Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Apparently someone wants to build housing and retail on the site of the Battle of Chancellorsville.
This is indeed appalling, and shows little or no respect for our Civil War dead, and further indicates that the decimation of the troops of General M. Mouse at Third Manassas back in 1999 is a fading memory.
HOWEVER. As far as I can tell, unlike the case of the battlefield at Gettysburg which is actually owned by a preservation group (which continues to buy up land around the battlefield, I might add), no battlefield preservation group has ever gotten around to actually purchasing the land on which the battle was fought. So I’m not sure what all these battlefield preservation groups are on about. Ownership of the battlefield is 90% of the preservation effort. Just placing a battlefield on your preservation list isn’t sufficient. Everyone — including the land owners — have to agree that preserving the battlefield is more important than anything else.
So I’m not really surprised that the group lost their bid to reject the rezoning. I’m just appalled that anyone would want to essentially erase a Civil War battlefield.
(For what it’s worth, I’m not a big fan of neighborhood preservation. I find it a serious violation of property rights to tell a person that he can’t do what he wants, within obvious reason, to the outside of his property, if it would change the essential character of his historic home. Most historic homes aren’t worth the money poured into them to fix them up, and having been a contractor who did a certain amount of historic renovation work, I know whereof I speak. Most historic homes are also cramped and built on tiny lots in crappy neighborhoods. People left these neighborhoods for a reason, people. Think about it. Then tear that damn undistinguished 1880 row house down and build something else.)

WashTimes today has an article on Ari Fleischer’s impending nuptials.
But I was caught more by this comment than anything else:

“Anytime a bald Jewish guy — and I’m one myself — manages to get a nice girl, it’s cause for celebration,” [NPR] host Peter Sagal told The Washington Post.

What’s your point? I could have told you that two years ago.

Nicest girl I ever knew. Proud to call her my wife (although usually I just call her “Pookie”). And it WAS cause for great rejoicing, with both of us over 40 and never married 🙂

God is getting California for re-electing Grayout Davis.
Tellingly, 353,000 SF area residents lost electricity during the storm. A reminder of the summer of 2001, perhaps? Kinda makes ya go, “Hmmm…”

I guess for the next two years we’ll be making Alabama jokes instead of Florida jokes. The sitting Dem Guv of Alabama is challenging the election he lost to his GOP opponent.

Counterfeiting is on the rise again. Big surprise. All that high-tech reworking of the currency is meaningless when people don’t pay attention to their money.
The penalty for being found with counterfeiting materials should be death; it’s too easy to get out of a 20-year term in the slammer (first offense, time off for good behaviour, etc). If you can’t give them death, then loss of citizenship and lifetime banishment to Antarctica might suffice.
No country should tolerate people screwing around with its money.
(In particular, I can’t believe this chick in NYC who passed the counterfeit $5 bill she got from someone else because she “[did]n’t want to lose it [the money]”. How patriotic of you, Miss. Think about that five bucks the next time a defense appropriations bill comes up and gets trimmed because there’s not enough money to go around. And then think about that again in the millisecond or so you’ll have when a nuke goes off in NYC because it wasn’t detected or interdicted.)

Well, enough blogging fun for today. Got to go tux it up and go raise a Master Mason tonight. No matter what the Democrats think, life does go on. And yes, all you free-thinking Democrats out there, there is a God. And according to P.J. O’Rourke, he’s a Republican:

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.
God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful, and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.
Santa Claus is a different matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.
Parliament of Whores, p.xx.

See ya on the flip side.

Over at Best of the Web, Taranto’s lede today (spotlighting Eugene Volokh’s item on Stanford U. inviting Lynne Stewart to be a Visiting Public Interest Mentor) ends with:

One wonders how long it will be before some university invites Osama bin Laden himself to be a guest speaker.

Hell, if I were president of a university, I’d invite him myself. And then make sure if he accepted that there were nothing but armed Special Forces in the audience.
Not that he’s alive to accept the invitation.

As Rush always says: Democrats are much funnier out of power than they are in power. Ain’t it the truth.

From ArgusLeader.Com:

“The president ought to feel good this morning, and I congratulate him. We had a president who talked a lot about 9-11, the war in Iraq, and North Korea. It precluded us from breaking through, talking about issues like the economy, education and health care,” he said.

But you didn’t have any solutions of your own, so why would this have made a difference?
Silly Senator.

If Terry McAuliffe now believes that “the responsibility for this sputtering economy is now [Bush’s]”…does that mean he agrees that the responsibility for it up to now has been Bill Clinton’s?
Terry, sometimes you make a guy just bust out smilin’.