Pot and kettle

In an interview that can only be characterized as the pot calling the kettle black, Bernie Madoff compares his crimes with those of our government.

Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff said in a magazine interview published Sunday that new regulatory reform enacted after the recent national financial crisis is laughable and that the federal government is a Ponzi scheme.

"The whole new regulatory reform is a joke," Madoff said during a telephone interview with New York magazine in which he discussed his disdain for the financial industry and for its regulators.

Ponzi scheme? I guess it takes a Ponzi-schemer to know one.

And who can argue with him? Social Security is a total Ponzi scheme. The same can be said of virtually all of our "entitlement" programs.

The current direction our government is taking us in leads to financial meltdown and will leave this once-proud nation in ruins. Don't take my word for it. Read Vox Popoli on a daily basis and you'll come away as pessimistic about the future as I am.

The American experiment is not going to end well.

Justifiable discrimination

Anyone who has read this blog more than about 5 times knows that schadenfreude is one of my favorite things. Forget raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. I want to see despicable people suffer!

And speaking of despicable people, who among us wouldn't include the TSSA* in that category.

A Seattle area restaurant certainly does.

Fed up with what he views as crappy treatment from the TSA, the owner of a restaurant near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has decided to put all TSA agents on his No-Eat List.

"We have posted signs on our doors basically saying that they aren't allowed to come into our business," one employee tells travel journalist Christopher Elliott. "We have the right to refuse service to anyone."

She says that whenever a TSA agent attempts to dine at the restaurant, "we turn our backs and completely ignore them, and tell them to leave... Their kind aren't welcomed in our establishment."

The restaurant claims that 90% of its patrons are in agreement with their stance and that the local police have actually helped escort TSA workers off the premises.

"Until TSA agents start treating us with the respect and dignity that we deserve, then things will change for them in the private sector," says the employee.

Is that awesome, or what? "Their kind aren't welcomed in our establishment."

Let's hope more businesses pick up on this and start to do likewise. There's no one more deserving than the TSSA's goon squad. No one.

* You can't abbreviate Schutzstaffel without the double 'S'

Dripping with irony

Senator John Kerry Lurch made an appearance this past weekend. The reception he got was the sweetest type of schadenfreude imaginable, and for all of the right reasons.

A loud and angry crowd in Northampton confronted Sen. John Kerry over his support for the war in Afghanistan, the government’s response to the recession and other issues.

Anti-war protesters interrupted Kerry numerous times Saturday as he met with constituents.

OMG, is that the best or what? Mr. Vietnam Veterans against the war. Mr. Winter Soldiers investigation. And he gets heckled for what? Supporting an unpopular war!!!

It just doesn't get any better than this. Seriously.

A thought for today

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

— C. S. Lewis

Couldn't have said it any better.

Contrasting Presidents

Today is Presidents Day. This means that mattresses are discounted. That, and Federal employees get the day off. Hey, how 'bout that? [/sarcasm]

But February 21st used to mean something. It was the celebration of George Washington's birthday. It was Nixon (figures!) who combined GW's birthday with Abraham Lincoln's birthday, which falls just 9 days prior, to form Presidents Day.

It's a safe bet that no one born after 1980 has the remotest clue as to what Presidents Day is. That is, aside from the mattress sales.

Nixon did more than make two holidays into one when he combined Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays. He obscured what the two men meant to this nation at the crossroads of history at which they stood.

Washington: first in war, first in peace, and last in the National League. Okay, that's a lame and dated line. But does anyone remember WHY Washington was referred to as "first in war, first in peace"? General Washington was a gigantic figure in the creation of this country. He lead the armies. He secured the terms of British surrender. And he was the first president.

There were those who wanted to crown Washington as King following the revolution. He would have no part in it.

To fully appreciate the times in which Washington lived, you have to understand that the idea of a ruler who voluntarily steps down after a period of time and turns over power to another in a peaceful transition was something well outside of the norm. That Washington would serve two terms, handing over power to the newly elected President Adams at the end of his second term, and simply go home to Virginia was astounding for the times in which he lived.

That was the greatness of Washington.

Contrast that with the evil that was Lincoln. I wrote extensively about what Lincoln was (vice the "history" we're taught in government schools) two years ago. There's no point to elaborate on what I wrote then. It would just be piling on.

To lump Lincoln and Washington into a sort of equivalence (which is what Nixon effectively did) is to disrepect the greatness of Washington and whitewash the atrocities of Lincoln.

It's not right. It's just not right.

Once again, NWA was right

'cause a cop think a badge give him the authority to kill a minority.
NWA, F*** tha police

Some time back, I referenced a tragic shooting in the Seattle area of a Native American man by a police officer donut-eating self-important bully. John T. Williams is still dead. And the tax-fed waste of oxygen who killed him is still a free man, as per standard procedure in this type of case.

