Just a thought

While half-listening to Fox News this morning, one interview caught my interest. A mom of a survivor of the VA Tech shooting debated appeared alongside a NRA staffer to discuss a new (proposed?) Law in Virginia to teach gun safety in public schools.

The mom was livid that anyone would dare teach gun safety and repeatedly said, “That has no place in schools.”

Couldn’t the same be said for condom safety?

That’s just as much a “special interest” as the gun lobby, an argument the mom tried to employ.

Just sayin’.

News you can use (the movers arrive in a few hours edition)

I thought all the hopey-changey racial identity politics was supposed to end once O was anointed elected.  Not make it worse. 

As Obama attempts to “reconnect” with every ethnicity save the white guy I wonder if he realizes he would not have won sans the white guy votes.  Pogue.  Check out Another Black Conservative’s reaction (and he used the video.  I couldn’t bring myself to do it.)

I ♥ Chris Christie, continued: the mania runs wild,  H/T: Pundette.

Wild pictures of the liberal anti-Arizona protests at Michelle Malkin.  A must see.  Hint: “May Day is Che Day.” 

Funny, I could’ve told you this last year: Economists say the stimulus didn’t help.

THAT’S THE POINT

From a Reuters article bemoaning the “hard choices” illegals have to make in “racist” Arizona:

For Mexican day laborer Rodolfo Espinoza, meanwhile, it was simply time to go back home to work as a fisherman on the Pacific coast of northwest Mexico, where he has a wife and four children.

“This new law gives us no other option than to leave … I’m going back to Mexico, where I feel more comfortable,” he added.

Thank you, Arizona.

Turn of phrase

Pundette highlighted this masterful sentence, eloquently expressed by none other than Victor Davis Hanson on the Potluck the other day (English geeks, prepare to swoon):

(In response to all this, I am trying to restore this 1870 two-story house to its original appearance, in and out, as much as I can ascertain in photographs from my great-great-grandmother’s era, though I confess it is a questionable expenditure of scarce funds: I’m 56, spend most of my time at Stanford these days, am not sure any of my three children wish to live here, grant that it is now to be in the city-limits, accept that it is no longer a homestead farm, and its vineyards, barn, shed, and barnyard are virtual, realize that the environs in general, in terms of dog licensing,  policing, crime, community, is pre-civilizational, and am foolishly spending what I can on the idea of it, of trying to ensure the memory of the 19th century survives the chaos of the 21st in one tiny place for a decade more or so, of in reactionary fashion protesting against the world of 2010, of aiding the memory of all those now dead I remember so well in the 1950s and 1960s in these rooms.)

(I love the artful ability to create monster sentences that glide off the tongue).

Worthy reading, take a look-see here. 

VDH prescribes a heady dose of common-sense cures for California’s ever-increasing woes: 

All of which raises the question: how would we return to sanity in California, a state as naturally beautiful and endowed and developed by our ancestors as it has been sucked dry by our parasitic generation? The medicine would be harder than the malady, and I just cannot see it happening, as much as I love the state, admire many of its citizens, and see glimmers of hope in the most unlikely places every day.

After all, in no particular order, we would have to close the borders; adopt English immersion in our schools; give up on the salad bowl and return to the melting pot; assimilate, intermarry, and integrate legal immigrants; curb entitlements and use the money to fix infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc.; build 4-5 new damns to store water in wet years; update the canal system; return to old policies barring public employee unions; redo pension contracts; cut about 50,000 from the public employee roles; lower income taxes from 10% to 5% to attract businesses back; cut sales taxes to 7%; curb regulations to allow firms to stay; override court orders now curbing cost-saving options in our prisons by systematic legislation; start creating material wealth from our forests; tap more oil, timber, natural gas, and minerals that we have in abundance; deliver water to the farmland we have; build 3-4 nuclear power plants on the coast; adopt a traditional curriculum in our schools; insist on merit pay for teachers; abolish tenure; encourage not oppose more charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling; give tax breaks to private trade and business schools; reinstitute admission requirements and selectivity at the state university system; take unregistered cars off the road; make UC professors teach a class or two more each year; abolish all racial quotas and preferences in reality rather than in name; build a new all weather east-west state freeway  over the Sierra; and on and on.

If New Jersey can elect a real conservative, California can, too.  (But can we clone Chris Christie?)

How do you insult the the men and women who serve?

Naming a ship after the very Senator who slandered the Haditha Marines and never apologized after all were exonerated.

Quite Rightly is among the outraged.  Read the full post.  If you’re in need of background, read Michelle Malkin‘s coverage.

