Fish Fear Me

We Now Interrupt Spring For An Important Message From Winter

I Guess Spartacus Was Taken

"I am Perez."

"No, I am Perez."

This story was unusual enough to pique my curiosity immediately:

Border Patrol agents recently arrested 13 illegal immigrants disguised as U.S. Marines and riding in a fake military van, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday.

The Border Patrol gave themselves a big and well-deserved pat on the back:

"This effort is an example of the lengths smugglers will go to avoid detection, and the skilled and effective police work and vigilance displayed everyday by Customs and Border Protection personnel," the agency said in a written statement.

Outstanding. Of course this might have been more a case of blazing red flags than one of vigilance:

All of the vehicle's occupants wore U.S. Marine uniforms, reportedly emblazoned with the name "Perez."

How would you like to be the third guy who had to answer that his last name just happened to be Perez too? I mean, two could be a coincidence, but three? Four? Thirteen? What is "oh, shit" in Spanish? Or, perhaps, "Gee, I should have had a V-8."

Headline Of The Day

Yes, I know it's juvenile, but I couldn't resist:

Leonard Green firm considering offer for BJ's

Can you blame him?

The Pentagon Devil Made Him Do It

I read a number of good articles today on both sides of the issues of should we have intervened in Libya and should President Obama have asked Congress for authorization before acting. Easily the strangest opinion though, came from a Democratic member of the U.S. House:

California Democratic Rep. Mike Honda, the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s Peace and Security Taskforce, said in a statement Monday that in launching missiles on Libya over the weekend, “not only did the Defense Department undermine a carefully constructed consensus, which included the Arab League, but it leveled a devastating blow to our legislative-executive checks and balances.”

“For the Pentagon to deliberately circumvent Congressional authority sets a new precedent for war powers authorization and sends the message to the world that American democracy is deeply dysfunctional,” Honda said.

What? I think it's debatable to say that Congress was circumvented here, but if it was there can be no debate about who did it. Clearly that would be President Obama. Is it so painful to directly criticize President Obama for his actions that Rep. Honda has to pretend that the Pentagon is acting on its own here? I don't think even the hardcore anti-war groups are going to buy that one. 

Guess The Drug

Acid is way too easy of an explanation for this quote from Sammy Hagar, so that answer is banned:

That’s right. It was real. [Aliens] were plugged into me. It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, “Fuck, they downloaded something into me!” Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment. “See what this guy knows.”

I'm going with psilocybin mushrooms. 

Tell Me How This Ends

My skepticism about intervention in Libya's civil war took a major hit yesterday when I heard that Michael Moore had come out against it:

It's only cause we're defending the Libyan people from a tyrant! That's why we bombed the Saudis last wk! Hahaha. Pentagon=comedy

And we always follow the French's lead! Next thing you know, we'll have free health care & free college! Yay war!

We've had a "no-fly zone" over Afghanistan for over 9 yrs. How's that going? #WINNING !

Khadaffy must've planned 9/11! #excuses

It's possible for people to arrive at the same conclusion for different reasons, but to be on the same general side as Michael Moore, albeit with a different way of expressing it, is enough to make me pause. But then I read stuff like this:

The crowd included many women and children, and some said they had family in Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. They said they had come to protect Colonel Qaddafi’s compound from bombing by volunteering to be shields. 

Followed by stuff like this:

Bombs have been dropped in close proximity to the headquarters of embattled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli.

Followed by reports of civilian casualties in Tripoli. Consider the source, of course, and initial reports at this stage are unsurprisingly vague or confused. I'm sure American media will give Obama cover that they never gave Bush, at least at these early stages, but you can bet the Arab press agencies will not.

And with that news, barely two days into this the Arab League is already complaining that they only asked for a no fly zone and not, "all necessary measures" to protect civilians.

Moussa has told reporters Sunday that "what happened differs from the no-fly zone objectives." He says "what we want is civilians' protection not shelling more civilians."

