John and Melissa McCafferty are parents and residents of Radnor Green, Delaware, a quiet suburban neighborhood. In their front yard was a basketball pole and hoop that had been there for 60 years.

Last fall the McCaffertys received a letter from DelDOT(Delaware Department of Transportation) informing them that the placement of the pole was in violation of state law by being within seven feet of the public street, and that the pole had to be removed. They were working with DE State Rep. Bryon Short to contest the removal of the pole due to alleged traffic violations.

Before the matter was resolved, a truck came rambling through the neighborhood yanking poles out of yards. Melissa McCafferty beat the truck to her house, where she parked in front of her family’s hoop and climbed atop the pole in her fuzzy slippers to keep the killjoys from ripping her private property off of her private property.

Read the rest at The Stir

In which I talk about the mean streets of Delaware and evil basketball hoops, and Evan Pokroy joins to chat about life, religion, and politics in Israel.

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Last March, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly told the public that the Affordable Care Act needed to be passed before we could find out what was in it. The bill was soon passed and signed into law, and one year later, we are still peeling back the layers on the onion that is Obamacare.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) originally didn’t support President Obama’s health care initiative, but for a different reason than his Republicans counterparts. Where Republicans on the Hill voted against a massive intrusion of government into 1/6 of the economy, Rep. Weiner wasn’t fond of Obamacare because he didn’t believe it went far enough. The congressman sponsored an amendment to implement universal coverage – Medicare for all.

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

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

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. From fashion to societal morality, history keeps on repeating itself. Who ever thought skinny jeans would come back in style? What’s next, stirrup pants and scrunchies?

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is an excellent reminder of the dangers of socialism in our current age of entitlement. The parallels between the story and our current political and cultural state are uncanny and more than a little bit unsettling. As a witness to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, author Ayn Rand was well aware of the tragedies of statism, and her most famous work of literature depicts what happens when the wealth is spread around in the name of fairness.

The movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged remains faithful to Rand’s themes of capitalism and the evils of collectivism. One major change from the pages to the screen was the decision to change the setting from a future fictional country to America in 2016. It was a good decision, in this writer’s opinion, as it illustrates the slippery slope of socialism our nation is teetering on.

It opens with America in decline. Fuel prices are through the roof, making air travel impossibly unaffordable and bringing back trains as the major mode of transportation for people and goods. Airplanes and buildings are in disrepair, businesses shut down, and successful citizens disappear after being sought out by a shadowy character calling himself John Galt.

Taylor Schilling does a beautiful job portraying heroine Dagny Taggart, who fights tooth and nail against her annoying brother James (Mathew Marsden) and his political cronies in Washington to make Taggart Transcontinental a success. Poised, polished, and with an iron will, Dagny partners with Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), an entrepreneur who has invented a new metal that is lighter, cheaper, and stronger than steel. Together, they battle oppressive government restrictions and sanctions to rebuild the Rio Norte line in Colorado. The Centennial state is one of the last prosperous states in the nation, thanks in large part to oil tycoon Ellis Wyatt (Graham Beckel). Once the newly christened John Galt line is completed, Wyatt will have a safe way to transport his product to consumers. That is real job creation.

Dagny and Rearden hit roadblock after roadblock in their quest to build the John Galt line, but their determination to make a thing and see it work pushes them forward. Harry Reid-like politicians do all they can to destroy the business partners, while maintaining a public face of empathy and equality. They apply new taxes to steel mills, make it illegal to own more than one enterprise, and even get a government committee to testify that Rearden metal is untested and unsafe.

In a scene that could have included former SEIU president Andy Stern, Dagny is warned that she cannot force the union members to work on her ‘dangerous’ train. Her response shows the grit required for business success: “You can do whatever you want with your men … but that train will run if I have to drive the damn thing myself.”

Bravo to The Strike Productions for tackling this ambitious project and producing a wonderful film. Add it to your must-see list – it is definitely worth the price of a ticket.

Cross-posted at Big Hollywood

Low-flush toilets are ridiculous. The concept is good, especially inCalifornia where water is in high demand and short supply. But the practicality of water-saving toilets is non-existent.

Once upon a time, people did their business in buckets or holes in the ground. Fancy rich people used decorated chamber pots, and they employed people to empty them. I’d like to see Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowetackle that task. Actually, I take that back. I have no desire to watch anyone clean out a chamber pot. Ever.

