First Principles

The Wisconsin Legislature is preparing for disaster!  I wonder if they could rent out Dick Cheney’s old Secret Bunker… The [Wisconsin] Legislature is getting ready to pass a bill that allows lawmakers to designate secret successors.  The bill would allow each legislator to name three to seven successors. They would come into play if an […]

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I’m greatly amused over the hippy boycott of their former-favorite grocery store, Whole Foods, over WF CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal Op/Ed on health care reform.  Fortunately for all the working stiff WF employees liberals claim to care about, it doesn’t seem to be hurting the company’s bottom line any. The thing that kills […]

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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently sat down with ABC’s Jake Tapper, and the discussion inevitably turned to health care.  From that short discussion, the Prime Minister revealed two important things for us to keep in mind – one intentional, and one probably not so much. Most important was the accident.  When asked if Canadian […]

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Nancy Pelosi’s article calling the Obamacare protesters “un-American” is, of course, ridiculous.  It is beyond parody.  If I wrote it word for word under her name as satire, I would be accused of straining hyperbole to beyond all limits and beyond.  Only slightly less absurd are the “factual” claims she makes in the piece. But […]

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Obama has declared the program a “success.” But what does that mean?  Consider: Congress authorized $1 Billion for the program, and expected it to last until November.  It didn’t make it past the first week of August.  This is an important thing to consider when considering the President’s own spending and deficit projections. That first […]

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I just got home from Reno’s Tea Party, and it was great fun.  What better way to spend America’s Birthday than to talk and think and debate and celebrate the founding ideas of the United States! There was certainly anger in evidence, and rightfully so.  But that was a small undercurrent in what (to my […]

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California has long boasted one of the most “generous” public welfare systems in the nation.  Now they’re talking about doing away with it completely for lack of funds.  The horrible irony is that the one thing led to the other.

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Amused Cynic points out this centuries-old but all-too-relevant warning from James Madison in Federalist No. 61: It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; […]

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At a protest of President Obama: They held their signs up high: “Don’t tread on me,” “Spend all you want, I’ll pick up the tab,” “I’ll keep my freedom! You keep the change!” “Free fertility drugs now.” And “B.O. smells and so does Socialism.” A Gilbert woman, with a sign that said, “Fund bikini wax […]

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As a former Surface Warfare Officer, navigator, and Hawaii sailor, I’ve been following with interest the grounding of USS Port Royal (thankfully freed today).  While the actual mishap report won’t be released for months, I have some guesses about what went wrong – mostly because they’re the same things that always go wrong when a […]

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I should have live-blogged this, so ripe it is with stupidity.  But here are some highlights as I sit a watch with increasing outrage and disbelief. Obama claimed that the “Stimulus” bill is stripped of earmarks.  Really?  Are you kidding?  Sure – only if you get really creative with the language.  You can rename all […]

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One week.  That’s all the House of Representatives might have to read, discuss, debate, and vote on a bill that will spend an estimated three quarters of a trillion dollars.  (And that’s before President Elect Obama has his input, which I somehow doubt will lower that number.) One week to vet the spending of $2,500 […]

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As a brilliantly concise and colorful summation of my post below, I offer this via Big Bend Bikers: Back in 1990, the Government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion and, as required by law, tried to run it. They failed and it closed. Now we are trusting the entire economy of […]

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That’s how the Reno Gazette Journal summed up the bailout package this Sunday in their lead editorial.  The funny (not ha-ha) thing is that it was how they summed up a positive editorial on the situation. The only thing worse than the summation was the headline:

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Our message to Wall Street is this: the party is over. The era of golden parachutes for high-flying Wall Street operators is over. No longer will the U.S. taxpayer bailout the recklessness of Wall Street. Said Nancy Pelosi, right before she voted to force the U.S. taxpayer to bailout the recklessness of Wall Street.  Fortunately, […]

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In her column this last Friday, Peggy Noonan discusses the ever more mind-boggling absurdity that is the “Baghdad Diarist” TNR debacle. (If you don’t know the Scott Beauchamp story, a soldier agreed to blog for the magazine, and decided to fictionalize his account in ways that a) painted our soldiers in the worst possible light, […]

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