Bring It On

Russ is itching for Democrats to focus on Impeachment. He believes the President’s low job approval rating leaves the Democrat’s open to go for the kill with impeachment, by making it the centerpiece of the Fall Campaign.

Bring it on! Come on Democrats, I want you to talk nothing but impeachment from now until election day. You see Bush has been losing popularity among his base, but that will rally people to the President’s defense for a couple reasons. First of all, the President has low approval ratings but his personal approval rating is much higher. People like the guy despite the policies or at least they don’t hate them as much as Democratic Underground folks.

Lets add Impeachment up. For Impeachment to happen, it requires Democrats to impeach Bush, they have to take control of Congress. Now, you get rid of Bush, and who does that leave as President? Dick Cheney? No, Congress couldn’t allow that. Cheney, after all is the eeeeevil mastermind behind that Simpleton’s schemes, the Darth Vader to the Haliburton Empire. Could he be allowed to remain President? No, he must go?

And then who would become president. Nancy Pelosi. In essence, what Russ wants is a Coup d’état, not using the Impeachment power to remove a corrupt President, but using it to remove an entire political party and overturn the result of the last election.

You see the Democrats have enormous political opportunity, under normal circumstances, there’d be huge chance for a figure to come forward and propose a plan for effective change to the American people. Instead, what the Democrats have is Bush-hate. Bush-hate doesn’t cut the costs of gas at the pump, drilling in ANWR does. Bush-hate doesn’t balance the budget, cutting out of control social spending and reforming entitlements does. Bush-hate doesn’t make education better, doesn’t create opportunity.

Yes, Russ, you and the Dems bring it on, tell the American people what you guys really care about is inside-Washington Power games. That’ll get people enthused to vote Democrat, just like Republicans inspired people to vote in 1998.

It doesn’t work, but feel free to try it.

It may actually be their best plan, ladies and gentlemen, because you see the day President Pelosi takes office, she’s going to have to deal with some questions. What do you do with Iran?

“Let them have weapons, because we have weapons and by gosh who are we to stop any Tom, Dick, and Ahmed from arming up?”

We’re not going to buy that. Its nice from a philisophical perspective, but in real life, we’re allowing people to arm who are crazy enough to actually use the weapons.

What’s the Democratic position on Iraq? There is no standard position. Democrats are fractured a hundred ways from Sunday on how to deal with that. Now, a Democratic President couldn’t just cut and run lest the whole thing turn into a quagmire and we can’t have that type of failure under a Democratic watch, can we? Its important that America succeed. So, we might see an attempt to wimpify the US military in Iraq, but we’re still going to be there for some time until the Iraqis to defend themselves.

What about oil? “Well, we need to get everyone driving hybrids and new fuel efficiency standards?” Oh, of course, nothing like a whole bunch of new regulations to fix things. That’s the liberal way. As Reagan said, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.” Meanwhile, while Fidel Castro drills for oil off our coast, we don’t and we leave billions of barrels untapped in the Alaskan wilderness.

The Democratic plan for catching Osama Bin-laden (throw a few more billion at the problem) will work about as well as the Democratic plan for education (which is the exact same thing.) Throw some money around and that will fix it.

Republicans don’t have much better, but the Democrats plan for 2006 is to whine and moan and I don’t think its going to wash. There’s not enough leadership in Congress to fill a 12 oz. Coke Can in the “leadership” on either side of the aisle and the people are going to basically decide, “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.”

Taco Bell: Yo Quiero Late Night Eating Binges

When we went to Taco Bell (a former employer), I saw something pretty disturbing. Taco is plugging its late night drive through with a new slogan, “Fourthmeal” Fourth Meal according to Taco Bell is that meal which falls between Dinner and Breakfast. They’ve got an accompanying website for the campaign.

Now, what bothers me about this is that it really crosses a line. The reason you have late night drive through hours, both at Taco Bell and the nearby McDonalds is that people use those services. Both restaurants are located near the Interstate and people, especially truckers come through and they want food. That’s fine.

What Taco Bell is doing crosses a line into irresponsibility. Rather than saying, “Here’s a demand we can fill for late night meals, because some people are hungry or they’re overeaters and they’re going to eat something.” Taco Bell is encouraging people to binge eat.

