Sometime yesterday, for no reason I can fathom, I began having a problem posting comments in the thread from my last post, The Democrats And Taxes.

Every time I attempted to reply to a comment, I received a mostly blank error page with the following at the top:

Wrong, wrong, totally wrong. We have no page called (none), and we never did. So http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/archives/2006/10/the_democrats_a.php must have screwed everything up. They deserve an atomic wedgie for that.

This seems to be the sort of error message one gets at mu.nu., LOL. Not being, by any means, a computer wizard, I have no idea what this is about nor how to go about correcting it, though I’m more than positive it has something to do with something I either did or overlooked.

However, I’m hoping that whatever it was, it only applies to that post.

I do intend to get to the bottom of it and in so doing reply to a great comment forthwith. If anybody out there is more technically familiar with the workings of mu.nu and Moveable Type and can shed some light on what could have caused this and how I can correct it, I would greatly appreciate it.

**** I just attempted a test comment on this post and received the same error message. Hmmmmm.

According to such cartoon characters as Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, should they manage to get enough of their fellow travellers elected so as to have a majority in the House of Representatives, with Pelosi expected to become Speaker of the House (well, Halloween is almost upon us, so what’s a good scare among friends?), one of the first priorities of the Democrats will be to stamp out the Bush tax cuts and roll back our taxes to 1990s levels.

If I were an enemy of the state, I would utterly destroy my hands applauding this ambition. Unfortunately, I am a patriot who loves America, to say nothing of the fact that I am also an American who lives and pays taxes here, so I must convey the blatant fact that I am not a fan of this intended tax increase.

I understand the Democrats’ need to tax me into the ground. Well, not exactly understand it, per se, but I realize that the Democrats have a serious problem with their fellow Americans being able to keep some of the money they earn and are fixated on the concept of raising taxes whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Some people are into sky diving, some people collect butterflies, some people are passionate stamp collectors, some people love archery, some tennis, some throwing rocks at passing cars, some surfing porn websites, some collecting sea shells, some climbing trees, others mountains…. Democrats are into raising taxes. It’s what they do, just as sucking blood is what mosquitos do, or what leeches do.

It’s not their fault, it’s simply who they are.

They particularly like to tax those who are successful, like the rich and like large, prosperous corporations, and are very much like Robin Hood — they take from the rich, and give to the poor. It makes them feel good — hell, it makes them feel great — stripping a big company of its investment capital plunges them into ecstasy.

Back in the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, the greatest President in my lifetime stopped the bloodsucking practice of penalizing American business for its success, allowing it to keep its investment capital in order to put it to work, and lo and behold, despite the Democrats’ criticism of what they fondly referred to as Reaganomics, our economy exploded into a dynamo of successful professionals, low unemployment, newly created millionaires and prosperous companies.

This trend continued through the Bush 1 Administration, but then, alas and alack, American voters sent Bill Clinton, a Democrat, off to the White House.

Keeping to the sacred tradition of Democrats, he raised taxes, as usual targeting the rich.

Before the end of his second term (he was actually reelected, go figure!), we were plunged into recession. The unemployment rate soared, businesses struggling to stay afloat transferred record amounts of their production to outsourced labor pools and after Algore, Clinton’s Veep, lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, the newly elected President engendered massive tax cuts.

Naturally the Democrats, dismayed that Americans were being permitted to keep more of their earnings, mounted yet another of their innumerable bumper-sticker friendly campaigns — “The Republicans have given tax cuts to the rich, screwing the poor as always!”

That was worth, at the very least, a good chuckle, since every American taxpayer was entitled to the cuts. The Democrats somehow managed, once realizing that they really couldn’t produce any low income working folks who were being either neglected or recieving the fid, cited poor people on welfare and other premature social security venues who weren’t benefiting from the tax cuts, the fact that these people didn’t pay any income tax to begin with notwithstanding… they actually forced the government to give something “back” to these noncontributors as well.

Meanwhile, the tax cuts enabled corporate America and smaller business people to use the “surplus” equity to expand existing business and create new enterprises.

The result has been a major rebound in our economy and a serious decrease in the unemployment rate that is still adjusting downward. America is again flourishing!

But let’s not be too confident, friends, okay? We still haven’t had this year’s elections, so we don’t actually know where we stand.

We’re pretty confident about holding a Republican majority in the Senate, but there has been a lot of negative conjecture regarding the House majority after 7 November. Personally, I believe we’ll hold our majority there, as well, though we’ll have a few less seats.

