Protesters in Wisconsin

For two weeks protesters have been living in the capitol building.

Imagine if Tea Baggers did the same to a Democratic governor in a capitol building, occupying it for two weeks? This was a question posed by Dennis Prager on his radio show.

How do you think the MSM would react?

The left gets a free ride with the MSM. They can do anything they want with impunity. The MSM provides free cover.

Here's another example. Note the MSM on this.

LA Police Union

From the LA Police Union:

 

At noon local time on Saturday, February 26, MoveOn.org will hold rallies in front of every statehouse and in every major city to stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin. Find a Rally to Save the American Dream near you by visiting the website and entering your zip code. You can also show your support by sending words of encouragement to Wisconsin’s workers via a special website created by the SEIU.

 

For the whole article

 

Imagine, the LA Police Union is in solidarity with the likes of MoveOn.org, SEIU and National People's Action than with the American people. Is this the direction mainstream America wants to go?

Jambalaya--Paella

Jambalaya is a New Orleans creole dish and Paella is a cousin food that originates in Spain. If you've had either one, you know you've had some good eats. This picture is a recipe of my own making that is similar to these two dishes. Two of my golf buddies came down from Seattle and I didn't have the time to make it for them, but here's the recipe that I would like to share with you. It's quite simple.

Ingredients:

White rice

Chicken

Italian saugage

Seafood medley

Onions and garlic, can of chicken broth, can of tomato sauce, and a can of beer.

Spices of salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin and bijol. Bijol is a coloring condiment that turns the rice to a yellow color.

Most ingredients are likely in your pantry. Here's what I did:

Start by cooking the sausage.  After that is done, pull it out of pan and brown some onions.  Then I pull out the onions and add oil to the pan and I add in a couple cups of rice and stir fry it in the oil.

After stir frying the rice a few minutes, I add back the onions, then chicken broth, diced tomatoes or tomato sauce, water and all the spices listed above. I mix up that witch's brew and then I put in a few pieces of chicken. I just buy a whole chicken cooked at Costco, so I don't have to deal with raw chicken. Then I add back the sausage.

The seafood medley consists of shrimp, mussels, oysters and squid. It comes in a frozen package at Costco for $13. I used 1/4 of the package in making this dish. All I do is spread the mussels, shrimp, squid and oysters on top of all the other ingredients.

After everything is in the dish, I don't do any more stirring. I want the dish to cook and what's ideal is for the rice to have a crust on the outside. Let it cook in it's own spices on low heat and allow all the food to absorb all the flavors. Ten minutes before the dish is served, pour in a can of beer. I like Corona, but my WA state friends probably use Ranier beer:-)

Like I say, it's an easy recipe, and good eats.

Evils of Public Sector Unions

“And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they’ve acceded to many of their governor’s specific demands… but they don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining. But that is exactly what they need to lose. Private sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests and, as we’ve seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government. The labor-politician negotiations can’t be fair when the unions can put so much moneyinto campaign spending. Victor Gotbaum, a leader in the New York City chapter of AFSCME, summed up the problem in 1975 when he boasted, ‘We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.’”

More from News Real Blog

Whether pro or anti public union, this is an excellent informative article about public unions.

Obama Threatens America

Begin with the reality that Mr. Obama is a socialist. Those doubting this assertion of fact need only refer to Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There, Stanley Kurtz meticulously and undeniably lays bare Mr. Obama’s socialist education, associations, mentoring, roots, beliefs, and actions. Let us also keep in mind that socialism, like Marxism, is fundamentally incompatible with freedom, democracy, and capitalism as embodied in America’s founding documents and as practiced in America. If Mr. Obama is indeed a socialist — and he is — then his belief system, his way of thinking, is innately hostile to America. Socialism and American democracy cannot coexist, so if Mr. Obama is pursuing socialist policies, American democracy must, of necessity, be weakened or destroyed.

But if this is true, how did Mr. Obama become president? It boils down to this: He lied. He lied about who he is, about his background, his fundamental beliefs, his intentions, and his methods. He employed standard Marxist/socialist tactics and concealed his true nature so as to seize power and impose his will, and for two years, he pretty much got away with it. A recurring theme of Mr. Medved’s article is that such things are impossible, as Mr. Obama — like all politicians — wants to be reelected. Put aside, for the moment, that Mr. Obama has addressed this issue explicitly, saying that he’d rather accomplish his (socialist) goals than be a two-term president

 

More from Pajamas Media

 

Mitch Daniels Must Be President

From Wall Street Journal

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels believes he faces a taller challenge as he ponders a White House run: Could voters warm to his message that the country is doomed unless it slashes its debt and radically revamps the popular Social Security and Medicare programs?

