Is it the Water??

Is it the Water?

July 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment · Edit This

The liberal loon capital of  San Francisco is at it again.
Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.
That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.
That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.
“People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don’t know what they’re getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized,” said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. “That’s what we’d like to stop.”
San Francisco residents who want a pet would have to go to another city, adopt one from a shelter or rescue group, or find one through the classifieds.
The Board of Supervisors would have final say on the matter. But not before pet store owners unleash a cacophony of howling, squeaking and squawking.
“It’s terrible. A pet store that can’t sell pets? It’s ridiculous,” said John Chan, manager of Pet Central on Broadway, which has been in business 30 years. “We’d have to close.”
This from the same people (liberals) who think that happy meals are a tool to make people fat.
And salt is evil and should be banned because it’s “bad for you”.

‘Terrible for our business’

Joe Taylor, bird manager of Animal Connection on Judah Street, called the proposal “ludicrous.”
“What difference does it make if you get a parrot at the SPCA or a pet store? If it doesn’t work out, in either case, you just bring it back,” Taylor said. “This would be terrible for our business.”
The idea originated about two years ago, when the commission began looking into a ban on dog and cat sales as a way to discourage puppy and kitten mills. But the city’s animal control staff said that excess puppies and kittens are not the problem at the city shelter, thanks to the plethora of rescue groups. In any case, only one or two pet stores in San Francisco sell dogs and cats. The rest stick to small animals.

The hamster problem

The real problem, staff said, is hamsters.
People buy the high-strung, nocturnal rodents because they’re under the temporary impression that hamsters are cute and cuddly. But the new owners quickly learn that hamsters are, in fact, prone to biting, gnawing through expensive wiring and maniacally racing on their exercise wheels at 2 a.m.
So the animals end up at the shelter. Just about every species has its own rescue group in San Francisco, but no one seems to want hamsters. Hamsters are the No. 1 animal euthanized at the city’s shelter, said San Francisco Animal Care and Control director Rebecca Katz.
“It’s definitely a concern,” she said. “They’re an impulse buy, and we do sometimes get tons of them, especially babies.”

Committed owners

On Wednesday, the shelter, which is on 15th Street in the Mission District, had six hamsters, nine rabbits, nine mice, nine rats, two guinea pigs, a bowl of goldfish, two birds, a leopard gecko, a bearded dragon and a hermit crab named Charlie.
But those shelter hamsters almost certainly did not originate at a pet store, said Michael Maddox, general counsel for the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council in Washington, D.C.
Studies by UC Davis and the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy have shown that only a small fraction of shelter animals were purchased at pet stores, he said. People who buy animals at pet stores are just as committed, emotionally and financially, to caring for their pets as people who procure pets elsewhere, he said.
“This is an anti-pet proposal from people who oppose the keeping of pets,” he said. “If their goal is to ban the ownership of pets entirely, then this is a good first step.”
The commission plans to listen to testimony from pet store owners, among others, before voting. Among the items it will consider is the impact on small businesses, whether to allow the sale of feeder rodents for snakes and other reptiles, the sale of fish, owner education, penalties and rescue groups that host adoptions at pet stores.
“We’re still in the information-gathering phase,” said Commissioner Philip Gerrie, who is sponsoring the proposal. “We’re trying to get at the problem of people buying these creatures with the best intentions, but then the reality turns out quite different.”
So let’s just ban it!!
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And then I ran across this little ditty:

When it comes to misinformed signage, bad news travels fast. A news producer in Chicago sent this booth sign to a New Orleans friend writing, “Sorry to say, I snapped this picture at the Taste of Chicago yesterday afternoon.” It was then forwarded to New Orleans food writer Lorin Gaudin who posted it on Twitter. That’s three degrees of separation, since Gaudin is originally from Chicago.
“I was at the very first Taste of Chicago when Jane Byrne was Mayor. I am sick, just sick about that photo. Disgraceful,” she says of the “Our Lobster & Shrimp Are Not From the Gulf Coast” sign.
Top Chef Judge Tom Colicchio talked about the perception problem at a Friends of the Fishermen event in Grand Isle last month. He told me he’s heard stories from fellow restauranteurs about customers saying, “I can’t believe you still serve seafood.” As if every fish in the ocean is tainted by the BP oil spill. To push back on some urban legends, seafood vendors do not generally order lobster from the Gulf Coast; there is no Gulf Coast walrus crossing; and Gulf Coast seafood is now being tested for safety more than any other source in the country.
But don’t let liberals stop paving that road to hell with their “good intentions”  and their desire to save you from yourself because you’re too stupid to do it for yourself.
Personal Responsibility is their job, not yours.

