Lawrence Lessig Wants to Fix Congress and Get Money Out of Politics

Interesting that Glenn Beck and Lawrence Lessig say exactly the same thing about corruption in Washington. The difference is the liberals, socialists, and progressives all love Lessig and they hate Beck. But another thing Beck says, that I'm not sure Lessig does, is that Congress has made itself irrelevant. With appointed czars and various regulations, who needs Congress? We the people may have been suffering from the behavior of our corrupt representatives at the beck (excuse the pun) and call of the lobbyists, but they were our guys--the czars and appointed advisors are not. Now we don't even have them. This is just one more left wing circus and Lessig is definitely not Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
Lawrence Lessig Wants to Fix Congress and Get Money Out of Politics - Campus Progress

Fenway Park Food Vendor Hit with Immigration Fine

Workers pretend to be legal, and employers pretend to believe them. No problem getting work despite illegal status.

Video: Fenway Park Food Vendor Hit with Immigration Fine

Senate passes food safety bill

"The Senate on Tuesday approved a vast overhaul of the nation’s nearly century-old food safety system, ending more than a year of political stalemate and boosting the Food and Drug Administration’s power to deal with contaminated products that have sickened thousands of Americans."

Not sure what's behind this (other than big-Food/agribiz lobbyists), but according to a chart I saw in the paper, 12 people have died in 2008-2010 from e-coli or Salmonella. Meanwhile in the same time period I think about 15,000 teenagers have died in auto accidents because we don't raise the legal driving age to 18. So it seems this is just a power move on the part of another government bureaucracy and/or the mega-food companies to drive out the little guy with higher costs, but it's not a safety measure. (There are some who think it is a deliberate move to raise food prices and level of panic among voters.) Even the problems they had with food safety in the last few years could be traced back to unsanitary conditions, often using illegal agricultural workers.

Senate passes food safety bill - Meredith Shiner and Scott Wong - POLITICO.com

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association

HALE: Food-safety law raises prices, puts unreliable FDA in charge - Daily Nebraskan - Opinion


Lobbying Spending Database-Food Industry, 2010 | OpenSecrets

Isn't that just like a mom?

"The mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Wednesday she was distressed by an international police alert for her son's arrest and did not want him "hunted down and jailed.""

If you steal something (that means it doesn't belong to you), or you put the lives of others in danger, it's called a crime, mommy, and maybe it's time for little Julian to grow up and face the music. There's no evidence that he's had a break with reality--like the local guys in Michigan and Ohio who have killed their own children in the last few weeks. The fact that he's decided he personally knows better than all the people who've elected leaders, worked for change, and negotiated treaties, shows he's just as much a megalomaniac power obsessed weirdo as those he's decided to expose. Sorry mommy. You've raised a monster.

Wikileaks: Interpol puts Julian Assange on 'Wanted' list over 'sex crimes' - Telegraph

U.S. Faces Hard Bid to Prosecute Leakers - WSJ.com

Did WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange commit a crime? - CSMonitor.com

I love you, but . . .

Elizabeth Bernstein has a fashion article in today's WSJ that has a lot of wisdom about relationships. She writes: "Woe to the man who tries to makeover his woman." She's talking fashion here ("Do you like this outfit?" can be a relationship killer if a woman asks it; a man probably won't ask.) She says women are more insecure and harbor perceived insults like an elephant--they NEVER forget.

If you're the laundress/laundryman in your home, you can sometimes sneak out the old, frayed, worn and way too comfortable clothing. If your guy is outside raking leaves, he may see more people in a glance than several hours at church. If I never see that never faded, gold colored t-shirt with a button neck that formerly belonged to one of our daughter's boyfriends in the 80s, I won't miss it. I think it was worn for yard work about 20 years.

I love the program on TLC cable "What not to wear," but I sometimes wonder if the makeovers are like diets, and if you checked back in 2 years, would their closets be just the same.

The Christmas bomber and the Portland mayor's epiphany

James Taranto reports:

"Although the Joint Terrorism Task Force is a partnership between the FBI and local law enforcement, the Oregonian reports that Portland's Mayor Sam Adams, a Democrat, found out about the plot at the same time the public did: when the FBI announced Mohamud's arrest on Friday.

