On Patriotism

"Patriotism is now the last refuge of the bugger."

-- Imam John

TSA Mops The Floor With Claire Hirschkind at Austin-Bergstrom Int'l Airport

"I can't go through because I have the equivalent of a pacemaker in me."

"I turned to the police officer and said, 'I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights.  You can wand me,'" and they said, 'No, you have to do this.'"

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are.'"

 "[T]he police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me.  I was crying by then.  They [dragged] me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."

The TSA did release a statement Wednesday that said in part, "Our officers are trained to treat all passengers with dignity and respect. Security is not optional."

Complete story and video here. 

Preparing Our Hearts For Christmas, With George Washington and Thomas Paine

From Paine's December 23, 1776 The American Crisis, which Washington had read aloud to his troops as they prepared to attack Trenton on Christmas:

Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.


Enjoy it all, here.

Minyanville Founder and Dead-Head Asks The Stupid Question of the Year

"What's another word for thesaurus?" (Todd Harrison, here)

You'd think "treasury" would come to the mind of someone whose job it is to talk about money all the time, and preempt the question, but that would presuppose that Syracuse University required its honors graduates to know some Greek.

On Sin

"Sin is what everyone commits, but few admit."

-- Imam John

Politico.com Fawns Over Senator Murcowskie (RINO-AK)

With photos no less, here.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Which is why we should repeal the 19th Amendment.

TSA De-deputizes Pilot For Posting Video of Sacramento Security Theatre

The story, with video, is here.

Apparently the TSA is upset that you find out from this story that ground crews don't go through the invasive screening that you and flight crews have to endure. Ground crew members swipe a card reader and get access to your plane, by-passing metal detectors, naked scanners, and enhanced pat downs.

Do you feel safer?

Well, do ya, punk?

The Major Antonyms of the Moment

Military Will Follow the Nuremberg Offense on Repeal of DADT

Just following orders, sir:

Major Tim Densham of the 63rd Brigade said the military will do as asked.

“Our role is to do what the president tells us to do. We are just going to follow the rules.”

The moral hollowness of a Nazi.

Here.

Vern Ehlers' Parting Shot at Conservatives

U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Grand Rapids, voted for repeal [of DADT].

He predicted people will look back in five or 10 years and wonder what all the fuss was about.

“I just don’t think there is going to be a problem here,” Ehlers said.

Here.

Mlive.com Targets Free Speech

Per the very unattractive, Stalinist cave-dwelling hobgoblin in charge, here.

Admiral Says Obama's Motive in START was not National Defense

“If Obama wanted to save some money and improve national defense, he should have gotten out of the nuke negotiations and acted unilaterally. START is simply a political victory for Obama.”

-- Vice Admiral Jerry Miller, USN (Ret.), here

Alaska Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Senator Lisa Murcowskie

But she wanted more:

Murkowski tried to make her lead even bigger by arguing that the state should have counted about 1,500 ballots where voters wrote in her name but didn't fill in the oval next to it.

The Supreme Court considered that along with Miller's lawsuit and ruled the state was right not to count those additional ballots for Murkowski.

The full story is here.

"The Tax Code is 10 Times Longer Than the Bible, Without the Good News"

So says Republican Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, and George Will approves, here, especially with the additional observation that it is not right that the bottom two income quintiles pay no taxes whatsoever, and receive direct cash payments in the form of refundable tax credits.

Real conservatives agree: everyone needs to have skin in the game.

Senate Traitors Enshrine Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction 71-26

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse than George Bush's immoral doctrine of pre-emptive war, 16 Republicans helped, HELPED!, the Senate's Democrat majority turn back the clock to the bad old days of mutually assured destruction and ratified THE NEW START, which is just the old madness. 13 actually voted for the thing. 3 didn't bother to show up.

From The Washington Post:

The final vote came after Senate Democrats accepted two amendments designed to placate Republicans who had qualms about the treaty. The amendments, which passed on voice votes with bipartisan support, emphasized the administration's commitment to a limited missile-defense program and to continued funding to modernize the aging US nuclear weapons complex.

The amendments were to the resolution of ratification accompanying the treaty, a nonbinding statement that codifies the Senate's understanding of the pact but does not directly affect its language. Republican efforts to alter the treaty language were defeated, with supporters of the pact arguing that such changes would have forced new negotiations with Moscow and effectively killed the treaty.

