The Occasional Observer

Courtesy of Beetz:

The $50 Lesson

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President of the United States.

Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there.

So I asked her, "If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.." Her parents beamed.

"Wow....what a worthy goal," I told her.

"But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my driveway, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"

I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party."

Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

There are plenty of lunatics that still insist 9/11 was an inside job, politically motivated and organized by Bush & Cheney. Where are they now? Isn't it clear that Obama planned the gulf oil spill to halt drilling for oil and pushing his green agenda? After all, he's surrounded himself with members of the Weather Underground who've blown stuff up before. Or is it part of the machines' plan to take over - their first move to destroy life.

The latest fad for celebrity activists seems to be legalizing drugs. Not just, "ok, you can smoke a joint now", but meth, crack, anything goes. This post does a good job of pointing out how riduculous and scary it all is. Here's one of my favorite paragraphs from it:

Please Sting, save us! Unleash the full intellectual firepower you’ve amassed
writing forgettable smooth jazz/rock fusion tunes for people who buy their music
at Starbucks. Just because you’ve been waited on hand and foot for three decades
by a coterie of professional sycophants telling you you’re wiser than Buddha and
smarter than Einstein doesn’t mean it’s true.

if you make a good product, people will buy it.

Boom time, baby.

D.C. stop reading now.

It's risky work, but it does pay off.

Anyway, what annoys me is the hat. You just put that on to piss me off, didn't you?

it works every time.

Apparently I'm not the only one who is into my namesake. HBO is airing a documentary on the too-short life of John Cazale, who died in 1978 at age 42.

But check this out:

The documentary, which airs on HBO Tuesday night, shines a light on the actor and his times. Cazale...was at the heart of the '70s film golden age, despite appearing in just five films -- "The Godfather," "The Godfather Part II," "The Conversation," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Deer Hunter." Every one was nominated for a best picture Academy Award.

Remarkable.

to all those who served and paid the ultimate price for our freedom.

I really try to understand the left's point of view. I even read some of their blogs. I read this really articulate article about Socialism's Inevitable Downfall, and happen to also run across this article titled The Case for Socialism. Both writers seem to truly believe what they are writing. The former article uses examples of how socialism has been tried and failed repeatedly. The latter just uses statistics without any logical connection to capitalism, and states as if fact, that business owners steal the fruits of laborers work. There's no acknowledgement that the business owner creates the opportunity in the first place, assumes all the responsibility for generating revenue, and assumes all the risk.

DHS unclassified memo claims that "...the number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period."

It goes on to state that: terror groups are expected to try attacks inside the United States with "increased frequency."

Now, there are many aspects of this information worth discussing, such as appropriate prevention strategies and tactics, but for now I just want to focus on one. This nine-month period they refer to was under Pres. Obama.

I bring this up for one reason--to counter all the naifs out there who claimed that terrorism only existed or was exacerbated because of Pres. Bush and his policies. Such a ridiculous argument should of course have been rejected on its face given the existence of the '93 WTC bombing, USS Cole bombing, and especially the fact that the 9/11 terrorists lived and trained in the US for 3 years under Pres. Clinton. Yet somehow people still advanced the flawed premise that terrorism existed as a response to Bush's policies, and not the reality that they exist because of flawed Islamic societies.

What will their response be to this information, that attacks are at an all-time high despite the Great One and Hope & Change being in office?