Mary Landrieu was last seen taking a $300 Million Bribe in order to pass a bill to spend 2 or 3 Trillion dollars (exact numbers are hazy) in spending of money that nobody has in order to force everyone in the US to drop their health insurance and accept Universal Medicaid. Freezers no longer being safe to hide illegally obtained money, she is believed to have put it in a big cookie jar.

Seriously, isn’t BRIBERY supposed to be illegal? Why isn’t Landrieu being clapped in chains along with Reid, who offered her the bribe?

Technorati Tags: Corruption, Louisiana, Senate, Landrieu, Bribery

This parable has been making the rounds on the Internet. Even if the numbers aren’t exactly right, they are just an illustration of the problem, not a description of it down to the penny.

You have two families: “Juan Legal-Immigrant” and “Jose Illegal-Immigrant”. Both families have two parents, two children, and live in California.

Juan Legal-Immigrant works in construction, has a Social Security Number and makes $25.00 per hour with taxes deducted.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant also works in construction, has NO Social Security Number, and gets paid $15.00 cash “under the table”.

Ready? Now pay attention…

Juan Legal-Immigrant: $25.00 per hour x 40 hours = $1000.00 per week, or $52,000.00 per year. Now take 30% away for state and federal tax; Juan Legal-Immigrant now has $31,231.00.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant: $15.00 per hour x 40 hours = $600.00 per week, or $31,200.00 per year. Jose Illegal-Immigrant pays no taxes. Jose Illegal-Immigrant now has $31,200.00.

Juan Legal-Immigrant pays medical and dental insurance with limited coverage for his family at $600.00 per month, or $7,200.00 per year. Juan Legal-Immigrant now has $24,031.00.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant has full medical and dental coverage through the state and local clinics at a cost of $0.00 per year. Jose Illegal-Immigrant still has $31,200.00.

Juan Legal-Immigrant makes too much money and is not eligible for food stamps or welfare. Juan Legal-Immigrant pays $500.00 per month for food, or $6,000.00 per year. Juan Legal-Immigrant now has $18,031.00.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant has no documented income and is eligible for food stamps and welfare. Jose Illegal-Immigrant still has $31,200.00.

Juan Legal-Immigrant pays rent of $1,200.00 per month, or $14,400.00 per year. Juan Legal-Immigrant now has $9,631.00.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant receives a $500.00 per month federal rent subsidy. Jose Illegal-Immigrant pays $500.00 per month, or $6,000.00 per year. Jose Illegal-Immigrant still has $ 31,200.00.

Juan Legal-Immigrant pays $200.00 per month, or $2,400.00 for insurance. Juan Legal-Immigrant now has $7,231.00.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ insurance!” and still has $31,200.00.d

Juan Legal-Immigrant has to make his $7,231.00 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline, etc.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant has to make his $31,200.00 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline, and what he sends out of the country every month.

Juan Legal-Immigrant now works overtime on Saturdays or gets a part time job after work.

Jose Illegal-Immigrant has nights and weekends off to enjoy with his family.

Juan Legal-Immigrant’s and Jose Illegal-Immigrant’s children both attend the same school. Juan Legal-Immigrant pays for his children’s lunches while Jose Illegal-Immigrant’s children get a government sponsored lunch. Jose Illegal-Immigrant’s children have an after school ESL program. Juan Legal-Immigrant’s children go home.

Juan Legal-Immigrant and Jose Illegal-Immigrant both enjoy the same police and fire services, but Juan paid for them and Jose did not.

Commentary

Jose Illegal-Immigrant gets all the benefits of being a US citizen but doesn’t pay any of the costs. He did not obey the laws and paid criminals to smuggle himself and his family across the line, enriching the same coyotes and drug criminals who prey on his community. By his actions he is a parasite on the United States and damages other Americans who are legal residents and citizens. Worst of all to self-reliant Americans of all sorts, he is not self-reliant. He and his family are free-loaders. Everyone else has to pull their weight because he declines to.

Isn’t this the exact same reason why Democrats want to take away the private market healthcare insurance enjoyed by 87% of Americans and put everyone on universal Medicaid? Because there are a few who don’t buy insurance themselves?

