"Put the microphone down and go home"

Take that. And that. And that, some more. My new political crush: Rep. Allen West.



The man asking the ridiculous question, and it is utterly ridiculous, is Nezar Hamze, Executive Director of the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). He stands there whining about "words" people. Words.

Golly. Why can't we just be nicer? Huh? If an Islamic extremist wants to cut off your head, the least you can do is smile and be cordial.

CAIR wants better American/Islamic relations? Well, I've got a few suggestions. Trifle things, really.

1. Condemn suicide bombers and terrorists. Condemn them publicly. Then do it again. And again. And...I don't know...again. Keep doing it. Be the loudest voice condemning this evil.

2. Work with federal, state and local governments to root out and identify mosques promoting extremist views.

3. Publicly and financially support war efforts and democracy efforts to free Muslims from extremists in places like Iraq, Afganistan, Iran, Sudan, Tunisia, etc., etc.

4. Actively protect Muslim women from abuse at the hands of their husbands. Also, try and get those dads to stop running over their daughters. Just a thought.

5. And this is the last one. This is it. Stop acting as if you are the one being persecuted. You aren't. Stop getting your undies in an uproar over words (which, by the way, are true) and care, instead, about the violence being perpetrated from Muslim extremists on anyone not like them.

You do that, and Americans will be your BFFs.

Steven Crowder: the Thuggyest Thugs that ever Thuggeryed

I want new black dress shoes. I need them, actually. My hips hurt in the ones I own. I need those dress shoes to wear in client meetings. I must have them. I deserve them because I need them.

So I'm going to the shoe store. I'm going to pick out the best pair of shoes I can find.

I deserve that, too.

Then, I'm going to demand the other customers in the store take up a collection to pay for these shoes. Everyone will have to pay. No one leaves until they donate a percentage of the money they have for shoes to my shoe purchase.

If that means they don't have the money for their own shoes, bummer. My shoe demands come first.

Then, every year, I'm going to do it again. Next year I will probably need two new pair.

I need white ones, too.

Welcome to the public sector union mentality. Just a fancy name for legalizing pick pocketing.

Atlas Shrugged, the Movie

Well, golly. I'm excited. I really am.



When Passion of the Christ came out, my family went to watch it and then had dinner after to discuss. I remember asking my father, while diving into a bowl of chips and salsa, what he thought about people criticizing some of the artistic license Mel Gibson took, like the opening scene of Jesus with the snake in the garden.

My father said something rather brilliant, as he always does. "I'm not going to criticize him for producing a story about Jesus when I haven't done it. Too often, we like to sit back, do nothing, and criticize others who are doing something worthwhile."

In other words, for those on the right so badly wanting a movie that reflects their free-market ideology who are already finding minor points of contention because the movie wasn't done how they'd do it, well...you should probably just zip it.

Until, of course, you make an Atlas Shrugged movie of your own.

Check out the website and prepare for the April 15 premiere. I'll be there

Cracked like an Egg

He said something needed to break, a statement he made right after snapping my hip like a twig. Chiropractors always astound me with their ability to twist your spine like bubble wrap and send you off feeling better.

It'd been a long week. The middle of a long month, actually.

Snow had kept me from getting any help after my sacrum decided to take a stroll outside the socket. Every year and a half or so, for no particular reason at all, my spine gets bored with being aligned and my hip decides to do a walk about, see the sights, try a new adventure, and find out for itself whether there isn't a better party happening somewhere else.

When it happened this last time, there wasn't a lot I could do about it other than whine and complain and roll around on the floor trying to find that magical combination of leg stretches and back twists and pinky movements that would miraculously shove anything outside it's God-designed position back in again.

I didn't find it.

Finally, after my scale of pain went from a three to a nine and jumping off my porch roof was the only thing left I hadn't tried, a friend rescued me with a 4-wheel drive vehicle and a chiro appointment.

My hero.

As recovery has stopped and started and stopped again and started back again and still I find myself walking around with a ziplock of ice strapped to my side, I keep hearing those words: Something had to break.

Oh really.

He didn't mean it as a life lesson, only a statement about my hip bone. Still, I've thought about it a lot.

Something had to break.

It seemed so brilliant, in a macabre way.

