Last Call

And Barack Obama, of the Moneygall, Ireland Obamas, nipped off to the pub this afternoon for a pint o' Guinness.

President Obama made a brief St Patrick's Day pilgrimage to a Washington D.C. Irish bar, The Dubliner, on Saturday, where he quaffed a pint of Guinness and enjoyed cheers from a rowdy crowd of green-clad partiers, some of whom had staked out their spots as early as 10 am. He was accompanied by Henry Healy, described by a White House staffer as the president's ancestral cousin from Moneygall, Ireland, as well as Ollie Hayes, the owner of the Publican bar that the president went to on Moneygall.

I love this guy.  I really do.

The president got more raucous cheers as he walked in (if he paid the $10 cover, it was out of your pooler's field of vision). At the bar in the Dubliner's front room, the president enjoyed a Guinness, taking a couple of respectable sips with what your pooler read as an expression of contentedness. The resulting Guinness mustache was, pooler and others agreed, "much more 'David Niven,' and much less (AP White House ace) Jim Kuhnhenn." On two occasions, the hundreds of partiers sent up cries of "Four more years!" and there was a raucous "U.S.A! U.S.A.!" call at one point.

Erin go Bragh, folks.  Hope you had a good St. Pat's, from one bi-racial kid with Irish ancestry to another.

Dancing Up A Storm On St. Paddy's Day

Now if this doesn't bring a tear to Zandarmom's Irish eyes, then nothing will.

For those feeling down about the United States and its place in the world, meet Drew Lovejoy, a 17-year-old from rural Ohio. His background could not be more American. His father is black and Baptist from Georgia and his mother is white and Jewish from Iowa. But his fame is international after winning the all-Ireland dancing championship in Dublin for a third straight year.

Drew is the first to admit that this is a lot to take in, so he sometimes hides part of his biography for the sake of convenience. As in 2010, when he became the first person of color to win the world championship for Irish dancing — the highest honor in that small and close-knit world — and a group of male dancers in their 70s, all of them Irish, offered their congratulations. 

“They said, ‘We never thought it would happen, but we’re thrilled that it did,’ ” said Drew’s mother, Andee Goldberg. She added, “They don’t even know he’s Jewish. That hasn’t been broached. I think it would be too overwhelming.” 

On a recent Wednesday, Drew, dressed in an orange polo shirt and jeans, was eating grapes and holding a tiny, shaking dog named Belle while his mother talked about his accomplishments. Ribbons and trophies adorned his sea green bedroom, the rewards of dozens of competitions since he started dancing at the age of 6. 

Neither mother nor son can remember a time Drew wasn’t dancing, or the reason that he started. Drew thought it might have had to do with his mother getting tired of Disney movies and playing Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly videos for him. She also took him to musicals and theater performances. 

But when he went to a friend’s Irish dance competition in Indianapolis, and saw the girls and boys leaping and skipping, dancing that was part tap, part ballet set to very happy music, he was hooked. 

“I was like, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” his mother said, shaking her head. “You’re biracial and you’re a Jew. We thought you had to be Irish and Catholic.” 

He said, “I was like, ‘I want a medal.’ ” 

Drew's something of a local legend around here in Southwest Ohio.  He performs with the world-class McGing Irish Dancers here in Cincy and his third All-Ireland championship is finally getting him noticed.  Good on him.  And yeah, I'm partial to stories about bi-racial kids kicking ass.  Go figure.

You'll be hearing his name more in the future, I'm betting.

Dear America:

"Who you calling stupid, Obama? I mean damn that Obama boy is stupid, stupid, stupid himself.  I mean you liberals thought Bush was stupid, but Obama is dumber than an empty septic tank.  He may be the dumbest President we've ever had.  Rutherford B. Hayes never said ''It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one' about the telephone! This proves my central point of how stupid and dumb and stupid Obama is.  What do you say to that, libtards?"

--Mark Steyn, National Review

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

So let's see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th century Spaniards when, in fact, he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste Marie. A man sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama's own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on "Half-A-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks For Lazy Public Speakers." A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently "forward-looking."