That's because in 2005, Portland became the only city in the country to withdraw from the JTTF. The reason, York explains, is that then-Mayor Tom Potter "said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren't violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs."

Adams, then a city councilman, was part of the 4-1 majority that voted to withdraw from the JTTF. Now he's having second thoughts, reports the Oregonian: "Adams . . . emphasized that he has much more faith in the White House and the leadership of the U.S. attorney's office now than he did in 2005."

The paper reports that the American Civil Liberties Union still opposes participation in the JTTF. Agree or disagree, the ACLU deserves credit for consistency. But Adams's position is blatantly partisan. One can't even attribute it to an epiphany brought on by the Mohamud arrest. According to the Oregonian, Adams and his police chief, Mike Reese, "have discussed for months" whether to rejoin the JTTF. What made the difference, it seems quite clear, is having a Democrat in the White House."

Portland Mayor Sam Adams, Police Chief Mike Reese discuss return to Joint Terrorism Task Force | OregonLive.com

Instead of Clueless in Seattle, I guess it's Clueless in Portland.

Why I'll never shop on Black Friday

Greedy people are also obese and blood thirsty if this video is any indication.

Media Matters can't refute Beck on WikiLeaks ties George Soros

They (it) can be as sarcastic and scornful as they want, but nothing in this blog entry does anything other than spread Beck's theories that Soros' money through OSI is backing the treason of PFC Bradley Manning. I guess they get it once in awhile.

Beck struggles to tie WikiLeaks to George Soros | Media Matters for America

Obama to freeze federal pay for 2 years

It's not going to make a lot of difference. A drop in an ocean of debt, really. The number of federal workers earning more than $150,000 rose more than tenfold between 2005 and 2010, and has doubled in the two years since Mr. Obama took office. Federal workers make much more than the private sector, so freezing their wages is simply a PR move.

Obama to freeze federal pay for 2 years - Washington Times

But at least the NYT is no long saying the November election results stemmed from a failure of Obama and Pelosi to communicate! We heard them just fine. "At the top of the agenda are the economy and federal spending, both prime targets of voter anger during the just-concluded campaign."

Obama Proposes a Pay Freeze for Federal Workers - NYTimes.com

WikiLeak On An Already Sinking Ship | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

"Any U.S. person who cooperated with WikiLeaks has committed a crime and should be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law." Works for me. Why can they find a guy who wants to blow a hole in Oregon, but not one under their own nose? Maybe because they want the leaks out there?

Morning Bell: Just Another WikiLeak On An Already Sinking Ship | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

"These leaks are as dangerous to the U.S. as a terrorist attack," said Arthur Hulnick, an international relations associate professor at Boston University and author of Keeping Us Safe: Secret Intelligence and Homeland Security and Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence for the 21st Century.

"Other countries will be reluctant to share intelligence with us, and diplomats will wonder why the U.S. can't keep secrets," Hulnick -- who served for 28 years in the Central Intelligence Agency -- told TechNewsWorld.

Technology News: Collaboration: Wikileaks Spill: Catalyst for New, More Open Style of Governing?

Thanksgiving leftovers--returning the containers

As I contemplate a counter full of odd shaped and homeless containers with lids sitting on my kitchen counter, I think about two things. 1) How long before I get them back to their own homes, and 2) What did women do about leftovers in the 1940s and 1950s, before the ubiquitous plastic container with a matching lid and plastic-wrap were invented? (I'm old--the first time I saw Saran Wrap was about 1953. I thought it was amazing because it would stick to the dish.) And I'm sure my mother didn't use Reynoldswrap when I was a child.

I think the reason I don't know the answer to #2 is when I was young, we ate holiday dinners at home and because there were six of us, people came to our house. Then later we would sometimes go to grandparents or aunts' homes of the other side of the family and eat some more. No one brought food back to my parents' home that I can remember because we already had a turkey carcass. And no one would dare compete with my mother's pies.

Also, when I started my family, we always went to Indianapolis or Illinois when the children were young, and by the time they were grown and returned occasionally to eat at our house (not very often, I guess they don't like my cooking), the plastic container for purchased food and plastic wrap had been invented. I think the so-called disposable containers came a little later.

