Nom de plume: Rivrdog

I take back the kudos

That I handed out here. Scanning the evening news, I come across this little gem about the GOP's diminishing crew of State Governors.

It seems that they are all going to go with their (D)onk bretheren from the Statehouses, hat in hand, to the Obamawallah and the Peloser and beg for money to balance their budgets.

Isn't that just special? Such solidarity with the Congressional GOP!

Well, they can all kiss my grits. If none of these governors is willing to do what his or her State Constitutions ALL tell them to do, balance the budget within existing revenue, and they must ALL go running to Washington DeeCee to get dollars to tide over their bloated budgets, then we are lost.

It's just that simple, the conservatives have lost. Short of a Clancy-esque destruction of the entire government, nothing can save us now, because when the States call for that "Gimme-Gimme" dance from the bandleader, they will eventually have to pay for the music, and that payment can be nothing else but vastly diminished State's Rights and a busted Constitution.

Incoming RNC Chair Michael Steele has but days to whip these Governors into shape and have them back toeing the small-government line, which is at the very heart of conservative politics.

Meanwhile, the Christian Right has found their White Knight, and it's Rush Limbaugh. When you hitch your wagon to a comedian, don't be surprised if there's little political effectiveness and damn little humor either. MN is about to learn that lesson the hard way.

The future of Conservatism evidently does NOT lie with the GOP, so a "third" party will be necessary to express conservative THOUGHT. Yes, I said "thought", not religious dogma.

That pretty much leaves out everyone except the libertarians.

Now, if the libertarians can hitch THEIR wagon to someone besides losers, sci-fi whackos and tax evaders, maybe there's a chance. Under a libertarian government, I'd have to fight off gangs of doper-bandits, but I have the tools and training to do that, and that fight could be won rather easily. After that, it would be smooth sailing.

Yep, time to look to the Ls. The GOP has abandoned us badly.

Typo or Freudian Slip? (Updated !)

First look at the news this morning brought this. I'm sure it will change in the next few moments, but the headline originally read:

"Iraq wraps up election with major violence"

The first sentence of the AssPress story reads:

"BAGHDAD – Iraq's provincial elections have wrapped up without any reports of serious violence."

The photo accompanying the article was of a woman in traditional garb holding up her ink-stained finger (they ink a finger at the polls there so you cannot immediately go and vote again).

A screen-capture of the article is here:

Download AssPressBooBoo

A simple typo, right? They meant to write the word "without" in the headline, right?

Or was this headline pre-written because the stringer who wrote it believed that there WOULD be major violence?

I don't think either one of those explanations are any good. I think that this news outfit is so used to the idea that we can't change the old ways with our nation-building in Iraq, that when the nation-building has actually succeeded, no one can believe it because they've been immersed in the negative side of reporting from Iraq the entire way before today.

It's a Freudian Slip. Especially when one considers the number of layers of editing that this had to go to before being published on the Internet, as the lead story of the hour, no less. The ENTIRE STAFFS of the Associated Press and Yahoo! News had this Freudian Slip. The desire for the USA to fail in Iraq is THAT strong with these organizations, and they just proved it with prima-facie evidence.

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UPDATE: 013109 1037 PST: There's a re-do of the boo-boo. You can see the redux screenshot below. Note that they must have had an an Imam or two call in with a complaint of how wrong it is to display the unveiled female face, because the accompanying photo is now a male:

Download AssPressRedux

That is all. Should I re-title this post, "How many ways can the AssPress screw the pooch in just one story?"

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Who done It? (Updated with video!)

At some point, hopefully AFTER the economy stops sinking, there will probably be hearings to determine fault. These hearings could get very interesting, especially if this man is in charge of the Commission to Investigate, and he might well be.

Interviewed on Jim Cramer's "Mad Money" program on CNBC (I'm a fan! BOOYAH!), Senator Kent Conrad said that an investigation into market manipulations which might have precipitated the economic disaster is VERY high on his to-do list.

He also said that as a result of such an investigation, referrals for Federal prosecution would be made as appropriate. The Senator believes that a "9-11 Commission" style of investigation, with the Commission having full subpoena power, will be needed.

People, this WILL happen. It becomes more likely even as the dollar begins it's long journey into the night of failed currencies, began as it was by Bushies and accelerated by the errant policies of the Obama Administration. Senator Conrad, of course, was one of the first to climb on the Obama bandwagon, and he is also the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, therefore he is the most powerful fiscal Democrat in the Senate.

He is considered very astute as a fiscal policy advisor, at least by the liberals in the Democratic Party.

I see these hearings as the circus of the "bread and circuses" distractions the Obama Administration will try to throw at us to distract us from our economic misery.

