After all, if those fat, lazy, complacent politicians on the Hill weren’t so anxious to get in their usual slothful weekend, we wouldn’t be seeing this

The Senate has reached a deal that will allow a vote on a measure to keep the government funded and possibly prevent a weekend of work on the budget.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced the deal on amendments to the government-funding measure on Wednesday afternoon, ending a stalemate in the Senate that had thrown off the upper chamber’s schedule.

Votes on several amendments will start at 2:15 p.m. Wednesday, and the Senate is expected to approve the funding measure that afternoon. The Senate will then immediately begin considering the Senate Democratic budget.
A “vote-a-rama” featuring dozens of amendments is expected on the budget, meaning delaying a final vote on the funding measure could have left the Senate scheduled to vote on the budget Saturday or even Sunday. The Senate is scheduled to begin a recess after it concludes work on Friday.

The deal announced Wednesday doesn’t eliminate the possibility of weekend votes, but it does make it more likely that the Senate could complete work on the budget sometime on Friday. The Senate had been set to vote on the funding measure as late as Thursday afternoon. With the deal, a final vote will occur Wednesday afternoon.

Let ‘em start doing what we pay them to do…

This is too much, LOL!

This Is Not a Joke: Government Issues Study of a Study About Studies

The Pentagon was inundated with so many studies in 2010 that it commissioned a study to determine how much it cost to produce all those studies.

Now the Government Accountability Office has reviewed the Pentagon’s study and concluded in a report this week that it’s a flop.

The study of a study of studies began in 2010 when Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that his department was “awash in taskings for reports and studies.” He wanted to know how much they cost.

Two years later, the Pentagon review is still continuing, which prompted Congress to ask the GAO to look over the Pentagon’s shoulder. What they found lacked military precision.

The GAO found only nine studies that had been scrutinized by the Pentagon review, but the military was unable to “readily retrieve documentation” for six of the reports.

The Department of Defense’s “approach is not fully consistent with relevant cost estimating best practices and cost accounting standards,” the GAO concluded. In fact, they often did not include items like manpower, the report found.

The Pentagon “partially concurs” with the GAO’s report.

The cost of the study of the study of the studies was not available from the GAO.

— heh heh heh

After all, ANYONE (well, almost anyone) but Obama!

Prisoner #11593-051 at a Federal Correctional Institution in Texas put up strong numbers in Tuesday’s Primary Election in West Virginia.

Keith Judd, who is currently serving prison time for making threats at the University of New Mexico, had the support of 41% of voters in the race for the Democrat Presidential nomination compared with President Barack Obama’s 59% of the vote, according to results reported on Tuesday night.

ROTFLMAO!!!!

From CNS News:

The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045-billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009.

Yes,

“In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. “The plant’s location was directly in the footprint of a roadway improvement project designed to upgrade the seismic and structural integrity of the south access to the Golden Gate Bridge.

“The translocation of the Arctostaphylos franciscana plant to an active native plant management area of the Presidio was accomplished, apparently successfully and according to plan, on January 23, 2010,” the Interior Department reported.

The bush—a Franciscan manzanita—was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries for as little as $15.98 per plant…

You’d think this $205,075 figure would be a bit expensive, but the cost is well justified here:

…The particular plant in question, however, was discovered in the midst of the City of San Francisco, in the median strip of a highway, and was deemed to be the last example of the species in the “wild.”

That’s right, the last example of the species in the “wild.”

Prior to the discovery of this “wild” Franciscan manzanita, the plant had been considered extinct for as long as 62 years–extinct, that is, outside of people’s yards and botanical gardens.

Before that, the bush had grown in the “wild” in two cemeteries in San Francisco’s Richmond District as well as on Mount Davidson, a peak in the middle of San Francisco. The Department of Interior said that there had also been “unconfirmed sightings” of the shrub in the city’s Haight-Ashbury District—an area that became famous in the late 1960s as the epicenter of the psychedelic hippie movement.

…there had also been “unconfirmed sightings” of the shrub… LOL!

The Haight-Ashbury population of the plant, the Interior Department said in the Federal Register, was believed to have been “lost to urbanization.”

Oh, my!

…the Presidio Trust, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the California Department of Fish and Game developed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) for saving this one bush from the highway project, for which ground had been broken in December 2009.

The agreement of Dec. 21, 2009 – Memorandum of Agreement Regarding Planning, Development, and Implementation of the Conservation Plan for Franciscan Manzanita – explains how, why, and when the bush would be moved and which agencies would be responsible for which aspects of the move.

To cut to the chase, the cost summary goes like this:

The $100,000 to pay for the “hard removal,” the $79,470 to pay for the “establishment, nurturing and monitoring” of the plant for a decade after its “hard removal,” and the $25,605 to cover the “reporting requirements” for the decade after the “hard removal,” equaled a total cost of $205,075 for “translocating” this manzanita bush.

