The World Court ruled in 2004 that the U.S. could not execute Mexican nationals who had been convicted in Texas (for gang-rape and murder of two teenage girls) and sentenced to die.

Anywho, the lame open-borders administration attempted to get Texas to abide by the overreaching World Court, and Texas told Bush to go to Hell.  The case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, whereby a 6-3 ruling in favor of common sense and national sovereignty was handed down.  SCOTUS said that the World Court had NO authority to intervene in the American legal system and that the president did NOT have the power to order Texas to abide by the World Court’s ruling.

Well, old habits die hard, because the World Court is trying to meddle again.  Details:

The World Court ordered the United States on Wednesday to do all it could to halt the imminent executions of five Mexicans until the court makes a final judgment in a dispute over suspects’ rights.

The row, which has strained relations between the neighbors, centers on the fact that the United States failed to inform 51 of its citizens sentenced to die in U.S. jails of their right to consular assistance.

One of the five Mexicans on death row, Jose Medellin, is due to die on August 5 in Texas.

In 2004, the World Court ruled in favor of Mexico, finding the United States had violated international law, and ordered it to review the 51 cases to see whether the lack of consular assistance had prejudiced the outcome of their trials.

A year later, U.S. President George W. Bush ordered Texas to review Medellin’s case but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that Bush had no authority to do so, leading Texas to schedule Medellin’s execution for August.

“The court indicates that the United States of America shall take all measures necessary to ensure that five Mexican nationals are not executed pending its final judgment,” Judge Rosalyn Higgins said.

Mexico has asked the World Court or International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an interpretation of its 2004 ruling, given U.S. assertions that its federal states have a large degree of legal autonomy and it .cannot compel them to review the cases

Will the open-border amigos of Jorgé W. Bush in the administration pay attention to OUR court this time, or will they try to ignore OUR court to placate the UN’s court?

Once someone was finally able to peel Barry O’s lips off of the teachers union’s collective behinds, he dazzled them with this bit of genius:

That begins with recognizing that the single most important factor in determining a child’s achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.

Memo to Mom and Dad: Mr. Bowers, my senile 7th grade science teacher, apparently played a bigger role in my life than you did.  All that feeding, housing, supporting, nurturing, bonding, affection, etc., that went on in our household during my childhood?  Well, it just doesn’t hold a candle to the man who filled my life with unmatched richness like mispronouncing “protozoa”, drizzling a puddle of spittle the size of the Caribbean when trying to say “photosynthesis”, and nearly blowing up the room by dropping a chunk of pure sodium into a beaker of water.  Who knew?

For those of you on the left, the prior paragraph was sarcasm.

Look, I was blessed enough to have had a number of outstanding, caring, and competent teachers in my life who I readily recognize as having had a profound and positive impact on my development.  But with all due respect to all of them, not a single one of them were more important than my parents!  Important, yes…but by no means more important!

An absolutely awesome column by Mike Adams that you must read!  If you don’t read it, you suck.  Excerpt:

This trait of being more in love with consumption than production is one shared by most of my socialist colleagues in academia. They base their lives on the idea of taking “from each according to his ability” and giving “to each according to his need.” The problem is that they do a better job of articulating their needs than promoting their abilities. This is, of course, because socialists are generally short on abilities. They seek socialism because they think being guaranteed an average outcome is safer than trying to beat the average in a system based on merit, which is otherwise known as ability.

He also has a new term for the Obamessiah: the Dali Bama.  Heh.

This kind of economic ignorance is what you can expect when you let the left control the credit cards.  From Chicago:

The highest sales tax in the nation is now found in Chicago, and it’s costing Cook County residents more to buy just about everything.

As CBS 2’s Joanie Lum reports, a 1 percent sales tax hike approved by the Cook County Board for its 2008 budget went into effect on Tuesday. The hike is not sitting well with consumers or businesses.
…
The 1 percent increase hikes the sales tax in Chicago to 10.25 percent. By comparison, the sales tax in Lake and Will counties is 7 percent, and in DuPage County, it’s 7.25 percent.  (The neighboring counties are LOVING this! - Ed.)

A sales tax of 10.25 percent is also significantly higher than the sales tax in other major cities. The next highest rate in the country is in Memphis at 9.25 percent. (Friggin’ wonderful. My hometown is the SECOND most expensive city in America, in term of sales tax. - Ed.) New York, Los Angeles and Dallas all have a sales tax of less than 8.3 percent, Phoenix has a tax of 6.3 percent, and Denver’s sales tax is only 3.6 percent.

The Cook County Board voted to raise the sales tax at the end of February, after a five-month stalemate on the 2008 budget. Board President Todd Stroger and his supporters ultimately prevailed, saying the tax hike was necessary to provide health care and other services.

The tax hike applies to everything but groceries, medicine, cars and boats. For larger purchases like furniture or appliances, the taxes can add up.

It will definitely be cheaper to shop in the suburbs. Buy a $500 TV in DuPage County where the taxes are 6.75 percent and you’ll pay $534, in Chicago where the taxes are 9 percent, you’ll pay $545 for that same television, and when taxes increase to 10.25 percent, you’ll pay $551.

