Holding out for a hero

Lessons we can learn from the tragic Fort Hood shootings: One armed nut can get through almost any sort of security setup, more sane people should carry personal weapons on themselves at all times for the public good, and the government needs to change the rules to accommodate this, somebody seriously needs to rethink having followers of Islam in the armed forces, and big heroes come in small packages.

Kimberly Munley, as I’m sure you all know by now, was the 30-something mom of two girls, aged 12 and 3 who took out the Fort Hood Shooter. She stands a whopping 5 foot 4 inches and probably weighs 120 pounds soaking wet. She’s from North Carolina and is married to a Fort Hood Special Forces officer.

I can’t help but hope that the piece of trash she stopped, Nadil Hasan, knows who stopped his little spree. I hope one day very soon he wakes in muslim heaven hoping for his 72 virgins and Allah says, “Sorry, dude, you got taken out by a chick. We’ve had a chat with the people over at Hindu heaven and we’ve arranged for you to be reincarnated as a pig in a Arkansas sausage factory. After you finish up there, you’re scheduled for a stint as a stray dog on the streets of Beijing, and we’ll just play it by ear after that.”

Can you imagine doing what that little woman did?

Sleeping with the enemy

“This man Hitler was even more ferocious.
The more ferocious the better, don’t you think? The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are.”
–Mao Zedong

If you’re a Beckhead, or a FOX news junkie, you’ve already seen the video of Obama’s White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn, telling a bunch of high school kids that her heroes were Mother Theresa and Mao Zedong. Interesting choice, don’t you think? A Saint and a Chinese mass murderer? What the heck is going on in the White House personnel office? With unemployment numbers creeping up every day, you’d think they could find somebody who doesn’t think that Communist dictators are appropriate role models for our high school kids to emulate.

I don’t want to pick on the Chinese, I like Chinese people.  I actually took five hours of Mandarin at U.F.  (I made a B, in case you’re nosy.) Why? Well, honestly, when I got to the end of the drop-add line, it was either Chinese or Swahili, and I figured–using fat-girl logic–that there are a lot more Chinese restaurants than there are Swahili!! As a part of the class, I also spent some time “mentoring” the wives of Chinese grad students who came over here and found themselves in a new place, with no friends and darned little English.  I ate with them at Pizza Hut. I took them to the mall; I showed them all of the best bits of American culture. Well, my favorite parts anyway. I can’t help it if they all involve melted cheese and book stores. It was my own little “Cultural Revolution.”

Those ladies loved it here, and didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get back to Mao-country, despite what today’s liberals would have you think about the wonders of centralized government control. It seemed a little funny to me at the time; while I was showing Chinese women the wonders of capitalism, American professors were trying to indoctrinate me in the belief that everything that America does is wrong and that communism would cure all our ills. Most of them were old hippies who had gone to school in the 60’s but who had never left campus. It didn’t work on me, thank goodness.

I wasn’t around for most of the 60’s, and the part I did live through I spent watching Sesame Street and toddling around my house in Jena looking for my pacifier. To those of you who were the “flower children” who enjoyed the free love and rock and roll of that era I’ve just got to say, you’ve got a heck of a lot to answer for, Buddy. Sure, sure, the music was great and I owe you big-time for Star Trek…but I’m beginning to fear for the republic, and it’s all your fault. Even the Beatles knew that worshipping at the feet of psycho “philosophers” preaching violent revolution was crazy. How did so many of you baby boomers grow up, but not grow out of the delusions of youth?  And why are so many of these revolutionary, nut-job America haters working in D.C.?

The misguided Miss Dunn isn’t the only weirdo on the czars list.

Uncle Sam is stalking your babysitter

I think I’ve mentioned here before that I read really an embarrassing amount of information on the internet every day. I’ve been doing it so long that I have big gigantic bookmarked lists of news sites and blogs that I ingest, sort of mindlessly, one by one. Little nuggets of information stick in my head and sometimes I’m able to make connections from all of that random data.

Today, three separate news stories caught my attention at different times. I was in the kitchen, making strawberry
Jello for the kids when they sort of blended together in a sort of eureka sort of way. One story was weird, two was kind of strange, three similar stories in one day makes a
disturbing trend.

