1984 and Your Media

The American people have spoken, your senators have listened, and yesterday the Bush/Kennedy immigration plan was shot down. The masses apparently don’t like the idea of amnesty for 12 million illegals before we fortify our (open) borders. Lest you believe I am merely a Bush honk, I want to openly state that I was very much against this bill. The whole thing stunk of a backroom deal, and clearly Americans did not want it, as they blew up the House phone lines and shut the whole system down with their telephone campaign. This is a good thing; it’s democracy in action. We speak, they listen. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But wouldn’t you know it, as soon as the final score was posted it was on to the next item in the liberal agenda: to silence the masses with a new fairness doctrine as it regards to talk radio. Congratulations Harry Reid; Joe Stalin would be proud.

Fairness in the media is a hot topic these days. You’ve got righties whining about the alphabet networks and their liberal slant. You’ve got lefties crying about the lack of a liberal voice on the radio. As soon as the gavel dropped on the immigration issue, Dianne Feinstein
was talking about the domination of talk radio by conservative voices. She blamed the death of the immigration bill on the likes of Rush and Sean, who urged their audience of millions to speak up on this legislation of disaster. Guess what: she was right. We can probably give 90% of the credit to these two guys for imploring Americans to voice their opinions on this shady deal, because they did. And now America is better off in that this bill is dead. Of course it only means that the immigration issue gets put onto the back burner as we gear up for the 2008 elections, and that is not a good thing, but it’s better than a bad fix to a worse problem. Now that that looming disaster is out of the way, you’d think our representatives would turn to pressing issues such as the war in Iraq or the European missile defense proposals or even Universal Health Care. No, all of these issues are trumped by the fact that Sean Hannity is more popular than Al Franken. That’s the big deal now. Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are running the country, according to some pols. Scary thought? Yes. True? No.

What it all boils down to is that Dems are mired in failure yet again, and they cannot get over it. It’s the 2000 election all over again, and we’ll never hear the end of it. George Soros’ billion bucks can’t buy him Larry Elder’s audience, so the Dems are going to legislate the right right off the air. Or they’re going to try it at least. Because more people like Laura Ingraham than NPR, we need more fairness. The whole thing is so ridiculous it’s laughable. How does Hillary Clinton get to decide what I listen to? Where are we going with this? In town here we’ve got 1490 with Dr. Laura and 1340 with…. whoever they air on that station. Isn’t that fair enough? It's always someone else's fault with the left, and I'm hard pressed to figure out whose fault it is that Air America sucks so bad. Wait I remember now. It's because Janeane Garofalo is a complete loser and nobody likes her.

LOSER

Drivel

When the first few minutes of down time at work hit me each day, I do one of three things. I'll check the email, or set my rotisserie baseball lineup for the day, or lastly troll the local liberal blogger sites to see what kind of drivel they're spewing about the state of affairs. This morning my inbox was pretty thin; there's only five baseball games today; the lefties in town are going OFF! Excellent!

Target acquisition systems honed, I zeroed in for the kill and banged out a couple of comments. One was on George's blog over all the Presidential namecalling I saw this morning. Another was on Trekking Left's site where he was saying he'd decline an invite from the President to the White House because he despises the man. In the comments there Queen Whackamole said she'd like to fart on him. Yes, she did. Now that might seem a little juvenile, but I want to say this: it is juvenile. I think it's hilarious. These people are a train wreck on the scale of the Howard Dean scream. They've hit the wall and reverted back to the fourth grade; Billy Madison would be proud.

Anyway the purpose of this post is to remind the people reading here that it doesn't start and end here. Support your local bloggers by reading their drivel ERRRRRR sites. Think of it as wanting to watch your favorite baseball player's at bats while he's on the road, because I'm representing there. That is, I'm representing there when they want to pitch to me. I would never want to compare myself to Barry Bonds, but sometimes I feel like Barry Bonds when I post a comment and it never sees the internets because I've been censored by these loudmouths. Sometimes it's too tough for them, so they pitch around me.

That won't happen here though. Anything goes. It's why I allow anonymous posters to call me an asshole in the comments sections of my posts. I won't censor.

Y'all come back now!

Green Is Good

Front page story in today's Santa Barbara Daily Sound trumpets "City finalist for climate award." Apparently we here in SB qualify to be listed amongst the meccas of Fayetteville, AR, and Northbrook, IL, to name a couple of other finalists. That's great news. Our city has long been a major innovator in the attempt to keep things nice, that's for sure.

For instance, the trash guy that picks up at my house: he's always there bright and early in the morning. Okay, maybe not bright but early. I'm talking before 6:30 A.M. I want to kill this guy. He pulls in, the Dude starts barking his head off, the eight week old starts wailing; lights start popping on up and down the row and now everyone's dog is barking; it's a freaking nightmare. But hey he's just doing his job.