But…

Should the Democrats gain a majority in the House Of Representatives, they will raise taxes, and you can bet your bottom dollar, assuming you still have one, that the late 1990s recession will return even more quickly than it went away.

Of course, the Democrats will find a way to blame Bush….

I received this email awhile ago, another one o’ them there forwards, and thought it was kinda’ cute, so I thought I’d share it:

In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft
error messages with Haiku poetry messages. Haiku poetry has strict
construction rules -each poem has only 17 syllables; 5 syllables in
the first line, 7 in the second, 5 in the third. They are used to
communicate a timeless message, often achieving a
wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity.
Here are 16 [sic] error messages from Japan:

The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.

——————————————–

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

——————————————–

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

————————————————

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

————————————————–

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

—————————————————

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

——————————————-

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

—————————————————

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

————————————————–

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

—————————————————

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

—————————————————

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

————————————————

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

—————————————————

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

H/T Brenda

… to vote GOP come 7 November.

13 days and counting….

So I’m just sort of kicking back at 0400 hours, playing with my new Firefox download — I haven’t yet(after what, 10 months?) figured out how to adjust my blog clock to the east coast, so the time of this post will appear as a zillion hours or so earlier.

I have my MusicMatch library running some Bangles through my great Logitech speakers, stuff like September Gurls and my all time favorite song by that awesome group, Return Post.

I’m thinking about the present situation in Israel — the Hamas rejects and Fatah squaring off to blow each other away, both sides arming up. Okay, so this isn’t as unusual among Arab Muslims as it might be among normal, 21st Century human beings — we discuss, they destroy. Western diplomacy consists mostly of a bunch of over-educated assholes sitting around a table engaged in two-faced, multisyllabic dialogue, but at least they usually come to some sort of agreement that preserves the peace. Arabic diplomacy is just a bit different: It usually means a lot of explosions and hot lead flying in many directions, and lots of people “expiring”. The diplomats that most effectively get their points across are those that kill the most diplomats on the opposite side of whatever disagreement happens to be on the table are considered the best diplomats, even though they, personally, don’t have to wax anybody.

The flotsam that lives to butcher innocent women and children are the true warriors of Islam.

The very idea that the Bush Administration wants these people to have a sovereign state is beyond me, but GWB is the President, so I suppose he must know what he’s doing. Excuse me, I have to go to the head….

I think I’ll let a great blog I recently discovered and blogrolled called Morning Coffee give us an update.

Meanwhile, the combatively challenged Prime Minister Olmert has agreed to bring a “hardliner” onto his team in order to avoid a slide into ruin for his own ill conceived Kadima party, one Avigdor Lieberman, and thank G-d for him, and his Israel Beiteinu Party. Lieberman’s own point of view as to how to get things done is fractionally different than the politically correct Ehud Olmert’s, maybe a mere 180 degrees, at most. Not too much. Did I say “thank G-d for him”?

My own model scenario would be for Fatah and Hamas to kill each other off in the civil war that seems to be brewing between the two corrupt terrorist factions that are the sum total of the so-called “Palestinian” entity, leaving a few necessarily reasonable Arabs who might be willing to assimillate themselves into the Israeli population and allow the Jewish State to get on with living in peace and prosperity, but that’s probably too much to hope for….

I just downloaded Firefox and made it my primary browser, and while surfing around ran into this tidbit.

Mmmmmm, hot buttered popcorn!

Download courtesy of the illustrious Gayle.

Today’s Andy Borowitz OpEd in Jewish World Review is funnnnnyyyy!

I ran across this 4 year old article recently and thought it a good “share”.

As on so many other issues, the hypocrats Democrats say whatever they have to say to get votes, no matter how shameful the lies or the manipulations.

The black vote has long been one of their mainstays, which is really pitiful as they have proven, decade after decade, that they are the worst enemy of black Americans, the very party that holds them back while blaming the Republicans, whose intent is to give them real equality and real equal market share in America and the American Dream. Considering their track record, the very fact that blacks continue to vote Democrat probably confirms in their eyes that blacks are exactly what the Democrats think they are. After all, when you run such a transparent scam on the bulk of a major voting block for so many years and they continue to allow you to lead them around by the nose, how smart can they be, right?

