Blue Crab Boulevard

This is a first, I think. A man was robbed of his bag of tacos - at gunpoint.

FONTANA, Calif. - A hunger for carnitas nearly led to some carnage after a Fontana man was robbed of a bag of tacos at gunpoint. Police Sergeant Jeff Decker said the 35-year-old victim had just bought about $20 in tacos from a street-corner stand Sunday night and was bicycling home when the suspect confronted him and said "Give me your tacos."

The robber then took the bag, punched the man in the face and pointed a handgun at the man threatening to kill him. One shudders to think what he would have done for burritos. The criminal mastermind managed to turn a relatively low-level crime into a felony in one step. What a genius.

Ben Smith at The Politico writes:

A co-chairman of Hillary's Michigan campaign and  has a line that's sure to drive a whole bunch of red state governors up the wall:

"Superdelegates are not second-class delegates," says Joel Ferguson, who will be a superdelegate if Michigan is seated. "The real second-class delegates are the delegates that are picked in red-state caucuses that are never going to vote Democratic."

Now this should not come as a surprise given the Clinton campaigns already announced contempt for democracy. But there is so much of it being displayed so openly these days. What I'm having a hard time deciding is whether the Clinton camp is arrogant, stupid or both. Just read some of the comments on Smith's post - I'm guessing that most people are going with "all of the above."

I'm beginning to doubt Hillary Clinton is going to be able to pull out of the dive before the campaign augers in.

The UN has issued and urgent appeal for $25 million in emergency aid to Tajikistan. Why, you ask?

To save The Tajiks from the extremely cold winter conditions.

The UN has issued an appeal for donor aid to help the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan.

A severe energy crisis coupled with an unusually cold winter is affecting the lives of millions of people.

The UN says it needs $25m (£13m) to help Tajikistan deal with the worst energy crisis it has ever experienced.

Much of the country has been left without heat and electricity, and the main hydropower stations do not have enough water to run their turbines.

In many places the temperatures are well below zero, and frozen pipes have left people without drinking water.

As people spend more on fuel and wood to keep warm, they have less money left to feed themselves with.

There are severe food shortages and the UN says additional fuel and food supplies are key. 

Complicating matters, however, is the fact that even if food and relief supplies arrive, there is no way to reach the hardest hit areas due to the heavy snow. The BBC reports that Tajikistan has experienced the worst snowfalls ever recorded. With the hydroelectric stations frozen, there simply is no way to get enough food and energy into the country.

Canadians are waiting from six to twelve months to get an MRI in Saskatchewan, so a local Indian tribe wants to open a clinic with an MRI machine. This will give a much needed boost to local medical access and provide high-paying technical jobs to tribal members. Obviously a win-win, right? Not for the dedicated Canadian statists, it isn't. They want the state to have exclusive control of the health care monopoly at all costs - even if it costs people's lives.

This week, the Kawacatoose First Nation, which has an urban reserve on Regina's eastern outskirts, announced it wanted to build a health centre there with its own money. Among other things, the band wants to buy a state-of-the-art MRI machine and perform diagnostic tests on Saskatchewanians — aboriginal and non-aboriginal– who currently face some of the longest waits for scans in the country.

This should be a win-win: Aboriginals show entrepreneurial initiative, without any financial obligation on the part of the federal or provincial government, and create well-paying high-tech jobs for natives who desperately need them, while at the same time easing the wait for MRI tests in Saskatchewan that can now run to six or even 12 months.

Each year, hundreds or even thousands of Saskatchewan residents — mostly middle-class — drive across the border into North Dakota and pay their own money for scans rather than wait for one at home. The Kawacatoose proposal would give them a much closer alternative.

So what was the reaction of the opposition NDP in Saskatchewan? Restrained contempt and veiled fear-mongering.

The restraint was a result only of the fact that this proposal was coming from aboriginals. Had a private, non-native company suggested the same thing, Saskatchewan's opposition socialists would have been screaming from the rooftops that greedy insurance companies and health profiteers are lurking under every hospital bed ready to prey on unsuspecting patients the moment they get the green light.

Still, despite their untypical decorum, it was easy to see the NDP's disdain.

Health critic Judy Junor said such private facilities threaten the public system, even if they do not offer fee-for-service scans, because they poach staff from public hospitals. "You can buy the machine," she sniffed, "that's the easy part. It's who's going to work it on a day-to-day basis."

There is a shortage of doctors, nurses, hospital beds and diagnostic equipment. All in the name of preserving the system. Canadians endure severe rationing of health care in order for the system to stay in place. And this is where  the American left want health care to go in this country.

The state above all. Still think socialized medicine is a great idea? 

The New Hampshire Union-Leader has an editorial praising George Washington on this "President's Day, the replacement for what were once two holidays, Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday.

