How to tell if you are a Liberal or a Conservative

Do you wonder where you stand on the political scale? Are you so far left that Obama actually got his health care message through to you, or do you fall somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan?

Fear not, I am here to help you find out whether you should register as a Democrat or a Republican: just answer the following questions truthfully by circling either A or B:

1. If you are asked for money from a scuzzy bum on the sidewalk, you:

A: Tell him to get a job.

B: Empty your wallet into his filthy fingers.

2. When President Obama appears on your television to give his 788th speech on health care reform, you:

A: Throw a brick through the TV screen.

B: Listen with rapt attention for important additional information on the issue.

3. If you find out that you and your spouse are expecting a baby, you:

A: Celebrate the joyous news.

B: Race to the abortion clinic to remove the unwanted fetal tissue from your body.

4. When asked by a pollster what you expect from government, you:

A: Tell the pollster you want absolutely nothing from the feds except a body count of dead terrorists.

B: Tell the pollster you want security and the fulfillment of any want or need from the time you are born to the moment of your death. 5. When the same pollster asks you your thoughts about unions, you tell them:

A: Unions are bloodsucking parasites on capitalism.

B: Unions help promote paradise on earth.

6. Ronald Reagan was:

A: the greatest president of our times.

B: the dunciest dunce to ever come out of Dunceville.

7. Kelo vs New London is:

A: a SCOTUS decision trampling our rights to hold private property.

B: some kind of new Little Debbie snack cake.

8. Teddy Kennedy was:

A: a murdering coward who left a girl for dead in a submerged car he drunkenly wrecked.

B: the greatest senator of our time.

9. President Obama has proposed taxing big banks. You think:

A: that Obama is an idiot who has no clue about how commerce works, and just wants a new bad guy to demonize, just like Saul Alinsky taught him.

B: that this is a good move, to penalize those fat cat bankers who have bags and bags full of ill gotten money laying around doing nothing anyway.

10. When asked if you want to join the neighborhood recycling drive, you:

A: tell them that recycling is a pointy headed liberal concoction that doesn't work, and you point to the sign in your yard that states "Don't Feed The Hippies."

B: jump up and down shouting 'oh goody goody goody, I can help save the planet.'

SCORING:

Count the number of "A" answers you circled, and match this number to the scale below:

10 A's: You are definitely conservative material, welcome to reality. Register as a Republican.

7 - 9 A's: You need some work, but have potential to wake up from your dream world. Register as a Republican.

6 A's or less: you are a Birkenstock wearing, bean sprout and tofu eating, pony tail sporting, Ted Kennedy loving, tree hugging socialist loser. Please don't take your insane notions of utopia out on the rest of us at the ballot box. Stay home during the next election.

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* Please note the irony in my use of the Simpsons characters above: The Comic Book Guy, while on the surface appears to be a pony-tail wearing, peace sign T-shirt donning liberal, is in fact a small business owner who is the target of the Obama administration via tax hikes and oppressive regulations. Superintendent Chalmers, on the other hand, while displaying his sartorial splendor in his three piece suit appears to be the consummate conservative, he is in fact the head honcho of the Springfield School District, a card carrying union member of the NEA and in all probability votes Democrat straight down the line. To actually use arch conservative Montgomery Burns as my icon of a conservative would be to diminish my point. I considered it, but gave the nod to 'Chalmy' as my conservative stalwart.

Where have all the 'manly' men gone?

Question: What is more sad and pathetic than the sight of an able bodied average American guy standing next to his car on the side of the road with a flat tire, cell phone to his ear calling AAA to come rescue him?

The answer: nothing.

What happened to us formerly red blooded, All-American guys over the last few decades? Have we guys all become helpless weenies? A nation chock full of what Arnold Schwartzenegger would call 'girly men?' Maybe so. I drew this cartoon above a few years ago after reading an article from Popular Mechanics, whose editors compiled a list of the basic skills that they deemed every American guy should possess, and it appears below. Read it and weep: 1. Patch a radiator hose 2. Protect your computer 3. Rescue a boater who has capsized 4. Frame a wall 5. Retouch digital photos 6. Back up a trailer 7. Build a campfire 8. Fix a dead outlet 9. Navigate with a map and compass 10. Use a torque wrench 11. Sharpen a knife 12. Perform CPR 13. Fillet a fish 14. Maneuver a car out of a skid 15. Get a car unstuck 16. Back up data 17. Paint a room 18. Mix concrete 19. Clean a bolt-action rifle 20. Change oil and filter 21. Hook up an HDTV 22. Bleed brakes 23. Paddle a canoe 24. Fix a bike flat 25. Install a wireless router system When I read this list, I agreed that most of these are all skills that fathers used to teach their sons in days gone by, and I scored a perfect 100%. But I am an old guy, with perhaps tired old notions of self reliance, determination and a willingness to get your hands dirty from time to time. In that bygone era, dads used to take their 10-year old boys out in the back yard and show them how to build a tree house. That right of passage taught young boys many skills to include using hand tools, planning, organization, safety and pride in workmanship. Sadly, those days are gone thanks to several factors such as advances in technology, and the slow and steady urbanization of the country. Most folks don't have backyards with substantial trees able to support any kind of tree house anymore unless they are out in the country. And even if they do, they have busy body home owners associations keeping their eyes peeled for these unsightly tree houses, those images of Americana now lost to our modern sensibilities. Rather than make excuses for why guys are turning into helpless losers, I suggest that this trend need not continue. Take a long, hard look at this list, guys. If there are a few things here that you don't have a clue as to how to proceed, man up. Find out how, and go do it. If you can't start a campfire, then you have no business calling yourself a guy anymore. Just turn in your man card, and we will scratch you off of the man list, and don't bother coming to the man meetings anymore. And one final thing: change your name to Shirley. Or Pam.

