Quantities are limited ...

Just in time for Christmas for the Favre jock sniffer in your life (hint, hint Mrs. Fischer).

Just between you, me and Vincent T., only a crucifix in urine may be more sacrilegious than this.

Drive-thru ettiquette

The other day I went through a McDonald's drive-thru to pick up lunch. It was one of the two lane drive-thru's, and things moved very quickly - left, right, left, right ...

Finally I get up to the board where I can pick out my Dollar Menu lunch. Left, right, left, right, right ... oops.

"Excuse me," I yelled in the speaker, "you missed my turn." No answer, as the woman in the right lane is having her order taken.

What do I do now? I can think of four main choices.

1. Wait until they finally decide to take my order.
2. Pull in front of the woman and give my order at Window 1.
3. Pull in front of the woman, then pull out of line and leave.
   
4. Pull in front of the woman, pay for and take her order, and hopefully foul up the orders of the next half dozen cars.

Take the poll, sidebar right.

UPDATE:

Poll results are here.

The Curse of Brett Favre

Until today, I have been a naysayer of those criticizing Ted Thompson's decision to trade Brett Favre to the New York Jets for a 2009 draft pick. By my logic, the drop-off in quarterback quality with Aaron Rogers was not exceptional and the Packers will end up with a potential future star with that high draft pick from the Jets. I analogize the trade to getting something for a used car that would otherwise not be driven again.

I have also been hard on Favre jock-sniffers Kevin Fischer and Huckleberry Dumbell. They are focused on the quarterback position where statistically Favre and Rogers have been a toss-up, 94.1 to 90.5 QB Ratings following last Monday night's fiasco in New Orleans. The reality is that Aaron Rogers is not losing any more games for the Packers than Favre normally did. It has been the Packers defense this year that is losing games. Fischer's and Dumbell's comparisons to the 2007 Packers also ignore the fact that the team was incredibly lucky with injuries last year.

I've been of the same mind as Jib, who said this week.

1. Think back on how many shootouts the Packers won with Brett over the years. Having trouble coming up with more than a few, aren't you? That's because the ultimate gunslinger wasn't actually all that good in shootouts. He was undisciplined and made a ton of errors when games seemed to be spinning out of control. Like you, I was hoping for Favre-like big plays in the second half from Rodgers. Unfortunately, even Favre did not make those plays very often in games like last night. He was more prone to toss 5 interceptions in games like last night.

2. You all are right. The Packers do miss the pass rush that Brett brought last year. And he was a stout run stopper, too.

3. You all are right. The Packers do miss the blanket-like pass coverage Brett brought to the secondary of this team.

But earlier today I learned of The Curse of Bobby Lane. The parallels are troubling.

In 1958, after leading the Lions to 3 NFL Championships and providing Detroit nearly decade of Hall of Fame play, the Lions traded Bobby Layne. Bobby was injured during the last championship season and the Lions thought he was through and wanted to get what they could for him. According to Legend, as he was leaving for Pittsburgh Bobby said that Detroit "would not win for 50 years".

For nearly 50 years the Lions have searched for answers and each time they think they have one, it gets foiled and they have to start from scratch all over again. The team is constantly in a rebuilding state with an ever constant Quarterback controversy (Ala Munson/Landry, Peete/Ware, or Harrington/Garcia).

And.

Upon his retirement in 1962, Bobby held the NFL record for most career pass attempts, completions, passing yardage, and touchdown passes (since broken). However, it was his leadership and will to win that, to this day, separate Bobby Layne from his quarterback contemporaries. He willed three average Detroit Lions teams to championships in 1952, 1953, and 1957.

Layne and Favre were cast in the same mold.

"Bobby Layne never lost a game. Time just ran out. Nobody hated to lose more than Bobby."
-- Doak Walker

How many time has that been said of Favre?

I now understand that it is not the quality of the quarterback's play that is losing games this year. It is the bad mojo that the Packers now carry from Thompson's treatment of Favre. The lesson of the Lion's treatment of Bobby Layne bodes ill for the Packers chances of success for decades.

How long until we can add the Favre Curse to this list of famous sports curses?

Cross posted at The Curse of Brett Favre blog.

I do like I Don't Like Mondays

I got here in a roundabout way. Dad29 linked to this Hugh Laurie YouTube song, which led me to Laurie playing the opening of I Don't Like Mondays, and then to Bob Geldof's version. A New Wave classic.

