Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha!!!!

Quick, Dems, keep demanding Ellison repudiate Duke even after he has done so repeatedly!  Except Duke and Ellison are much closer in philosophy than Trump and Ellison are.

So, You Need A Product

And you go to the store.  You find a version of that product on the shelves, but it is not as high a quality as what you want, so you plan to continue your search.  But you pay for the product you don't want before walking away and leaving it on the store shelf.  After checking out a couple other stores you find the version that you wanted and buy it and that's the one you take home and use.

So you've paid for an inferior model of what you were looking for without having any intention of using it.  Plus you've also paid for the product that you found that fits your needs.  Double dipping OUT of your pocket.

Does anyone know of someone who would do such a thing - willingly agree to pay for a product they don't want and leave it on the store shelf?  Does it make sense to do something like that?

Well, that's what opponents of tax breaks or vouchers for private schools or home schooling are demanding people do.  Children in private schools or who are home schooled do not use the product known as public school.  They don't require that a teacher be hired.  They don't use the facilities, don't use the text books.  Yet their parents are required to pay for the teacher, the facilities, the text books.  It's not the product the parents want for their children.  But they are forced to double dip out of their pockets.

Just one more example of the hatred the left has for choice.

Heh

Dang.  You'd think he was a hillbilly.

It's Sort Of Weird

First there was Blu, who was the cat equivelent of an albino and had multiple problems because of that.  I started having to shove medications down his throat more than a decade ago.  And then there was the whole period when Mom fell at my house and ended up with compression fractures of her spine.  At the same time I needed major surgery.  That was the beginning of two years from hell and trying to take care if everybody at the same time - myself, my mom,  and my furrbutts.  Yeah, that was fun.

And Blu needed more and more medication and Blackberry, just a few months younger than him, began to slide into the need for more and more medications as well.

Then I lost Blu to cancer.  And less than two years later my garage produced 14 needy kittens and we went through rounds of respiratory infections, giardia, and tapeworms.  And all the while Blackberry needed more meds morning and evening.

By the time Blackberry died 3 weeks ago she was getting meds morning and night plus sub-cutaneous fluids every other day.  She had her own pill case, morning and evening pills, pills she only got twice a week, and liquid meds in the fridge

And now Blu is gone, all the kittens are gone, Blackberry is gone, and I'm down to just two seemingly healthy cats.  Nobody needs meds.  But the weird thing is that I have this strong pull to go to the kitchen and get meds every night.  If I watch Netflix I want to turn right at the top of the stairs as I come up from the family room at night.  If I read in bed I want to go to the kitchen before I turn out the lights.  I'm so used to taking care of a sick somebody that I still want to go get their meds.

I'm free of having to get somebody in, to pay somebody, to give meds to a cat twice a day for the first time in a decade.  I'd like to run away now and celebrate my freedom. I'd like to go over to the ocean and get an ocean front room.  Or go to Pittsburg and go enjoy their art museums, the national aviary, and their zoo.  But I'm so broke because of vet bills that I can't run off and celebrate.  I haven't even gotten Blackberry's last bill yet because her vet is way more interested in condolences than bills.  Which is why I still take my cats to her even though it means an hour's drive each way.

Pets - can't live with them, can't live without them.

And I'm hoping Mama just has the hiccups right now...

Enchanting

I've gone back to walking every day, usually 5 miles or so.  And my location gives me relatively quick access to both the Appalachian Trail and the C & O Canal Towpath.  Plus a walk down the mountain to our mail shed and then back up is a 5 mile round trip that's rather a challenge.  And I've discovered that I don't actually hate Winter.  I just hate being cold and I hate lack of spontonaity.  So now the back seat of my suv always carries a pack with water and food as well as a variety of head coverings, scarves, gloves, and different wieght jackets, including the first Winter jacket I've bought in years.  And I'm out in the woods walking somewhere nearly every day now.