Haiti's woes: blame climate and culture, not Satan

Haitians just can't catch a break, or so it seems. And they never will, either. If it’s not revolution, it’s hurricanes. If not hurricanes, it’s earthquakes. If it's not earthquakes, it's floods. Constant corruption and poverty are a guaranteed way of life in Haiti: it always has been so, as it always will be. A few decades ago they made the news as the poor and dispossessed Haitian mobs booted out one dictator, Baby Doc Duvalier, and crowned another, Juan Betrand Aristide, and the current dictator, Rene Preval, is just the last in a long line of corrupt, ineffective despots to preside over this country currently formed by former West African slaves. The history of this pathetic country takes it from a tropical paradise inhabited by the indigenous Arawaks, to a French colonial sugar plantation. Afterwards, the former African slaves who overthrew the French themselves murdered, enslaved and otherwise exterminated the native Arawaks, and this country has been governed by a very small handful of the ruling class ever since, who themselves are the offspring of pirates, slave owners and all manner of scoundrels and thieves. And these handful of thug descendants still control virtually all of the cash flow of this country, which produces almost nothing. 40% of the Haitian government budget comes from foreign aid, of which nearly all of this money goes into the coffers of the ruling thugs. And why does nothing ever change in Haiti? The answer should be obvious. While Pat Robertson seems to attribute it to a pact with the devil, Haiti is simply a nation of ne’er-do-wells, where sloth is the cultural norm. Why bother building anything of value, when either the thugs in control come and confiscate it, or a hurricane or earthquake eventually destroys it. Why go through all that trouble? Property rights are virtually nonexistent, and the religion of most of the population is not Christianity, but rather voodoo. With such obstacles to overcome, how is it that the population of Haiti is now over 10,000,000 on a piece of island of only 10,714 square miles (936 people per square mile population density, versus 83 in the U.S.)? The climate is such that the temperature rarely if ever goes below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and permanent housing is not really a necessity, but rather a luxury. If the bamboo poles and plastic tarp that the typical Haitian puts up to keep the warm rain off them blows away in a tropical storm, no big deal. They will just pull a few banana leaves over them at night, and they are fine. The climate does not demand that they put forth anymore effort than that, unlike the northern climates, where the winter will thin the herd of the lazy, slovenly and nonindustrious retches. The ‘industrious’ Haitians who actually put up more substantial dwellings care little if anything about the integrity of their structures. Putting reinforcement bars (rebar) into their concrete (if you can call it concrete, it’s more like really hard mud) only adds 'unnecessary' costs. And now a 7.0 earthquake comes along and levels virtually the whole country, and they wonder why God has forsaken them (or more accurately, since most Haitians are not really a God fearing bunch, they will wonder what witch doctor is sticking pins in their voodoo dolls). With perhaps 100,000 dead (or more, many more), the blame for this kind of devastation cannot squarely be put on God’s hands (or laid at the feet of those pin wielding witch doctors). The San Francisco earthquake of 1989 was also 7.0 on the Richter scale, yet only 57 deaths were attributed directly to the quake. The western democracies have been pouring billions and billions of dollars into Haiti for decades, now. You would think that some of that dough would go for infrastructure, right? Wrong. It went directly into the pockets of the handful of ruling thug families that are the proximate cause of all of the misery you see on the TV night after night. And all we hear now from the media is that rather than sending relief supplies such as medicine, food, water, etc., we should instead send buckets and buckets of cash. Cold hard cash will relieve the suffering. Exactly who do they think they are fooling? Rather than sending $10,000 to a Haitian relief fund, the same results would be seen if instead you just set fire to the $10K stack of bills and watch them burn. The only trickle down effect of any cash relief effort to Haiti will be realized by the ruling thugs' Mercedes Benz dealers, their yacht brokers and their Caribbean real estate agents. Pact with the devil? Maybe. But Haiti’s woes are more likely rooted in factors associated with the climate, the culture and politics rather than any satanic foolishness.

Pelosi to Americans: 'Let them eat cake.'

Is it possible that our Democrat leadership in the White House and in Congress can get any more arrogant? No, that is not possible, as their hubris allows them to thumb their nose at the overwhelming opposition by the majority of Americans who abhor their lunatic lunges towards socialism, because they truly believe they are smarter and more 'well born' than the rest of the Great Unwashed in Fly Over country.

We're all just too dag nab dumb to understand how great this country will be with the government running every aspect of our lives. To our elite Democrat leaders, we simply can't manage our affairs 'correctly' without their help. And, like little kids who whine about taking their cod liver oil, Mommy Pelosi will just ignore our caterwauling and jam this stuff down our throat because she truly believes she knows what's best for us.

When Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Mars) was asked about the constitutionality of requiring Americans to buy anything, such as health insurance, she looked at the questioner and simply said, 'are you kidding?', and promptly dismissed the question. At a recent press conference, Pelosi was asked about Obama's many and repeated promises to publicly air congressional debates about health care reform legislation on C-Span, and she arrogantly dismissed the question with a laugh, stating 'there's lots of things said on the campaign trail...'

In other words, 'let them eat cake.'

Rather than go into the tedious details of the last arrogant, elite woman who supposedly uttered that sentiment (Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI of France pictured above) to a growingly hostile population to their tyrannical and indifferent regime at the beginning of the French Revolution, let's just say that the commoners wielding pitchforks and torches found that suggestion offensive and arrogant, and in 1793 it ended somewhat badly for her.

November 2nd, 2010 is just around the corner, and while I would be exaggerating to compare it to the guillotine for these guys, I can tell you that the Zeitgeist we all feel today will result in their liberal heads rolling at the ballot boxes in November.