Technorati Tags: Common Sense, Immigration, Health

1. Buzzmachine asks and answers the question: Should the news media be government sponsored, like Pravda?
   http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/10/19/giving-up-on-the-news-business/
2. Mika Brzezinski: Every producer, anchor, reporter, and editor at CBS over ten years was pro-gun-control, pro-abortion, anti-military, and anti-Bush, except one
   http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2009/10/19/mika-one-exception-every-cbs-reporter-director-anchor-liberal
3. White House and Congressional Democrats make war on the US Chamber of Commerce
   http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28445.html
4. Comparing Austrian with Keynesian stimulus packages, by Wladimir Kraus
   http://blog.mises.org/archives/010853.asp
5. An Interview with Peter Godwin, about COIN and the politico-socio-economic collapse of Nigeria
   http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/306-noonan.pdf
6. Another anti-Limbaugh racial smear
   http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/10/chicago-sun-times-runs-rush-as-klansman-cartoon/
7. Yes, Virginia, Donovan McNabb really is an overrated QB
   http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/18/newsreal-sunday-rush-was-right-mcnabb-was-over-rated-and-still-is/
8. Complete video of Lord Moncton’s speech on Obama at Copenhagen is online
   http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/18/video-of-moncktons-speech-on-obama-poised-to-cede-us-sovereignty-in-copenhagen/
9. Bill Whittle’s modest proposal on how to treat Congress. Pay them to do jack and squat
   http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bwhittle/2009/10/19/a-modest-proposal-to-reform-the-congress/
10. Stimulus? Are you sure that word means what you think it means?
    http://www.insideronline.org/blogarchive.cfm?blogid=5DD80286-03E8-85BA-68F25C62909A89EA

Enough to watch this all the way through.

And this (embedding disabled)

And this (embedding also disabled)

And this

And this

And this (is this racist?)

And this

Technorati Tags: Video, Family, Appreciation

This review will not take long. Darling wife and I took our three young children and a neighbor kid from across the street to a movie followed by Five Guys for burgers.

We saw Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s tragically flawed adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic. Perhaps you like watching depressing movies about relationship problems between people who refuse, idiotic, to change. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like watching a movie with the message that your friends are waiting until you slip up, at which time they will eat you up, cannibal-like. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like movies that speak the unselfconscious symbolic language of children while carrying a lesson that relationships cannot last, that marriage ends in divorce and mutual alienation, that only relationships between simpletons like Ira and Judith can last, and that on a more basic level relationships are just a bummer. Then you might like this movie. Or perhaps, like me, you recognize the seductive beauty of the movie, and hate it for the psychic poison it delivers to the defenseless minds of kids.

We will not be buying it on DVD.

Did I mention that while rushing to the bathroom to pee, our 4 year old Sugarlump vomited her popcorn all the way down the carpeted hallway behind the theater? And that after cleaning up and returning to our seats she curled up in her daddy’s lap and went to sleep? That made the rest of the movie more bearable.

We finished the evening at Five Guys with the best burgers and fries the kids ever ate. That’s what they said. Evening saved.

Other reviews: NYT, Tech Banyan, Entertainment Weekly, HuffPo, NRO

Technorati Tags: Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are, Movie Review

All hands alert!

I don’t have anything to add because this is so shattering there is nothing that can be added. If this extract scares you then you have to read the whole thing. And then we all shall have to do something.

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

Read the treaty. Read the rest of Lord Moncton’s remarks. If this is signed and passed, it will be the greatest act of BETRAYAL that has ever been committed on the American people. We all must act, every one of us, doing whatever we can.

This must not stand!

Technorati Tags: Obama, Copenhagen, Climate Treaty, Environmentalism, Tyranny, Constitution, Treason

After the NFL has made a mockery of itself by obsequiously smacking its forehead against the ground on which DeMaurice Smith, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton walk, it is up to NFL fans to find out if it is possible for the NFL to be embarrassed any more. Remember, this is the league that welcomes people convicted of homicide, rape, burglary, wife-beating and dog-fighting back into the players’ ranks. Yet it is also the league that refuses to let a conservative radio personality and lover of the game of football become a minority owner of a team, using vile, racist quotes invented out of whole cloth to smear him.

The question begs to be asked. Can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL? Not by throwing ice-balls at opposing teams; Not by booing lustily at little kids; Not by wearing nothing but body paint on their torsos in midwinter; But can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL by making a spectacle of rejecting the new NFL determination to goose-step to the drumbeat of the race hustlers and slanderers of the progressive left?

Some have proposed cutting up team jerseys and sending the pieces to Roger Goodell’s office. Some have proposed canceling your NFL Sunday Ticket. Those are good, and they hit at the wallets of these hypocritical leftist slimeballs, but they are not embarrassing enough. Embarrassing an organization as big and wealthy as the NFL with all its television time and bootlicking local sports reporters requires strategic planning.

Don’t just cut up your stuff. Don’t just cancel. Make a spectacle of it!

How to Make a Spectacle

Let’s say you have an NFL collectible. A coffee cup signed by Steve McNair. A jersey signed by OJ Simpson. A drink cozy or cooler that used to belong to Bret Favre. A framed limited edition photo of Joe Namath. You get the idea.

Choose one item that wouldn’t kill you to destroy it. Ready? Get out your video camera. Film yourself getting ready.

