Framed, in the entrance of our home:
Welcome
to Our House
Enter Freely;
Go Safely,
And Leave Something
of the Happiness
You Bring
Who amongst the RNS readership can identify this version of an
infamous but courtly Old World greeting?
Hint: it’s Halloween-y.
First the LA Times scoops the NYT in its own back yard on illegal donations to Hillary’s campaign.
Now they’re sitting on a sex scandal story, “all wrapped up” and ready to go, dealing with one of the candidates. Everyone writing about Presidential politics knows about it, but they’re all being coy, so you’re supposed to glean clues by observing the shifts in the jots and tittles of their writings about the various contenders.
I’ll cut it short for you — looks like the candidate affected is Hillary, and the perpetrator’s good ol’ Bill.
Tell ya what, this isn’t the LA Times I remember from law school. Good stuff.
UPDATE: Ace, for one, is skeptical.
Then there’s this, from a freeper thread:
Larry Flynt, editor and publisher of Hustler magazine, just told FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto that he’s “hoping to expose a bombshell†that will stand “Washington and the country on its head.†Within the next week or two, he says his magazine will expose a sex scandal of huge proportions involving a prominent United States Senator. Flynt refused to comment on the Senator’s political affiliation, but alluded that he or she is a Republican.
My, my. Who will it be? More to the point, will we, the people, give a rat’s ass?
UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: Apparently it’s based on activity from the ’80s, and involves a marriage. Well, I suppose the Clintons are still in the running, but you’ve got to add some others too. FDT? McCain? Obama? (Was Obama even married in the ’80s?) Good heavens, the possibilities are pretty much endless at this point. But if it involves a Senator, that eliminates Rudy and Mitt. And Rosenbaum (at the first link) specifically says it’s not Edwards.
Oh, you do not know how this site scares my wallet. Not that AIM Surplus can’t still do that, but this is a different kind of fear….
“Items he’ll rarely use” of Terror!
With the purchase of Buddy the Jeep, friend and co-worker, Paul, sent me a link to this group of folks who not only build up their 4WD vehicles, but take them out and test them under very, very real scenarios.
For days and weeks. Across whole states. Hell, across continents.
Now, I don’t know that I’ll have the disposable income available to the group members, but sooner than later, I hope to put a Cherokee onto their list of Expedition Vehicles.
She fucked it up.
She confirms that that she agreed with NY Governor Spitzer about giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens. Not even the NY Legislature was gonna let that BS pass. She stunk it up big-time.
Dodd catches her and calls her on it until she has to resort to the natural Dem fallback position: Blame Bush.
So she spent a moment blaming Bush for the Democrat controlled Congress not being able to pass welfare reform.
Very rare video for your Halloween spookalies.
I know the broad scares the hell out of me. And if you watch just after she realizes she’s been caught, you can see just the itty-bittyest flames escaping her eyes and going towards Russert and Dodd.
Last night The Wife and I were carving up pumpkins while watching “The Crazy Socialist Show!” (advertised as the Dem debates), easily the scariest thing on TV that evening.
Russell
Has been on injured reserve since we got back from Spokane. Most likely because, upon our return home, he tried to jump up on what is known as “The Doggie Ottoman/Window Perch” without the stool and hurt himself due to his increasing age and his decreasing athletic ability.
He has been making steady improvements this last week or so, but something happened last night that put him back at square one.
Ellie
Was very excited to get her walk after Russell got back from his, and her and The Wife went off for a good long time. They get back and The Wife asks Mrs. Butterworth
If she wants her walk for the night. Mrs. Butterworth declines and The Wife decides that that means Mrs. Butterworth wants her bath instead.
The Bath is over and Mrs. Butterworth is running about in a vain attempt at velocity air drying and Ellie starts wanting to play. Bad juju.
Mrs. Butterworth is a 12lb tweenie Dachshund. Ellie is a 100+ pound Rottweiler mix.
Now, Mrs. Butterworth can let out a bark that’ll intimidate Ellie, because that is what Dachshunds excel at. But she doesn’t.
The Wife and I, on the other hand, decide that things are getting too rambunctious and shut it down. Butterworth goes through her belly dragging routine and Ellie sits down like a good girl.
But Russell thinks she is a “bad girl”, and decides to attempt a maneuver a dog with 6in legs should never try on a Rottie, especially when he is injured.
While in recovery from his amorous ways, he will hopefully remember that sometimes, having the will is sometimes enough.
Read all about it here.
22 (presumably unarmed) crewmembers vs. eight gunmen. I’ll bet there’s a really fascinating story there. We’ll see if any more details pop up.
