STIMULATE ME OBAMA

Well, the big Bush stimulus package failed miserably, as has every other package since. So now the obvious solution, according the the Big O, is to mutliply the original fiasco by ten or twenty fold. The buffoons in Sodom on Potomac just keep throwing good money after bad. It gets more like Atlas Shrugged every single day, and the luniatics running the asylum are burying their heads deeper in the sand than anyone else.

While we're here, let's check the fine print on some of the pork, er, I mean, important infrastructure and industry stimuli included in the latest, greatest waste of money brought to us by the Messiah and his congressional minions. Here is just a tiny peek into the legions of entire hog farms' worth of pork, as detailed by Joel Skousen.

$15 billion to increase college Pell Grants

$50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts;

$400 million for global-warming research

$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects

$650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons

$252 billion is for income-transfer payments -- that is, cash or benefits to individuals for doing nothing at all.

$200 million expands Americorps

$746 million for after school snacks

$6.75 billion for the Department of Commerce, including $1 billion for a census.

$2 billion for child-care subsidies

$4 billion is allocated to expanding the police state and the war on through Byrne grants and the COPS program, both of which are corrupt and largely ineffective programs.

$20 billion would go towards health information technology, which would create a national system of electronic medical records without adequate privacy protection (These records would instead be subject to the misnamed federal 'medical privacy' rule, which allows government and state-favored special interests to see medical records at will)

$250 million is allocated for states to nationalize individual student data, expanding Federal control of education and eroding privacy.

Then, as pointed out in the link, there's some tinfoil hat goofball fringe kook candidate, I dunno who, he was saying some crazy stuff about the economy being a house of cards before they threw him out of the GOP campaign, who had a simpler solution. Some of us remember that tinfoil hat nutcase, who was trying to warn folks of all this for years, named Ron Paul. His ideas are:

1) Let banks and companies fail if they cannot survive on their own 2) Stop inflating asset prices with government purchases and bailouts 3) End the Trillion dollar annual spending to maintain the US Global Empire 4) Bring all our troops and assets home from around the world 5) End the fractional Federal Reserve banking system that caused the hyper asset inflation through pyramid debt 6) Have the US Treasury take charge of our monetary system and create a non debt based system.

By golly, that's so crazy it just might work. Which is why it will never ever even see the light of day out there in Sodom on Potomac. They'll continue to put band-aids on severed limbs and give aspirin in lieu of brain surgery until the whole economy plunges into Great Depression II. Well, the Big O did compare himself to FDR. Be careful what you wish for.

Random Points of Perspective

On Mandates

Number of Americans that voted for Barack Obama: 66.8 million
Number of Americans that DIDN’T vote for Barack Obama: 237 million

Electoral votes for Barack Obama: 365
Electoral votes for Ronald Reagan (1984): 525

(source: Wikipedia.org)

On War

Cost of “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan (through FY2008 request):
$820 billion ( in 2007 dollars)

Cost of American Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War (Union & Confederate costs), Spanish-American War, World War I, and Persian Gulf War combined:
$551 billion (in inflation -adjusted 2007 dollars)

(source: Reason Magazine)

On Taxes

Year 2000 (Before “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy“):
Top 10% of wage earners paid 67.33% of all federal income taxes collected.
Bottom 50% of wage earners paid 3.91% of all federal income taxes collected.

Year 2006 (After “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy“):
Top 10% of wage earners paid 70.79% of all federal income taxes collected.
Bottom 50% of wage earners paid 2.99% of all federal income taxes collected.

(source: Heritage Foundation)

On Guns

Australian crime rates during the 6 years following passage of sweeping gun ban in 1996:
armed robbery + 51%, unarmed robbery +37%, assault +24%, kidnapping +43%, murder - 3%, manslaughter +16%

English handgun crime in 2 years following its 1997 gun ban: +40%

Increase in the number of guns in U.S. during the 1990s: +40 million
Murder rate during same period: -40%
Accidental gun deaths during same period: -40%

(source: Gun Owners of America)

BORED OF THE DANCE

It looks like I finally went a little overboard broadening my horizons. We went to see Lord of the Dance in the cultural mecca of Butte, MT, home of Montana's only Superfund site, the Berkley Pit, whose cobalt blue water kill migratory birds that land in it.