“It’s kind of frustrating,” said David Ashmalla. “I go to Best Buy or something, and high-priced electronics – it adds like $20, $30 to a TV I bought.”

Ashmalla said he plans to avoid it.

“I’m not going to be purchasing in Chicago much more – not electronics or anything high-priced,” he said. …

Every time, liberals will expect you to get by with less money long before they expect government to get by with less money.  Why, it’s as though it’s your patriotic duty to suffer…or something.

Heartache for the socialized medicine proponents, eh?  The left has wanted us to emulate Canuckistan’s health care system, but even the “Father of Canuckistan Socialized Medicine” (unofficial title, mind you) sees his pet project as the abject failure that it clearly is.  From IBD:

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

Well, well, well!  Say it ain’t so!  Who’d have thunk it, a Canuck realizing the wonders of capitalism and the free market and recognizing the pitfalls of socialism?  Pitfalls like these:

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.
…
Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.
…
De Vires is far from unusual in seeking medical treatment in the U.S. Even Canadian government officials send patients across the border, increasingly looking to American medicine to deal with their overload of patients and chronic shortage of care.

Since the spring of 2006, Ontario’s government has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies — defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as “broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.” Other provinces have followed Ontario’s example. …

In closing:

However the candidates choose to proceed, Americans should know that one of the founding fathers of Canada’s government-run health care system has turned against his own creation. If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?

But yeah…let’s base our health care system on Canada’s, eh?

And the left wants us to emulate Canuckistan?  No thanks!  From AFP:

A Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl’s grounding, overturning her father’s punishment for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting “inappropriate” pictures of herself online using a friend’s computer.

The father’s lawyer Kim Beaudoin said the disciplinary measures were for the girl’s “own protection” and is appealing the ruling.

“She’s a child,” Beaudoin told AFP. “At her age, children test their limits and it’s up to their parents to set boundaries.”

“I started an appeal of the decision today to reestablish parental authority, and to ensure that this case doesn’t set a precedent,” she said. Otherwise, said Beaudoin, “parents are going to be walking on egg shells from now on.”

“I think most children respect their parents and would never go so far as to take them to court, but it’s clear that some would and we have to ask ourselves how far this will go.”

According to court documents, the girl’s Internet transgression was just the latest in a string of broken house rules. Even so, Justice Suzanne Tessier found her punishment too severe.

Beaudoin noted the girl used a court-appointed lawyer in her parents’ 10-year custody dispute to launch her landmark case against dear old dad.

Got a little slut for a daughter who likes to yap on the ‘net and post skin flicks of herself for the world to see?  Sucks for you, pal, because according to the court, you can’t do a damned thing about it.

So now the Canadian government gets to tell you how you can and cannot discipline your child.  Heck, why bother raising the kids, then?  Just pop out a rugrat or two, then turn them over the Nanny State to raise.  Let them change the diapers!

Quips Ace:

A judge stepped in to basically protect her fundamental right to be sexually violated by an adult.

Big government and common sense don’t mix.  From Neal Boortz:

In Worcester, Massachusetts the Seabury Heights Apartments is this housing complex for the elderly and handicapped.  Now it is June and there is a heat wave.  It has hit at least 90 degrees in Massachusetts.  But in the Seabury Heights Apartments, residents are complaining because management is refusing to turn on the air conditioning.

Here’s where government steps in.  There is this asinine state regulation that mandates that heating systems in housing for the elderly must remain operational until June 15^th.  The landlord says, “You just can’t turn a lever and go from hot to cold. You have to shut down the heating system before you can turn on the air conditioning. There are some code requirements.”  Apparently last year the complex tried to turn the heat off before June 15^th and residents complained.  So this year management decided to stick to the state regulation and even taped the law to the wall for all residents to observe.

Residents are clearly upset.  Because not only is the air conditioning forbidden until June 15^th but personal air conditioning units are also banned from this complex.  And like any government operation, their quest for answers was fruitless.  They tried contacting the Board of Health and they were referred to HUD.  They tried contacting HUD and they were referred to the state.  They contacted the governor’s office and sent a letter to Senator Ted Kennedy.  Nadda.

This is your government at work, ladies and gentlemen.  The government regulates when an apartment complex can turn on its air conditioning … doesn’t it make common sense for the complex to turn on the air when it gets hot?  That’s just too logical for a government operation.

Just wait until the very same government is controlling your health care!

Nah, I’m sure the same government that can’t run a restaurant or keep old folks from burning up will do a bang-up job managing your health care!  For those of you on the left, the prior sentence was sarcasm.

When “Big Gubmint” entitlement mentality kicks in, Lesson #434,998.  From the NY Post:

A Bronx bride was left at the altar, but it wasn’t the groom who stood her up - it was the court clerk, who refused to marry the couple because she claimed to be tired and hungry.

In a scene reminiscent of a scandal that erupted a year ago in the Marriage Bureau at Bronx Supreme Court, 23-year-old Gwendolyne Ortiz stood in her white dress as she used a brown paper bathroom towel to wipe away tears.