The Towpath along the Potomac River is particularly enchanting.  I've been a "low level" birder for more than 40 years and a river is a great place for that.  A few days ago we had a series of snow clippers come through and I found myself watching wild turkeys and a pair of bald eagles through swirling snow.  I was grinning with delight with each alternation of light and dark, snow and sun, as the afternoon went on.

Two days later, walking in the same area, a bald eagle swooped over - probably one of the pair I saw before.  It used to be that I had to drive over to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and to Blackwater Wildlife Refuge to see eagles.  Now they are by far the most common raptors I see.

But the eagle got upstaged.  I saw a flash of white coming in on the river and watched as flock of common goldeneyes - a type of wild duck - landed.  When you've been birding in the same area for decades it's rare to have a new entry for your life list, let alone an entry as beautiful as the goldeneye.

And then today, two days later, I got to watch them again a couple miles up the river from where I first saw them.  I'm a very happy camper.  I look to Spring, when I can get the kayak out there, but right now Winter is A-OK.

Sooo...

It appears that folks are out protesting the halt in immigrants from Muslim hot spots. Are those the same people who protested Obama giving Cubans in transit the middle finger as he went out the door, leaving them in limbo?

Oh, wait...

The Difference

Last week there was a big march in D.C.  It was called something like the Women's March on Washington 2017.  The "trigger" seems to have been President Trump's macho locker room comments a decade ago.  I'm sure that Juanita Broaddrick appreciated their support when these same women marched in protest of Bill Clinton's actual attacks on women.  And they came out in force when it was learned that Clinton made trips to "Pedophile Island" sans his Secret Service detail:  they marched in protest of his use of young, possibly under aged girls in pure objectification for his pleasure.  They've also been protesting quite regularly against the horrors and abuse that face women under Sharia rule, particularly where radicals have taken over. 

Oh, wait, silly me.  Locker room talk: bad.  All the rest: phffft.

Of course, the instant the march organizers denied official association to pro-life women's groups you knew exactly what it was about.  They couldn't have made it any clearer if they'd danced around with signs that said "I'm a pro-abortion hypocrite!"

So in order to to make America take them seriously as women they marched wearing "pussy hats", dressed as vaginas, carried obscene and vulgar signs, and chanted obscene and vulgar slogans.

Yep, when those images went world wide, it really made people respect American women.

And the speakers...Well, everybody has already heard the audio of Madonna and Ashley Judd presenting their intellectual feminist arguments.  But there were some other "feminist leaders" involved that most people don't know much about.

Like Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers.  Her feminist credentials are top notch as shown by a tweet she sent out 2013:

You might not know Brigitte Gabriel or Ayaan Hirsi Ali's names, either.  They are ferocious opponents of Sharia law.   Ali is a leading activist against the Islamic practice of genital mutilation.  She knows whereof she speaks - her genitals were mutilated when she was 5 years old. 

Linda Sarsour, march organizer, on the other hand, is an advocate of Sharia law and has ties to radical Islamic groups.

Then there was speaker Donna Hylton, a convicted killer who was part of a gang who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed  a 62 year old gay man.  A detective who interviewed Hylton said later:

"I couldn't believe this girl who was so intelligent and nice-looking could be so unemotional about what she was telling me she and her friends had done. They'd squeezed the victim's testicles with a pair of pliers, beat him, burned him."

Psychology Today featured her in an article in 1995.  The full text is here.

So, pussy hats, vagina suits, vulgarity, and women who are just dandy representatives of women.   And lots and lots of media coverage.   Which is a good thing because that allowed millions of people to see and hear what went on and many were repulsed, particularly when they saw that children were in the crowd.

There was a march today, too - the March for Life.  It won't get nearly as much media coverage, no matter how many hundreds of thousands are there.

There are no vagina costumes or topless women.  There is always pink because the march is heavily attended by women, especially young women.  And there are always signs.

There is no vulgarity in speech or behavior, no obscenities.  There is always a great deal of something the left hates much more - prayer.

But here is the biggest difference between these two marches:  the march last Saturday was about Self.  The march today is about Other.  And that is why they are so different.