I’ve been guilty of using late night drive throughs and buying food late at night in the past, but its unhealthy and stupid, without a doubt. Because, if you’re working a normal schedule the best time to snack is between breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner. Your metabolism’s moving a heck of a lot faster and you’ll more easily burn the calories. If you drive down to Taco Bell at 11:00 PM just before bed for a 4th meal and you get a couple tacos, one of those genuine Mexican Burritos, and an order of nachos, you’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s going right towards your hips.

What Taco Bell is doing is more than marketing its product, its marketing an unhealthy lifestyle of late night binge eating. People should know better on their own, but a lot of Americans are easily led aside by advertising campaigns and about 10-20 years down the road this will come back and bite Taco Bell in the rear end as people will say, “Taco Bell made me fat by encouraging me to drive down and binge eat at 2:00 in the morning.” My opinion is that for the mere stupidity of their actions, they deserve whatever they get.

Mexican Food We Couldn’t Get In Mexico

We went to Taco Bell for dinner. One of the reasons for this is to get some “Mexican” food we couldn’t get in Mexico. Indeed, all of our time down there in Cancun we only had one taco each and no burritos. According to Wikipedia, Burritos in the US are not from Mexico, even though there are burritos that originated in Northern Mexico which are different than US Burritos. Great! Am I going to have this much trouble ordering pizza in Italy?

America Under Stake Out

There is a big to-do about the NSA obtaining American’s phone records. To hear some talk of it, this constitutes a compromise of essential liberties.

Give me a break. The concern over government obtaining phone records is overblown. Understand, that we’re not talking about a warrantless wire tap, which there’s a bit more of a debate on, we’re talking about a “phone record”.

What exactly does my phone record or your phone record tell anyone? It tells the government the numbers of the people who called your phone number and who you called out to. Now, a key point in this is the program is not individualized, so my phone number 208-xxx-xxxx doesn’t have a big label on it that says, “Adam Graham’s Phone Number.” Now, if the federal government, we’re making an investigation and my phone number came up, it would not be incredibly hard to find it, but unless they have reason to look into it, our phone numbers are just phone numbers. That’s it.

If you imagine the Orwellian idea of wiretapping every single telephone conversation that occurs as analogous to having a police men eaves dropping on every single conversation, you can imagine having a phone record as a police officer on a stake out, watching whose going in and out and everyone’s place. This isn’t illegal. There’s no warrant required to do the real life equivalent. A Police Officer could stake out my place or your place and not violate any law in doing so. Obviously, there’s things like police harasment that come into play, but its not applicable here.

This is a great tool for law enforcement and most Americans understand that. If you find a terrorist, you can find who that person’s been talking to, not only other terrorists, but non-terrorists who might have a clue.

“Yeah, that was funny about that guy. He wanted me to teach him how to fly an airplane, but not how to land or take off.”

The American people show themselves far smarter than Washington liberals as by a 2:1 margin, they support giving the Administration the tools it needs to fight terrorism. Even 45% of Democrats understand the necessity of this program. Most of us aren’t stupid. On 9/11/01 none of us sat there and said, “Well, at least the government can’t find out I called Pizza Hut.”

Observations on Television

I did not spend a whole lot of time watching TV in Cancun. Saw a little bit of the Giants game on Sunday Night and then watched a bit of World News on Tuesday Night, but on the way there and back I had Direct TV for about 3 hours and managed to find something to watch. Here are some observations from someone whose not watched TV in some time:

-I have to wonder is CNN International less biased than the US CNN. I tuned in to watch CNN and caught the end of “The Situation Room” where they were talking about the letter from the President of Iran to President Bush and how some in the Iranian community saw it as an opportunity for dialogue. The host lamented at the end that the Bush White House was ignorning the letter.

Then CNN International’s World News Tonight came on from Hong Kong and the segment mentioned that the letter was seen as the Iranian President preaching at Bush and not an attempt to open dialogue, which put an entirely different slant on the story. CNN International looked like a serious news organization, US CNN not so much. For anyone to purport or sympathize with the idea that letter was an invitation to dialogue is the height of bias.

-CNN Headline News and ESPN News have reinvented themselves. It used to be, particlarly with Headline News, these networks followed a very simple format. Anytime you wanted to, be it 4:00 PM in the afternoon or 4:00 AM in the Morning, you could spend half an hour and find out everything that was going on the World. With Headline News, it really worked like clockwork. From the top of the hour to fifteen minutes after you got just “news” and then from Fifteen to Twenty minutes, you got business news. Twenty to Twenty five minutes you got sports and then Twenty-five minutes to the bottom of the hour you got some Lifestyle puff piece. Then, it started all over again.

