The Stimulus Has Failed

Mr. Obama came into office betting all his hopes on recovering the nation’s economy through a massive stimulus package.  Well, that’s failed.  The stimulus was supposed to make unemployment go down, not up.  Now we’re deeper in debt, worse off for employment, and Mr. Obama owns it all now.  Remember way back when, when this thing was going through the Senate.  Only three of ours crossed over to vote for it, and one of them later became a Democrat.  This is Mr. Obama’s economy now, and it’s lousy, and his falling approval ratings attest to this.  Couple this with his dreadful handling of the Iran situation, and his decision to back the leftist dictators of Latin America in condemning the courts and congress of Honduras, and this administration looks more and more like Jimmy Carter’s every day.  Stagflation and dictators beware, Mr. Obama is limiting his days in office.


Fun with Mug Shots! A special Sunday Edition of White Trash Wednesday

Ok, I’m still way burnt out on the serious political stuff. Yeah, yeah, I know. I was never that good with the political. I tried. Anyway, today, we are going to have a SPECIAL EDITION of White Trash Wednesday! I give you White Trash Wednesday, Special Sunday Edition: Fun with mug shots! We will cruise the Gaston Gazette and look at the mug shots from the weekend.

Here in North Carolina, we have our share of major rednecks. You can just hear the country music and the yeehaws. “here’s Uncle Joe, he’s moving kind of slow at the Junction”
rn1

Do the Palin glasses make me look smart too?
rn2

Now we also have our really cute ladies with the temper. These two hotties are charged with assault. Let’s get them a boxing ring with some mud and sell tickets!

aslt1

a2

Now this one in the red tank had a great weekend. On Friday, she assaulted someone and on Saturday she got drunk and started running around the neighborhood and was arrested again for drunk and disorderly. Sister, I want to party with you! Hey! She could take on the winner of the other 2 girls!

a3

So, when you get arrested and you have no shirt, or are in PJ’s, it’s a 99% certainty that you’re a wife beater. Here are 3 of those “oh so tough they have to hit a woman to prove it” men:

This loser is actually a career actor. He’s always plays a townfolk in any western/redneck/mountain movie.
beater 1

Yes, this dude in the hospital gown was charged with assault on a female.
beater 2

Just look at the moustache. Is there any question of his charge? Or it’s accuracy? L-O-S-E-R!
beater 3

Ok, so let’s go to the DWI winners and caption these mugs!

“Quick, take the wheel. I have a DWI already. They won’t arrest you! I’m going to kick his ass when I get out of here…”
dwi 2

Please let me go. PLEASE! I’ll do anything…
dwi 3
“I’m not drunk officer, I’m high. Oh, man, I’m so high. Wow, a unicorn!”
dwi 5

“Honey, the funniest thing happened to me on the way home from the bar!”
DWI 1

“Oh, Hi daddy! I’m going to need some money. And a lawyer too…”
dwi 6

“If I show them my boobs, will they let me go? I think I’ll just lean into the camera a bit. Can’t hurt!”
dwi 4

These three kings of Orient are arrested for…
shirtless 1

shirtless 2

shirtless 3
If you said assault on a female, you’d be correct! Remember, shirtless means beater.

This next pair is in the category of “your family tree is a stump”. Yes, these next 2 are brothers, as if you couldn’t tell, and were arrested for drugs (gosh, no, really? Shocking!). Their names are Dustin and Justin. I guess like these two, their mom and dad weren’t too bright either. I think Thing 1 and Thing 2 would have been better.
loser 2

loser 1

Ok, this one was charged with “forced rape”. No comment.
Huh

These two were charged with prostitution and soliciting. I guess there’s a Viagra commercial there somewhere! “After I take Viagra, I am so ready, I offer money to every woman I see!!”
hooker

Here in North Carolina, we get our share of stars. Here’s Gary Bussey’s twin brother!
bussey

And finally, the winner of tonights white trash Wednesday, Sunday edition, this woman was charged with 10 different crimes. DWI, Posession, etc. The last one was public nudity when she did a strip for the officers before her mug shot, hoping that the entertainment would get them to let her go. As you can see by her expression the answer was “No dice”. Dang, she usually gets at least 20 for the lap dances and this one will have to be for free. However, all is not lost, the nudity charge was dropped when the DA said that the jail photo room was not public and therefore it had to be tossed.
winner

So that completes this edition of white trash Wednesday, Sunday Special: fun with mug shots. I hope you enjoyed it. Here’s hoping we don’t find your picture here, or yes, it will get posted!


