cheeseburger anyone?

I'm sure you all thought I was long gone. In fact, at a time, I thought I was. I just didn't have the heart to blog anymore. The country has been spiraling out of control--and I just had to close myself from it--to maintain my own sanity.

Well, I'm back. Hopefully for good.

So, I am considered a pretty healthy eater. I rarely eat out, I try to cook my own healthy meals...but I also work full time, go to school full time, volunteer in my community, and sometimes, well, I just don't have TIME. So yes, I drive through the dreaded drive thru--get me a greasy burger and greasy fries--and I feel NO REMORSE.

Southerngirl--where on earth are you going with this, you ask?

To San Fran.

They have lost their minds.

And so have my friends.

My good ol' trusty FB account always provides for some very interesting topics of discussion. Wednesday was no exception....enjoy, I most certainly did. (Some people are just beyond insane).

LIBERAL: I love San Francisco for banning happy meals!

SouthernGirl: Glad they think parents can think for themselves. :)

LIBERAL: If parents could think for themselves we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic among children.... I think parents have had their chance, it's time for kids to.

THIRD PARTY: Totalitarianism "for the good of the people" is still totalitarianism.

SouthernGirl: Sure, SOME parents do a terrible job...My concern is--when do we stop telling people what to do/how to do it and just let them suffer their own consequences, ya know? I mean--why just outlaw happy meals? Why not add televisi...on, video games, etc.? I don't know, I just feel like it might be crossing a line into something that is bigger and scarier than what we can imagine. PLUS...happy meals are smaller portions. NOW, those parents will just buy a regular sized meal and give it to the children. FINALLY...there are days when I just really want a greasy burger, and not from the regular meal. I guess all I should really hope for is I never get a craving while in San Fran. :)

LIBERAL: Slippery slope arguments are weak guys. If we can keep kids from smoking and drinking, we can keep them from eating poo on a bun (aka fast food beef). Doesn't mean we will suddenly be in a dictatorship.

COMEDIAN: But I....I....I like happy meals.

SouthernGirl: I don't believe it is a slippery slope argument. I believe that there has to be a point when enough is enough. If you don't like fast food, ok, don't eat it. If Jim Bob likes it, well, then he will have to face the consequences and it is not your job to tell him whether he can have it or not. As for children, no government better tell me if my child can have a happy meal or not. That is my choice as a parent.

SouthernGirl: I suppose, I just fear the nanny state is getting to be too much. We need to teach proper nutrition, respect, so on and so forth, but we can not take away people's choice, even if that choice will clog their arteries.

THIRD PARTY: "Slippery slope arguments" aren't weak when the subject of the argument is our government, who have proven time and time again that they will take away every right we will let them. B: Just because you and 51% or more of San Franciscans p...refer and can afford Whole Foods gluten free organic farm raised grass fed all natural carcinogen free carbon neutral humane green tea ginko boloba beef doesn't give you or them the right to meddle in my "shut the hell up and eat this so I can make it through this shopping trip without freaking killing you" situation. C: And don't even get me started on the hypocrisy in banning ONLY happy meals, that's just retarded. If I can't buy a happy meal, I can buy a McDouble, small fry and a small drink for $3.18 and give my kid a dollar instead of the piece of shit toy and they're still getting the shaft nutritionally. If they actually gave a shit and weren't just pandering to their granola-head constituency, they'd shut McDonalds down entirely. 3. I ate happy meals growing up AND smoked and drank and I turned out JUST F-F-F-F-FINE. Granted, I'm three inches shorter than average, have an enlarged heart and severe psychological and emotional issues, but compared to a lot of... er... some.... ok, a few people, I'm the picture of health. You can have my kids' Happy Meals when you pry them from their cold, dead hands.

COAST GUARD: Im loving it! Sorry just had to do it.

COMEDIAN:This argument is silly. Who the fuck really eats McDonalds anymore. The real issue is what they are fed at school, period. Anyways, its not the governments fault, or the parents, or even McDonalds....Its that Godforsaken Marilyn Mansons fault. You guys are all stupid!

THIRD PARTY: I bet San Francisco schools have some pretty kickass lunches.

LIBERAL: Ok you're right. On that same token, we need to remove penalties for smoking crack while preggers, beating ones own child and child sexual abuse if it's done by parents. It's a parent's right to choose!!!!!!!! In all seriousness, I never tho...ught I'd say this but COMEDIAN you are so right!See More

LIBERAL: Just sat down at the gate at the airport across from an obese woman eating .... Wait for it ..... A Happy Meal!

COMEDIAN: Im right all the time. BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE!

THIRD PARTY: In LIBERAL'S world, Happy Meals are like incestuous child rape. Someone should outlaw them so that fat woman will be incapable of making stupid decisions about her diet and activity level and become fit and healthy as a result.