Perhaps they expected Obama to ride in on his magic unicorn and with a wave of the hand cause Qaddafi's air defenses to disappear. This Moussa fellow is creating a little gap that can be useful for the Arab League down the road if things go bad. The Obama administration needs to forcefully close that gap right now or it will be used against us down the road. The Arab League wanted intervention and they got it. We can't afford to let them distance themselves from that by even the smallest amount.

If You Are Poor...

...don't come to Minnesota, because we hate you. And not just the ordinary crazy hate. According to Susie Madrak it's the crazy AND evil hate:

War On The Poor: Minnesota Republicans Want To Bust Poor People Who Carry Cash

They're not just crazy, they're evil -- and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn't last a week:

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

It's the winters up here. Eventually they freeze solid our black little hearts. Or it could all be a bunch of BS.

Yeah, go with that last one.

Here's the real deal in a nutshell. Minnesota uses Electronic Benefit Transfer cards to distribute public assistance funds from several different programs. There are about 480,000 cards in use for food assistance and another 180,000 cards in use for "cash assistance" in the state. The cards function like a normal debit card, though the food program cards are limited to certain stores and certain products from what I understand. The cash assistance cards function like normal debit cards.

Last year one of our local TV stations did an investigation into abuses of the cash assistance cards and documented instances of people buying non-essential items such as alcohol and cigarettes. Also, out of 2 million transactions in the month of September last year, some 55,000 or so took place out of state. Their series of reports can be viewed at KSTP's site. The reports are probably somewhat sensationalized(I know, shock!) but predictably they rattled some cages and prompted renewed efforts to tighten restrictions on what the cards can buy and how much cash per month can be withdrawn.

You can read the bill at the Minnesota House website. The misinformation about restricting how much cash a person on welfare can carry comes from the effort to limit cash withdrawals to only $20 per month. There is nothing in the bill that even mentions the possession of cash.

And so another myth is born.

Now that we've dispensed with the nonsense, I think there could be some issues with the bill and how practical things such as the $20 monthly limit are. But why the hysteria? Do the Susie Madrak's of the world actually believe the stuff they spew out there or is it just a tool to get the natives all ramped up? And note that when I write "Madrak's of the world" I mean her type across all political persuasions. I used to have Gateway Pundit linked on the side bar but deleted that site a few years ago because he does the same exact thing from the conservative side. 

I tried my biannual "get into a dialogue at a progressive site" on the issue and it was entertaining as a way to knock back some beers, but pretty much a disaster on the dialogue front. I'll spare you the details, but I did stumble across an attitude about public assistance that absolutely astounded me. 

After admitting that the possession of cash limit was a crock, what came back was the $20/month cash withdrawal limit was too small to be practical(maybe a valid point), and criticism of any restrictions at all on how public assistance funds were spent by the recipients. You see:

"It's their money."

That's not a joke or exaggeration. The attitude was that once the state distributed the money the recipients should be free to spend it how they wish. Booze, smokes, gambling, tattoos...who are we to judge? They're poor. Give them money and stop whining about how they spend it you Rethuglican assholes. I kid you not.

Now, I don't think we should demonize people who need public assistance and I would bet that the majority spend the money on necessities as intended. Abuse does happen though, and we should have the right to exercise reasonable control over how public assistance is used in order to limit that abuse. It should not hinder the proper use of such assistance and it should not be insulting or abusive to recipients. But to make it taboo to even talk about it strikes me as ridiculous to an extreme.   

I also don't think it's too helpful for some people whom those particular progressives supposedly want to help. One path to poverty is substance abuse. Do we really want to make it easy for people to slide back into that with public money? How about the guy who smacks his wife around when he's had that six-pack that I was accused of being cold-hearted about? 

And I always thought of the anti-smoking effort as being more of a left-wing thing. Now they want us to pay for them for the poor? I thought they were "death sticks." Is the left trying to kill the poor now?

