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!

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

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

A few months ago, conservatives were outraged at the firing of liberalJuan Williams by National Public Radio for saying that flying with Islamic-looking males made him nervous on Fox News’ The O’Reily Factor. According to NPR’s head honcho Vivian Schiller, Mr. Williams had “several times in the past violated [their] news code of ethics with things that he had said on other people’s air.”

Apparently expressing an opinion based on the fact that virtually every airplane-hijacking terrorist in the United States over the past few decades has been a Jihadist is punishable by unemployment from NPR. Juan Williams did not state that he thought all Muslims were terrorists, or even that he refused to fly with them. He simply stated that it made him nervous.

Shortly thereafter, many prominent conservative pundits called for NPR to be defunded of the federal money that it receives. Private businesses can run things how they see fit, but organizations receiving taxpayer money should not be able to terminate someone’s employment for expressing a valid opinion, especially when it wasn’t even done on NPR’s airwaves.

In November, the then-Democratic House of Representatives defeated a bill to cut the federal fundingof NPR. The supposedly unbiased organization released this statement after the vote:

In an increasingly fractious media environment, public radio’s value in fostering an informed society has never been more critical. Our growing audience shows that we are meeting that need. It is imperative for federal funding to continue to ensure that this essential tool of democracy remains available to all Americans and thrives well into the future.

Fast forward to March 2011. Ron Schiller, a senior executive at NPR, was caught on tape in a sting operation criticizing the Republican party, and Tea Party Republicans in particular, as being racist, fundamentalist Christian, and fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.

**Side note: Democrats want to control our health care, our education, and what we can feed our kids, but Republicans are “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives”? Um, ok …

Read the rest at The Stir

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

As a conservative, I am often accused of being a selfish, heartless,mean girl. Somehow, believing that Americans are strong, hard-working people well capable of taking care of themselves and their communities means that I’m a thieving capitalist who only wants the rich to get richer. Oh, and for some reason I’m also a racist.

Let’s take a look at the current situation in Wisconsin. The public sector unions are protesting at the state’s Capitol against Governor Scott Walker’s plan to make the members pay a fraction of their own health insurance and retirement contributions, and to limit their ‘collective bargaining’ capabilities to salary alone (as opposed to benefits as well). I stand with Governor Walker on this issue (incidentally, so would Democratic hero FDR), which obviously means I’m joining the ‘attack’ on workers in Wisconsin.

Why is it that every time conservatives advocate for taxpayers keeping more of their own hard-earned money, we’re accused of stealing from the poor? The GOP opposes Obamacare, and Harry Reid claims we’re stealing from the middle class. If we so much as mention privatizing Social Security, John Boehner gets painted as a clown and we’re accused of trying to steal from people’s retirement accounts. (Newsflash: that money is already long gone.) Parents that support a voucher system so that they can choose the best schools for their children are guilty of defunding the public schools they are districted for.

Read the rest at The Stir

President Obama’s 2012 budget was released on Valentine’s Day, just in time to break conservative hearts everywhere. How many times do we have to say that we want less spending before he’ll listen to us? It’s more frustrating than trying to make a phone call using AT&T Wireless.

The President’s self-proclaimed ‘responsible’ budget will double the national debt from $13.56 trillion to $26.3 trillion by the end of 2021. Keep in mind that neither contractors nor the government ever comes in under budget.

President Obama claims that his budget reduces spending. Someone needs to tell him that two plus two does not equal three. It’s true that Obama’s budget reduces discretionary spending. It does this byredefining Pell grants (government- sponsored college scholarships for poor kids) and surface transportation spending as mandatory spending. The budget also reduces spending in Iraq and Afghanistan by $38.2 billion in 2012.

Obama’s 2012 budget increases spending, and it increases taxes on job creators. Probably not the best idea in an economic climate where Americans believe that unemployment is the number one issue to be tackled. Remember, a boss has to pay his taxes from somewhere. She might have to let an employee or two go to foot the bill.

Read the rest at The Stir

In a post I wrote regarding Michelle Obama and her plans to parent our children for us, I remarked about her $495 Tory Burch gardening boots. A few of the comments wondered why I brought them up, and why, as acapitalist, would I have a problem with pricey shoes?

The boots were mentioned to remind readers of how out of touch with reality the First Lady is. The average American mama doesn’t have a single pair of shoes in her closet that cost that much, let alone gardening boots. When I’m inclined to work outdoors, I put on a pair of three-year-old sneakers that are practically falling apart.

Referring to the self-appointed mom-in-chief’s aloofness when it comes to relating to us regular moms was useful to drive home the point that she is not qualified to make our parenting decisions for us. Only the best for the Obamas, whether it’s boots, school, vacation, vacation, vacation, or vacation. The rest of us can eat cake. Or carrot sticks.

Read the rest at The Stir

It’s no wonder that Republicans have such a bad rap with progressives. Apparently, we want to legalize rape. I wouldn’t like Republicans either if that were even one teensy weensy bit true.

The controversy stems from the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act, which seeks to expand existing Hyde amendment restrictions on the use of taxpayer money for abortions by prohibiting indirect funding and tax-exemptions to businesses that provide abortions.

As it stands now, the government claims it doesn’t fund abortions with taxpayer money, yet billions of dollars go to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services. Which then frees up ‘private’ money for abortions and advice on how to run an underage sex slave ring.

The legislation includes an exemption for the 3% or less of abortions performed after rape or to preserve the life of the mother. The bill explicitly states that federal funding will not be withheld from women that ‘need’ an abortion, just those that ‘want’ an abortion.

Read the rest at The Stir

When the gut-wrenching story broke of the Philadelphia abortionist that routinely delivered live, viable babies before jamming scissors into their brains to kill them, I had to write about it.

The part of the story that struck me so deeply was the desperation that those women felt walking into that clinic. I don’t believe that anyone wants an abortion; but that women are pressured by family, friends, and society (mostly well-meaning, I’m sure) to believe that the procedure is no big deal.

How far below rock bottom does a woman have to be to walk into a filthy ‘clinic’ and have the kicking, squirming life sucked out of her? That woman needs love and support, not the legal right to an abortion. In the article I wrote, I mentioned some ways to actually help pregnant women, such as donating money to cover prenatal care for those that can’t afford it, bringing meals to single moms trying to make it, or volunteering with a pregnancy care center or adoption agency.

For that I got called a woman-hater.

It turns out that unless one believes that a mother-to-be has the right to end the life of her unborn child, that person hates women. I vehemently dispute that claim. I do like women. I like men, too for the record. I like all people no matter how big or small, no matter their age, and no matter where they live: In a mansion, on the street, or in a uterus.

I believe that God created humans (and other stuff … like everything), and even though you’re not going to get along with everyone, life is worthy of respect.

Read the rest at Pundit League