Foundation

There is now no more doubt: Fidel Castro is dead. The hostage photo of Castro holding the newspaper is the wrong color! It was printed in red, but the faked photo shows it black!

And I love that the jacket he’s in is even an old one, from the World Baseball Classic.

In reference to Adam C’s Red Hot post at Red State, here’s a solid Republican agenda that we ought to run on at all levels to appeal to frustrated men like Juan Williams and Bill Cosby:

• Abolish the minimum wage. Even if we can’t convince people to back such a plan for all people, we should at least end the minimum wage for employees under a certain age, perhaps 25. The easier we make it for employers to give entry level positions to part time American youth, the better. Because every person who gets a start down a productive path, will potentially become a positive role model for somebody.
• Prosecute employers of illegal aliens. It doesn’t help when part time American youth have to compete with full time illegal alien labor under the table.
• End the domestic drug war. Preventing the mass export of drugs from places like Colombia and Afghanistan into the United States is a great idea, but unlike with traditional crime, I see no evidence that tough enforcement has done anything positive for the affected communities.
• Fight for school choice. Public schools are run by unionized, bureaucratic, politicized teachers and administrators. Instead of adding more bureaucracy and centralized control, we need to break free of centralization and put control back into the hands of parents.
• Deregulate medical care. By allowing providers to distingush themselves and cut costs, medical care can be come affordable to more people, thus cutting out one more way people are made dependent on big government.

I know at least one of these will be controversial among Republicans, but any of them will take strong leadership to accomplish.

When I first heard of UN talks about a cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon (are the two distinguishable entities anymore?), my hope was that the UN and Israel would ignore it, and the talks would be fruitless.

So I was greatly surprised when not only did the US take part in the process, but both President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave full support to the results! A UN cease fire, complete with blue helmets, after blue helmets arleady there (in a years-long ‘interim’ deployment) did absolutely no good? What’s the point?

Despite my doubts, though, I decided it was best to give Olmert (Ariel Sharon’s #2 in his new Kadima party) and Bush (chief proponent of an aggressive War on Terror) the benefit of the doubt. I could only argue it so well though, having doubts on my own anyway.

So it cheered me up quite a bit to see Erick Erickson’s new piece on Red State saying that this could be a big PR boon for our side when (not if) Hezbollah violates the terms of the cease fire. Let’s just hope Olmert doesn’t hold back at that point!

I actually managed to catch the last few innings of this one. Steve Finley’s a Giant now apparently, and he tried to make it interesting (in between Fox replays of his grand slam that won the division for the Dodgers against the Giants). Grady Little was ready, though, and substituted Jason Repko into center in the 9th, and Repko caught up to Finley’s hard, deep hit to turn it into an wall-smacking out.

NOW the console got in. Got that taken care of when, after hours of fruitless debugging of my NSPipe-related code, I realized that it was some third party code *cough*RMUDAnsiTextView*cough* that was the source of all the evils.

So, I took out RMUDAnsiTextView and its dependency AGRegex, wrote my own smaller and BETTER code to convert ANSI color coded strings into NSAttributedStrings, and it’s all set.

The Braves reject mainstream Christianity, so mainstream Christians should probably reject them. Says the AP:

Focus on the Family, a group founded by James Dobson, was barred from participating in Sunday’s post-game activities after sponsoring first such event at Turner Field last month.

The team wouldn’t provide a reason for its decision, several gay rights groups on the Web bristled with speculation that Focus on the Family was given the boot for promoting its belief that homosexuality is a social problem comparable to alcoholism, gambling or depression.

The Braves chose sides, and now I hope they have to live with the consequences of that choice by taking in less revenue.

P.S. You can just tell how much the AP loves the side the Braves have chosen. Do you think the headline would be “Yer Out!” if the Braves had kicked out a radical homosexual activist group from an event?

Who could have expected it? Since the All-Star break, the Dodgers lost 13 of 14, then won 13 of 14. They started this stretch in second place, and have ended it in first place by a game and a half.

It helps when Jeff Kent gets the best of his old sparring partner in San Francisco by out-homering Barry Bonds 1-0, doesn’t it?

I hate onions, or at least their texture. And there’s nothing worse than biting into something and hitting an onion by surprise… Ugh.

The Dodgers are alone in first place, and Greg Maddux has a lot to do with it.

When I think about it, him coming to the Ravine is a lot like Karl Malone arrival with the Lakers. Maddux was hitting his peak with the Braves right around when I started really getting into baseball (and in those days, the Braves and Dodgers were both in the NL West). Likewise, Karl Malone’s Jazz would knock out the Lakers every year right around when I started watching basketball seriously.

Let’s hope nobody ELSE gets hurt this year. The injuries to the Dodger pitching have been so bad, that nobody in the bullpen at the start of the season is there now.

We miss you Eric Gagné, but at this rate we’ll get to go on without you to October.

I am so sick of Americans being so ashamed of their country that they refer to the act of showing support for and happiness with one’s country as “being an ugly American.”

We’re a wealthy country. We’re a free country. We’re a well-fed country. We’re a safe country. We’re a strong country. All of these things are good, and it’s said when anyone feels the need to avoid talking about it or, worse, apologize for it. If others are envious and wish to pervert what’s great about this country into criticisms, that’s their problem, not ours.

It’s times like this I wish that international sports bodies weren’t so riddled with corruption and anti-Americanism, so that I’d have an interest in watching our athletes dominate.