I'm still on Ed Snowden's side

Until I hear about some actual damage or loss of American life due to the Snowden leaked documents, I believe him to be a whistle-blower rather than a traitor. Of course the government hacks will call him unpatriotic and criminal and treasonous, but as far as I can tell all he did was expose practices that the US government shouldn't have been doing....and that is spying on American citizens by collecting communications data without a specific reason to do so.

The US government has been hiding behind "counter terrorism" for too long as an excuse for the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, and phone call collections. The potential for abuse far outweighs the possibility of stopping a terrorist act.

There isn't a politician or government hack alive that would hesitate for one second if plowing through a private citizen's phone records gave him a political advantage somehow.

Here's how I see the results of the Prism program in the future: Some citizen exposes a President, Senator, or CEO who's the friend of the President as a criminal of some kind and in order to shut him up and discredit him, the President's chief of staff tasks the NSA to plow through this poor guy's phone records for the past 20 years and then expose any questionable patterns they find.

That's how it'll happen. Pretending that there are rules in place is self-delusional in the extreme. If the Clinton's and Obama's can sick the IRS on political enemies, you don't think people like them in positions of power would hesitate to use the NSA to intimidate critics?

Here's Snowden's Hong Kong interview.......click on over to the 6:00 mark...or watch the whole thing and see if you don't agree.....

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Afghan war, now less popular than root canals

A newly released poll of the American people shows that support for the 12-year long war in Afghanistan, if you can even call it a war rather than a quagmire, has dipped below 20% for the first time. It also reveals that most Americans want US troops out of Afghanistan before the Dec-2014 beginning of draw-down.

First, who're these a-holes who still support the war? 20% means that one out of every 5 people polled works at the Pentagon or for a defense contractor because they're the only ones who're enjoying this.

Can anybody tell me what we've accomplished in 12 years? Who have we gotten rid of that won't come back the day after we leave? I'll be happy to entertain any and all arguments for our continued participation in this costly fool's errand.

Climate-change dingbats on a mission to prove there's less ice, get stuck in ice....hahahahaha

In case you missed this bit of ironic hilarity over the weekend, a boatload of global-warming scientists, while gathering proof that global warming is shrinking the antarctic ice mass, got their ice-breaking ship stuck in the ice because the antarctic ice shelf was much larger and thicker than it's ever been. Heh heh heh.

The AP, Reuters, and all the major propaganda arms of the democrat party(ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC), all but ignored this juicy fact. As global warming sycophants, they cannot bring themselves to poke fun of morons who get themselves in trouble trying to validate what the world knows is a myth.

So join me in pointing and laughing at the ineptitude and stupidity of people who still think man has any effect at all on the climate of Earth.

Here we see a forlorn global-warming scientist, staring teary into the ice, and asking of God by way of his own reflection there, and therefor of himself by way of God, "Where did it all go wrong? What life decisions could I have made differently? I wonder if my shipmates will eat me first."

Phil Robertson has defenders aplenty, he needs more mockery

How's this for a bit of pop-culture irony?

Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty compared homosexuality to bestiality, and not in a good way ;-), but his whole life is dedicated to tricking ducks into thinking he wants to have sex with them.

Sorry for the light posting......I have a good reason

So I should probably explain the dearth of posting over the holidays. It started with a weird medical day back on the 26th. I spent about 7 hours at an American Family Care to be seen about the unexplained swelling of my right calf and the low-grade fever that seemed to accompany it.(The resident clinic at UAB where I always go, had no appointments until like mid January.)

When they finally got back with the blood tests, my d-dimer level was elevated.....this is indicative of a possible blood clot. OK so the doctor delivering this news seemed a tad panicked and therefore so was I, because while other things can cause d-dimer to be elevated, none of them can kill you in the next 30 seconds.
Apparently "possible blood clot" triggers an automatic trip to the ER in order to rule that out first, and I felt lucky that I was able to convince him to let Dianne drive me there and not call an ambulance.
UAB did the ultrasound to test for clots and thankfully they came back completely negative, which left unexplained cellulitis as the cause of the swelling and fever. After a Vancomycin IV we were discharged from the ER at like 10:30.
In all the madness, I had forgotten to eat and realized I hadn't since 7:00 breakfast. Thankfully Wendy's is open 'till 1:00 and that Double with fries went down nicely.
It was a crap day to have spent it like that, but finding out I didn't have a blood clot was a relief.
So I guess you'll still have ol' Ed to kick around for the foreseeable future. Any way, I haven't felt much like writing since I've been sitting on the couch with my leg elevated watching movies and plowing through season 3 of Breaking Bad on Netflix for the past few days. 

I feel much better now and should be back tomorrow complaining about the government, full-time. 

Dukes of Hazzard temptation level - 99

Heh heh, I would so consider this, especially if I were driving a souped-up muscle car like the General Lee.

Where Hershey's Kiss cookies come from

This is what the Elf on the Shelf does when you're not looking.

Try to get this image out of your head when you eat chocolate-kiss cookies over the holidays.

Merry Christmas.   ;-)

Neither Dixie Chicks or Phil Robertson situation are free-speech issues

Liberals predictably are incorrectly pointing out that the Dixie Chicks were treated unfairly, that their free speech rights were violated, and they got censored, all by the same people who're supporting Phil Robertson. 

The two situations are different and neither represent a free-speech issue. What happened to the Dixie Chicks was simply a market function. Patriotic country-music fans didn't like Natalie Mains apologizing for President Bush to a European audience and stopped buying their records and concert tickets. They weren't censored by the government. They were censored by their audience.

Phil Robertson's situation is not quite the same thing. He said something controversial and his employer punished him for it, not his audience. The irony is that the liberals who defended the Dixie Chicks on free-speech grounds are the same people who applauded A&E pulling Robertson off the air, thereby depriving him of the same speech. 

Supporters in both situations who're complaining about their first amendment rights to free speech should read the Constitution. It limits the government's regulation of speech, not the consequences of that speech. 

Sure, everybody has the right to free speech, but because speech is free doesn't mean that it doesn't come with possible consequences.....there's a huge difference between free speech and consequence-free speech. 

The Dixie Chicks wanted consequence-free speech, I think the Robertson clan understand and accept that Phil's public speech might come with negative consequences and they're prepared to live with that. The Dixie Chicks insulted their audience by offering directed personal criticism during their concert, and then got pissed off when that audience dared not continue buying their records.

Irony, in criminal form

Retailer TARGET reports that tens of millions of its customers may have had their credit and debit card information stolen. 

If only there was a term for choosing a specific group of people for directed criminal action.

I have no use for Paul Ryan

I'm kind of done with Paul Ryan. He colluded with Sen. democrat Patty Murray to use Obama-like gimmicks to double-count savings and vastly underestimate costs to their "bipartisan" 10 year budget bill. Just a cursory glance shows an actual increase in the deficit by $15B and nobody's even looked through the bill thoroughly yet.

I had my doubts about him when he teamed up with Romney, now I'm sure. Paul Ryan is a big-spending, big-government republican just like Boehner, Cantor, McCain, Romney, and Bush. And I have no use for any of them.

If the GOP machine trots out Ryan in 2016, I'll be sitting this one out.

Here he is, colluding with senate democrat Patty Murray to screw over the American people yet again.