TODAY is generally known as Presidents Day, but its official name is George Washington's Birthday. And for good reason.

Without George Washington, there might never have been a United States of America. Washington shaped his world more profoundly than any other man of his time. Not bad for a hot-tempered adventurer with little formal schooling.

Washington was 6-foot-3 and so strong a cousin said he could throw a stone clear across the Rappahannock River (not a coin across the Potomac, as legend later had it). He was a professional surveyor by age 17. By age 21, he was a major in the Virginia militia, trusted enough that the governor sent him to order the French out of the Ohio River Valley.

On his second trip to assert England's claim on the territory, he accidentally started the French and Indian War. Really. He wrote a friend after the skirmish that ended in his surrender, "I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound."

In a later battle, Washington, though only a volunteer aide, took command as Gen. Braddock's army was being routed, and rode before the men in a courageous attempt to rally them. He had two horses shot out from under him and four bullets shot through his coat. He liked it so much, it became a trademark behavior. During the Revolutionary War, when most commanders watched the battle from safely behind their forces, Washington routinely rode the line, shouting orders, encouraging his men, and defying death and the enemy.

It is a pretty decent thumbnail biography. Here's the text of Washington's farewell address, delivered when he left office as President.

It is also fitting to remember Abraham Lincoln today. Here's the Wikipedia biography on Lincoln. 

New York City jail inmates are being forced to eat unsweetened muffins, are deprived of butter and are only allowed to drink skim milk. This, says the city Department of Corrections, is for the inmates own good.

The overhauled menu at the city's jails includes no sweets, no butter and only skim milk. The Department of Corrections wants healthy alternatives to traditional jailhouse grub.

A breakfast might include fresh fruit, whole wheat bread and wheat flakes. A sample dinner: pepper steak, rice and steamed carrots.

"These people are in our custody, and they don't get to make their own choices," said Department of Correction Commissioner Martin Horn. "We have a moral obligation to make sound choices for them."

That means unsweetened muffins, which are expected to replace the wickedly sweet ones for the roughly 14,000 inmates in the jail system.

"We have no choice but to eat what they give us. It's bland — so I guess that's healthy," said Christopher Alberici, a 40-year-old inmate. 

If all of this sounds depressingly familiar, that's because it is. The same thing is happening in Carmel, New York with the inmates clients at senior citizen centers. Also on the streets of New York City itself. Heck, it's even happening in the House of Representatives itself. The increasingly authoritarian nanny mentality of the left which declares that government stay out of people's bedrooms demands access to people's refrigerator. They will make your food choices for you, thank you very much.

Taking the jail situation to the logical conclusion, soon they will be limiting jail food to whole grain bread and spring water. And how long will it be before the mandates extend to the rest of the inmates citizens of New York City?

(I'm not particularly worried about what jail inmates are being fed, incidentally. I am more concerned about the mentality that is driving this sort of thing.) 

The rallying cry for the Democrats appears to have changed. This time they aren't saying their proposal is "for the children." This time it is all about making deep-pocketed trial lawyers happy. Robert Novak reveals the details of the reasons behind Nancy Pelosi's refusal to take up the FISA bill: Money.

A closed-door caucus of House Democrats last Wednesday took a risky political course. By four to one, they instructed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call President Bush's bluff on extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to continue eavesdropping on suspected foreign terrorists. Rather than passing the bill with a minority of the House's Democratic majority, Pelosi obeyed her caucus and left town for a 12-day recess without renewing the government's eroding intelligence capability.

Pelosi could have exercised leadership prerogatives and called up the FISA bill to pass with unanimous Republican support. Instead, she refused to bring to the floor the bill approved overwhelmingly by the Senate. House Democratic opposition included left-wing members typified by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, but they are but a small faction. The true cause for blocking the bill was the Senate-passed retroactive immunity from lawsuits for private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation's torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity.

The recess by House Democrats amounts to a judgment that losing the generous support of trial lawyers, the Democratic Party's most important financial base, is more dangerous than losing the anti-terrorist issue to Republicans. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against the phone companies for giving personal information to intelligence agencies without a warrant. Adm. Mike McConnell, the nonpartisan director of national intelligence, says delay in congressional action deters cooperation in detecting terrorism.

Big money is involved. Amanda Carpenter, a Townhall.com columnist, has prepared a spreadsheet showing that 66 trial lawyers representing plaintiffs in the telecommunications suits have contributed $1.5 million to Democratic senators and causes. Of the 29 Democratic senators who voted against the FISA bill last Tuesday, 24 took money from the trial lawyers (as did two absent senators, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). Eric A. Isaacson of San Diego, one of the telecommunications plaintiff's lawyers, contributed to the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Sen. Chris Dodd, who led the Senate fight against the bill containing immunity.

Carpenter's article about the money involved is here.