You Can Lie with Spin

Government these days isn’t about making the hard choices. It’s about making the choice that will sell, either to “your base” (thus ignoring everyone else) or by spin (which is inevitably deceitful) because it will benefit you or one of your “sides” interests.

They write 2000+ bills they won’t read. But expect everyone to follow.
They can’t be bothered to read SB1070, at a minimalist 16 pages.
Much easier to just play on people fears, anxiety,biases, and divide and conquer.
And when that doesn’t work, just lie.
Then there’s the politician favorite phrase these days, “I misspoke”.
No, we have it on tape or audio.
But they “misspoke”.
Then you get stuff like this:
President Barack Obama, fresh from a win on a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations, on Saturday urged Congress to take up his proposal for a $90 billion, 10-year tax on banks as the next step in reform.
Obama wants to slap a 0.15 percent tax on the liabilities of the biggest U.S. financial institutions to recoup the costs to taxpayers of the financial bailout.
“We need to impose a fee on the banks that were the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer assistance at the height of our financial crisis — so we can recover every dime of taxpayer money,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
He does realize that a tax on business is passed onto the consumer right?
He doesn’t care. It sounds good.
It plays to his anti-capitalist base and the “wall street” anger that has been ginned up.
The fact that Congress in the 1990′s set up the roots of this problem and the Government agency in charge of monitoring them were too busy with Porn is not a matter for discussion.
And one of the biggest players in this whole mess, Fannie and Freddie were and are  ignored should be a sign.
Alinsky, Rules for Radicals:
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Daniel Foster at the conservative National Review Online argues that the bill is filled with unnecessary or useless measures.
“There is much in the bill that has nothing to do with ‘Wall Street’ or the root causes of the crisis (i.e. debit card and interchange fee rules),” Foster writes. “There is little in it that will ‘reform’ too big to fail or change the incentives for the kind of behavior that led to the crisis (implicit subsidies and bailout authority galore); and it was a ‘compromise’ mostly between Democrats.”

Then you have VP Joe Biden, a one man gaffe machine:
VP Biden ran into an ice cream shot owner (in his shop) who aked him to lower the taxes and he called the guy a “smartass”
And it gets better:
Vice President Joe Biden gave a stark assessment of the economy Friday, telling an audience of supporters, “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”
Appearing at a fundraiser with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) in Milwaukee, the vice president remarked that by the time he and President Obama took office in 2008, the gross domestic product had shrunk and hundreds of thousands of jobs had been lost.
“We inherited a godawful mess,” he said, adding there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.” (CBS)
Andrew Langer, The Daily Caller:

