Quickies

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A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.






This has been far too long in coming but a hearty congratulations to our friend Leslie of Temple of Mut who has earned a regular gig at the popular conservative blog Legal Insurrection. Leslie has been a tireless advocate for free markets and free minds and L.I. picking her up is well-deserved. Oh, and she has been kind enough to link to some of our stuff over at L.I.

Again, congrats, Leslie!






From the All-You-Need-To-Know Department...


...#OccypyLA has seen fit to honor murderer Christopher Dorner:

Occupy Los Angeles has chosen to honor Chris Dorner in the wake of his death, despite the body count he apparently amassed. . . . The statement of support and solidarity was posted on the Occupy Los Angeles’ official Facebook page Wednesday. The statement came in the form of a posted picture captioned with the phrases “Rest In Power Chris Dorner” and “Assassinated By The Police for Trying To Expose LAPD Corruption.”

Of course, it probably will never occur to these dim bullbs that Monica Quan will never be able to fight against the injustices she may have experienced in her life because of Dorner who shot and killed Quan and her fiance'.



Our buddy, JD, (twitter handle: @PSUdrozz) wondered what the Venn diagram would look like of Christopher Dorner fan boys (and girls) and those who own Che' t-shirts. We answered: A single circle.


Lefty grievance industry birds of a feather flock together and there is pretty much zero daylight between the Occupy movement and those that see some sort of martyrdom in Dorner. This speaks of the white, middle/upper-middle class progressive, participation trophy culture we engrain in our youth that gets kicked in the teeth when our youth face harsh real-world truths. We spoke of this phenomena in response to the Newtown massacre (and Columbine, Santee, Aurora, VaTech, etc.) and Jim Geraghty,here, echoes our sentiment (link above):

Perhaps it’s a reflection of the well-intended “you are a special snowflake” message of parenting in the past two decades or so. (I say well-intended because to a parent, their child IS a special snowflake.) Young people go through their childhood and teen years, believing that they are uniquely gifted and talented and wonderful and believing that their adult life will be one fabulous victory and success after another. And then at some point they depart the protected simulation of life that is childhood/high school/college . . . and the real world just kicks them in the crotch again and again. (This is a bit of what Adam Carolla talked about in his rant about Occupy Wall Street.) And so instead of concluding, “Oh, achieving my dream is going to be a lot harder than I thought, I had better redouble my efforts,” they deflect the hard truth of responsibility and conclude that somebody else, somebody out there — society — is to blame. They can take no joy in anyone else’s success, because that just reminds them of their own failure to achieve what they had envisioned all of their lives. And their attitudes quickly become one more obstacle — short-tempered, incapable of taking responsibility, quick to blame others, perhaps paranoid, concluding others are out to sabotage them.

And just a hunch: the amount of sympathy one has for Christopher Dorner is inversely proportional to one's take-home pay.






One a much lighter note, wouldn't it appear that Russia is to meteors/meteorites what trailer parks are to tornadoes? Don't worry, Oklahoma, Spring is right around the corner.







As Pops would say, "It's a solution in search of a problem."... New York Congressman, Charles Rangel up to his old saw again in wanting to bring back the draft. Although, with women now getting the OK for combat roles, it does bring up the question of requiring women to apply for selective service.

Of course, with Rangel, there is a defense policy/social engineering angle behind his backing of the draft:

“If you take a look at that segment of the United States that actually goes to war, they get unfair disadvantage in every darn thing that’s happened. I know, because I was one of them,” Rangel said on NBC’s Morning Joe. “And it’s unfortunate that in the last draft that we had, all you had to do was say that you’re going to college, you get into college and you can avoid it. That’s why my no-nonsense-everybody-goes, it really counts…. You may go in screaming and yelling, but when you come out, you salute the flag.”

Yeah, Vietnam was such a swell time in this nation's history, let's attempt to recreate those conditions from that era. Got it.

It should be noted and as Rangel alluded to above, the congressman served honorably in the Marine Corps during Korea. Thank you for your service, sir.





Sports website Deadspin ranks the Constitutional amendments and, predictably, makes absolute hash of it.

When the 1st amendment is ranked #7, it is either a sign of dumbfounding ignorance or a sad attempt at being too cute by a half. Either way, the rankings present a revealing look behind the curtain of statist/progressive priorities and individual freedom ain't one of them.

White, liberal and over-educated is no way to go through life, son.




And same website ranks luncheon meats and aside from the inexplicable exclusion of bacon and pastrami, manages to not embarass themselves.






Strangely enough, the Department of Justice feels compelled to jump into the homeschooling fray as the miserable hack that runs that outfit claims that banning homeschooling doesn't violate fundamental rights.

3 questions:

1. WTF?
2. What compelling interest does the DOJ have in the homeschooling business?
3. WTF?

A bi-partisan outfit called "No Labels" is an attempt to get Congress to quit the rancorous bickering and get something done.

Stretching back to the previous administration, let's take a look at the biggest legislative accomplishments that have been signed into law by both Republican and Democratic Presidents: Medicare Part D, TARP (including the bailout of GM and Chrysler), the $800 billion American Recovery Act (Porkulus), Dodd-Frank financial regulation and the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare).

Explain to us again why gridlock is such a horrible thing.





And with respect to the proposed assault weapon ban, we suppose we see their point. It's not like our assault rifle is going to do us any good in the event of a drone strike.





How can publishing a map showing the locations of your political opposites be considered anything but inciteful and hateful? We're looking at you Southern Poverty Law Center.





And if you missed the President's State of the Union Address, B-Daddy of the Liberator Today has a great breakdown of it, here.




60 Minutes managed to track down and interview the Algerian terror attack survivors. So what about the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack survivors?


Totally related: Substitute "Benghazi" for "Algerian gas facility" and you have pretty much the same story.





OK, gang, that's it for now. We'll catch you all tomorrow.


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