Surly's Soap Box

Which came first: Crime or Liberals? Poverty and Liberals? Murder and Liberals?

Well, obviously crime, murder, and poverty came first. But who locks people into a downward spiral with false promises of help and sooths them by taking away their responsibility and blessing them with victimhood? The Liberals.

Take New Orleans. Morally and Politically a Liberal stronghold for decades. A population that is largely released from taking responsibility for their own actions. After all, when talking about a rash of recent murders, some brainiac made this connection:

"Unfortunately, the city of New Orleans is the victim of 40 or 50 years of neglect as it relates to the education system, as it relates to literacy," Riley said at a news conference Saturday. "Obviously, there has been something that is feeding the mentality of our criminals that allows them to be brazen and vicious, and allows them to kill four and five people at a time."

Why yes! Illiteracy caused these criminals to go out and gun people down! They obviously didn't read the directions and warnings on the box the gun came in. They didn't understand that the hot lead propelled at speeds above that of sound would kill somebody because they couldn't read.

My friends, Liberals never neglect the educational system. They are always dumping money into it. The problem is, they don't actually teach anything of value. They focus on things like self esteem and end up with a bunch of criminals that really feel good about themselves. If they could read, they wouldn't supply the kids with books that actually teach them anything because they would have a new format by which to pump their brains full of garbage.

The Liberals don't want to acknowledge that their decades of rule and social experimentation have failed. Their only answer is that there is a pit, and money is the only thing that can fill it.


New Orleans, Liberals

Apparently he used three substances banned by the French: Tooth Paste, Deodorant, and Shampoo!

Well, he tested high in testosterone, something else the Socialist French don't want men using.



Landis

As I posted before, I believe that amusement parks are communist centers for social engineering and culling out the weak from the strong.

Here is further proof.

Coleman's father cited for lewd conduct

Come on! I'm sure that Al set Norm Senior up. 81 and having sex in a car outside a pizza joint? It had to be a set up!

"The 81-year-old father of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman was cited for lewd conduct and indecent exposure Tuesday for allegedly having sex in a vehicle with a 38-year-old woman, according to police reports.

Police responded to a call early Tuesday evening and arrested Norman Bertram Coleman Sr. and the woman, Patrizia M. Schrag of St. Paul, outside a pizza joint on the eastern edge of downtown.

Sen. Coleman issued a statement this afternoon that said:

"I love my father dearly. I do not condone his actions or behavior, and I am deeply disturbed by what I have learned. He clearly has some issues that need to be dealt with, and I will encourage him to seek the necessary help."

The elder Coleman was a fixture on the campaign trail four years ago when Coleman defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale after Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash.

Sen. Coleman often held up his father as a hero, a veteran of the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. "He's the smartest man I know," the senator said in 2002."

Pretty light posting this last week, possibly going on into the next.

I've been studying a lot of material on building community and relationship in the church, and it's cutting into my blogging time.

Snarky comments and witty observations will resume soon.

Bandanna: Check!

Fingerless Motorcycle Gloves: Check!

Sleeveless Harley T-Shirt: Check!

Pack O' Heaters: Check!

Waiting for a bus out on Olsen Memorial Highway at 10:00 in the morning because you don't have a job or a license: Check!

I ran across this via Kennedy Vs. The Machine: 101 Reasons for Change.

Now, I was just browsing through, not really paying much attention, just seeing how many reasons were actually posted when I came upon these entries:

"#20: "I have 55,000 reasons to change Washington, after serving in AmeriCorps two years my loans from 4 years of college will be over $55,000." Paul C. Grove City, MN"

Paul, Paul, Paul. Comrade Paul: You sniveling, whining, commie bastard. I wish you had the male body parts to put your last name out there so I could call you and personally inform you of some facts, the most obvious that you didn't learn anything in college other than to be a sponge off of society. Must have some sort of liberal arts major and spent your time in the Americorps proping up a communist dictator or trying to over throw a democracy somewhere.

You went to college so you could learn a skill or trade that will help you get a job and make money. You obviously were interested in moving beyond McDonald's. After all, college grads tend to make much better money that the folks who do the Fast Food thing. So who benefits from your education, Comrade? Why, you do, you ignorant schmuck.

So why do you expect other to pay for your education when you are the one who is going to benefit from it.

You should have taken an economics class, and Marxism doesn't count.

Commies,
Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Politics,

Well, I didn't have a heart attack. I had 2/3rds of a heart attack. Or a near heart attack. Best explanation I got was that I got to the hospital in time and the nitroglycerin stopped whatever was going on. After extensive testing, they determined that my heart is in good shape, my cholesterol and triglycerides where all good. Other than my deadly high blood pressure, my (decreasing) girth, and the lump on my noggin, I'm pretty healthy. In fact, healthier than I ought to be.