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It's not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle "Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies" as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison... How does that song continue? "They laughed at me..."

At Prince George's Community College they didn't. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

Yes, history will surely destroy the mentally deficient Obama for that Hayes quote.  Meanwhile, wake me up when the President does does something worse than attributing a quote wrongly to Rutherford B. Hayes and instead says stupid garbage like this.



Then get back to me, Steyn, on whom history will judge more harshly.

A Special Kind Of Stupid

Check out this video, where a man jumped through the window of a Burger King, bumps the cashier aside and tries to make off with the register money.

Me, I particularly like the way they drag him down, slam the window shut and drag him out of camera view. You can hear the "Aaaaahhhhhhh" fade out as they drag him out of sight.

The original video was taken down, so here is the raw footage via YouTube:



Enjoy!

Very Well, AT&T

You have made me take time out of my busy day to tell you the obvious.  It seems, though you are a mighty corporation who has surely has brilliant people on staff, that you are incapable of understanding the most basic customer service principle ever:

Stop being bullying assholes.  It is not doing you any favors.

NEW YORK (AP) -- AT&T is offering to discuss a settlement to an iPhone user who won a small-claims case that alleged the company was slowing down his "unlimited" data service.

In a letter dated Friday, a law firm retained by AT&T Inc. is threatening to shut off Matthew Spaccarelli's phone service if he doesn't sit down to talk.

The phone company doesn't say if the settlement would involve money beyond the $850 award the Simi Valley, Calif., resident won from the company in small claims court on Feb. 24.

In its letter, AT&T asked Spaccarelli to be quiet about the settlement talks, including the fact that it offered to start them, another common stipulation. Spaccarelli said he was not interested in settling, and forwarded the letter to The Associated Press.

Whether AT&T is right or not, they have handled this about as ass backwards as possible.  A flaw has been exposed, and without apology or any demonstration of giving a damn, they made it worse.  Trying to shut the guy up and threaten to cancel his service based on whether he did what they wanted only makes them look nastier.

They have done what I now call "pulling a Komen" where they issue a bland, corporately scrubbed and non-incriminating apology and don't even try to learn the lesson.

The Kroog Versus Drill Baby Drill (Again)

Krugthulhu rises from the Keynesian depths to devour the soul of Drill Baby Drill.

The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.

Why the hydrocarbon boom? It’s all about the fracking. The combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing of shale and other low-permeability rocks has opened up large reserves of oil and natural gas to production. As a result, U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years, reversing a decline over decades, while natural gas production has exploded.

Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.

Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery that, despite better news lately, has been very disappointing on the jobs front.
As I said, this was totally predictable.

Imagine that.  We're producing more oil and gas under President Obama.  We're drilling, baby, drilling...and fracking for that matter.  But gasoline prices are nearing the $4 mark in friggin' March.  Once again the evidence is abundantly clear that gas prices don't seem to have anything to do with supply and demand, at least as far as supply is up and demand is down, prices are skyrocketing.

Sabre rattling with Iran, commodities speculation, refinery issues, and good ol' corporate greed on the other hand...

Wages Of Failure

Easiest way to stump a GOP candidate running for office?  Ask them what the federal minimum wage is.

Three Missouri Republicans running to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in November were asked during a radio debate on KMOX what the federal minimum wage is and whether they would vote to increase it. None of the three knew what the minimum wage it, but all knew that they would vote against increasing it, regardless.

Host Charlie Brennan asked the three candidates — businessman John Brunner, former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, and Rep. Todd Akin — “What is the federal minimum wage? Would you vote to increase it?” Here are their responses to the first question:

BRENNAN: Okay, do you know what the minimum wage is?
BRUNNER: No sir.
BRENNAN: How about you Sarah Steelman?
STEELMAN: Uh…$7.50 an hour.
BRENNAN: Do you know what the minimum wage is?


AKIN: My guess is its somewhere in the 6 or 7, but I don’t know the exact number right now.



But hey, all three of them are against raising it, whatever it is.  Clearly $15k a year is just too much money to compete with Chinese sweatshops.  Especially when all three GOP candidates are filthy rich.

