Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

I think Tivo users doth protest too much.
I knew when Tivo came out that I wouldn’t be buying one, mostly because you aren’t really “buying” one at all; you’re paying for a receiver that’s useless without the monthly fee.
A real “digital VCR” wouldn’t require a subscription. And until one comes out, I’ve still got my trusty tape deck. Not that much worth taping comes down the pipe from the satellite these days.

…even a Jew boy like me.
Joe Bob Briggs has a few things to say about Jesus and SUVs.
(Via the Professor.)

…muses Victor Davis Hanson over on NRO.

Ben Stein on the conspiracy to ban SUVs (among other things) and how using Jesus and God arguments against them is, well, somewhat pharisaical.
Ben doesn’t write nearly enough to make me happy. (And he’s a fellow fan of the beautiful and apparently pregnant Linda Vester, so he has good taste as well as great intellect.)

…how the world’s Jews don’t descend on Saudi Arabia and stuff the Holy Kaaba up King Fahd’s butt sideways after reading shit like this.
Fatwa this, you boy-buggering walking tea towels.

I’m really getting sick and tired of people who bitch and moan about two things, usually at the same time:

1. Homeland Security is a clear and present danger to our precious civil rights; and
2. Homeland Security is woefully inept at just about anything it tries to do. How will we ever protect ourselves from terrorist activities?

The Professor, whom I normally think is a fairly smart cookie, links today to Brock Yates, who talks about how confiscating nail files and cuticle scissors from airline travellers doesn’t protect us from people crossing our undefended borders (well, that’s simplistic, but read Yates’s piece and you’ll see that he really doesn’t have a whole lot else to say).
Think about this for just a moment: How does a country with a tradition of liberal democratic civil rights, fairly open borders, and ease of access, overturn all that in just over a year to a system that is so tightly-regulated that nobody gets in or out? How do we build a Berlin Wall across 2000 miles of undefended and unsecured Canadian border? We can’t even build a six-foot-high fence along the Mexican border, or station troops along it to guard it, for crying out loud, because our wimpy libs and the Mexicans cry boo-hoo every time we talk about it.
What really makes you think that “the gummint” is going to turn the United States into the People’s Republic of North America? Have you read the Patriot Act and realized that it isn’t the fascist, jackbooted Hitlerian/Soviet manifesto people said it was when it was going through Congress? Do you have any idea how much information swampage is going to be involved in TIA? (Those people are going to be lucky to see the forest for the trees if they plan to use that database to try to predict terrorist activity.)
God damn it, people. Wake up and smell the fucking coffee. Our civil liberties are only in danger from the people who hate us and would do us ill. And I think our president, legislators, and courts are smart enough to realize that (well, maybe not the 9th Circuit, but the exception usually proves the rule).

A fairly competent article about the ADA in respect to cyberspace is written today over on NRO by James L. Gattuso. While I agree with his points with regard to commercial websites, I have to take exception to one of his points:

The Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson warns, for instance, that web-design creativity and spontaneity could be stunted, as publishers feel constrained to use only officially accepted tools. Amateur websites would be winnowed as legal and technical rules limit the art to professionals. So much for “blogs.”

I kind of think he’s missed the point. I’m not bound by the ADA and neither is anyone else who runs a blog (unless maybe they run one on a pay site). If I charged money to read these pearls of whatever they are that I write, it might be a different matter. As it is, I have absolutely no responsibility to make my blog accessible to the blind, the deaf, or the mentally-impaired (although I am not 100% certain if Democrats fit that last mold or not — not that I care).
It would be nice if people would think before they write. (Full disclosure: I fit that mold myself sometimes.)

to Strom Thurmond. 100 years old today and the longest-serving Senator in US history.
I will avoid my usual cant of “term limits for everyone, Republicans included” just this once.

The Venezuelans got it right the first time, and it’s a damn shame our president made them put their president back on his throne. Sr. Chavez is a very dangerous man if he’s going to be this way about perceived threats to his regime.
Time to remove another banana dictator, I guess.

Via LGF: The IDF takes out the trash once more. Three missiles, one window, no waiting. Damn.