Just a hint: Clutching your chest while mowing the lawn is not a good way to motivate your wife, who is totally stressed about your health as it is, to get you a beer. Unless you want it delivered at 80 mph. Fortunately, it was cold, so I could press it on the goose egg while waiting for the carbonation to settle down before opening.


Thanks for your prayers and good thoughts.

This is RICH with irony: Water needs may soon hamper ethanol plants.

Think about it: The anti-oil drilling, hybrid driving, no blood for oil, socialist are going to be butting heads with the bicycle riding, new home burning, vegan environmentalist anarchists over ground water concerns.

This might be one were we of the center right might be able just sit back, have an adult beverage, and watch. And for further irony, I think I'll be drinking Skakers Vodka.



H/T: King Bananian


Ethanol

And we're not talking State Fair here. I've been a proponent of the Fair Tax for years, and I'm glad to hear it's making head way in congress. What is the Fair Tax?

The FairTax is a bill that would repeal all taxes on income - no more corporate income tax, no personal income tax, no payroll taxes, no self employment tax - no gift tax, estate tax, capital gains tax or alternative minimum tax. Any tax that is pegged to income would be gone, as would the IRS. We would replace that with a consumption tax - a tax of retail sales on personal consumption at final purchase of new goods and services.

Currently, the average taxpayer gives the government 33 cents of every dollar they earn. In our system, they would give the government 23 cents of every dollar they spend. Then we would provide to every household - every household - a cash distribution at the beginning of every month that would totally untax them up to poverty-level spending.

More here.

H/T to Psycmeistr.


Fair Tax

Have you noticed how many people are dropping dead at Disney lately? Well, okay, there's been two in the last 13 months. But I wonder...perhaps the rides at Disney are part of some one-world-government, Darwinian-survival-of-the-fittest plot to weed out the weak and stupid from our society?

There are things we have to investigate:

Who built the rides? Was it Haliburton?

Who designed the rides?

Who paid for the rides? Was it the Bush/Nazi Money Laundering /Occult connection.

Are they actually using the Swift money tracking program and domestic surveillance program to keep monitor the health and spending habits of people who have walked through the gates and survived?

Be worried, people. Some day we may all be rounded up and herded through Disney parks to be sorted out for some cruel purpose, like alien invasion.

Disney, Darwin, Bush, Nazi, Conspiracy

Why do pacifist organizations, particularly "ECAPC" tend to thrive in the most powerful nations?

How come they spend their time protesting the most powerful nations, especially the U.S., where their freedoms are protected?

Why do they refuse to acknowledge history: Reagan's military build up bankrupted the Soviet Union, bringing about the colaspe of communism?

Speaking of history, why do they protest Israel? Don't they know the Palestinians have been blowing themselves up since they learned how to fasten explosives to their bodies? Since the 1880's!

Why do they trash the soldiers who had to kill people to rescue their 'peacemaker teams' from the hands of terrorist?

And how about when Jesus trashed the money changers and in Luke 22 told the disciples get a sword if they didn't have one?

I have been reading a lot about building church community lately, and find myself intrigued by the community life of the Anabaptist, the Mennonites, and such groups. I appreciate their commitment to simplicity and service. Their passion for Christ encourages me to dig deeper. But the stumbling block for me is that there seems to be a great hypocrisy at work here.

Isn't it hypocritical to rally against a government and nation that by it's might and willingness to go to war protects their religious freedom and their right to protest?

Isn't it hypcritical to stand with the Islamo-Fascist who torture and kill their own people and when the heat get on they run back to the safety of the powerful nations that allow them to exist?

Isn't it hypocritical that many of these groups came to the United States because they would have have freedom to practice their faith here, then they spend their time trying to bring us down?

It's kind of like moving next to a hog farm then complaining about the smell.

Violence and Peace live in tension to one and other. Pacifism, true pacifism, will only work when everyone is a pacifist. In this world, we need the people who are willing to go out and be violent in order to maintain and pave a way for peace. Every Soldiers dream is to come home to a peaceful place.

Pacifism

Yesterday, while I was lying in a hospital bed in the cardio unit at Abbott Northwestern, they wheeled an old man down the hall who was definitely near the end..."WHAT? YOU WERE IN THE HOSPITAL?"

Errr...yeah. I was having chest pains this week end, and Monday morning I started having some of the more advanced symptoms of a heart attack like shortness of breath and such. In light of my other medical issues of late, I decided not to be a hero and went to the hospital.

They hooked me up to all types of monitors, took lots of blood, gave me aspirin and nitroglycerin, and endlessly interrogated me about my health issues, my families health issues, and so on. After a couple rounds of the nitro, the pains went away.