“[The clerk's] upset with the staffing. She refuses to do any more [ceremonies],” the bride said, choking back tears.

Her groom, Harold Poueriet, 22, all decked out in a white Armani shirt with gray pinstripes, said, “[The clerk] says she’s tired and she’s hungry.”

But Ortiz’s wedding day was saved when a lawyer, court officers and a judge stepped in for the weak and weary clerk and performed the ceremony Friday.

Appalled at seeing the crying, four-months-pregnant bride, lawyer Maxine Susseles, Maj. Raymond Diaz, Sgt. Tamara Glover and others came to the rescue.

“You know what they say, ‘You cry once on your wedding day, that’s 1,000 tears you won’t cry during your marriage,’ ” Glover told the bride.

“Don’t cry. Everything’s going to be fine,” Diaz added. “I got a judge. He’s waiting for us.”

Diaz then escorted the couple to Judge Paul Victor’s eighth-floor chambers.

Before they knew it, Victor was saying, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” as Susseles stood as a witness with the maid of honor, Catalina Cruz. The relieved newlyweds then embraced and kissed.

“I’m glad I was here,” the judge said.

The bride, finally smiling, said, “I am, too.”

The newlyweds said they had a big reception planned for Saturday in The Bronx and are now on their honeymoon in Atlantic City.

Edwina Townes, in charge of the bureau in the absence of head clerk Carmen Baez, had no comment.

In May 2007, couples claimed clerks had closed the doors 45 minutes early for a co-worker’s retirement party.

I’ve been saying that for a while now, but Charles Krauthammer is much more intelligent than I am and thus lays out a compelling case against the global “warming” Chicken Littles and their treehugging commie brethren.  Excerpt:

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself. …

Read the whole thing.  It’s brilliant.

After the fall of communism and the demonstrable collapse and failure of socialism, displaced leftists had to have somewhere to go in order to perpetrate their misery on humanity.  That new home is the modern environmentalist movement.

Displaying his socialist bent, the Obamessiah laid out his vision of an America where independence will not be tolerated.  From Neal Boortz:

Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday where he laid out his housing plan. In his speech he actually said that he does not accept an American where Washington’s only message to working people is that “you’re on your own.”

Now what does this really mean? It means that when it comes to the nanny government, you never get pushed out of the nest. You never have to fly on your own. You never have to fend for yourself or look to your family and friends for help. Nope … not in an ObamaNation. An ObamaNation means that you have the privilege of being born into a wonderful womb to tomb, cradle to grave nanny state where you always have the government to depend on.

Translation: When the going gets rough, you always have a friendly caretaker government that will take money away from someone who has made better choices and worked harder than you, and give you that money to pave the way. How nice. …

This should come as no surprise, since the party has openly declared war on individualism for a number of decades now.

From Rasmussen:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 62% of voters would prefer fewer government services with lower taxes. Nearly a third (29%) disagrees and would rather have a bigger government with higher taxes. Ten percent (10%) are not sure.

I’m not buying the results of this poll for one minute.  I don’t think Rasmussen messed up in his polling methodology.  Instead, I think the respondents weren’t honest.  We live in the midst of the “gimme” generation  As Neal Boortz points out:

But then when you dangle in front of them (the American people - Ed.) these fancy entitlement programs and wealth envy rhetoric, they are like fat kids at McDonalds … you can’t resist temptation, because it all looks so darn good.

Many of you remember Jean-Francois Heinz-Kerry’s debate gaffe in 2004 whereby he suggested that anything America does must pass some sort of “global test”.  Apparently, the Marxist frontrunner on the Dem side feels the same way.  Quoth the Obamessiah:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

I wasn’t aware we needed other countries’ OK in order to drive and eat here in America.  I also wasn’t aware that getting said international OK was a sign of “leadership”.  I swear, I learn something new every day!

I could have just as easily labeled this post “No good deed goes unpunished”, but the impact isn’t quite the same.  From South Flori-duh!:

A man who said he thought he was just helping a woman in need is accused of running an illegal taxi service.

Miami-Dade County’s Consumer Services Department has slapped Rosco O’Neil with $2,000 worth of fines, but O’Neil claims he is falsely accused.

“I ain’t running nothing illegal,” O’Neil said.

The 78-year-old said he was walking into a Winn-Dixie to get some groceries when he was approached by a woman who said she needed a ride.

“She asked me, ‘Do I do a service?’” O’Neil said. “I told her no. She said, ‘I need help getting home.’”

O’Neil told the woman if she was still there when he finished his shopping, he would give her a ride. She was, so he did.

As it turned out, the woman was an undercover employee with the consumer services department targeting people providing illegal taxi services.

“She said the reason she targeted him (is because) she saw him sitting in his car for a few minutes,” said Ellen Novodeletsky, O’Neil’s attorney. …

Moral of the story?  Don’t give elderly women on their feet a ride.  It’s not worth the hassle.

Look at the bright side: Miami must have finally solved its well-publicized drug, rape, murder, gang, and robbery problems and is looking for more stuff to safe its citizens from…right?