“If you’re going to prosecute a cop for excessive force amounting to manslaughter or homicide, you have to prove that the officer acted with malice,” says Strait. “(The standard requires proof) that (the officer) acted with intent to harm (the victim). You have to prove he really wanted to get the guy.” Birk has presented the shooting as an act of self-defense.

The inquest brought out the cloudy nature of some of the aspects of the case. Witnesses and Birk presented several different versions of the afternoon’s events — Birk believed that Williams presented a threat to passers-by, while civilian witnesses perceived Williams as a normal pedestrian.

The jury leaned somewhat toward the witnesses’ version of events. Four jurors out of eight believed that Williams “pose(d no) imminent threat of serious physical harm to Officer Birk.” Three jury members were undecided and one agreed that Williams was a serious threat.

Several other key points of the incident are in dispute: Jurors were split on whether or not Williams was facing Birk when he was shot, if Williams was able to put down his knife before he was shot, and whether or not Williams’s knife blade was open or closed.

With a demanding burden of proof, Washington prosecutors are often loath to pursue prosecutions of police officers who have fired on citizens.

Often loath? OFTEN?!?!?! How about 'virtually never'. Cops literally get away with murder in over 90% of these cases. Why? Because cops and prosecutors are on the same "team", and it's bad form to throw a member of your "team" under the bus.

The reactions of citizens and local officials to the decision not to prosecute are telling. The few private citizens quoted are foursquare in the Williams camp. The tax feeders and union hacks are foursquare behind Birk. And the prosecutor does his best Pilate.

The policy of this state is to give police officers this special protection. The underlying policy, passed 25 years ago, is a sound one. My first and foremost responsibility is to follow the laws in the state of Washington. I had to look and see, 'Is there malice, is there a lack of good faith?'

Translation from lawyer-speak: Cops get special treatment. Go pound sand if you don't like it.

I, for one, don't like it.

Apparently, a badge DOES give a cop the authority to kill a minority...or anyone else...and will continue to do so until right-minded people demand that policies like the Seattle area "the cop is innocent unless we say so...and we won't say so" policy are abolished and cops are treated the same as ordinary citizens who commit acts of violence.

So-called conservative comments on CPAC

In case you missed it, Ron Paul won the straw poll at CPAC, with Hairdo Healthcare finishing second. The indignity of this result was too much for one of Fox News' legion of Neocons to bear.

The top three winners of this weekend's CPAC straw poll will not win the 2012 presidential nomination. And if any of the top three do break through to prove that prediction wrong, none of them will go on to win the White House in 2012.

This year's top three placeholders in the poll were Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Gary Johnson. Ron Paul and Mitt Romney repeat their standing from the 2010 poll as No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.

If the results of this straw poll do not sufficiently demonstrate the bizarre nature and overall oddity of this year's gathering of "conservatives," nothing else can.

Ron Paul, though technically still a Republican, has given up his GOP identity to embrace the chance to be the poster child for the more libertarian streak that has run rampant through CPAC, largely unabated for the past two years. Mitt Romney, the virtual author of Obamacare, and 2008's third-place finisher for the GOP nomination, is weighed down by the fact that his universal health care mandate in Massachusetts has largely failed – with the exception being the $50 state-subsidized abortions. Gary Johnson was only added to the lineup at the last minute, his presence stoking the flame of immoral libertarianism that actually advocated for legalized pot and the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual unions.

In other words, this year's CPAC wasn't about advancing conservatism. Rather, it exposed the radically disrespectful element of the libertine.

It has been the inclusion of the libertarian aspects of the past two years that has thrown the message of conservatism askew in a widely disproportional way.

It is the libertarian in attendance that produced the free pornographic calendar passed out to attendees in 2010. It is the libertarians in attendance who openly promote the inclusion of groups like GOProud, largely as an attempt to silence groups who would speak in strong support of traditional moral values. It is the libertarian in attendance who slandered President George Bush, by claiming his appreciation for the Constitution was best summed up as a "damn piece of paper." It is the libertarian in attendance that proclaimed the war to prevent terrorists from regathering strength and coming after our homeland as "illegal." And it is the libertarian in attendance that eschewed, booed, cajoled and screamed "war criminal" to Vice President Dick Cheney, a man who served his country with commitment and still attempts to help the world understand the threat of the radical Islamic element devising plans to eliminate us and our allies.

Now the libertarians stuffed the ballot box of the CPAC straw poll, and for the second year in a row made it the laughingstock poll in the eyes of the voters. (This year's voters are perhaps more engaged, more aware and more plugged in than ever before.)

In head-to-head polling going back a full year to last year's CPAC, neither Ron Paul nor Mitt Romney has consistently topped a head-to-head match-up against a greatly weakened President Obama. Romney has only topped the sitting president once in that 12-month period. Gov. Mike Huckabee, a no-show at CPAC for the past years, has beaten the president head-to-head in nearly every poll taken.

David Keene, the American Conservative Union’s outgoing president, gave a lengthy discounting of this year's poll in the lead up to it. That should serve as a very clear indicator that next year's CPAC needs some significant changes if it is to become the great conference it has been in past years.

