This Monty Python skit has always made me laugh from beginning to end.

Nothing like a government that has our back when it comes to responsible guardianship of the taxes they collect from us, and well they should be, since that money is our money.

They should, in fact, be paying exceptionally close attention to how they dole out our money these days, considering all the hype we get regarding the dreaded “sequester”…

Energy Department approves lavish bonuses: $3.5 million to 10 workers alone

Ten contractors are on pace to collect $3.5 million in excessive bonuses due to a lack of oversight, investigators warn

Federal employees are facing unpaid days off and salary cuts due to the sequester, but several contract workers inside the Energy Department are still raking in the cash.

Ten individuals at the department’s operations in Oak Ridge, Tenn., are set to make an extra $3.5 million above and beyond their normal pay, according to an Energy Department inspector general investigation that exposed a lavish bonus system.

The operations in Tennessee include a national laboratory, a security site, and a former uranium enrichment facility that is being cleaned up. The contractors are involved in what is known as the East Tennessee Technology Park, where the cleanup work is going on. (An earlier version of this story incorrectly mentioned the lab as being connected to the contractors.)

The 10 people are executives at the company UCOR, which the department hired for environmental clean-up. And despite watchdog warnings that the executives’ salaries are as much as 82 percent above the market rate, Energy Department officials continue to pay out the bonuses.

The entire article is here, in The Washington Guardian.

I was rummaging around in Seth’s music library file (always a lot of fun, and always eclectic and somewhat informative, learning about all the good music that was out there that I was unaware of or had forgotten) and found some jazz, circa the mid 1970s, that he likes. Giving it a listen, I thought I’d post a sample. This is merely audio with a pic of the album cover, from a German band called Passport.

Enjoy!

Yes, indeed, it’s great to know our taxes are being well spent.

The National Science Foundation awarded a grant for $876,752 to the University of Iowa to study whether there is any benefit to sex among New Zealand mud snails and whether that explains why any organism has sex.

The study, first funded in 2011 and continuing until 2015, will study the New Zealand snails to see if it is better that they reproduce sexually or asexually – the snail can do both – hoping to gain insight on why so many organisms practice sexual reproduction.

“Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction, yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs,” the study’s abstract asks.

We’ll have the answers to that and more, just a few short million dollars of our tax money down the road…

According to some African officials, Obama Administration assertions that al-Qaeda is being diminished are bogus.

From The Washington Guardian

Key Mali lawmaker challenges Obama on al-Qaida threat

Haidara Aissata insists Africa has become to al-Qaida what Afghanistan was a decade ago, challenging U.S. assessments that the terror group has been diminished

Haidara Aissata, the only female Parliament member representing northern Mali, picked up the phone earlier this month to the anguished cries of a young mother who just learned her husband had sold the couple’s 9-year-old son to al-Qaida fighters for $40.

The boy was taken to a training camp, where he would be indoctrinated into Sharia law and fight against French troops seeking to repel al-Qaida’s grip on the African nation.

Aissata, who stands out in Mali’s male-dominated politics as much for her beauty-queen looks as her impassioned oratory, tells the story as she travels the globe these days trying to dispel the notion _ fanned by some U.S. officials _ that al-Qaida is weakened and on the decline.

To the contrary, the terror network has inspired and trained al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, along with its Western Mali off-shoot, Ansar al-Dine, and both spinoffs are gaining strength and “infecting the continent like a cancer,” Aissata tells the Washington Guardian.

Well!

“Al-Qaida is still a threat to the national security of the United States, just as it was when Osama bin Laden trained young fighters in Afghanistan — this is what is happening in Mali and other parts of Africa,” she said in an interview where she sounded alarm about the growing number of al-Qaida training camps sprouting across Africa.

“In those training camps future terror leaders are born,” she said. “Terrorism is spreading, al-Qaida is becoming stronger. The extremists don’t stay in Africa they travel to Europe and the U.S.”

Aissata just finished a tour of Europe to call attention to the rise of al-Qaida in Africa, and plans on making a similar trip to the United States next month.

Given the paucity of real veracity that has come from the left wing agenda driven “partisan politics all the time” Obama Administration, I would not discount Haidara Aissata’s assertion even one little bit.

From The Daily Caller

Don’t judge a book by its title, the saying goes. Perhaps the same adage should be applied to federal legislation.