Seriously, what do you say to the sailors and Marines who will have to serve aboard the Murtha?  “Sorry, this is how Washington works.”

Epic fail.

The movers arrive in TWO days?! (Various and Sundry)

New conclusion: it’s much easier to pull the stakes and move out after living in a home two years than it is four.  Roots run deeper.

Playing catch-up with the news.

Yea for Arizona’s new immigration law which makes it a crime to be in the state illegally.  A no-brainer, really, except the liberals are beside themselves.  Entering the country illegally is a crime in and of itself.  Shocker. 

The President calls the measure to enforce in Arizona “misguided.”  More from our illustrious leader:

“Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others,” Obama said at a Rose Garden naturalization ceremony for 24 members of the U.S. military. “That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona.”

Beware Obama’s use of the word “responsible.”  In this case “responsible” translates to “full amnesty” so that Democrats will replenish their ever-dwindling number of voters in time for the November elections.

Another fake: using soldiers (who entered the country legally) as props (what else should we expect from the Greek-column President?) as they become citizens (because they worked for it through service to this country). 

Professor Jacobson read the Arizona bill and has interesting commentary.

More Chris Christie love here.   The man makes me swoon (politically, of course, as pjHusband is the bee’s knees.  Don’t get any crazy ideas.)

Quote of the day:

“Yes, people are hurting. That’s why we need a tax increase.”

Go read the rest.  Keywords: union, Illinios, corrupt teachers.

Barbara at Mommylife had the same thought I did re the Obama’s “vacation” in the woods:  Obama’s slumming in North Carolina–who are they kidding.  The polls must be bad.  Not that they care, of course. 

 

A Saturday surprise: Lindsey Graham pulls his support from the cap-n-tax debacle he helped author.  Let’s hope more Senators get a clue.

 

Lovely: SEC executives surfed porn while economy crumbled in 2008, yet another reason to not trust government

From the AP:

 A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

Boxes.  Apparently one can’t have enough at the ready.

 An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.

Assuming a 22 work days in a month, 16,000 blocked attempts in one month equates to 727 attempts daily. 

He still works there.

 Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” earning salaries of up to $222,418.

 The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.

About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.

They all apparently work for the government.

Got to love the AP headline: GOP ramps up attacks on SEC over porn surfing.

Those Republican bastards! Why should anyone care that jerks making over 200k a year spend more time surfing “very graphic” images over 700 times a day while the financial system teeters on collapse on their watch?

H/T Another Black Conservative who commented:

As Obama tries to go after Wall Street “fat cats” by giving the government more regulatory control, the very agencies that should have been minding the store in the first place were busy searching for porn. 

So why do we need more government control?  Oh to hire more regulators who can surf porn on the government dime and keep their jobs after being caught with graphic images on hard drives and overflow for a rainy day in scattered boxes littering the floor as they laugh all the way to the bank with 200k a year. 

Enough. Already.

UPDATE: Pundette has an Obamacare edition of Another reason not to trust government today, too.

Eco-cult deprogramming: Reason 10,008 to homeschool

Via the always-interesting-recovering-liberal-psychotherapist, Robin of Berkeley writing at American Thinker:

 My twenty-something client Emma, a survivor of the Berkeley public schools, had a coughing fit during our session. I helpfully got up to get her some water. When I handed her a cup, she looked at it, incredulous.

Her voice quivering, she asked, “Is this Styrofoam?”

I said yes. She stared at the cup, mesmerized by this forbidden fruit. When she finally found her words, she said, “I’ve never seen Styrofoam before. We learned in school that it kills baby birds.”

Worried that Emma would bolt, I quickly defended the contraband, “Actually, I bought the cups years ago, and still have a few left.”

When Emma returned the next week (thankfully), I asked about her reaction. She flooded me with stories about indoctrination by teachers. One of her earliest memories was singing songs on Earth Day, prayerfully, when she was five.

A sensitive soul, Emma became terrified that her beloved Earth would perish, and that she’d be culpable. Starting in third grade, she became an environmental fanatic. Emma went ballistic on her disabled grandmother when the old woman threw a bottle in the trash.

After school, she and her friends would sift through other people’s garbage to root out recyclables. While Berkeley has plenty of homeless folks going through trash, Emma and her friends were out to save the world.

The poor thing would even sob in her car when she had to drive more than a few miles. She envisioned the pollution burning up the rain forests and asphyxiating polar bears. 

The cure?  A year of “therapy/cult deprogramming.”

That a young adult would require cult deprogramming in order to lead a productive normal life after twelve years of public school is shameful.

Robin’s assessment:

Now, if the planet is not about to crash and burn, why turn children like Emma into eco-warriors? Why condition them to take three-minute showers and lambaste their elders? 