More scratch

After months of substandard writing, I have pulled my blog back up to it's rightful Genius Level. It must have something to do with the increased non-Obama subject matter.

Movie Reviews

For those unable to comprehend this highest level of discourse, please click here.

Scratch this

This recipe for Baked Cornbread Casserole has become a Thanksgiving staple in my home. If you are looking for something different and easy this year give it a try.

INGREDIENTS
1/4 pound butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten
1 (15 ounce) can whole kernel corn, drained
1 (15 ounce) can creamed corn
1 (12 ounce) package corn bread mix
1/2 cup sour cream
2 TBSP Raw sugar
1 (4 ounce) can diced green chiles or jalepenos (optional)
1 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese (optional)
1/4 cup crumbled cooked bacon (optional)

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a mixing bowl, fold all ingredients together. Pour into a 2 quart casserole dish. Bake for 45 minutes.

Click here for the easy wheelchair accessible recipe instructions.

Barack Obama - Economic Ignoramus

In contemplating Barack Obama's possible actions to address the economy there is one thing that he could immediately do to reassure and strengthen our financial markets. If he made a statement that the Obama Administration will make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, it would provide significant economic stimulus. Tom Blumer wrote on the matter of Obama making the tax cuts permanent and abandoning his plans to destroy domestic oil production.

If Obama doesn’t currently signal and then carry through on forgetting about his punitive tax plans and/or foolishly locks up fuel resources, the fuel-price stimulus just noted will go away. Any other so-called stimulus coming out of Washington won’t be of much ongoing value to the long-term health of the overall economy. If fuel prices will head back up, or if Obama’s campaign tax promises are carried out, businessmen and entrepreneurs will continue to play it close to the vest by avoiding hiring and capital investment.

The new president and his party have worked tirelessly to talk down, and take down, the economy for years. They finally succeeded doing so sometime in June, creating the current POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy — soon to be known, barring an unlikely fourth quarter turnaround, as the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Recession. Unlike them, I want the US to prosper no matter who’s in charge. Following the suggestions just outlined will bring prosperity back.

I believe, however, that Obama will continue with his plans to further manipulate the tax code to achieve his idea of redistributive tax nirvana. It is telling to watch Obama respond to Charlie Gibson after Gibson carefully explains how our economy previously responded to reduced capital gains tax rates by collecting a greater amount of total taxes.



Obama does not even acknowledge what Gibson explained for almost one minute. He instead goes directly to talking about fairness, punitive measures against hedge fund managers, and how he needs to raise capital gains tax rates to finance health care and other giveaways. Gibson and the compliant media never challenged Obama on this change of subject or pointed out his economic ignorance. It is crystal clear that Mr. Obama does not understand basic economic theory or the demonstrated effect of the Laffer Curve for over a quarter century.

This was not an isolated incident, as Obama reinforces the fact that he is economically ignorant in the famous dialog with Joe the Plumber.



"Spread the wealth around" is his response to Joe, showing that he believes that economics is a zero-sum game. He thinks he can simply take "wealth" (actually meaning income) from those earning more and give it to those earning little or nothing without affecting the economy or reducing the overall amount of taxes collected. For our next President, it is all about punishing those that do well and rewarding those who do not try.

The question that should have been asked by Charlie or by Joe was, "Mr. Obama, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that when taxes are raised on the affluent, not only do they end up with less money, but the government also receives less taxes to spread to the needy and the number of needy also increases. With these facts in mind, how is raising taxes on the affluent fair to anyone?"

This type of economic ignorance is not unusual for many who major in the arts or letters when in college. These individuals gravitate to these soft majors in part because they have little or no aptitude for math and science. Obama fits this profile, which could be one more reason he will not release his college transcripts. More evidence ...



This Obama gaffe was blamed on ad libbing or poor preparation. But I think his staff prepared him well with this talking point, but his brain could not process math and economics which led to his awful verbal stumble.

I worry that despite have a large group of informed economic advisers, many coming from Bill Clinton's pro-growth administration, Barack Obama will be unable to mentally process their arguments. He will govern based on his feelings, which may be appropriate for preschoolers, but is dangerous for an adult in the office of the President.

Global warming's cause discovered - Visual Evidence

Anthony Watts created this graphic which shows the adjustments made to the U.S. temperature record between 1999 and 2008 by James Hansen's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. (Click the graphic to see it in it's entirety. The formatting does not cooperate with Blogger).