The first item wasn’t even an American story, since it happened in the U.K. Apparently, someone called in to the government and reported that two local moms of toddlers–who had been friends since they were toddlers– were taking turns watching each other’s children so that they could both work part time without having to pay for day care. Wow, I thought. This is news? Doesn’t everybody do this? In jolly old England, apparently, this type of arrangement, even if no money is ever exchanged and it’s just done to “help each other out,” is illegal. Yep, illegal. That is, unless both moms submit to background checks and jump through hoops to become registered “childminders.” The…ahem…nanny state stepped in and now both moms have had to quit their jobs that didn’t pay enough for “state approved” babysitting. Well, sure, we have laws regulating paid day care here, but something that silly could never happen in the land of the free and the brave.

Yeah, well, not so much. Enter some poor, well-meaning woman in Middleville, Michigan who lived right in front of the school bus stop. She started watching her neighbor’s kids at the bus stop for the half-hour or so it took the bus to arrive, so that the parents could drop off the kids and get to work on time. She didn’t charge anything; she just happened to live right there and liked kids. So she kept an eye on the muchkins for her friends until they got on the bus safely. Apparently her dog peed on a neighbor’s rose bush or something and they got ticked off and called the Dept. of Children and Families and said the woman was “running a day care without a license.” Now the poor woman is being threatened with huge fines or even jail time, and the kids are standing on the road, unsupervised. Good thing the government was there to look after those kids, huh?

But what really got me thinking was another story, that coincidentally, also is happening in Michigan. (Word to the wise, stay out of the Badger State.) The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, filed suit against the Michigan Department of Human Services in a case where a “shell corporation” was established to shanghai more than 42,000 home-based day care business owners into a “government employees union.” On behalf of two owners, Sherry Loar and Dawn Ives, the MCLF filed an action at the Michigan Court of Appeals seeking to stop the DHS from improperly siphoning “union dues” out of state subsidy checks meant to provide assistance to low-income parents. Michigan also expanded the idea of day care to cover people who watch or provide assistance to the elderly on Medicare or Medicaid, too. The MCLF estimates that the little scam will rack up a tidy $4,000,000 in union dues.

Apparently, Loar and Ives, who babysit out of their own homes as licensed private home child care providers, were shocked to get a letter telling them that they were now members of the “Child Care Providers Together Michican” Union and that without their permission, money was going to be sucked out of their babysitting checks to pay union dues. None of these people work for the government. They don’t get government health insurance or benefits.  They’ve just been made faux “government employees” just to fatten the coffers of a union. The government, like the Mafia, made them “an offer they couldn’t refuse,” all because they were watching kids who got government assistance with day care.

What do these three stories have in common? Aside from the obvious child-care angle, they all demonstrate that when legislation “for your own good” allows the government to poke it’s nose in private matters, nothing good ever results. (Also, it seems to be a good idea not to have nasty, Gladys Kravitz-type neighbors, who peek out of their windows and call the cops a lot, but I digress.) The government wanted to “protect” children from bad people, so it requires background checks, licensing, and (inevitably) fees. Therefore, it extends that authority to tell you who, and who can’t, watch your children. Even if they’re lifelong friends doing you a favor. If you work for people who accept public “charity,” then you, too, are considered the property of the state.

Uncle Sam has decided that if he writes any portion of the check, he gets to make all the rules, and you can be forced to pay tribute to the Union bosses at gunpoint. This precedent could be applied to anyone who gets government money of any type: doctors who see patients with Medicaid, homebuilders or contractors who build or work on homes that get SHIP money or federal financing, auto shops who work on “Cash for Clunkers” cars…even bag boys at stores that take food stamps could fall under the “union” label.

Today’s news made it obvious to me that if you give up a single inch of liberty for “safety,” the government will take that mile, sooner or later. Nanny state, indeed.

You lie!!

“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”

Alfred Adler

The headline above may lead you to think that I’m going to harangue you this week about Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who had the gall to stand up and yell during President Obama’s umpteenth boring speech.  To be honest, I missed it–about ten minutes in, I started dozing off and woke with a start, thinking I was back in Mrs. Engers’ Calculus class– it was so mind-numbingly dull. I saw it everywhere else, though, afterwards. When Obama got to the part about illegals not being covered under a public health plan, Mr. Wilson lost it and yelled, “You lie!” I’d love to go off on that, and I probably could spend a few thousand words telling you why I admire the man for standing up and being rude on national television, but not this week. We need more men like him!

I think that our government should go back to a more confrontational-type speech.  Everybody says we need “more civility in politics.” I don’t think so. Quite frankly, I’ve had enough of slimy political dodging and lawyerlike non-answers to important questions. There’s a time for playing “nice-nice” and there’s a time (to paraphrase HL Mencken) “to hoist the jolly roger and start slitting throats.”

