I will be boating to celebrate summer's global warming, and out of intertube range for a few days. Will burn many gallons of gas to help prevent global cooling. Life is short, but I want to do what I can to help.
Leaving these links for you landlubbers:
Re the California tax vote (h/t, Surber)
According to the Tax Foundation, officials in Sacramento have been on a wild spending spree since 2000, the last time California’s budget was balanced without borrowing or resorting to one-time accounting gimmicks. Between 2003 (when Schwarzenegger took office) and 2007, state spending ballooned 31 percent – far beyond inflation (12 percent) and population growth (5 percent). Californians have seen this train wreck coming for many months.
Why should I pay California's bills? I have my own problems and, frankly, I don't give a damn. Related, at Betsy.
Time to clip up those credit cards and go to cash.
BA is still cool, and everybody speaks English.
Knife death good; gun death bad. I prefer my killing when I use a baseball bat. The skull crunch is so satisfying.
Unions are fraudulent children. They want money and goodies without responsibility. UAW doesn't want Chrysler stock. How could they complain? Who would they negotiate with? How would they sell their unwanted products? Thus the lameness of modern unionization is exposed for what it is.
A spy reacts to Pelosi's attack on the CIA
A serious book critiquing multiculturalism. (h/t, Gay Patriot)
Even the Germans refuse those Gitmo scum. Where's the terrible Swine Flu when you need it?
Guaranteed: you will be deeply disappointed in Obamacare...if it ever happens.
Max Borders: How can Conservatives compete with Free Stuff? TCS
Related, from Villainous:
Read my lips: I'm not asking for national health coverage. I don't want it. So don't tax my "risky lifestyle choices" to pay for something that's going to break the federal piggy bank as a back door means of giving the Nanny State carte blanche to tell me how to run my life.
I stopped smoking when I was 14. Idiocy like this just makes me want to start up again.
I suggest Merit Menthol Lights. They won't kill ya, but they are pleasant enough. But, of course, there is nothing sexier than a gal smoking a ceegar.
Pubs figger out how to get around the UK pub smoking bans. Haha.
Jesse Jackson Jr. - a chip off the old block. Chicago loves their con men.
Netanyahu: Not impressed by Obama.
The New New Deal, at RCP:
If you believe President Barack Obama, he's working overtime to save American capitalism.
"I strongly believe in a free-market system," he told reporters in London, "and...in America, at least, people don't resent the rich; they want to be rich. And that's good." The market, he declared, "is the most effective mechanism for creating wealth...that history has ever known."
GOP identification increasing - but you wouldn't know it.
The O admin and the NYT not on the same page - for once. Must have gotten their wires crossed.
Released Gitmo jihadists and their recidivism: Report suppressed
Good piece on newspapers at Driscoll, who quotes:
Which would you say was more responsible for the death of American newspapering? The “descent into tabloidization”? Or the dreary monarchical deference of American liberalism’s insipid J-school courtiers? The king rode in the park. He was riding his videographer in the shrubbery, but you don’t need to know that.
I do not want Susan Gill protecting my home and family. The blogger notes:
Let us for a moment look past her sincere ignorance and the fact that there have been precisely two murders documented with legally-owned machine guns since 1934, that children are already barred from purchasing all manner of firearms, that "harmonious living" never stopped a hardened criminal, and that criminals should not circumscribe your freedoms. We'll look past all that to focus on what all too many outside of her moonbeams-and-unicorns world view also misunderstand about what our nation is, and the role firearms were intended to play.
The climate-industrial complex. What it is. Related: Sociologists ask "Where's my global warming $?"
Defining defamation down: The UN is insane.
Also insane:
SHOCKING NEWS: This Just In: U.S. Obesity “Epidemic” Due Solely to Overeating! “So the implied solution seems to be that food industry must be forced to make their products tasteless and unattractive.”
A good dose of poverty ought to solve that crisis easily, especially if everybody quits their credit cards.
Light rail: pretty idea, but not practical. We never should have gotten rid of the trolley cars, which every town in the USA had until the 1950s - when the gummint began subsidizing buses and put the trolleys out of business.
I am tired of reading about Narcissism at Dr. Sanity and Shrinkwrapped, but I must admit that the topic is relevant to our decadent, spoiled, entitled "Gimme" society. As Shrinkwrapped says:
The Utopianism inherent in Socialism appeals to those who feel that life is unfair and that it should be more fair. What child hasn't, at one time or another, uttered that immortal phrase that so many parents have so much troubling resisting, "Its not fair!" By the time the youngster begins to support him or herself, in modern Western cultures usually by the age of 30 or 40 (pardon the mild hyperbole, though there are efforts afoot to increase that age to never) they begin to recognize that the world is, in fact, not fair. The Universe does not care if you are a good person or a bad person (leaving religion out of the mix) but only whether or not you can support yourself and those who depend upon you. Modern liberal capitalist states have become so incredibly wealthy over the last century that we can now afford to support a growing dependency cohort which naturally evokes the infantile wish among the dependent to be treated more fairly, ie, that to each according to his needs should be the rule. The upshot is that there is an inherent tension in our society between those who pay and those who are dependent. This can and does create cognitive dissonance among those who have incorporated the ethos of Socialist compassion without spending time and energy understanding the far greater moral imperative of personal responsibility and freedom (tow inextricable values.)
The last century's grand experiments in Communism and Socialism led to the impoverishment of millions, authoritarian and totalitarian rule and the deaths of millions. History has rendered its verdict and Communism and Socialism have failed. This has led to a crisis for the Left.
Yeah. The crisis is what do you do after you crush all of the producers? Where does the money and wealth come from? The sky?
