Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Remember When We Were Going to Close Gitmo

Well that promise like so many others made by the Obamessiah were made with his fingers crossed behind his back. Apparently closing Gitmo has moved down in priority:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

I’m betting Gitmo will never be closed. It’s just too convenient to have a prison offshore where we can hold prisoners indefinably without trial. You’re government at work everybody.

Joe Biden Will Bore You to Death

Did you know we have a vice president and his name is Joe Biden? Yeah I know it’s easy to forget since he’s never really doing anything. Well anything except trying to kill CEOs of major corporations. Gleamed from the front page of Dvorak Uncensored I found out that vice president Biden is so boring as to be lethal:

Jim Campbell, the President and CEO of General Electric’s Appliance and Lighting Division, was rushed to a doctor after he collapsed just before 11:30 a.m. Monday as Vice President Joe Biden was speaking.

So is this Obama’s plan to stop the big bad corporations from ruining America? Send Joe to give a speech with each company’s top brass present and kill them? Some plan.

Here’s a video for added hilarity:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXv438LVSJo]

Milk and Oil are the Same Thing

At least according to the EPA who has now classified cow milk as oil because it contains animal fat. Along with this reclassification comes the fact that farmers are now required to create milk spill prevention plans:

“This is an example of where we have overreach by the department that defies common sense,” said Matt Smego, legislative counsel for Michigan Farm Bureau.

Smego said its an unnecessary regulatory burden that creates additional costs. He said it could cost $2,500 for a certified engineer to safeguard milk, plus more to construct secondary containment structures.

Michigan has 2,299 dairy farms. According to the Michigan Department of Agriculture, dairy is the leading segment of Michigan’s agricultural industry, providing a $5.1 billion impact on the state’s economy.

Who would think up something this fucking stupid? Our government. Who would support something this fucking stupid? The Sierra Club:

But Gayle Miller, legislative director of Sierra Club Michigan Chapter, said agricultural pollution probably is the nation’s most severe chronic problem when it comes to water pollution.

“Milk is wholesome in a child’s body. It is devastating in a waterway,” Miller said. “The fact that it’s biodegradable is irrelevant if people die as a result of cryptosporidium, beaches close for E. coli and fish are killed.”

My question is this, has such a scenario ever happened? Has a milk spilled filled with harmful bacteria every caused harm to a population? This sounds like a ploy to make life even more difficult for farmers through enacting stupid laws that benefit nobody besides the government (who get to employ more people to enforce these regulations).

Your government at work.

Rolling Advertisements and the Lead Ammunition Loophole

Very seldom can you get two completely unrelated topics into one news article. But that’s what I found. The main gist of the story is talking about how California is planning to make money. They’ve tossed around tons of ideas but this one most certainly takes the cake. California is looking into using electronic license plates so they can turn your car into a rolling billboard. The idea is if the car is stopped for more than four seconds the license plate goes from your standard license plate to a billboard displaying advertisements.

I’m sure no mechanism would be introduce to opt out of certain adds leading some hilarity such as a car with an anti-gun bumper sticker displaying an add for the NRA or visa versa. Oh wait this California they probably won’t allow the NRA to advertise. Either way not only would you get the privilege of paying California for a new license plate but you would also get to be an advertisement system for them.

Things I’m curious about are how do they plan on updating the ads? Cellular connection maybe? So then California would have to pay up for cellular data plans to one or more of the big carriers. I also couldn’t wait to see some ingenious hacker get into their electronic license plate and display far more fun and interesting things.

But that’s not all this other little quip was in the same news article:

Lead ammunition would be banned completely from state wildlife management areas under a bill by Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara. While state law already requires hunters to use nontoxic shot to hunt waterfowl and big game, certain migratory birds and small game species are not protected. Nava’s AB2223 seeks to close that loophole. He says lead ammunition can spread through the food chain when animals ingest the casings. The bill is scheduled to be heard Tuesday in the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.

Emphasis mine. Once again the anti-gunners are claiming a law is a loophole and it needs to be closed. I wonder what got them started with this word. Did Mr. Hennigan open up a dictionary one day and randomly come across this word? Did he think, “Gee golly that’s a neat word. It’s pretty long too so I bet I’d sound smart saying it.”