This dog will hunt.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of
freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were
our countrymen!”
– Samuel Adams

I have this bassett hound (well, mostly bassett, I think her mama had a beagle in the genetic woodshed somewhere) that I got from the Shively family almost a year ago now. I’ve always loved bassetts. My daughter Casey had one that I got from the Jacksonville pound named Sugar who was probably one of the best dogs I’ve ever had. She was so sweet, and so smart.  I think she knew, somehow, that I saved her hide that day I brought her home. She had already been adopted out, but her new owners brought her back, saying she was “too hyper.”  She was on her last day when I loaded her up to come to Dixie. She was never hyper for me, and she was one of those dogs that you could say, “Sugar, go watch the kids on the swing set,” and she’d trot over there and sit with them while they played, keeping an eye out for snakes or wayward cats who might be getting too cocky and who might need a good doggy talkin’-to. I still miss that old dog.

Anyway, the new one’s name is Annabelle Lee. She’s not as smart as Sugar was, but she’s sweet. She has one major character flaw, though….she thinks she’s a hunting dog. From the minute I let her out in the morning to the minute I manage to drag her wet, sandspur-and-tick covered body back into the house, she’s on the trail. She runs around the woods surrounding my house constantly, looking for a deer trail.  When she finds one, she barks. And barks. And barks. And barks. She runs through the woods as fast as her short little bassett legs will drag her huge bassett body, nose to the ground, sounding more like a fire truck on its way to a fire than a canine.

It gets more than a little old, trying to hunt her down and drag her off of whatever it is that she’s tracking. Apparently, the deer in the area think it’s some sort of game to set her off, or somehow they know there’s no way on Earth that she could ever catch them, and they’ve started showing up in the front yard. This one doe just stood there the other day until she was sure that Annabelle had spotted her, then sort of wiggled her tail in a “come play” sort of way and bounced off into the woods. Annnabelle looked up at me for just a second with that “Oh, it’s ON now” look and charged off after the doe.  When she finally dragged back in she jumped up on the couch, rolled over on her back with her feet up in the air and gave this big, exhausted, but contented doggy sigh and slept for the rest of the afternoon, twitching, and chasing phantoms of Bambi’s daddy in her sleep.

I don’t understand why she works so hard going after something that she knows she can’t catch. Goodness knows, her chunky little self has never missed a meal. She’s not hungry. She’s just….driven, somehow, to work.  To pursue her quarry, and to run it down, come what may. It’s in her blood, I guess. Centuries of hounds were bred to hunt; to chase down animals for their masters. I suppose that’s not something that you can just throw off for a bottomless bowl of Puppy Chow.

I was watching her this morning while watching Meet the Press and started wondering if maybe Americans have finally managed to throw off 200 years of breeding. We were a tough and independent people once. I mean, heck, our motto was “Don’t tread on me!” We were supposed to be the John Waynes of the world; free, ornery, determined and maybe a little bit wild when necessary.

Boyd gets reamed in Cross City

Hot Air link here

But see, what REALLY happened wuz….

(From my story coming out Wednesday in print….)

The American flag was too tall. Too large for the room’s ceiling, it slumped forlorn in the corner where Representative Alan Boyd’s Assistant Travis Hart placed it after giving up on the effort of making it stand tall at the Women’s Club in Cross City where Alan Boyd held a Town Hall meeting on health care on Monday morning. The Stars & Stripes was obscured by the TV camera crews, the reporters, the politician and his entourage, but the citizens of Dixie verbally took up the Colors, each one speaking in favor of liberty and freedom and against the proposed government takeover of the health care industry.

In the standing-room only crowd that spilled outside, not a single voice was heard in favor of House Bill 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.”

Not one.

After several warnings about being polite and allowing civil discourse, Rep. Boyd told the packed room that “Of all the town hall meetings I’ve done in this area, I’ve never had one with this many people.” He gave a short talk outlining his belief that the current health system is too inefficient, citing insurance companies who refuse coverage for pre-exiting conditions and the rising costs involved in health care. “I’m concerned about the debt, too,” he said, as someone in the audience erupted in laughter. He continued, “We don’t like someone telling us where we can get our health care–we like that–and we’re going to keep that.” He held up a copy of HR 3200 as a prop and said, “I cannot support this bill in the version it is now,” and said
“We can do better.”