LIBERAL: Oh so the slippery slope can only go one way? I'm learning here....

THIRD PARTY: Yeah, you have to keep the leaps of logic within one or two light years of each other. Goverment taking away one right --> government taking away others. Feeding a kid a happy meal-------------------------------------------------------------...--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> kidrape.

Two Can Play At That Game

There is a video of Jason Mattera going undercover at Rep. Jim Moran's town hall meeting in Virginia posted out at Moonbattery.com. My, my. It seems two can play at this game, huh? My thoughts are that this video needs to be spread throughout the nation for multiple reasons.

1. It demonstrates the lack of knowledge that these people have about how this government is *supposed* to work.
2. It demonstrates the feeling of entitlement these people have--I wonder how much of their own property they freely give up (minus the crazy commune guy).
3. It PROVES that there are people in this nation trying to sabotage the conservative movement (which is expected). It is up to us to counter these acts of sabotage and get the word out that these people play DIRTY and want your freedoms taken away.

Enjoy.

Words of Wisdom

A friend sent me this statement in an email. Short and sweet. But how true it is. Read this, then stop and think about what it says. Profound, indeed. (emphasis mine)

You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." * Adrian Rogers, 1931*

Freedom of Speech Only Applies...

Well, posting once a month is unacceptable and I deeply apologize. I will try to be more proactive with this blog--but I simply can't help but let the smell of fall and football just around the corner distract me from my obligations. Because, in case you haven't noticed...I love football. But enough about that. I do my daily reading of news stories (if you can call it that--"news"), and I check on my favorite blogs for updates and I find myself AMAZED at what some people will let this current administration and its goonies get away with.

Flag@whitehouse.gov? Seriously? Hey little ones, if you hear your mommy and daddy talking bad about our President or his policies, please let your good White House know. Remind you of anything else? Please note when that link was published. Yes--I saw (like many of you) the potential of similarities long before we elected this man into office. I say "we" in the most general sense of the word.

It's only proper to dissent when you disagree with W? But don't you dare oppose Obama and his goons. Never mind that they're trying to ram through legislation that our representatives have admitted to not reading (I don't think a link is necessary--as we've all seen the reports). I think one of my favorite quotes thus far comes from Dan Jeror (h/t John Hawkins at Townhall.com), "Why would you guys try to stuff a health care bill down our throats in three to four weeks when the President took six months to pick out a dog for his kids?" Ummm. Good question.

As I sit hear and ponder today's politics, I honestly get sick to my stomach that there are actually people that are accepting this type of behavior. Organizing for America is grassroots? Please. I pray daily that more and more Americans wake up to what is happening and let these fools know in D.C. that we are ON TO THEM. We are not a monarchy--and just because you're a Washington bureaucrat does NOT mean that you are better than me--so get over this Marie Antoinette attitude. My friends--I can only pray that we show up at the polls with fury and rage come November 2010 and let these bureaucrats know just who IS the boss in this good ol' USA.

I wish more than anything I could head to Washington on September 12th...but with stuff going on in my personal life and you know, my JOB (that apparently I am simply working to pay for Joe Blow the LOSER), I am unable to get away. I hope that some of you are able to make it. We need a STRONG showing to let D.C. know. We're not messing around anymore.

So--my hiatus has resulted in a long rant. I will try my very best to do some research and post more than once a month from here on out. Maybe The General will contribute, too? (hint, hint)

Growing Worries About Our Pied Piper

So, again, I know I'm neglecting this blog in a terrible way, but there is just too much going on and not enough hours in the day. So once again, I am posting someone else's work.

I must say, though, that this piece is very well written and hits about any and every point I'd try to make myself.

On a lighter note, did anyone notice that the Prez got booed at the All Star game? Um...I haven't been through too many presidents, but I cannot recall a single one getting BOOED in his first 6 months.

Now, I don't agree with any president being booed--as we should respect that office--but I do think it is quite entertaining that he got booed so early in the game. I'm praying that America is finally starting to WAKE UP.

This is quite a long read but well worth the time!

Growing Worries about Our Pied Piper Americans are catching on to Obama’s fiscal sins and rhetorical devices.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Recent news that President Obama’s approval ratings are beginning to slip is understandable. Even popular leaders lose appeal once they have to govern, and therefore offend, rather than merely promise and please.

And so far, these fairly modest declines in popularity are not resulting in much Republican traction. Few opposition leaders have presented systematic, clear alternatives to the Obama agenda, and even fewer have been knowledgeable and charismatic in voicing them.

All that being said, I think the Obama presidency is going to encounter far more public skepticism than one would expect in the usual post-honeymoon political adjustments. Why? Because our president often acts and talks as if he were at war with what we might loosely call “human nature.”

There is a growing collective recognition that things simply do not work the way Obama thinks they do. They may in the hothouse at Harvard Law School or in the charade of Chicago politics, or among young, hip bloggers right out of Yale, but not necessarily in the larger American landscape or the real world abroad.