Apparently, the Internet’s made a lot of that obselete, so now they’re offering some talk on these stations. I saw ESPN news with a couple sports guys doing rapid debates jumping from sport to sport.

Then I caught the new Glenn Beck TV show on Headline News. I like Glenn on the radio. I just don’t have as much opportunity to listen as I’d like. I have this thing called work that gets in the way.

Glenn’s TV show basically does what most radio hosts do when they go to television-bring the radio show to television. Glenn’s fairly humorous and has some good guests. The TV show is not even close in terms of humor, because Glenn does all of these fantastic parodies and it doesn’t translate as well.

Still, the guy’s funny, he’s got good guests, it’s different than anything else on Cable Television, which is to say, it will probably get cancelled in 6 months because shows that are different like this tend not to last.

What happens with Cable TV is so many people like Dennis Miller, Alan Keyes, or Glenn Beck come at it and say, “By Gosh, we’re going to be different.” The thing is that people don’t want different. That what the same old format delivered with the host’s personality and wit. So, Glenn Beck’s TV Show will either change or die.

-Finally, I was watching Boomerang, a part of the Cartoon Network for the last hour of the trip back and I realized something. Tom and Jerry is a really sick cartoon. I never thought about it growing up, because it was just this little mouse running from a cat, but it was sick, sadistic, and really twisted.

Bugs Bunny could do some awful things, but nothing compared to what Jerry did to Tom. Things like making Tom believe he was going out of his mind and trying to kill himself. I was watching it and said, “Whoa, this is sick!” I mean, it was violence really that was out of proportion to the need for defense.

In one way, the show is almost post-modern in its outlook on life. In Bugs Bunny, he always had at least a claim to moral rightness in his attacks, he’s provoked. In Tom and Jerry, whose right or wrong doesn’t really matter. Jerry wants to steal some cheese, sneaks on board a ship. Tom ends up flying way up in the sky and Jerry throws a life preserver in the water and Tom steers towards it. I said at that point, “You know, the mouse has got some decency.”

Then, he whistles and this shark sticks his nose up under the life preserver. No, Jerry has no decency. I’m not saying there’s not a certain genius behind these. Its just a sick, twisted genius.

Anyway, TV rots the brain, so enough with that for now. :)

The Iguana on the Mini-Golf Course Weekend Open Trackbacks Threa

Thanks so much to everyone who guest blogged for me this week. I read through the it all last night. It was great stuff. I’ve really moved light years ahead from just 10 months ago when I had nobody to call on to guest blog and made a pathetic post, “Would someone like to guest blog for me?”

Of course, back then I had less than 100 hits per day, so really, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to babysit. I was also pleased by the level of contribution I got from everyone. Part of my reason for asking so many is that life happens and odds were one of them wouldn’t be able to get a post in. I was so pleased that everyone posted. Thank you again, guys, and someday you can call upon me to return the favor!

Now, I want to start off by letting you know my trip in Mexico went fantastic. I’ll have a lot more to say on that today and throughout the weekend. What I want to do is give you a small taste of Mexico where a mini-golf course is home to several iguanas, one of which is pictured below:

Now, welcome to today’s Open Trackback party:

1) Post about anything that’s in good taste. No porn, no spam, no profanity.

2) Send me a trackback of any tasteful post you want and as soon as I check my blog, I’ll update this post with your link provided you link back to this thread. If your software won’t allow you to send trackbacks, just use the Wizbang Standalone Pinger

3) Deadline is Sunday at 11:00 PM MDT. Further trackbacks won’t be posted after that time.

Today’s Permalink and the Trackback:

http://www.adamsweb.us/blog/htsrv/trackback.php/1932

Click above to see all the great places you can promote your work today

Other Open Posts:

Blue Star Chronicles
Stuck on Stupid
The Right Nation

Linking in:

Blue Star Chronicles:

I Love My Country
I’m sick of the partisan ‘gothca’ games that have put this entire country at risk. The dems, progressives have put their political power OVER the good of the country. And a bunch of conservatives are reacting to every bit of information that’s being …

Mark My Words:

Happy Mother’s Day
Mother, You Are an Angel…

Planck’s Constant:

Sexual harassment affects most college students –
We have become a nation of over-sensitive, politically correct, namby-pamby wimps and whiners.