Ultimately, with election victory comes the responsibility of governance. That responsibility requires grappling with the excruciating problem of making tough choices. This is something all elected officials face at some time or another, and it is the caveat for anyone interested in pursuing a political career. Problems ensue when political leaders abdicate their responsibilities—and a case can be made that such abdication is an abuse of the public trust. And when it comes to domestic policy, there is no more important issue than the creation of a government’s annual budget.
For the past three years, there has been a disturbing trend of federal legislators essentially punting their responsibilities—whether it comes to oversight of federal agencies, understanding the constitutional implications of legislation, or, at its most basic, actually reading legislation being voted upon. This seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of the role of legislators in our republic has resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of public ire, from Tea Parties to very public “dressing downs” of congressmen at Town Hall meetings.
Congress should have gotten the message, yet as proof they are deaf to their constituencies, leaders in the House have recently done—or not done—something stunning. Congressional leaders have decided that they are unable to even propose, let alone pass, a federal budget this year.
They have ostensibly done this while they await the decision of President Obama’s “Deficit Commission,” a convenient fiction created to give cowardly Democrats the “cover” necessary for a tax increase following the 2010 elections. It is not their fault, they will argue when they eventually do propose a budget. They were forced to do this because of the recommendations of the commission.
It is an excuse that doesn’t hold water. Congress has the responsibility for the budget, which means that the majority party has the responsibility for getting it prepared and shepherded through the system and passed. It is, in fact, statutorily mandated. But without any consequences, the law has about as much real power as a Las Vegas illusionist: it’s great theatre, but it really doesn’t do what it claims.
The problem is that more and more government entities (including state and local governments) are shifting these powers to unelected commissions. While some might call it mere “punting”—moving the power to some other group of individuals—it’s more accurately a form of political surrender; the functional equivalent of throwing in the towel because, well, the job is just too darn hard, and, in an election cycle, these guys want the title but they don’t want the responsibilities to go along with it.
Spending and size of government are the two top issues going into this fall election, with healthcare reform playing a role in both. Voters not only are fed up with out-of-control spending, they’re genuinely fearful of the potential economic instability runaway spending creates. Controlling that spending is infinitely more complicated when government officials refuse to release a budget detailing just how that money is being spent. It was, interestingly enough, the continued secrecy of national budgets that brought Gorbachev to power as the Soviet Union’s last premier—and opening up those budgets to greater scrutiny one of the hallmarks of his Perestroika program. How ironic, then, that more than two decades later, America is moving in that direction—an entirely wrong direction—when it comes to budgets.
Americans are tired of cowardly politicians. They are tired of being lied to, of having polls say one thing and do quite the opposite. They are hungry for real leaders—leaders who mean what they say and say what they mean. Leaders who are willing to make the tough choices, like Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey.
Whether it’s trying to shift responsibility or surrendering to the difficulties of governance, either way the result is the same: Americans’ government grows larger without anyone exercising fiscal restraint. Political leaders raise taxes to try and pay for their inability to control spending. Overall we all suffer. Unfortunately, in this case, waiting until January 2011 might just be too late.

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• The deficit will reach a stunning $1.5 trillion this year. Even after the recession ends, trillion-dollar deficits will persist, causing the national debt to double by 2020.
• Excessive spending—not low revenues—accounts for 92% of deficits by 2014 and 100% by 2017.
• Solutions that “split the difference” between tax hikes and spending cuts doesn’t really address the source of the problem: spending.
• Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest costs will surge by nearly $2 trillion by 2020. By comparison, the cost of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is 85% less at $404 billion.

Tax Increases Are Not the Solution

• Raising federal income taxes to pay for entitlement spending would require rates to double by 2050 and continue to rise thereafter.
• Balancing the budget with tax increases alone would increase the tax burden from an average of 18% of the economy to 30% by 2055.
• Layering on a value added tax (VAT)—a new national sales tax—would create a huge drag on the economy and family budgets.
• A VAT would cause the price of everything to rise by 15–20%. By 2019, 44 cents of every dollar would go to the federal government, compared to 15 cents today.

Tax Hikes Have Harmful Economic Consequences

• Tax increases take money from families and businesses, lowering savings and investment and killing jobs. This is especially harmful in the current economic climate.
• Future generations—who can’t yet vote—will be stuck paying the higher taxes and inheriting lower standards of living that go with it.
• Any new federal income taxes would be on top of state and local taxes, such as income, property, excise, fuel, and sales taxes.
• A VAT would become a cash cow for Congress to fund new spending and open the door for continued, stealthy rate increases.
• Twenty of 29 developed economies with a VAT have increased rates since passage. Denmark leads, having increased their VAT from 15 to 25% since it was enacted.

Congress has been mismanaging taxpayer dollars for decades. Can Washington really be trusted to use new revenues to close the deficit gap, or would they just spend the money on new programs? (heritage.org)

I would say no.
When you can just “misspeak” or “The previous administration…” or “the party of no” or just demonize someone else, why bother.
It is much easier to spend than to be responsible.
After all, it’s not the politician’s money.
It’s yours.
And you’ll always be there for them so why should they worry.

