Nom de plume: Rivrdog

A GOP win? (D)emo defeat? WTF?

The GOPes are crowing that they beat the (D)onks on the Sequester. I have gotten two blast-mails from GOP-HQ already saying "we done good, give us mo' money!"

I don't think so, Festus. Any time you're on the battlefield, and the enemy makes a strong move, and you don't counter that move, but instead, roll with it, the best you can said to have done is survived the enemy's move. You can never be said to have won.

Re: this "sequester": Obama is applying a simple "poison-pill" strategy here, one that's very hard to beat. If the GOPes are going to beat it, they have to beat it by standing their ground, and making it look like HE is the one deliberately applying the hurt with the Sequester, which is true. They didn't stand their ground on the Air Traffic Controllers, they caved by modifying the Sequester so it's not an across-the-board system anymore, but has line-item control by the FAA (read: White House). That's not only NOT a win for the GOP, it's just handed some sort of line-item veto capability to the President which he did not have before, so it's really a major defeat.

The House just gave up their Article 1, Section 8 spending authority to some degree. Of course, once (and if) a budget deal is reached between Congress and the White House, you can count on Obama to start line-item vetoing whatever he wants, claiming that Congress gave him the authority to do so with this FAA sequester variance.

You NEVER give a bully what he wants, NEVER. He'll just take your offer, and punch you out anyway.

The GOP are my Maroons of the Month for this idiocy. They stood their ground on gun control, then decided it was okay to grab their ankles on a budget issue.

My pothead Congressman

Yep, you read it correctly: MY pothead Congressman. U.S. Rep Earl Blumenauer, (D) East Portland, just came all out (or was that all in?) for Federal MJ legalization. He gets Maroon of the Month for that.

Before all you Libertarians jump all over me, I'm coming around to the idea of legalizing weed by states, but not by the dot.gov. Simple, really. The government can't afford to be in the business of encouraging stoners, simply because unlike fine whisky drinkers like me, they are a motley lot.

Seriously, let's get real. NO Government has any business legalizing ANY sort of intoxicant until and unless it can detect and control intoxicated behavior where such behavior is legally and practically inappropriate. The Government can do that, more or less, with alcohol, but has NOT learned how to do it with weed. Hell, the Government can't even control intoxication by prescription drugs, which it DOES control at the front end, but does NOT control at the user end.

Now comes pot and it's millions of users.

Society is getting further and further behind the power curve on protecting itself from people doing complex, dangerous tasks while impaired by intoxication.

Earl Blumenauer wants to make it worse.

Oh, well, I'm represented by a pot puffer. It could be worse. I could be represented by an actual socialist.

Oh wait...

There's a reason to call them "Ass Press"

Two reasons, actually:

1. They are nincompoops. Utter crap flows from their newswire in a constant stream.
2. They have their lips pressed so far into the ass of the Socialists and their agenda item of Gun Control that they can't get the brown off.

Example, current, common, one each

The AssPress article asks the question, of whether Costas overstepped his position, in it's title. The answer is a simple "Yes". The article then goes on to issue a "well, no" answer and deliver a standard lefty excuse that Costas' departure from sports to delve into social engineering and Civil Rights Denial is okay because, well, because his ideas "will keep us safe". Except they won't keep us safe, that science is settled; denying the Bill of Rights is not only unpatriotic, it's treasonable; and just because, well, a sports blatherer is supposed to stick to sports. That's why they're there, isn't it?

When I want to see ass-kissing of the serious sort, I always turn to the Ass Press.

For Maroon of the Month, I give you Bob Costas. Wotta Maroon!

Bloomie steps over the line

NY Citeh Mayor Bloomberg was asked by the Brooklyn Borough President for National Guard help. Hizzoner refused to pass along the request because the Guard would have showed up in uniform and bearing arms, lending the appearance of a...wait for it...wait...a POLICE STATE!

Okay then, first the Marathon issue, now this. New Yorkers, could your city possibly be mismanaged worse than it is now?