Perhaps explaining their ignorance of the current minimum wage is the fact that none of the three candidates personally live anywhere near it. Akin owns two homes and receives an annual congressional salary of $174,000. Steelman has donated upwards of $400,000 to her own Senate campaign. Brunner tops them all, sporting a net worth of approximately $100 million.

Minimum wages?  Those only affect business owners, the only class in America worth giving a damn about if you're a Republican.  But remember, Claire McCaskill is the elitist.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• As he arrives back in the US from Kuwait in Pentagon custody, the solder behind the alleged Afghan massacre has been identified as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
• The NSA's Total Information Awareness project, scrapped after 9/11, has been resurrected in Utah in a new electronic surveillance and codebreaking center.
• China's halls of power are still trembling after the public removal of reformer Bo Xilai as Party Secretary of Chongqing city.
• Sears will close 62 more stores in the first half of this year in order to cut costs and compete with Wal-Mart.
• Radio's This American Life is retracting its show on Apple's worker conditions in China based off comedian Mike Daisey's one-man show over serious inaccuracies.

Last Call

My Senator, Rand Paul, is trying to do everything he can (along with fellow GOP members Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham) to sell seniors on taking a step back from Medicare and embracing "Obamacare".  It's a hell of a thing to do putting seniors at the tender mercies of the insurance companies with vouchers and subsidies, but they're selling it as "the same health care that members of Congress get".

Under the plan, seniors would be subsidized up to 75 percent of their monthly premiums, with wealthier seniors receiving smaller subsidies. The eligibility age would also climb, slowly. But FEHBP per-capita costs are rising faster than Medicare’s — so even if the plan were able to save money at the outset as Paul claims, the costs of the new program would likely surpass projected Medicare costs in the near future.

Unlike ObamaCare, Paul says there would be no mandate requiring seniors to buy insurance — “The system is voluntary in that sense,” he said. “But it will be the new Medicare.This will be Medicare. Medicare will be the federal employee health care plan.” But that would create an incentive for healthier seniors to opt out of the program, triggering what health policy experts term adverse selection — and a “death spiral” for insurance premiums.

In all other ways, the plan is structurally akin to Obama’s health care law. It even kicks in in 2014 for all seniors, just as Obama’s law does for the uninsured. DeMint explained, in admirably honest terms, why Republicans are OK with, essentially establishing Obamacare for seniors, but not for everyone else.

“Medicare is already set up as a government program,” DeMint said. “So we’re beginning to privatize with this idea. To go the other way in the private sector for people who have private employment, and to bring that under government control and to define benefits is completely the opposite direction. So what we’re trying to do with Medicare is move it back toward a plan that we would like.”

A plan that would leave most seniors paying the majority of their health care costs and healthier seniors opting out altogether, assuring that insurance rates for seniors would increase exponentially.  Yeah, that's a great plan: the end of Medicare in under 2 years.  Awesome.

Texas Goes All In On Voter Suppression Hold-'Em

Texas Republicans tell Eric Holder and President Barack Obama exactly where they can stick their opposition to the state's voter suppression laws as they go for broke and demand that the Supreme Court rule on the Voting Rights Act being constitutional.

Attorney General Greg Abbott on Wednesday made a direct constitutional challenge to a piece of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, which singles out Texas and several other states.

Abbott took aim at a section of the act that requires Texas and several other states, mostly in the South, that have histories of discrimination to "pre-clear" any changes to election laws. Abbott seems to be using the U.S Department of Justice's recent denial of pre-clearance of the Legislature's controversial voter ID law, which would require voters to present a valid form of photo identification before casting ballots, as a way to try to change the larger decades-old requirement.

"For the Department of Justice to now contend that Texas cannot implement its voter ID law denies Texas the ability to do what other states can rightfully exercise under the Constitution," Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement.

Yes, Texas is going there, trying to strike down not just pre-clearance, but the entire act and the voting protections it entails, citing that the Tenth Amendment outweighs the legislation.  The pre-clearance measure, Section 5 of the act, is the target but the real goal is to overturn the entire bill.

Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Anthony Kennedy would be all it would take in order to gut the VRA as much as possible.  If as part of their voter ID law case SCOTUS agrees to hear this too, it's entirely possible that the VRA could be gone before November.

If that happens, all bets are off.

How Dare You Force Us To Vote Against Women!

No really, that's the Senate GOP's excuse for vowing to destroy the Violence Against Women Act.  The evil Democrats made the bill actually protect women, so of course it has to be destroyed.  Women don't merit protection, sillyheads.

Republicans are bracing for a battle where substantive arguments could be swamped by political optics and the intensity of the clash over women’s issues. At a closed-door Senate Republican lunch on Tuesday, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska sternly warned her colleagues that the party was at risk of being successfully painted as antiwoman — with potentially grievous political consequences in the fall, several Republican senators said Wednesday. 

Some conservatives are feeling trapped. 

“I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who opposed the latest version last month in the Judiciary Committee. “You think that’s possible? You think they might have put things in there we couldn’t support that maybe then they could accuse you of not being supportive of fighting violence against women?” 

So what horrible things does this bill do that destroys comity in the most august of deliberative bodies?

The legislation would continue existing grant programs to local law enforcement and battered women shelters, but would expand efforts to reach Indian tribes and rural areas. It would increase the availability of free legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, extend the definition of violence against women to include stalking, and provide training for civil and criminal court personnel to deal with families with a history of violence. It would also allow more battered illegal immigrants to claim temporary visas, and would include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence. 

Republicans say the measure, under the cloak of battered women, unnecessarily expands immigration avenues by creating new definitions for immigrant victims to claim battery. More important, they say, it fails to put in safeguards to ensure that domestic violence grants are being well spent. It also dilutes the focus on domestic violence by expanding protections to new groups, like same-sex couples, they say. 

Brown women and LGBT women aren't "women", they're objects to be ridiculed.  Why would anyone want to expand protections to cover these immoral groups who would never vote for Republicans?  Certainly not Republicans, that's who!

His Word VS. The Other Guy... Who Is Conveniently Dead

George Zimmerman was the subject of complaints to police, regarding his overzealous methods as neighborhood watch captain.  Those details aren't available, but they do portray a man who takes himself very seriously, and has at the very least annoyed neighbors.

And then there's the day he shot a young black man after police told him to stand down.  He called 911 to report Trayvon Martin walking home from the convenience store.  He blatantly disregarded the advice to stand down.  He instead followed Martin, making a comment about how "they always get away" and escalated the situation.  He then shot and killed the boy, and when witnesses appeared he told them it was self-defense and put the gun down.

An officer on the scene was narcotics, not homicide.  He corrected a witness when she told him she heard the teenager screaming for help.  By correcting her, I can't see an alternative besides implying it was actually Zimmerman shouting for help.  But that seems mighty strange from a man who expressed frustration and determination to force events to a head.  After all, it was he who chased Martin, not the other way around.  Martin was just walking home, with some iced tea and candy.

There seems to be a decided reluctance to prosecute Zimmerman.

“In this case, Mr. Zimmerman has made the statement of self-defense," Lee said during Monday’s press conference. "Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don’t have the grounds to arrest him.”

I hate to be the one to bring this up, but the other guy is conveniently dead.  The evidence is there in the fact that this man clearly pushed for confrontation against advice and common sense.  A young man who had nothing to do with this craziness was shot dead.  He left to buy iced tea and candy, and he died on the way home.  Now this man gets to call self-defense and the best they've got is turning it into one man's word against a dead body?  Where is the culpability for pursuing this violence?

I understand innocent until proven guilty.  I'm saying there is enough probably cause here to warrant those charges, and enough evidence to warrant trying.  The events could not have transpired if he had not disobeyed orders to wait.  He was armed and determined to use his weapon.  There was no justice for the victim in this, not even a hint.

Abandoned Boy Thanks Foster Parents For Not Locking Him Up

A boy was kept in a squalid trailer, sleeping on a urine-soaked mattress.  Mice have gotten into the food in the cabinet, contaminating it with hair and droppings.  It would seem the boy wasn't much of a threat to them, and the house reeked of animal urine.