Sanford Should Resign

Mark Sanford purports to be a conservative. Well, last I checked, family values are an important aspect of conservatism. Sanford has admitted to an affair, and while the decision on whether or not he stays married is the domain of his family, his state and his party deserve far better than a hypocrite. Sanford should resign as governor of South Carolina immediately, and if not the party should expel him from its ranks and mount a primary challenger for the next election.


Fate Removes Another Prospect

So, 2012 prospect Jon Huntsman is going on exile. . .  .errr. . . appointment to an ambassadorial position in China. Of course, he wasn’t our only ace in the hole. Well, wasn’t. We had Mark Sanford, but, I guess he has a tendency to flake out and go run off into the woods for a week when things get tough. Oh yeah, I can see the 3 am call ad now, Obama waking up to take the call, an empty White House bedroom for Sanford. Then the scene turns into a guy off in the woods next to a camp fire eating a squirrel on a stick. Well, here’s to hoping we have a candidate by 2016.

UPDATE Nevermind, like so many of our supposed party leaders, he’s just cheating on his wife. *facepalm*


You Try, But You Just Can’t

I try to root for Mousavi and this young, freedom-loving mass of Iranians out there, I really do. Then, Mousavi opens his flap about how he’s ready to be a martyr, and I just can’t bring myself to do it. In all honesty I didn’t really ever think it mattered who won this election, but seeing that this same zeal for martyrdom that is so wrong in so much of the rest of the middle east is indeed a driving force in Mousavi as well, I think we might be better off with the devil we know over the devil we don’t.


Allah’s Tiananmen Moment

Were you all watching it!? I know I was! Just look at those demonstrators out there! They’re fed up! They’re fed up of the censorship, the control of their lives, the dictatorship. They’re fed up, and they’re demonstrating for change. Surely democracy is just around the corner in China!

Remember that? Remember how euphoric the world got over the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square? Everyone was convinced back then, too, that democracy was just around the corner in China. Unfortunately, brutal reality was about to rear its ugly head. Out went the cameras. In came the military. Gone into thin air were the protests. Democratic reform? Off the table. The communist party clamped down, hung on, and would some day be headed by a man who shut down opposition newspapers in Shanghai to keep demonstrations from spreading. Political prisoners are, well, still prisoners. Uighurs and Tibetans are still oppressed. Media is still censored. China is, well, still the China that it was in 1990, just with more economic opportunity.

So, before we wax poetic about the demonstrations in Iran, let’s put this all in perspective. The mullahs still control the military. In a day these pro-Mousavi demonstrations can be shut down in bloody fashion, and Iran can become another example of unjustified western euphoria over a movement of young people. Iran too can see the bold but powerless crushed like a buzzing fly, and proceed on to another unchallenged two decades of despotism.


Did he really win?

Recently the Iranians had themselves a little election of sorts. One has to add emphasis and italics when referring to anything the Iranians do in democratic terms. The winner of every election in Iran would be the clerical council. The chosen President in this election goes on to wield very little actual power. So, the great hubbub we now witness on the streets of Tehran is a bit like who’s going to win this argument over Sidney Crosby’s handshake snub; even if Kris Draper and Nick Lidstrom win, they still lost.

