I Refuse

I will not step foot in a retail store today.

I will not shop online.

I will delete every sale email I receive without reading.

I Just Saw Something Horrible

It was so bad in fact that it has made me question my faith in humanity.

Here it is, Thanksgiving Day for gosh sake, and I was out running a quick beer-fetching errand which caused me to drive by a Work Out World gym in the same strip mall.

And the gym was packed.

On Thanksgiving.

I of course immediately rushed home and opened up a beer.

I may have to hit the bourbon soon to erase the memory.

How Very Odd

Are they setting off charges for the Keystone pipeline?

What a weird series of earthquakes: three in Oklahoma and one in Texas running more or less on a straight line.

A Bad Hair Day

Man oh manachevitz, is it messy today. It’s like living in a car wash!

Everyone who has to travel in the NE be safe.

Oh, and it’s 60

And tomorrow it will be 20

All Hail The Lightbringer

My, Liberals sure do love themselves some dictatorships, don’t they?

“Somebody keeps on yelling, ‘executive order,'” Obama said. “I’m going to actually pause on this issue because a lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem, which is just, ‘Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress.'” When people started applauding, Obama said, “Wait, wait, wait. Before everybody starts clapping, that’s not how it works. We’ve got this Constitution, we’ve got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no short-cut to politics, and there’s no short-cut to democracy. We have to win on the merits of the argument with the American people, as laborious as it seems sometimes…What we have to do is keep on going, keep on pushing, and eventually we move in a better direction.”

Liberal Facism: dissent is cherished, so long as you agree with them, natch.

That pesky old Dead White Slave Holder Constitution, that Charter of Negative Liberties that so unreasonably restrains the Enlightened One from Doing Our Work.

For Us, my Brothers.

And The Point Was?

So after ten years and, what, 2,200 dead US Soldiers and oh a trillion dollars or so pissed away here’s what our Nation Building efforts have yielded

Twelve years after the Taliban was ousted from power Afghanistan is planning to reintroduce public stoning as punishment for adultery, according to a new draft penal code.

The move has shocked human rights campaigners and will dismay donors who have poured billions of pounds into the country for reconstruction.

It will be viewed as another backwards step at the end of a year that has seen women’s rights undermined, with a slew of legislation and murders of prominent women.

Human Rights Watch called for international donors to withhold funding if the government went ahead with the plan.

… The draft – devised by a working group led by the Justice Ministry and parts of which have been obtained by The Telegraph – states that unmarried adulterers should be subject to 100 lashes. If they are married, the punishment is stoning in a public place.

You know, quite coincidently I just so happen to have a plan too.

It calls for reacquanting any nation that treats women like it’s the 12th Century with the Enola Gay.

Alias

So I call Comcast yesterday because our modem is rather antiquated and can’t provide the bandwidth that Comcast is charging me for. Their website gives a list of recommended modems and a very convenient link to order one directly from Amazon. Very smart and efficient.

Anywho, I picked out one and before I clicked “order” I called the 800 number for Comcast to double check that it would work and the installation woul be seamless. There was the usual delay as I was routed to the call center in Bangalore and then that little extra delay that tells you that you are now talking to someone wearing a headset sitting in a room with three hundred other such folks, and then this nice fellow says, in accented English that checks off every box on the Official Stereotype Indian English Form, “Hello, thank you for calling Comcast. My name is Larry, how can I help you?”

Larry.

Larry.

So now companies are giving these folks fake Gringo names.

What a hoot.

Obama Interviews With The Bobs

(Thanks to Geraghty’s Morning Jolt)

Make the Bastards Enforce EVERY SINGLE LINE AS WRITTEN

It is “THE LAW”, right?

Round 2 of ObamaCare enrollment to be delayed until after 2014 midterms

The Obama administration plans to delay the start of next year’s ObamaCare enrollment period, a move pitched as a way to give consumers and insurance companies more time to study their options — but which also conveniently pushes the second round of enrollment past the 2014 midterm elections.

A Department of Health and Human Services official confirmed the change to Fox News. The decision does not affect those trying to enroll this year, despite the myriad problems with the launch of the law and HealthCare.gov. Rather, it affects those who will sign up late next year for 2015 coverage.

…The administration so far has rebuffed calls to delay or extend the current enrollment period beyond March 31, 2014, even as HHS scrambles to repair the flawed HealthCare.gov site and some states struggle with their own exchanges.

