There is an organization that needs your help. It is in desperate dire straits and without our help, it will go under. And if it goes under, many, many other people will be affected.
I’m talking about Air America. With ratings that require an electron microscope to read, with content that makes all but the most Liberal among us nauseous, they are going down. And it is up to us to prevent it.
Why, you ask? Have you ever heard about the Fairness Doctrine? It was a law passed in the 50′s that meant if you had one view of something, you had to give at least some time to the opposite view. This was shot down by President Reagan in the 80′s and again by President Bush. But if it comes up again with Hillary in the White House, it will surely be signed into law. Which will kill Talk Radio.
Unless the opposing view has their own network. Which, for the moment, it does.
I personally would like to donate $250 to the cause, simply because I want Al Frankin to say “Thank you for your donation The Conservative Zone.” That should hurt his mouth enough to make some teeth fall out. At least I can hope.
Now, living on $734 a month, I don’t have that kind of money laying around. So if you want to donate to me, I will save it up and pass the donation along to Air America.
What do you think? Please donate so they won’t have to skim off another childrens agency.

Well, it seems that the Democrats will stop at nothing to get what they want. Ronnie Earle Cleared DeLay Two Weeks Ago.
You find out that you’ve been all but cleared of any wrongdoing, then you get hit with a nebulous conspiracy charge and everything changes.

Travis County prosecutor Ronnie Earle’s announcement yesterday that he was indicting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay came a little more than two weeks after Earle gave clear indications that the top Republican was off the hook.
“I have never said that DeLay is a target of the investigation,” Earle told the Dallas Morning News on Sept. 10.

So why the indictment?

DeLay says reports that he was off the hook prompted a firestorm of outrage from national Democrats, who pressured Earle to reverse course.
“Do you really believe that the national Democrat leaders that announced that they were going to take this strategy … never picked up the phone and talked to Ronnie Earle?” he asked the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” Wednesday night.

An interesting point, one unfortunately that will never be proven, at least without a court order for phone records.
In this case, a glancing hit is just as good as a bullseye. Even if DeLay beats the rap, the damage will have been done. He will always be known as the “formerly indicted” Senator.

Sorry, but I have been getting up late lately, and I’ve run out of time. I have to report to you on the Valerie Plame matter, Tom DeLay, and I need your help in helping Air America.
I’ll see you tonight.

Well, I found the OKCupid! on Say Uncle and took it. Here are my results:

You are a Social Liberal (68% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (66% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

I don’t put a lot of faith in this, as I didn’t like the way a lot of the questions were asked. However, I’m stuck with the answer, until I can figure out how to shave the test that is.

In case you didn’t know it, Mike and I get together every Wednesday and play Epic:Armageddon, a 6mm scale wargame. You can do a search on the Zone for Epic and see all of the posts that I have done on the subject.
Anyway, Mike has picked up the book The Art of Maneuver and it has improved his game markedly. His strategies are more thought out and “crisper” in execution. Then he loaned me his Library copy. So now I am picking up all of the same tips and hints he has been using on me recently.
I bring this book up because he has gotten a lot more confident of his game since reading it and has been trying “Mind Fu” or trying to psych me out before the game ever begins. Little does he know I have no mind to psych out . Anyway, armed with only the first 67 pages of the book, I went into our battle today. I did Mind Fu right back at him, not by psyching him out, but be concentrating on his weakness and applying it against him.
Our first game lasted a grand total of 15 minutes. My changing tactics on him caught him and his forces flat-footed. His Space Marines had no anti-air weapons, and I had 6 Fighter-Bombers and a Lander roaming the air with impunity. I used my air units first, before he could do almost anything, and I destroyed one unit and put serious hurt on another. Seeing that I had outclassed him, Mike realized that he was beaten before the battle had been truly joined. He capitulated and asked to tweak his list. I agreed.
In the second game, things fell into place according to my plans. I had a total of 4 Ork Warbands, two mounted in Battlewagons and two on foot, garrisoned in the middle of the board. I left the foot Warbands right where he could not ignore them and let him throw his forces at the foot Warbands. While he was busy advancing his forces into my retreating foot Warbands, my mechanized Warbands were pulling off a classic double envelopment maneuver. I also ignored his Warhound Titan roaming the board, realizing that with no Terminators he would be sprinting that Titan towards my Blitzkrieg objective. I let him have it, because by the time the Titan had got there, I had killed one of his Devastator squads, giving me a balancing point for Break Their Spirit.
So by the end of the third turn, He held my Blitzkrieg, but I had BTS and was one stand away from getting his Blitzkrieg. His Titan was rendered ineffective, because it could not leave the Blitzkrieg (he would lose his battle point) and all of my units were out of his range. He capitulated again, knowing that there was nothing he could do to protect his Blitzkrieg. I would have won in the next turn 2-1.
So my Orks received not one, but two victories tonight! I am most pleased that I have finally won with them. I am also pleased in the fact that Mike is getting better as well. I stuck around and let him play a third game, which he handily won against another friend.
If you don’t play, you should try some kind of wargame. It helps you think dynamically. It teaches critical thinking skills, prioritizing of targets and with dice, unlike chess, you can sometimes lose when you are on top. Mike and I still talk about the situation several games ago where he worked very hard to set his units up in the proper position, set up my units for a Close Combat attack by putting several blast markers on them, then attacking. The bad news is, even with an advantage on the roll, he lost the roll-off, which meant his unit withdrew, broken. That precipitated the crumbling of the entire flank. He did manage to still win the game, but that lost flank made it a lot harder for him to do so.
I like dice based wargames over Chess because in Chess, the Pawn will always take the Queen if she ends up in one of his attack squares. In dice based wargames, it is highly unlikely that the Pawn takes the Queen. But if you get lucky enough, you can pull it off, to the squeals of delight and howls of frustration that a dice roll like that can cause.
Thanks for a great game Mike. I promise to read the rest of the book by next week. Let’s see how well my Mind Fu works on you.