All the same, I can’t help but challenge the conventional thinking that this election was somehow rigged. Call it the contrarian in me (do it, you know you want to), but I went through the arguments in favor of this notion, and found it an irresistible exercise. So, my top 5 reasons why I think it’s fully plausible that Ahmedinejad really did win the Iranian elections:

1. The West is biased towards the reform: We all love to comfort ourselves with the notion that somehow, deep down, our enemies really are just good people who don’t want a fight with us. We delude ourselves into thinking they would lead us to the golden promised land of peace if they could just seize the reins of power from their horrible leaders. And I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Nothing has been a more formidable notion in this country that the “Iranian reform” movement is a large force that has been gaining steam. Meanwhile the reality over the past several years in Iran has been anything but. The mullahs have shut down independent newspapers, the social police have cracked down, and at the same time the Iranian people have lined up lock-step with the government over the nuclear issue. This has not stopped the west from looking on the reform as some vanguard of a free democratic Iran, but the truth is that’s not what Iran voted for in the last election and the passivity with which Iranians accepted everything else the government handed them in the ensuing years gives us no good cause to expect they would really make it an issue this time either.

2. Passion is not the same as popularity: We were all awestruck in recent weeks to see the passionate, energetic crowds flocking to demonstrate in the name of their reformer. Of course, anyone with more than a year’s worth of memory can tell you about the fanatically strong presence of Ron Paul supporters. Anyone with access to a good elections atlas can tell you of Mr. Paul’s enthusiasm and that of his supporters didn’t translate to a lot of votes. Instead he finished a dismal 4th, and only by virtue of the fact that he kept campaigning long after every last candidate dropped out. Can passion make you text votes or attend an online poll to say your guy won? Yup. Does it mean your guy stands a chance? No.

3. Iranian polling isn’t exactly Rasmussen: America is a polling obsessed nation with countless firms and great scientific samples on which to run polling based models. And. . . we still screw up, sometimes in grand fashion. Just ask the VNS about the reliability from cycle to cycle of sample districts for exit polling. And we do this a lot. As it stands, the US conducts more polls asking Americans about Iran than Iran conducts of its own citizens. So is it any wonder that some great deal of dissonance might exist between what their polls say and what reality is?

4. Who’s rigging the result: If the result is, indeed, rigged, it must have been by an idiot. The reported spread of support is supposedly uniform, and even Mousavi’s home town is reported to have voted for Ahmedinejad. If it were rigged, there’s one of two ways to do it. One of them is cynical, like Saddam’s 100% election. The other is to manipulate the reported turnout in believeable ways so you have a close, but believable, result. If the mullahs were trying to send a message, the result would have looked like one of those Soviet Era elections. If they wanted a believable result they would have made it closer. This just looks like the work of an idiot. . . or an astounding but very real outcome.

5. Who gains: Who really stands to gain anything by having Ahmedinejad in? The mullahs were in zero danger of seeing any real loss of their power by letting Mousavi in. In actuality, would we bomb a reformist Iran, even to stop a nuclear program? I bet you nobody has a problem bombing Ahmedinejad’s Iran. Furthermore, it was bound to precipitate a fight with reformists, whereas just letting them have their little powerless president would have shut them up in a way police and shut down newspapers never would have. And, given a few years and economic malaise later, the hardliners could ride the crest back in. Any way you slice it, the mullahs really didn’t have anything to gain by manipulating the result, whereas tampering with it could have cost them a lot.

In the end none of it will probably matter. Iran is steamrollering towards nukes, and they will do so with the consent of their public. The question is, do we have the resolve to stop them, the prudence to let the Israelis do it for us, or the foolishness to let Iran acquire nuclear weapons?


A Tale of Two Hate Speeches

Let me preface my remarks by saying this: James von Brunn is a vile racist murdering son of a bitch who should get his turn on the chair for what he did.  Fifty James von Brunn’s aren’t worth one Stephen Johns, we are worse off without Johns, and will little miss Brunn when his small shriveled 88 year old heart finally gives out on him.  That said, I already see the precursor for another tragedy developing. . . the tragedy of society’s double standards.  Brunn left a note explaining that the motivation of his actions centers around this lovely passage right here: “The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media. The 1st Amendment is abrogated –henceforth.”  Unfortunately this vile little man is getting tacked on to his very well deserved murder charge a hate crimes charge.  I say unfortunately not because I don’t want Brunn to face justice to the hilt (I believe I prefaced this calling for his execution), but because hate crimes are not only a crude government instrument of thought control, they are also a sad vehicle for society’s double standards.