First, Obama’s budgetary agenda defies common sense. If it were true that the United States with impunity could borrow $2 trillion this year — and, in the aggregate, run up another $10 trillion in collective debt over the next eight years — then the rules of finance as we know them would be rendered null and void.

In truth, all that borrowed money not only will have to be paid back, but paid back with compounded interest through higher taxes and cuts to government services. And the more we borrow from ourselves and the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans, the more likely it is that the interest rates will climb — both because we will strain capital markets and because the current deflationary downturn cannot last forever.

The American people sense this. They assume that what goes up must come down. At times they themselves have splurged on their credit cards — and enjoyed the thrill of consumption that comes with borrowed money, or even the notion of magnanimity of helping others with someone else’s cash. But they likewise remember that mounting debt at some point overwhelms the borrower, who must either default or radically curb his standard of living. When voters hear that a broke government is talking of “a second stimulus,” they conclude that there is a collective madness in Washington.

Second, there is likewise a spreading feeling of doubt about our foreign policy. All Americans like to be liked — and like to think they are confident enough to admit mistakes. But Obama is beginning to be predictable, boring even, in his once sincere, but now serial apologies about America’s past and present — to almost everyone from Latin Americans and Europeans to Turks and Muslims in general. And why are we more worried about the feelings of a hostile Ahmadinejad than of a friendly Maliki or Netanyahu?

We already have come to expect a certain boilerplate theme, in which the president seeks to placate his hosts by confessing the errors of previous Americans. But the lawyer does not regularly apologize to his rival firm over courtroom disputes; the contractor does not routinely call up his competitor to confess to his own past unfair business practices that unduly won him the disputed contract; the principal, as a matter of habit, does not call in the teacher to show regret over his own theatrical exercise of influence and power.

In the perfect world of the university lounge, perhaps such noble things transpire. But most Americans suspect that gratuitous magnanimity can earn contempt as often as appreciation. Like serial borrowing, a tab comes due. And in the case of foreign affairs, we all sense that sometime soon, a rather dangerous thug or two is going to gamble that his aggression either will not or cannot be deterred by a remorseful and unsure United States.

Also, in emphasizing America’s alleged sins, Obama shows himself to be somehow oblivious to the simple fact that he enjoys such power and prestige as a U.S. president because someone, at some time, must have done something quite extraordinary. Surely there is more to America than slavery and Hiroshima. So many Americans are vaguely beginning to sense that Obama is simply ignorant of Valley Forge, the Oregon Trail, and Iwo Jima. What happened at these places seems absent from his knowledge of the past, and so fails to inform his present narrative of and future plans for the nation.

Third, the same sense of something not quite right is beginning to characterize Obama’s obsessive evocation of George W. Bush, the prior administration, the need to hit the reset button, the “mess” we inherited, and all the other blame-gaming themes that have been daily fare the last six months.

Most of us inherit jobs from someone else. Many of us think that we do a better job than our predecessors. And some of us also like to think we are cleaning up messes that others left. But such self-serving referencing has a brief shelf life. It becomes soon monotonous, then irksome, and finally repugnant. Obama is nearing that third stage of whining, when many Americans are beginning to bristle, and think privately, “Okay already. We’ve heard enough of your ‘he did it’ routine. Now snap out it, get a life, and take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions.”

Fourth, people often fail, not just because of the bogeymen “they” who “raised the bar,” but also due to their own actions. But too often in the world of Obama, max out on your credit card and it’s the fault of predatory banks. Default on your mortgage and you were tricked into buying more house than you needed. Choose to buy a cell phone or TV rather than make a monthly payment on a private catastrophic-health-insurance plan, and it is because you were neglected by government. Do not pay taxes, get a tax credit — but then still blame those “who do not pay their fair share.” In contrast, Americans sense that the world of debt and trust will not work without responsibility and personable culpability — and that often our problem is not just to be found in “them” — the duly chastised and arrogant Lords of the Universe on Wall Street — but sadly in “us” as well.

Fifth, novelty wears off. Bush’s tough right/wrong talk sounded welcome after the Clinton era’s indecision and moral relativism. But soon critics got bothered by the excess of “smoke ’em out,” “dead or alive,” and “bring it on” lingo, which emphasized rather than mitigated a certain unease with Texan braggadocio.

With Obama, the charm of last year is slowly wearing off. What once sounded fresh, even cool, is now suddenly predictable and sometimes trite. When we hear “Let me be perfectly clear” and “Make no mistake about it,” Americans suspect that some sort of dissimulation may follow: Obama is not going to be perfectly clear, and we will understandably make plenty of mistakes about it.