Well, here I am, tired but satisfied. I went out with Alpha Patriot and Mike to a premiere showing of Serenity.
The short answer is, it was an excellent movie.
A sightly longer answer is, this is Joss Whedon’s first attempt at a big screen production. He did it right. While somewhat formulaic, it skips a lot of the formulas that you see in movies today. This fact alone makes me happy.
It exceeded my expectations in every way. There were places for you to laugh, a couple for you to get mad in, and very few places for you to feel sad. It explains a lot that the series didn’t, and you do find out a lot.
I am not going into any kind of spoilers, you’ll have to look elsewhere for that.
The good news is we picked up some swag, a card stock flyer and a neat keychain.
All in all, it was a great movie and if you have ever watched Firefly and liked it, you will throughly enjoy this movie.
Go see it. You won’t regret it.

This is a bad idea. Bush seeks to federalize emergencies.
The story is about immediately federalizing National Guard troops and sending in the military into disaster areas.
This is a natural reflexive action, considering the grilling that the President got when he wasn’t “fast enough” in the wake of Katrina. Never mind the response was faster than any other emergency by Clinton, and most of the efforts were hindered by local officials rather than federal.
I’ll say it again, this is a bad idea. If a governor wants to be indecisive and screw up the recovery efforts in their state, that should be their purview. If a mayor does not want to follow his own emergency plans, no blame should be laid at the feet of the Federal government, no matter how much the press wants to.
To bridge Posse Comitatus is a major error in my book. We are built on the pyramid of local, state and federal for a reason, and abridging those prior levels will mean a lot of trouble for civil liberties down the road.
For once, I have to agree with the ACLU, no matter how much it pains me to do so.

Louis Farrakhan has now claimed that explosives were found at the bottom of the levee that broke and flooded the 9th Ward. Louis Farrakhan: Divers Found Levee Explosives.
How outrageous this man can get I have no idea, but it seems there is no upper limit. He will claim anything that the “White Man” did to the “Black Man” to keep him down. Excuse my language, but Bullshit.
There is no grand conspiracy to “keep the Black Man down.” I think word of it would have leaked out by now. Besides, the Black population, by shunning education and work, and embracing Welfare, keeps themselves down without any help from the “White Man.”
A pox upon you, Mr. Farrakhan. For all your lies.

Louisiana is sucking hard on that Federal money teat: Louisiana Goes After Federal Billions.

Louisiana’s congressional delegation has requested $40 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, about 10 times the annual Corps budget for the entire nation, or 16 times the amount the Corps has said it would need to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane. [emphasis mine]

With the infamous corruption known in the Big Easy, most of this money will not make it into the projects, but the pockets of politicians.

Corps funding is only part of what Louisiana wants. The 440-page bill also includes $50 billion in open-ended grants for storm-ravaged communities and $13 billion for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, along with mortgage assistance, health care, substance abuse treatment and other services for hurricane victims. It also includes hefty payments to hospitals, ports, banks, shipbuilders, fishermen and schools, as well as $8 million for alligator farms, $35 million for seafood industry marketing, and $25 million for a sugar-cane research laboratory that had not been completed before Katrina.

In other words, anything lobbyists can dream up and politicians can get into law.
It is sickening, and a classic example for how a dependent mindset works. I don’t hear about Mississippi and Alabama, hit just as hard, asking for outrageous amounts of Federal dollars. They plan on doing it themselves, as self-reliant Americans do.
It is disappointing to see such “gimmie gimmie” politicians, and citizens who are trained not to help themselves.
They will get their money, there is little that can be done to stop it. No one will oppose it because they don’t want to be labeled as “insensitive.” And the money will, like so many other Federal programs, squandered and frittered away uselessly.
Not to mention the citizens and environmentalists will resist the reconstruction of the levees to Cat 5 standards. The environmentalists will oppose the construction to “protect” the Square-Tailed Mud Darter (whatever that is) and the citizens don’t want all of the construction noise. How do I know this? This kind of stuff has already been done. The levee that broke due to a barge ramming it, had money and construction all lined up, but was resisted by the environmentalists and citizens.
No reason for them to change now.