But those were not the only costs incurred by taxpayers on behalf of the bush. According to the MOA, other costs included:

–“Contract for and provide funding not to exceed $7,025.00 for initial genetic or chromosomal testing of the Mother Plant by a qualified expert to be selected at Caltrans’ sole discretion.”

There’s more, the entire article is here.

One California nursery currently allows customer to purchase Franciscan manzanitas online for $15.98 per bush. Another sells them for $18.00 per bush.

One of the pet peeves shared by both Seth and myself (Wolf could care less, he just shakes his head and mutters) is the idiocy that cell phones have introduced into our society.

These mindless young twits, male and female alike, who spend their every waking minute yakking on their cell phones, meandering along the sidewalks, unable to keep in a straight line and oblivious of their surroundings because their unending conversations absorb the vast bulk of their feeble attention spans; Interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic, clogging lines at cash registers as they pay no attention to cashiers when it’s their turn to pay, blabbing their personal affairs into their PC devices in loud voices so that everybody within earshot is forced to hear all the sordid details…

I posted an article a few days ago related to “the cell phone menace“.

Well, now let’s get ridiculous.

From Congo to Cancer, Cell Phones Are Killing Machines, Sunday Columnists Argue

Reading the print edition of The New York Times can bring the paper’s strange priorities into focus. Both the left-hand and right-hand columns on Sunday’s op-ed page warned of the “carcinogenic” hazards and moral turpitude of owning cell phones.

On the left, the text box to Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday column “Death By Gadget” warned: “That smartphone you’re using may be financing killers and rapists.” Kristof was warning his readers that their fancy phones may contain tantalum (a rare metal) “peddled by a Congolese militia.”

On the right (or actually, the other left), Maureen Dowd’s column “Are Cells The New Cigarettes?” warned that cell phones could be giving you cancer. Dowd defended San Francisco’s crusading leftist mayor Gavin Newsom against the “brazenness of Big Business,” when a wireless association announced they may not hold their convention in San Francisco.

They should be sending Mayor Newsom a bottle of good California wine for caring about whether kids’ brains get fried, not leaving him worried about whether they’ll avenge themselves in his campaign for lieutenant governor.

Kristof and Dowd, just two more “progressive” twits.

Earlier, I came upon a sidewalk Lyndon LaRouche stand on a street corner that bore colorful abstract banners that said:

Save NASA, Impeach Obama!

The workers there were attempting to acquire signatures and cash donations to support the impeachment of the president.

“Never happen,” I said.

“If we work hard and get the support we need…” A worker told me.

“No, it won’t.” I insisted. “I’d love nothing more than to see that corrupt commie bum get the boot, but the reality is, it just ain’t gonna happen. Even if it did, then what? Biden’s next in line, then Pelosi, the fate worse than death, and then, if the country’s still around, Hillary.”

“Oh, we’ve got a plan for that.” he assured me. “We let Biden know that if he doesn’t get it right, he’ll be next, then Pelosi –”

“Keep dreaming.” I said.

As I was about to leave, he handed me a flyer with some LaRouche politics on it, which I took with me and subsequently read.

The narrative on one side ended with:

“Anyone who is not moving for Obama’s ouster is not for real. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is one more demonstration of why Obama must be expelled from office on an emergency basis. If you want to save the nation, he has got to go. Either he goes or civilization goes.”

I kid you not! Either he goes or civilization goes.

Now, this came off an oh - fish - ial Lyndon LaRouche hand-out. I looked around on-line to try and find it in one linkable place or another, since many might find it difficult to believe that someone with so many followers wouls actually print up something like that, and this is the only one I found.

If what this guy was saying and the editorializing on the letter size, small print flyer are core LaRouche (pure frantic alarmism, well beyond even the more dramatic rants one hears on the right, mixed with a heavy dose of paranoia), we are one lucky republic that the man never made it to the White House.

What’s still frightening, though, is the number of people who take him seriously.

If you ever tune in to talk show debates between liberals and conservatives, you’ve seen how the “progressive” always shouts down the conservative whenever he or she attempts to register his or her side of the story.

Likewise, it’s the same when a conservative attempts to give a speech at a university or other forum and a crowd of “progressives” shows up for the sole purpose of shouting the right thinker down so that no one can hear the intended speech.

This is because the left side doesn’t want anyone to hear what the right side has to say, as for “progressives”, freedom of speech is a one way street. They’re afraid, you see, that if the conservatives’ message gets out, those previously undecided will hear the common sense of the imparted speech, and vote/support campaigns based on good information rather than on the bias of left wing media and “progressive” politicians’ propaganda.