When the hearings are held, you can count on wall-to-wall coverage by the MSM.

I will listen to much of it myself, if only to see if money still talks. If it still does then, you can bet the real culprits, a cabal of Clinton party hacks and derivatives fund owners, will never do the perp walks. Some poor second-echelon bankers and maybe an oil futures trader or two will get frog-marched off to the calaboose, but none of the original scum-get-mortgages proponents and none of the leveraged-out-of-the-universe derivatives fund managers will ever see a night in jail.

Lots of ordinary folks will be duped by this show, which is probably being planned as I write.

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UPDATE: 013009 2251 PST: As if preparing to tilt the never-level playing field even more, this video was removed from US You-Tube, and it is only available in Canada at this point. It might still be available in Fox' archives, but for now, you have to go to the Canadian Conservative Party to see it. The video runs the timeline of warnings about the mortgage meltdown, a timeline which started in 2001 with GOP reservations about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their habit of granting mortgages to uncreditworthy people.

Dumbing down America: the results

Here's a result: when the basic lessons of personal hygiene are ignored, people can get very sick. Listen as the surgeon who saved this patient's life explains how he expects this sort of thing to get worse.

It's easy to Blame The Gun

This morning, if it bleeds, it leads on the editorial page of the daily Oregonian.

Taking advantage of the tragic shooting this past weekend in downtown Portland, the Oregonian blames the gun store:

"After all, this is where Erik Ayala acquired the 9 mm, semiautomatic handgun he used Saturday night in the worst mass shooting in Portland history. Surely, you might imagine, this was the place to intervene, to keep the necessary distance between a suicidal young man and a handgun that can spit 11 deadly bullets in a matter of seconds."

Intervene in a gun shop? The thought boggles my mind. I envision a crowd of anti-gunners picketing gun shops, and their destruction of a lawful business being tolerated by the Socialist government, as it was in the case of the fur store which recently went under because the city refused to chase PETA and their crowd of nasties from the store's entrance.

Try this handy-dandy bullet-point list on for size, says the Editoral crew:

"But in the United States, when you go looking for answers to a mass shooting at a place like 99 Pawn, here's what you find:

• Easy access to guns, and a nation that wants to keep it that way. Under federal and state gun laws, Ayala's handgun purchase was perfectly legal.

• No chance for the kind of sweeping gun controls that would have been necessary to keep a gun out of Ayala's hands. There is no broad public support, and no appetite in Congress or in the Obama administration, to take up serious new controls on guns.

• Existing gun laws under legal challenge. The U.S. Supreme Court found Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban unconstitutional and ruled that under the Second Amendment, U.S. citizens and, presumably, legal immigrants in this country, such as Ayala, have an individual right to bear arms."

There was no mass shooting at the gun store, as the subject-object inversion in the first sentence of that paragraph would have you believe. I thought editors were supposed to EDIT.

Of course, all that pious rhetoric above ignores the fact (highlighted later in the editorial) that the gun store proprietor did everything according to the book, and even saved the cops their usual legwork by telling THEM that he had sold the gun, as soon as a photo of the shooter was released and broadcast.

That little juggling of facts isn't the real nub of this Constitution-intolerant editorial, however:

"Under all U.S. and Oregon gun laws, Ayala was fit to own a semiautomatic handgun. He didn't have to steal it or buy it on the streets. He simply had to show up at 99 Pawn with a government-issued photo ID, three months of utility bills and a clean criminal record.

He left with his new gun and directions to a nearby indoor firing range.

And that is all there is to it." (Emphasis added)

Get it, readers? We're ALL blamed for the nightclub shooting because we haven't demanded universal disarmament, which has been proven, over and over, to only disarm the law-abiding, and almost never disarm the truly dangerous like Ayala.

This is where the pen is INDEED mightier than the sword. Our founding Fathers decided, in their Eternal Wisdom, that an armed society is a safer society, and the new Republic they were inventing needed protection from the demonstrably overbearing Crown (read: Federal Government in our times), so they permitted the citizenry to be armed, and a lawful commerce in arms to proceed. With a few pen-strokes, the Editorial Board wants to negate all that wisdom and it's result, our Constitution.

If any of the members of the Editorial Board of the Oregonian read this, how about suggesting a countervailing idea? How about suggesting that MORE, not less, citizens become armed? Had there been a few armed citizens on that busy thoroughfare a few nights ago, the shooter would likely have been stopped before he did the damage he did do. Perhaps if many more citizens went about their daily (and nightly) business armed, guys like Ayala would consider another way to make their 15 minutes of fame.

Editorial Boards have only a self-given mandate for their agendas. It's bad enough that this Board ignores the Constitution when they make these suggestions, but it's intolerable that they make those suggestions on the dead and wounded bodies of the innocent victims of this horrible tragedy.