I suppose I enjoyed Mamma Mia! so much because I was expecting nothing out of it anyway. I was anticipating Lord of the Dance, however. We’ve got some Irish blood in the family tree somewhere, between a whole bunch of Germans on one side and a couple of Englishmen in the woodpile on the other side. I’m told it takes ten generations to dilute Irish blood sufficiently that one no longer feels the call of the Ould Sod.

So I went to the Lord of the Dance with much anticipation, in large part because I really love the song by that same name. I sometimes listen to the music of the Irish Rovers, and developed great affection for the song itself. I left the dance very disappointed, all because of that song.

Yes, it was a musical extravaganza. Yes, the Irish dance with the clogging was amazing. Yes, the performers were incredible athletes and even the smallest woman among them could kick my ass in a heartbeat. Yes, the sights and sounds and light show were awesome. Yes, the fiddlers were some of the most talented musicians I’ve ever seen. Yes, all the dances were absolutely brilliantly choreographed.

The performance had all these Celtic runes and mythical stuff and hooded figures and a "Dark Lord" and the struggle between good & evil. They even played the song Lord of the Dance during one dance, and the little glittery sprite or nymph or whatever she was supposed to be played a few bars on her flute occasionally. But in the grand scheme of things, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the real Lord of the Dance.

The song Lord of the Dance celebrates the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the real Messiah, (whom folks used to worship instead of Chicago politicians) the ultimate in the struggle between Good and Evil. In this odious day and age in which we live, however, it has become a hate crime to even mention Jesus Christ in public, even on his birthday (which is Christmas; some people don’t know that anymore). Unless of course you’re a Muslim or atheist berating the Church he founded, then you can mention Him and his followers. It’s painfully obvious that you can’t celebrate Him in song or dance in public in America.

So, my friends, here is the real Lord of the Dance, as performed by the Irish Rovers.

I danced on the morning when the world began
I danced on the moon, and the stars, and the sun
I came out of Heaven and I danced on the earth
In Bethlehem I had my birth

(Refrain)
Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance said He
And I lead you all wherever you may be
And I lead you all the in the dance said He

I danced for the scribes and the Pharisees
They would not dance and they would not follow me
I danced for the fishermen James and John
They came with me and the dance went on

(Refrain)

I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame
The holy people thought it was a shame
They cut me and they stripped me and they hung me high
And left me there on a cross to die

(Refrain)

I danced on the Friday when the sky turned black
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body; thought I'd gone
But I am the dance, and the dance goes on

(Refrain)

Well they cut me down, but I leapt up high
I am the light that will never never die
I live in you and you live in me
I am Lord of the Dance said He

(Refrain)

I BE EDUCATIN'

I tell ya, you try to broaden your horizons a little bit, think outside the box, and do something different, and your own brother starts sending you boxes of tampons just because you enjoyed Mamma Mia! I sure hope he doesn't find out about that Irish Lord of the Dance thing in Butte tonight.

So I better get back to snarking about and ridiculing Barry's cabinet picks. The whole flippin' town of Kooksville is being relocated to Sodom on Potomac to help the Big O "rule" (his word, not mine) these here United States.

Now we have the brilliant cronie Arne Duncan, the genius who runs the fine education establishments that are the Chicago Publik Skools, appointed as Education Secretary. Quite a bit of Constitutional doubt exists on whether we should even have a Department of Education, but we'll go down that rabbit trail some other time.

By spending a trifling $10,550 per student per year under the sagacious leadership of Duncen, er, I mean Duncan, Chicago Publik Skools managed to teach a whopping 17% of their 8th grade students to read at an 8th grade level, down only one percentage point from 2005. Also in 2007, 13% of the same kids could meet grade-appropriate math scores, and 23% could write legibly.

But even as he made these heroic reforms and improvements, he still had time to support and approve plans to establish special homosexual high schools for Chicago's youts.

