Archive for October 16th, 2009
Balloon Boy was a giant hoax meant to launch a new reality series for Heene family
H/t Perfunction for taking the time to piece together some video that show what a hoax the whole Colorado Balloon Boy nonsense is.
Oddly, we almost never watch the Wife Swap show, but did actually catch the Heenes when they were on a while ago. They were some of the strangest people we’ve seen in a while — and only kept watching because they reminded us of the crazy people in that old Helen Hunt tornado movie. And we only really liked that because of all the Wizard of Oz references because, honestly, we’re gay and the love of all things Oz is as encoding in our genes as our appreciation of all things Gyllenhaal.
It probably cost the state, the feds, and local authorities over $2 million scrambling helicopters, diverting flights, and mobilizing emergency response teams when they believed a 6 year old boy was trapped on an uncontrollable makeshift aircraft.
When things like this happen, we wonder how many people die on the ground because paramedics and other emergency staff are occupied elsewhere. We know from experience that 5 minutes is a long time for a heart attack victim, for instance. We have a friend who suffered a massive coronary and had medical help arrive in 3 minutes. We was saved, but the medics said later that if they had gotten there even minutes later the result might have been different.
So, we don’t have much sympathy for people who cause stunts that take emergency responders’ eyes off their work for even a moment. ”Baby Jessica Down the Well Syndrome” manifests every time there’s a small child in a bizarre situation, where everyone and their mothers want to come running to help the poor tyke in peril…so when it turns out the child’s parents are attention-starving whackadoodles and the little boy very honestly says “this was all for a show”, then someone in Colorado needs to stand back and look at what sort of penalty the Heenes need to pay to settle accounts for this.
At the very LEAST, the Department of Child Services needs to evaluate this family…for the safety of the children. Even if this was a hoax, it doesn’t seem to us that living in close proximity to experimental aircraft that can so easily be launched is the best environment for children. We know people whose children were taken away because of much, much less than that. In one case, it was because the mother insisted on keeping a very large dog in the home…and DCS took her kid away.
Giant flying saucer balloons sure feel more dangerous than a mangy, 10-year old rottweiller.
After the MSM tires of this story and it floats off over the rainbow, we wonder what the authorities’ follow-up will be. It would be interesting if you help us keep our eyes on this…and see if the Heenes suffer any sort of consequences for what very much seems like a giant publicity stunt.
What does it mean to be a Democrat today?
This is a questions we’re asking ourselves more and more lately, upon witnessing the utter travesty that’s taking place in Washington these days.
What Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are doing in Congress is illegal, criminal, treasonous, and unconstitutional. We’re talking, of course, about the plot to ram through Utopiacare using backdoor, secret, reconcilliation means instead of voting this important, world-changing legislation up or down properly in the House and Senate.
We’re lifelong Democrats around here…whose faith in the party was first shaken by the way the DNC backed Dr. Utopia and used all its resources to bring down Hillary Clinton last year. The final straw broke our backs on May 31st, 2008 around 5pm or so when we heard news the DNC had awarded Dr. Utopia some of Hillary Clinton’s Michigan delegates. That outrage will never be forgotten. They actually TOOK delegates away from a woman who earned them because they wanted to give them to a black man who did absolutely nothing for them. How the Democrats have behaved since taking over all three branches of government has been stomach-turning. If it weren’t for the Clintons, who we will always be loyal to, we’d no longer call ourselves Democrats. We’d be independents, or members of the new Tea Party that’s forming…whatever that ultimately turns out to be. Not Green, not Libertarian, not anything that exists currently, but something else…something PUMA-flavored that’s still brewing.
But, as long as the Clintons are Dems, we’re right there with them. Some of you out there can’t understand our loyalty to them, but the Clintons have always been good to all of us, and we believe in them like no other family on the planet. Bill, Chelsea, and most of all Hillary, will ALWAYS be the public figures we support most and back no matter what. Many of us year spent every cent we had in 2008 helping them, and never regret one bit of that. It is our most sincere hope in this world one of them runs for elected office again so we can once more be boots on the ground under their banner. The three of them wake up every morning doing whatever they can to make this country stronger and life here better for all Americans…and for that, we can get up each day and work hard following their example as best we can too.
So, in reality, we’re more Clintonites than we are Democrats.
And we hope to Olympus on high that what Pelosi and Reid are trying to pull with reconciliation leads to massive liberal defeat in 2010. We want all the moderate Dems siding with the Clintons to win, but all the Kool-Aid Kids in Dr. Utopia’s fold to go down with Harry Reid and lose re-election. We want it to be an absolute ROUTE. And we want that to lead to a full-on Democrat Civil War to take back our party from the loony left.
We hope moderate Dems and independents team up with Republicans in 2010 and create a tidal wave that makes the Contract with America rebuff of 1994 look like a Kool-Aid backwash.