So climate protection is like a mandate here. I can get with that. I can see that we're definitely putting forth the resources in the studies and the time spent discussing what we can do better, etc. Keeping the sand clean on East and West beach has always been a priority. We certainly can't have those guys outside the post office on Milpas Street approaching with the muddied appearance that would suggest that the sand that they slept on the night before was anything but the purest Pacific pebble.

How about when you walk down Hendry's beach? My wife and I have special shoes we use when we decide to stroll that oil slick. If you don't use them you can end up back at the house with your feet covered in tar. You need to scrub them with vegetable oil to get the tar off; if you don't act quick the black gets over everything. There's a creek that runs behind my house that goes straight into the ocean at Hendry's. Recently they've redeveloped the area at the end of Las Positas where this creek hits the lagoon that turns into the slough that runs into the ocean. It looks really pretty as you're driving by. It smells the same, though, and that's not a good thing. I won't swim there. Maybe it has to do with the half dozen or so dead animals that the Dude has happened upon on that beach and decided to roll in. Picture me sprinting in from 50 yards out while the Dude is simply giddy to root in the stink of carcass, the "Noooooooooooooo!" hanging in the morbid sea air that the offshore wind cannot blow out of that place.

Been up to Elings Park lately? It's a beautiful spot, especially at the end of the day as the sun goes down behind the hill opposite. It's a great dog park too. The Dude loves to run up there with his pals, and we're up there all the time. Maybe you didn't know that Elings Park is built on the site of the old city landfill. It used to be a dump! It's an excellent testament to the efforts of local citizens to green up their city. You would never know it used to be a dump if you walked it and didn't know its history. That is, unless you were the Dude. He was rooting around up there in the gully behind one of the softball fields, and when he came out of the woods his whole head and neck were covered in this brackish blackness the consistency of meconium. It smelled worse than death. It smelled worse than poop. I know the Dude, so I know those smells, and this was different. It was an old trash toxic battery acid rancidness that I am really struggling to explain here; just know it was bad. I went over to check out what he had been rolling in, and it looked like the La Brea tar pits: oozing blackness coming up from the ground that I could only imagine was fifty year old toxic waste rising from the dead. It was kind of scary. I later read that during rains, a yellow ooze seeps down the street from the park on it's Northeast side. Not green, mind you, yellow.

The moral of my post, I guess, is that it's nice to be recognized for trying to do the right thing. Stir fry that with a little don't judge a book by its cover and we're good. And Mayor Blum, if you want to know what issues to tackle next on the green front, come on over to my house and meet the Dude. He's got a handle on all of the hotspots.

Sicko Shows on YouTube

Michael Moore is growing on me.

While I don't believe nearly a shred of his alarmist faux-documentary Farenheit 911, I have enjoyed his other films. Upcoming we will get his new film, Sicko, which by all accounts is a scathing representation of our health care industry. I will pay to see this film, unlike his last effort, which I borrowed from someone else that patronized this fat Bush basher. But alas I wake this morning to find that I don't have to pay to see Sicko. It's up on YouTube right now in something like 19 segments. As of an early Monday, June 18 article on Reuters, it was still up there, breaking every copyright law ever imagined.

Here's the kicker: Michael Moore doesn't care that we're stealing his movie. In his own words he said "I do well enough already," and says that the more people that see his movie, and get his message, the better. I like that. While I don't think that it's right to disseminate copyrighted material without the correct people getting paid for their work, the fact that the guy that stands to lose the most from this crime would rather you steal this movie instead of not paying for it and never seeing it at all validates Moore's passion for his work. He believes in what he does. It's weird to write this, but we need the Michael Moore's of the world to keep it fair, to keep it balanced. Even if you don't buy what he's selling you have to agree that he is a compelling voice, and a good lefty tit for my righty tat. See Sicko, whether it's online or in your local theater. Michael Moore doesn't care where.

Invasion USA

The endearing image of Chuck Norris on a hoverboat in the Everglades, shooting it out with the Russian terrorists, has never left me. Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen kicked ass when the Reds and the Cubans teamed up and nuked most of the major targets in America. Bittersweet, though, when the Russian gunship mows down C. Thomas Howell and the movie ends with Jed Eckert carrying his dead brother to the frozen playground. Cold war terrorism was a big theme for post adolescents like myself in the mid 80's. I used to lose sleep to dreams of Jason Robards' slowly melting face. But that was then, and this is now.