The good news:

The US government posted a $US159.3 billion ($A169.52 billion) surplus in April, helped by the mid-month deadline for individuals meeting 2007 tax obligations, …

The bad, yet utterly predictable, news:

But outlays also set a record at $US244.5 billion ($A260.19 billion), compared with $US205.9 billion ($A219.11 billion) in April last year.

This is what the Dems had in mind when they promised “fiscal responsbility” two years ago?  Spending all of the extra money they get on growing government?

Only in the pea-brained world of government does this make any sense.  From Georgia:

Fulton to increase water rates 15 percent

Fulton County officials praised county water users Wednesday for their success at conservation — then socked them with a 15 percent rate increase for their effort.

The conservation penalty the County Commission adopted Wednesday 6-0 matches the increase Atlanta utility officials asked to impose earlier this year but which the City Council so far has resisted. The average water/sewer bill should increase nearly $9 per month to a total of about $68 per month, water officials said.

Why raise rates on water? Well, because the conservation has cut revenues:

Utility managers said water use has dropped by as much as 30 percent since last year when Gov. Sonny Perdue asked each county to cut usage by at least 10 percent because of the lingering drought. That has Fulton facing potential default on its bonds, said Angela Parker, public works director.

“We just can’t swallow this reduction in revenues,” Parker said.

She said Fulton one day might roll back the rates if the drought ends and revenues return to pre-drought levels.

Riiight.

This is Fulton county doing this. Apparently the city of Atlanta is trying to do the same thing but has been blocked so far.

No good deed goes unpunished, right?

Every single time, the government will expect you, not them, to do more with less.

Warning to any socialist or otherwise Big Government advocates: the following information may disrupt your worldview.  Unless, of course, you’re impervious to facts, in which case you may feel little to no discomfort at all.  From Hot Air:

In the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, California needed to take quick action to repair damaged freeways to restore order to traffic in the Los Angeles area — or at least as much order as one can get in the region.  Instead of using Caltrans to repair the destroyed overpasses and roads, the state government waived volumes of regulation to allow outsourcing to the private sector.  The result?  The contractor restored the roads and bridges in months instead of years, and at a fraction of the cost that Caltrans would have incurred.

Minnesotans learned a lesson from that when the St. Anthony Bridge collapsed last August into the Mississippi river.  The rebuilding project may finish as much as three months ahead of schedule, thanks to a series of financial incentives and the hands-off management by MnDOT:
…
The project has had its share of detractors ever since Flatiron won the contract.  It was the most expensive of the bids, but the state chose it for its overall package.  If they can deliver a high-quality bridge three months earlier than expected, no one will spend much of that extra time criticizing the contract award.

Like California, this proves a lesson in free-market power to solve problems efficiently, and in the long run, less expensively.  Instead of running the project themselves, the decision by MnDOT and the legislature to outsource the project applied the skill and experience of the private sector to a critical part of the traffic infrastructure.  The early completion of the project will save millions of dollars in traffic inefficiencies and relieve stress on parts of the local traffic system that weren’t designed for the loads that the bridge’s failure created for them.

Perhaps at some point, people will learn to harness the power of the private sector more completely for future public efforts as well.  If we started to apply this lesson to non-emergencies as well as emergencies, perhaps we would have fewer of the latter.   When we incentivize succes, we succeed.  When we incentivize bureaucracy, we get red tape, delays, and frustration.

Imagine that…the private sector doing better than a Big Government bureaucracy at solving problems!  But hey, let’s go ahead and have the government manage our health care, right?

Liberal mecca Washington, D.C., is all about Big Government and economic ignorance, and stories like this just emphasize that fact.  From WJLA:

Three streetcars purchased by the District of Columbia for about $10 million are being held in the Czech Republic until the city builds tracks for the cars.

D.C. Department of Transportation Director Emeka Moneme say that although the streetcars were purchased three years ago, there is no timetable for when a rail line will be built.

Moneme says he would like to have the streetcars in D.C. this summer. Plans call for the cars to run from Bolling Air Force Base in southeast Washington to the Anacostia Metro Station.

The streetcars are being maintained by Skoda-Inekon, a company that manufactures streetcars in the Czech Republic.

“We have NO idea if or when a rail line will be built.  Hey, I’ve got a great idea!  Let’s pilfer $10 million of the taxpayers’ money to buy a streetcar that won’t be running on anything!”  Friggin’ brilliant.  What, did Marion Barry come up with that crackpot (pun intended) idea?

Pardon the redundancy in the headline.  Anywho, from Shelly O:

Should she become first lady, she said she’d focus on family issues.

“If we don’t wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership…for how we want this country to work, then we won’t get universal health care,” she said.

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

This, ladies and germs, is a classic case of the economic ignorance displayed by the left.  It’s this mentality that causes morons like Shrillary to say that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

See, liberals believe that our economic “pie” is fixed in size.  Those of us who understand how the real world (i.e. capitalism) works realize that the economic “pie” can be expanded.  As wealth expands, so does economic opportunity for everyone…yes, everyone.  Notice I said that opportunity, and not the outcome, expands for everyone?  If you’re a lazy #ss, then while your economic opportunity may grow, your outcome will not, and voting Democrat isn’t going to change that.