The Editorial Board of the daily Oregonian owes the families of each of these victims an apology for their callous pandering.

Good on ya, GOP

After sleeping through the last Presidential election, and the congressional election of '06 which preceded it, the Grand Old Party finally begins to show some cohesiveness, voting TOTALLY en bloc against the reckless "stimulus" bill. They even picked up a few (D)onk votes along the way.

The GOP now has the some street creds to oppose the (D)onks and Obama with on their exhuming of the body of the tried-and-failed Keynesian Economics theory.

If the GOP can hold this thought for more than a week or two (hard to do in DeeCee), and keep voting against these screaming-Socialist treatments of a free-market economy (or what's left of it after Bush got through tearing it down), they will be able to march into the 2010 Congressional Elections and tell the suckers who voted in Obama, Pelosi et al that their ideas to rescue the economy from a bad business downturn sucked a big root, and maybe, just maybe, enough of those suckers will remember their Econ 101 and vote with the GOP, giving us the chance to escape the Obama Years with the Republic intact.

I'm not holding my breath until November 2010, but the GOP actually just started down that high road. We'll see.

BTW, if you're the betting type, how about betting me on the drop of the dollar vs. the yen when this turkey is signed into law? Today, the dollar bought 90.4 yen. I'm betting that after the law is signed, our Dollar won't buy more than 85.6 yen, a drop of about 5%. Any takers?

If I win this bet, I'll toss it all into a much grimmer wager, if someone wants to predict how much more fall the dollar will take with repeated huge printing press runs before it tips over into free-fall and we get into a hyper-inflation that no form of economy can survive.

Shame, Sam, Shame

...it's really all about shame, a strong emotion, but a necessary one in the human condition. Shame, and the fear of having and displaying it around others, is what makes us unique as humans. Shame is the visible face of conscience, and we even have a reaction to display when we feel it - blushing.

Some humans have learned to suppress their sense of shame, and we USED to regard those people as dangerous. The shouted warning, "Have you no shame, sir" was meant to inform a man that his actions had just passed a point of no return in the book of morals, whichever one he might use, doesn't have to be the Bible.

Sam Adams has no shame. He's the "openly gay" Mayor of Portland caught up in a sex scandal over first grooming a child and student-intern to be his lover, then having a sexual relationship with that person when he turned 18, all done from his City Commissioner's Office (and adjoining bathroom, apparently), then lying about it, repeatedly, during his mayoral run for office.

Debate grips the City Hall, and has virtually paralyzed the governance of Oregon's largest city. No one is doing much work, they're just waiting for the next shoe to drop in the apparently-unending drama.

Last night, one of Sam Adams' most important aides quit. Wade Nkrumah, Adams' Director of Communications, and a REALLY honorable man, did the honorable thing and left the service of "His Honor" the Mayor. Mr. Nkrumah had a good job before he joined Mayor Adams' staff, that of a reporter with the daily Oregonian. He is unemployed for the moment.

I hope the Oregonian offers him his old job back.

Meanwhile, the Mayor continues to be the butt of various national comedy jokesters (4 nights in a row on Leno) and commentators (a mini-debate on Bill O'Reilly last night).

Adams' people have ginned up a "Support" site on Facebook, but according to one commenter to the above-linked article, not all the listed 3400+ people are actually supporters. The commenter "armycougar" found his/her name on that list despite never having "enlisted" in the Support Sam cause:

Posted by armycougar on 01/27/09 at 10:58PM

The 3,468 member count of the "support" Adams facebook is misleading. I would go as far as to say that not even close to half of that number actually supports him. If you read the comments on the page most of them are against adams. I am one of very many on the "support" page against adams.

Facebook is primarily a youth network, so it appears that Hizzoner is still trying to manipulate youth, even as he is under attack for having done so in a likely-criminal manner.

For Shame, sir!

"Driving in a New Direction" - Editorial rebuttal

The daily Oregonian puts this editorial in their second slot today. In it, they attempt to cheer for President Obama and gloss over all the problems associated with his "climate change" initiatives, particularly the one he expressed yesterday about trying to ram a CAFE change down the auto industry's throat in too short a time.

The editors said,

"That's a dramatic, but shrewd, acceleration. It may put the automakers in more of a crunch, but it pushes them towards a much stronger economic position in the long run."

Sorry, I disagree. Firstly, it ISN'T "shrewd" at all to kill off the automakers before they ever get any of the wunder-cars out the door. Their position is so precarious now that ANY economic forcing will probably drive them into Chapter Eleven. Secondly, the "much stronger economic position in the long run" has yet to be either calculated, or written down into a business model. It is pure blue-sky supposition at this point.

