Hey, you know who’s REALLY to blame for this #VAScandal, don’t you? Don’t you?!?

At this point, the Democrats have transformed the Koch Brothers into some devilish amalgamation of Emmanuel Goldstein, Keyser Söze, and Godzilla.

Which is handy, actually, since they can now be blamed for anything everything.

Why do I mention this? Well, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, VA Secretary Shinseki has (finally) resigned his post. The only surprise about this “entirely political soap opera”  is that the resignation/firing/whatever didn’t happen already (via @Doc_0):

“…Contrary to Obama’s pitiful spin attempts, there is no question that these awful deeds took place at VA clinics.  Reports about those doctored wait lists have been in the hands of top officials since last year.

Endangered Democrats in purple and red states only started yelling for Shinseki’s scalp when they performed a political calculation and realized the public was now fully engaged and furious…” 

It’s a horrifying situation highlighting just some of the built-in (and entirely predictable) problems with government-run healthcare. Whether Shinseki was complicit with the problem, or utterly ignorant of it, doesn’t really matter. One is just as bad as the other if you’re the one in charge. Either way, he had to go.

But don’t tell that to Bernie Sanders. No, no, no, he’s got the REAL culprit in all of this nailed dead-to-rights:

Random Acts Of Journalism At NPR

When you’ve lost NPR, …..

cosmoscon

For the past few days NPR has run 3 separate stories on Obamacare and all of them have clearly shown the wake of destruction that this massive takeover of healthcare has left.

The first story was about a Cleveland, Ohio bar owner who is frustrated with his hike in insurance costs.

“They just seemed to keep going up every year,” he says. “One year we got a 38 percent increase; another year we got 11. One year we got 3.”

“This year, under the Affordable Care Act, he saw another hike — this one about 20 percent.”

“It just seems odd that we get such a drastic price increase when nothing has really changed with us as far as our employees and health issues,” he says.

“I always thought that health reform was needed of some type,” he says. “It just seems like … they botched it.”

The next day…

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Stop with all the %@!*#&^! Warnings, would ya’??!?

We’re being warned to death.

Product warnings. Tool Warnings. Ride Warnings. Viewer Warnings. Warnings on everything from coffee to cough drops, and from matches to mattresses. Warnings in every single set of instructions for anything we’ve ever bought, and ever WILL buy. Warnings at work, Warnings at home, and Warnings the entirety of our commute between.

“Warning: there’s another Warning ahead! 

You have been Warned…”

Yet now, even as we are several orders of magnitude past merely being replete with warnings, the state of California wants to drop still another warning into our lives. Any guesses what new “danger” has been uncovered by our duly-elected Wizards of Smart, and which now (naturally) requires a warning label to protect us from its fearsome wrath?

Give up?

It’s SODA.

Yes, the drink.

As in “Soda Pop”.

I’m old enough to remember when “outing” our #CIA agents’ identities was a BAD thing…

If you’re not entirely sure as to what I’m referring with my headline, here you go:

“White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan”

(via the Washington Post) – “…The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops…” 

Whoopsie!

Considering the absolute dearth of coverage this has received thus far, you could be tempted to believe that it must be no big deal.

And of course, you’d be wrong:

(VIDEO) – Memorial Day Tribute

The video below is still the best, most stirring Memorial Day Tribute I’ve ever found.

May God Bless our brave military men and women, too many of whom have sacrificed EVERYTHING to protect our freedom. They are the reason we can spend today cooking hot dogs and hamburgers with our family.

Existential conversations with my three-year-old

Lucy with Husky the dog, her current inseparable companion

Lucy still spends much of her time either being an animal (favorites right now: wolf cub, tiger or puppy) or talking to her army of stuffed animals. But more and more she also takes time to ponder her own history.  Many of her sentences begin, “When I was little…” or “When I was a baby…”.

Since I will sometimes tell her a story from my own childhood, she recently was trying to grasp how she fit into that scenario: “When you were a little girl, did you know me?”  No, Lucy, when I was a little girl, you were not alive yet. Your daddy was not alive yet.

(silence for a moment)

“When you were a little girl, I was pretendin’ to be dead?!”

What is the point of Gun Registration?

Recently, a federal judge upheld a law in Washington, D.C. requiring guns be registered every three years (among other things). Taken in conjunction with Connecticut’s “assault weapons” registration law which just went into effect January 1st, they portend ill-tidings for both the Second Amendment and our country itself.

Still, you might ask:  “What IS the problem with registration”? And if you did, I’d answer, “How much do you know about the Supreme Court decision entitled U.S. v. Haynes – 1968“?

Clayton Cramer wrote a fascinating article on the subject that I read at Firearms and Liberty.  His summary of the case is as follows:

“In Haynes v. U.S. (1968), a Miles Edward Haynes appealed his conviction for unlawful possession of an unregistered short-barreled shotgun. 

His argument was ingenious:

Why the Redskins’ name should be left up to… the Redskins

UPDATE – June 18, 2014: ***[In light of the 50 Senate Democrats who recently sent a letter to the National Football League and demanded the Washington Redskins football team change its name, as well as the U.S. Patent Office having just cancelled the Washington Redskins’ trademark registration (by calling the team’s name “disparaging”), we’ve updated the post below accordingly…]***

The feelings that a sports team’s fans have about their team’s nickname/logo are incredibly strong, maybe more so today than even in years past. In the old days and in every sport, plenty of athletes would spend their entire careers with one team, whereas that’s incredibly rare now. So when we’re rooting for a team, it may consist of almost entirely new personnel from one year to the next.

THIS makes the team nickname one of the only consistent aspects with which to identify. We end up rooting for an icon and an image, whether it’s a Giant, a Viking, a Bruin, or a King.

And that’s why this brouhaha over the Washington Redskins’ nickname has folks so thoroughly steamed.