Anywho, back to my Econ 101 lesson.  Private enterprise and the free market provide the best opportunity for improving the standard of living in this country…not government!  Government confiscates the fruits of labor from producers and bleeds investment and expansion capital from the market, then turns around and squanders this money by feeding inefficient and incompetent services that it can’t manage properly.

As government continues to screw up those services, it confiscates even more working capital from the producers to further feed its bloated incompetency.  Need proof?  How about the imperial federal government’s unconstitutional incursion into education?  The feds confiscate and spend more and more on education every year (over 58% increase since 2000, inflation-adjusted), yet I challenge you to find anyone who thinks we’ve seen improvement to the tune of 58%!  Yet Shelly O and her ignorant cohorts tell us we’re not spending enough.

Shelly O and her hubby, as well as most Dems out there, have no desire to see the “pie” grown.  They believe that it is government, and not society, that should control the dimensions of the “pie”, and that the “pie” is to be distributed, not earned.  They want to confiscate more of the existing “pie” to redistribute it even less efficiently than they already are.  Only we can stop them!

From the Windy City:

Are Chicagoans trekking to the suburbs to buy cases of bottled water — and avoid a new nickel-a-container tax that adds $1.20 to the price of a 24-pack? Or are they making the switch to tap water to save money?

One or the other is happening. Maybe both.

Revenues from Chicago’s new bottled water tax are trickling in — at a rate nearly 40 percent below projections — exacerbating a budget crunch that has already prompted Mayor Daley to order $20 million in spending cuts.

January collections were $554,000. That’s far short of the $875,000-a-month needed to meet the city’s $10.5 million-a-year projection.

Wendy Abrams, a spokeswoman for the city’s Budget and Management Office, said it’s too early to sound the alarm.

“Since January is generally one of the coldest months of the winter, we don’t think January collections are a strong indicator of potential revenue for the remainder of the year,” she said.

David Vite, president of the Illinois Retail Merchant’s Association, acknowledged that bottled water consumption rises with the temperature.

But that doesn’t explain away what Vite calls “enormous increases” in suburban bottled water sales, particularly in stores near the Chicago border.

Check that out again: “Since January is generally one of the coldest months of the winter, we don’t think January collections are a strong indicator of potential revenue for the remainder of the year”…which completely ignores the fact that the Chicago suburbs (not subjected to the tax) had an explosion of bottled water sales.  So put that in your Evian bottle, you bureaucratic boobs!  Your constituents aren’t as stupid as you thought they were.

It’s official: my state has finally run out of problems to solve.  Once again, we’re putting the “duh!” in Floriduh.  Observe:

A proposed law currently making its way through the Florida legislature might help you with what can be an embarrassing problem. Here’s the bottom line, the bill would be a mandate that all eating establishment must have enough toilet paper when you go into the restroom.

The only problem is the bill doesn’t dictate how much toilet paper is “enough.”  (Awesome foresight, you idiot! - Ed.)

State Senator Victor Crist, a Republican from Tampa (no relation to the governor - Ed.), felt the problem was so important, a law must be passed to protect the backsides of anyone in Florida. The measure will also try to regulate the cleanliness of restrooms in eating establishments.

Crist, says in the bill, restaurant inspectors, “should also check the restrooms along with the kitchens to make sure that basic cleanliness necessities are in place.”

The Senate Regulated Industries Committee approved the bill, SB 836, on Monday. It has two more stops to go and as long as it’s not wiped out before then, it could then go to the Senate floor. A similar measure is currently awaiting passage by the House. 

Yes, my friends, this is at the state level.  Some state legislator had a bad experience when a restaurant didn’t have TP for his bungh0le, so he decides to use his position of power to address the problem.  Cornh0le.

Look, I detest gross public bathrooms as much as anyone does, but it seems that the proper remedy is to let the market work this out.  If enough people think an establishment’s lavatory is barely fit for rats, either the owner will correct the problem or watch business walk out the door and possibly go belly up.  Eventually, the problem gets solved.

Besides, if the government is going to get involved, why stop at restaurants?  Who among us hasn’t been to a gas station with horrendous bathrooms?  Gas stations, truck stops, rest stops, etc., all tend to have filthier conditions in their restrooms than do restaurants.  I guess had ol’ Vic got stuck on a bad bowl at the Quik Stop in Wildwood, his efforts would be directed towards that “end” (yes, pun intended).

From Kentucky:

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

 Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

Action News 36 asked people what they thought about the bill.

 Some said they felt it was a violation of First Amendment rights. Others say it is a good tool toward eliminating online harassment.

Represntative Couch says enforcing this bill if it became law would be a challenge.

“Sure, my bill’s not enforceable, but at least I get to tell my constituents that I ‘did something’, now don’t I?”

