I really, really dislike the whole “nanny state” concept.  It brings out the rebel in me.  Korea may or may not be trending that way, but it is at least a decade or two behind what I’ve observed in the good ol’ USofA.  But really, does it get more insane than this:

When a small church comes to the Bowery Mission bearing fried chicken with trans fat, unwittingly breaking the law, they’re told “thank you.” Then workers quietly chuck the food, mission director Tom Bastile said.
“It’s always hard for us to do,” Basile said. “We know we have to do it.”

Lines at soup kitchens are up by 21 percent this year, according to a NYC Coalition Against Hunger report released yesterday. The city’s law banishing trans fat took effect in July 2008 and touched everyone with Health Department food licenses — including emergency food providers.

You might die hungry, but you’ll die healthy I suppose.

So, when people ask why I am seriously considering retirement in a third world country here’s another reason.  I’d rather have the inconvenience  of limited government services than the oppression of a government telling me what’s good for me.

This is on my list to Santa Claus:

Saturday Night Live skewers the President’s recent visit to China.  See it here, it is funny as hell.

More worrisome has got to be being compared unfavorably to Sarah Palin by the Queen of Liberals, Maureen Dowd.  An excerpt:

Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Palin. On Friday, for the first time, his Gallup poll approval rating dropped below 50 percent, and he’s losing the independents who helped get him elected.

Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife. But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people.

Obama showed a flair for the theatrical during his campaign, and a talent for narrative in his memoir, but he has yet to translate those skills to governing.

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

Yikes.

Lindsey Graham takes Eric Holder to school.

I’m not a big fan of Graham, but he was a military Judge Advocate, and in fact still is in the Reserves.  He knows what he’s talking about.

You know, when The One promised change, I didn’t expect we’d be seeing show trials in our courts.  But since Obama has decreed that KSM is guilty and that even if the jury acquits, he won’t go free, I’m not sure how it can be called anything other than a show trial.

Meantime, we give Bin Laden and his followers an international forum to spew their hate plus a treasure trove of intelligence.

Good plan guys.

This:

And this:

…without you in it.  Here’s hoping there is a special place in hell for the bastard John Allen Muhammad.

Yeah, I was living in the DC Metro area during this pricks reign of terror.  Two of his victims were shot within a couple miles of my house in Stafford.

It sucks to be looking over your shoulder while pumping gas, trust me.  I look forward to the day when the Fort Hood shooter meets a similar fate.

These guys that kill in the name of Allah are such cowardly pussies.  They ain’t got the balls to face an armed man in combat.  So they seek out innocents as victims.  If I were Muslim I’d be pissed to have my religion hijacked by these wimps.

I’m sure we will soon see millions of adherents of the “religion of peace” marching in the streets carrying banners “reading not in my name!”.

Yep, any day now.

It is on this day that Americans remember with pride and gratitude all who have given of themselves in defense of our great nation as members of the armed forces.

On Veterans Day, and all days, we salute, honor and thank you for your service.

How high can it go?  Talk about your jobless recovery.

Republicans argue that an unemployment rate higher than it has been in more than a quarter of a century is evidence that the Democratic agenda isn’t putting Americans back to work. They say the situation will be made worse if Congress and President Obama enact a health care overhaul that will require $1 trillion in tax hikes and entitlement cuts to expand insurance coverage.

“Ten-point-two now makes it hard for the majority to sell their agenda,” said Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

“All I know is that Speaker Pelosi is trying to force her members to vote for a bill that the American people have soundly rejected,” added House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Democrats counter that their agenda has kick-started a recovery on Wall Street, even if it hasn’t trickled down to the job market yet, and that Republicans are putting what they’ve begun at risk.

Trickle-down economics?  Trickle-down economics!  Has it really come to this?

UPDATE:  Watch this.
Yesterday, I posted on the heresy of anyone who deviates from the Obama party line.

Of course, hypocrisy walks hand-in-hand with heresy…meaning those branding others as heretics are most likely hypocrites.   Funny how that works out.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs helpfully provides a useful example of this phenomenon in response to this weekends march on Washington by those opposed to Obama-care:

“I will continue to say what I’ve said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People — imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Hopefully we can get back to a discussion about the issues that are important in this country that we can do so without being personally disagreeable and set up comparisons to things that were so insidious in our history that anybody in any profession or walk of life would be well advised to compare nothing to those atrocities.”

Yes, let’s imagine, shall we:

Plenty more where those came from, but you get the idea.  Oh, and you won’t want to miss this gem.
And these demonstrators got a free pass from the media, whereas one ignorant person shows up at tea party rally and everyone there is a racist hick.  Or worse.  Yeah, Jon Voight gave a speech at the demonstration and it was all Gibbs could do to keep from humming the Deliverance theme.

It’s bad enough that we have a bunch of incompetents running the show in Washington.  Did we have to get incompetent children?  Spoiled, petulant children.

God save us.

Just horsin’ around.

From the WSJ:

Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg was no fan of the $58 billion federal rescue of General Motors Co., saying he worried taxpayer money would be wasted and the restructuring process would be vulnerable to “political pressure.” Now the lawmaker says it’s his “patriotic duty” to wade into GM’s affairs.

Federal support for companies such as GM, Chrysler Group LLC and Bank of America Corp. has come with baggage: Companies in hock to Washington now have the equivalent of 535 new board members — 100 U.S. senators and 435 House members.

Since the financial crisis broke, Congress has been acting like the board of USA Inc., invoking the infusion of taxpayer money to get banks to modify loans to constituents and to give more help to those in danger of foreclosure. Members have berated CEOs for their business practices and pushed for caps on executive pay. They have also pushed GM and Chrysler to reverse core decisions designed to cut costs, such as closing facilities and shuttering dealerships.

