The Parable of the Kosher Deli

Before I insert the meat of the post (you may groan now; you certainly will once the pun hits you :-)), a question: has anyone asked about the effect of HHS rulings about Obumascare requirements on Muslim health organizations? Or are they exempt? And who would care anyway?

The Parable of the Kosher Deli, as told by William Lori, the bishop of Bridgeport, CT, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee, February 16, 2012

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I Had An Affair With Herman Cain!

From 1986 to 1996, Herman Cain and I had an ongoing affair. Over many dozens of encounters, Herman made me pizzas, even bringing them to my home, a sure sign of his devotion.

Oh, wait. You say he was chairman of Godfather’s Pizza? Hmmm, perhaps our relationship wasn’t as close as I thought. And on second thought, the Domino’s guys who delivered didn’t really look all that much like Cain, either.

Darn. In the current Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind Cain bashing kerfuffle, “I coulda been a contenda.”

Oh, well. At least my claim is more believable than that from Cain’s latest accuser. As Ann Coulter put it,

Gennifer Flowers produced taped telephone calls with Clinton totaling thousands of words between them, with him counseling her on how to deny their affair: “If they ever hit you with it, just say no, and go on. There’s nothing they can do … But when they — if somebody contacts you, I need to know … All you got to do is deny it.”

Paula Jones had multiple same-day witnesses — including the state troopers who worked for Clinton and had already told the press about a “Paula” they brought to Clinton’s hotel room. And that was for a single incident.

Monica Lewinsky had lots of gifts from Clinton, including a hat pin, two brooches, a marble bear figurine, a T-shirt from Martha’s Vineyard and Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” all of which she mysteriously placed with Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie, during the investigation, as well as a semen-stained dress, which Monica kept.

Ginger White claims she had a 13-year affair with Cain — and all she has are two books with inscriptions that could have been written to an auto mechanic who waited in line at a Cain book signing. Even her business partner during the alleged affair says White never mentioned Cain’s name.

These women are like triple-A ball players with the stats being: number of bankruptcies, smallest bank account, number of liens, most false claims, number of children out of wedlock, degrees of separation from David Axelrod, total trips to human resources and so on.

OK, Ann, no need to spike the ball.

Earthy Common Sense…

bowdlerized, is actually sometimes more accurate. Smitty, at The Other McCain, opines in a recent post,

Jerry Sandusky Is To Joe Paterno As. . .

. . .Eric Holder is to [analogous parallelism: The Zero–ed.]

They told me that if I voted for John McCain, executive accountability would be for the little people. So far, they’ve been proven quite correct, no thanks whatsoever to that craven sack of a Senator from Nevada.

Nice to see someone making a clear, if elliptical, link between “Senator”–especially that one, and by implication, all his ilk–and “shit”.

Death to DST! *heh*

OK, I’m sure some “old Indian” somewhere has said something similar, since I know both my grandfathers uttered similar observations about DST, but it’s a decent graphic presentation of an old, old truth: government is best at screwing things up, or at least at its normative “best”.

(Just CLICK the pic if it doesn’t display correctly in your browser/display resolution)

Study: Daylight saving time a waste of energy

The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.

Anything else we want to leave in the feds’ hands? Charity? The cost of so-called “welfare” as exercised by the feds–excluding the societal costs of having the feds thumb their noses at the Constitution–are well known, both the upfront excesses and the backend societal costs of breeding more irresponsibility and a leisure, entitlement-minded “welfare class”. Meddling in the marketplace? The “compassion industry” in the “feddle gummint bureaucrappy” as specifically empowered by serial Congresses and presidents gave us the housing bubble and mortgage collapse that led directly to our current economic woes. Want more of that? Border security? An oxymoron.

Oh, and one acronym: TSA. Thugs Standing Around has to stand as the most blatant “feddle gummint” exercise of Security Kabuki, Theater of the Absurd that puts Beckett, Camus and Albee in the shade. It’s nothing but a full-employment program for low-brow dumbasses and thugs designed to train those who were once citizens into becoming “good subjects” (that is, docile sheep).

I think DST stands as a good example of the simple fact that the more the feds–congresscritters, executive branch, ALL “feddle gummint bureaucraps” (and even many–few though their raw numbers may be–decent bureaucrats caught up in the monstrous federal bureaucracy) and the federal injudiciary–intrude into citizens’ lives, the worse off we as individuals and the country as a whole become.

Death to DST! *heh*

Stupidity Cubed

I’ve not said a lot about the recent Herman Cain flap–and nothing here, as far as I can recall. A couple of observations, though:

Every (and I do very specifically mean EVERY) case of workplace “sexual harassment” that I have been personally aware of, and near enough to know the players, has been bogus. Not just questionable: B-O-G-U-S. I’m not saying that sexual harassment in the workplace does not take place, just that I have no personal knowledge of ANY legitimate sexual harassment charges made based on workplace (or even remotely work related) behaviors. My own take, based on the cases I know personally, is that in each case, the women involved deserved and needed a whipping for having made their slanderous accusations, but in at least one case (and maybe another) some sort of “settlement” was made to make them go away. Very away.

That sort of shakedown really offends me.

And then there’s this comment in an ABC “story”:

Cain has already denounced the two previous allegations of sexual harassment against him as false, and suggested at least one of the women was a poor worker. But an ABC News investigation found that both women are highly respected professionals who have gone on to successful careers in and around government.

I hate to break it to the idiots who wrote that, but “Cain… suggested at least one of the women was a poor worker,” and “both women are highly respected professionals who have gone on to successful careers in and around government” does not form any basis for contradiction. Success in a “government career” isn’t necessarily based on being a good worker. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy hints at part of the reason for this:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

As far as I’m concerned, since the women have “gone on to successful careers in and around government” anything they have to say now is worth less than a bucket of warm spit.

And then there’s the “substance” (such as it is) of the accusations I read. Cain made NON-SEXUAL “inappropriate gestures”? WTF is that, and how does something like that constitute sexual harassment in the mind of anyone but a seriously disturbed person who’s just itchin’ for a fight?

Still, I’m willing to suspend judgment–on the unnamed accusers (and the one woman whose lawyer has spoken). As Professor Jacobson says,

Let’s sum up the “facts” as they are known right now. Mostly unnamed people accused Herman Cain of unspecified conduct which some people who will not specify the people or the conduct have deemed “inappropriate.” And one of the unnamed people received a piddly $35,000 severance package almost 15 years ago for unspecified conduct which included conduct unrelated to Cain.

Now that they’ve got themselves a noose made of a bunch of hooie, the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind looks like all it’s waiting for is a bit of gasoline to get on with the lynching and cross burning…

Update: Yep. I’m right. The media’s giving plenty of time and “ink” to someone claiming to be a lawyer of one of the women who was an accuser. “She’s not going to affirmatively make any public statements or public appearances about the case, everything will be through me,” the guy is quoted as saying. Sorry bubba and whiny baby claimed as client. Faceless accusers are worthless in my book. Worse than worthless. Using intermediaries to make proxy attacks while remaining in the shadows doesn’t even rise to the level of Tawana Brawley hoax “legitimacy” in my eyes.

Continue reading “Stupidity Cubed”