So this is late. I try to post these weekly round-ups on Sunday or Monday, depending on how my weekend goes, and it is now Wednesday night. So late on Wednesday night, in fact, that’s it’s actually Thursday morning on the East coast. What can I say? It’s summertime, which in Mom World is crazytime. The kids are home all day long. They are hungry all day long. They are bored all day long. Actually, kids in my house are never bored, or at least they never voice it, because if they do, they find themselves staring at toilet with a scrub brush in their hand. Nothing cures boredom quite like scrubbing a toilet!

And that’s the kind of mom I am. Interestingly, I just got off the phone with a single girlfriend, with whom I shared a story from the beach today. One of my kiddos was carelessly kicking sand on people, and needed to be corrected. “See?” She said, “This is why I can never have kids. I’d probably kick sand on them and ask, ‘How does that feel?’”

“Um … what do you think I did?”

And that’s the kind of mom I am. The kind of mom whose kids don’t carelessly kick sand on other people.

Anyway, I wrote some stuff last week! And you should totally click on it and maybe even read it. Otherwise you might find yourself staring a toilet with a scrub brush in your hand.

President Obama gave a little speech about the debt limit. It was riddled with blatant untruths. I narrowed down the top nine.

Speaking of President Obama, do you know that he signed a bill that authorized $50 million of your hard-earned money to put guns in the hands of dangerous Mexican drug lords? Because he totally did. Oh, and Attorney General Eric Holder lied about it.

I also mocked global warming scare tactics and possibly polar bears. Because polar bears would totally eat me, given the chance.

Happy reading!

In the same week that ultra-liberal personality Ed Shultz has been suspended from MSNBC for calling conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham a slut, Democratic Congresswoman and DNC chairwomanDebbie Wasserman Schultz is claiming that theGOP agenda is essentially a war on women.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz arrived at her illogical conclusion by citing the predominantly Republican call to defund Planned Parenthood of federal funds:

It’s just so hard for me to grasp how they could be so anti-women as they are. If you look on balance at the entire record, their record is anti-women, their record is a war on women and it’s a priority for them.

Apparently, wanting to defund a corrupt organization of our limited taxpayer dollars equals an intense hating of the female sex. Just in case anyone was wondering, Planned Parenthood is very profitable, which raises the question of whether or not it should be taxpayer funded.

Read the rest at The Stir

California is releasing tens of thousands of inmates after a ruling by theSupreme Court on Monday. No, they haven’t been wrongfully imprisoned and suddenly found innocent due to some new DNA technology.

It’s just that the prisons are overcrowded.

A sane solution would be to build more prisons. Unfortunately, there’s apparently not enough money to build more steel bars. So, we should totally tax the rich, because even though they pay the vast, vast majority of our taxes, they still aren’t paying enough, because new prisons aren’t getting built!

Another logical option would be to spend less money per prisoner, so that the savings could go toward building new facilities. The average prisoner in the State of California costs over $48,000 annually, with about $16,000 of that going to health care, mental health, and dental costs.

Prisoners, convicted felons, probably have better health care than you do.

Seriously, does your health insurance cover free hormone replacement therapy for you if you happen to be transgendered? California prisons do. And soon, they may even provide gender reassignment surgery as well.

Read the rest at The Stir

Another week, another round of Obamacare waivers. One has to wonder at this point if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act applies to anyone anymore. It certainly doesn’t seem to apply to friends of President Obama.

They’re all getting waivers.

The Obama administration granted 204 new waivers nationwide in April, and almost 20 percent of them went to fancy restaurants and hotels in San Francisco. It’s probably a coincidence that San Francisco is former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s district. Ms. Pelosi, along with her Senatorial counterpart Harry Reid, was one of the biggest pushers of Obamacare when the president was trying to get it passed.

The other 80 percent of the waivers went to the usual recipients:labor unions, large corporations, financial firms, and local governments. How nice it must be to be in bed with big government. Sarah Palin had a succinct response to the Pelosi waiver revelation:

“Unflippingbelievable! No, wait, it is believable,” Palin said in an email to TheDC (The Daily Caller). “Seriously, this is corrupt. And anyone who still supports the Pelosi-Reid-Obama agenda of centralized government takeovers of the free market and the corresponding crony capitalism is, in my book, complicit.”

Read the rest at The Stir

The United States hit the debt ceiling on Monday, surpassing $14.3 trillion in debt owed to pay for super important things like the stimulus that was going to keep unemployment from going over 8 percent. It’s totally cool though, because Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner suspended investments in federal retirement funds to buy us a few months to figure out what the heck to do.

Congress has until August 2 to raise the debt ceiling (think of this as a credit card limit — there’s only so much you’re allowed to borrow) or balance the budget.

This has happened numerous times since 1917, when the first limit was set. The idea was a good one: Congress could only borrow so much money before it had to figure out a way to balance the budget and pay back the debt. In theory, it works as a permission slip to borrow and spend, because Congress gets to decide whether or not to increase the limit.

Read the rest at The Stir

Boeing is trying to open a new factory in South Carolina that would employ people to build airplanes. Unemployment in the country is still high, and getting people back to working creating things that other people want to buy is a very good thing.