In any other year, a campaign platform that gloomy would render a politician toxic. Today, with concerns over the nation's fiscal health on the rise, the Indiana Republican's wonkish bravado is making some think he is a good fit for the moment.

Gov. Mitch Daniels is tireless on the stump. But like many of his potential opponents, he's keeping coy on whether he'll make a run for the White House in 2012. WSJ's Neil King reports.

If the time is indeed right for Mr. Daniels's get-tough message, the angry budget standoffs in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and New Jersey are also shining a new light on his credentials as a messenger. Mr. Daniels rescinded collective-bargaining rights for state employees six years ago—long before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker caused a firestorm by putting the same issue on the table.

Mr. Daniels also cut spending, trimmed the state work force to its smallest in decades, and turned a yawning deficit into a surplus, with only scattered outbursts of popular anger along the way.

 

Krauthammer--Wisconsin Union Vote

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats' strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

Hence the import of the current moment - its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years - from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.

Obama's Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell, no.

 

For the rest of the article

 

Large Hadron Collider--TED

Las Vegas--The Poor Man's Guide

Vegas is a great town. For two days.

 

I do enjoy my stay in Vegas.

Professor of Politics from Princeton

Anne-Marie Slaughter

 

And a generation raised on multilevel videogames with complex graphics and strategies is unlikely to be content with Follow the Leader.

 

Read more of Anne-Marie Slaughter's article at The Daily Beast

Mr. Spencer--Let Me Be Wrong

Please, Lord, Let Me be Wrong

Well, the Tsar has abdicated the throne, and seems headed into exile. Even his crown jewels, in Swiss bank accounts, have been seized and will be returned to the national treasury. The mutinous troops who would not fire on the crowd at the Winter Palace will soon be handing power to some sort of Constituent Assembly, which will elect the Egyptian Kerensky. And the world is all atwitter at the prospect of a despot giving way before the power of a crowd. It's people power! Power to the people! You'd think that Corozan Aquino or Vaclav Havel were waiting in the wings in Cairo to pick up the pieces of the fallen dictatorship, instead of the tightly disciplined cadres of the Muslim Brotherhood. I've previously compared this group to the Bolsheviks, but now I feel compelled to admit where I was wrong: the Bolsheviks in 1917 commanded the allegiance of only a tiny percentage of the population, and their vote total in Russia's first (and last) democratic election was dwarfed by that of the Socialist Revolutionaries. By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood is the only organized political alternative in Egypt--broadly popular, with an infrastructure of governance already in place.

For Mr Spencer's whole article

Mubarak with a few choice words

From Haaretz.com

Hosni Mubarak had harsh words for the United States and what he described as its misguided quest for democracy in the Middle East in a telephone call with an Israeli lawmaker a day before he quit as Egypt's president.

The legislator, former cabinet minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said on TV Friday that he came away from the 20-minute conversation on Thursday with the feeling the 82-year-old leader realized "it was the end of the Mubarak era".

"He had very tough things to say about the United States," said Ben-Eliezer, a member of the Labor Party who has held talks with Mubarak on numerous occasions while serving in various Israeli coalition governments.

"He gave me a lesson in democracy and said: 'We see the democracy the United States spearheaded in Iran and with Hamas, in Gaza, and that's the fate of the Middle East,'" Ben-Eliezer said.

"'They may be talking about democracy but they don't know what they're talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam,'" he quoted Mubarak as saying.

U.S. support for pro-democracy elements in Iran has not led to regime change in the Islamic Republic, and Hamas, a group Washington considers to be a terrorist organization, won a 2006 Palestinian election promoted by the United States.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after a coalition government it formed with Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas collapsed in a power struggle.

Ben-Eliezer said Mubarak expanded in the telephone call on "what he expects will happen in the Middle East after his fall".

"He contended the snowball (of civil unrest) won't stop in Egypt and it wouldn't skip any Arab country in the Middle East and in the Gulf.

---------------------------

Can you imagine? We now have the Chancellor of Germany, the President of France and the Prime Minister of England declaring that multiculturalism is a failed model. Now we have the 1 day old former President of Egypt lecture Obama about democracy in the Middle East.

Obama disses our greatest allies, England and Israel, and bows to those who wish death to America. And it used to be America that led the way.

Yeah, Egypt might have its free elections. But once the Muslim Brotherhood is in power, do you seriously think there will be any elections after? If I'm an Egyptian woman, I'd be getting my ass on over to Nordstroms and buy a burka real quick.