Goodness knows that the p#ssies who lurk here wanting to spew their venom behind their veils of IP-based cowardice would disappear if something like this became law.  It’s clear that many people wear masks of bravado on blogs and in chat rooms, saying things online that they’d never say in person.  However, I’m going to do something I rarely do: I’m going to defend the moonbats.

OK, anonymity obviously doesn’t apply only to moonbats.  Most of us here don’t use our real or full names, and I don’t blame you.  For some of us, maybe it’s due to fear that our employers will punish us for contrary opinions from theirs.  In the case of you moonbats, you don’t have employers to worry about.  For others, maybe you’re in a line of work that deals with the general public and you cannot afford to alienate (or even remotely risk the possibility of alienation) potential customers, fans, etc.  For yet others, you don’t want to run the risk of having moonbats stalk you (trust me, my friends, that DOES happen).  And for yet others, you just want to use an online handle, period.

The point is that there are varying reasons for using anonymity online.  We can feel freer to express ourselves, and in the case of moonbats, free to express yourself in a way that illustrates your sheer stupidity and instability.  It’s not illegal to be a barking moonbat (yet).  Sure, cyberbullies and moonbats and a host of other miscreants abuse their anonymity by harassing, intimidating, annoying, etc.  However, what about the 90+% of online folks who do not do any of those things?  If Couch gets his way, the baby will be thrown out with the bath water.  I suspect that his hairbrained idea won’t become law, and even if it did, it would likely not pass constitutional muster.

When she’s not busy being ashamed of her country (and isn’t that just a darling characteristic for a First Lady to have?), Shelly O is letting us in on Barry O’s plans for America.  Those who think Dubya is too authoritarian should (but probably don’t) have a problem with this (from NRO):

Last night I appeared on Hugh’s show, and his producer Duane mentioned a Michelle Obama speech at UCLA. Captain Ed talked about this a bit, but I hadn’t seen anyone transcribe the part of the speech where it gets a little… unnerving. It starts at about 8:41 in the audio.

Barack Obama will require you to work (Now THAT’s gonna freak out his welfare constituents! - Ed.). He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

I’m sorry, nowhere in the Constitution does it authorize the President of the United States to demand anyone shed their cynicism. And I’m all for people pushing themselves to be better, but I don’t think the President demanding it is the way to go about it.

And what if we kind of like our lives as usual? What about Americans’ freedom to be uninvolved and uninformed?

Darleen at Protein Wisdom transcribed what follows:

“You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eights years from now, you will have to be engaged.”

Ah. Apparently apathy will be criminalized, then?

Does anybody on the left side of the aisle find this rhetoric a little creepy? Isn’t this describing an authoritarian presidency way beyond anything George W. Bush has done or proposed?

Do the powers of the presidency really encompass everything Michelle says Obama wants and plans to do? Based on this rhetoric, isn’t he actually running for messiah? 

Partial-birth bortion legal, apathy illegal.  Got it.  Thanks for the clarification.

Hilldawg pimped out Chelsea to deliver this most snortworthy of one-liners.  BEVERAGE WARNING!  Here goes:

It was a surprising choice of topic given the mostly student crowd stuffed into a lounge at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union. But the first question posed to Chelsea Clinton, who was stumping in Madison this afternoon for her mother, concerned Social Security.

“It is important to me because the Baby Boomers are aging,” the young woman told Clinton.

Clinton, the daughter of presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, said that a return to “fiscal responsibility,” as promoted by her mother, would be one of the ways to secure Social Security. She also noted that her mom, as she referred to Hillary Clinton throughout the question and answer session, was the “most fiscally conservative candidate running” and “the only candidate who tells you how she’ll pay for everything.” 

Yeah, I can see how that whole multi-trillion dollar socialized medicine thingy could easily be confused with tax cuts and limiting the size and scope of the federal government.

Then again, most of you knew that, didn’t you?  It’s just nice to hear the greenies finally admit it.  From Coyote Blog:

Fortunately, after years of skeptics trying to warn folks about this, the global warming folks are doing us the favor of being honest about their goals.  From the catalog description for the book “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy.“

In this provocative book, Shearman and Smith present evidence that the fundamental problem causing environmental destruction–and climate change in particular–is the operation of liberal democracy. Its flaws and contradictions bestow upon government–and its institutions, laws, and the markets and corporations that provide its sustenance–an inability to make decisions that could provide a sustainable society. Having argued that democracy has failed humanity, the authors go even further and demonstrate that this failure can easily lead to authoritarianism without our even noticing. Even more provocatively, they assert that there is merit in preparing for this eventuality if we want to survive climate change. They are not suggesting that existing authoritarian regimes are more successful in mitigating greenhouse emissions, for to be successful economically they have adopted the market system with alacrity. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power. There are in existence highly successful authoritarian structures–for example, in medicine and in corporate empires–that are capable of implementing urgent decisions impossible under liberal democracy. Society is verging on a philosophical choice between “liberty” or “life.”

By the way, for a description of why this technocratic fascism by the experts never works, read here.  By the way, when you see this…

Nevertheless, the authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power.

…it means “We support fascism as long as we are the fuhrer.” 