Don't send me scare stories about storing or reheating food in plastic. There are all sorts of advice columns on that on the internet, and if I've made it this far by ingesting a few chemicals, I probably can go a few more years. But if you remember taking home leftovers in the "good old days" tell me how our mothers and grandmothers did it.

Why do liberals love Islam?

We probably don't want to know what's at the root of the liberal's problem, but I suspect it's "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

"Liberals deride Christianity and Catholicism in particular for its strict approach towards sexuality, claiming that prohibitions against abortion, contraception, homosexual sex, and premarital sex are simply oppressive forms of prudish patriarchy. But Islam is every bit as traditional on these matters; indeed, Muslim nations are the best allies the Vatican has at the U.N. in fighting against funding for third world family planning initiatives. You can’t reasonably deride one while accepting the other.

Furthermore, Islam goes way beyond Christianity by embracing doctrines that actually are oppressive, demeaning to women, and tyrannical. Throughout the Middle East, there is widespread acceptance of polygamy, of giving adolescent girls in marriage, of female genital mutilation, of harsh criminal sanctions against fornication and homosexuality (a capital offense in some countries), all of which is done in accordance with interpretations of Sharia law that are accepted by significant percentages of the Muslim world. While liberals rightly revile American polygamists, they fail to acknowledge that every major Muslim country (with the exception of Turkey and a few smaller countries) legally provides for this disgusting practice.

(I always find it odd that liberals get outraged at polygamists — it’s the only sexual sin they still acknowledge between of-age, consenting individuals. Homosexual unions can be “marriage,” but not polygamous ones? Since when do liberals care about a strict limitation on the definition of “marriage?” Ultimately, I think it’s because homosexuals vote Democrat and drive Priuses, and polygamists don’t.)

Further, let’s look at how Islam treats religious and other minorities. In Darfur, Sudan, black Africans are being killed in a race- and religion-fueled vendetta of violence by Muslim militias, who have slaughtered more than 200,000 people. In Armenia, tens of thousands of Armenian Christians were slaughtered by the Turkish government at the turn of the 20th century; the Turkish government still won’t even acknowledge that the genocide happened. Sharia makes all sorts of provisions that non-Muslims in Muslim lands have to pay higher taxes and be subject to oppressive policies.

Read more: Liberal love affair with Islam

Reading Burma Shave signs cross country

“THIRTY DAYS - HATH SEPTEMBER – APRIL JUNE – AND THE SPEED OFFENDER” – BURMA SHAVE.

My mother drove her family of four children and her sister west on the Lincoln Highway in 1944 in a 4-door 1939 Ford. For some reason I have no memory of my aunt being in the car, and was quite surprised years later when I was told she too was with us. Then in 1945 Mom drove us back home to Illinois a different route, I think on Rt. 66. So we saw a lot of the country. But I do remember the Burma Shave signs. Can't imagine that I knew how to read at age 4, but maybe I did by age 5 having attended Kindergarten in Alameda, because I remember chiming in as we all read them aloud.

The Power of Choice

Really? Would you feel good about your own freedom as a parent to make choices if you got this letter from the government, sent home with your kids from school? Would you even read it?

And dig that song! What if the kids decide to use their "power of choice" in an unapproved way? I can really see teens getting into this pyramid stuff.

Something's not right in Fairfax County Virginia--is it the government bubble

According to 2009 county data, the median family income in Fairfax County is $122,651. Unemployment is way below the national level--Gosh--Franklin County would kill for their rate (5.4%). Nearly 60% of Fairfax Country residents over 25 have better than a bachelor's degree. A single family home median value is about $550,000. So with all this affluence and education--42% of the students in Fairfax County schools are eligible for free and reduced price meals. What's going on? If this rich county with its abundance of college degrees and government workers can't spring for their kids' lunches, who can? Something is really screwed up in the D.C. suburbs.

Airport 'Security'?

Thomas Sowell growls: "Those who made excuses for all of candidate Barack Obama's long years of alliances with people who expressed their contempt for this country, and when as president he appointed people with a record of antipathy to American interests and values, may finally get it when they feel some stranger's hand in their crotch."