The other thing we noted that Obama was strong on yesterday was countermanding POTUS Bush43's order to the EPA refusing Kalifornica's "right" to impose it's overly-strident anti-pollution regulations on the entire automobile industry, not just on the cars that are for sale in Kali. Bush43 was correct to do that, since the Federal Government DOES have a regulatory interest here that is being usurped by individual states. Federal Courts have held that a State may restrict or control what pollutants are emitted into the air in that state's own airshed, but MAY NOT control what other states allow in THEIR air. Kali has ZERO legal basis for attempting to force it's standards on the rest of the country. It has even less of a scientific basis for doing so since it is a state upwind (generally) from all the rest of the country.

The editors state their position, then, in the next sentence, deny that position:

"Let's stop right here and acknowledge that a single Federal standard in both realms, of fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas regulation, would be ideal. Obama should be pushing for just such uniformity. But giving the states that are ready to lead a license to go forward could be the quickest route to a federal standard on greenhouse gasses."

Wow! Just Wow! The Editors are telling us what the best idea is, then they advise us to accept a countervailing idea. This is really all about State's Rights vs. Federal Rights. The Oregonian Editorial Board manages to advocate both in the same breath, for the same subject. THAT deserves some sort of "Impossibility Award". It's also a very slippery slope. The Founders were careful to write guidance into the Constitution spelling out what was a State right and what was a Federal right, then they also wisely provided the Supreme Court for deciding conflicts between the two, for any future claims which might arise.

Writing on the same subject, US Rep. Peter DeFazio (D, 4th District, Lane County) advises that the "cap and trade" system advocated by both Governor Kulongoski and President Obama will not work. His letter is a good read. Pete DeFazio can be left of Karl Marx at times, but about half the time he is directly on the path of common sense. This is one of those common-sense times.

There oughta be a law

With apologies to Jimmy Hatlo and his comic strip of two generations ago, and all the articles, blogs and even books of this title which have followed it since, I'm going to use Hatlo's 'toon-title for a new category in this blog.

The category will propose actual laws to control the outrageous behavior of politicians, mostly, but everyone, generally.

My first submission in this category was prompted by this blog-post over at Random Nuclear Strikes blog.

Paul Krugman, of course, disgraces the op-ed page of my local blatt, so I can read him over at RNS or right at my own breakfast table.

To defeat one's enemy, you must have an understanding of how that enemy thinks, especially how that thinking is different from yours. Then you can develop strategies and tactics to take advantage of weaknesses in the enemy's plans caused by their logical failures, or their logical predictability for that matter.

Paul Krugman, an economist by trade, and for now, an important advisor on money matters to the Obama Administration, could benefit from re-learning his old academic lessons on the purity of statistics.

So, without further review, I propose a Constitutional Amendment to end such shameful lying with statistics.

First, it's easy to prove statistics are bad, if they are. Proving such bad stats can be done with mathematical precision which easily fits into the requirements of proving the probable cause of a criminal case.

The law would honor the First Amendment by NOT making it a crime to present such statistics, but to only make it illegal, in three steps, when someone gains a money profit by use of such lying figures.

I don't have the time or space to detail all such liars here, but Krugman would obvious be wearing Federal Prison Khakis if the law existed.

The RivrFrau predicts:

That Obama will come up with a "clunker law" which will force all of us to scrap our old "gas guzzlers".

Kalifornistan tried such a law (voluntary), some twenty years ago. It failed miserably, because lots o'folks decided that they could make a fair street living dragging non-running street hupdies in for the reward, and few running autos were actually gotten out of the Los Angeles airshed.

I won't bet against the gudwife on this one.

She will probably be correct, although I expect that the clunker law will be tied up with all sorts of sparkly deals to have the gummint guarantee auto loans for new cars, etc, etc. Maybe even a return to tax deductability of auto loan interest?

So, getting ahead of the process, what will be involved? My guess is that any car predating the OBD-II emissions control diagnostics system (started in 1995) will be involved. There will probably be a 40-year exemption for "antiques", but also a driving limitation for them (my '68 VW Bug should skate by).

Here's the rub: forcing us to get rid of property against our will without direct compensation makes the gummint involved in an illegal "taking".

That's un-Constitutional.

Oops.

Sorry about that "oopsie", Mr. President. I'm sure Mr. Holder will help you figure out a way around that pesky Constitution, he's good at that sort of thing.

Let's make a deal, Mr. President: you give me a rebate certificate good for three years, for $5,000 off the price of ANY new car made in the US of A, a rebate which is good IN ADDITION TO any dealer or manufacturer discounts, and I'll give you the pink on my restored VeeDub, UNLESS I can get more from a collector for it.

You know where to find me to close this deal.