Of course, the Democrats have their own black perpetuators of racism, such as the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who depend on playing the race card to earn their miserable livings by helping to keep their fellow blacks from waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee. These two individuals are the real “tokens” or “Uncle Toms”, as they sell out their own for their white masters in the Democratic Party in order to perpetuate their own careers.

The OpEd is here.

….on 7 November, before you think about casting any votes to the left, it might be good to consider what the Democrats have in store for us should they win themselves a majority in Congress.

Gayle, at My Republican Blog, has posted a partial summary of Nancy Pelosi’s voting record and a link to same in its entirety — Pelosi’s voting record reflects perfectly the agendas of today’s Democratic Party, and with a majority vote would be able to make many of their agendas a reality.

Unlike so many of our Republicans on the Hill, the Democrats don’t believe in compromise: The first chance they get, it will be “my way or the highway” as they begin slamming out bills that will do great harm to our national security, our economy, our already broken education system and the criminal justice system, not to mention, of course, various “adjustments” to social issue legalities that would go against what most Americans endorse. They have already laid out their plans to impeach the President based on their dubious charges regarding his conducting of the War On Terror.

Many elections in the past have been less significant in terms of combined major impact, but this upcoming election comes at a time when the wrong policies generated from the Hill can do the most long-term harm to this country.

Please give Gayle’s linked post and the link within a good read….

…. to be concerned about, we now have the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership looming on a horizon of uncertainty.

The stated goals of this entity are to “enhance security, prosperity and opportunity” for the North American community. Hmmm.

According to the Welch Report,

The CFR Task Force calls for the “creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March, 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders (of the three nations) that ‘our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.’ Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within the movement of people, products and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe.”

To those ends, the CFR report called for establishment of a common security border perimeter around North America by 2010, along with free movement of people, commerce and capital to be facilitated by the establishment of a North American Border Pass that would replace a U.S. passport for travel between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Also envisioned by the CFR task force include a North American Court, a North American inter-parliamentary group, A North American Executive Commission, a North American Military Defense Command, a North American Customs Office and a North American Development Bank.

The task force report is important to the debate over the official Security and Prosperity Partnership because the language used in the CFR task force report and SPP documents, so far, have proven to be nearly identical. Clearly the CFR task force report is being used as the blue print to establish the North American Union.

CFR is the U.S. Committee on Foreign Relations.

That doesn’t sound like there is a whole lot of remaining room in the deal for any picayunes, like, perhaps, U.S. sovereignty, does it? It sounds more like that economic failure across the Atlantic, there, the one they call the European Union. In fact, the only difference I can see is the number of countries involved.

The name Security and Prosperity Partnership is employed, obviously, because North American Union would be a whole lot less palatable to Americans who have already seen what such a compromise of national political determination and sovereignty has done for to the countries of Europe.

I had known about this for some time, at least peripherally, but only seen a few brief articles on it — the entire project has thus far excluded the media and Congress, has been a “private” project of President Bush and the leaders of Mexico and Canada. Yesterday, while following a link on an unrelated matter, courtesy of informed and astute commenter Civil Truth, I ran across the above link at the same site and that clinched it, I felt the need to look at it more closely.

What we are looking at here is a plan, to be fully executed in less than half a decade, to incorporate the United States, Canada and Mexico in the same way the EU has incorporated the nations of Europe. If you read the “myths” dispelling page of the SPP website, also linked above, you’ll find the same sort of bland, you-American-voters-are -stupid-people-so-believe-this language the administration used to try to convince us that amnesty for criminal aliens would be the best thing that could ever possibly happen to the American people.

This plan would place yours and my freedoms in the hands of Canadian socialism and Mexican whatever it is they have down there that doesn’t work. Billions of dollars of our tax money would be invested in Mexico to try to fix their failed economy that doesn’t work only because they have a corrupt government that is only interested in the richest of the rich and couldn’t care less about the common man, and because their citizens, at least those who aren’t wealthy enough to buy them, don’t enjoy the rights we do here in America. Politicians of that same government would have a say in our lives and our rights.

To date, Congress has passed no specific legislation to authorize the activities of the SPP, nor to funds it is spending. Congress has had no official involvement in the process and has no oversight.

