This past weekend, my hubby and I decided to drag the kids to Costco after church on Sunday. We’re obviously masochists, I know. Our Costco has a gas station that sells fuel for about $.25 less per gallon than the average local station. When we pulled into the parking lot, the lines for these discount pumps were eight and nine cars deep.

People were waiting for half an hour or more to pay $3.75 per gallon of gas. I just hope they weren’t letting their engines idle — that sort of defeats the purpose. By the time we waded through the crowd in the warehouse store with our 12-pack of chicken breasts and so-cute-we-had-to-buy-them matching pajamas for the girls and were on our way home, the price of unleaded had gone up to $3.77.

Supply, demand, and speculation over the woes in the Middle East have contributed to some pretty pricey gasoline. Let’s face it: There’s a limited amount of oil in the world, more countries are developing industrially, and the place most everyone gets their oil from is, for better or worse, in the midst of a revolution.

Of course the cost of energy is going to go up. It’s written in The Law of Common Sense, right in between “what goes up must come down,” and “never stare down the barrel of a shotgun.” (You can find this book in the ‘Welcome Newbies’ section of the Republican bookstore, along with Facts Are Not Hard and A Convenient Truth.)

Read more at The Stir

A San Diego grandmother is sitting in jail on charges of child abuse. Last Saturday, she allegedly flung her 2-year-old grandson to the ground and slapped him. The child received minor abrasions on his back and head, and was examined at Rady Children’s Hospital.

Kelly Daffara was traveling by bus with her toddler grandson to visit a relative. When they got off the bus in a busy part of San Diego, the little boy ran away from her.

Daffara told police she yelled at him to come back, but he ignored her.

That was when Daffara allegedly screamed at him, went after him, picked him up, and slammed him down onto his back on the pavement. Witnesses told police Daffara slapped the boy once or twice.

The police reported that Daffara admitted to losing control.

Her reaction might have been extreme, but how many of us haven’t lost our minds when our children darted away from us near the street? Kids, especially adventuresome toddlers, are hit and killed bymoving vehicles all the time.

Read the rest at The Stir

The vitriol spewed by many ‘news’ sources after the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, last Saturday has been pointless, political, and extremely uncalled for. A congresswoman was shot through the headand will probably never fully recover. Six people died, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl.

The Left came out swinging against their favorite target Sarah Palin, claiming that she has blood on her hands and that she caused the massacre. Apparently guns don’t kill people, metaphors do.

It wasn’t just Palin that the left accosted, but the Tea Party movementin general. Because, you know, Tea Partiers are so violent. That’s why there are always so many arrests at tea party rallies. (That was sarcasm, by the way. Tea Partiers may be crazy about Glenn Beck, but they’re not violent.)

Read the rest at The Stir

Ezra Klein thinks conservatives are silly for trying to understand theConstitution. After all, it’s way too old to be relevant — over 100 years! In an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday morning, the Washington Post writer told host Norah O’Donnell that the Republican plan to open the 112^thCongress with a reading of the Constitution was a gimmick. Furthermore, he said:

The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.

The Constitution is not confusing — Ezra Klein is confusing. The ‘issue of the Constitution’ is not that the language is confusing; it’s that people like Klein are so readily willing to disregard the parts of the U.S. Rulebook that they don’t like (like the Second Amendment) and make up parts to suit their own purposes (like the ‘right to privacy’). The issue is that there are people that believe that the Constitution is a binding document, an agreement among a nation of people that broke from tyranny and decided to give self-government a try, and other people that believe it’s a living, breathing document open to reinterpretation whenever the wind shifts direction.

Read the rest at The Stir

Racism is awful. The discrimination that blacks endured for centuries was deplorable. The slavery, the segregation, and the hate crimes: all bad, bad, bad. A small amount of racial discrimination even exists today, a fact that should sadden the heart of every freedom-loving American.

In 1996, a small group of black farmers filed claims that they had beendiscriminated against on the basis of race by the USDA. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman set in motion Civil Rights Action Teams to look into the matter. They found that 205 of the 116,261 loan and crop payments issued by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency had triggered complaints of racial discrimination.

A farmer named Timothy Pigford filed a claim against the government for reparations. Many more joined the suit, and eventually it became a class-action lawsuit simply referred to as “Pigford.”

Due to lots of legalize and governmental restrictions, exemptions, and waivers, the settlement case for these farmers bounced back and forth for years. As publicity for the lawsuit grew, more and more people applied for a payout from the blanket settlement.

2004 finally saw the last of the reparation payments issued. We’ll never know the exact amount paid out to the thousands of farmers claiming racial discrimination because the judge sealed the documents, but estimates are in the billion-dollar range.

Read the rest at The Stir

As the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts rages on, some people are accusing Republicans of adding to the national deficit by not raising taxes on ‘rich’ people. The icky Republicans want to steal $36 billion and “transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation’s millionaires.”

Does anyone take basic math classes anymore? Economics? History?

