You have to laugh at this numbnuts.

Alleged Burglar Cooks, Makes Fresh Juice

Apparently, you can build up quite an appetite breaking-and-entering. James Michael Fowler, 26, was arrested and charged with burglary Tuesday after a neighbor watching the house found a pan of cocktail franks cooking on the stove and some freshly made orange juice nearby.

Anderson Police Lt. Layton Creamer says when the neighbor went to check on the home, she saw the food cooking and a black stocking cap on the kitchen counter.

Creamer said it looked like Fowler broke into the two-story house through a first-floor window.

LOL!

If I were making a wager here, based on the efficiency of his burglary “operation”, my bet would be that Mr. Fowler is a liberal. Or at the very least, a run-of-the-mill Democrat.

The article doesn’t say whether or not Fowler ever got a chance to eat the cocktail franks…

Mark Steyn, one of my favorite all time columnists, has got an awesome Op-Ed at the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal titled It’s the Demography, Stupid.

I won’t even comment on it, because it speaks completely for itself.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760

Now this is a bunch of B.S.

If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you’d probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union.

Whas, as they say, sup with that?

Under new federal rules pushed through by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, large unions must now disclose in much more detail how they spend members’ dues money. Big Labor fought hard (if unsuccessfully) against the new accountability standards, and even a cursory glance at the NEA’s recent filings–the first under the new rules–helps explain why. They expose the union as a honey pot for left-wing political causes that have nothing to do with teachers, much less students.

This does indeed bring up an interesting question. The question? WTF!?

Last time I looked, a union’s reason for existing was to make sure its members were compensated and otherwise treated fairly. Isn’t that what they tell us? Isn’t that what their members pay dues for?

We already knew that the NEA’s top brass lives large. Reg Weaver, the union’s president, makes $439,000 a year. The NEA has a $58 million payroll for just over 600 employees, more than half of whom draw six-figure salaries. Last year the average teacher made only $48,000, so it seems you’re better off working as a union rep than in the classroom.

Hmmmmmmm….

The new disclosure rules mark the first revisions since 1959 and took effect this year. “What wasn’t clear before is how much of a part the teachers unions play in the wider liberal movement and the Democratic Party,” says Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a California-based watchdog group. “They’re like some philanthropic organization that passes out grant money to interest groups.”

Indeed.

There’s something really, really seedy and corrupt about this.

Remember, our country is a capitalist republic, the primary reason we are the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, and these political organizations to which the National Education Association donates so much of its members’ dues to are socialist organizations.

Socialism is the antithesis of capitalism. One of its tenets is that no matter how hard you work and how successful you become as a result, you are entitled to no more than a nonachiever and therefore, rather than enjoying the fruits of your labors, you must share it with said nonachiever through merciless taxation.

That’s not what the United States of America is about, never has been and hopefully never will be, though these internal enemies continue to eat away at the foundations of our way of life and our form of government, using the very freedoms they want to destroy against us.

The fact that the NEA helps to top off their warchests can be construed as a kind of unpunishable treason.

They are backing organizations that threaten our nation from within, yet they cannot be prosecuted because what these organizations do is completely legal according to our supremely benevolent Constitution. Yeah, that’s the one, the document that authorizes them to speak freely, lobby freely, spit on or burn the American flag and wipe their backsides with it if they so desire. What they promote would be a country devoid of most of its rights, an Orwellian government that micromanages its citizens, as I said in my early blogging days, establishing a politically correct, assinine excuse for existence akin to that in the Stallone/Snipes film Demolition Man, only run more along the lines of the failed and long-since-gone-Chapter-Eleven Soviet Union.

And that’s what the mother ship of U.S. teachers’ unions contributes its members’ dues to.

It’s well understood that the NEA is an arm of the Democratic National Committee. (Or is it the other way around?) But we wonder if the union’s rank-and-file stand in unity behind this laundry list of left-to-liberal recipients of money that comes out of their pockets.

David Limbaugh’s on-point forecast of the Democrats’ political fortunes come 2008 should serve as a warning to the once formidable party that the liberals hijacked and turned into a quagmire of defeat that reads like a 20th Century journal of the French military.

Their own presidential role model, Bill Clinton, and his vice president, Al Gore, were adamant about the looming problems with Social Security. There was much talk of lock boxes and other schemes to “protect” this hallowed institution. And let there be no mistake — both gentlemen, along with their entire political party, considered Social Security to be in “crisis.”