Thirteen Republicans joined all of the Senate's Democrats in voting for ratification, helping to exceed the 67 votes required. Three senators - all Republicans - were not present.

The amendments are meaningless, pure mental gestures by the effete for the effete.

Charitable observers will nevertheless say the US Senate ignored Russian threats to embark upon a new arms race if we didn't ratify, when the truth is this country under Barack Obama doesn't have the stomach to defend itself and couldn't declare its independence from the inside of a paper bag. It doesn't even know what it stands for, and couldn't articulate it if it did.

The moral center of America has melted, as the passage of repeal of DADT makes plain.

What are we fighting for? The right of Afghan men to parade their adolescent lovers as they do, to the disgust of every frontline soldier in arms?

Are we really in such a state of decline that we fear the Russians' ability to outspend us? The answer in truth is No. But what we do have is a population fed up with the protracted wars of nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan and consequently now incapable of understanding the pressing need to rise above this squandering of resources and build up America's deteriorating strategic defenses. Barack Obama is a man made for just such a time as this.

The Russians will use the opportunity to build anyway, and cheat and lie about it as they always have done, which suits the Bolshevik in Chief Barack Obama just fine, a traitor to everything this country has stood for, who will get us all killed if something isn't done soon to stop him.

Clearly the Republicans are not the party to do it. The Stupid Party has struck again, snatching another defeat from the jaws of a victory won just weeks ago, and the Democrats are laughing all the way to New Year's Eve with feathers of healthcare, another year of stimulus spending, repeal of DADT, and this treaty in their caps. The corks will be a-poppin' on Nancy Pelosi's last flight as Speaker. 

Here are the names of the disreputable lot of Republican cowards:

Alexander-TN

Bennet-UT

Brown-MA

Cochran-MS

Collins-ME

Corker-TN

Gregg-NH

Isakson-GA

Johanns-NE

Lugar-IN

Murkowskie-AK (heh, heh, heh)

Snowe-ME

SPECTRE-D, PA (heh, heh, heh)

Voinovich-OH

The Republicans not bothering to vote on something so momentous:

Bond-MO

Brownback-KS

Bunning-KY.

Useless men and women, all.

A pox on them, and on their states.

I'm Barack Insane Obama, and I'm Full of Bolshevik

Effete Senate Republicans Rest on A Letter and A Resolution on START

The news that a resolution of understanding will be attached to the START treaty along with a letter from President Obama to address the misgivings of Republicans reminds one of the Executive Order on abortion the president provided when healthcare reform passed in March.

The language of the treaty will be the law, not the resolution nor the letter from the president, as surely as abortions will be paid for under Obamacare despite the Executive Order.

Fill your boots, men, and stop acting like the sissies everybody thinks you are.

Story here.

Obama's FCC Internet Commissars Impose Doctrinaire Anti-Capitalism

In other words, Marxism masquerading as "net neutrality," as John Fund for The Wall Street Journal makes plain here:

Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

"You'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot." -- Barack Obama, January 29, 2010

Leading Commie Advocates Cooperation with Democrat Party

"It is certainly the case that in the US the real stuff of politics and governance occurs through the two mass political parties. Here is where the action is and it is here, mainly through the vehicle of the Democratic Party, that the peoples' movement fights for its interests. Serious politics cannot stand apart from these struggles...

For the foreseeable future Democratic Party circles will be an area of engagement for those wanting to make a difference.

That said, even with the growth of newly independent forces operating within the Democratic Party, it’s hard to see how the role of a communist party could be realized within these confines. ...

One does not have a crystal ball and even an unlikely outcome such as capturing the Democratic Party cannot be completely ruled out.

What is certain is that the CPUSA must be part of this broad struggle in which two trends – the old Democratic Party machine and the all peoples coalition – continue to coexist in cooperation and antagonism."

-- Joe Sims, co-editor, CPUSA's Peoples World, here, and quoted here. 

3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals Defends Fourth Amendment on Cellular Info

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected the Obama administration’s contention that the government is never required to get a court warrant to obtain cell-site information that mobile-phone carriers retain on their customers.

For more on the ruling against the Obama administration, which wants to spy on you without a warrant, just like the Bush administration did, go here.