Libertarians and Conservatives are as different as Libertarians and Liberals. The truth is libertarians are the worst form of political affiliation in the nation. Combining the desire of economic greed, with the amoral desire to promote any behavior regardless of its cost to our culture is a stark departure from the intent of the Founding Fathers.

And it is not consistent with the average conservative voter in America.

Libertine? Legalized pot? Advocating behaviors? Not consistent with the average conservative voter in America? How extraordinarily rich! But my favorite part of his meltdown was this.

Libertarians and Conservatives are as different as Libertarians and Liberals. The truth is libertarians are the worst form of political affiliation in the nation. Combining the desire of economic greed, with the amoral desire to promote any behavior regardless of its cost to our culture is a stark departure from the intent of the Founding Fathers.

Seriously? "Amoral desire to promote any behavior"? Where does this jerk get THAT from? No libertarian is actively promoting ANYTHING except freedom from government.

His whole article is an attack against liberty-loving people everywhere. His thesis is predictable, because it's the Team Elephant establishment and Neocommie platform: war without end, big government in our image, and "you're either with us or against us".

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're a conservative, Team Elephant is NOT your friend. And Fox News is NOT conservative: it's nothing but the organ of propaganda for the Neocommies.

The Super Bowl was super

Hey, how 'bout that? The Vulture got one right! The Green Bay Packers are Super Bowl champions. The game was every bit as close as the score (31-25) would indicate.

What a great game! Clearly the two best teams in the league (sorry, New England!) faced off in what turned out to be one of the better Super Bowls. Pittsburgh clawed back to within 3 points of Green Bay after being down by 18 just before halftime. But the Pack put together one last long drive for a field goal, then made a clutch defensive stand to ice the game.

Aaron Rodgers had a great game (Brett who?). The Packers defense shined.

Pittsburgh has nothing to be ashamed of. Three turnovers killed them. Killed. Them. Otherwise, it might be the Black and Gold celebrating victory instead of the Green and Gold.

There will be one more post on the NFL before I drop that bone. I'm going to compare the Vulture's preseason picks against the preseason picks of the so-called experts. Should be worthy of a chuckle or two.

Super Bowl XLV prediction

The Vulture presents his fourth annual Super Bowl prediction.

I've got a perfect record in these predictions. In each of the three previous years, the team I selected as my rooting interest/pick to win -- the Patriots, Cardinals 49ers' bitches, and Colts -- have all lost.

I apologize in advance to this year's pick.

This year I'm going with the Green Bay Packers. There's a number of reasons for this pick. First, it's a direct "in your face!" to the junk-slinger, Brett Favre, who had the worst year of his career, got in trouble for sending pictures of his junk to random women, and appears to be washed-up. Second, I'm sick of the Steelers and their legion of fans in this region. I suspect that there are as many Steelers fans in Frederick County as there are Redskins or Ravens fans. And they're arrogant. And annoying. The fans, I mean; the Steelers, as a team, seem to be about team. There aren't any Deion Sanders types prancing around saying, "Look at me! Look at me!" They are workmanlike and professional. And they're winners.

Both teams are extremely good. Both teams peaked at the right time. Both teams have quality QBs. Both teams have exceptional defenses. So why pick the Packers over the Steelers? Because the effing Steelers already have one more SB championship than my 49ers! Enough already!

I'll post after the game regarding the success of my pick. Hopefully this will be the year that I get one right.

Science scare tactics

I for one am sick and tired of science and its over-hyped, overblown, overly dramatic "findings". At the heart of each of those "findings" is the need for a "solution" that will require massive amounts of funding for more "science" or bigger government.

Here's a recent sampling.

World is 'one poor harvest' from chaos, new book warns
Summary: overpopulation and global warming are going to wipe us out if we don't do something. "Something" isn't defined exactly, but more science funding is the implied "solution".

If Quakes Weren’t Enough, Enter the ‘Superstorm’
Summary: a superstorm could hit California, dumping up to 10 feet of rain on the state in a short span of time. This would result in the Sacramento valley becoming an inland sea. Considering that this "study" was funded by FEMA and CEMA, I'll leave it to you to figure out if there was any ulterior agenda in the "findings".

Smoking Damages DNA Within Minutes, Research Shows
Summary: Okay, setting aside the utter absurdity of the premise, that you're doing life-threatening damage to your body the instant you smoke your first cigarette, the study aims to scare smokers and those who might consider starting to smoke by claiming that your DNA is damaged and your risk of short-term cancers increased within minutes of your first puff. Chemicals called PAHs are to blame. Obviously, more money must be spent in researching these all-powerful and lethal carcinogens.

Is it any wonder that no one outside of the collectivists who wish to herd us all together into sheeplehood believes in AGW any more? All of science's "solutions" involve increased taxation and more power to the almighty Staat. Science is coming dangerously close to losing its credibility.

Hmm. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.