Big Sky Cairn

I recently described Obama’s hasty exit from Montana as a bit like a frat boy’s exodus after a one-night stand. Empty offices, crying Democrats feeling a bit used. Well, it looks like those empty spaces are being put to use.

Exotic dancer Victoria Lindley plans to open her business, called Aphrodite’s Inferno - A Membership Only Theatre of Arts, in the former Casey’s Golden Pheasant at 222 N. Broadway. The building most recently housed Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign headquarters.

A building full of people willing to say anything to extract money from a desperate and emotional audience with no intention of following through on what they are implicitly promising? And now it’s going to be a strip club. One wonders if Billings will notice a change.

David Crisp has recently fancied himself a monkey on the back of Republican strategists. Lately, he criticizes the GOP for denying Kelleher a speaking slot on the main stage at their convention. He sets up this faulty dilemma:

1. Give the guy the five minutes at the convention podium that he has earned and then let everybody have dessert.
2. Turn our dissatisfaction into a front-page news story that makes us look more divided and inept than ever.

The problem here is that he assumes giving the guy five minutes at the convention wouldn’t be front page news. I think it would under the headline “State GOP Endorses Kelleher” or “Kelleher Finds Himself at Home in GOP.” Kelleher is a nut-job liberal, so giving him a microphone and a stage would make reporters drool. It might even turn into a national story.

There’s plenty of precedent here for the no-win media situation. The GOP comes across badly (in the press) no matter what they do with regard to RINO Lt. Governor Bohlinger - invite him or exclude him. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t and my preference is that they keep Kelleher as far away from my party as possible. I don’t want to the convention to be about that.

From a media perspective, Kelleher is the story - it doesn’t really matter what the GOP does.

Wow.

For international law to have any moral force in cases like Slobodan Miloševi?, Augusto Pinochet, or even Saddam Hussein, the law has to apply to powerful countries as well as weak ones. Given that the architects of the Bush policy of detention and torture are unlikely to be prosecuted here, one only hopes that the international community will act.

These are the people that want to shape our foreign policy?  These are the people that want to negotiate on our behalf with enemies that want to kill us?

The paragraph reads:

He supports a huge, New Deal-type government work program to reduce poverty, backs nationalizing U.S. oil and gas industries and favors government-run, socialized medicine. He is highly critical of President Bush.

Not a flattering portrayal of liberal ideologies. Do you think this paragraph (with linguistic gold like “huge government program” and “government run” and “socialized medicine”) would ever show up if the candidate it was describing wasn’t on the Republican ticket?

If this ‘graph was describing a candidate with the same views running as a Democrat, it would read more like this:

He supports expanded work programs to reduce poverty, government-regulated interventions to reduce the cost of energy for consumers and believes that no American should be without health care. He is also critical of President Bush, whose approval ratings are at record lows in Montana.

Future Democrat: Man, I’m so sick of my parents telling me what do to. I want some independence, but every time I try to do my own thing, they hold my allowance over my head.

Future Republican: I agree. You and I are way too dependent on our parent’s allowance. Let’s do something about it.

Future Democrat: I have a plan. First, we can make our parent’s allowance go further by finding different suppliers for the things we like to do. We’ll have to go on the internet to find the best prices from around the world and - yeah, they might take some time to get here, but at least we’ll be saving money. More importantly though, we need to try to completely ween ourselves from our parent’s money. To do this, we need to invent a brand new economic system based around a currency that doesn’t exist yet. Of course to make this work, we’ll have to develop the currency itself, figure out how to distribute it and convince enough people to actually use it so that we can spend it at all the stores we like to shop at.

Future Republican: Heh. That’s a good plan for the long-term, but don’t you think it’s a little slow and complicated? I mean we should definitely do those things, but in the mean time, since I have plenty of time to myself - I’m just going to get a job and earn my own money. That way I’ll be less dependent on my parents.

Future Democrat: Um, you can’t earn your way out of this problem.

Future Republican: Actually… you can.

17 high school girls at Gloucester High School are expecting children out of the bonds of wedlock.  What could have caused this lapse in family values among the Catholic community?  I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Church’s stand against contraception… No.

Clearly allowing gays to marry in California has undermined the otherwise strong sense of family values in this country.  I mean, just look at these activists spewing their hatred and venom all over the sacred institution of marriage.  If only they cared about marriage as much as heterosexuals who respect it enough to stay married about half of the time.

In all seriousness, right-wing moralists (who are often just as bad as the nanny-state lefties) should worry about the log in their own eye before they complain too much about the splinter in the eye of the gay community.  To put it in Jesus’ words.  Of course, Jesus spent his time with hookers and tax collectors so I’m not sure he’d be welcome in the Westboro Baptist Church.

I have no problem with gay marriage although I do find many gay activists petty and a bit silly.  I do have a problem, however, with overreaching government involvement in marriage.  Tell me again why I would need a license to get married and why Big Brother should have any say at all about who I choose to make a vow to before God, family or The Love Guru?