At the same time that this miserable excuse of a man was committing these heinous crimes, we were also being treated to a rant no less odious from the illustrious Jeremiah Wright.  Wright too echoed Brunn’s paranoia about Jews, stating “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me,”elaborating further “They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.”  Brunn’s hate speech is rightly regarded for what it is; vile, pernicious, hurtful, wrong.  The problem is when it comes to Wright, the tune changes.  Then we start hearing “free speech,” and “who cares, he’s not in office.”  But what Wright said is so frightfully similar to what Brunn said.  It illustrates a deep dysfunction on our social conceptions of hate that Wright’s is dismissed, while Brunn’s is to be prosecuted.  Either the opinions of both men are criminal, or the right to free speech should confer, like most other rights, even when you do wrong.  In fact, most of our rights exist to protect us when we are in the gears of justice.  We have rights against unreasonable search and seizure, rights to protect us from bearing witness against ourselves, rights to face our accusers, rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, and rights to due process.  These are not suspended when we have committed crimes.  It makes little sense, then, that one’s right to free speech and editorial freedom would cease to extend to the times when we break laws.  After all, even a thief can sue you if he slips and falls on your sidewalk while robbing you.  We are left with one of two notions, either Brunn’s right to speech precludes criminality of his opinions (we can still fry him for murder, and you bet I’d be the man to throw the switch), or the speech itself is fundamentally criminal, in which case we should prosecute Wright.


Capone Care Coming To You!

Al Capone once said “you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” Al Capone could have written the House Democrats new health care bill.  The kind word?  The government is going to offer you a somewhat cheaper competing healthcare plan to private insurers.  The gun?  None other than the overbearing force of the state telling you that you are required to have health insurance.  They include an exceeption for hardship.  Of course, hardship will be defined as the government sees it, not you as the individual empowered to make your own choices.  So, are you a college student just getting started in a career and living with mom and dad till you save up enough money to make it on your own?  Generally in good health?  Too bad, the government says you get to buy health insurance.  Are you a man in your 30s and 40s who ensures your child and not yourself because you can’t afford it?  You’ll be happy to know you’ll now have plenty of insurance to pay for your gunshot wounds when you move into a failing neighborhood to save money to pay for the government’s mandate.  And, of course, once the government starts covering people in the insurance realm, it won’t be long before they start to get even further into the business of lifestyle management, because then how you live becomes public domain as long as the government pays the health costs of it.  Welcome to the nanny state.


Wings Penguins Game 7


Life, the universe and everything

Life has a way of throwing stuff at you that you never see coming. You could see it, if you were looking for it or even paying attention, but, you’re not, and it hits you upside the head. I have been neglecting my family for stuff like Facebook and blogs. I have to stop and that begins now.

I have enjoyed posting here at Beth’s Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and I will from time to time, put up some things. But it will be very light for me. I am starting a journey back to my family and life and it starts with this. I hope it’s not too late. Please keep me and my family in your prayers.

Earlier I cleared out my facebook. That is going on hiatus too. The internet is fun, but if you get too caught up in it, you wind up missing out on the real and the fun or you wind up having everything slip away without even noticing. If it seems like I am rambling, I am. But that’s the state I am in. The depth of how badly I’ve messed up is hitting me and it’s not pretty.

Y’all are in good hands with LordBiteMeMan and Martin. And I will put up occasionally, but for now, it’s time to stand down. God bless and God speed to all of you.


Wings Penguins Game 6

If the wings win, they skate the Cup. If not, then game 7 is Friday in Detroit.


Wings-Penguins game 5

It really is a one game series. Who ever wins this, will win the cup, in my opinion.


What If He’s Not Closing It. . .