Also note that not all jihadis are aligned with pirates:
During the six months that the Council of Islamic Courts ruled most of southern Somalia, where Somali pirates are based, piracy abated, Mwangura said.
At one point, the Islamic group said it was sending scores of fighters to crack down on pirates there. Islamic fighters even stormed a hijacked, UAE-registered ship and recaptured it after a gunbattle in which pirates—but no crew members—were reportedly wounded.
And don’t forget your source for all sorts of interesting pirate/jihadi-related info, such as this story about how terrorists now have a manual for blowing up your local LNG facility.
UPDATE: Looks like some U.S. warships lent a hand and sunk some pirates.
So I’m flipping through the channels last night and I come upon a re-broadcast of the BBC show, Top Gear.
Top Gear Season 9 Episode 3
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Premise: Buy a car in Miami and drive it to New Orleans, with the original premise being to see if they can buy a car at Point A and sell it at Point B and take less of a hit from the resale loss than you would if you rented a car for the trip.
However, between planning for the show and the filming, Hurricane Katrina hit.
They arrive in NOLA a year after Katrina and make multiple remarks about the devastation still visible and ask one question that goes way over the line: How can the world’s richest country still have a city so devastated after 365 days to rebuild?
With all the other little digs from the nose in the air Brits, which are easily repelled as I believe the guys are just insanely jealous, this is the one that actually pissed me off.
Fortunately, though maybe these intellectual geniuses didn’t quite get it, the question answers itself.
When they get to NOLA, they decide to just give the cars away. Wasting UK Taxpayer money is, apparently, no problem for their moral centers.
However, for one of the cars, the Cadillac, no one was willing to take it. A free car to people whose only vehicle had been washed away in the storm surge, and they wouldn’t take it.
That is why New Orleans was in the shape it was in.
And to top it off, another of the cars was a 1989 Camaro. The producer had made a simple mistake and told the woman at the church who was helping these guys give the cars away that it was a 1991 Camaro. She threatened to sue the BBC for misrepresentation. Though in what I’m sure she thought was a reasonable offer, she said that she would drop her lawsuit for $20,000.
Have any of the Christian types in and around NOLA ever heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? Maybe the God of Abraham only uses fire and brimstone once and then uses water the next time?
Something to think about.
And why would anyone go low when it comes to children’s education?
Especially when it is THIS low
You could have knocked me over with a WASL test book.
My 10-year-old son received a letter signed by Gov. Christine Gregoire and Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson. “Congratulations!” it started. “… We are very proud of you, and you should be very proud of yourself.”
Apparently, my son “achieved the state reading, writing and mathematics learning standards.”
Here’s the punchline to my son’s letter. He is autistic in a self-contained special-education classroom with limited mainstreaming, can read some words, can add a little and can barely draw a straight line. Much as it pains me, I told my colleagues a few months ago, there is no way my pride and joy will ever meet state learning standards.
And then he did — or so they say.
Recently, a bright young acquaintance confided she didn’t pass the fourth-grade math test. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her my son, whose limitations she is aware of, nailed it!
I’m feeling a little hoodwinked.
I was an editorial writer before I was a mother. I drank the high-standards Kool-Aid way back in 1993 when education reform started. I was moved by my work as a tutor for an adult literacy program. I was stunned to learn my student with a third-grade reading level had graduated high school. If she had gotten help at 10 instead of 30, her whole life might have been different.
Since then, I have written scores of editorials supporting the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. I defended keeping standards high.
“The diploma has to mean something,” I argued. Over. And over. And over.
As the stakes ratcheted up to become the threshold for graduation this year, I was persuaded to spike my WASL Kool-Aid with a little accommodation.
Sure, let’s have alternative ways to pass the WASL. The students still have to meet standards, they’ll just do it in different ways. So a kid who has test anxiety gets to show he meets the same high standards in a different way, in a portfolio of work.
Which is how my son took the test — by portfolio in the Washington Alternate Assessment System. It was a meticulously kept body of work, representing honest, hard effort and, indeed, progress. But it did not — repeat, did not — meet any common-sense interpretation of fourth-grade standards.
Turns out, in education’s semantics wonderland, there are standards and then there are standards. Under No Child Left Behind policy, the federal government requires states to establish standards for special-education students. In Washington, special-education students have only to meet their own personal “standard” based on the goals in their annually revised Individual Education Plans.
You can go here to read my past rants on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL).
My apologies to Ms. Riley for reprinting so much of her editorial here, but it is the perfect piece of work that proves Washington State does not care about the education of children.