Then someone brilliant invented flushing toilets with the revolutionary U-bend, which kept the smell of the sewers from coming up through the bowl. Within a century, toilets as we know them today became commonplace in developed countries.

Add the invention of Charmin Ultra-Soft, and toileting became a much more pleasant task than it had once been.

In 1994, Congress decided that water was too precious of a commodity to waste flushing waste, so anew law was put into effect mandating low-flush toilets. Where toilets once used up to seven gallons a flush, the new law made it illegal for toilets using more than 1.6 gallons a flush to be sold in the United States.

And people have been flushing three times for number two ever since.

Read the rest at The Stir

First Lady Michelle Obama has a problem with fat kids. More specifically, she doesn’t like childhood obesity. Last year she launched the Let’s Move campaign, with the goal of ending childhood obesity in a generation. After all, it is a national security risk (insert eye roll here).

Lady Michelle promoted legislation to overhaul school lunches, which her husband signed into law at the risk of sleeping on the couch. She’s constantly on my TV when my kids are watching their shows, encouraging young viewers to get active. She even slips into her$495 Tory Burch boots to do some organic gardening at the White House.

Most recently, Mrs. Obama has been talking with the National Restaurant Association about providing smaller portions andhealthier options on the kids’ menu. She must know better than restaurateurs how to run their businesses.

Read the rest at The Stir

The left loves illegal immigrants. Let’s make all the criminals that sneak into our country citizens, with full access to social services! The right loves legal immigrants. We say, let’s reform the system and let anyone (that isn’t a criminal) that wants a shot at the American dream to come on over.

Oh yeah, and let’s build a big fence with armed guards to keep the drug traffickers, sex slave traders, kidnappers, and murderers out.

You know what else the left loves? The European Union. Especially countries like Greece, where an extravagant redistribution of wealth in the name of social justice has bankrupt the entire country.

I wonder if liberals still love the EU since news leaked of their strict border enforcement policy. Greece is the entry point for 90% of illegal immigrants trying to make it into Western Europe. The EU sent 175 border agents with guns to the Greek border with Turkey, but the Greeks have deemed it insufficient:

The socialist government has recently announced that it plans to build a razor-wire fence along the border. It will, say officials, be equipped with sonar systems and thermal sensors and be modelled [sic] along the lines of similar “walls” in Spain, Lithuania and France.

“If we could have it up tomorrow, we would,” said Christos Papoutsis, the country’s minister for citizen protection. “Greece is not a paradise… it is in the midst of economic crisis, wages are going down, unemployment is surging and there is not enough work for our own people or the migrants who are already here. Our hope is that this fence will send a message.”

You can’t have socialism and open immigration. Two plus two does not equal five. Liberals in our country can’t have it both ways. Either you allow everyone in and give them a chance to make a living, or you batten down the hatches and tell would-be immigrants, “No soup for you!”

Personally, I favor the approach that made America great to begin with. Let them in. Give them property rights. Don’t punish success with excessive taxation. Let anyone willing to work for it come in and take a shot at the American dream.  We might be welcoming the next Andrew Carnegie or Levi Strauss.

When I was little, my mama always taught me that actions speak louder than words. Co-opting a phrase from the most widely owned and read book in the world, she told me that I would be able to discern a tree by the fruit it bore.

In other words, talk is cheap.

I’ve been reminded of this so often over the past couple of years while watching the Obama administration. Barack Obama claimed to be forbetter education, and then he ended the DC voucher program. He said he wouldn’t hire lobbyists, and then he hired lobbyists. He said he wanted make sure every American had health insurance, then he gavewaivers to businesses so they wouldn’t have to provide health insurance for their employees. Anyone else notice a trend?

The latest round of hypocrisy has to do with energy. In 2008, then-Senator Obama vowed to implement a cap and trade law that would limit carbon emissions and ‘necessarily skyrocket’ energy costs. Unable to pass cap & tax through congress, President Obama has decided to do whatever he wants anyway by expanding EPA regulation. Since I’m remembering phrases from my childhood, ‘more than one way to skin a cat’ comes to mind.

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency will regulate greenhouse gases from power plants and other major polluters — which will stifle growth, kill jobs, and raise the cost of electricity. But if you’re lucky, a polar bear will come hug you. Polar bear hugs are far superior to being able to turn on your heat in the middle of a snowpocalypse.

Read the rest at The Stir