You have worked all your life and built a nice home. It's comfortable, fits your needs and you feel safe sitting in your living room or working in your backyard. One day, a man from a neighborhood a few blocks over takes a short cut through your yard. It upsets you a bit and you grumble to your next door neighbor but that's about it. Soon he has worn a path in your well manicured lawn and occasionally grabs a deck chair and once even took a steak off the grill as he passed by. You call the Cops who sympathize with you but explain that they are really too busy chasing real criminals to put any effort into catching this guy.
One day you come home to find him rummaging through your refrigerator and medicine cabinet. This time when you call the Cops, they don't even bother to come as the decision was made to no longer enforce trespassing or breaking and entering laws in your town. The man is pleasant enough as he provides a list of groceries and medical needs that you should pick up for him because he's going to be staying in your spare bedroom for the forseeable future. And since he is now considered to be a resident of your home, if the need arises, you are responsible for putting him on your health insurance and supporting him until he can find a job.
You continue to complain to police and the mayor who sometimes sympathizes with you but never seem to do anything. All your efforts have now caught the attention of the folks who live up the hill in the fancy gated community. Without bothering to discuss the situation with you, they use the local newspaper as a platform to explain why this guy deserves to live in your house and you should be proud to provide for him. When you write a letter to the newspaper editor asking why the man can't live with the folks in the gated community, he refuses to publish it as it is too imflammatory. During this whole situation, you have been subjected to ridicule for your selfish, uncaring and even racist attitude.
In an attempt to be understanding, you ask the man why he wants to live in your house when you know he has one of his own. He simply explains that your house is so much more comfortable and in a safer neighborhood. Life is just so much easier in your neighborhood and besides his kids are out of control at his house and he can't do anything with them.
Throughout this whole situation, financially things are getting tough. You are no longer able to save for retirement or your kid's college fund as you must pay for not only your family's expenses but those of your new house guest. Soon it becomes obvious to you that something has to change or in the near future, you may have to let the house go back to the bank and then no one will have a decent place to live.
Over the years, the immigration issue has become very convoluted by politics and sometimes by legitimate debate. But when you actualy break it down to its simplest level, the obvious situation surfaces.
Obama's administration plans to sue Arizona over its immigration law stating that it is the Federal government's responsibility to set immigration policy. Apparently it is the Obama Administration's "policy" to not enforce existing immigration laws already on the books. To add insult to injury- the planned lawsuit was announced not by official letter to the authorities in Arizona or even in a national press conference but by the Secretary of State while on a visit to Ecuador.
Meanwhile many areas of federal land in Arizona are off-limits to our citizens for safety issues due to the illegal human and drug trafficking and the violence such activities bring to these areas. So in effect Mexican drug lords are controlling parts of our country. There seems to be very little concern in Washington over this invasion of American soil.
It is very obvious that the administration's actions are steeped in some strange brew of liberal politics, elitist guilt and practical ignorance and not in its constitutionally ascribed responsibility of law enforcement. If a fraction of the money, time and effort that will be spent on a lawsuit against the state of Arizona was actually spent on border enforcement in these federal lands, maybe taxpayers could actually enjoy the use of these areas that they pay taxes to the federal government to maintain.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Now If They Only Made One For The Wife
Gentlemen, get control of your clickers! You know what I’m talking about- the TV remote. We have lost a lot of ground over the last few years when it comes to being kings of our castles. Nowadays, we do dishes, cook an occasional meal, baby sit and change diapers. I’ve even heard of a few guys doing laundry; all things that our fathers would have never dreamed of doing. Well, it’s time to draw the line. We may not rule the roost anymore but by George, any remote device should fall within our jurisdiction.
It’s not like the clicker can be shared anyway. One person’s got to be in charge and it might as well be the man. A woman’s role should be limited to search and discovery only and not involved in actual remote operations. Search & discovery would entail helping me look for a lost clicker between the cushions of the couch, under the chair or in the refrigerator where I sometimes leave it when I’m making a sandwich.