I ended up having 2 of the 3 major indicators of a heart attack. Something about the enzymes in my blood and physical symptoms. I'm not quite sure were that leaves me, but today I go back in for further testing to see if there is any damage to my heart.

As far as prospective goes, a year ago I would have tried to tough something like this out. I won't know for a few days what happened, but I do know what could have happened: The old man I was writing about in the first paragraph tried to tough it out. What good is it for me to be 'macho' and end up...well, dead.

First off, Learned Foot does indeed own a chimney starter. It's also the only thing he has in his back yard that hasn't been used to launch fireworks.

And there were lots of fireworks. Loud screaming things. Two stage sparkly things. Things with little parachutes that gently float through the sky and land on the neighbors roof tops.

Then there were the loud boomy things that you drop down the sewer that causes shock waves through out the community.

We only had one instance when we did the duck and cover:

Learned Foot and Bill had this thing where they put a boat load of bottle rockets into a tube, then stuff in a sparkler to light them all off at the same time. They called it the "Tongue of Fire".

Well...I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it was the brats. Maybe the long day golfing in the sun. Maybe the beer... Definitely the beer. Anyway, LF shoves the lit sparkler into the bundle o' fireworks and some of them go off. Not all of them; some of them. As far as the rest of them, the wooden stabilizing sticks start on fire, causing some of them to readjust their trajectory to anything other than 'up'. Some just dropped to the ground. Then, the burning sticks lit the fuses and you had bottle rockets flying every where.

A good time was had by all.


The golf outing was a blast. I did horribly, and if it hadn't been for my team mates (The Surly Residual Forces of the Night) Triple A and The Night Writer, I wouldn't have had as good of a time as I did.

Of course, 18 holes is a lot of golf. Especially when you haven't golfed much in the last, oh, decade. By the 16th hole all I was interested in was being done. Let me put it this way: I'd have to shave twenty points off my game in order to just suck.

Others who participated were Team Comment Trolls: Rick S. and his non blogging team mates Mike G. and Nate B., Mark Yost and non blogging Bogus Doug (who I believe rescued me from the cellar), Learned Foot and Nihilist in Short Pants.

Hopefully I'll get some practice before next years event.

Update:The Night Writer has this to say about the event.
Triple-A has this.

Tomorrow 12 brave men set off to inaugurate what will obviously become a time honored tradition: The MILF. I say inaugurate because it doesn't become an 'annual' event until the second year, otherwise it was just some guys getting together and golfing.

Adult beverages will be drank.

Cigars will be puffed upon.

Undoubtedly, a curse word or two will be spoken.

And Learned Foot, who actually endorsed using ***cough*** lighter ***choke*** fluid and then back pedaled faster than John Kerry being confronted on his voting record, will be using a charcoal chimney to start the coals to grill up various sausages. Remember, a couple pieces of news paper is all you need. But what if you read your paper online? Well, print out a couple of pages then burn it.

A good time should be had by all, and some money raised for a good cause: Soldiers Angles.

Update:In case anyone was wondering, I have golfed more than twice. The problem is that I've only golfed twice in the last eight years. Just to clarify.

Hmmm...

1: Put together sermon for Sunday.
2: Learn how to golf.

I was talking to my wife about golfing, seeing that I am participating in the prestigious 2nd Annual Millard Fillmore KAR-Nation Open Championship Golf Outing Classic, and she asked me if I actually knew how to golf.


Well, yeah! I know how to golf. I used to do it all the time. To which she reminded me that I had only golfed twice since we met, and that was, well, err...8 years ago.

Which proves that marriage is bad for your golf game.

Anyway, I go looking for my clubs...not good.

Do you think I have any golfing shoes? No where to be found.

Truly, a sad day.

Hopefully, I'll have a chance to hit through a bucket of balls yet this week. But probably not. See number 1 on the list.

But I could have pansied out. I could have concocted some excuse, like having to work, or having a sermon to write, or having scotch to drink, but no. I will be there! I will give it my best try. I will endure the humiliation. And I hope it's a best ball tournament.

Update:

The Israeli's know how to deal with governments that support terror:

From Fox & Forkum.


From Captain Ed

Via Drudge

People don't seem tor realize that the Israelis are the only ones in the middle east that has actually done anything for the Palestinians. Syria keeps them in camps. Egypt expelled them. Everyone else has kept chases them away. Israel let them have a government of their own.

People forget that the Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon told the Palestinians that they were going to wipe out the Jews, chase them into the sea, and that they, the Pali's, were to flee the coming war. They did. In droves. They totally abandon their homes, shops and fields. After the Israeli's handed the combined Arab forces their backsides, the Arabs abandoned the Palestinians. Jordan is the only country that offered then citizenship. The rest use them as tools against Israel and the US.



Israel, Middle East