Here’s how an economy works: Cobbler Joe makes excellent shoes, but his wife really wants a purse for her birthday. So Cobbler Joe works extra hard in his shoe shop creating excellent shoes that he can sell for a decent price. When he has enough money saved, he goes down the street to Polly’s Purse Shop where he purchases a fabulous handbag for his lovely wife.

When Polly sees Cobbler Joe, she’s reminded of the pair of purple satin stilettos she wants, and asks Joe if he has any in stock. He does, and she stops by later and purchases them. Or she goes to Jim’s Shoe Shop because he’s selling them at a discount. Or maybe she goes back to Joe who will price-match them.

Read the rest at The Stir

The newlywed Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had quite the wedding party to celebrate their marriage vows. I think it’s wonderful. If a girl marrying a prince can’t have a spectacular wedding and supremely gorgeous dress, who can?

But my heart’s just not into the excitement of it all. One of the greatest gifts God gave us is marriage, and the public declaration of a life-long commitment to another person is precious, glorious, and terrifying. It’s why chicks cry at weddings. It’s emotional, man!

It makes me sad that so many people no longer value the sanctity of marriage. That love has become a squishy, tender feeling, rather than a verb. People don’t fall out of love; they fall out of lust, infatuation, or like. And then they throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Marriage is hard. Sometimes it sucks. Tough. Deal with it. When you set out on a journey with another person, you hold that person’s hand through storms and sunny afternoons alike. Hopefully your days will be mostly sunny with a small storm here or there, but there are no guarantees in life.

Marriage vows do not ask us to have and hold each other until death do us part, or until life gets crappy, whichever comes first.

Marriage is commitment, not an excuse for a party. No Brad Pitt, you and Jennifer Aniston did not have a successful marriage, and you saying so doesn’t show maturity or emotional evolution, or whatever anyone wants to call it. It mocks and belittles marriage, and shows a blatant disregard of your own commitments.

The deprecation of marriage by celebrities (royalty included) makes it impossible for me to get super excited about Will and Kate. I wish nothing but the best for the newlyweds, and hope that through the years they will prove my cynicism wrong. I hope they will be each other’s best friend and truly love one another, and not become another couple that disparages their vows with secrets, lies, cruelty, affairs, and eventual divorce.

Now please excuse me while I go kiss my husband and remind him that I love him.

Washington State has spent a lot of effort over the past few years enticing people to buy electric cars over old school gas-guzzlers. In addition to a tax incentive from the federal government, the state has exempted sales tax on the purchase of electric vehicles. In other words, it’s a great deal to buy a car that uses less gas.

People buy hybrid or electric cars for one of two reasons: To save money or to appear cool. People that actually want to save the planet ride bikes, not drive coal-powered cars.

To the hipsters, a tax on electric vehicles might not be a huge issue. These people might even feel that paying higher taxes for the privilege of driving a Prius makes them even cooler.

Read the rest at The Stir

We’re almost half way through the fiscal year (which began on October 1, 2010), and the federal government still hasn’t figured out its budget.They keep passing continuing resolutions, which means that they agree to stick mostly with last year’s budget until a final budget can be passed.

The most recent extension passed 87-13 in the Senate on Thursday, with our politicians assuring us that this will be the last time. The resolution included $6 billion in cuts for the fiscal year, yet nine Republicansenators voted against it.

The conservative naysayers say that the cuts aren’t deep enough for their conscience to allow them to vote in favor of the short-term budget stopgap. Florida Senator Marco Rubio released a press statement explaining his vote in opposition of the resolution:

Today’s vote, first of all, should remind us of how we got here. Why are we funding government in two or three week increments? And it’s because Democrats, when they ran the House, the Senate and the White House, didn’t pass a budget.

“But more importantly, this is a terrible way to run government. We are facing some serious issues in America today, particularly the fact that we are borrowing $4 billion a day to keep the lights on and particularly the fact that we owe $14 trillion and growing. It’s time to face those issues in a serious way. The time for waiting is over. The time for games has passed.

Read the rest at The Stir

I just filled up my gas tank and I didn’t want to cry — I actually did cry. At $4 per gallon, it cost me nearly a c-note to fill up my mid-size SUV. That’s not for the fancy high-octane stuff either; we’re talking regular unleaded.

We don’t have room in our budget to increase the amount of money we spend on gas, so this means we’ll be doing a lot less driving. Fewer trips to visit friends in neighboring cities, no running back to the store for that one thing we forgot, and definitely no drives through the countryside.

I’ve had to do a lot of economizing in the kitchen too, as the price of food has been going up and up. The First Lady likes to tout the benefits of organic rabbit food (which, by the way, children would rather throw away than eat), but she’s not the one trying to pay for it on a modest salary.

Organic farming is much more expensive than farming with pesticides. Without pesticides, there’s nothing to kill the hungry bugs in the fields, which means that actual people need to be employed to keep the produce from being chomped to the vine by the creepy-crawlers. Employing people to care for the plants in organic farms is much more expensive than hiring a crop-duster once or twice a season.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the cost of organic food, but all food that has climbed in recent months and years. In fact, food prices rose more last month than they have in 36 years.

Read the rest at The Stir