Airport 'Security'? :: The Atlasphere

If the President had a Special Assistant for Reality

Great "what if" story by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, wishful thinking about getting the President out of the Washington bubble with just one more staff member.

If Mr. Obama had a special assistant for reality this week, this is how their dialogue might have gone over the anti-TSA uprising.

President: This thing is all ginned up, isn't it? Right-wing websites fanned it. Then the mainstream media jumped in to display their phony populist street cred. Right?

Special Assistant for Reality: No, Mr. President, it was more spontaneous. Websites can't fan fires that aren't there. This is like the town hall uprisings of summer 2009. In the past month, citizens took videos at airports the same way town hall protesters made videos there, and put them on YouTube. The more pictures of pat-downs people saw, the more they opposed them.

President: What's the essence of the opposition?

SAR: Sir, Americans don't like it when strangers touch their private parts. Especially when the strangers are in government uniforms and say they're here to help.

President: Is it that we didn't roll it out right? We made a mistake in not telling people in advance we were changing the procedure.

SAR: Um, no, Mr. President. If you'd told them in advance, they would have rebelled sooner.

President: We should have pointed out not everyone goes through the new machines, and only a minority get patted down.

SAR: Mr. President, if you'd told people, "Hello, there's only 1 chance in 3 you'll be molested at the airport today" most people wouldn't think, "Oh good, I like those odds."

President: But the polls are with me. People support the screenings.

SAR: At the moment, according to some. But most Americans don't fly frequently, and the protocols are new. As time passes, support will go steadily down.

President: I've noted with sensitivity that I'm aware all this is a real inconvenience.

SAR: It's not an inconvenience, it's a humiliation. In the new machine, and in the pat-downs, citizens are told to spread their feet and put their hands in the air. It's an attitude of submission—the same one the cops make the perps assume on "America's Most Wanted." Then, while you stand there in public in the attitude of submission, strangers touch intimate areas of your body. It's a violation of privacy. It leaves people feeling reduced. It's like society has decided you're a meat sack and not a soul. Humans have a natural, untaught understanding of the apartness of their bodies, and they don't like it when their space is violated. They recoil, and protest.

President: But you can have the pat-downs done in private.

SAR: Mr. President, you don't know this, but when you ask for that, a lot of TSA people get pretty passive-aggressive. They get Bureaucratic Dead Face and start barking, "I need a supervisor! Private pat-down!" And everyone looks, and the line slows down, and you start to feel like you're putting everyone out. You wait and wait, and finally they get another TSA person, and they take you into the little room and it's embarrassing, and you start to realize you're going to miss your plane. It's then that you realize: all this is how they discourage private pat-downs.

President: I've wondered if this general feeling of discomfort might be related to a certain Puritan strain within American thinking—a kind of horror at the body that, melded with, say, old Catholic teaching, not to be pejorative, might make for a pretty combustible cultural cocktail. This heightened consciousness of the body might suggest an element of physical shame we hadn't taken into account.

SAR: Mr. President, the rebellion isn't shame-based, it's John Wayne-based.

President: I don't follow.

Follow the rest of the story, obviously a fantasy, but telling, none the less, with a great ending.

Ms. Noonan you may remember was one of George H.W. Bush's speech writers, but fell from grace during the G.W. Bush era, and lost her credibility with me when she when all gushy over candidate Obama's phony speech pattern and good looks. The lefties didn't like her for what they saw as her lame excuses for Bush (really weak, no matter which side you took), so I guess she just can't win. She's slowly, slowly been crawling her way back from her Obama-gusher mistakes of the campaign.

Decision Points--Enhanced interrogation

On page 168, George W. Bush in Decision Points gets around to "enhanced interrogation," aka torture for information. You will call it what you want depending on whether you hate or like George Bush, on whether you thought he was the original Satan/Hitler for taking us into Iraq and Afghanistan or whether he was keeping us safe after 9/11.

He writes, "The FBI began questioning Zubaydah [associate of bin Laden who had run a camp which trained the 9/11 hijackers], who had clearly been trained on how to resist interrogation. . . [He] was our best lead to avoid another catastrophic attack. . . [Looking at a list of options Bush was presented] George [Tenet] assured me all interrogations would be performed by experienced intelligence professionals who had undergone extensive training. . . There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them."