Under the Affordable Care Act, medical claim costs, the largest driver of health insurance premiums, are expected to increase by 32 percent for individuals, a new study by the Society of Actuaries finds.

Though some states might see declines in cost-per-person medical claims, the report found “the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers,” The Associated Press reports.

Read On…

Note the photo in the article of Obama hatchet woman Kathleen Sibelius. She really does look like a hatchet woman, doesn’t she? I keep imagining her all in black, with a silver death’s head badge on her cap.

I know, “be nice, Mrs. Wolf”, but it’s just so difficult to do knowing this woman is what she is, if actions do indeed speak for themselves….

This one’s a treasure…

LOL!

Back in June, 2005, Seth did a post about Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbuck’s. The post was quite favorable, as Schultz, a supporter of Israel, put his money where his mouth was in that support via monetary largesse.

For some reason I can’t get the link to stick, so I’ll have to do some work on that when I have more time. The post was pretty in depth as are the majority of Seth’s older posts (and once he’s back, hopefully that won’t change), so to move along for now…

It was quite disappointing to read that Schultz is a vociferous supporter of same sex marriage, something we at Hard Astarboard are totally opposed to.

We have absolutely nothing against a couple of consenting adults of the same gender doing whatever it is they want to do behind closed doors, nor of their living together if that’s what makes them happy, but…

…when it comes to making a mockery of traditional marriage by making it legal for a man and a man or a woman and a woman to be married, well, that’s a problem for us, as is allowing a same sex couple to adopt a child.

There is, after all, a limit to the amount of tolerance we, and like minded persons, can come up with.

Howard Schultz, it seems, also has issues with tolerance, in fact, he has zero tolerance for people who support traditional marriage.

From Examiner.com

At the Starbucks annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday, CEO Howard Schultz sent a clear message to anyone who supports traditional marriage over gay marriage: we don’t want your business. After saying Starbucks wants to “embrace diversity of all kinds,” he told a shareholder who supports traditional marriage that he should sell his shares and invest in some other company.

According to a report by Forbes, Schultz seemed a bit intolerant of any Starbucks shareholders who embrace opposed gay marriage for moral or religious reasons. During the meeting, shareholder Tom Strobhar (who founded the Corporate Morality Action Center) pointed out that after the company voiced its support for a referendum backing gay marriage in Washington state, a boycott by traditional marriage supporters caused a drop in sales revenue. Schultz told him “You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company” if he did not agree with the company’s pro-gay marriage stand.

So, if Mr. Schultz wants to make his belief in gay marriage part of what his business is about, he’s just lost our business as well…

I had wanted to share a great Renaissance song, and wasn’t sure I had before. I looked back in the archives and couldn’t find any indication that I had.

The only video of this particular version was sort of screwed up as it appeared on some British TV show called DAVE, who is evidently a tacky “bloke” who specializes in stupid, uninformed comments.

Luckily, I found the same video without Dave’s commentary near the end. It’s lip synched, a TV production, but excellent nonetheless and is called Northern Lights.

This is it.

What a deal, what a deal!

We import illegal aliens from Mexico,while we spend the taxpayer’s money to export manufacturing jobs to….Mexico!

From CNS News

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has granted uniform contracts to VF Imagewear, Inc., an apparel company that relies on manufacturing sites in Mexico for a “significant percentage” of its occupational garments.

The latest contract with the company was awarded on Dec. 20, 2012, to make “uniform and insignia items” for the CBP at an estimated cost of $6,157,997.57, and a ceiling of $8 million.

The CBP, which is responsible for protecting America’s borders, told CNSNews.com that items from VF Imagewear, a subsidiary of VF Corporation, are manufactured in a number of locations, “including Mexico.”

So let’s get this straight: The tax payer funded Border Patrol, one of whom’s main jobs is to prevent illegals coming up here from Mexico, a country whose government has been singularly uncooperative in helping us staunch the flow of criminal aliens both through and from their sovereign soil, allows Mexico to profit from the manufacture of their uniforms, and the taxpayer who pays for this is essentially compensating employees in the country south of the border rather than providing work for Americans in a time of obscenely high unemployment.

Meanwhile, the same illegals whom the Border Patrol is tasked to stop (while hampered by the party in power in Washington at the moment) come into the United States and take jobs cheaply at the cost of taxpaying Americans working.

What a deal, what a deal!