Later in the editorial, Ms. Riley writes about how she was asked if her objection to these very low standards meant that she wanted the her son “to count against the school”.
Her answer was “no”.
My answer would have been a resounding “yes”. If the school isn’t teaching my child, then I want that reflected in the collective test score. If the school is nothing but a day care for her child, then why should it look as though he is being taught? They should get no credit for doing something they are not.
Which is exactly what this new WASL system is doing to the kids. Patting them on the back and saying “Well, you’re dumb as a rock, but that is a mice macaroni art project you got there, kiddo! Welcome to the next challenge we’ll be putting in front of you that we have in no way prepared you for. Don’t worry, when you fail this one, we’ll pass you upwards again any way. And don’t forget to tell your parents that if they vote against the school levy, you won’t be this smart.”
Yet another reason to keep you children out of public schools.
Local racist hatemonger, David Neiwert, decries the enforcement of illegal immigration laws in Prince William County, VA, calling for a new beginning of re-use of the phrase “Sundown Towns” for jurisdictions who actively enforce immigration laws.
(For those that don’t recognize the phrase, this pic may refresh your memory)
Why is Neiwert so up in arms about this new vitality in law enforcement?
Because telling illegal immigrants that if they are caught, day or night, despite Neiwert’s inference, that they will be arrested and deported, works wonders for getting them to leave your town for the safety and anonymity of somewhere else.
And that is one of the big differences that Neiwert doesn’t recognize between a real “Sundown Town” and his childish idea of what one is: Today’s illegal immigrant needs the ability to move anonymously through society.
In what used to be racist America, the very last thing a non-white person wanted was to be “just another kike/nigger/spic/chink”. Knowing a person’s name was like a little bit of poison to their random attacker because it gave the victim a sense of identity.
Today, being anonymous is the powerful position. “Just another illegal” was the ultimate place to hold since the early 80’s because liberal guilt over their fathers and grandfathers thoughts/actions made them look the other way.
But not for me. I’m smart enough to be able to divide the thoughts/actions of my ancestors from my own. I am not them and they are not me. I will not be tried, convicted and sentenced in the minds of others, or in reality, for what they and theirs may have thought or done. Just as those who do not share my pasty white/pinkness should not be held by their ancestors, or their contemporaries thoughts/actions.
Neiwert’s worst implication is that Prince William County is killing illegals.
He is attempting to infer that with his comparison between PWC and the long ago “Sundown Towns”, because that is what a non-white person could expect for breaking the “Sundown Law”: A long, slow, torturous death. Fire, knives and ropes drawing out the inevitable, from an inhuman being so ignorant in their hatred that they were entertained by the suffering.
Prince William County, on the other hand, is simply arresting, jailing, and then handing over the illegal immigrants to federal law enforcement, something unheard of in “Sundown Towns”, for deportation. While the person breaking the immigration laws may feel as though their life is ending, it is only their unlawful life in America. The alternative of actual death, is much, much worse.
But then again, Neiwert only has his sycophants because of his hatemongering and dramatic implications. They lay at his feet and drink his every word because they are made to feel superior to not only those they accuse of hatred, but also the supposedly hated.
The same manipulations used by every other monster of history.
Folks such as myself took a bunch of heat in the media for not blaming Bush or Schwartzeneggar or Iraq or “Global Warming” for the latest round of California wildfires.
Audio & visual rightwing blowhard, Glenn Beck, was vilified in the LAT for yakking about BlameAmericaFirsters getting their houses burned down, while multiple leftist talking heads got away with accusing Blackwater of arson.
However, when it comes to wildfires, you have to listen to those who know wildfires and they said, well what do you know, exactly what I said
Earlier this year, the National Association of State Foresters – representing the 50 lead state fire agencies – declared there was an “urgent and dire need†to reform federal wildfire policy. The association notes that “only 1 percent of the wildfires burn 95 percent of all burned acres, consuming 85 percent of total suppression costs.†But since wildfire costs vary from year to year, one particularly bad blaze can wipe out funding for the other key functions of the U.S. Forest Service besides nuts-and-bolts firefighting. Those functions: managing forests to reduce fuel and mounting awareness efforts to show property owners how to limit fire risks.
The state foresters say U.S. Forest Service funding should be partitioned, with a big chunk diverted into an account that is tapped only when a highly destructive wildfire occurs. The twist: Fire agencies could not access this special fund unless they had undertaken vigorous, cost-effective measures to reduce the wildfire threat.
Most folks know not to put a gas can in front of a fireplace. Why is this situation so hard for people to figure out?