Congressman Tom Tancredo, (R-Colo) has demanded that the Bush Administration fully disclose the activities of the SPP working groups, including revealing the names of the members of those groups. No answers to his demands have yet been received from the Bush Administration, though the activity continues to move forward. NAFTA Super Highway Quietly, the Bush Administration is working to advance a plan to build super highways through the heart of the United States to transport goods from Mexico and Canada. The highways are part of the original North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA). The plan is now being advanced through an operation called “North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc” (NASCO). Since being exposed to the general public, NASCO is now denying it is building the highways, but plans go forward.

Beginning at the southern tip of Mexico, passing through Laredo, TX, the highway heads to an “inland port” in Kansas City, where a “Sentry System” will electronically inspect the cargos, before they head East or West, or continue on North through Duluth, Minnesota and into Canada.

The Super Transnational System includes multiple lanes for cars and trucks. Speed limits will be relaxed as well as safety inspections for vehicles from Mexico and Canada. Trucks will be allowed to carry extra tonnage and be extra long. A Railway system will travel up the center of the highway.

Several such highways are contemplated. Environmental impact studies have already been completed. In Texas, efforts are already underway as 584,000 acres have been targets for takings through Eminent Domain.

Emphasis mine.

An OpEd at Renew America observes,

Recently, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez Baustista floated a “trial balloon” during a speech at the University of Texas, ominously revealing a possible answer. According to Baustista, Mexico and the United States should eventually become “integrated,” thus forming what can only be construed as the hub of a “North American Union,” no doubt eventually including Canada as well.

President Bush has indicated a disturbing sympathy towards such thinking, refusing to characterize Mexican immigrants as “illegal.” In contrast, he implies illegality by the “Minutemen” who now protect the border, having described them as “vigilantes.”

Conversely, he discusses the actions of the “undocumented immigrants” as “pursuing their dreams,” seemingly indifferent to the fact that Americans will be forced to shoulder the burden of fulfilling those dreams, ultimately at the expense of their own.

In a Canadian perspective, from Global Research,

If the existing system were being respected, why would the planning and implementation be so secretive, and government statements not supported by facts? And if it’s for our benefit, why aren’t politicians, who love to show how much they are achieving for their constituents, promoting it in glowing terms?
DeWeese concludes, “The United States is the most unique nation on earth. We were created out of a radical idea that free people, with their freedoms protected by the government would be happy and prosper beyond imagination. The idea worked. Now, the Bush Administration is ignoring this historic fact to “harmonize” us with Canada and especially Mexico, which is not a free country; has no [right of] property and has just proved its unworthiness of conducting free and fair elections. At risk are our culture, our wealth, and the once proud American way of life.”

Further citing the same sort of stealth among Canadian officials,

Government Secrecy: Canadian officials silent

Organizers of the event in Canada were the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, an elite club of Canada’s richest CEOs, and the Canada West Foundation, a very right-wing and pro-SPP think-tank based in the Alberta oil patch.

We Canadians have been encountering total stonewalling from our own government on the subject. Even recent and current Prime Ministers, who know perfectly well what is going on, have refused to discuss it. And because they have not permitted the issue to arise during any recent election, there is certainly no mandate from the Canadian public to negotiate an agreement to terminate the country.

Stockwell Day, a former leader in the Conservative (or as it was then called, Alliance) party, and now Minister of Public Safety in the Conservative federal government, was an active participant in Banff. His office is flatly refusing to answer questions from journalists.

This was disclosed by the founder of the citizen watchdog group Council of Canadians, Maude Barlow, who has pointed out that it’s the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) which lobbies the government and continually pushes the notion that because the economies of the two countries are already partly integrated, Canadian “domestic laws are essentially redundant.” (Ref. 12). Her concern is that the idea of redundancy of our laws will be extended to the government itself, and that because its government is seen as redundant, Canada itself will be made to disappear.

Now, while I am not a fan of Canada’s political make-up, I will be the first to say that they are an ethical bunch who look out for their citizens’ interests.

Mexico, on the other hand… well, the same way I don’t believe in giving amnesty to people whose very presence on our soil has been a violation of our laws, I wouldn’t even consider giving a government that encouraged its citizens to sneak into our country illegally, just to shed themselves of people they had no interest in helping themselves, a seat at the table where laws and rights in this country are concerned. If the Mexican government has no respect for American laws, who in their right minds would want them to have a say in making laws for us?

And make no mistake, the only way a North American Union could play out would be, in order to consummate a smooth flow of inter-union commerce and security proceedures, if laws in all three member states were adjusted to be on the same page.

We’re definitely running out of time here….

How’s that for something else to be concerned about?