Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

Time for a history lesson.  In 1973, Congress overcame a veto by President Nixon and created the War Powers Act.  It requires (from Wikipedia):

the President to consult with Congress prior to the start of any hostilities as well as regularly until U.S. armed forces are no longer engaged in hostilities and to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities if Congress has not declared war or passed a resolution authorizing the use of force within 60 days

There is a lot of legal concerns about the Act.  It has never been challenged for its Constitutionality.  Many scholars think it is a bogus law that wouldn’t pass muster. Every president since Nixon has hated it and assumes it is unconstitutional.  I suspect they don’t challenge it in court because they are afraid they would be wrong and then it would be the unchallenged law of the land.  Why the issue at all?  Because while Congress is enumerated with the power to declare war, the President is the Commander-in-Chief with operational responsibilities for the military.  But after Vietnam:

Many Members of Congress became concerned with the erosion of congressional authority to decide when the United States should become involved in a war or the use of armed forces that might lead to war.

So why do I bring this up?  Because of this article on MSNBC.com:

Former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher will head a private, bipartisan panel to study a lingering and gnawing national question: Who does the Constitution say has the power to begin, conduct and end wars.

Should make for interesting reading when they are done.  Aw, come on.  You know it will be interesting to read.

This is so bad, I don’t think I can even make a joke out of it. 

A woman admitted Monday that she coached her two children to fake retardation starting when they were 4 and 8 years old so she could collect Social Security benefits on their behalf. Rosie Costello, 46, admitted in U.S. District Court that she collected more than $280,000 in benefits, beginning in the mid-1980s. Most was from Social Security, but the state social services agency paid $53,000.

Now, I said I don’t THINK I could make a joke out of it, but…

Ummm...this concerns me.  It should concern you:

The federal agency that’s been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago. Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

Other little details from the analysis:
• There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues
• Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency’s own statistics

Ok, so over the last three weeks or so, we have had a massive spinach/e. coli outbreak, peanut butter recall, and cantaloupe recalls. You can read all of the FDA’s recall alerts here.  I don’t know if more inspectors would have prevented some of these outbreaks, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt, right?  One last little tidbit from the report:

After the September 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation’s food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains.

Yeah, I said kite festival.  WTF?!?  I don’t ever remember kites being dangerous when I was a kid.

At least 11 people died and more than 100 people were injured at an annual spring festival in eastern Pakistan celebrated with the flying of thousands of colourful kites, officials said today.  The deaths and injuries were caused by stray bullets, sharpened kite-strings, electrocution and people falling off rooftops yesterday at the conclusion of the two-day Basant festival, said Ruqia Bano, spokeswoman for emergency service in the city of Lahore.

Per K’s instructions:

Three Things That Scare Me
1. Sharks
2. My new blackbelt wife
3. Losing my kids

Three Inevitabilities That Terrify Me To My Core
1. My father’s death
2. Sharks
3. Bigger sharks

Three People Who Make Me Laugh
1. My wife
2. The guys from “What’s My Line”
3. The cast of “Scrubs”

Three People Who Make Me Feel Like Everything Will Turn Out OK in the End
1. My wife
2. Both of my mothers
3. HKB

Three Things I Love (in no particular order)
1. Cigarettes
2. Coffee
3. My family

Three Things I Heart
1. Valentine’s Day NECCO Heart Candy
2. Heroes
3. My wife and kids

Three Guilty Pleasures
1. Frozen Snickers
2. The final twelve of American Idol
3. CENSORED

Three Decadent Indulgences
1. Starbucks
2. Captain Morgan Private Stock
3. Our annual “All Children Left Behind” tour

Three Things I Haterade
1. Heroes (Yes, it is own the love list as well - don’t ask)
2. Writing across asses. Especially across prepubescent girl asses. (I completely agree with K on this one)
3. Teenage Punks

Three Things I Don’t Understand
1. Faith without Reason
2. Peoples undying urge to butt into other peoples’ business
3. The structure of the Universe

