For those still keeping score at home...

Via Twitter:

Obamacare hasn't been repealed, taxes haven't been cut, the Wall isn't being built.

Congressional Republicans, you've let us down.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) September 28, 2017

Jones Act false narrative

For days, media and left leaning politicians have hounded President Trump for not immediately waiving the Jones Act to help traffic hurricane relief aid into Puerto Rico ports.

But after Trump waived the Jones Act for Puerto Rico, media now reports that it's not the Jones Act that's delaying aid to the island. 

Today's media. Quick to emote. Slow, if not incapable, when it comes to applying analysis or reason.

NFL update...

Via Twitter:

Me too, but I'm an old white lady.
Denied, nonetheless!

— BayAreaFrau (@bayareahausfrau) September 26, 2017

Same ol' same ol'

The New York Times eagerly sugar coated Communism in the 1930s.

And appears to be still at it.

For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big https://t.co/Fci82iAPxM

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) September 26, 2017

"Just getting started"

"The ruling class and its Democratic Party had been practicing identity politics with increasing intensity for more than a generation. The elections’ outcome convinced them that they needed to engage in it just about exclusively, and in a warlike manner. Possessed of the modern administrative state’s manifold levers of power, they expect to win that war. That is unlikely, if only because its components’ notions of their respective identities’ demands are ever expanding. Hence they preclude imposing any extended peace among themselves, never mind with the rest of America. This impossibility of socio-political peace is the reason why the revolution in which we are living is just getting started." - Angelo Codevilla

A good night for the republic

"Moore crushes Strange in Alabama GOP primary."

This is what's needed. Grassroots uprisings against GOPe.

District by district, state by state.

Moore's victory gives energy to the necessary insurgency.

Media increasingly shows its truer nature

Sure, it's easy for media to target Trump. And media gets indignant when Trump fires back. What's not so clear is the media has games of its own, and some of those games have changed noticeably as it tangles with Trump and a populist uprising.

"They're turning themselves from "relatable" -- and therefore worth giving a fair hearing to -- to very unrelatable and weird in their single-minded obsessive political propagandizing," says Ace of Spades.

Puerto Rico, politics, and a new round of "blame games"

The Left is already hammering Trump's "lack of response" to the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster.

Seriously? Give me a break.

I saw one story slamming Trump for not having already visited Puerto Rico.

As if tying up airspace and limited airport resources, thereby delaying disaster relief flights, to accommodate Air Force One would be appropriate?

Comparing the response in Puerto Rico to FEMA's response in Texas post Harvey or Florida post Irma is disingenuous.

In Texas and Florida, governors there had plans in place prior to the storm, and took responsibility for early implementation until reinforcements arrived.

In Puerto Rico, being an island (actually islands), disaster response logistics are far more complicated. And Puerto Rico appears to have been far less ready to stand in the gap until help arrived than Texas or Florida.

Consider, for example, the Puerto Rican electric utility declared bankruptcy last July. It's probably safe to say, it's not nearly as well prepared to rebuild a massively damaged grid as its financially solvent state-side counterparts would be.

Trump says it may take a week or two to come up with a comprehensive plan for relief in recovery in Puerto Rico. Sounds like the feds are having to start from scratch. And it's hard to come up with a realistic or effective plan until assessments can be made of damage, and priorities set for what needs to be prioritized.

The lack of immediate action on a comprehensive recovery plan doesn't mean essential disaster relief supplies aren't being pumped into Puerto Rico as fast as possible.

But don't expect logic or reason to keep the political Left from trying to make the Puerto Rico crisis seem somehow to be "Trump's fault."

The Left tries to have it both ways.

Some folks are fed up with that.

Via Twitter:

Good guy with a gun

Several major media accounts of the Tennessee church shooting story leave out the detail that the already injured church usher retrieved his own firearm from a car before subduing the attacker.

The Chicago Tribune, to its credit, plays this important point in its headline. 

What was the potential for more death or injury had the usher not had access to a weapon. Would the situation had ended with less harm had the usher been armed from the git-go?

The NFL and a bunch of its players need a reality check

It appears NFL has grown into nothing more than another spoiled, elitist club for self indulging celebs. Much of the wealth in the NFL came by way of tax concessions and stadiums funded by government bonds or taxes. Many of the residents who now subsidize the NFL's opulence can no longer even afford to attend its games. And yet these NFL players dare to look down on the people, communities, and nation that made their lives so good.

I'll caution that DBD Cartoon is frequently NSFW.

But a friend sent me today's strip, and it should be okay unless your employer screens for mockery of Hillary Clinton:

Nobody wins here...