Yet, when President Bush dared to take action to reform Social Security, instead of merely talking about the issue, Democrats obstructed at every turn and even denied there was a serious problem, much less a crisis. Let them continue to gloat about their obstruction, but let history reflect their dangerous deferral of a problem that threatens our long-term fiscal solvency, a matter they profess to be close to their hearts.

The Dems’ problem, as I see it, is that they’ve begun believing the liberal point of view, which is apparently that most Americans are stupid, uninformed, and believe without reservation all the malarkey the Democrats’ political leaders and the Mainstream Media feed them.

They are dead wrong. As Limbaugh asserts, and rightly, the major issues in 2008 are going to be national security and the war in Iraq.

Voters were already skeptical of the Democratic Party on national security issues. But in the last few years, that skepticism may have ripened into full-blown distrust. And if not, it should have.

At the root of the public’s lack of confidence in Democrats over national security is the party’s ambivalence about the prosecution of the war and its absence of moral certitude about the nature of our enemy.

To this day, Democrats can’t tell you whether it’s a good thing we attacked Iraq. They were against the war in Iraq before they were for it only to be against it again, and now they’re probably just waiting to see how things turn out to decide, ultimately, whether they should be for or against it.

As an American, I am profoundly ashamed of those on the left side of the aisle for their dangerous substitution of cheap political agendas for the patriotism we once expected from all our senators and representatives.

As a conservative Republican, I’m grimly amused by the way the Dems are helping to assure a continued Republican majority on Capitol Hill and the election of a Republican to succeed George W. Bush.

Grimly, because their War On Bush is and has been compromising American lives both here and in Iraq. Amused, because it’s always amusing watching a bunch of idiots sabotage their own chances of success with such tenacity.

Limbaugh’s column is spot-on, and is here in its entirety.

Game show host Pat Sajak’s got an amusing piece going at JWR today.

The time has long since passed when I could be of any use to my teenage son when it comes to the matter of math homework. I’m fairly useful in the fields of English and History, less so with Science and Latin, but totally superfluous in the bizarre world of Algebra.

That point was driven home again the other night when he introduced me to an imaginary number, or, as those wacky mathematicians like to call it, i. Here is the issue, as I understand it, and I’m not at all sure I do. There is no real way to find the square root of a negative number, because any number multiplied by itself would be positive. So, you might logically assume that, since a number can’t exist, there’s no point looking for it. Well, you’d be wrong. Apparently the inability of a number to exist isn’t a sufficient reason not to find a way to pretend it exists.

I can sympathize with ya’, Pat. I’d be more lost than you are.

I’m not what you would call a major fan of David Letterman, in fact on the rare occasions I actually watch TV, I make a point of not watching his show.

However, had I only known, I would definitely have watched this episode.

It didn’t take long for fireworks to erupt last night when Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly guested on David Letterman’s “CBS Late Show,” with the late night host finally admitting he wasn’t “smart enough” to engage in a debate over the Iraq war.

The verbal fisticuffs began when Letterman asked if O’Reilly had a good holiday.

O’Reilly responded: “I had a nice Winter Solstice,” prompting a contentious exchange over whether Christmas traditions were indeed under attack.

But the confrontation really heated up when Letterman suggested, “Let’s talk about your friends in the Bush administration. Things seem to be darker now than they might have been heretofore…

Read on, heh heh.

Back in late December I posted about this, and am profoundly relieved that the perpetrators of the large explosives theft have been caught, the stolen materials recovered.

Three charged with stealing explosives at N.M. bunker
The suspects weren’t trained in handling the dangerous stolen property, say federal agents who tracked them down.

The explosives were specialized, powerful and dangerous in the possession of untrained handlers.

That’s exactly the situation federal agents say they came upon when they tracked down a sloppy band of thieves who broke into bunkers belonging to a nationally recognized New Mexico explosives expert.

The ATF, the same folks who unnecessarily brought us Waco and Ruby Ridge, says that there was no connection between the people who stole the explosives and any terrorist organizations, and that the theft was a “crime of opportunity.” According to the author of the linked article on the arrests and recovery, Alicia Caldwell, the feds said they don’t believe the perps even knew what they had.

