newzjunky's Blog

I was talking to this little girl, Catherine, the daughter of some friends. She said she wanted to be President someday.
Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there with us.

I asked Catherine - 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?'

Catherine replied - 'I would give houses to all the Homeless people.'

'Wow - what a worthy goal you have there, Catherine.' I told her, 'You don't have to wait until you're President to do that, you can come over to my house and clean up all the dog poop in my back yard and I will pay you $5 dollars. Then, we can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $5 dollars to use for a new house.

Catherine (who was about 4) thought that over for a second, while her Mom looked at me seething.

Catherine replied, 'Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and clean up the dog poop and you can just pay him the $5 dollars?'

And I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party'.

The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the politicians' spending YOUR tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were Living in the Stone Age.

D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a look at New Orleans. It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division. Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number, what does it mean?

A. Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you Each get $516,528.

B. Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.

C. Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

There are a lot of folks who can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in America. Well, there's a very simple answer......

Nobody bothered to check the oil. We just didn't know we were getting low. The reason for that is purely geographical.

All our oil is in Alaska, Texas, New Mexico , and Oklahoma. All our dipsticks are in Washington

A couple weeks ago, in Clearwater, Florida, Jean Merola, a 75-year-old grandmother of eight, got served and protected at the drive-thru of her neighborhood McDonald's by Officer Matthew Parco, who happened to be behind her in the line and who took it upon himself to do some policing of the McDonald's parking lot - without ever having been asked to by anybody at McDonald's, of course, and in fact hassling, escalating a confrontation with, and then finally handcuffing and arresting Jean Merola for parking her car exactly where the cashier at McDonald's had told her to park:
About 4 p.m. Thursday, Merola pulled her gray Lincoln Town Car up to the drive-through window of a Clearwater McDonald's minutes from her home. She ordered the coffee and medium fries, no salt. No salt on fries being a special request, the teller told Merola to pull forward to an area of striped asphalt where customers are typically asked to wait if their orders will take some minute.

Suddenly, Merola heard a car horn blasting behind her. In his cruiser sat Officer Matthew Parco, 30, a member of the force since December 2006. He kept honking and waving his arms, Merola said. She did nothing. Then he stepped out of his cruiser, walked up to Merola's driver side door and asked for her license and registration. Merola bristled. Not until you tell me what I've done wrong, she told him.

"He told me something about being parked in this particular place," Merola said Friday. "I told him this is where the people from McDonald's told me to park."
Little did she know that the McDonald's parking lot, just like everywhere else in the city, happens to be Officer Matthew Parco's proprietary domain, and if he tells her to move her car away from where the business occupying the lot told her to move it, she'd better ask "How fast," damnit. If she doesn't recognize her civic duty, it's probably because she's old and crazy:

In his report, Parco says he asked Merola to move the Town Car forward a foot to allow cars in line to go around. If he did, Merola said she doesn't remember it. And it was actually his cruiser blocking people, she said. But Merola said she was really offended when Parco called a supervisor to say he had a possibly demented woman on his hands who might need to be held under the state's Baker Act.

The Baker Act is a Florida state law which allows any government cop, more or less at his pleasure, to legally declare that you must be crazy and arrest you so that he can force you to undergo a psychiatric exam, possibly to be followed by "involuntary commitment" to a government-approved psychoprison hospital ward. This unchecked and almost completely discretionary power to ruin your life on a cop's whim is all For Your Own Good, of course.

"He was aggravating me by saying that," Merola said. "I said, "I don't have dementia, tell your supervisor."" By then, Merola had called Parco a brat, but the dementia comment stirred anger. Merola upped the ante and called him a "smart a-" and a "dumb s--."

She's never been easily pushed around, her daughter said Friday. "She's not a meek and mild little old lady," said Deborah Burge of Palm Harbor. "She's going to say, "Hey, what did I do wrong?""