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® – and Emmy – nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

I look forward to seeing this movie on Tuesday. Full review to be posted on Wednesday, if not Tuesday night after the movie. You can check out more, including a great flash application at Serenity.
If the movie is as good as I think it will be, you just might see me at the premiere Friday as well.

“Take me where I cannot stand. Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me.”
So starts the theme song from the canceled TV show Firefly. The best way to describe this show is a Sci-Fi Western. Canceled before all of the filmed episodes could be shown, all because the show appealed to too many demographics. In other words, Fox suits wanted this to appeal to one group of people, and everybody liked it. The suits didn’t know what ads (to target that wonderful single demographic, such as women 25-40) to run on the show, so they reflexively canceled it.
Well, one week from today the movie Serenity opens. Based on the TV show, this is a big budget extension of the series.
I have been invited to a pre-screening of the movie, and on Wednesday I will give you a review of it. I bought the DVD set of the series and got it just yesterday. I am working my way through the series, working myself up for the movie.
There is one small difference between the show and the movie, but I’m keeping an open mind as to how it will work out.
The good news is all of the players have been signed to do at least two more sequels. If this one takes off then the producers could have a shot at bringing this back to TV.

My apologies. I am so wiped out today and I don’t know why. I’m getting 8-9 hours of sleep a night, but I wake up and want to go right back to sleep again.
I had no motivation yesterday, and I still have none today. I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s not the pills, any drowsiness I should be used to by now.
I guess I’ll have to go to bed extra early tonight and see if that doesn’t work.
Talk to you tomorrow.

Well, the Fulton County School System has gotten a lot of bad press it seems and have backed off their plans to eminent domain the land meant for a Jewish high school. Private school won’t be forced to sell land.
This is the part that gets me:

When Weber officials said they had no desire to sell the site, Fulton indicated in a strongly worded letter that unless Weber agreed by Monday to sell the property, the school board would use eminent domain to obtain it.
[...]
Fulton school board president Gail Dean said the board had been under the impression that the district was in negotiations with a willing seller.

Yeah. A willing seller that you have to threaten with eminent domain? Come on. Somebody realized that taking the land would be a big public relations disaster, so they are trying to cover it up as a miscommunication? I don’t think so. That dog won’t hunt.

I don’t believe this. Wash Postie: ‘Reasonable’ Blacks Believe Levee Plot.

“Reasonable” African Americans in New Orleans believe that the Bush administration engineered the levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina in a bid to save the city’s white sections by flooding black neighborhoods, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said Sunday.
“I was stunned in New Orleans at how many black New Orleanians would tell me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered in order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black,” Robinson told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

This disturbs me. Not in the “fact” that it might be true (there’s no possible way it can be), but that so many people believe it, if this guy is right.

“These are not wild-eyed people,” Robinson insisted. “These are reasonable, sober people who really believe that.”

How one can ignore the laws of physics to this degree staggers the mind. First of all, the kind of bomb that would be required to do this kind of damage would be kin to a Daisy Cutter, a 15,000 pound bomb dropped from a B-52. I think someone would have seen a B-52 flying over the city. Second, the sound from such an explosion would have been heard throughout most of the city. Third, water doesn’t flow uphill, no matter how hard Minister Farrakhan wants it to. Those primarily White neighborhoods that didn’t flood, didn’t flood because they were built on higher ground. The land that was built on lower ground was cheaper so the poor gravitated toward that.
Now we see just how deep the attitude of “the government must help me” goes. Those who are too used to suckling on the government teat will do nothing to improve their lives, depending on the government to rescue them (even if they didn’t want to go in the first place) and rebuild their lives. Let’s see how many don’t jump on the learning curve and continue to live in those neighborhoods that were flooded.
Wow. I mean, just Wow.

Here you go: Battle for school site taints day.
Fulton County, Georgia, is going to take private land meant for a Jewish high school and make a Public elementary school out of it.

The Fulton County school system wants to buy the Weber School site and use the land to build a new elementary school. In a strongly worded letter sent earlier this month, the school district indicated that unless Weber sold the property by today, the school board would use eminent domain to obtain the land.

This is not Kelo, but still it is a travesty of justice to see something like this happen. There must be a way to have both schools co-exist, or to have the elementary school somewhere else in the neighborhood.
Why is it a travesty? Because a high school that will be morally committed to turning out high quality adults will be preempted by a holding cell for young kids. With everything wrong with public schools today, more of them is not the answer.
This is a case of the Dog in the Manger. Read up on it if you have forgotten your moral lessons from childhood.