One reason I hope for this is because the Official Weekend Pundit Snowblower has become a casualty of eleven winters hard use. It finally 'gave up the ghost' and is now more suited as parts. (BeezleBub already has plans for the engine, which is still in good shape.)
So this coming fall we'll have to make a trip to one of the local snowblower retailers and select a new Official Weekend Pundit Snowblower.
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Speaking of BeezleBub, he and Twirl Girl have been busy all weekend at the State Drama Festival, both competing and playing host to other high school drama departments and their one act plays. Both had to be at our high school at 6AM yesterday, staying until almost 11PM last night, and getting there again at 8AM this morning.Fortunately things go back to normal after today, with BeezleBub returning to work at the farm after a two week hiatus, and Twirl Girl getting ready to resume her summer job at the local DQ.
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Jay Tea has a passive-aggressive means for responding to the Wisconsin public employees union 'requests' for support.***********
Could Los Angeles become the next American ghost town in a long line of new ghost towns?While the second linked article lists the top 10 'new' ghost towns/counties, I have to take issue with at least one of them: The County of Dukes County in Massachusetts (no, that's its real name, not an accidental redundancy) which includes Martha's Vineyard Island, is listed as No. 7. Considering it has a very high percentage of summer vacations homes, is it any surprise there aren't all that many people around during the off-season? By that criteria, my little home town here on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire would be considered a ghost town. The town population doubles in the summer and is pretty quiet during fall and spring. (We have the county ski resort that generates a lot of traffic on one of our main roads, but it's mostly daytrippers, so they don't count.)
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The battle between the New Hampshire Legislature and the public employee unions continues, with some Democratic leaders trying to use Ronald Reagan's words about collective bargaining to justify the continuation of the practice for the public employee unions within the state. Never mind that Reagan was talking about private sector unions. They have also chosen to ignore one of their Democrat icons – FDR – when he warned against public sector unions, as did AFL-CIO head George Meaney.What most people outside of the debate don't realize is that public sector employees are covered by the civil service system, which already gives them protections not afforded to those in the private sector.
I would have no problem with keeping public employee unions under one condition: the unions (or their national organizations) would be outlawed from giving campaign contributions to anyone running for office. They would, however, be allowed to contribute to the federal election fund, period. This would make it more difficult (but not impossible) for unions to buy politicians. It would also prevent them from financially supporting candidates whom some members of the rank-and-file do not support. (That was one of my biggest gripes when I was a card-carrying member of the IBEW – supporting candidates with the most abhorrent political beliefs only because they toed the union line.)
But I'm not going to hold my breath that any of this will come to pass.
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Oh, yeah, this is going to come back and burn them.It seems the DSCC is trying to obtain copies of the medical insurance records of Senator Scott Brown's (R-MA) family.
You know that if the GOP tried something like that the Democrats would be having fits and raving about “invasion of privacy” and “unethical campaign tactics” to the MSM and every other Democrat media organ. But because the target is a Republican and the perps are Democrats it's perfectly OK to do this.
And so the double standard lives on.
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If you haven't seen this yet, Bill Whittle channels Iowahawk, explaining how we can pay for the coming fiscal year's $3.4 trillion (that's trillion with a “t”) budget.While doable, it doesn't answer an important follow-up question: How do we pay for the following year's budget? Everyone will be broke.
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Glenn Reynolds has a number of links, quotes, and comments in defense of anti-intellectualism.One quote:
Is it any wonder that the term “intellectual” is looked upon with disdain?
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact.
Another of his readers gives us this bit of historical perspective, quoting Neal Stephenson:
Do we really want to commit the same mistakes as those made in the past by others, handing over control of our society to intellectuals of the same bent of mind as those who brought about the Holocaust and long dark decades of the Soviet Union?
“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century (meaning the 20th Century – ed.), intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir (sic). Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.”
“We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media.”
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Susannah Fleetwood reports on long overdue and much deserved smackdown of a Muslim cleric by Pakistani actress Veena Malik.We have been far too tolerant of radical Islamists, all in the name of multiculturalism. It's time for liberals to wake up to the threat to everyone (including themselves) if we allow Muslim immigrants to dictate to us how our laws and customs must be subsumed to their own. If they don't want to assimilate into American society they can always move someplace that allows them to keep practicing their barbaric 7th Century customs.
The idea of America is to embrace the best of the cultures of those who come here to live in freedom, not to let our society and customs be swept away by something everyone (except liberals) sees as barbaric and criminal.
Message to multi-culti liberals: Stop betraying your own kind to those who would like nothing more than to cut your head off all in the name of God. You'd best come to realize that our culture is not inferior to all others. It is far superior in more ways than I can possibly list here. If you don't like American culture you can always move to one you believe is superior and see how you really like it. Then and only then can you make the determination which one is “superior”.