Puzzling.

Now What?

They told me that if I voted for John McCain the president would lead us into war without congressional approval, and they were right!

The Libyan government declared an immediate cease-fire Friday in a bid to head off Western military intervention on behalf of rebels seeking to overthrow longtime leader Moammar Gaddafi, hours after the U.N. Security Council authorized a no-fly zone and the use of “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.

I'm glad that Qaddafi is not slaughtering the people of Benghazi today and it would please me greatly if he winds up on the receiving end of a 500 lb. bomb in the next few days. But I'm not entirely sold on US involvement in Libya right now. 

Someone named Shadi Hamid believes that US intervention is a "moral imperative." Perhaps it is, but morality can be a complicated thing. Moral codes during wartime can be particularly tricky, as our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown. So before we get too deep into this Libya thing, can we take a moment and identify the moral code we will be operating under?

Is it the moral code that turns a blind eye when combatants endanger civilians by wearing similar clothing and hiding among them, even sometimes using them as human shields? Is that the moral code?

Is it the moral code that demands harsh judgment against the US military when it admits and investigates the accidental and wrongful deaths of civilians by its hands, yet greets the deliberate targeting of civilians by our enemies with a stony silence?

Is it the moral code that judged the US guilty of not providing security when terrorist bombs exploded in Iraq and slaughtered dozens, instead of the barbarians that perpetrated those acts?

Is it the moral code whose only response when IEDs destroyed infrastructure in Iraq was to blame the US for not providing services?

Before we risk one American life I think we should know if the answer is yes to the above questions. Because if it is, I think we would be better of letting that moral code take care of the problem itself.

Street Go Boom

A gas line exploded in south Minneapolis this morning and amazingly no one was killed or injured. It happened on 60th Street just west of where it goes under I-35W. That's about a mile south from where I grew up and it's about a mile east of my mom's house. She says she never heard or saw anything this morning. That street is a fairly busy one since it is the only east-west connection for about a half mile because of the freeway. There is, of course, already some You Tube video up:

 

Who has the marshmallows and hot dogs?

The Obligatory Adrian Peterson Said Something Stupid Post

Adrian, Adrian, Adrian...

AP: We're business-minded, also. It's not just fun and games. A lot of football players, whether it's Sunday or Monday night — we're out there on the field, competing, hitting each other. But people don't see everything else behind it. It's a job for us, too — every day of the week. We're in different states, sometimes thousands of miles away from our families and kids, and a lot of people don't look at it like that. All some people see is, 'Oh, we're not going to be around football.' But how the players look at it … the players are getting robbed. They are. The owners are making so much money off of us to begin with. I don't know that I want to quote myself on that…

SC: It's nothing that I haven't heard from other players, believe me.

AP: It's modern-day slavery, you know? People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too. With all the money … the owners are trying to get a different percentage, and bring in more money. I understand that; these are business-minded people. Of course this is what they are going to want to do. I understand that; it's how they got to where they are now. But as players, we have to stand our ground and say, 'Hey — without us, there's no football.' There are so many different perspectives from different players, and obviously we're not all on the same page — I don't know. I don't really see this going to where we'll be without football for a long time; there's too much money lost for the owners. Eventually, I feel that we'll get something done.

Peterson is set to have a base salary of $10.72 million if the 2011 NFL season is played.

His agent is asking people to not take his words out of context, but there's the context and what he said is stupid. Take it out of context and it will still be stupid. There's no way to make it unstupid. I don't want to make too much out of it, but there it is.

Maybe the players should take ownership of the means of production and form their own league. Why should they be giving the owners anything at all? As Peterson says, "Hey — without us, there's no football." They could organize committees to run each local team and decide how much their fellow players should make. Decide who should be hired and who should be fired.  Negotiate with municipalities on facilities to play in. I mean, they would hire people to do all of that, but collectively they would all decide what directions to give them. 

What could go wrong?

Oh. Yeah.