Such elitism and snobbery are staples of all leftist ideologies.  As H.L. Mencken once said:

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

Reason #4,234,178 to leave Big Government out of the health care business: they are excrutiatingly highly incompetent, to a lethal degree.  Observe:

A North Dakota manufacturer has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a suit saying it had repeatedly shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including those for the first troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twelve days before the settlement with the Justice Department was announced, the company, Sioux Manufacturing of Fort Totten, was given a new contract of up to $74 million to make more armor for helmets to replace the old ones, which were made from the late 1980s to last year.

Our tax dollars at work, my friends. Inspires confidence in the feds to do things the right way, no?

Mississippi must have officially run out of problems to solve.  That is fantastic news, because that must mean they’ve finally stopped hovering around the bottom of the nation in education.  Anywho, the brilliant minds in the Magnolia State have crafted a bipartisan bill that will force restaurants to stop serving obese patrons.

Apparently, the bill is deader than Ted Kennedy’s liver.  I have to wonder, though: why stop at restaurants?

I mean, if the goal is to help curb obesity by telling businesses they can’t serve obese folks, then why not extend that ban to grocers and convenience stores as well?  Can’t obese men and women go to Publix and buy a case of Ho-Ho’s just as easily as they can go to Mickey D’s and buy a few Big Macs?

Therefore, why place such a burden on restaurants but not on other food vendors?  After all, if the obese can’t eat, they can’t get bigger, right?  Sure, they’ll starve to death, but look at the bright side: they’ll be thin when they die!

This bill is proof that Big Government do-gooders are found in both parties.

I always get a kick out of seeing Barry O spout his bovine feces about “not red, not blue, but purple states” and finding “common ground” with ideological opponents.  Why do I find it amusing?  Because he’s so damned dishonest, that’s why!

From National Journal:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal’s 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator.

Dude is more liberal than Her Highness! I mean, the guy sure talks a mean game about “uniting” and “considering opposing points of view”, but his record shows that he never deviates from the party line, thus proving his mantra about compromise to be a load of crap.  The guy’s about as genuine as Pamela Anderson’s rack.

Forbes has a Top 10 Most Miserable Cities list.  Here they are:

1. Detroit, MI

2. Stockton, CA

3. Flint, MI

4. New York City

5. Philadelphia, PA

6. Chicago, IL

7. Los Angeles, CA

8. Modesto, CA

9. Charlotte, NC

10. Providence, RI 

Notice one thing in common?  They’re all predominantly Big Government liberal cities, and with the exception of NC, the other nine states are liberal states.  No wonder the left wants those of us in normal America to adopt their failed policies: misery loves company.

What?  The government didn’t come up with it?  How that possibly be?  For those of you on the left, the prior was sarcasm.  Anywho, from Rhode Island:

… Lisker was finally able to do that because she is one of a couple of hundred uninsured people who have enrolled in an innovative program called HealthAccessRI. In this program, she pays $30 a month for a “membership” in her primary care doctor’s practice, essentially keeping him on retainer. That means that even without insurance, she can get frontline medical help whenever she needs it, paying just $10 for each office visit.
…
HealthAccessRI is the brainchild of Lisker’s doctor, Michael D. Fine, who today will join his colleagues in announcing that HealthAccessRI is going statewide and launching a publicity campaign, hoping to reach more of the 120,000 uninsured Rhode Islanders.

Fine’s practice, Hillside Family and Community Medicine, with eight doctors in Pawtucket and Scituate, has been offering the program since 2002, as has Family Doctors of East Providence, with three doctors.

Recently, five other family-medicine practices joined, bringing to 21 the number of participating doctors. The fees vary by practice, with a monthly retainer of $25 or $30 per person (with discounts for families) and office-visit co-pays of $5 or $10. For this price, patients get all the basics of primary care: yearly physicals, well-child visits, checkups, sick visits within a day of calling, school and sports physicals, family planning, preventive health advice and a doctor to call to at any hour when they feel sick.

But they have to pay out of pocket for specialty care, hospitalization, x-rays, laboratory work, prescription drugs, emergency room visits and mental-health care.

The premise underlying the plan, Fine says, is that primary care is both inexpensive and effective, and for most people, it’s all they need. 

If you’re healthy most of the time and rarely see a doctor (and thus opt out of health insurance), then this option works great, especially if you pair it with some kind of high deductible catastrophic insurance plan (or health savings account).  Like it says, the vast majority of doctor’s patients are people who aren’t in there very often.  HealthAccessRI is great for these patients.

Naturally, the big government bureaucrat pooh-poohed the plan:

Christopher F. Koller, the state’s health insurance commissioner, welcomed HealthAccessRI as an interesting experiment and worthwhile effort to promote primary care, but said he did not expect it to attract many people. “It’s an innovation,” he said. “I’m really convinced at this point that we need to encourage experimentation and we need to learn from it.”  