Also I find it funny how lead ammunition can spread through the food chain by animals ingesting casings. I would think that would happen if the animals ingested the lead shot not the plastic casings. It’s almost as if the person talking about this doesn’t actually know anything about the subject at hand. But that’s impossible, nobody would hire somebody who didn’t know anything about guns to write a law involving guns… oh wait.

Another Senator Shows Great Ability to Manage Money

Senator Dodd sure knows how to use money. According to an article I found via Dvorak Uncensored Senator Dodd just awarded $54 million in stimulus money to a very profitable casino. Here’s the gist of it:

The tribe runs the sprawling Mohegan Sun casino, halfway between New York City and Boston, which earned more than $1.3 billion in gross revenues in 2009. Each tribe member receives a cut of the profits, a number a tribal official said was “less than $30,000” per capita per year. The stimulus money is a loan from a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development program that is meant to help communities of less than 20,000 people that have been “unable to obtain other credit at reasonable rates and terms and are unable to finance the proposed project from their own resources.”

So some of our tax money just went to another country. Although somebody is going to yell racism because I’m bringing this up some education is truly in order. Native American (I’m not using this name to be politically correct, I’m using it so there isn’t confusion with people from India) reservations are sovereign soil, not part of the United States. We gave them land after we took it from them as compensation for practically wiping them out. Part of this compensation is the fact the land given back to them was not part of the United States but sovereign soil for the Native American tribes.

Because of this people living on Native American reservations do not pay taxes to the United States (unless they buy goods and services off of reservation land in which case they have to pay that state’s sales tax). This makes sense because they are not in the United States while on their reservations. Likewise as a mechanism for generating wealth most reservations have built casinos. Gambling is usually restricted or outright banned in most states making casino construction difficult if not impossible. Since Native Americans are not bound by the laws of the state their reservations are in they are able to build casinos.

Here’s my problem, that stimulus money is tax money. It’s money stolen by the government from it’s citizens. Now it’s being given to another nation whom do not contribute to said taxes. So I don’t care if each member of the tribe is getting less than $30,000 they shouldn’t be getting tax money since they don’t pay taxes (and they shouldn’t have to as they aren’t members of our country).

Oh I love this one:

“As with all beneficiaries of funding through this program,” said DeJong, “the loan will be repaid to USDA with interest.

Hopefully by that they don’t mean the loan will be repaid by taking government from another source as with GM.

Execution on the Cheap

I’m sure most of you have guessed I’m against the death penalty simply on the grounds that I don’t believe a government has the right to kill citizens outside of the defense of a human life (in other words the same rules that apply to the citizens apply to the government in my book). But if you’re going to execute somebody at least do it on the cheap.

At 0000 MDT Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by .30 Winchester rifle round to the chest:

Four of the .30 calibre Winchester rifles were loaded with live bullets but a fifth carried a blank, so that none of the men would have known with certainty that he had shot a lethal round.

Gardner was asked if he had any final words and said: “I do not. No.”

He was hooded and strapped to a black metal chair, with a white target pinned to his chest.

Gardner was then shot at a range of 25ft (7.6m).

I have to say I don’t mind this method of execution if we’re going to do it. It’s cheap and effective. Lethal injection requires chemicals that I’m sure are fairly expensive, the electric chair isn’t always reliable, but good old bullets are cheap and reliable. Also this may go down at the best use of Twitter ever:

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff used the Twitter micro-blogging site to say he had given the go-ahead for execution.

“May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims,” Mr Shurtleff tweeted.

That’s right his execution was Tweeted. I wonder if that’s a first.

I’m also not sure if I would call this an execution so much as natural selection:

He was convicted in 1985 of fatally shooting a lawyer during an attempt to escape from a court where he was facing another murder charge dating from 1984.

Real bright buddy. You’re up on murder charges so at the trail you shoot a lawyer and try to escape… from a courtroom most likely to guarded. You’re a smart one aren’t you. I guess I should say you’re were a smart one weren’t you.