But by pushing off next year’s enrollment period, the administration conveniently pushes off the possibility of any ObamaCare hiccups until after the midterm elections. Some of the biggest critics of the current rollout have been Democrats up for reelection next year.

And In the Wayback Machine, Sherman

…speaking of lying cadaverous liars:

…The Washington Free Beacon reports that in 2008, Reid denounced Republican consideration of the “nuclear option” and vowed that he would never use it:

“As long as I am the Leader, the answer’s no,” he said. “I think we should just forget that. That is a black chapter in the history of the Senate. I hope we never, ever get to that again because I really do believe it will ruin our country.”

Then again, Zombie pederasts are not exactly known for their brain power.

Such a Revolting Lump of Lying Liars RUNNING THIS COUNTRY

Remember pudgey little Henry Chao’s innocent, “Nobody told ME!/never got the memo” that the website was f*cked up?

Sharyl Attkisson has taken him APART this morning.

Govt. project mgr. Henry Chao was emailed Sept. 26 about “performance & stress test cycles.”

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) November 22, 2013

Documents: 5 days to launch: “the results are not good and not consistent at all.”

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) November 22, 2013

Chao emails staff: “I DO NOT WANT A REPEAT OF WHAT HAPPENED NEAR THE END OF DECEMBER 2005 WHERE http://t.co/tthjnYyIi2 HAD A MELTDOWN”

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) November 22, 2013

Documents: 4 days to launch:Chao is told“We have not been successful in moving beyond 500 concurrent users filing applications…"

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) November 22, 2013

…without income verifications."

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) November 22, 2013

There’s panicked, GET THIS SH*T FIXED FROM CHAO (and underlings) right up to Go-Day.

Which is a problem, Congressional testimony-wise…

Chao has repeatedly testified under oath that he had no inordinate concerns & no idea that the website would have so many problems on Day 1.

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) November 22, 2013

A Charter Of Negative Liberties

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Words, just meaningless antiquated words

The Washington Times and one of its former journalists on Thursday sued the Department of Homeland Security, accusing federal agents of illegally seizing the newspaper’s reporting materials during the execution of a search warrant in an unrelated case.

In a motion filed in federal court in Greenbelt, The Times and reporter Audrey Hudson asked a judge to force the federal agency to return all reporting files and documents it seized from Ms. Hudson’s home office during a raid in early August.

The newspaper alleged that federal agents accompanying Maryland State Police on the raid took materials from Ms. Hudson’s office that were not covered by the search warrant that authorized the collection solely of evidence about guns and a potato launcher allegedly possessed by her husband, Paul Flanagan.

The seized materials included documents the newspaper had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as well as notes and memos that identified confidential sources from a series of investigative stories that exposed problems inside the Homeland Security Department’s Federal Air Marshal Service.

… Ms. Hudson’s home was raided by Maryland State Police at 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6. The investigators, including Miguel Bosch, a federal agent with the Homeland Security’s Coast Guard Investigative Service, had a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a potato launcher belonging to Ms. Hudson’s husband. To date, Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing in the case.

The warrant did not give investigators permission to seize personal records and documents unrelated to the firearms investigation, the newspaper’s court filing argued.

An evidence log from Maryland State Police shows that on Sept. 3, the documents were removed from the evidence holding room by a federal agent and returned an hour later, but the log gives no record of what was done with the documents and why they were removed.

Remember the uproar about Jonah Goldberg’s “smiley face” of Liberal facism?

Doesn’t sound so far-fetched now, does it?

And He Was Murdered By A Communist

He was a fallen, error-prone man who was given a pass on his failings by a compliant, worshipful media to an extent not exceeded until the current day. I am very very sorry that his life ended as it did, as he loved this country and was, at his core, a patriot.

Ocean Grove Versus FEMA

Funny that one has not heard a lot about this in the local media

When Sandy swept across the Jersey shore in October 2012, the coastal town of Ocean Grove was spared the worst. Sure, half the town’s boardwalk was destroyed and its pier was swept out to sea. And yes, sand, trees, and concrete benches were carried two blocks inland, while entire buildings were picked up and moved across town. But Ocean Grove’s crown jewel, an ornate and beautiful 6,250-seat auditorium, built in 1894, survived. It only had a third of its roof torn off. The auditorium’s foundation was intact and, most important, its 11,561-pipe organ was unscathed by the wind and rain.

