Cranky T-Rex's Blog

If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. --President Barack Obama He didn't build that, apparently. Just a little over seven years ago a small local company came to me and asked me to write them a program. I knew the owners and so they knew that part of my college education had included software development, and since I was in my last year of college with no practical experience and they didn't have a lot of money to spend, it was a good arrangement. We discussed their requirements and then I spent several days banging out my first real software gig. I got paid, they got the software, and everyone was happy. When I finished my degree, I came out into a job market that wasn't terribly interested in my skill set anymore, at least not unless I chose to move to California, which was...

The Crane Technique Most people remember Mr. Miyagi for his famous "wax on, wax off" training method, but the Karate master gave Daniel-san lots of sage wisdom about all facets of life in The Karate Kid, including one gem that has particular relevance to yesterday's Health Care Summit. You see Daniel was always in a rush to learn, and even though he had barely grasped the basics of how to throw a punch, Daniel immediately asked to be taught the advanced Crane technique when he saw Mr. Miyagi performing it on the beach. In response, Mr. Miyagi chuckled and admonished him, "First learn stand, then learn fly. Nature rule Daniel-san, not mine." Like Daniel, President Obama and the Democrats are perpetually in a rush to do everything, and they always want to do the biggest thing they can. Yesterday at the Health Care Summit, the President once again reiterated his resistance to smaller and more incremental steps towards health care reform by saying, "baby steps ...

There's a classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generati on in which Captain Picard is captured by the Cardassians in an attempt to glean information about Federation defense plans. Picard is given over to Gul Madred, played by David Warner, who proceeds to torture the good captain in every way imaginable (waterboarding is curiously left out) including inserting a device into Picard that can instantly cause pain and continue to do so for prolonged periods of time. The hallmark of the repeated tortures is the test Gul Madred uses to determine if Picard has finally submitted. Madred has placed above and behind him, four spotlights. He turns them on, and then he asks Picard the simple question of "how many lights do you see?" Picard naturally counts four, only to be rebuked by Gul Madred that there are, in fact, five lights. This exchange is repeated a number of times over several days, and when Picard disagrees, Madred inflicts pain on Picard, even leaving the pain device ...

Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and several other terrorists captured by the United States, will now be tried in criminal court in New York City. This decision is appalling on many levels, but none more so than the fact that this will tear apart the very fabric of the United States criminal justice system. This trial will be little more than a farce, a show trial designed to have the appearance of justice but with the verdict signed, sealed, and delivered before the proceedings even begin. There is no way on this Earth that the Obama Administration would ever allow KSM or his co-defendants to go free, regardless of any criminal court giving them their freedom based on legal technicality or acquittal. As such, this trial will mean nothing, and true justice shall not be served, as the defendants never had a chance to go free. Even if that were not the case, if they are tried in civilian court, it must respect all the rights and privileges that be...

Here's a little something I did up today. If you're not familiar with the reference, back in February there were a few schools that decided to have their children sing songs of praise to President Obama as a part of Black History Month. It's creepy in its own right, but the rhythmic chorus of "Mmm mm mm, Barack Hussein Obama" was just too good to pass up. Parents and other citizens alike are naturally outraged, and the school's defense was that the whole thing wasn't supposed to be taped, as if that somehow makes it ok that we have young children singing songs of praise to Dear Leader. Getting kids to effusively praise their head of state through song and dance is a hallmark of almost every dictatorship in human history and a critical step in convincing the population that the dictator is something more than human. Then again, if the people running that school went through the public education system, it's highly likely they never learned about anythi...

Sarjex serves up another illustration for us this week. This time she tackles two topics in one. Recently, audio has surfaced of a meeting between a representative of the Obama White House and the National Endowment for the Arts or NEA for short. In that meeting, the White House pushed for the NEA to do projects in support of the various causes the administration has been working on, such as health care and environmentalism. Since the NEA is funded with our tax dollars, this is almost as egregious as ACORN getting tax money to help prostitutes evade paying taxes and bring in child sex slaves. Meanwhile, everyone who disagrees with the administration has been getting slapped with the ye ole "racist!!!!!!" label, although the Obama Administration continues to disavow those who put that out there. Obama has played that card before though, so one is left to wonder if they're just looking for plausible deniability...

For those who have not heard, during President Obama's address to Congress this week, at one point Republican Joe Wilson shouted out "You lie!" in response to the President's assertion that illegal immigrants would not be covered under his health care plan. He quickly apologized after the address, and the President accepted that apology. In response, the pundits and the progressive bloggers have demonstrated all kinds of outrage at the breach of decorum. Not only that, they claim the outburst was motivated by some kind of latent racism in Wilson. On CNN, I watched as a host and his guest bantered back and forth the idea that if Obama had looked more like his mother, Wilson would never have had the temerity to speak out like that. Thanks to a conversation with a friend of mine, I have come to the conclusion that these people simply do not know what a racist breaking decorum looks like. I, fortunately, have an image for them. It looks like this: ... That is a depiction ...

President Obama said: Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick. It seems that the President does not understand what insurance is. Insurance is, at its core, essentially gambling. The insured gamble that they will need more money at some point than they will have given the insurance company. The insurers gamble that the insured will never need the money back. It is no different than going to a casino in Vegas and playing every month, hoping to eventually hit the jackpot. The casinos naturally attempt to minimize their losses ...