This is something that puzzles me every time a government official, from Eric Holder who seems like a shriveled wimp to Arnold Schwarzenegger with his massive body and Austrian accent, discusses a tricky decision. No government official can know everything about everything and they depend on lawyers to tell them what is legal. Lawyers don't agree, and apparently neither does case law, massive regulations or 2000 page laws passed by Congressmen who don't even read them.

So if a President is told plan A is legal, it is used, and "Zubaydah revealed large amounts of information on al Qaeda's structure and operations," and that information is in turn available to the next President who as a candidate thought and spoke ill of his predecessor, but continues to use and act on that information, which guy is Satan/Hitler, the guy who had to make the decision and did keep the country safe, or the one who tries to float above it all and not get his hands soiled?

Doctors say Medicare cuts forcing them to shift away from elderly

For all you boomers who joyfully and expectantly voted for Obama. Here's your thanks.

Doctors say Medicare cuts forcing them to shift away from elderly

But, it's not all his fault, you know. Congress has been adding mandates and expanded coverage for years--at some point, the piper had to be paid. This is the way socialized medicine works. It sounds fabulous until you have to pay for it. Or make cuts.

Volga Germans--The Mennonites

One of the languages of the German Mennonites of Russia is Plattdeutsch, also called Low-German . I first came across this story reading the Wycliffe Bible translators page about translating scripture for Germans from Kazakhstan resettled in Germany, who didn't know German. Most of us scattered around the world who have German roots trace back to pre-Germany days--i.e. there was no country known as Germany when my ancestors arrived in the United States. In fact, there was no United States in the 1720s, and they'd all pledged loyalty to the King of England. My Mennonite roots go back to Hannah, the brave widow of Hans Wenger, a weaver of Bern, Switzerland, who with the help of friends and family, emigrated to American for religious freedom in 1749.

Here is an account of the wanderings of the Mennonites who ended up in Russia. "The Mennonites occupy a special place among the Germans [of Siberia]. When the Mennonites left the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and resettled in Prussia, they did not see themselves as sharing a common origin. Among them were people of Flemish, Dutch, Frisian, and Lower Saxon ancestry. Two basic types of speech had been maintained by the Mennonites— molochnenskii and khortintskii. However, they took as a common language a Low German dialect (Plattdeutsch). As a result of their religious isolation, the Mennonites did not mix with the local peoples and thus maintained their traditional customs. At times they joined their different confessional groups into one ethno confessional unit. During and since the resettlement the Mennonites have been officially registered as Germans; most scholars think of the Mennonites as Germans. The Siberian Mennonites themselves trace their ancestry to Germans, although they also emphasize their Dutch origins."

Siberian Mennonites extend welcome to visiting Americans


Freedom has done what the Soviet Communists couldn't: "In the Germanic language family, Plautdiitsch claims a special place. Its long isolation from other German dialects and its close contacts have given it a specific character, which to some extent can be compared to that of Yiddish. The Plautdiitsch language, the sole descendant from the many West Prussian Low German dialects once spoken in the Weichsel delta area, is now spoken by Mennonites in many countries and has partly taken over the religious factor as the main identity marker. It is a pity that a language, that managed to survive centuries of isolation and many years of prohibiti­on, should now disappear where it has long had its most speakers - in Siberia. The increasing emigration to Germa­ny has left many Mennonite villages russified more than decades of Soviet Russification policy could accomplish. The Plautdiitsch speakers who choose to stay find it more and more difficult to provide their children with a Plautdi­itsch speaking environment, and in the long run it must be feared the language will lose much ground to Russian. In Germany, the children of Russian Mennonite immigrants will almost certainly only have passive knowledge of Plautdi­itsch.

One can only hope the language will survive in North America and in the isolated colonies in South America, where a revival can be observed." From the article "Plautdietsch, a Germanic language related to Dutch and Frisian, spoken in Siberia"

Canada has a Plattdeutsch radio station. You can listen here--pod cast. I listened to a poem in Plattdeutsch from Russia, and the rhythm was definitely Russian/Slavic; this sounds English.