Quote Of The Day

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
-----H.L. Mencken

Quote of the Day

"The Right To Be Heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously"
--Herbert Humphrey

Veto Racial Profiling? Why Would I Do That?

Today the Governor of Arizona signed into law a bill which aims to help police deal with illegal immigration. So far so good right? Everything's good, just another day in Arizona. So why am I writing about it? Because when you actually read the bill there are some very scary things in it, and I don't mean that the bill quotes Stephen King, the scariness of this bill is a much more George Orwell type of scariness.

The bill states that "FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE,
WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c)."

Yeah. And that's not even the best bit. That comes later in the bill when it says "A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES."

What I love is that the Governor of Arizona signed the bill and then issued an executive order saying that police officers should have training on how to enforce this law without using racial profiling. Did she miss the memo or something? "REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES"? How can that not be racial profiling? How do they expect to have "reasonable suspicion"? If the person has an accent?

This law is slippery slope, and I certainly don't like where the slope leads.

And that's the way it is.
(I really need my own catchphrase to say at the end of rants like this, any suggestions?)

lyrics of the week

Clampdown
(J. Strummer/M. Jones)

What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
'Cause they're working for the clampdown
They put up a poster saying we earn more than you!
When we're working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers

The judge said five to ten-but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D'you know that you can use it?

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now

In these days of evil presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown
But ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!



one of my all time favorite songs.

lyrics of the week

I Need to Wake Up By Melissa Etheridge
From the film An Inconvenient Truth


Have I been sleeping?
I’ve been so still
Afraid of crumbling
Have I been careless?
Dismissing all the distant rumblings
Take me where I am supposed to be
To comprehend the things that I can’t see

Cause I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

And as a child
I danced like it was 1999
My dreams were wild
The promise of this new world
Would be mine
Now I am throwing off the carelessness of youth
To listen to an inconvenient truth

That I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

I am not an island
I am not alone
I am my intentions
Trapped here in this flesh and bone

And I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

I want to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Oh, Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

Book review: This World We Live In

Okay, so, I love me a good post-apocalyptic book, and the Dead and The Gone By Susan Beth Pfeffer was a good one. The basic premise of the book and it's companion book Life As We Knew It is that an asteroid smashes into the moon knocking it closer to the earth and thus screwing everything up. Life As We Knew It was about a family that lives in a small Pennsylvania town. The Dead and the Gone(which was way way better) was about three kids living(and dying) in New York City after their parents go missing.

In the third book in the trilogy, the newly released This World We Live In, things are getting a little better for the family in Pennsylvania when the two surviving kids from the Dead and the Gone show up. Shockingly the older girl from the first book and the boy from the second book fall in love within twenty pages. Who could have possibly expected that? Two protagonists falling in love with each other? Totally unheard of!!

Before the Dead and the Gone people arrive the book is a generic disaster survival book and then the Dead and Gone guys arrive and it becomes Twilight.

There are many problems with this book but I have three main ones. The first and most important is the way the book treats Alex, the main character of the Dead and The Gone. In the Dead and the Gone he is a heroic character who looks out for his two younger sisters in a terrible situation. In this book he is a suborn, fanatically christian, overly romantic, moron. He consistently tries to leave the small town in Pennsylvania where he and his sister are happy and relatively safe to got to a monastery for really no reason whatsoever.

My second problem is the way the various romances that occur in the book are portrayed. They all happen basically overnight, one literally does happen overnight. Early in the book the brothers of the girl from Pennsylvania go to the river to fish and one of the brothers meets a woman who is being beaten up by a guy(what that was all about is never explained) and the brother tells the guy to stop hitting her and then he(the brother) marries her the next day. Okay, yeah. So that gives you a little taste of what was wrong with this book.

My third problem is the ending. I don't want to ruin it for you, but I will if you don't stop reading now.


Still Reading? I will ruin it?



Will you stop reading already?! God almighty!!



Okay here is what happens in the end, the protagonists decided to go away to a "safe town" where there are still hospitals and schools and such with some of the family members, leaving the rest behind for no real reason. Then a tornado hits the town. Killing one of the group and paralyzing the sister. The female protagonist kills her to put her out of her misery. And then she writes(did I mention that the book is told through her diaries? Well they are.) that the world is bad, her life is bad, in the end everyone is going to die, there is really no hope, so she's going to go hang out with Alex. And they all lived happily ever.

But it's all okay because she learned life lessons from those who have died.

I do not recommend this, but I do recommend the Dead and the Gone.

2/5

quote of the day

"I never considered myself a maverick."----John McCain

Yeah he never considered himself a maverick except in campaign ads(one was actually called "the Original mavericks"), speeches, town halls, debates, and the subtitle of one of his memoirs. For years John McCain's thing is that he's a maverick and that he wasn't elected "Miss Congeniality", now apparently he never said that. John, what's going on in that mind of yours?

A question

Okay so this is a question I have for Alex who represents the conservatives here at LR(see I have a cool abbreviation). Do you think that the government should help those who can't help themselves? And if so, how should they help people who can't afford health care for their children and themselves? How should they help people who have lost their jobs or their houses?

If not, then why shouldn't they? If the government shouldn't help people then what should they do?

To answer your question.

Well Rock4 ever, in a earlier post, I commented saying that America is a center- right country, and you asked a very good question. "if America is a center right country why did they elect a large number of left and center-left officials?" I wondered about that... but then I found out why. The left won in the last few elections because of people like this.

This is a sound clip of Rush Limbaugh (did I spell that right?) playing a sound clip.

Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOZ-Etb0k0Q

quote of the day

"Nobody got hurt at the Boston Tea Party. The only people that got hurt was some fancy boys who didn't have anything to wash down their crumpets with. We jumped out from behind bushes, while the British came down the road in their bright red jackets, but never has a war been so courteously declared. It was on parchment with calligraphy and "Your highness, we beseech you on this day in Philadelphia to bite me, if you please."
Issac and Ishmael(West Wing Episode) By Aaron Sorkin

quote of the day

Rep. Matthew Santos: It's true. Republicans have tried to turn liberal into a bad word. Well, liberals ended slavery in this country.

Sen. Arnold Vinick: A Republican President ended slavery.

Matt Santos: Yes, a liberal Republican; what happened to them, Senator? They got run out of your party! What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I'll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.


Dialog from The Debate(West Wing Episode) by Lawerence O'Donnel Jr

U.S. National Debt Clock

I found this very interesting. This is a link to the national debt clock for the US. Its a lot of raw data, but if you can process it, its very informative... and horrifying.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/