This is hilarious. Anna over at Left in the West has a post up about how impressed she is with the frank honesty of Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama otherwise known as The Great Messiah of Hope and Freedom. Anyway, here’s the passage that got her all hot and bothered:

In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

Did you catch that? The passage that Anna thinks demonstrates her man’s impeccable character is really about the fact that this man has no integrity and will say anything to get elected.

During the Democrat Primary, Obama veered Left to attract the votes from the people who were criticizing Clinton for moving to the center (ironically making herself more electable in the General). Now that he’s secured the nomination, Obama is going to try to move into that center ground that Hilary abdicates with her Fall back to the Senate. But as he does so, he’s also going to have to abandon a lot of that far-left rhetoric that got him the Nomination. All we learn from that passage is that Obama will lie to fit what he thinks his audience wants to hear.

Newsflash Anna: Being honest about the fact that you lie doesn’t make you an honest person.

[Update: Looks like Dave Budge beat me to the punch by a few minutes…]

I’ve been a Netflix customer since about a month after the service was offered in Missoula. I’ve loved every minute of it. My girlfriend and I now share an account - watching movies is something we like to do together. She has her own queue and I have mine. It’s a great way to change who choses movies so no one dominates the decisions. And then today, I got this from Netflix:

Dear Cody,

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

- The Netflix Team

Hmm. This is one of the best features Netflix has. I can’t imagine why they are eliminating it. I’ve loved watching Netflix masterfully dismantle Blockbuster and rework the movie-rental industry. This, in my opinion is the first mis-step - the first time they are rolling back customer service. I hope it’s not the sign of a trend.

[Update] - I called late last night and the wait time was 15 minutes - the operator explained that that they were fielding a lot of calls on this issue. Netflix is hearing from people on this - now we find out if they’ve learned the lessons of a competitive environment with equal alternatives waiting in the wings to scoop up disgruntled customers. Blockbuster has got to be feeling a bit like Rehberg and Baucus did the night of the primary - like they’ve been handed a gift. In the mean time, there’s a pretty long Netflix Discussion here and you should definitely head over to Digg to read the comments there (and, if you have an account, add your voice).  There’s also some interesting discussion at Slashdot. We’ve got until September 1.

Corn is already expensive - driving up the cost of food - because the government has decided to interfere with the market demand for crops by heavily subsidizing corn production to be used in the production of ethanol.

“The reality is that people are dying already,” said Jacques Diouf, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, they will react,” he said. The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted. “The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso,” said Mr Diouf. “There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food,” he said.

Corn - now a source of energy - has already been a significant source of food in the United States.

“There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn,” he reports. Indeed, corn and its array of byproducts have so successfully colonized the U.S. diet — and so dominate the diets of the animals consumed here — that Americans have ripped the title of “the corn people” from Mexico, where corn was originally domesticated and remains a staple.

Iowa - in the heart of the bread-basket - is the nation’s largest producer of corn (pdf). By a long shot.

And now with millions upon millions of Iowa corn fields under water - with a complete loss of crops - supply is about to drop even as demand sky-rockets.

And we all know what happens in those circumstances…

Democrats vote to raise taxes on the evil profiteering farmers.

Mike at Last Best Place has an interesting post comparing the reactions in two places to a disastrous excess of dihydrogen monoxide.

In New Orleans:

When Katrina hit New Orleans and the levees broke, people who had spent a lifetime being neutered by government dependence didn’t know what to do. There were riots, looting and murders. The sick and infirm were left on the side of streets and even inside buildings to die, if they hadn’t already perished, and the National Guard had to be deployed just to bring back order so recovery operations could begin.

In Iowa:

The entire state has been declared a disaster area. Flooding has turned it’s major cities into giant lakes, their farms, long known amongst those in the business as producing the “high yield” winners for corn and occasionally soybeans are ruined. No where in the media have I seen video of people standing on their roofs with signs saying “help me!” No where have we seen rioting or looting. No one has advocated bringing in a fleet of FEMA trailers to house people who will be “permanently dislocated” because of the storm.

Undoubtedly, I will be called a bad person (Mark T will call me racist), but in the aftermath of Katrina, I was embarrassed - ashamed even - by the way the people of New Orleans responded. That was not the neighbor helping neighbor response that makes this country great.

To this day, I am apathetic toward the rebuilding of New Orleans. I certainly don’t plan on visiting there in the near future. The trouble is, the tremendous generosity of the American People was not appreciated. It was expected by an entitled population who felt that they could turn their noses up at the help because it wasn’t fast enough or comfortable enough. Thanks, but there are plenty of people who need more help and that’s where I’ll put my resources - emotional and financial.

I don’t wish this sort of hardship on anyone, but when the times get hard, the true nature of a community go on display for the entire world to see. I am proud of Iowa.