Parco handcuffed Merola behind her back and put her in his cruiser. Another officer arrived and drove her to the Pinellas County Jail, where the widow of 10 years was booked for disorderly conduct. She had no previous criminal record.
The cops kept her handcuffed for an hour, to protect themselves from the obvious danger posed by a crying 75-year-old woman. For the terrible and dangerous crime of demanding to know what she did to deserve a cop getting in her face, for not flashing her papers on demand, and for offending against the grave dignity of a petulant, pushy, and insulting Officer Of The Law, Officer Matthew Parco had Jean Merola locked in a cage for the afternoon, and meanwhile impounded her car (which it cost her $160 to recover once she was free).

Trying to account for her own behavior, Merola said she was taught to respect the police because they are there to protect and help you. It's a message she said she had passed on to her three children. Despite the uniform, she suggested, Parco just didn't seem like the real thing. "I guess I felt he wasn't a police officer," Merola said. "He wasn't there to help me, he was there to be mean to me."

Jean Merola no doubt meant that in a metaphorical sense. But I think there's a very literal sense in which she is right. Professional police are, and ought to be regarded as, ordinary mortals, just like you and me. They are not a special or superior class, and they neither require special privileges nor deserve special immunities from what we normally expect from ordinary decent and honest people. If I got up in an old lady's face face, implicitly called her crazy, threatened to have her committed, and then responded to the insults that my unhinged behavior so clearly merited by pulling her out of her car, cuffing her behind her back, and locking her in a cage, you'd consider me an a$$hole, at least. If I did all that based on a complete mistake, in which I barged onto somebody else's property, ignorantly ordered around people in their parking lot, and then, when corrected about the owner's policy for use of the parking lot, insisted that I was entitled to tell them how they should run their own damn parking lot and to yell at or arrest anybody who didn't pay attention to my ideas about how it should be used, you would consider me not only an a$$hole, but a dangerous lunatic and a menace to public safety.

Respect and courtesy are for those who earn it, not for any two-bit punk who figured out how to put on a uniform and swing a night-stick. Those who are actually protecting identifiable innocent people from harm-and I mean in their actions, not in their mission statements-have every right to do what they are doing, and every right to use force to defend others against aggression. Those who think their dress-up games entitle them to shove around old ladies, tell McDonald's how to do their own job, and lock away anyone who dares question or insult them have no right to exercise force and no entitlement to be treated with anything other than the contempt that any violent bully deserves.

The old priest lay dying in the hospital. For years, he had faithfully served the people of the nation's capital in Washington D.C. He motioned for his nurse to come near.

'Yes, Father?' said the nurse

'I would really like to see Bill and Hillary Clinton before I die,' whispered the priest.

'I'll see what I can do, Father' replied the nurse.

The nurse sent the request to the Senate and waited for a response. Soon the word arrived; the Clintons would be delighted to visit the priest.

As they went to the hospital, Hillary commented to Bill, 'I don't know why the old priest wants to see us, but it certainly will help our images and might even get me elected President. After all, I'm IN IT TO WIN IT.'

Bill agreed-- it was a very good thing for her campaign once they put out a press release about it.

When they arrived at the priest's room, the old priest took Bill's hand in his right hand and Hillary's hand in his left. There was silence and a look of serenity on the old priest's face.

Finally Bill Clinton spoke. 'Father, of all the people you could have chosen, why did you choose us to be with you as you near the end?'

The old priest slowly replied, 'I have always tried to pattern my life after our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.'

'Amen' said Bill.

'Amen' said Hillary.

The old priest continued...'He died between two lying thieves. I would like to do the same.

Boy, where's Bush's "hooked on Phonics guys" ( for pronunciations)

when you need them?

 

Serious note... Has anyone noticed that What's his name made a comment about the validity off the "Official 9/11 report" and there was NARY a mention anywhere about it?  If this guy is as much of a crack pot as he's made out to be, why wouldn't his comments be more easily available? Who would believe him anyway?  But the fact that his comments were ommitted from NEARLY every local and network site, It does make you wonder, "Just what in the hell did he say exactly?".  I for one would like to know. If anybody has the answer, or a link where I can find it, Please leave it for me.  And if you're curious about it like I am, feel free to unleash it here.  Come to think of it, if you're not curious, and don't care, feel free to unleash it here also. 

 

If you read the "ABOUT ME" you probably know what kind of responses...Pro/Con...that you can expect.