I didn't think so.

Recall Bloomberg's incompetent, dictatorial ass, and DO.IT.NOW!

H/T to Say Uncle Blog

Dancing in the flood - Earl Blumenauer, whatta Maroon!

You've heard of Dancing in the Blood, of course, if you've read this blog for long. That particularly nasty terpsichore is done whenever there's some sort of mass-murder with firearms, and the anti-Civil Rights groups immediately use the event to try to further their un-Constitutional agenda to kill the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution. That's Dancing in the Blood.

The envirowhackos have their own version of this danse macabre, which I will call "dancing in the flood". The "science" behind the discredited theory of man-made global climate change has been discredited sixteen ways to Sunday, but the adherents of that strange religion remain unconvinced by the debunking of their phony "science". Not only do they remain unconvinced, they grab at straws in the wind, hence the Dancing in the Flood whenever a major adverse-weather event happens. Hurricane Sandy was just such a Weather event.

So it goes with our Greenie-Weenie, Earl "the Pearl" Blumenauer, Democrat representing the 3rd District of Oregon in Congress. He's just Danced in the Flood of Hurricane Sandy. He danced earlier this year in the big Heat Wave. The flood that time was in the tears of farmers and ranchers ruined by the drought, a continuing Weather event.

Earl, you dolt, there's Weather and there's Climate, and they are NOT the same, in fact, they share few connections in science. Climate is the continuing record of Weather events, and that's as close as it gets. Weather isn't even discussed in real Climate-science circles unless it's discussed as as a long, continuing record, the longer, the better, and it's specifically NEVER discussed in relation to a single Weather event.

Let this be a lesson to the Climate-scare Socialists* who have un-Constitutionally established their earth-religion as science-fact in US law: Weather is NOT Climate, never was, never can be.

But, these pearls of wisdom are lost on Earl, because, as my Momma done told me, you should never cast Pearls before Swine.

Representative Earl Blumenauer, (D) 3rd District, OR, you are the Maroon of the Month!

Your blogger may or may not be the Punster of the Month. You decide.

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* My forever challenge: the Climate-Scare religion is purely a function of Socialism. This blog challenges all readers to try to find proponents of that religion who are NOT Socialists.

No big deal, the film sucked

I watched the part of the (horrors!) anti-Islamic film when it was available on You Tube. It might be charitably re-titled "Harold and Kumar become Hadeed and Omar", with apologies to the stoners in that film trilogy. It is low comedy at it's worst, and takes several opportunities to show the Prophet Mohammed as a dorky opportunist, and his acolytes, the Harold and Kumar characters, as frat-boy dorks of even lower caliber. The film-maker completely failed to properly use the satire he was obviously trying for, and the ultra-low budget location work, out in the dunes somewhere in SoCal or AZ, didn't even bother to use a leaf blower to erase the ATV tracks in the sand dunes. Losers.

If I'm a muzzie, my reaction is to ask why Westerners are such crappy film-makers, but if Hassan Nasrallah, Mullah of Hizbullah, actually appears in public to denounce it, I guess anyone can be a film critic these days.

The film-maker is not a threat to anyone or anything, but I will award him Maroon of the Month, anyway.

Rep. Akin slept in class...Dummy! Maroon!

When I took the class, it was Psych 201, Human Development. In that class, I learned that many things affect how the female conceives. Fear, general physical stress and something as simple as dehydration can radically affect rates of conception following a fertile insemination. I learned that the fertile woman can affect the chances of conception positively by conscious actions, and the reverse is probably partly true as well.

This means that there is likely a small bit of truth in what Rep. Todd Akin tried to allege: that a woman truly fearing for her life in a violent rape might have less of a chance for conception than one who might have had some acquiescence in the act. I say might, because it's likely never been studied, and to do so would put the researchers in the class of the Nazi physiologist/experimenter Josef Mengele.

I can only conclude that one of two cases is the truth here: Akin deliberately made up this idea and presented it as a tested, proven hypothesis, or he slept through those parts of the class he took.