Historically speaking, lowering taxes for employers actually produces more revenue for the government. The Bush tax cuts were what saved us from nose-diving into a recession in the early 2000s. The economy tanked in 2008 because they were spending more than they were taking in, but that’s a subject for another time. We’ve also bounced back from recessions by lowering taxes in the 80s under Reagan, in the 60s under Kennedy, and in the 20s under Coolidge. No country has ever taxed itself into prosperity, and the idea that it could all of a sudden magically work shows a failure to learn from history.

Read the rest at Pundit League

With only three weeks left until the Bush tax cuts are set to expire,Congress is scrambling to save taxpayers from the largest tax increasein history. There have been several proposals tossed around on the Senate and House floors, including extending the cuts only for those families making under $250,000 or individuals making under $200,000 per year.

It appears as though Bush’s tax cuts benefited the non-wealthy after all. Even Obama had to admit that the average American family profited from Bush’s tax policies:

Make no mistake: Allowing taxes to go up on all Americans would have raised taxes by $3,000 for the typical American family. And that could cost our economy well over a million jobs.

Last Saturday, the House passed a bill that would increase taxes on “wealthy” Americans only, but five Democrats in the Senate joined with the Republicans to kill it. Our politicians had to go back to the drawing board.

The current deal that has yet to be voted on is Obama’s compromise with Republicans. If passed, Bush’s across-the-board tax cuts will be extended for two years (with the exception of the inheritance tax, which will go from 0% to 35%), and the payroll tax would be cut by 2%, benefiting every working American. In exchange for the concession, federal unemployment insurance would be renewed for 13 months.

Read the rest at The Stir

Parenting is hard. The modern mom is supposed to do it all: Help pay the mortgage, bake the cookies, and raise socially conscious, compassionate children. We are supposed to purposefully expose our progeny to all religions, lifestyles, and backgrounds in the name of diversity. And we’re not supposed to let them play with evil toys like stick ponies, Barbies, or trampolines.

Tree houses? Forget about it. They’re super-duper dangerous and should be torn down immediately.

Forbes recently published a list of dangerous toys that were recalled in 2010 for safety reasons. The list includes a stick pony (long reins could strangle a child), plush asparagus (wire could poke through and cause abrasions), and a pogo stick (falling risk). Obviously parents are too stupid to check over their kids’toys for loose or broken parts, or understand the “falling risk” associated with pogo sticks.

While we’re busy cutting up our kids’ hotdogs, we are supposed to broaden their worldview and encourage their minds to open into tolerant little sponges of acceptance. We’re not supposed to care that Kevin Jennings, Obama’s Safe School Czar, promotes the sexual education of children as young as five. That’s not morally deplorable, that’s progressive!

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog

After twenty years of playing jolly old St. Nick at a Macy’s in San Francisco, John Toomey was canned last weekend after making some inappropriate comments. As a parent, I can’t even imagine the sickening feeling of witnessing a childhood hero violate my children’s innocence by speaking to them inappropriately.

Except that’s not what happened.

The joke has been in his Santa bag for decades. But after thousands of tellings, the 68-year-old retired caretaker for the elderly finally hit the wrong recipients – apparently an older woman and her husband, who considered it inappropriate.

Toomey – who stays in Oroville most summers and winters in San Francisco while he does the kiddie-on-the-knee gig – said he’d never had complaints before about the joke, which he saves for the occasional grown-up who visits him.

“When I ask the older people who sit on my lap if they’ve been good and they say, ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Gee, that’s too bad,’ ” Toomey said Monday.

“Then, if they ask why Santa is so jolly, I joke that it’s because I know where all the naughty boys and girls live.”

The kids who sit on his lap, he said, get only his trademark laugh and questions about what toys they want.

The kind of grown up with a sense of humor enough to pay a visit to Santa should be able to appreciate the adult jokes. No, they’re not appropriate for children, but there’s a bigger difference between adults and kids than size alone. If people can’t tell the difference between grown-ups and kiddos…well that’s just sad. And an indication of San Francisco’s nanny state mentality that regard all adults as children, incapable of making their own decisions — like whether or not to buy happy meals.

SEIU (Service Employees International Union) has spent millions of dollars getting Barack Obama and other Democrats elected. The famously left-wing labor union supported the presidential candidate that was going to pay Peggy Su’s mortgage and put gas in her car.

Unions are all about the little people.

One of Obama’s biggest campaign promises was for health care reform, specifically universal health care. It works so well in Canada, after all. SEIU openly supported Obama in the 2008 Presidential election.

Obama was elected, everyone partied (and left their litter behind), and everyone waited for change to come to America. In one of the few campaign promises that the President has actually kept, he signed into law a bill that would transform our health care system into a nationalizedone.

Be careful what you wish for. Since ObamaCare passed last March, small businesses have dropped health care coverage for their employees while big businesses got special exemptions, and drug relabeling has discriminated against women with cancer. Taxes have gone up, and will continue to do so.

Read the rest at The Stir