Start by expressing what you believe in your heart:

• in America’s freedoms.
• a man has the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty.
• vile accusations need to be proved, and if unproved are nothing more than slander and libel.They should not be passed on by so-called journalists without any even minimal level of checking or vetting.
• people have the right to use their money in any legal way they like.
• we should judge a man, not by his political party, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
• our own experiences are better guides than wild rumors spread on the internet.
• the NFL has crossed its fans with its pandering, slavish subservience to those who slandered and libeled a man who was making a good faith business offer to get into the NFL owners’ business. This is the same NFL, mind you, that happily welcomes dog-torturers, wife-beaters, rapists, and those convicted of homicide back to the players’ ranks.

Isn’t sports about truthful calls, fair play, and trust? Clearly this league has no respect for the truth. Clearly it has no respect for fair play. Clearly it cannot be trusted. And if it cannot be trusted, how can its games be trusted?

Film yourself saying those things in your own words. Film this whole process. That is how you multiply your protest and make a spectacle of it. Upload the whole package to Youtube. Send faxes, letters, emails to your local newspaper and TV station letting them know what you are doing.

Announce that for the reasons given you are going to destroy this valuable NFL artifact. But you are selling the right to save it or destroy it on Ebay in case there are other people who care about this. Make a long bidding period, 2 weeks or longer if you can. Sell the fate of the collectible to the highest bidder, who can either bid to have you destroy it (run it over with the biggest, meanest looking vehicle you can find, or have it torn to pieces by wild animals or by being torn in half by two big pickup trucks with trailer hitches), or buy it from you to save it from destruction. Start the bidding at $1 with a reserve of the cash value of the item and no buy-it-now price.

Did you send the announcement to your local newspapers and TV stations? Do it.

Film the plans and the destruction on video. Upload it to Youtube if the local news doesn’t pick it up. Blog about it.

Embarrass the hell out of Roger Goodell!

Technorati Tags: Activism, Libel, Slander, Rush Limbaugh, NFL

At the top of the news are a few Nobel Blogs about the very deserving winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics

• Michael Spence gives an overview
• Peter G. Klein on Oliver Williamson
• Paul Romar on Elinor Ostrom
• Peter Boettke on Lin Ostrom

Barack Obama is George Soros’s marionette?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_soros_wanted_obama_delive.html

Liberal warnings of TEA party violence are pure psychological projection. Bitten off any fingers lately?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/liberals_violence_warning_come.html

The Nobel Peace Prize sucks. The world need a Reagan Peace Prize.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/13/the-reagan-prize

Eliot Spitzer wants to crush the US Chamber of Commerce because it takes conservative positions and doesn’t buy into environmentalist wackjob hype. Herein he lays out his evil plan to James Bond. And you.
http://www.slate.com/id/2232441/?from=rss

Lieberman is ready to make some Democrat heads explode
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574473293212092518.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

How the Baucus healthcare bill will cause a health insurance market death spiral
http://healthcare.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODA4ZmI2YTI0Yzk2OTkyMzczYTRjYjViODgxODA1OGE=

Running the numbers that damn Baucuscare
http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2009/10/senate-finance-health-bill-has-no.html

How to distort statistics to say a poll shows the opposite of what it says
phohttp://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republican-party/poll-only-28-of-republicans-believe-american-health-care-best-in-world/

The statistics that are so brutally warped by the previous article
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=825

Ron Paul vs. Lindsey Graham in a steel cage death match
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/10/14/ron-paul-vs-lindsey-graham-on-the-future-of-the-gop/

The vile and mendacious racialist calumnies of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Vadum too)
http://spectator.org/blog/2009/10/12/extreme-irony-alert-or-springt

How to nail Terry Krepel of Media Matters to the wall with his own vile smears
http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/14/with-every-reply-krepel-just-keeps-digging-a-deeper-hole-to-defend-smear-of-beck/

How long will the Recession last? Forever!
http://mises.org/story/3764

When the Government and some Private Companies collude to drive other private companies out of the marketplace and give overwhelming financial benefits to the colluding companies for campaign contributions for colluding politicians, why is that the fault of the free market instead of the fault of government meddling with the free market?
http://mises.org/story/3761

Islam4UK demands full sharia law over the United Kingdom, replacing all other laws
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/uk-muslim-group-demands-full-sharia-law.html

Death Panels anyone? Robert Reich, Democrat and proponent of single-payer health-care, says that HEALTH CARE TO SENIOR CITIZENS AND VERY SICK PEOPLE WILL BE RATIONED UNDER ANY GOVERNMENT PLAN
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-advisor-admits-senior-health-care.html

Another Clinton Scandal
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/15/another-clinton-scandal

Iowahawk’s $33 art stimulus has opened the floodgates of the underground art world
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/10/the-art-just-wont-stop.html