They got $787 billion, you got $13 a week

“A man’s labor is not only his capital but his life.
When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter,
this surely is one of the most
urgent tasks before civilization.–William Booth”

I can’t find it right now, but I was going to pull up the first column I wrote about the second 787 billion dollar “stimulus” package–Bush had the “little” one, remember at only $168 billion–and quote myself on how it was a bad idea and how it had no chance of working. I think I wrote something about how it’s only design was to payback political cronies and to grow government (thereby creating more political cronies), and that the normal working stiff wouldn’t benefit at all. At the risk of sounding childish, nyah nyah nyah nyah. Even the liberals have figured it out by now: I was right. I told you so. Like the bumper sticker says, “How’s that hope n’ change working for you?”

Now some of the more idiotic voices in Washington are making noises about “needing another stimulus,” because the first two weren’t “big enough.” Oh sure we do. Because sending all of our hard-earned money to government fatcats who look at us much the way foxes look at chickens just makes us oh-so-happy.  We don’t need money. Please. Just make sure Nancy Pelosi gets to go back on another week-long jaunt to Italy on our tax dollar. It just makes a tingle run up our legs to see the Obamas jetting around Europe while we’re home working two jobs trying to support our families….and them. We don’t need vacations. You let our “representatives” have them. (Yeah, O.K., I’m feeling a little sarcastic today.)

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the “stimulus” wasn’t going to work.  Let’s do a gut check, seeing as you and I are the salt of the earth: consumers, you know, the little people, the unwashed masses who make the economy go. If it excites us then the odds are, it will “stimulate” other consumers and it will help fix the economy, right?

Hughes–NOT!

“Hello, this is ‘Steve,’ at Hughesnet technical support, how may I help you today?”

Well, ‘Steve,’ (Who are you kidding? We both know your name is Ramesh and they make you use a made-up anglicized name just to make we xenophobic, Ango-Saxon folk more comfortable)…but anyway, my cheap, but yet hugely overpriced plastic modem isn’t working. You remember two weeks ago when I called, and spent an hour waiting on you while I was on hold because I had no service and you told me that your satellite was down and to wait for a few hours and it’d be back?  It’s like that, except it’s not going away this time.

“I am sorry for any inconvenience that your lack of service has caused you. May I put you on hold while I look at information about your account?”

Yep. At this point, I sigh a deep sigh of resignation, because I know I’m going to spend twenty minutes listening to a staticy Dollywood rendition of Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” over and over and over. It seems to be the ONLY song on the Hughesnet customer non-service hold tape. I’m beginning to break out in hives every time I flip past it on the radio, I swear.

Four times. I listened to it FOUR times before Steve-Ramesh came back. “I am sorry for the long hold. I am checking information on your account. What is the problem?”

Well, Steve-Ramesh, I don’t have any internet!! You know, that service I’m paying you close to $100 a month for? Yeah, that.  It’s not working. Kaputt. Dead. It is an ex-internet.  It has shuffled off the mortal coil. It has gone to meet it’s maker. It is pushing up daisies. (OK, unless you’re familiar with Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch, this is going to make no sense. Go get the DVD. Seriously.)

“I am sorry for any inconvenience that your lack of service has caused you.  May I put you on hold while I do some tests on your modem?” Sigh. Back to La Isla Bonita again. The static is so bad, it sounds like a Cuban AM radio station at 3 AM. At times the voice goes away entirely, and I’m listening to pure nerve-jangling static. At about the fifth repeat, I pop my head in the living room to see that the kids are fighting over a Nintendo DS and that the dog is eating the sock I’ve spent the last two days knitting. My blood pressure starts to make the roots of my hair tingle. Four more trips to La Isla Bonita later, and Steve-Ramesh comes back. “I am sorry for the long hold. I am testing issues with your modem.” He then runs me through a series that I’ve become so familiar with over the last year: unplug the modem, unplug the router, reboot the computer.  Did that work? No. Now plug the modem directly into the computer, skipping the router and reboot everything again. Did that work? No.

At this point, I try to break through his robotic repetition of the “fix it” steps, and say, “Hey, Steve-Ramesh, I know what it is.  We had a big storm and I’m fairly sure it got hit by lightning.” Steve ignores me, and presses on with his checklist. We ping. We ipconfig. We’re becoming fast friends and I’m beginning to toy with the idea of naming my next kid Steve-Ramesh. TWO HOURS LATER, and God only knows how many more “May I place you on hold” time periods, Steve-Ramesh says, “I think your modem may be defective, may I place you on hold so that I can check your account to send you a new one?” Sure, Steve, why not. What’s four or five more Isla Bonitas now between friends? “Thank you,” says Steve-Ramesh. And then he places me on hold.