The private sector, on the other hand, likes the idea:

Dale Venturini, president and chief executive officer of the Rhode Island Hospitality and Tourism Association, is sold on the idea. Her industry employs many young people who often don’t want to pay for health insurance. Venturini sees potential for restaurants to offer to pay the monthly fees of employees who enroll in HealthAccessRI. “We thought that our industry would be a likely incubator to get it started off the ground,” she said. “This is an opportunity for people to get basic health care at minimal cost.”  

A family from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts sees the benefits, too, and is even willing to pay Mass’ “how dare you not purchase expensive insurance in our bloated leftist state!” fine:

Rose and Fyed Zia, of Reboboth, stopped buying health insurance for themselves and five children a year and half ago, when the cost rose to a prohibitive $1,500 a month. They run two convenience stores and own some rental property, and have few options for group health coverage. Luckily their doctors are part of Family Doctors of East Providence, which offered them the HealthAccessRI program for $25 a month. It’s been “perfect” for them, says Rose Zia.

“Having a primary care doctor, that eliminates any visit to the emergency room or even to the walk-in,” she says. “If you have a primary care doctor that you can call, they will advise you what to do.”

Under Massachusetts law, the Zias are required to obtain health insurance, but they paid the $219 per-person fine last year rather than buy it. Since then, their children have qualified for MassHealth, the state-run health plan, while the parents were put in a free insurance program with a $15,000 deductible. They don’t want to end their relationship with their doctors in East Providence, so the Zias will pass up the benefits of MassHealth for their children. For the parents, the high deductible in their coverage makes HealthAccessRI an ideal alternative for them. 

Every time, the innovation of the market will work, if only the government would get the hell out of the way.

Obviously, the fault could not lie with the murderous psycho mother.  Nope, culpability falls solely on the shoulders of homeschooling.  From WSJ:

Four girls in the District of Columbia were allegedly murdered last year, and a New York Times¹ news story suggests the root cause is . . . home schooling? Here’s how the report begins:

Ten states and the District of Columbia, where Banita M. Jacks was charged on Thursday with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters, have no regulations regarding home schooling, not even the requirement that families notify the authorities that they are educating their children at home.

The lack of supervision of the home-schooling process, some experts say (always the ambiguous “some say”, with no references or quotes from those who “say” - Ed.), may have made it easier last year for Ms. Jacks to withdraw her children from school and the prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls.

Instead, the children, ages 5 to 17, slipped through the cracks in multiple systems, including social services, education and law enforcement. Their decomposed bodies were discovered earlier this week by United States marshals serving eviction papers on the troubled family.

The absence of any home-schooling regulations in Washington is largely the result of advocacy and litigation by the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The report goes on to concede that “for sure, the fact that Ms. Jacks’s children last attended school in March in no way accounts for their deaths.” The home-schooling link looks even more tenuous when you look at the Washington Post² account of the case. On Sunday, the Post reports, Mayor Adrian Fenty fired six child-welfare workers, saying they “just didn’t do their job.” It turns out that the girls’ absence from school was noted at the time:

The girls were killed sometime in late spring or summer, authorities believe. But they were alive when a school social worker, with growing alarm, tried to get child welfare workers to look in on the family. …

“From what I could see, the home did not appear clean,” the social worker, Kathy Lopes, said in a call to police April 30. “The children did not appear clean, and it seems that the mother is suffering from some mental illness and she is holding all of the children in the home hostage.”

Lopes first visited the Jacks home April 27, after Brittany Jacks, 16, missed 33 days of school and no one answered a phone at the house.

“The parent was home. She wouldn’t open the door, but we saw young children inside the house,” Lopes said to a hotline worker at the city’s Child and Family Services Agency. “Her oldest daughter, who is our student, was at home. She wouldn’t let us see her.”

The operator took the information and reminded Lopes, who was clearly distraught that she could not talk to Brittany, that Jacks did not have to let her inside the home. . . .

Although a social worker made at least two visits to Jacks’s home, in the 4200 block of Sixth Street SE, no one answered the door to the rowhouse either time. Less than three weeks later, Child and Family Services staff members closed the case after receiving an unconfirmed report that the family had moved to Maryland.

The Post also has a timeline³ of Jacks’s contacts with various city agencies–five of them in all. It does appear as if Lopes, the school social worker, was the only bureaucrat who took any real interest in the girls’ well-being. But this was true even under the district’s laissez-faire regime for home schooling, and it’s hard to see how the sort of regulations the Times reporter implicitly advocates would have helped.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that stricter home-schooling regulations would have some beneficial impact in terms of protecting children from abuse. This would come at the cost of burdening thousands of legitimate home-schooling families, the overwhelming majority of which are not abusive, by intruding into their very homes.

Whether this trade-off would be worth it is a legitimate topic for debate. But it’s worth noting that the Times usually has little patience for those who value safety over privacy, as, for example, in the case of wiretapping terrorists. Are home schoolers more of a menace than al Qaeda?

In the eyes of the MSM, yes…homeschoolers are more of a menace than al Qaeda.  Note to self: Let that lady across the street who homeschools her kids know that I’m on to her murderous scheme.  Go ahead and hail my heroism now, my friends.

Nope, no liberal media bias!