Well, Wicked Witch of the West Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi got a sample of the same from members of her own side yesterday, and you have no idea (or maybe you do) as to just how good it makes me feel to see a traitor from the far left receive some of what those pseudo-Americans usually reserve for genuine Americans.

Crowds repeatedly interrupted and heckled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Tuesday at America’s Future Now conference in what was the latest and most dramatic evidence of simmering, left-wing anger among those attending the three-day liberal gathering.

Conference organizers had hoped Tuesday would be the day to highlight liberal success stories, but the theme running throughout the event — from hallway conversations to ballroom speeches — was frustration with Mrs. Pelosi, Senate Democrats, White House operatives and President Obama himself.

The tone was set early when Mrs. Pelosi’s speech at Washington’s Omni Shoreham hotel ballroom was hijacked by a rowdy coalition of antiwar protesters and advocates for the disabled who were angry over a health care bill they said was inadequate.

As the California Democrat tried to talk about her party’s accomplishments, members of the activist groups Code Pink and ADAPT shouted and challenged Mrs. Pelosi to put down her prepared remarks and respond to their complaints.

Her party’s “accomplishments”, that’s a good one. If the USSR were still in business and she could have reported her party’s “accomplishments” to the Politboro, she would have received the Order of Lenin.

Talk about a screw-up!

It just seems like a bad time for any firm with the word “British” in its title. We know all too well the various setbacks experienced by the oil giant once known as British Petroleum; now British Airways has drawn much unwelcome attention to itself with a photo touting its new mobile-boarding pass system as it appears to expedite the air travel of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man.

The photo appeared in the LHR News, the company’s internal staff magazine covering London’s Heathrow Airport. The image accompanied an article spelling out the benefits of the mobile-boarding setup, which permits users of mobile digital devices to print out their boarding passes on the fly. The boarding pass reads “Bin Laden/Osama” and appears in the graphic panel of a user’s iPhone. (AT&T reception in remote Pakistani caves is apparently better than anyone might have guessed.)

What’s more, the image features a frequent-flier number for passenger bin Laden — so much for all those airport terrorist watch lists — and has him flying first class on Oct. 26, 2010. As the travel site Gadling.com mused, “sadly, knowing the brilliant minds behind the anti-terror organizations, the terror level will be raised to ‘red hot’ on October 26, 2010, while airport police all over the world try to figure out which airport the most wanted terrorist in the world will be flying to.”

Whoever made that error, even if he or she did it as a joke, will be answering some rather pointed questions real soon, if they haven’t already, heh heh.

So how did this happen? The short answer is that no one knows — or at least, no one’s telling if they do. A British Airways spokeswoman told ABC News reporter Scott Mayerowitz that “a mistake has been made in this internal publication and we are working to find out how this occurred.” And in response to a follow-up call from Yahoo! News, another spokeswoman for the airline remained firmly on message, saying, “We’re still working to find out how this occurred at this time.”

I’ll bet they are.

Just a few observations.

While quite a few (an understatement) people drive their personal vehicles in New York, most Manhattanites don’t even own cars because a) N.Y.C. has an excellent public transportation system, arguably the best in the country, b) a guaranteed parking place costs thousands of dollars a year and there are often long waiting lists for same and c) who wants to spend half ones time in traffic gridlock, anyway?

To make up for the usual car owner’s status pecking order, there are…Baby strollers.

A $70.00 Combi might replace a Saturn, while a $900.00 Bugaboo might be another woman’s (and baby’s) Mercedes. A lot is based upon design, storage space (yes, a house wife or her husband might need to pick up a few things, maybe some groceries or whatever, and take baby along for the “ride”, so places to stash the purchases aboard the toddler’s personal vehicle are a plus, as opposed to having to carry a grocery bag and control the stroller at the same time).

I can just imagne the conversations that take place:

Barb: Oh, did you see the new Stokke Xplory Marilyn just bought for little Davey? Eleven hundred dollars!

Harriet: Yes, it’s a dream! And right after Connie picked up that $900.00 Orbit Baby Travel System. Just in time for spring, too.

Barb: I hear Fred’s out of work, and it shows. Mabel’s been pushing Deanna around in that same old $400.00 McLaren she bought two years ago.

Harriet: Oh, that’s so dreadful! How embarrassing that must be for poor Mabel!

******

From a recent column by Mona Charen,

Administrators at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis had seemed to be vying for the title of most ludicrous educators in America. The story began when a student, Keith John Sampson, who worked in the university’s janitorial department, was seen reading the book “Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan” in the break room. Sampson was notified by the university’s Affirmative Action Office that he had committed the offense of “racial harassment.” He protested that the book lauded the Notre Dame students who had taken on the Klan in 1924. Never mind, said Lillian Charleston, the AAO director. By “openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject,” he had violated university policy.