Something had to break.

There are a few "something"s in my life. Probably yours, too. Like preconceived notions, preconceived plans, a desire you shouldn't have, a want you don't need, a belief about yourself that simply isn't true, ignorance about yourself that needs some truth, a feeling of inadequacy or lethargy or general malaise. Who knows, maybe you simply need to snap out of the monotony in your life to remember why you love it.

"It" being you're life, that is.

I can relate. I have a few of those. Anything from plans for myself that aren't going according to the plan, to ceilings I've constructed that simply need to rot and crumble to the ground. When I look, when I really look, I can see that something has to break.

And, honestly, that just blows.

Breaks are painful. There's discomfort and swelling and lots of time to find blame, find self-pity, or find yourself mourning. Then there's the healing, which always takes so blooming long, and all the work needed for recovery, which takes so much blooming energy.

Then there's the rebuilding part. That means sweating through the reconstruction and finding stronger made materials. It also requires accepting your reconstruction plans might also get scrapped in the middle of the project for a design far superior. All of it taking you back to square one.

And it means finally accepting the fact your current path simply wasn't working as is.

So something had to break.

Who knows what that means for my wayward hip. Maybe it'll realize I love it best of all and come home. Perhaps that means some of the strongholds in my life don't have to be so strong.

Perhaps it means, despite my previous or even current belief, I'm stronger than what I think. It was just that one bone. One out of many. And all it needed was a gentle, perfectly placed, divinely timed, c-r-a-c-k.

Maybe as early as tomorrow I won't even notice the scar.

Quote Them: Rush to Excellence

Obama is the architect of this spending, and he opens his presser saying we have to live within our means. This is like Col. Sanders saying, 'We gotta stop killing chickens!'

Rush Limbaugh,
being who he is,
doing what he does

Quote Me: Pointless and Random

If there's ever a way to hurt yourself while doing the most mundane tasks in life, I'm determined to find it.

Tara Lynn Thompson,
discovering previously uncatalogued shoulder muscles while changing into pajamas

Eastwood v Islamic Extremism

I may hate Michael Judge. For many reasons. All of them having to do with jealousy. He's the freelance writer, a good one, who wrote an excellent piece on Clint Eastwood for the Wall Street Journal. An interview piece he conducted on Eastwood's ranch.

There are so many things to hate about Mr. Judge, including his excessive talent. It's a great read. And to back up my grumbling with a juicy Eastwood quote, here's an excerpt from the article.

He also appreciates the dilemmas faced by democracies when dealing with Islamist terrorism. "How many rights do you want to give to people who are trying to kill you just because you're you? . . . [Y]ou may be of a different religious sect, or you may be an agnostic, or you may be anything. But you're not one of them, so you're an inferior being. . . . Do you fight on 21st-century ideas or 17th-century, like the people who are against you?"

Leave it to Dirty Harry to break down a political argument between conservatives and liberals with a little cut and dry realism. How much liberty do you give someone trying to kill you simply because you exist?

I have an answer for that one. But I'll leave it along for now.

Read the full article here. But don't tell Mr. Judge I sent you.

Happy 100th, Mr. President

He turned 100 yesterday. And we're still enthralled in who the man was because of what he represented.

Ronald Reagan was a modern day Founding Father. Somewhere inside him, in a place some of us know, some of us seek to find, some of us hope exists, he understood the simplistic truth of life. He understood human nature, which meant loving it's right to choose while unapologetically fighting it's wrong choices.

He never had shame for his beliefs, never allowed anyone to force that shame. He simply stood on them, stood despite the force of opposition, despite the anger of opposition. He never wavered, confident he was right, confident in the American people, confident in the American way of life, confident it was right and good and desired by all mankind because it gave every man freedom.

His fame endures because he was right. Had he been wrong, had government ever been the answer, he would have gone down in history as a pitiful leader. Instead, even Obama wants people to think of him like good ole Dutch.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

So here's to the man who loved his country, who understood the priceless value of individual freedom, who truly loved the people he served. And who kept us either in awe of him or laughing with him throughout his time.

I still miss the Gipper. I suppose I always will.

Here are a few videos I chose of his birthday ceremony. First, an amusing, well-told and told often in Reagan's words, speech from Gary Sinese, a true patriot.



