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[*2] . 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[*3] –and killed millions of Russians in the state farms and gulags–being that close to the most powerful political position in the world?
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?”
Snookums and I went to the FreedomFest 2009[*1] 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.” We pulled up at about a quarter to 10 in the morning, and things were still being set up. We were there early enough to get good parking. Later, we saw a steady trickle of people walking across Brush Creek on the Oak Street bridge, so we had primo parking.
It took a while for the thing to get rolling. This is the first event of its kind that I’d ever attended–I don’t know if a slow start is par for the course, or if it was the (admitted) inexperience of the organizers–the Political Chips[*2] , Jason Powers and Alex Poulter.
Stigall, looking like he usually sounds on the radio
The Political Chips Guys aka the MIT Boyz. I don’t know what they sound like–yet.
The crowd was good, but I suspect that it was smaller than the organizers had hoped for. I’m nowhere near anal enough to sit down with a picture and count all the heads to get a halfway accurate count, but I’d guess somewhere between one thousand and two thousand people came out on what turned out to be an extremely nice Saturday noontime in Theis Park (also known as Volker Park) just off the Country Club Plaza in mid-town Kansas City.
The crowd in the ampitheater
The crowd milling above the ampitheater
There were a number of booths set up–various people running for office, some Ayn Randers, and some other right/libertarian type activist organizations. Snookums was disappointed that there wasn’t any good giveaway stuff. We on the right really need to get better at that whole astroturfing thing, I guess, starting with finding somebody to pony up some money for some cool chotchkies to fool and persuade the masses to do our evil bidding. Ha ha ha, he laughed evilly, or something like that.The speakers were really pretty good. Melanie Owen was an immigrant from the Philippines, who told tales of what things were like under Marcos. She said when she heard that Obama wanted to create a civilian organization as powerful as the military (yes, those are his words) she said “oh-oh, that’s exactly what Marcos and every other dictator does. That told me that Obama is a dictator.” (A paraphrase, but pretty close to what she actually said.)
Melanie Owen
Angelo Mino immigrated from Ecuador, and told the story of how he rose from dumpster-diving for thrown away food to feed his family to being an executive in a food service company. And he didn’t want that American Dream taken away from him, and he resented Nancy Pelosi advocating that the people who didn’t come here legally (the way he did) getting money from the government.
Angelo Mino
Next came a couple of speakers on health care. Beverly Gossage is director of HSA Benefits Consulting[*3] and a health consultant and research fellow of the Show Me Institute[*4] here in Missouri. She sounds like she knows her stuff.
Beverly Gossage
Michael Cannon[*5] should need no introduction to anybody who’s seriously studied health care in the country. He’s the director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute. He’s one of the heavy hitters in health care policy reform–or he would be, if we could somehow convince the left to stop shouting slogans and spouting inaccuracies long enough to listen to rational argument.
Michael Cannon
The final speaker, the keynote speaker, would have brought the house down, if we’d actually been in a house. He goes by the name of Apostle Claver[*6] , and he’s a good old-fashioned Southern preacher from Houston. All I know is that if he was leading a church here in Kansas City, I’d go just for the entertainment value alone, let alone the message–which was a good one.
Apostle Claver
I’ve got to admit, the whole thing was pretty uplifting. It was fun, a bit inspiring, and nice to see that I wasn’t the only guy who thought the way I do, sitting here typing this out in the den of my basement. The crowd was about as intimidating and vicious as any Independence Day parade gathering–lots of flags and red, white, and blue–along with a good number of signs and Gadsden Flags.
Oh, about some of those signs, people. Find somebody who can spell to edit your stuff, OK?
I only saw one counterprotester–some guy standing at the back of the crowd with a “Tax the Rich” sign. I wanted to go over to him, hold my hand out and say “Hi, I’m the rich. I’d appreciate it if you stopped pointing your gun at me.” but I was running around taking pictures–on a Mission, don’t you know. There might have been others, but if there were SEIU union thugs there looking for trouble, I certainly didn’t see them. The only other Stupid Leftie moment of the day I experienced was when leaving the FreedomFest, we were walking behind another couple, and heard–apparently shouted from a car racing down Rockhill Road, some female voice shouting “Get out of this country!” I thought that was pretty funny, but it couldn’t match the top moment of the day for me.
Here it is–proof that I have an incredibly warped sense of humor, but if you’ve made it this far, you deserve an “Easter Egg.” The Surreal Moment Of The Day came when the Battle Hymn of the Republic was playing over the loudspeakers, and this group of geese marched up the bank from Brush Creek towards wherever geese go when they march up the bank from Brush Creek. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway . . .
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.
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.
That somebody has written this sentence in a long, detailed analysis[*1] 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.
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.