In addition to the dealership issue, lawmakers have jumped into a union fight that pits GM and Chrysler against two trucking companies that haul new cars around the country. The auto makers want to give some of the work to cheaper nonunion contractors. But that raised the ire of lawmakers who support the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

We are in the best of hands…

So, Joe Biden says it’s a great depression.  Hell, it ain’t even a good depression (yet, but The One is just getting started).

When I start seeing photos like these, I’ll buy the hype.  Assuming I can afford it.

Damn, this happened a few miles up the road from where I lived.

So, this guy gets up to make coffee and is standing nude in his kitchen.  Some passerby and her child cut through his yard and see him naked.  And he gets arrested for indecent exposure!

I say the bitch should have been charged with being a Peeping Thomasina.

For the record, I made my coffee in the nude this morning.  Lucky for me I have no yard.  And I’m in Korea.

So the Obama administration has declared war on FOX news.  Oh wait, Fox isn’t a news organization, it’s an arm of the Republican party (my memos from the WH take some time reaching Korea).

Seriously, whatever your politics, isn’t this just a little bit scary?  And you know, I don’t particularly care much for Glen Beck, but without FOX who would have reported on the Van Jones, ACORN, and Anita Dunn scandals?  Perhaps this is why the Obama regime is down on FOX, it is the only network left that is not afraid to report stories unfavorable to The One.  Racists!

Well, I’m not the only to notice the latest idiocy from the White House:

Where the White House has gone way overboard is in its decision to treat Fox as an outright enemy and to go public with the assault. Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC. “Opinion journalism masquerading as news,” White House communications director Anita Dunn declared of Fox. Certainly Fox tends to report its news with a conservative slant — but has anyone at the White House clicked over to MSNBC recently? Or is the only problem opinion journalism that doesn’t match its opinion? On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace replayed a quote from an Obama interview: “I don’t always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that’s part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we’re not supposed to all be in lock step here.”

Maybe he should tell the rest of the team.

And I really liked what Claudia Rossett has to say:

This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets. The president has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That includes protecting free speech, not dispatching White House staff and advisers to hold forth publicly as media critics denouncing news outlets they don’t like.

If errors of fact turn up in reporting, the White House is entitled to dispute them. But Axelrod and Emanuel were not disputing a particular piece of reporting. They were slamming wholesale a widely followed and highly informative news outlet, and denouncing it as not “legitimate.”

Government personnel getting into this act is altogether different. These are people paid out of the public purse, and speaking under the imprimatur of public institutions — in this case the White House. Here they are, urging White House-favored news outfits to follow the White House lead, and ostracize a specific news outlet the White House doesn’t like. This is Banana Republic stuff, a stock tactic of pressure and intimidation. The effect of such stuff, as a rule, is not to promote accurate news coverage, but to cover up stories the government doesn’t want aired, and shut up critics.

Other news outlets — the CNNs, ABCs, NBCs, CBS’s, or for that matter the New York Times and the Globe-Post-Mercury-Etceteras, may not agree with opinions expressed on Fox. But they would be wise to remember that what goes around comes around. And if they don’t rally now around the idea that the White House has no business vetting, according to its own “perspective,” which news outlets are “legitimate” and which are not, then the legitimacy of all news outlets becomes a function of “point of view” held by the White House. Welcome to the road to China’s Xinhua News Agency and Russia’s Channel One TV.

On a more hopeful note, at least some in the media are pushing back.  I really like this exchange between the WH press secretary and ABC’s Jake Tapper:

Tapper: It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one –

(Crosstalk)

Gibbs: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.

Tapper: But that’s a pretty sweeping declaration that they are “not a news organization.” How are they any different from, say –

Gibbs: ABC –

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o’clock tonight. Or 5 o’clock this afternoon.

Tapper: I’m not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I’m talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a “news organization” — why is that appropriate for the White House to say?

Gibbs: That’s our opinion.

And one more thing.  If FOX is not a news organization, what the hell does that make MSNBC?

South Carolina takes on the boys from Alabama today.  I smell an upset!

Update:  Damn!

Like him or not, what the media did to Rush Limbaugh should scare us all.  So, Limbaugh is “too divisive” to participate in an ownership group but Keith Olbermann can provide NFL game commentary?  What kind of bizzaro world are we living in?

Limbaugh responds to his critics in the WSJ.  Read the whole thing, but here’s the kicker:

As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society.

Shame on Michael Wilbon, Rick Sanchez and CNN (I know MSNBC is beyond shame so why bother?).  And shame on all of us who don’t speak out against modern day lynchings like this.

UPDATE:  To be fair, Olbermann spoke out against the lynching of Limbaugh:

“There’re now gonna be character tests for sports owners?” Olbermann said.  “There’ll only be three of them left.  Unless they beat the Vikings Sunday as of next Thursday it will have been a full year since the Rams won a game.  My God, if Limbaugh wants to buy them far be it for me to tell him he’s flushing his money down a rat hole.”

If you don’t read Camille Paglia, you are missing a true and honest voice that transcends partisanship.  A breath of fresh air if you will.

South Carolina–the Fox News of the states.

This global warming thing is getting way out of hand.

Why it’s even affecting The National Pastime.

And Columbus Day travel plans.

Even the BBC is worried.

I say forget about health care, we need Cap and Trade.

NOW!

that hasn’t already been said.

Heh.  “The Mount Rushmore of Shut the Hell Up“.