The philosophy at GISS appears to be: When the climate data does not cooperate, change it.

I can conceive of no reason to accept any information provided by the zealots at GISS at face value. The philosophy at Headless Blogger is: When in doubt, throw it out.

Global warming's cause discovered

On Monday you may have read about NASA's James Hansen declaring that October 2008 was the hottest October on record. The Climate Skeptic blog had this report.

For October, the GISS metric is showing the hottest October on record, nearly 0.8C hotter than it was 40 years ago in 1978. However, the satellites are showing no such thing, showing a much cooler October, and a far smaller warming trend over the last 40 years.

So which is right? Well, the situation is not helped by the fact that the GISS metric is run by James Hansen, considered by skeptics to be a leading alarmist, and the UAH is run by John Christy, considered by alarmists to be an arch-skeptic. The media generally uses the GISS data, so expect stories in the next day or so trumpeting "Hottest October Ever," which the Obama administration will wave around as justification for massive economic interventions. But by satellite it will only be the 10th or so hottest in the last 30, and probably cooler than most other readings this century.

That graphic at the top of the page shows the reason for the high GISS readings. A large area of northern Asia reported an average measured temperature for October that was 13.7 degrees Celsius warmer than normal.

Putting that into words that you and I can understand, a North America-sized area across Northern Asia was 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for the month of October. I guess that would account for the new record high month. Twenty-five degrees warmer ... I'm surprised I didn't read about that in the news.

Eureka!

A blogger looking through NASA's dataset discovered an error. For the large area with the record high temperatures, September's temperatures were erroneously repeated for October. Again, putting it in terms that you and I can understand, NASA's vaunted Quality Assurance Program could not find this error, but some guy eating Pop Tarts in his pajamas at home did.

Even more amazing is that a huge brown 25 degree stain on the global temperature map was published by NASA without raising one single eyebrow within the buracracy.

From this it is easy to discern the cause of Global Warming. It is NASA's Dr. James Hansen fudging his data to achieve the results he needs to justify his abysmal climate model.

Aussie blogger Andrew Bolt may have put it best.

The Goddard Institute of Space Studies of warming extremist James Hansen has released its latest surface temperature data - and, oh my god, the recent cooling has suddenly ended.

Yes, it shows a huge upward spike for October - one of the biggest monthly anomalies ever recorded. And when you check closely, you will find that ... September was the hottest October ever recorded.

The measure of a man

Eugene Allen started work at the White House in 1952, retiring as a butler in 1986. In all that time he never missed a day of work, with the exception of a state dinner with Helmut Kohl that Nancy Reagan would not let him work.

First lady Nancy Reagan came looking for him in the kitchen one day. She wanted to remind him about the upcoming dinner for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He told her he was well ahead in the planning and had already picked out the china. But she told him he would not be working that night.

"She said, 'You and Helene are coming to the state dinner as guests of President Reagan and myself.' I'm telling you! I believe I'm the only butler to get invited to a state dinner."

Husbands and wives don't sit together at these events, and Helene was nervous about trying to make small talk with world leaders. "And my son says, 'Mama, just talk about your high school. They won't know the difference.'

"The senators were all talking about the colleges and universities that they went to," she says." I was doing as much talking as they were.

Mr. Allen's career and his pride in the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency is described in this piece in the Washington Post. If Mr. Obama does not keep company with Eugene Allen on 1/20/09 it will make a large statement about his character.

Don't miss the sad ending.

The Lapdog Media - Redefined

My goodness. Books, "living" ex-Presidents, a new puppy, and the school choice for his daughters. Thanks God President Bush never had to face hard-hitting questions from the press like that during his eight years in office.

The dog response is encouraging. If our President-elect ever finds time to give half as much thought to the financial crisis as that, a quick return to prosperity is guaranteed.

Talk about not ready for prime time. It is no wonder that Obama refused to hold press conferences for the last two years.

BREAKING: GAB says no vote fraud in Wisconsin

This may not be the officially published position of Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board. But it is the mindset of their staffers.

My leftist friend working in the cesspool of Wisconsin government reports that his breakroom buddies from the GAB's Election Division say that voter fraud in Wisconsin "is virtually non-existent when compared to the number of voters." They have also told him over donuts and coffee that "voter registration discrepancies never have been proven to lead to voter fraud." These public servants are more concerned with "voter suppression" that voter fraud.