Bad enough a person apparently intent on suicide manipulated police into using deadly force, but now the deceased is being turned into a martyr.

Reports of rioting and a burned police car are emanating from the Georgia Tech campus.

Welcome to the "progressive" age, where spin and agenda trump reality or reason.

Dig a little deeper

What's scary about those who want to remove the statues is their real agenda seems to be to rewrite history, and then transform America into something more in line with their sense of mob rule rather than rule of law. Even scarier is that so many people seem willing to just shrug and let it happen.

Battery charger

I'm looking around for a 12 volt automotive type battery charger, and I'm sorely disappointed by most of what I see. I'm looking for something in the 6 to 10 amp charging range. Something that could be used off a simple generator for AC power if need be.

For the most part, chargers today are "automatic" and microprocessor controlled. And if you read online customer reviews, quite a few are units are apparently subject to fail.

To me, microprocessor means you have be careful about what kind of AC power you feed into the unit, or risk blowing a sensitive component. What I want is a charger that will still function reliably with an imperfect power source, an old-school (pre-inverter era) generator.

I'm also skeptical as I review certain "manual" charger options. Again, reviews are mixed, from what I've read. Many fail early, or have defects right out of the box.

Too many tools and devices today are engineered to operate only in a perfect environment.

Reality is, you often have these tools or devices to help cope with adverse or imperfect conditions when status quo "perfection" fails. Design engineers and bean counter manufacturers seem to have forgotten this.

Rethinking politics

Forget the often phony games of Left and Right.

How about thinking of today's Washington DC politics in terms of establishment, insurgencies, and counter insurgencies?

The government power grab that will not die

Via Reason.com;

Today, Bernie Sanders will release a proposal for single-payer health care, co-sponsored by 15 Democrats. To call it a plan is, in some sense, too generous: Although it envisions a sweeping and generous system that would make government the primary payer for nearly all health care in the United States and virtually wipe out employer health coverage in the space of just a few years, it is not really a plan. Instead, it is a legislative fantasy built on a combination of wild overconfidence in government and an almost comical refusal to grapple with costs or trade-offs.

Single payer was the goal all along. Obamacare seems to be the "intermediate step" Obama said would be necessary to get us there. I truly hope some of this madness can be reversed. But alas, we now know Republicans were lying when the promised to roll back Obamacare. Democrats still seem focused on putting all health care under a government umbrella. Nobody in DC really wants to fix anything. The DC health care game is about power, not health care.

Power's out

Irma, or at least what was left of it, came through our North Georgia mountains.

Didn't seem like much of a storm by the time it got here, but it took down power in a bunch of places anyway.

Cranked up the lil' generator just after 6:00 am. I have coffee. I have bacon. I should be good for a while.

Say again?

Some media report "undocumented" workers don't have the means to flee Irma... Anyone else see a touch of irony here?

Trump-free zones

"Rahm Emanuel creates ‘Trump-free zone’ for students at Chicago schools"

As long as he knows there are stupid people who buy this kind of B-S, guys like Rahm will continue to exploit. As cities lose upper and middle class residents, and increasingly cater to lower rungs of society (including illegal aliens needed to prop up population numbers), Rahm's kind of politics will escalate, and not just in Chicago.

Gonna be lots of folks on the road next few days

When his people refused to evacuate ahead of the storm, Toonces took the keys to the Dodge and began heading north on his own...


via GIPHY

Long lines for hurricane supplies

This is madness.

Potential hurricane strike less than a week away, and people swarm stores for stuff they should have had on hand anyway. At the very least, stuff they should have bought and stockpiled around the start of hurricane season.

An old Lefty sees things piling up fast

James Howard Kunstler runs down what he sees as near-term reasons to be very wary in the present times.

Updated Post-Harvey sit-rep

Nine oil refineries remain shut down, seven are in the process of re-start, four are operating at reduced levels. Colonial Pipeline didn't restart gasoline transport ops out of Houston area on Sunday as initially outlooked, Tuesday is the new target.

Rain the forecast for early this week may mean more flooding in Houston.

Here's a link to Sunday's DOE post-Harvey update.

If you want to follow daily updates, you'll find them here.

I don't mind so much that gasoline prices rise following a disaster that impacts production, but it's the potential for outages that concern me. I'm still not sure we won't see wider shortages or outages post-Harvey.

Another Chik-fil-A in action

"We had to get out of there so I called Chick-fil-A, now that sounds kind of funny," J.C. Spencer said in an interview on "Good Morning America" Wednesday. "I ordered two grilled chicken burritos with extra egg and a boat. And can you believe that one of the managers of Chick-fil-A, she sent her husband to pick us up and we are so grateful." - ABC News