Just Plain Silly

Massachusetts, The Socialist Commonwealth, has many new Liberal ideas starting out there.

There auto insurance is so heavily regulated they have a lot less competition going on in that state. BTW, did you know you have the option to buy coverage to have it apply out-of-state!
See part 5: This option provides coverage for accidents beyond Massachusetts to anywhere in the United States, its territories or possessions, or Canada.
http://www.mypolicy.com/insurance-personal/automobile-12parts.htm
Universal Health care started there in 2007 and was bankrupt by 2009, but that doesn’t deter anyone.
So here is an editorial from The Daily Caller that stuck my fancy.
If you’re planning to spend the next New Year’s Day in Concord, Massachusetts, don’t get caught nursing your annual hangover with a plastic bottle of cool spring water — you might be breaking the law.
The city of Concord passed a law in April banning all bottled water in plastic containers, effective January 1, 2011. Supporters of the law say ridding the town of bottled water is a first step toward a cleaner planet. Never mind that plastic water bottles only account less than one percent of landfill space. Who are we to let facts get in the way of a good regulation?
In commemoration of the successful campaign to rid Concord of bottled H20, we decided to take a look at a few of the other laws that have come out of the Bay State, a land full of people who clearly think they are incapable of making personal decisions on their own accord.
1. A January 2010 law mandates that all children in Massachusetts daycare centers must brush their teeth after lunch — or else.
It is against the law for daycare providers to not help children brush their teeth after meals. While parents can opt out (either on libertarian principle or family tradition if they’re from some parts of Alabama), they can rest easy knowing that state bureaucrats are looking out for their children’s pearly whites. Heck, the state even provides toothpaste, brushes and holders! What? No floss?! There oughta be a law…
2. It is illegal in Massachusetts to deface a milk carton.
From what we can gather, there was once a rogue band of underground milkmen roaming the New England countryside defacing poor innocent milk cartons with giant Sharpie pens.  The horror! The mayhem! The curdling! Well, the state put an end to that, slapping a $10 fine on anyone who dared to vandalize a container of 2 percent.
3. It is illegal in Dudley, Massachusetts to own more than three cats without government permission.
Here’s to you, Dudley, for finding a way to push that nice lady with kitty litter in her hair and all those pussycats even further into desperate reclusion.  Residents of the town decided to impose a $100-per-day fine for owning too many cats after someone living next to the town cat lady complained about the felines ruining his yard. The cat lady promptly put her home up for sale, packed her 15 cats, and never looked back. Success!
4. Children in Attleboro, Massachusetts are forbidden from playing “tag” or other running games during playtime.
Heaven forbid an American child loses all that self-esteem his teachers worked so hard to build over the years. (Remember, everyone’s a winner!) A school in Massachusetts made national headlines in 2006 for issuing playground rules that restricted children from playing “chasing” games like tag and touch football because they were “dangerous” and “exclusionary.” In a rousing match of phone tag, a spokesman for the school refused to confirm or deny to The Daily Caller that tag is  still allowed today. Guess that means we’re it.
5. A Massachusetts fisherman was fined for saving a whale caught in his net.
As Clare Boothe Luce once quipped, no good deed goes unpunished. A U.S. District Court fined fisherman Robert J. Eldridge $500 after he untangled a whale from his nets and set the giant sea mammal free. What he should have done, the court told him, was call state authorities and wait for them do it. Never mind that the whale may have suffocated if they didn’t arrive in time. But hey, Eldridge should consider himself lucky: He could have faced a $100,000 fine and up to a year in jail. That’ll teach him.
Honorable Mention: Group in Cambridge calls for a ban on all meat on Mondays.
The Cambridge Climate Congress, established to make recommendations for climate laws for the People’s Republic of Cambridge, recently proposed a ban on all meat sales once a week to curb the “climate emergency.” (It didn’t pass.) As the logic goes, meat comes from cows, and cows emit gas (farts) that heats up the planet. Let’s take a moment to thank the selfless citizens of Cambridge for making a good faith effort to rid the world of climate change and those smelly bovine backsides.
So what new hot liberal trend to run your life for you will be coming to a town near you, or even yours.
Let’s Wait and see.