other news sources rather than doing their own work.

That's not reporting. That's sloth.

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To quote Squidward: “Just when I thought they couldn't get any stupider...”

I know California has its share of fruits and nuts, particularly when it comes to local government, but this is just plain stupid.

Eight-year-old Daniela Earnest has made lemonade out of lemons in more ways than one this week.

Hoping to raise money for a family trip to Disneyland, the Tulare girl opened a lemonade stand Monday. But because Daniela didn't have a business license, the city of Tulare shut it down the same day.

Geez, kids can't even set up their own lemonade stands any more! I wonder how long before some bureaucrat somewhere will make it illegal to sell Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. That's got to be next.

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I like the idea of these – TruFocal glasses – that adjust through a wide range of focal lengths. This means that folks like me won't need bifocals/trifocals/progressives in order to be able to focus at distances near, far, and in between.

Now if they can get the price down and make them look a little less like a thick frame version of Harry Potter's glasses.

(H/T Instapundit)

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Glenn Reynolds asks the question “Remember when protest was patriotic?”

"Protest is patriotic!" "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!"
These battle-cries were heard often, in a simpler America of long ago -- that is, before last November. Back then, protests -- even if they were organized by the usual leftist apparatchik-groups like ANSWER or ACORN -- were seen - at least in the media - as proof of popular discontent.

[…]

Funny how fast the worm...has turned. Now that we're seeing genuine expressions of populist discontent, not put together by establishment packagers on behalf of an Officially Sanctioned Aggrieved Group, we're suddenly hearing complaints of "mob rule" and demands for civility.

Civility is fine, but those who demand it should show it. The Obama administration -- and its corps of willing supporters in the press and the punditry -- has set the tone, and they are now in a poor position to complain.

Whether they like it or not -- and the evidence increasingly tends toward "not" -- President Obama and his handlers need to accept that this is a free country, one where expressions of popular discontent take place outside the electoral process, and always have. (Remember
Martin Luther King?)

So unless the protests come from the Left or one of their sanctioned organizations, they want to quash them? So much for the First Amendment.

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It's déja vu all over again.

Some say history repeats itself. Others say it merely rhymes.

This time around I think it's a little of both as Obama seems to be channeling his inner Dick Nixon.

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Megan McArdle writes about the high cost of innovation and the rewards for doing it well, and how removing the rewards for innovation kills innovation. With Obama's health care reform plan innovation will not be rewarded, which means innovation will stop.

Think it won't happen? All one needs to do is look at how medical innovation tailed off in Canada and the UK once health care was socialized.

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You know it's really bad when there's a toilet paper shortage in the socialist heaven that is Cuba. At least they still have free health care!

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Want to see what those on the Left are saying about Obamacare and the mistakes he made in pushing it, then point your browser here.

Make sure to read the comments as they are most enlightening about the liberal mindset. If nothing else it shows they've been well indoctrinated and haven't had original thought in a long time.

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It has become quite clear Nancy Pelosi is suffering from a bad case of selective CRS (Can't Remember S**t) when it comes to Nazis and swastikas.

Nancy Pelosi is shocked by the presence of some swastikas at protests against Obamacare. Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, any mildly alert American old enough to remember the anti-war protests of 2003-2007. Images of George Bush with a Hitler mustache and a Nazi uniform was everywhere at swastika-choked marches and rallies. “Stop the Fourth Reich-Visualize Nuremburg,” said one sign at a Hollywood march. “The Fuhrer already in his bunker,” said another. Lots of Nazi regalia appeared at protests in Pelosi’s San Francisco as well.

I've seen videos and pictures of various Tea Party and anti-Obamacare protests and I must have missed all the swastikas, Brown Shirts, and Geheim Staats Polizei agents. I've also attended a few and again I must have missed them.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is schizophrenic, the boating totals are down, and where school starts in three weeks.