Other than the Black Panthers, who was suppressing voters this year? News reports say that 2008 voter turnout was the "best in generations." This record turnout was led by African-Americans, with white Republican voting lagging 2004 turnout. There was even that black gentleman bragging to CNN about voting three times. From this I conclude that those Panthers were pretty damn effective in suppressing the white vote. Investigate THAT, GAB.

With the mindset of these hacks, why does the Election Division still exist? They have no interest in understanding and enforcing Wisconsin's election statutes. Jim Doyle can start here in making up that $3 Billion budget shortfall.

Nevermind these poll watcher reports from Milwaukee's inner city. There is nothing to see here, please move along.

My new neighbors

Investment tip for today - international securities.

You can fool enough of the people, enough of the time.

Four years of that wart. We'll find out what "change" means, soon enough.

Dude, please see a dermatologist.

Johnnie Walker Blue Label Nacht

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a Civilian National Security Force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

A disturbing concept. There are a good list of questions about this proposal posed at the Captain's Journal.

1. How will this Civilian National Security Force (hereafter CNSF) be just as powerful as men with guns, artillery, ordnance, war ships and aircraft?
2. What will make the CNSF “just as strong” as the U.S. Marine Corps?
3. How will this CNSF implement national security policy?
4. Since the 2009 budget includes just over half a trillion dollars for defense spending (The Captain’s Journal supports this, and calls for even more), and since it is judged that this CNSF be “just as well funded” as the military, where will this half a trillion dollars come from?
5. Finally, if he didn’t really mean that this CNSF would be the beneficiary of half a trillion dollars (to do with we don’t know what), then why did he say so?

I have a few questions on my own.

1. Who controls this "civilian" force?
   
2. Is this a part of the Federal Government?
3. Controlled by Executive, Legislative, or Judicial?
4. If part of the Federal Government, how does a "Security Force" remain "civilian?"
5. Does this amount to anything more than arming and legally empowering civilian Community Organizers to enforce the Obama doctrine?

The list could continue, but I tried to answer my questions based on historical precedent.

To understand this fully, students should be acquainted with the concept of the "dual state." In effect, the (...) government and the (...) party were operated at the same time and along parallel, but often conflicting, lines.

I think the Org Chart will look something like this.



Here is a real life example of what to expect from Obama's Security Troopers.

It seems that a bunch of Obama supporters -- paid campaign workers, actually -- were loudly demanding that they get the "working man’s price" for alcohol. When the bartender explained that the prices were consistent every night and that most Republicans didn’t order top shelf unless they were willing to pay for it, the Obama workers went a little batty. According to the bartender, the Obama-ites wanted top-shelf liquor, scotch, that was $100 a glass or more, but they wanted it cheap.

“Working man prices.”

When the campaign workers started going after other patrons, that's when it got ugly. They started accusing regular folks of not voting for Obama because of racism, etc. Instead of explaining why they liked Obama so much, Team Obama members demanded that others defend Obama on their behalf.

It is not hard to imagine that these campaign workers will be members of Obama's Civilian National Security Force. Expect them to be well armed with the power to quell dissent and arrest those who are disloyal to the State and Herr Obama.

How will this work. Try to imagine the following example with the SS having the ability to monitor communications on the Internet and cellular communications (24 fans: think Frau Chloe).

One final word is necessary on the operation of the Nazi government. Everyone knows how important the Gestapo was in terms of maintaining an atmosphere of terror. The usual view has been one of Gestapo agents everywhere, watching every move of every German. History teachers today would be well served to familiarize themselves with the work of Robert Gellately. He has demonstrated convincingly and surprisingly just how few Gestapo agents were needed to keep ideological order in Germany. For the administrative region of Lower Franconia, for example, only twenty-eight agents were needed to monitor a population of one million, and all but six of them were assigned to the city of Wuerzburg. How did they manage, given what appears to be an enormous task and a severe shortage of manpower? Gellately has shown that the ordinary citizenry proved to be enormously helpful in terms of conforming to the demands of the regime and spying on one another. The main job of the agents, as it turns out, therefore was to sort through denunciations. This is an aspect of the Third Reich that has definitely been misunderstood.

Change that from "disturbing" to "chilling" concept. You read it here first, folks. Be afraid. Very, very afraid.

I am GestapObama, and I approve this message.