But alas this method of execution was deemed too efficient and both in it’s ability to execute the target and in the small cost to the taxpayers:

Gardner, 49, chose the firing squad before Utah banned the method in 2004. Critics say it is barbaric, harking back to the Wild West.

Critics say death by firing squad is barbaric? Really? Wouldn’t it be better to say execution in general is barbaric? I mean between being electrocuted to death, injected with lethal chemicals, or shot I’d rather be shot. But the bottom line is killing somebody outside of self defense is a barbaric act. Changing the method of execution doesn’t all of the sudden make it all rainbows and unicorns.

Obama is Smarter than You

At least according to CNN. Jay over at MArooned brings the fact that we’re all idiots compared to the Obamessiah. According to CNN:

President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Yup you’re too stupid to understand his brilliance. So sit down and shut up you stupid surf. Don’t criticize him, because you really have no fucking clue what he’s talking about you moron. Here’s one of the examples they cite:

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

Yeah I’m sure a huge majority of Americans have trouble with large words such as scientists, engineers, challenge, and Nobel Prize-winning. Yup those are some complicated words all right. Woowee our president is a smart man.

What a bunch of pandering nitwits CNN’s analysts are.

All Things Being Equal

They’re not. Here’s an interesting headline item from the BBC, tell me if you can spot the inconsistency:

Bags are to be put over scores of surveillance cameras in parts of Birmingham with large Muslim populations, after local objections.

So Britain has decide that Muslims now are a higher class of citizen so they get special privileges? Don’t get me wrong here I’m glad they’re covering up the cameras I just believe they need to cover up the cameras everywhere. But here’s my favorite line from the article:

Councillor Salma Yaqoob said people had lost faith in the authorities.

Welcome to the party. Cookies and juice are over on the table in the corner.

Who Cares so Long as Our Dog Isn’t in the Fight

I’m sure you’ve already heard about the veritable shit storm hitting the gun blogs today as the NRA pulled it’s opposition of the DISCLOSE Act. Well they made an official statement stating they are a single-issue organization and this issue isn’t their issue. Needless to say this has created somewhat of a rift between the NRA and many of it’s members.

Sebastian says this is OK being the NRA is a single-issue organization. Robb made an analogy regarding how only fighting for a single issue can not win your the fight, even on that single issue. Sailor Curt lays it out that the NRA doesn’t seem to care since they have an exemption everybody else can fend for themselves. Alan brings up the fact issues don’t exist in vacuums all to themselves.

Well I love giving my opinion on things so here it is. The NRA fucked up big time here. With all due respect (never mind when anybody says that it’s instantly followed by a lack of respect) regard to the fact the NRA does the most when it comes to fighting for the right to keep and bear arms they are being juvenile and idiotic with this. I agree with the general sentiment that the NRA is more than happy to drop this issue now that they no longer have to worry much about it. More or less they went from fighting this bill as a crusade against the freedom of speech to a “single-issue organization” that only has focus on the second amendment. That’s just plain short sighted and dirty.

Let me make an analogy since they’re fun. Let’s say you and two friends get into a fight with four other people. The reason for the fight is irrelevant but you are outnumbered and stand less than a 50/50 chance of winning. You’re one of the larger and more capable fighters in your little group of three and the opposition want you out of the fight. To that end they make you an offer, they will not pursue you to kick your ass if you leave right now. If you leave you may save yourself an ass whoopin’ but your two buddies are going to be even more unlikely to escape without a few broken bones. What do you do? Personally I’d stand with my two friends if for no other reason than someday I may need their assistance and abandoning them now is not going to motivate them to help me later.

The NRA is a powerhouse in Washington D.C. They have a lot of weight and thus clout with the people on Capital Hill. By pulling out they abandoned other pro-rights organizations and their own members who happen to be members of those other groups that will still be affected by this legislation. Those other groups and those members will remember this and are likely going to be less than cooperative with the NRA in the future should they need help.

All they had to do was keep opposing this legislation. That’s it. Really other organizations could do the lobbying while the NRA could have been in it name only. But they second they were cut a deal they cut out of the opposition. Classy.

Basically they fucked up and I’m joining those who are calling them on it in the hopes they do better in the future.