The university has since reversed itself and expressed “regret that this situation took place.” But consider the fascist environment the PC police have created. That the student felt constrained to defend the book’s content as politically acceptable is an outrage in itself that goes to the heart of academic freedom. Welcome to an America where you must glance over your shoulder to wonder whether your co-workers will inform on you for reading forbidden matter!

Read the entire column here.

******

Go to Chinatown. Ask for Cane. He can help.

He sure couldn’t have helped one hapless little Italian fashion photographer and the model with whom he was doing a shoot yesterday, in the late afternoon rain at the intersection of Chinatown’s Grand and Christie Streets.

I was passing by on my way to the B and D trains’ subway station over there and had to stop and watch.

The model, a tall, thin (aren’t they all!), attractive woman with a familiar face (I’ve seen her picture someplace before, but not being one to care one way or another about such celebrities, I haven’t the faintest idea who she was), was wearing a slinky, silver silk dress and holding up a grey fur coat. The photographer wanted her to walk towards him across the street, but only while there was a walk sign so she could be moving along with the pedestrian flow.

Obviously, he didn’t know Chinatown.

Chinatown here in N.Y. is a densely crowded, fast moving, busy place whose denizens have no brief but for their own day-to-day activities, and no one paid the slightest attention to the model. Everytime the walk sign appeared, she began crossing the street and was immediately engulfed in throngs of other pedestrians headed the same and opposite ways, jostling her, cutting in front of her and generally making it impossible for the photographer to get the shots he wanted.

But he was determined and they kept trying over and over, to no avail.

Seeing the amused grin on my face and having himself picked up on what was going on, a young Chinese man smirked at me and said, “This guy doesn’t seem to know he’s in Chinatown.”

Finally, I shook my head and continued on to the subway station, wondering how many dozen additional attempts it would take before the photographer finally gave up and relocated to Broadway or someplace…

One of my favorite things to do here in Manhattan is to take some time out to relax over a cup of coffee at a vantage point sufficient to watching the city pass by, person by person. The way people dress (this town seems to sport a hundred different fashions at once, there is no apparent finite number of trends), the paces they keep, their expressions and actions and so forth, probably the best way to reaclimate myself to my home town.

It can also be pretty amusing.

Today has been a rainy one, pretty steady, slowing only occasionally to a drizzle — and I have always loved rainy days in N.Y., so I’ve been spending a lot of time out in it. I made a pit stop at a longish, narrow Mexican greasy spoon kind of joint on Kenmare Street (I couldn’t figure out the name of the place, I’ll have to get it next time) ***Got it — The Corner (esquina in red neon) Deli, believe it or not, probably the name of a former tenant of the property, seeing as it’s not a deli, and the current business didn’t bother changing the sign or the name *** — between Lafayette Street and Cleveland Place, a line of stools ranged along a counter facing windows. The eatery is pretty popular, they were doing steady business at the cashier’s station fronting the open kitchen — you pay for your order, take it and find an empty stool.

Okay, so directly across Kenmare is LIEUTENANT JOSEPH PETROSINO SQUARE. It’s actually a triangular square (no kiddin’) bordered by Cleveland Place, Kenmare and Lafayette. On the corner opposite the square on Cleveland Place is Eileen’s Special Cheesecake, a must-go to for anyone visiting New York.

Anyway, back to the story, so typical New York these days.

The intersection of Cleveland and Kenmare is almost always jammed up on weekdays, the product of idiots running yellow lights on both streets and blocking the intersection two different ways when the light turns red on them. So this stretch limo (you know, those foolish looking long-as-a-bus ones) gets stuck halfway across the intersection, heading west on Kenmare, and then an SUV gets stuck right behind it — this happened because another driver, responding to his own green light, cut in front of the limo and got stuck behind another guy who’d done the same thing) and abruptly there’s this mess…

…A traffic cop in his emergency orange rain gear comes out of nowhere, gets in the middle of the intersection and starts shouting orders, whistling and waving his arms (there was also a lot of finger wiggling there, I couldn’t decide whether that was supposed to be more signals to the drivers, but it made him look like he was having a seizure of some kind). He also had a West Indies accent, and the thought did cross my mind that perhaps this was a traffic directing sequel to Cool Runnings.

It was a lot of fun to watch.

The traffic cop did get control of the traffic, though it was a frantic, seat-of-the-pants kind of thing. I heard him yell at one driver, “And you’re going where, exactly!?”

Finally, after about ten minutes, he threw up his hands in frustration and stormed away, and the intersection immediately returned to the mess it had been on his arrival, with him stomping off in the background.

I have yet to figure out whether he was dispatched to the intersection or was simply some sort of roving director of traffic, but he sure put on a fun show.