And just like everything else, clicker operation has become more and more complicated and it requires a certain mechanical expertise that many women just don’t have. We recently purchased one of those new DVD/VCR/CD/MP3/BLU-RAY/BOO-RAY players. The player itself only cost $189 but the wires, jacks, adapters and batteries for the remote brought the final cost to somewhere around $600. It would have cost more but I got my twelve year old nephew to hook everything up instead of hiring a certified electrical engineer.
Now the remote for this thing is the size of a laptop computer and with as many buttons as a space shuttle dashboard. With so many buttons, there’s no room for full descriptions underneath each one of them so they use cryptic abbreviations. One button has the letters UMMPH underneath it. The first time I pushed it, all the toilets in the house flushed at the same time. There’s another button marked BARF. I’ve never had the courage to press that one.
To complicate matters, in today’s living room, it requires more than one remote to actually watch television. You need one to turn the TV on, one to turn the satellite or cable box on, one to turn the VCR or DVD on, and one to turn the stereo on if you’re audiophilic enough to have figured out how to hook it up to the TV. And to make matters worse, we have three TV’s in our house & the remotes are always getting mixed up. Throw in a garage door opener and a ceiling fan remote and you see how confusing things can get. I spent thirty minutes the other day trying to turn the TV on with my electronic stud finder. I have to admit that the only one in the family that can tell the difference between all these remotes is my daughter. When she’s not home, and the remotes get mixed up, I just grab a good book.
So you see that control of the clicker is of fundamental importance in any household and it shouldn’t be left to chance or first come first serve. I’m not usually in favor of prenuptial agreements but a legal document might be the only way to prevent long term marital discord. A man without clicker control is nothing; he has no authority and might even be forced to watch the Lifetime channel on a regular basis. The only people that would deny a man his remote are communists, feminists and Al Qaeda terrorists.
So in my house, I am in total control of our viewing choices. And when I get home tonight, my daughter promised that if I let her watch the “She’s All That” marathon she’d show me how to get the Braves game on satellite without opening and closing the garage doors.
It’s not like the clicker can be shared anyway. One person’s got to be in charge and it might as well be the man. A woman’s role should be limited to search and discovery only and not involved in actual remote operations. Search & discovery would entail helping me look for a lost clicker between the cushions of the couch, under the chair or in the refrigerator where I sometimes leave it when I’m making a sandwich.
And just like everything else, clicker operation has become more and more complicated and it requires a certain mechanical expertise that many women just don’t have. We recently purchased one of those new DVD/VCR/CD/MP3/BLU-RAY/BOO-RAY players. The player itself only cost $189 but the wires, jacks, adapters and batteries for the remote brought the final cost to somewhere around $600. It would have cost more but I got my twelve year old nephew to hook everything up instead of hiring a certified electrical engineer.
Now the remote for this thing is the size of a laptop computer and with as many buttons as a space shuttle dashboard. With so many buttons, there’s no room for full descriptions underneath each one of them so they use cryptic abbreviations. One button has the letters UMMPH underneath it. The first time I pushed it, all the toilets in the house flushed at the same time. There’s another button marked BARF. I’ve never had the courage to press that one.
To complicate matters, in today’s living room, it requires more than one remote to actually watch television. You need one to turn the TV on, one to turn the satellite or cable box on, one to turn the VCR or DVD on, and one to turn the stereo on if you’re audiophilic enough to have figured out how to hook it up to the TV. And to make matters worse, we have three TV’s in our house & the remotes are always getting mixed up. Throw in a garage door opener and a ceiling fan remote and you see how confusing things can get. I spent thirty minutes the other day trying to turn the TV on with my electronic stud finder. I have to admit that the only one in the family that can tell the difference between all these remotes is my daughter. When she’s not home, and the remotes get mixed up, I just grab a good book.
So you see that control of the clicker is of fundamental importance in any household and it shouldn’t be left to chance or first come first serve. I’m not usually in favor of prenuptial agreements but a legal document might be the only way to prevent long term marital discord. A man without clicker control is nothing; he has no authority and might even be forced to watch the Lifetime channel on a regular basis. The only people that would deny a man his remote are communists, feminists and Al Qaeda terrorists.
So in my house, I am in total control of our viewing choices. And when I get home tonight, my daughter promised that if I let her watch the “She’s All That” marathon she’d show me how to get the Braves game on satellite without opening and closing the garage doors.
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