There’s no music.  There’s no static. HE’S DISCONNECTED ME!!!!
So I call back. I maneuver my way through the automated service, asking for technical support. “Hello, this is ‘Ivan’ at Hughesnet technical support, how may I help you today?” Well, Ivan, see, I was talking to Steve-Ramesh and we had it figured out but he disconnected me and I just need to talk to him again so that we can finish up our call. “I am sorry for any inconvenience that that your disconnection may have caused. How may I help you today?” At this point, I admit, I was ashamed to notice a pleading tone creeping into my voice.  Please please please just let him give me back to Steve-Ramesh. I felt the vein over my eyebrow start to throb. I took a deep breath, and said well, Ivan (if that IS your real name), my internet’s not working and Steve-Ramesh says that I need a new modem. Ivan sounds more like the computer Hal from 2001: A Spacey Odyssey than an actual human being as he recites the Hughesnet mantra, “I am sorry for any inconvenience that your lack of service has caused you. May I put you on hold while I do some tests on your modem?” Without waiting for an answer, I’m thrown back to La Isla Bonita. I begin to wonder if it’s too early for an adult beverage.

I’ll spare you the details of the rest of the call, as Ivan forced me to repeat all of the same dance-steps that Steve-Ramesh had put me through: plugging, unplugging, pinging, re-wiring my computer, doing the Macarena….I’ll just say that at the end of yet another umpteen La Isla Bonitas, he, too, decided that a new modem was in order and that I should get one in “five to seven business days.” Oh, and he reminded me to ship the old one back, at my expense, or I’d be charged an outrageous sum of money for it. At that point, I didn’t care.  I would have promised him almost anything just to get my email back.

And on the Seventh Day, the new modem came, via FEDEX. (Cue the angelic choir) And after another hour and a half of installation and some cursing, I looked upon the connection and it was good.  And there was email, and I looked upon it and declared it good, too. And it kept coming, and coming, and coming. I think I had stored up 1000 emails over that week with no service. What was amazing was that almost NONE of them were actually for me.  Most of them were trying to sell me something, or Nigerian diplomats letting me know I’ve come into an inheritance. I got it all, checked my Facebook and Myspace and went to bed.

We woke up the next morning and the kids went to do their online homeschool work. Mitchell came to get me, saying that his reading lesson wouldn’t load. It was running so slowly that it was unusable. Apparently, all of those “buy Viagra” emails used up my 200 megabyte a day bandwidth and Hughesnet “fapped” me. That means they slow you down for 24 hours to about half of dialup speed–slightly slower than a drunken snail sliming across sharp gravel–to punish you for using all the service you paid for.  So I have yet another day of internet non-service to wade through.
Enraged, I gripped the phone.

“Hello, this is ‘Bob’ at Hughesnet technical support, how can I help you?” He robotically recited “I am sorry that you have been subjected to our FAP policy because you had no service for 2 weeks. How else may I help you?” I’m sure Bob spent his lunch break telling his co-workers Steve-Ramesh and Ivan over a lovely curry vindaloo about the crazy white woman who called him and then did nothing but scream, long and wordlessly into the phone, like someone staked out and being eaten alive by fire ants. I’m sure that it’s not the first time somebody got pushed over the sanity ledge by the robotic answers, the lack of anybody authorized to actually do anything, and the total lack of customer service.

I look at it this way: It could have been worse, Bob. I could have sung La Isla Bonita at you.

Obama: White men can’t judge

It was bad enough when that horrid movie made it common knowledge that “White Men Can’t Jump.” Now the President is telling little white boys everywhere to skip law school and to give up on hopes and dreams of sitting on the Supreme Court: they don’t have enough pigment in their skin or the right gender to have “empathy.” Now, I slept through more of Mr. Storey’s American History class in the 11th grade than I should have –Heck it was first period! Who can stay awake that early?–but I don’t recall the founding fathers sticking “empathy” as a requirement for sitting on the Court anywhere. Seems like I remember statues of justice with a blindfold, representing our uniquely American judicial system, that favors no class, no race, and no gender above another. Well, I guess the days of even pretending that is true are over.