Disavowals of government intervention presage a takeover of the auto industry. Promises to be fiscally sober indicate reckless deficit spending to follow. “Not raising taxes on anyone but the very wealthy” suggests everyone will have to pay more. “The most ethical administration in history” guarantees plenty of lobbyists and tax dodgers.

We now expect to hear in these speeches that gargantuan, costly new federal programs will in fact magically save us money. We anticipate listening to a string of evil “some,” “they,” “others,” and all the other bad straw men cited to create false enemies and, in turn, fake heroes.

Presidential talks are to be peppered with a dozen first-person pronouns, as in “I have directed” or “my team is at work on.”

Obama’s personal “story” inevitably follows, as if Americans, after six months of daily reminders, did not yet know that their president is half African-American, grew up without a father, has a non-traditional background, comes from a family with Muslim connections on his father’s side, has an unusual name, possesses unusual insight into race and religion, or is himself a metaphor for a new, diverse America. In the fashion of the obligatory 19th-century log-cabin birthplace and bloody-shirt gallantry at Gettysburg, we get the message “I am not your white-male president.” Ten times I think would have been enough, and after a hundred occasions such self-referencing wears thin.

When the president’s tone, and indeed accent, almost magically change, and he abruptly goes into his southern-Baptist rhetorical cadences, we have a vague sense that his oration must end with the usual ruffles and flourishes of last summer — “hope and change” and “this is our moment” tropes, but delivered without the passion and sincerity of a year ago. The tunes of last year’s Pied Piper are no longer mesmerizing, but becoming sort of creepy and even ominous.

Finally, Obama seems to believe that the exalted ends justify the often questionable means. Having a Latina on the Supreme Court trumps Justice Sotomayor’s past racialist talk and writing. Landing a supposed genius like Timothy Geithner at Treasury excuses Geithner’s inability or unwillingness to pay his fair share of taxes. Becoming popular in the Muslim world invites fabrication about Islamic discoveries and inventions, or the conflation of Middle Eastern religious and gender felonies with American misdemeanors.

So the problem is not just that Obama, like Bill Clinton, is proving insincere, or like Richard Nixon, at times duplicitous. And the rub is not even that he, like Ronald Reagan on occasion, is showing a limited repertoire or, in the manner of the Bushes, is becoming predictable in speech and custom. Obama, like Jimmy Carter, earns the added injury that all wannabe prophets incur when they promise more than mortal purity while proving to be an ordinary human in character.

Americans are waking up to the fact that their president says, promises, and does things that simply do not make sense, at odds with what they know of human physics — with the predictable nature of the way humans have conducted themselves for centuries: Borrowing is debt, not “stimulus”; serial apologies soon sound insincere or become counterproductive; blaming someone else becomes tiresome; scapegoating leads nowhere; taking responsibility for failure is as necessary as being praised for success; people can be fooled only so many times by sonorous, ego-laced rhetoric.

Because Obama is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn 50 years of doing business in America both at home and abroad, his shortcomings have the potential not only to diminish his own stature through unmet impossible expectations, but to take all those who signed on to his megalomania down with him.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

September 2001 vs. Today

Written September 11, 2008: From all the horror our country experienced on September 11, 2001, we did gain one positive: Our Nation gained pride. Pride some of us had never witnessed.

On September 10th, 2001, neighborhoods throughout the nation sported football team flags and yard decorations. By nightfall on September 11th, these neighborhoods had transformed into Old Glory sporting, candle burning memorials.

Throughout the nation, men and women said, "what can we do?"

Throughout the nation, Americans forgot about the small things, whether their neighbor was Republican or Democrat, who was black or white.

Those trivial things were gone...and for the first time in many's memory, we were all simply American.

Fast forward....seven years later. Where are we?

People yelling and screaming that we're war mongers and oil fanatics.

People yelling and screaming that we ignore international affairs too much.

People yelling and screaming that we're too harsh on illegal immigrants.

People FORGETTING what it felt like seven years ago today.

People already forgetting what it felt like to be an American.

People forgetting when men and women walked out of their desk jobs and joined the military.

Where each and everyone of us stared at the tv in shock.

We have forgotten as a nation what that day felt like. Now we're more concerned with the little things (just as we were before).

Half of this nation now wants to elect a man into office that has only held a Senate position for 140 days--and has NEVER considered leaving his desk job to join the military. Half of this nation wants to elect a man into office that doesn't place his hand over his heart when reciting the Pledge. Half of this nations wants to elect a man into office who's wife stated PUBLICLY that she was not proud to be an American. What have we come to? How can this even be acceptable?

I'll never forget. I'll never falter in my pride.

And now--we have elected this man into office. This man who parades throughout the world apologizing (no reference, just goodsearch or bing it) for what America has done. Condemning this beautiful nation for it's "horrible" actions.

A week ago Monday, America experienced its first terrorist attack on soil since that tragic day in September 2001. Just as Juval Aviv has predicted--it's the first, but certainly not the last.