Just as Billy Jeff Clinton vowed to do for America what he did for Arkansas, Barry and his minions vow to do for us what they did for Chicago.

Now if we could just figure out a way to put the Big 3 automakers out of business forever with asinine green emission standards, making cars no one wants to sell to unemployed people who can't buy them. Whoops, never mind, I see they got that covered too.


Is it just me, or did anyone else hear a giant sucking sound?

MAMMA MIA!

Okay, enough carping about our current crop of political buffoons for a moment to tell you about a very strange experience I had recently. An incident that will undoubtedly release both mirth and scorn from my brother and my buddies, and maybe even make them wonder if they should revoke my Guy Card. Yes, I viewed a Chick Flick, a musical at that, with my wife and found it rather enjoyable.

Most guys are like my friend Matt when it comes to musicals. “Does it having singing in it?” “Yes.” “Then I wouldn’t like it.”

I began my acquaintance with musicals because of my daughter Sabrina, who had an incredible singing voice herself. We saw The Sound of Music approximately 742 times, so we all knew all the songs by heart. By about the 5th viewing, most guys would be rooting for the Nazis to wipe everyone out. I actually got to enjoy it, and The Wizard of Oz, too. In retaliation, I managed to turn Sabrina into a John Wayne fan.

I understand this phobia about musicals being fruity. A lot of the guys singing and dancing in these musicals are obviously gay as a French horn. Witness those “football players” in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

But also witness that the afore-mentioned movie, which is admittedly pretty lame, also had Burt Reynolds in it, and Burt is always manly, even without the black Trans-Am. And you could always use the excuse that you were just going to see a younger Dolly Pardon in lingerie. My personal favorite, and much more testosterone-loaded is Paint Your Wagon. I mean come on, we’re talking a WESTERN with CLINT EASTWOOD and LEE MARVIN that involves drinking and fighting and chasing women between the songs. Can’t get much more macho than that. I can heartily recommend Paint Your Wagon to the estrogen-impaired.

So anyway, back to seeing a chick flick with my wife. It was Mamma Mia! Yes, I thought I would require lots of caffeine and possibly a barf bag to endure it, but actually it was downright enjoyable. Granted, I could have done without the romance between the little 20-year-olds, but that’s probably because I’m becoming enough of a curmudgeon that I am annoyed by ALL little 20-year olds these days. And yes, the plot was both silly and superficial, but still a lot of fun and a refreshing change from the lame, predictable, self-flagellating, left-wing crap Hollyweird usually oozes out these days.

I gave up completely on rock/pop when Springsteen did Streets of Philadelphia, and haven’t strayed far from the country and oldies radio stations in a long, long time. I suppose the reason Mamma Mia! was so darned enjoyable was that some of us actually remember those old ABBA songs. So what if some of the early lyrics are a bit shallow; they did sell 370 million records around the world and the music stays with you. Like The Brady Bunch or Gillian’s Island theme songs, ABBA songs are permanently embedded into the DNA of my generation. You go a few decades without them, and it’s actually quite fun to hear those old songs again, tapping your toes to the fast-paced instrumentals and singing along the six words from the refrain that you actually remember.

Plus it was nice that Sweden could become known for something other than Vikings, Rapala fishing lures, ice fishing augers, the 6.5x55mm rifle cartridge, and the Carl Gustav 84mm recoilless rifle. Well, at least that's what I think of in conjunction with Sweden, but I'm weird. And I digress. Back to Mamma Mia!

Visually, the waaaayyyy beyond cheesy “70’s look” of some of the costumes is absolutely hilarious now that the scars of once taking them seriously have had almost 30 years to heal; the bell bottoms and glitter and those boots. BWAHAHAHA! The landscape of a Greek island in the Mediterranean where the movie was filmed got me longing to visit such a place myself. Preferably Crete, because I’ll bet they have a helluva WWII airborne museum. I also particularly enjoyed Christine Baranski in her role as the Cougar.

So, all in all, if you’re old enough to remember the music, you can safely go see Mamma Mia! with your wife or girlfriend, pretend you’re grudgingly doing it for her, and secretly enjoy it.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled political bitching.