When the vacancy was announced, cable news was chattering about the “short list” of candidates for the job. Not a single male was mentioned, of any race.  All were women. “Everybody knew” that the job belonged to a woman, especially a woman of color. It was race and gender first, and picking the best person for the country second. Ultimately, Obama passed over more qualified jurists and played the obvious pandering-to-the-huge-hispanic-vote card. He picked Sonia Sotomayor, a mediocre appeals court judge who was lucky enough to win the 7-7-7 affirmative-action slot machine jackpot of being a female hispanic liberal.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor was quoted as saying. Too bad it was her group, LatinoJustice, who hounded Judge Miguel Estrada, a Honduran immigrant and Bush appointee to the D.C. Court of Appeals, until the poor man gave up and withdrew his name from consideration. I guess he wasn’t Latino enough for them. Let’s turn it upside down and see if it’s “racist”: Do you think that if Rush Limbaugh had said that white men made better judges that he would still be wielding the Golden EIB microphone? Odds are that the NAACP would have him drawn and quartered on the Washington Mall before he could take it back. Such a blatantly prejudiced statement makes it questionable whether or not Sotomayor has ever read the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which promises “equal protection of the law” to everyone, not just to whatever group is being represented as the most downtrodden at the moment. I’m fairly sure she’s at least read the 2nd Amendment, because as a student, she wrote in a theses called “Deadly Obsession: American Gun Culture” that in her opinion, that individual ownership of guns has actually been illegal since the Bill of Rights was passed. Good grief!

Anyway, sympathy for the poor or oppressed is a great thing at home or in church on Sunday; but it has no place in a courtroom. A judge has nothing else to sell other than his impartiality. Knowledge of the law is nothing without the promise that the judge will apply the law fairly. We’ve all heard stories of judges who prefer men to women in divorce cases or who slant decisions in favor of business big wigs, campaign contributors or their golf buddies.

When a judge chooses “empathy” or prejudice over the letter of the law he might as well hang up his black robe and take up fishing. He is no less corrupt than a judge who takes bribe money, and should be treated with no less contempt.

I guess it’s no surprise that the Sotomayor decision that has all of the pundits talking is the Ricci case. That’s the case where the firefighters who passed their promotion exams are suing because they didn’t get promoted. Yep, they passed the test. No, they didn’t get promoted.  Why? Because they were all the wrong color. Even, apparently, the hispanic guy who passed the test wasn’t “ethnic” enough for them.  Not a single African-American who took the test passed, so the test was thrown out, and nobody got promoted. Lots of other people who weren’t minorities failed the test, too, but nobody seems to care about them. It’s a sick, twisted version of kindergarten socialism: unless everybody can have candy, nobody gets any, regardless of who brought it to school.

Ricci, the main guy on the lawsuit, is a dyslexic man who paid a buddy $1,000 to read the textbooks onto tapes so that he could hear the material instead of reading it. Dyslexia makes reading very difficult. His handicap was slowing him down. He quit his second job so he could study more. He worked his caucasian, male butt off., and he passed, 6th in his class of 77. And now he can’t get promoted because people who didn’t study as hard as he did were the right color, and he’s not. Judge Sotomayor refused to hear the pleas of the firefighters. She earned the derision of the appeals court for her shoddy decision that was essentially a “because I said so” paragraph instead of stating any basis in actual law for her abrupt dismissal of Ricci’s claim.

I’d really like to know what the liberal reasoning on this one is. My take on it is that the people who worked hard, who studied, and who passed the test need to get promoted. The people who didn’t pass the test need to fail. Contrary to popular liberal belief, failure can be a good thing, and it’s ridiculous to handicap people (or businesses!) by telling them that “they’re too special to fail.” How would you like to know that your American Airlines pilot only passed the exam because of her gender?  How about your heart surgeon? Ability matters. Hard work pays off. Skin color or gender should not be a factor, in any way whatsoever, whether you’re hiring a Supreme Court Judge or a truck driver.

Most conservatives believe that ANYBODY can succeed if they apply themselves and work hard enough. Sotomayor’s decision in this case seems to say, “Well, you know that you can’t expect minorities and women to be able to compete on an even playing field with other people.” They might as well say, “Girls and minorities are dumb.” Ridiculous! Who is prejudiced here, the “enlightened” liberals who think that minorities and women need special treatment because they can’t compete with everyone else or the evil, bigoted conservatives who assert that ability, not sex and skin color, should be what matters?

No fake tans, and no fake republicans

Just say no to ol’ orangy spray-on-tan governor…Rubio is the choice of the REAL Conservative. NO RINOS. Not one red cent.