Hmmmmmm.

I sincerely hope that the investigation doesn’t stop there.

“Duh, yeah, we ripped off all that plastique, ossifer, and coincidentally, outta’ sheer dumb luck, we also grabbed all the DetCord we could find, but we didn’t know it was C-4 and DetCord, duh…”

If I was somewhat hard on theft victim Chris Cherry for his inexcusably negligent lack of security that facilitated the ease of the theft in my previous post on same, I can only be doubly enraged now.

On Dec. 18, Cherry, who works for the Sandia National Laboratories and trains military and law- enforcement personnel in bomb disarmament, reported the theft. He is the head of Cherry Engineering, and the stolen materials were the property of his firm and not affiliated with his work for the government, according to an arrest affidavit unsealed Tuesday.

{Above emphasis added mine}.

The man is an explosives expert who trains military and law enforcement personnel…

If anybody should know the magnitude of the potential danger to citizens that could result from the theft of such a quantity of explosives, it is Cherry, that stupid son-of-a-bitch, and his failure to implement adequate security procedures to safeguard those materials is way beyond inexcusable.

If he is permitted to store any more explosives, the government officials who allow it should be fired without pensions and charged with criminal negligence, charges that Chris Cherry should even now be facing.

Asshat!

An Austrian civil liberties group called Quintessenz has been hacking into, downloading imagery from and then sabotaging lawful police surveillance cameras in public places.

When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers.

Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it’s transferred from DVD to VHS tape.

The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices.

It’s interesting that these folks don’t seem to have anything to say about asshole tourists in various cities who practically shove their videocams in your face as you go about your business, without asking permission, or simply tape streams of passing pedestrians without asking anybody if it’s okay, and those are not illegal activities.

The videocams police set up to record activities in public places are not, therefore, infringing on anybody’s privacy. Anything you do in a public area is just that, public, including strong armed robbery, drug dealing, unlawful obscenities, hooking, picking pockets or engaging in terrorist acts. Picking out suspicious persons or known suspected criminals on realtime video can prevent everything from felonious assaults on innocent citizens or prevent multiple murders.

And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.

In my opinion, these people are obstructing legitimate law enforcement tools and protective venues endorsed by the majority of their fellow citizens and in so doing, creating public endangerment.

If interference with any of these cameras results in the monitoring authorities’ not being able to identify someone about to commit, or in the process of committing a crime or terrorist act, or to spot one of said situations in time to prevent it, the saboteurs — yes, that’s what these “civil liberties activists” are — the penalties for this sabotage should be equal to the punishment merited by the perpetrators they have protected.

Feline to the rescue!

Police aren’t sure how else to explain it. But when an officer walked into an apartment Thursday night to answer a 911 call, an orange-and-tan striped cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor. The cat’s owner, Gary Rosheisen, was on the ground near his bed having fallen out of his wheelchair.

Rosheisen said his cat, Tommy, must have hit the right buttons to call 911.

“I know it sounds kind of weird,” Officer Patrick Daugherty said, unsuccessfully searching for some other explanation.

I can’t say I disbelieve this story, as unlikely as it sounds, as I once had an experience where a couple of friends were away for a week and they asked me to feed their three cats while they were gone.

The food came in envelopes they stored in a very high cabinet above their kitchen sink. One day I was a couple of hours late getting over there, and I found the cabinet open, the box laying on the sink counter and three envelopes ripped open near the cats’ three bowls.

Scary.

Even though I’m not a cat person, it just may be that them thar critters’re a mite smarter than most folks’d give ‘em credit fer, if not downright sayyy-tanic…

Stop The ACLU is hosting Best Of The Blogoshere 2005, in which bloggers have submitted posts they consider their best for the year, linked to from the Stop The ACLU site.

While Jay invited me to submit a post and I would have genuinely enjoyed doing so, I’ve been so swamped with the details of a major move, buying and organizing myriad logistics for my new house and existing of late in a one man state of mass pandemonium that I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for the post that fits the bill.

By this time next year, I will have been long settled in my new home and be in a “state of mind”, LOL, that will render me truly able to participate.

Nonetheless, I’m completely supportive of Best Of The Blogosphere 2005, there are some truly excellent posts by some truly excellent bloggers, well worth taking the time to read and enjoy.

That said, I’ll see you next year, and

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!