So despite everything, the residents of Ocean Grove counted themselves lucky. That is, until they had to deal with the federal government. Ocean Grove has been denied rebuilding funds from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In one sense, this denial is part of the Obama administration’s quiet campaign against religion in the public square. Yet the story of FEMA’s conflict with Ocean Grove is about more than just Barack Obama. It’s the story of modern America’s rebellion against its religious foundations, rendered in miniature.

The article gives a very good background on how things got to where they are now and is worth a read in full.

The irony is of course that the folks there are very kind and understanding people.

This Doesn’t Look Like Pismo Beach Part 2

As it normally requires a lot of runway when loaded this ought to be a rather interesting take-off attempt

A Boeing 747 jumbo jet mistakenly landed a tiny airport in Wichita, Kansas late Wednesday, raising questions about whether or not the plane will be able to take off.

KAKE.com reports that the jet used to haul 787 Dreamliner parts landed at Jabara Airport instead of its intended destination of McConnell Air Force Base.

A Boeing spokesman confirmed to The Wall Street Journal in a statement that the plane had landed on the 6,101-foot long runway and that “we are working to determine next steps.”

It seems that this particular plane is a 747 LCF Dreamlifter, which is a highly modified funny looking duck.

I’d be rather curious to hear the explanation of just how they happened to land at the wrong airport.

Hillary Stays True To Form

Oh hey, look what we found lying around here in a box

The State Department has belatedly released dozens of photos of the aftermath of last year’s terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi after The Washington Times inquired about the authenticity of photographs it received from a Welsh security contractor assigned to the doomed American outpost in eastern Libya.

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, had requested all photos and videos of the besieged diplomatic mission under the Freedom of Information Act in December and February, and the State Department released only seven photographs in June.

But this week, after weeks of inquiries by The Times about photos it received, the State Department released a trove of photographs showing buildings and vehicles ablaze during the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Other photos show ransacked offices, burned-out cars and Arabic graffiti scrawled on walls.

The State Department said it had forwarded the photographs to the FBI for its investigation into the attack and submitted them to the accountability review board, the independent panel that conducted the State Department’s mandatory probe of the Benghazi incident and events leading up to it. The department also shared the photographs with members of Congress looking into the Obama administration’s response to the attack.

Judicial Watch was incredulous over the sudden release of never-before-published photographs and criticized the State Department for withholding requested videos of the attack and its aftermath.

“The new photos reveal a level of total devastation thoroughly belying Obama’s original cover story that the carnage was perpetrated by a bunch of random malcontents upset over an unpleasant video,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Wednesday on the group’s website. “The fact that we’ve had to wait nearly a year and file a federal lawsuit for basic documentary material of the attack shows that this administration is still in cover-up mode. And now the Obama administration brings the Benghazi stonewall to a whole new level by withholding video of the attack using frivolous arguments such as ‘privacy.'”

It worked for Hillary at the Rose Law firm, so why shouldn’t she do it at State?

And now she hopes it will conveniently get glossed over in the midst of the Obamacare disaster.

Gotta LOVE Spirit Airlines

70 Years Ago Today

Tarawa.

I Got My Flu Shot Last Night

Somewhere Jenny McCarthy wept…

Nothing Like Zipping That On By

…so you can claim “you asked about it” later.

In the last of a two-part interview, Judy Woodruff (PBS’s The News Hour) GRILLS new ATF director B. Todd Jones last night:

…JUDY WOODRUFF: We know that the bureau has had some high-profile controversies in recent years, most notably Fast and Furious, this exercise where ATF agents, in effect, were standing by while drug cartels were taking — trafficking in guns and moving them across the border.

The cigarette smuggling ring, we mentioned, other problems. How confident are you that this kind of thing is now a part of the past of the bureau and not the future?

B. TODD JONES: Again, I have been a trial lawyer most of my life and a prosecutor, and I have learned never say never, because we operate in a business that is chockful of risk.

But what I do have a high level of confidence, given some of the fixes that we put in, the leadership team we have in place, and our institutionalization of really the core flaws as to what happened on the southwest border, I have a higher level of confidence now 24 months on the job than I did when I came to this organization for the first time in September of 2011.

