MaxRedline

Almost Hot

Darn, if it wasn't for the bleary, crossed eyes, she'd almost qualify as a hottie.   
But then there's all that other baggage, and who can deal with that? No wonder everybody's outta there.  It'd be nice to see her proven guilty of nothing; be nice to see the boy alive and just staying with a friend for a while.  The odds don't seem favorable in either case. screenshot taken from Jack Bog's Blog

How To Boost Your Hit-Rate

There's been an uptick in hits to this site, and a big uptick at that.  

Folks have been coming in from Garland, Texas, from Indiana, from Singapore, from Sydney, Australia.  It was baffling.  Ah, but digging a bit further, they were all horn-dogging in on one post from three months back:  Figures.  And here I thought they might have been attracted to my wit, recipes, or analysis.  LOL!

We Don't Need No Education

Physical Education and other programs would be cut from the Portland Public Schools curriculum as a cost-saving measure intended to "plug" a $19 million shortfall in funding.  Oh, really?  A "shortfall"?

We spend thirteen thousand dollars per student, per year, passed some truly troubling tax measures just months ago, and PPS has a "shortfall" that will require it to cut PE and other programs?  Sorry, folks - that doesn't wash.  PPS doesn't have a funding shortfall by any stretch of imagination - what it has is a lack of discipline and sound fiduciary oversight.

Of course, that's pretty much standard for Portland.  Our politicians have loftier priorities:  we can build an iconic and sustainable and really spiffy new bridge for light rail and streetcars and bicycles and pedestrians.  We can let the workhorse bridges that actually carry freight and services crumble into dust, and the kids don't need exercise at school anyway, because they'll be walking to transit stations all of their adult lives.

Roads, generally speaking, are Very Bad, and must at all costs be discouraged.  An ideal Portland road looks like this: 
  

We Don't Need No Thought Control

In Arlington, Massachusetts, an inbound freshman noticed that there were no American flags anywhere, and nobody recited the Pledge of Allegiance.  So he got active; working with his fellow students, there's now a flag in every classroom.  But the school board balked at that whole Pledge of Allegiance thing:  The Arlington, Mass., school committee has rejected the 17-year-old's request to allow students to voluntarily recite the Pledge of Allegiance, because some educators are concerned that it would be hard to find teachers willing to recite it, according to a report in the Arlington Patch.

Note to the board:  if your "teachers" aren't willing to recite it, keep them away from my kids.

Ooh That Smell, Can't Ya Smell That Smell?

Crazed sex poodle AlGore is back in the news today, with back-to-back stories in Willamette Week and The Enquirer.  WW notes that Portland police are acknowledging that they made some mistakes in the AlGore investigation relating to allegations of sex abuse.  If they had it to do over, they'd have done things differently.  Meanwhile, The Enquirer reports that the masseuse has DNA evidence and surveillance footage, among other things, to bolster her claim against the Penguin.

American Spectator also weighs in with an effort to connect the many dots.  The picture that emerges isn't pretty.

This Could Be Good

Portland's slimy mayor and his twin have plans to steal a few tens of millions of dollars from water and sewer ratepayers in order to divert the funds to (what else?) bicycle paths and college scholarships.  Naturally enough, this move has enraged the folks who already pay some of the highest rates in the nation for water and sewer services.

Enter high-profile Portland attorney John DiLorenzo, who's now mulling whether to file suit to block their plans.  DiLorenzo said that he’s looking only at sewer and stormwater money and whether “it is legally appropriate to use those fees for purposes that are not related” to sewer services.  

Judging from the comments related to the story, the attorney has a whole lot of backing.  Portland's sleazy mayor, Sam Adams, and his ever-present sidekick, Randy Leonard, are finding support for their pet projects increasingly difficult to come by.

Next Up On The 2010 List Of Things That Will Destroy The Planet:

Jet contrails.  They block out the sun.  You'd think that they might be a great tool for fighting Man-Made Global Warming™, but not so.

Moratorium!

How much would Obama's drilling moratorium cost over a sixth-month period?

For starters, the guy who blew into office claiming to have a plan to stop our dependence upon foreign oil has just attempted to increase that dependence by nearly one-third.

200,000 jobs are at risk, or already lost.  But those are just the little people.  The federal government stands to lose half a billion dollars in revenue.  Every six months.  And the drillers aren't wasting time - unlike the federal government, they see downtime as lost opportunity.  They're already moving equipment out of the Gulf, and they won't be hurrying back after Obama's "moratorium" ends.  Obama is an idiot; albeit a well-educated idiot.  He has a lot of book-learning, and no real-world experience.

That's what makes him the most dangerous President in American history.

The Money Pit

If the G20 summit illuminated anything, it was the stark differences between European and U.S. fiscal policy (note that the term is used loosely).  For the past several years, both fixated upon the pipe dream of spending our way to prosperity, and it hasn't worked out as envisioned.  As the interest piles up and the bills - both financial and political - start to accumulate, the Europeans have decided that it might be time to swear off; to go on the wagon, so to speak. 

Obama, by contrast, wants to keep the printing presses going and continue running up a tab.  It seems curious that in a time when "progressives" speak constantly of "sustainability", they continue to act in an unsustainable manner.

Nanny Pelosi and David Obey want to give a $10 billion bailout to public teacher unions, but recognizing that Americans are already angry over their previous bailouts, they're going for a stealth move:  they're holding up a Defense appropriations bill in hopes of attaching their bailout to a critical Defense funding measure.  The package was supposed to be up for consideration last Friday, but Republicans made it clear that they weren't going for it.  Without Republican support, the bill won't go anywhere because Leftists oppose "war funding".

Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged Congress to approve additional war funding by July 4 or risk forcing the Pentagon to curtail defense operations and eventually stop paying some active-duty service members.

Gates told Senate appropriators he is “becoming increasingly concerned” by the delay in the approval of a $33 billion war supplemental for the remainder of this fiscal year.

“We begin to have to do stupid things if the supplemental isn’t passed by the Fourth of July recess,” Gates said at a hearing on Wednesday. 

But union bailouts are much more important to Democratic critters than are the folks on the lines.  Don't look for things to get better, either: things are about to implode, and the problem is due to politicians kicking the can down the road.  With public employee pensions, we've hit the end of the road.  Illinois is expected to hit bankruptcy in eight years; 19 other states will be in the same boat by 2025.

We're looking at bailouts on an unimaginable scale.  That's because the pension plans are guaranteed contracts, and rather than acting to modify the contracts when they had the opportunity to do so, politicians just kept shuffling on and whistling.  And why not?  Many of them, such as in Oregon, are covered by the very pension plan they were supposed to monitor.

Gimme Back My Bullets

The Supreme Court has extended gun rights to all 50 states; overturning Chicago's ill-advised and ineffective gun ban in the process (3 people were shot and killed in Chicago last Saturday night alone).  Building upon their 2008 decision in Heller vs. D.C., which overturned a gun ban enacted by the District, Justice Alito, in writing for the majority, noted that "the right to keep and bear arms must be regarded as a substantive guarantee, not a prohibition that could be ignored so long as the States legislated in an evenhanded manner."

James Feldman argued for the City of Chicago; mounting a claim that cities and states have every right to regulate firearms: "Firearms, unlike anything else that is the subject of a provision of the Bill of Rights, are designed to injure and kill."

He's obviously correct in that firearms are designed to injure and kill - but misses the fundamental conclusion that this is precisely why the framers specifically guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms.

Question:  Will the Democrats follow up on their attempt to abrogate Freedom of Speech (via their "disclose" act) with an attempt to bypass SCOTUS's affirmation of the Second Amendment?