The Florida Masochist:

Homering in pink
What MLB and these ballplayers is doing is for a good cause. That’s what matters. Cancer is a horrible disease, I wish no one else would ever have to die from it.

The Florida Masochist:

The Knucklehead of the Day award
Today’s winner is Laura Lee Medley

Mark My Words:

A moment of joy
My usual Saturday afternoon consists of walking to lunch and reading whatever books I have at the moment, while enjoying a good meal at The Bread Basket, a favorite restaurant of mine. My walk takes me past a home where I’ve had the pleasure

Blue Star Chronicles:

Who died was killed in the terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001? Look at their faces. They are not any different than me and you.

Tel Chai Nation

A taste of what kind of problems can be found in South America:

SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) – Overnight gang attacks on Brazilian police in Sao Paulo left 30 people dead by Saturday morning, and in a related occurrence the number of prison reb…

Planck’s Constant:

We’ve grown up in a video world. Certainly most of the country still gets most of its news over the tube. Bloggers are now starting to dip their toes into vlogging, e.g. see the latest vlog from Atlas Shrugs who instructs us to read about The Muslim …

Third World County

Blogmothers Day: May 14
Last year, I encouraged my readers to add their “Blogmothers” to their Mothers Day celebration. The modest success of the first (as far as I know) Blogmothers Day was heartening… Please do honor your Blogmom, if you have one, on Mothers…
The Florida Masochist:

The Knucklehead of the Day award
Today’s winner is the Orlando Sentinel newspaper.

Blue Star Chronicles:

US Troops Rescue Sunni Hostages
I heard a blurb about this, but little else. I only found one story on the internet about it. Perhaps I’m not looking hard enough. I take that back, I found 2 stories. One was on a blog that headlined with ‘US soldiers injure a child in raid’. Some p…

Jon Swift:

The NSA Code
The NSA contends that they are simply looking for “patterns.” In fact, the kinds of patterns NSA analysts are looking for may be the key to winning the War on Terror.

The Florida Masochist:

Stop the presses
Slump or no slump Annika is still formidable. Just look where she is on the money list.

Blue Star Chronicles:

Virginia Memorial for Victims of 9-11 Attacks
Twenty-two people from Prince William County, Virginia were killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks. Yesterday a memorial was dedicated in their honor.
Third World County:

NSA Kerffufle Redux
Well, the usual suspects—Jean Fraud sKerry, Dianne Feinstein, Teddy “Swimmer” Kennedy and all the denisens of Demoncrappic Underpants and the like are baying at the moon over Michael Hayden’s nomination to head the CIA…

Planck’s Constant:

Back in December Scarlett Johansson had signed a four million dollar contract with L’Oreal. But now she’s balking at taking off her clothes for their new campaign:

Random Yak:

Part 4: Welcome Back Adam

Open Trackbacks

Jean-Francois Revel: Frenchman for all seasons

Jean Francois Revel, the French neo-conservative philosopher who was pro-American and wouldn’t flinch on the study of communism and terrorism, passed away a short time ago at 82. R. Emmett Tyrrell at the American Spectator, who knew him years ago, has one of the best takes on him:

I met him in the mid-1970s and knew him for his journalism. His three-volume history of Western thought was beyond me, but his journalism, appearing in the French magazine L’Express and also in English publications, was learned and lively. His French was clear and understandable even to an American with only a couple of years of college French. He was enormously erudite, gruff, and sardonic. During the Cold War when his fellow Europeans in large numbers idolized Castro and Mao, Revel mocked them all. To him the evidence was clear. Behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains was tyranny and economic futility. In America there was hope. In his 1970 book, Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution, he notified anti-American leftists that the great revolution of the 20th century would come from America where the American notions of democracy and economics would overwhelm the “Socialist revolution.”

Revel also was an early neo-conservative to support free market trade, something that’s still finding a difficult time being accepted today. But I have a feeling that as time goes by now, free market trade will succeed in finding the acceptance it deserves, as people come to realize how it can help their economy tremendously.

To conclude, Adam should be returning soon, so let me say that it’s been a pleasure to guest blog here, and many thanks for inviting me to keep things active while he’s on vacation. I’ll be continuing with work at my own blog, and so, let me say thanks to everyone for your attention, and have a good weekend.