Medary.com

Van Jones resigns from his White House post.

In the middle of the night.

On a weekend.

On a holiday weekend.

What do we call this?

A good start.

Oh, and make no mistake. I am not being the slightest bit hyperbolic here. I am not exaggerating. Van Jones is a self-admitted communist. That he was in the White House at all should make any rational person wonder what the hell Barack Obama is doing up there.

THIS is precisely why all of the tea partiers and town hall attendees are so angry.

If you voted for Barack Obama, you voted to put a communist in the White House. How do you feel about that? How do you feel about someone who openly adopts and advocates the very same philosophy that bankrupted Russia--and killed millions of Russians in the state farms and gulags--being that close to the most powerful political position in the world?

Are you OK with it? Really?

New York Times:

In the very long term, the ability to artificially warm the climate, particularly the Arctic, could be seen as a boon as the planet’s shifting orientation to the Sun enters a phase that could initiate the next ice age.

Hmm. Do I detect a shift in the narrative? If the New York Times, generator of many of the memes of the left side of society, is starting to maybe kinda sorta say "well heck, maybe that global warming thing isn't so bad after all" then what the heck are we trying to do with "Cap and Trade?"

Save The Planet. Burn Coal.

Snookums and I went to the FreedomFest 2009 that had been advertised on KCMO 710 here in Kansas City. I went because, you know, I'm apparently a right-wing wacko. Snookums went because she's married to a right-wing wacko and it was a chance to sit outside in the sun for a few hours and read her book.

The Pig Guys

The pigs say: "That's All Folks," "American Capitalist Pig" (standing up) and "No Socialist Pigs" (belly-up). More follows--click "read more."

The "war on drugs."

The drug war has been a debacle both domestically and internationally. In the United States, it has overwhelmed our prisons (indeed, the entire criminal justice system) caused many urban neighborhoods to become combat zones, and eviscerated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In the drug-source countries of South America, it has created a bonanza of corruption and helped bring to power such populist demagogues as Bolivia’s Evo Morales. In Afghanistan, the counter-narcotics mission has alienated tens of thousands of Afghan opium farmers and, even worse, tribal leaders and other important political players — key U.S. allies who rely on the drug trade to fund their power bases. The war on drugs there, in short, has undermined our far more crucial mission to defeat al Qaeda.

And I say that as a person with no interest in any drug stronger than Jack Daniel's.

Reuters:

Researchers at Imperial College London have found evidence a chemical in broccoli and other green leafy vegetables could boost a natural defense mechanism that protects arteries from the clogging that can cause heart attacks.

I like broccoli. I'm weird that way.

That somebody has written this sentence in a long, detailed analysis of the U.S. government's financial mess:

But my guess is that, faced with the alternatives of seeing both the dollar and the debt become worthless or defaulting on the debt while saving the dollar, the U.S. government will choose the latter.

It can happen here. It will happen, if the Democrats don't sober up in a damn hurry and stop spending money like drunken Congresscritters. The Republicans aren't in this game--the voters quite effectively saw to that in the 2008 elections. It's the Democrats who are driving us all right off the financial cliff--quite frankly, the completion of a suicide trip that Hoover and FDR put us on after the Crash of 1929--including and especially FDR's New Deal. We're in the endgame now of the New Deal policies, and all the Democrats have to offer is more of the same disastrous policies that got us here in the first place.

It's the Democrats, and only the Democrats, who can stop it. If they don't, then not a single Democrat deserves to be re-elected in 2010.

The Republicans might have been bad fiscally towards the end of the Bush Administration. The Democrats have been worse, by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Neil Gaiman's Library. (Click link for a picture)

After a long hiatus, I have opened up the registration to Medary.com. Since I opened it up, I've been rejecting a lot of signup requests--e-mail addresses from China and the like. They don't get approved. They go to cyber-heaven.

If you want to make it through the signup process--to for instance comment on my self-evident wit and brilliance (well, it's evident to me, the self anyway), or to tell me--in the nicest possible way of course, that I'm full of it, it would be a good idea to ask for a user name and/or provide an e-mail address that makes some kind of sense, and won't set off all kinds of alarms when I type that stuff into various search engines to check you out.

It would also help a great deal if you e-mail me to tell me you're a real person, and not some robo-spammer (or a human spammer--hello to all you poor schmucks working in India and elsewhere!). My e-mail address starts with phil. (Don't put the period in the e-mail address. It won't work that way.)

Then you put the little ampersand curly-a at-sign that goes between a user name and a host name.

Then you put haskett.org at the end of it.

Then you can send me e-mail--assuming of course it makes it through the spam filter. If it doesn't, well then sorry about that. You probably should put a subject in the e-mail like "please let me have an account at medary.com." Saying "please" is important, you know. If I decide I like you, I'll let you have an account here, and will let you comment, at least until you get too obnoxiously annoying. If I don't, I won't. Simple.

Now that the Democrats have their claws firmly attached to the levers of Federal power, I have begun my traditional slide back from a reluctant Republican to a strident libertarian.

That's because while some Republicans have always bothered me a bit with their obsession on certain social issues, the Democrats simply scare the hell out of me. And while Republicans tend to get more moderate, or even start leaning leftward when they have control over everything, the Democrats get even more crazily out of control when they have all of the cards in the deck of political power.

The Republicans have the saving virtue of actually caring about national defense and promoting freedom, liberty, and the rule of law. The Democrats--and I'm talking about the national Democratic Party leadership here--demonstrate time and time again that they really don't care about defending the nation, are actively opposed to freedom and liberty, both at home and in places like Honduras, and they certainly have disdain if not contempt for the rule of law, not to mention the very people who voted to put them in office. The latter is the most important takeaway lesson from the August town hall meetings--at least, the ones that Democrats were willing to hold.

It's time to undo the New Deal and restore traditional American liberty and personal responsibility. I don't have a big problem with some kind of means-tested social safety net to cover those who are truly needy, but we simply can not afford to cast that social safety net over the entire country, and take over half of the gross domestic product of the country away from the productive private sector and spend it instead on government.

We can't afford it.

We can't afford it.

We can't afford it.

It will destroy this country, the exact same way that socialism destroyed Russia in the U.S.S.R. years, and the way it has corroded and corrupted the once-world-leading United Kingdom. We can't afford it.

Where, exactly, in the New Testament does Jesus tell his followers to rob Peter in order to pay Paul?