We have done a fair amount of work to make sure that cases are monitored, that there’s appropriate leadership involved in decision-making, and that the communications between what’s happening out in the field and what the knowledge of headquarters here in Washington, D.C., knows is much, much better than it was when I arrived here.

Yeah, okay. THAT’S ALL there was TO it ~ couple o’ guns went that-a-way ~ and I have no frickin’ idea what HE said.

Criminal.

…Can Long Endure

One hundred fifty years ago today, after some music and a two hour oration by the leading speaker of the day, a tall gaunt man stood and delivered in but a few brief remarks words that have and will stand forever

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It is in fact very appropriate that Captain Teleprompter is skipping the events there today, as the comparison would shrink him even more.

This Doesn’t Look Like Pismo Beach

Looks like somebody is channeling Daffy Duck

BERLIN—The Munich man from whom German authorities confiscated an art trove they believe includes Nazi-looted works broke his silence, saying he isn’t willing to return any of the art to previous owners, including pieces taken from Jews.

“I will not speak with them, and I won’t freely give anything back, no, no,” Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, said to German weekly Der Spiegel of reports that government officials are working to negotiate settlements for many of the works. “When I’m dead they can do with them what they want.”

Mr. Gurlitt’s comments—the first he has made on the wartime art stash discovered in his apartment and his intentions—came after Bavaria’s justice minister, whose office is overseeing the investigation, said Friday he hoped to reach a settlement with Mr. Gurlitt to avoid a lengthy legal fight and expedite restitution.

Here’s a nice chilling line from the article

He became the subject of a Bavarian tax probe after authorities in autumn 2010 searched him as part of a routine border check on a train from Switzerland to Germany and noted he was carrying €9,000 ($12,140) in cash?just below the €10,000 legal limit, prosecutors have said.

Think about that.

And think about how politicized the IRS has become.

John Besh’s “Cook From the Heart” Book Tour

…about stops my heart.

@treehuggingsis loved visiting with y'all!! #cookfromtheheart

— John Besh (@chefjohnbesh) November 17, 2013

**swoon**

Turkey Day Practice

Diligent Gentle Readers will recall that this past January we took a wonderful trip to Brazil. You will also recall that in the midst of afore-mentioned gastronomic excess we had a wonderful lunch in Rio with some very neat and creative food, most notably a cheese/shrimp mixture inside a pumpkin

At the time it struck me that how cool would that be back here in Gringolandia for Thanksgiving?

Well, since we have some Outlaws and Relations coming, I thought it best if I gave it a trial run this weekend.

Of course, I also decided that I’d best subject myself and my poor Bride to a trial run of wine as well, as I just simply could not inflict untested wine upon our Dear Guests

This wine, at $28, ain’t cheap, and it had a 93 or so rating from Parker. It just didn’t do a lot for me, frankly. My Beloved Bride liked the faint smoky character it has, but to me it was rather tepid and plain. Oh well, it still contained alcohol.

Anyhoo, I bought me a few mini pumpkins, which are surprisingly hard to find post-Halloween,

and hollowed the suckers out

and put them in a 325º oven to roast for, oh, 25 minutes or so.

I then took my Costco brie

and cut off the outer rind and placed it, along with some diced red bell pepper, two shakes of dehydrated onion and cracked black pepper in a double boiler (my Bride’s idea)

and let that gently meld and merge and then I glopped it into the pumpkins, added a few pre-cooked shrimp and some more black pepper

and then back into the oven for another 20-25 minutes of cooking while I made the saltimboca

At this stage the first bottle gave up the ghost and I moved to the next potential Turkey Day wine

This was another Not Cheap wine ($30) and I was again underwhelmed. Yes, it had a more pronounced butterscotch and ripe melon character than the previous wine, but dang it still to me was not worth this kind of money. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

I have to say the timing worked out pretty well, as the time it took, all of 20 minutes really, to prepare the saltimboca was just the right amount of time for the pumpkins to get all bubbly cheesey in their goodness

and the flavor was quite tasty, especially when topped with fresh cilantro and you scraped some of the rich pumpkin flesh onto your spoon with the cheese.

As far as the wine goes, well I’ll just have to buy a few more different bottle and keep experimenting.

Dang.

Thanks YOU, Sissy Willis for Posting This

Now BeauBeau wants a damn elephant.

Picking up poo in the backyard was already hard enough.