Three [Innocent] Crushes
1. Angelina Jolie
2. Daisy Fuentes
3. Sandra Lee

Three People I’d Be Semi-Powerless Against
1. A shark
2. My daughter when she bats her eyes at me
3. My wife

Three Things I Want To Do Before I Die
1. Travel to Amsterdam
2. Testify before Congress
3. Be honored at an awards ceremony

Three Things I Can Do
1. Kill you (seriously...)
2. Read upside down
3. Recite the alphabet in three languages other than English: Russian, Greek, and Spanish

Three Things You Should Listen To
1. National Public Radio
2. Happy music
3. The sound of children laughing

Three Things You Should Never Listen To
1. Idiots
2. Death Metal
3. People who don’t have any sense of adventure

Three Things I’d Like to Learn
1. How to repair cars
2. How to hunt
3. How to do double ledger accounting

Three Jobs I’d Love to Try Out
1. Teacher
2. Pizza Maker
3. FBI Computer Forensics Technician

Three Favorite Foods
1. Hamburger Gravy
2. Meatloaf
3. Sausage and Green Pepper pizza

Three Favorite Quotes
1. Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people’s souls, when we all ought to be worried about our own souls, and other people’s bellies - Rabbi Israel Salanter
2. I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me ....they’re cramming for their final exam - Anonymous
3. Do you know any reason why someone would sodomize your husband with a banana? - Detective Olivia Benson, Law and Order - Special Victims Unit

Literally.  She is now a first dan in Tae Kwon Do.  That is first degree black belt people!  I am so proud of her.  Love you baby!

This picture was inspired by something I saw on FARK.com.  I call it One-Stop Shopping.  Sorry...it’s late on Friday.  I need a hobby, I know.

What is the definition of paranoia? Merriam-Webster defines it as:

1 : a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations
2 : a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others

This is the only thing I can think of when I heard about Conservapedia (mucho props to Stupid Evil Bastard for pointing this site out).  Apparently, Wikipedia is anti-Christian (not anti-religion, just anti-Christian).  Therefore, someone created a “conservative version.” Umm...Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.  It deals in facts, not wishes. According to Conservapedia:

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian “C.E.” instead of “A.D.”, which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance.

OMG!  That is their bitch?  CE instead of AD? They even go so far as to list Wikipedia’s “biases“.  After the CE/AD slight, their second bitch is that Chrisitianity is not given ENOUGH (I am not making this up) credit for the Renaissance.  Enough?  Gee, that is not a quantitative argument, is it?  How exactly will they be satisfied?  Who decides when enough is enough?

Sites like this foster a climate of paranoia that needed exist.  The United States is not out to get Christians!  Jeez...lighten up folks.  Just because someone out there somewhere might be having a good time is not a reason to get your hackles up.

This Saturday, my lovely demure wife will be taking her test for her first degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do.  I am so proud of her and I wish her the best of luck.  This is for her:

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. - Lynda Barry

I am as guilty of it as the next guy: falling for the glamor and glitz of this cycle’s crop of presidential candidates.  Senator Clinton and her “conversations”, Senator Obama’s smooth and easy rhetoric, etc.  But what about actual ability?  Bill Richardson might just be that candidate.  He has been a member of Congress, an ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy, and is now the Governor of New Mexico.  Listen people, senators make shitty presidents (Kennedy aside).  Governors (Bush aside) make pretty good presidents. It comes from having executive experience. 

So, I went out to Governor Richardson’s Presidential Exploratory Committee website and reviewed his issues pages.  I then read a speech he gave the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  CSIS is headed by a gentleman I greatly respect, Dr. John Hamre. BTW, here is the speech in PDF.  I don’t agree with all of it, but it is a great start. His positions on Iraq, the economy, energy independence, and immigration reform all closely my own.  I encourage to at least give me a chance as this front-loaded primary moves forward.

Outstanding!

Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud and drug trafficking among anti-terror cases in the four years after 9/11 even though no evidence linked them to terror activity, a Justice Department audit said Tuesday.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine were either diminished or inflated. Only two of 26 sets of department data reported between 2001 and 2005 were accurate, the audit found.