Technorati Tags: Roundup, Interesting Articles

1. The biggest news of the day is the slow melt of the glaciers of journalistic support for the pseudo science of anthropogenic global warmening. Today Drudge has the following links above the fold
   • BBC: What happened to global warming?
   • US CHILL MAP…
   • Montana cold breaks records…
   • Record Cold temps in Idaho threaten potato crops…
   • Austria: Earliest snowfall in history set to break records…
   • Man has microphone cut off after asking about ‘errors’ in Gore film…
   • Video…
   • Soros says aims to invest $1 Billion in green tech…
   • Greenpeace activists clamber on to Houses of Parliament in climate change protest…
   • Energy crisis postponed, new gas rescues the world…
2. Obama didn’t win the 2009 Nobel in Economics. In a shock development felt worldwide, some economists won it instead (NYT)
3. Argentina’s media clampdown continues
4. Time Magazine thinks we should blog about Education!
   • Few things in France can provoke heated debate faster than moves to tinker with the country’s vaunted public-education system, which embodies republican values that date back to the French Revolution. It’s especially true when the changes involve an …
   • Successful Schools Avoid False ChoicesEducation Week News (subscription)
   • Education Secretary Criticizes Education CollegesInside Higher Ed
   • Community must be involved with education in HarrisburgThe Patriot-News – PennLive.com
   • Hartford Courant -Examiner.com -Torrington Register Citizen

5. Insurance Industry projects $4000 per year per family in added costs for health insurance. White House throws tantrum. Memeorandum links. White House promises to hold breath until it turns blue. (That last sentence was wishful thinking)
6. Top on memeorandum: White House bites the hand that feeds it. Calls gay activists the “Internet left fringe.”
   • BREAKING FROM NBC: White House official calls gays part of “Internet left fringe”  —  UPDATE FROM PAM: … And let me just add that if we’re all insignificant children who don’t understand politics, and who the White House doesn’t worry about, then why did a White House official feel the need …
     Link Search: Technorati, Google, IceRocket, and Ask
     Discussion: Washington Monthly, Politics Daily, The Hill, Another Black Conservative, Left Coast Rebel, La Shawn Barber’s Corner, Ruby Slippers, American Power, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Stop The ACLU, RedState, The Stranger …, Breitbart.tv, Gates of Vienna, The Other McCain, Pundit & Pundette, Osborne Ink, Confederate Yankee, Raw Story, RADAMISTO, Time and Times of London
7. Democrats set to ratchet up personal attacks, dirty tricks in 2010.
8. Obama’s Safe Schools Czar wrote that killing someone for calling you names was “not aberrant behavior”
9. Obama White House has already planned to put severe restrictions on “sport fishing.” That means you going fishing with your kid in fresh or salt water.
10. Lindsey Graham backs “cap and trade making electricity too expensive for ordinary people to afford it” bill

Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard is not really a book. It is an article from the “Philistine” magazine of March 1899 that became immensely popular and was reprinted as a pamphlet in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Mandarin and Japanese, perhaps more. It is freely available on the Internet. Briefly, it is about two things:

1. Excellence;
2. One person can change the world.

There are those who do things excellently, as opposed to those who only partly do a thing if they bother to do it at all. The excellent can make huge changes. Those who do not seize excellence can barely do their job. The common wage-earning man of 1899 was useless when given any task requiring judgement and initiative.

make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

Such a man is a waste of a position, and might as well be let go. He will never be a great success unless he changes something in himself. Such a man must transform himself to be more like Col. Rowan, who was asked by Pres. McKinley to carry a message to Col. Garcia, the leader of the Cuban rebels against Spain. Rowan had lived in Cuba and written a book about the island. Rowan traveled by himself in small boats to Cuba, then hiked by himself across an island occupied by the hostile Spanish, through jungle and over mountain to Garcia’s jungle encampment, where he made contact, delivered his message, developed a rapport, then left the island and returned with a command of American soldiers to assist Garcia in his successful rebellion.

Cuba was able to throw off the Spanish yoke because Rowan reached Garcia and delivered McKinley’s message. Without Rowan’s excellence in every task he had to complete in order to carry that message it would not have happened.

How relevant is this pamphlet?

Though nobody knows the story of Rowan and Garcia, the problem still exists. The article is more than a simple historical curiosity. There are still plenty of workers like the man who only works when he is being supervised, only does what he is told, fobs off his responsibilities on others, argues against every new assignment, complains, and makes excuses for his failures when he bothers to do his job at all. Unions and HR Departments exist to protect such people and keep them employed.

One man can change the world. He doesn’t have to be extraordinary, but he has to embrace excellence. We need to remember this in these days when the progressive march to eliminate individual freedom in these United States has been advancing, almost without interruption for 110 years.

Take heart, stay optimistic, and think strategically. We have nothing to fear but panic, nothing to lose but mediocrity, and our country’s freedom to win again.

Technorati Tags: Message to Garcia, Conservatism, Book Notes