I'll give him the benefit of my doubt: he slept through the class.

Time to retire, dummy, or choose to wear the Dunce cap forever more. 

What Og said

Og, the Neanderpundit, has a strange way of aproaching this subject, but he proposes a Gentle Revolution. His method isn't guns or even new laws or even "un-do", which I've favored.

No, it's simply one of my mother's old maxims: "let them stew in their own juices". Og suggests learning all about the "git yo free shit here" laws**,  and steering those who want that free shit directly to it, with the intent of overloading the "git yo free shit" society quickly.

I guess we have to ask Og what his plans are if we curmudgeons did manage to crash the system, but something tells me that Og is prepared for that crash, and I know that I am, as well.  

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** "Git yo' Free shit" is not a racist statement, it is a classist statement. Classism started this Nation, and it is what we must revert to if we are to save it. More on Classism to follow.  

The June Maroon is....

...Bill O'Reilly, of Fox News.

On the O'Reilly show last night, Bill, a self-described devout Catholic, had one Fr. Pfleger of the Chicago Diocese on his show, and the subject of discussion was Chicago's horrible rate of homicide, which has exceeded our troops' rate of KIA in the 'Stan.

On background: Illinois, and Chicago in particular, has some of the most draconian gun control laws in the USA, and IIRC, the SAF is suing them over the State and City denials of Civil Rights as they are stated in the Second Amendment (and affirmed in the recent Heller decision in SCOTUS).

The priest immediately jumped on guns as the reason for the horrible rate, even though O'Reilly tried to initially steer him into a theological answer. Uncharacteristically, O'Reilly then let the priest prattle on about gun control being the answer. This priest even has some sort of (totally disconnected) new plan for gun control, "titles" for guns like cars are titled. He said that (paraphrase) 'we look at individuals who have 200 car titles listed in their names, so if guns were titled, we could look at those with 200 gun titles'. Define "look at", Father Pfleger...

"Apples and oranges" argument never won any debates when I was debating in college....

In the entire bit, which ran a full 5 minutes or so, O'Reilly never once reminded this priest of the Second Amendment, nor did he point out to him that if any kind of gun control worked, there shouldn't be any gun deaths in Chicago with it's level of 2A-denying gun rules.

Therefor, by the authority of the Devil Hisself: (I divorced my Catholic wife, so I am Condemned to Hell, according to Catholic dogma), I accuse Bill O'Reilly:

• For giving the cassocked communist cretin total carte-blanche to trash the Bill of Rights;
• For totally failing to either inject logic or 2A law into the interview;
• For failing to stand up for his own Constitution

Bill O'Reilly, you get the not-so-coveted June Maroon award. It's quite possible you might have to wear that mantle of shame for some time, because more than most righty journalists, and due to your lofty (self-proclaimed) status as King of Righty Talk, you owe more fealty to the Constitution than anyone else, and you completely failed in your duty.

A few words on the NBA...

...very few words: screw them!

With the NBA Commissioner, David Stern, who is supposed to represent ALL of that level of pro basketball now totally in the tank for the owners only, not the fans, the arenas, all those who've pegged their lives to the game, and with the players being rich enough to pass on an entire season, Stern now declares that's it's "Nuclear Winter"

The only problem for Stern is that he hasn't thought this one through.

If the Player's Union dissolves, Stern has no one to try to impose his will on, and the players will then be free (assuming courts go along with their de-cert effort) to form an entirely new league. New teams, new conferences, all that.

Stern has bitten off more than he can chew.

If I'm a player's rep, I don't decertify right away, but threaten to, and have as my bargaining chip the dumping of David Stern.

BTW, the sports world is gearing up to present even more college hoops, which will be all over your TeeVee, both free channels AND subscription channels. There will be plenty of hoops to watch, and some programs will get rich off of the NBA's demise.

BTW, David Stern, you don't go away empty handed. You get the Maroon of the Month for your bungling of this conflict, which was YOUR duty to resolve, not prolong.