The boy was found cowering under a porch in Colorado.  His mother had left him more than two weeks ago, she had moved out of state to live with her boyfriend and left the boy to fend for himself.  He was barely eating, and had not been to school in at least three years.

The mother was sentenced to three years in prison.  Her legal team had requested a non-prison sentence, but the judge said it was rightfully pointed out that with comfortable temperatures and regular meals, she was living in more ideal conditions than the boy had endured.

The boy is in a foster home now, and has thanked his foster parents for  not locking him up.  Can you imagine ever stopping to feel grateful for not being locked up in a filthy room that reeks of pee?  For coming to the conclusion that your mother wasn't coming back?  That kid has seen misery most of us will never know, all before he is old enough to shave.  I rarely buy into the "life owes me" mentality, but karma owes this kid a break or two.

Perceived Crimes And Collective Punishment

I'm honestly wondering if we do understand that the larger, more salient point of crazy, clearly unconstitutional insanity like Arizona's "right to fire people for using birth control" bill is to assure the Republican base that the coalition of "others" that elected Barack Obama to the White House: all "those" people who "don't know their proper place" like African-Americans, Latinos, young people, women, the LGBT community, and "traitor" liberals in general, are going to be punished in 2013 and only they will be punished, right?

Look, Republicans are basically saying "Hey, look, we know you're scared.  When push came to shove, the America you thought you knew sided with the black guy and for a lot of you that was pretty much the last straw.  So here's the deal:  we promise to make laws that will assure that, demographic shift be damned, they're never going to have that kind of financial or political power again for a long, long time.  We're going to force the reckoning that you know has to be coming soon and we'll make sure the bill goes to them, not you.  And here's the best part.  We'll design the laws to be guilt-free code-word stuff.  We'll give you the power to make the decisions on winners and losers and keep the losers losing for a long time to come.  We've got all kinds of experience with that.  Don't worry about the courts, we've got those covered.  If you side with us now they'll be backing us for decades, that's where there real long game is and then the control at the local and state level really pays off.  But we need you with us, because anyone against us, well...you don't want to be them when this train leaves the station, because it's going to run over everyone else, got it?  What do you say?"

And yes, that means that a healthy chunk of our political process in this country is motivated by the "plot" of GCB.  It's all about vengeance, both petty and fever-bright.  Never mind the GOP's real aim is to screw over the people who support them in the end, but they need the political support for now.  They figure once they get back into power, they won't make the same mistakes of the Dubya era as far as allowing that power to slip through their fingers again.  It's time to reboot America, they believe.  They're not too far away from being able to pull it off, either.  Demographic tides and all be damned if they can lock down power at the state level to simply ignore federal laws they don't like and simply treat the unwashed "others" unlucky enough to live in a red state as untouchable lepers who need to be driven off to the urban hellholes and liberal enclaves.

Something to keep in the back of your mind when you hear the GOP make their pitches this campaign season.

Enjoy The Weather Before It Tries To Kill You

Unusually warm winter, meet unusually warm spring to follow.

A streak of above-normal temperatures that led to the fourth-warmest U.S. winter on record is expected to continue for the next three months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

NOAA said the southern states of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi will have the highest chance of warm weather from March through May. The forecast was part of a report that said Texas may get drought relief and that the risk of spring river flooding will be the lowest in four years. 

That's actually good, Texas's drought over the last three years has been awful while here in Ohio we got record flooding.  But that will change, right?

The Ohio River Valley and Louisiana have an elevated risk of high water, Furgione said. They aren’t expected to face anything close to the record flooding that swept down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers last year.

The report also said parts of northeastern Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas may get some relief from a severe drought. However, a large part of the southern U.S. from California to Florida is still struggling with drought and that is expected to continue, said David Brown, director of NOAA’s Southern Regional Climate Services.

“The historic magnitude means recovery from the drought will be a very slow process,” Brown said on the conference call.

Brown said the drought caused $6.5 billion in agricultural losses in Texas and Oklahoma last year and led to wildfires that burned 4 million acres in Texas alone. 

Well...better than nothing.  But hey, Cincy has flash flood warnings today.  Looks like more will be on the way.  Wonderful.