The Left’s underlying goal: to convince all of us that we don’t matter. Our happiness, our cleanliness, our ease of living, our money, and our time…it’s the government’s business, not ours. While Marxist theory celebrates the proletarian, in actuality, people become interchangeable cogs in the collective wheel. 

With the promotion of environmental hysteria, the government keeps the masses frightened and in survival mode. When you traumatize and terrify people, they’re malleable. As stated succinctly by Adolph Hitler himself, “Terror is the best political weapon.”

Another potent way to dominate people? Blame and shame them; make them feel defective if they trash a bottle or enjoy a hot bath. Self-hate and shame are unbearable states of mind. People will do almost anything to get out of them.  

How true and how incredibly sad that so many people have fallen for this garbage, to say nothing of the generation of children indoctrinated into a cult. 

The movers arrive in how many days? (Various and sundry)

Pardon the intermittent blogging: it’s getting a little nuttier here at Chez PJ with no end in sight.

Here’s a quick must-read list du jour to tide y’all over, though.

As per my I ♥ Chris Christie post earlier this week, Michael Medved on the politics of “fat” candidates.  Considering Corzine made snide cracks regarding Christie’s weight during the gubernatorial campaign, you can bet it will come up again if he runs for another (pray:  higher) office.

Massive taxes comin’ our way, do dah, do dah.  

First Navy SEAL cleared of all charges of beating an Iraqi detainee.  More here.  Best line from the NYT story:

The trial of three SEALs, the Navy’s elite special forces unit, in the abuse case has outraged many Americans who see it as coddling terrorists.

See it like it is.  Cassy Fiano:

When you throw in the fact that Al Qaeda’s own training manual tells operatives to claim torture and abuse if captured, it’s a wonder that the prosecution went forward at all. It’s an outrage that the Department of Defense would go after these three heroes, these honorable men, based on nothing but the word of the mastermind of the brutal murders of four American men. It’s beyond an outrage. I’m so excited, relieved, and happy to hear that Huertas has been cleared of all charges, but I’m still spitting mad that charges were ever brought to begin with.

Pundette on one Chicago liar subpoenaing another.  Heh.  Should make for courtroom fun, no?

UPDATE: Many thanks to Pundette for the link.

“South of the border photos” for money: reason 10,007 to homeschool

Ah, the list grows longer.

Courtesy Pundette, a local reason to homeschool:

A Bethesda middle school student allegedly rented his iPod Touch to classmates who clicked through images of female classmates and other girls in various states of undress, according to Montgomery County police who are investigating the sexting at Pyle Middle School.

Didya catch that?  Middle school.

But at least the young perv in question was honing his entreprenurial skills, right? 

Last week, Pyle officials caught one of the students who paid to use the iPod and shut down the operation, Cpl. Daniel Friz said Friday. Since then, the iPod’s owner has been identified, Friz said, and police are trying to determine how a middle school boy came to amass such a large collection of provocative images.

And what’s provocative these days?

Friz said detectives are working to identify and interview the girls in the images to learn how they were taken and distributed. The police want to make sure the girls were not coerced into posing.

The problem is, Friz said, most of the images are close-ups of body parts and there are not many faces.

“If you have a photo of only south of the border, you aren’t going to do a lineup,” Friz said.

Depersonalize those girls early.

Another laugh:

Montgomery police began investigating Thursday and are trying to determine whether any crimes were committed, Friz said. It is also unclear how much money changed hands, he said.

“From a middle school perspective, I can’t imagine it would be very much,” he said.

You can’t imagine, eh?  Given what the middle schooler accomplished–coerce dozens of middle school and high school girls to take nude photos of themselves–I wouldn’t be surprised if he amassed a small fortune doing so.

Pundette’s take:

This sounds a lot like child pornography, doesn’t it? And it’s made by and for children. How clever of them.

Where are the parents?  How could you not know your child has amassed his own porn collection?

And the principal’s letter home isn’t exactly inspiring:

In the April Pyle Phyle (available on the school website), I expressed concerns about trends in the student use of technology. The inappropriate use of cell phones, social networking sites, email, and general internet use can seriously affect our learning environment.

Over the past three years, we have informed students, staff, and parents about internet safety through assemblies, parent seminars, round table discussions and classroom lessons. Our focus has been on addressing the use of technology in a positive and productive manner. We remain steadfast in our commitment to confront these challenges and will do everything possible to raise awareness and ensure that our students and school community can learn from this experience.

Three years worth of lessons, assemblies, seminars and discussions, eh?  That’s encouraging.