1. Occupy Wall Street’s Sanitation (or lack thereof)
2. Obama’s Jobs Bill, Confusing Cloture, and Mainstream Media Fail
3. Iranian Space Monkeys and Assassinators
4. Crazy California Bans Open Carry of Unloaded Guns
5. The DOJ Hotline for Alabama Immigration Policy
6. Topeka Choses Skate Parks Over Prosecuting Domestic Violence
7. Baseball (Or as I like to call it: Cute boys in tight pants)

Plus we have a rant, a dirty joke from Eli, and and awesome Dude of the Week.

Happy listening!

Let me take a moment to give credit where credit is due. President Bush began the hunt for Osama, but President Obama took hold of the torch he was handed, and by golly, he got the job done. Bravo, Mr. President.

Now comes the question as to how much joy we’re supposed to feel at the death of another human being. Soon after the pronouncement of Osama’s death, people were partying in the streets ofNew York and Washington, D.C. In my own neighborhood, I could hear my neighbors whooping it up.

As the news scrolled across our own TV screen, our 7-year-old daughter asked, “Who’s Osama?”

“He was a very bad man that killed a lot of people,” I told her as simply as I could. She responded thoughtfully, “Oh. Then I’m glad he’s dead. He won’t be killing anyone now.”

Read the rest at The Stir

Last month the preacher set fire to the religious book ofIslam, which went remarkably unnoticed by the U.S. press. Thank goodness for that — the last thing attention-seekers need is more attention to fuel the craziness.

Unfortunately, word got out in Afghanistan, and the incident supposedly sparked a terrorist attack that resulted in the death of at least 11 people, seven of whom were U.N. staffers and guards.

Being quite the argumentative bunch (democracy rocks!), we Americans hopped on this story to decide whether or not Terry Jones has blood on his hands for the deaths in Afghanistan. He may be a jerk, but he’s not a murderer. The radical Islamic terrorists are murderers.

Read the rest at The Stir

Because I’m an equal opportunist, I feel compelled to also add Jezebel, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, and Andrea Yates to the list. It’s apparent that evil comes packaged in either gender.

There’s been an evil dude in power in Libya for more than 41 years.Muammar Gaddafi has been the totalitarian ruler of the middle-eastern state since a military overthrow in 1969. Life is not kind to the average citizen under Gaddafi’s rule (it never usually is when one lives under a dictatorship), and recently Libyans have protested the oppressive government regime.

Gaddafi’s response was to call the protesters “cockroaches” and claim they were “serving the devil.” Oh, and he had his minions kill anyone they found opposing him. After the funeral service for those massacred by Gaddafi, the tyrant ordered his peeps to use artillery, swords, or even hammers to attack the mourners. In other words: Crush any and all dissent.

Not cool, evil dictator dude, not cool.

Read the rest at The Stir.

• President Hosni Mubarak has been in power for 30 years.
• The people of Egypt don’t want Mubarak to be president anymore.
• It’s illegal in Egypt to protest the government.
• The Egyptians protested anyway, using social media like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to coordinate their efforts.
• The Egyptian government promptly shut off all Internet and cell service in the country, shutting its citizens off from the world and each other.

I am not going to speculate on whether or not the Egyptians have a right to protest, or even if they should protest. I have no opinions to offer about the relationship between the United States and Egypt, because I’m not fully educated on the subject. A great writer once said, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

I do know that Egypt is supposedly one of our allies in the Middle East. Mostly because our mutual distrust of Iran unites us. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or something like that.

The people of Egypt probably aren’t too keen on the United States right now, since their government is trying to end their protests partly with tear gas made in the USA. Ah, nothing like using American-made products to quell protesting citizens. No one better give Barney Frank any ideas, mmmkay?

I don’t know exactly what the end goal for the Egyptian protesters is. I get that they don’t like the current regime. But what’s their ultimate goal? Remember the Bolsheviks? They violently overthrew a corrupt government ‘for the people of Russia.’ That didn’t turn out so well … Remember Stalin? Super evil dude.

On the other hand, the Boston Tea Party led to the American Revolution, from which emerged a new nation that became the greatest and freest country in all of history.

I don’t know if the Egyptians are Bolsheviks or Patriots, and I would be an idiot to speculate. Of course I hope they want a truly free society, instead of replacing one oppressive government with their own oppressive government, but hope is not truth, and to blindly assume that the people of Egypt are purely good while the government is purely bad is naïve.

What I can speculate on is the power of social media and networking, and the danger of letting government regulate it. Whether or not these protesters are protesting for actually democracy or just another regime change is irrelevant to this point. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are basic human rights (we in America have legal rights to them as well, but the rest of world isn’t necessarily as lucky), and protesting one’s government falls under the whole ‘pursuit of happiness’ thing.

The people of Egypt used Twitter, Facebook, emails, texts, and more to coordinate their efforts. The initial manpower didn’t have to be huge. They didn’t need to send people out to knock on doors and share the information. They did it from home, blasting it to hundreds and thousands of others, who joined their ranks. They worked together, quickly and efficiently, to get the protests organized and to rally the people. Every person in the chain of communication felt like part of something; they might be just one link, but that chain needs them.

This is what we’ve seen over the past few years in our own country. A sense of camaraderie and partnership formed over the interwebs that was near impossible even just a decade ago. We have a free-flow of information and dialogue; first-hand accounts of events live-tweeted, speculated on, compared with other accounts, related to the past, and used to make predictions about the future.

Social media has been an integral component of the conservative uprising we’ve seen in America. We are no longer isolated – we have found each other and realized that there are more of us than the mainstream media wanted us to believe. We have organized rallies, we have cheered one another on, and we consoled each other when Jerry Brown was reelected Governor of California.

Watching the Egyptian government take away its people’s ability to communicate rapidly and efficiently makes me grateful to live in America. And fearful to ever let the authorities have any power to regulate our online access. The government should fear its people, not control them.

On January 19, there was a big fancy-schmancy dinner to honor the visiting delegates. As part of the entertainment, Chinese pianist Lang Lang played anti-American propaganda song.

Let me repeat that: As part of the entertainment at a White House state dinner to honor the President of China, a well known, anti-American song was played.

At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain.”

The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. CCP propaganda has always referred to the Korean War as the “movement to resist America and help [North] Korea.” The message of the propaganda is that the United States is an enemy—in fighting in the Korean War the United States’ real goal was said to be to invade and conquer China.

The rest of the world is laughing in our faces and all our president can do is bow to them.

Secretary of State Clinton is mad. President Obama is cracking down with a zero-tolerance policy for anyone caught leaking information. Congressman Pete King (R-NY) is calling for the government to declare WikiLeaks a foreign terrorist organization, in order to “seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them help or contributions or assistance whatsoever.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims that total transparency is in the public’s best interest.

Read the rest at The Stir

On Monday, Helen Thomas retired from her career as a journalist forUnited Press International at the ripe old age of 89. The now former member of the White House Press Corps did not step out gracefully with a Costco cake and warm wishes for happy golden years fromPresident Obama.

Ms. Thomas retired after making some spectacularly inappropriate comments that even White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbscondemned. He stated in a press conference Monday morning,”Obviously those remarks do not reflect the opinions of most of the people in here, and certainly not of the Administration.”

So what did Helen Thomas say? Remember, this is a woman that called sitting President George W. Bush the worst president in history. You think that she’d be old enough to remember what journalistic integrity was, but I guess not. But even that inappropriate, off-the-record comment pales in comparison to what she said last week.

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