Medical treatment has had a long history of evolution, and for quite a bit of it, going to a doctor was often worse than simply dying. With little to no understanding of how the body worked or the microscopic organisms that could poison it, doctors often relied on religion and superstition to discern treatment. Consider the Dark Ages, wherein disease was considered caused by evil spirits. The Cure? Prayer. Blood-letting. Drilling holes in the skull to let the demon out. That kind of thought persisted well into the 19th century. Even by the American Civil War, doctors were still often little more than butchers and charlatans. A soldier who took a bullet in a limb could reasonably expect to have his limb hacked off with a dull blade that just came out of the leg of someone with gangrene and no anesthesia to speak of. The lucky ones got a sip of tequila or some other hard liquor. Many so-called doctors even traveled the country prescribing a variety of chemicals for ailments that ranged ...

The Godzilla Award was founded in honor of my cousin from Japan, who unfortunately took his own life in 1998 after he was tricked into starring alongside Matthew Broderick in one of the worst American films ever made. One of Godzilla's most famous traits was his ability to do massive damage with just the power of his breath, and so we dinosaurs have created an award that recognizes the biggest blowhards we can find. With all of the Congress critters running around calling protestors angry mobs and nazis, it was a tough pick this week and a very close vote. But, in the end, one nomination stood above the rest. This week's winner is... Linda Douglass! Ms. Douglass wins for telling everyone not to believe their lying eyes. “Hi. I’m Linda Douglass. I’m the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, and one of my jobs is to keep track of all the disinformation that’s out there about health-insurance reform. And there are a lot of very deceiving headlines o...

Having been a big movie and television star, it comes as no shock to this giant lizard that movies and television shows often serve as fantastic metaphors for current events. In the classic movie, The Untouchables , Sean Connery's character Jim Malone catches a member of the Italian mob sneaking up on him with a knife in an assassination attempt. Malone, being a smart Irish beat cop, pulls a gun on him and remarks, "Isn't that just like a wop? Brings a knife to a gun fight. " Unfortunately for Malone, the knife is a setup and the assassin just a lure. He is tempted outside where one of Capone's men opens up on him with a tommy gun. This classic movie moment is the perfect metaphor for what has happened across the country for the last two weeks. President Obama and the Congress pulled out their knives to carve up the health care system, and the American people said, "wait just a minute there." They have showed up in droves to tell their local representati...

Tonight, this T-Rex was watching a classic movie on AMC as he often does. In that movie, Kevin Costner's character of John Dunbar became known by the Sioux Indians as "Dances With Wolves", thus giving the film its title. There are many things to be said of this film, be it the many Oscars it won or the stirring epic of a loaner on the prairie adapting and making friends with the local tribe, but rather than drone on about some of the more philosophical aspects of this movie that I have been dwelling on this evening, I thought it would be more interesting to create a contest of sorts instead. As "Cranky T-Rex", I essentially already have an Indian name, but what Indian names would some of our politicians have? Here are a few I thought of while I was watching Dances With Wolves: Barack Obama: "SpendsBigMoney" Joe Biden: "DropsWordsfromMouth" Nancy Pelosi: "EyesThatBlinkOften" John Kerry: "ThreePurpleHearts" Robert Gibbs: ...

It seems someone with an interesting sense of humor has been running around LA putting up these pictures, in a parody of the recent smash hit (yet highly overrated in this dino's opinion) The Dark Knight. Remember the days when it was "patriotic" to make fun of the President? Back when it was one's duty to talk about ChimpyMcBushHitler's quest to conquer the world for oil, carried out by drowning blacks in New Orleans and creating a massive conspiracy to execute 9/11? When Dick Cheney was Darth Vader? Apparently, that is no longer the case now that America is the land of Hype and Chains ...excuse me, I meant Hope and Change, as several news outlets such as LA Weekly and MSNBC have decided this crosses the line. Now, I could discuss how incredibly hypocritical it is, but Allahpundit and Ace do the job well enough. The issue I want to address is... ...with the poster itself. The problem with this poster is that it is entirely contradictory. Socialism is on the e...

"That's the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper." -Barack Obama Apparently, that does not include helping an old man down the steps of your house.

Look at this picture. Don't these three look relaxed? You'd never guess that one of them arrested one of them, one of them called the one doing the arresting a racist, and the other one called the arresting officer stupid and racist. Now, I could get into the stuff that people have gone over all day long about what this means in terms of race or how this is getting too much coverage etc., but my question is... ...where's the urgency? After all, President Obama has declared that health care must be passed immediately or Americans will die from lack of health care and other Americans will go bankrupt from the cost. The President has already gone so far as to say the time for debate was over. If that's the case, why does the President have time to sit around enjoying a beer with a couple of guys he doesn't know just because he needs to do a little ass-covering? His health care bill is imploding in both the House and the Senate as Democrats tear viscious chunks out of ...

Hope and change: two words that came to embody the campaign of Barack Obama. It was believed that Mr. Obama would bring hope to the needy and the downtrodden, and change to the marginalized, the poor, and the pained. Of course, at the time many of us wondered if the promise of these things was quite simply: too good to be true. Though we are only six months into his administration, it seems that our apprehensions were entirely too correct. Instead it appears that all of the talk about Obama being some sort of post-racial Messiah sent to save us from our own short-sightedness is merely an awful lot of hype. And the change promised by Obama? It weighs down the future of every man, woman, child, or business that ever believed they could become something more like a ball and chain clamped to their ankle. The Obama Administration speaks of restoring relations with the world, and yet they continue to bungle diplomatic events with wrongly-encoded DVDs and mistranslated buttons. Obama...