It would be best, in terms of defeating Dr. Utopia in 2012, if Democrats just barely retain the House and Senate. This way, Pelosi and new-Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin have two years to make fools of themselves before the 2012 elections. If Republicans win the House and Senate, or either of the two, then Democrats have someone to blame for things for two years. We don’t want to see that happen. Harry Reid seems likely to be defeated no matter what, but it would take a miracle for San Franciscans to vote out Pelosi. It’s a safe bet she’ll remain Speaker, making cat videos or whatever it is she does all day, and that’s a large part of what’s needed to ensure Dr. Utopia’s a loser of a one-term president.
It was an odd position being Chicagoans who rooted for our city to lose the 2016 Olympics. We strongly feel that by losing those games, and suffering that humiliating Oprah and Mrs. Utopia-related defeat, that the city is stronger and better able to face the challenges of the future.
We also believe that as Democrats, true Democrats of the moderate vein, a strong defeat of the liberal agenda in 2010 and 2012 is needed if the party’s ever going to come back to the Clintonian center.
The DNC has moved so far into the alien territory of the Alinsky-Obama-Ayers Left that it’s unrecognizable to us.
The ONLY thing that’s keeping us around is that we can use the defeats in 2010 as an opening to take back the party and return Clinton centrists as our focus.
We don’t know how others out there feel, but that’s where we sit here in Boystown.
Friday Open Thread: October 16th, 2009
What’s on your minds this Friday?
Here’s an interesting post at Redstate on race-baiting hucksterism, mainly Al Sharpton’s cottage industry of shaking down corporations so that he doesn’t accuse them of being RAAACISTS. One fallout of the attacks on Rush Limbaugh for trying to buy the Rams could be FINALLY exposing Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Henry Gates, Spike Lee, Eric Holder, and the rest of their ilk for what they are — shameless manipulators of false grievances in what amounts to a Race Industry. Redstate has a list of corporations up who regularly pay off Al Sharpton so that he doesn’t bring protests and Henry Gates-styled wailing and screaming to their doorsteps.
It’s time the Race Industry ends, people. Race cards expired on January 20th, 2009 at 12 noon. Henry Gates’ antics were really the last straw in many people’s books, especially when the current president rushes to his race-baiting defense and calls police stupid before he even knows the facts. But, when dealing with the Race Industry and those who profit most from it — including hucksters like Sharpton and tenured “professors” who write and speak on the topic of grievances exclusively — facts are of little importance.
Facts like, oh, for instance, that Rush Limbaugh never said any of the vile things CNN accused him of saying…when CNN has no audio or transcripts of any of it…and despite 20 years of being on the air almost every day, there’s no tape of any of Rush’s shows making comments like the ones CNN claims he made.
It sure feels like a whole world of hurt’s going to be coming CNN’s way, and there will be no way to pay off anyone to keep it from happening.
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H/t Michelle Malkin for this one. It’s a rap about how much of a joke the Nobel Peace Prize is:
You get a Peace Prize if you:
* mow the lawn
* do the laundry
* stay in the house
* groom the dog
* do some dips
* are black
* make a sandwich
* eat the sandwich
* hope the sandwich is delicious
PEACE PRIZE
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File this one under hubris.
James Cameron’s spent $300 million on a movie called Avator, that’s a cartoon about people traveling to another planet and having themselves put into alien cat-people bodies so they can swing around in the jungle and ride giant monsters.
It truly looks like the single dumbest thing we have seen in a while.
Cameron was told during the making of Titanic that he was doomed to go down in history as making the biggest flop. Well, everything we read and saw about Titanic made us believe it would be a huge hit. Every scrap we saw on it looked gorgeous, and the story had something people could instantly grab onto and run wild with on an emotional level. And it was the TITANIC. Something that’s a cultural touchstone, something we’re all familiar with, something that was just aching for a love story to be set aboard it.
But Avator? Really?
We expect it to be an epic failure on the Heaven’s Gate scale…and could possibly sink whatever studios are behind this. Cue everything people said about Cameron before Titanic, but apply it instead to this $300 million cartoon.
If we are missing something, then please tell us we’re wrong here, but we just can’t imagine people lining up to see this piece of garbage…and then walking out of the theater to get back in line and see it again.
Never in our lives did we think people actually did things like that, but we heard stories about people seeing the original Star Wars and then walking out and getting in line to see it again.
We actually did that with Titanic when it was released. The first showing of it was sold out one day, so we saw the James Bond movie that opened that day instead (Tomorrow Never Dies, we believe). After that, we got in line and bought a ticket to Titanic…and liked Titanic so much we actually got in line and bought a ticket to the next showing. We saw three movies that day, and cried like little babies all through Titanic both times…more so on second viewing because we knew what was going to happen (to the characters…not the ship, since that was a given).
Cameron’s boasting Avator will be bigger than Titanic…which seems like a challenge to the Fates to ensure that it’s not. Unsinkable is never unthinkable, Mr. Cameron, as you should most certainly know.