Now Americans don't fear any kind of conventional invasion of our shores. In fact they don't seem to fear any kind of invasion; but we have already been violated. They've been throwing this figure of 12 million around the past couple of weeks, but who counted? I would figure it at a much higher number than that. We're holding a half a million in our prison system. I forget how much it costs to house an inmate but it's something on par with what I clear in a year of full-time toiling for our local government. Who are these people? They're largely Mexican and other South American Hispanic peoples who cross on our southern border. They come here to pick strawberries, work construction, operate the car wash, congest emergency rooms, overrun public schools, and provide authentic cuisine (not in that order). Mostly uneducated, mostly unskilled, and mostly hardworking and friendly, these folks have spun themselves into a pretty good niche in our society. It's a good enough niche that they feel entitled to certain rights that have never been granted to non-citizens, at least not officially. The pols are arguing right now about how to make it official.

While I'm not happy with the immigration issue and how our elected officials have dealt with it since the last major legislation in the mid 80's, it's not even the river of thousands of Hispanic people that flows into California, Arizona, and Texas every day that truly worries me. It's the small trickle of men that look like them that has me on the edge of my seat. You know who I'm talking about: the real bad guys. It's the chink in our armor that will allow these Mexican look-alikes representing the medievalists to carry out another 9/11. They are here right now plotting to kill you and your family. I don't care what Mike Bloomberg has to say about it, I'm freaking worried. Why shouldn't I be? There's no wall, there's noone watching, and they're free to come over here and set up camp like a bunch of squatters under the overpass.

How can we, in the midst of a war, not have our borders secured to protect against these people who would kill you and your family at the mall? It befuddles me. We're literally begging for it to happen again until we do something about it. Build the wall. No amnesty. Identify as many of them as we can and process them. Fill the labor void with our teenagers. I worked when I was 15, why can't that annoying kid next door who just rides around the parking lot on his skateboard irritating my dog get a job? The legislation needs to stop talking amnesty and start talking about stiffer penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants. The Patriot Act can help us identify the bad elements of this mess, but first we need to stanch the flow at the source. Recognize that the real threat of illegal immigration is about the flow of Islamic fundamentalists into our country and use that issue to attempt to correct the problem of the millions of undocumented workers who just want to come here to provide a better life for their families.

Save the 'Roos

I woke up this morning and it was weird but I knew I had missed something. A quick perusal of my daily Edhat confirmed that I did indeed fail to attend the local PETA rally downtown yesterday. I cannot explain to you folks how completely empty I feel this morning. Did you ever get to work and hang around the coffeemaker in the morning and learn from a co-worker that you missed the latest episode of The Office the night before because your tivo failed to recognize the fact that NBC ran it on a different night to non-compete with American Idol? That's me times ten.

PETA rallies are fun for so many reasons. You get crazy Howard Dean type shrill in any number of different chants. You might get some folks dressing up as the animals they're trying to defend. If you're really lucky you can get a B-list celebrity getting doused with red paint a la Carrie. So try to imagine an amalgamation of these attractions and you've pretty much got Disneyland's Main St. USA, on acid.

So yesterday at the PETA rally I did not attend they were railing against overturned legislation that now allows Californians to import non-endangered kangaroo skins into the country. The PETA folks are hopping mad about this (sorry), obviously, but at least one group is cheering. You guessed it: soccer players. You might have thought that the proponents of the world's most popular sport would be an inviting group of globalists, offering free orange slices to anyone who might venture near the sidelines, but this is an apparent ruse. Soccer players everywhere are being implicated in the mass extermination of Australia's kangaroos, and it won't be long, but mark my words, sooner or later they'll be implicating our greatest sports heroes in this massive conspiracy.

Just remember that you read it here first. If PETA is successful in its bid to save the 'roos, we may have seen the last of these undeniably convenient wheels.

Wha?

The strangest news story I've seen in some time.

Do They Know What Country They Are In?

I'm not certain when these pictures were taken but I'm guessing it was during the local immigration protests. These are students at Montebello High School in California. They're hoisting the Mexican flag. No big deal right? Except that they are hoisting the American flag underneath the Mexican flag. That's a blatant display of Anti-American sentiment. But it's worse than you think! In a move that would make Zack de la Rocha proud, the American flag is being raised upside-down. For the uninitiated, that is a statement that is equal to the Islamic chants of "Death to America." And these are our own students. Do they know what country they are in? This is California, not Mexifornia. Who doesn't think we need some immigration reform now?

The Dude Abides

But not always. I'm glad to report that my former Alpha Dog is doing well adjusting to his new role as Beta Dog. Sure he still gets his daily runs at Hendry's or Elings, but no longer is he doted on as he was in the past. Baby Emma, the new Alpha of my abode, has taken over the Dude's role of House Ruler. But don't try and mess with her, or you could feel the wrath of the Dude.