Like most everyone I’m tempted to accept the argument that Obama is something of a lightweight liberal who takes liberal stances following his heart and not his head.  Then, I slow down and ask “but is that necessarily true?”  I do this mainly because the one maxim I’ve always taken with me into politics is to “never believe your own bullshit.”  Sure we called Obama this “unknown quantity” and questioned whether or not he was a lightweight, but that was during the campaign and that was a tactic.  He’s no lightweight.  A lightweight doesn’t go from being a state legislator to a president in 5 years.  Such an individual either possesses a natural pragmatic brilliance to take himself there, or the rare form of genius that it takes to recognize and listen to one who possesses such brilliance.  Is he left of center?  Absolutely.  But how far really?  I doubt a George McGovern or a Jimmy Carter would have suppressed the Gitmo photos.  So I wonder, is Obama really a lightweight liberal. . . or is he more of a cynical center-left president?  Certainly I’m not the first to wonder, as John B. Judis of The New Republic states:

“In truth, however, if you examine carefully how Obama conducted himself as an organizer and how he has conducted himself as a politician, if you consider what he said about organizing to his fellow organizers, and if you look at the reasons he gave friends and colleagues for abandoning organizing, then a very different picture emerges: that of a disillusioned activist who fashioned his political identity not as an extension of community organizing but as a wholesale rejection of it. Indeed, the most important thing to know about Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer in Chicago may not be what he gained from the experience–but rather why, in late 1987, he decided to quit.”

Which leads me to the crux of this ponderance today.  What if Obama doesn’t really want to close Gitmo?  I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself and prevent your drink of choice from spewing out your nose in laughter.  If you think about it, and put aside some of your preconceived notions about Obama, there’s an objective case to be made here.

First, let’s consider what we know about Gitmo.  Gitmo is a conveniant place to have around.  These are bad people we house there.  We do not want them in US communities, we want them in a detention camp surrounded by a marine base and lots of men with guns.  There’s not a lot of substitutes for that kind of housing.

Second, consider the man.  Barack Obama was an unknown who gave an inspiring speech in front of a national audience.  He gathered a liberal following less on any merit he possessed but rather as a rejection to the return of the Clintons buttressed by a little lip service here and there.  But, when you strip away the vaneer, you have a man who rejected gay marriage, picked a Robert Rubin acolyte to head the treasury, suppressed the Gitmo photos, and tried to rein in his party on torture hearings.

So, take a man who’s not a lightweight, who’s done a number of things to distance himself from the farthest left course of policy he could take, would like to retain those liberal supporters though, and a facility whose closure would be both unwise and unpopular, and you ought to be awfully suspicious when one of the first thing the man does is promise to close the facility with little to no plan on how to handle the detainees.  That’s a policy destined to fail that only a novice would pursue.  That is, only a novice, or a man who’d like to keep the facility open but demonstrate to liberals why their silly little policy idea won’t work “so trust me when I keep it open and keep voting for me.”

Far fetched?  Perhaps.  That’s the great thing about blogging, I’m not paid to do this, so if I’m wrong I don’t lose a paying job.  But I know liberals who support this closure have unflappable faith in the international community and that this is just the work of paranoid conservatives who have nothing to fear with moving detainees into the US.  Well, as Harry Reid so adequately demonstrated, Republicans aren’t the only NIMBYs when it comes to the detainees.  As if that weren’t a mild enough embarassment to the position, our pals in Germany sure aren’t eager to get them either.  Now, if I were trying to SHOW liberals that their policy idea isn’t going to work and keep them on board with me, rather than TELL them it isn’t going to work and risk their ire, this would sure do a lot of that work for me.  I imagine it would for Obama too if he really wanted to keep Gitmo open.  In fact, not only would it serve the purpose of keeping his liberal support base on his side, but how can the Europeans then turn around and scream bloody murder if they wanted to play no active role in helping close it.  How could they say anything really?  How can the liberals either. . . if he’s forced to keep it open.


Wings-Pens Game 4

Detroit leads 2-1 but if they lose this, it’s a brand new series and only a best of 3. If Detroit wins this, they will have a stranglehold on the series.


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