The beautiful salute and a Marine with tears streaming down her face.



And because he was the best at telling his story than anyone, a few great Reagan videos.

Scalped

He's been cutting hair for fifty years. But because his license expired, the state of Oregon is forcing him back to school. Where he'll learn how to cut hair in a classroom. From professors who haven't been alive for as long as he's been cutting hair. Because the government said so.

We demand everyone else in the world operate on logic. Why do we give our government a pass?

Banned Super Bowl Ad

Not appropriate for children. This ad may motivate someone to read John 3:16. Watch at your own risk.



Fox has banned the Christian ad for reasons that it is "advancing particular beliefs or practices." I'm sure that means this year you won't see any beer commercials, since that promotes the practice of drinking; or car commercials, since that promotes the practice of driving; or advertisements for movies, since that always promotes a specific liberal belief.

Bummer. Fox may no be able to afford the Super Bowl this year.

If you handled the ad the first go around, here's the director's cut.

To compromise? Or not to compromise? That is the most tired, boring, pedantic question

Worth the eight minutes.




It isn't my thing. Compromise. Willingly choosing to be wrong? No thanks. I can be accidentally wrong all on my own without giving myself a leg up.

It's a tricky word. Or, more accurately, it's a word with a misconstrued meaning. When people think of compromise, they often link that to being agreeable, or being considerate, or simply learning to get along. If we're discussing where to eat for dinner or what color to paint the bathroom, that's one thing. If we're discussing truth, it's something quite different.

"There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction."

Ayn Rand

Politicians seem in love with the word "compromise," especially when they are out of power. It's spoken of as a higher state of existence, a mark of good breeding, and a show of sophistication.

Personally, I think it exists so people without conviction, without passion, and, most certainly, without courage, can sit in cushioned chairs of mock authority and snap their fingers in disdain for anyone who possess the guts they lack.

How do you agree to be wrong just a little bit? How do you embrace a little slice of evil?

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube...

Ayn Rand

It was odd I ran across this speech of Rand Paul's about compromise, or more accurately, about the perils of compromise. It closed a loop in a train of thought for me today. This is what started it. While editing an article of one of my clients, I read this one paragraph about King David that gave me an 'ah ha' moment. Here's the author, John Westervelt, to say it best:

I wondered how a man with David’s record for breaking the commandments could still be God’s man. Then I read in the revelation that Jesus gave to the apostle John, “I know you well – you are neither hot nor cold; I wish you were one or the other! But since you are merely lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.” David was not lukewarm.

That scripture has often given me chills. Maybe it's the mental image it creates. Maybe it's God's adamant abhorrence of middle ground lovers. Maybe it's confirmed my indignation when milquetoast ideals are touted as evolved.

There is nothing noble about holding a murky belief.

An atheist I use to work around once asked me, "Why can't you just admit there are other ways to Heaven? That's what I can't stand about Christians. They think they are right and everyone else is wrong. What's so wrong with admitting other people might be right, too?"

He didn't seem to realize why that was impossible.

"Because," I told him, "if I believed the Bible might be wrong, that what I believe might be wrong, even if I only considered it a possibility, then I don't believe in Jesus Christ at all. I don't really believe Him, do I. You can't believe something while simultaneously entertaining the possibility you're wrong."

To me, compromise is like taking your homemade tomato sauce, made from tomatoes you grew yourself, from plants your nurtured from seeds, peeling them and cooking them, adding the perfect blend of salt and garlic cloves and parsley, simmering it on low for a whole day, keeping an eye on the consistency, tasting it vigorously through the process and precisely cradling it to perfection. Then, right before you serve it, you dump in several cans of Campbell's spaghettiO's.

Truth is just as precise. And purity just as important.

Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise [on basic principles] does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.

Ayn Rand

Boiling water instantly freezes

Today in Oklahoma, we're under a blizzard. Literally. Under. It's been snowing since last night and not scheduled to stop until midnight. Then we get to dig ourselves out.

If this global warming doesn't end soon, we'll be buried alive.

Until then, enjoy a little trick of nature. How cold does it have to be for boiling water to instantly freeze?

This cold.


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