Folks, here is must read that will leave you shaking your head--From Mark Steyn

And this from Geert Wilders at his trial in Amsterdam:

The lights are going out all over Europe. Anyone who thinks or speaks individually is at risk. Freedom loving citizens who criticize Islam, or even merely suggest that there is a relationship between Islam and crime or honour killing, must suffer and are threatened or criminalized. Those who speak the truth are in danger.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at work, on the lookout for thought crimes everywhere, casting the populace back within the confines where it is allowed to think.

This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater.Freedom of speech is not the property of those who happen to belong to the elites of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birthright of our people. For centuries battles have been fought for it, and now it is being sacrificed to please a totalitarian ideology.

A Special Day--I Met Cathy

I have always had a special affinity for the kids I went to grade school with at Mount Calvary. Being that I never went to a real high school, these kids were in my life during the magic time of my youth. It has been well over 40 years since I've seen any of these kids, even though to this day they hold a special place in my heart.

So today my wife and I spent the day in Los Angeles. We're at Pershing Square and I'm filming the tall buildings around us. A lady comes and asks if she may pet our dog. We make small talk and she tells us she is from Baltimore. I say I used to live in Maryland, and she asks where. I told her a little town called District Heights. The other lady asks, "what's your name?" I told her. We were classmates for seven years.

Her name is Cathy, (and Cathy if you read this, I'm sorry, I forget if it's Cathy or Kathy). It was great to meet someone from so long ago. Cathy let me give her a hug, and foolish me, I had a few tears. I was so happy to meet her and to talk about our past. Right there she called up her good friend Pat in Maryland, who we both went to school with, and there we are talking to our friend Pat. It was wonderful.

Great Video-Downtown LA at Night

Obama's Cairo Speech 2009

Below are excerpts of Obama's speech in Cairo, Egypt 2009:

 

So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America.

 

 

Downsizing

This is from Silicon Valley Blogger

 

Go to above link to read the full post--The Hidden Financial Benefits of Downsizing

 

1. Let's state the obvious.... a simpler life requires less money. Keeping up with modern society can be a challenge. You only need to look at the wide range of gadgets and new technology that are around today to know that there is always something enticing out there to tempt us into opening our wallets.

Falling for the temptation of desiring all the latest things can be an expensive habit to deal with. You will always want the latest things so you have to find the cash to get them.

But can you really shift your mindset? It's certainly a challenge for some people to try to exert a bit more control over their shopping habits. But try prioritizing your purchases and focusing on other matters beyond the material a little bit at a time. Change can occur when you make a commitment, have a plan and focus on enjoyable things and events that cost you less. If you consciously decide to live a minimalist lifestyle, you will think differently. You will focus on other things in life and your expenses will diminish.

A simpler life can give you more leeway with your budget and the ability to focus on future savings and investment goals rather than on fighting your debt. Wouldn't you prefer to focus on buying mutual funds rather than on worrying about paying your bills?

2. You'll have less stress. Buying things you don't need and that you end up paying for over time can turn into a debt problem that is both overwhelming and stressful. One way to convince yourself to spend less is to think about what it is you're really trading for each item you buy. Ask yourself if the things you buy are truly worth your hard-earned money and the time spent working for that money. Just imagine not having to worry about money so much. One way to get to this point is to train your mind to want less, so that you can get by on less.

3. Less clutter can lead to a clearer, calmer mind. This is another benefit to downsizing that not everyone realizes. When your home is full of possessions, it is automatically going to sport clutter. Do you have a lot of stuff? If so, you'll have to keep organized or you'll be constantly misplacing items, wasting time seeking out lost things and fretting over not having enough space.

If you've ever cleared out your place, you will know how refreshing and liberating it feels. So just imagine doing that to your entire home! You may be pleasantly surprised at how liberating it can be to try a more minimalist approach to living. You won't require as much money to sustain yourself and you'll probably find yourself living more efficiently. Why? Less stuff usually equates to less maintenance and therefore, less things to worry about.

 

The Egyptian Dilemma

Excellent article by Steven Hayward at Power Line.

The important point that Steven is saying is that yes, Egypt will overthrow Mubarak, and have a free democratic election. Once! Who will win? Most likely the Muslim Brotherhood. Then there will be no more democracy.

Just because things are bad, doesn't mean they can't get worse. My guess is that Egypt is such a shit hole, the people will roll the dice. And things may even get better--for a while. Like socialism or communism.

Islam, where will it lead? One would want to look at other Islamic countries for that answer.

Picture is from Reuters