Halloween 2008

Watch your kids, Parents. Don't let them wander around without you being there, or a responsible adult nearby and alert. It gets dark pretty early on October 31. No matter how powerful the headlights on a car or truck, kids in costumes can be hard, if not impossible, to see. Can you think of anything more sad than having a child injured or even killed while 'Trick or Treating'?

Watch your kids! If you're out there and see kids without supervision, you watch them, too! Yes, it is, too, your responsibility as a member of the community, as an adult, as a fellow American. Do it! This is supposed to be a fun evening for the kids. Make sure it stays that way!

Just to drive home the point, my friends, here's a repost of a short story I posted in October of 2006. It makes the point even if a fictional event. Happy Halloween!

"The Dark Road"
by benning (10/03)

Leaves skitter along the road in the chill autumn breeze. The road is a dark and quiet place.

The boy is eight years old. Dressed in a brand-new Batman costume, the cape a swirling dull sheen in the twilight, he skips along the dark road. He carries an empty sack in his hand. Halloween is just beginning. The mask he wears limits his vision, and he watches the roadway a few feet ahead to avoid holes and roadkill. He doesn't want to ruin his new costume.

He can hear his breath echoing in his ears and thinks of Darth Vader.

"Luke, I am your father," he intones in his best grown-up voice. He giggles and tries it again.

Light streams around him from behind, his shadow suddenly appearing ahead of his skipping form.

"I'm the Batman," he whispers.

Too late, he realizes something is different. The road ahead is filled with light and the elongated shadow of Batman.

He stops. A horn blares close behind. He turns, his eyes widening in shock, then fear.

He has no time to even scream before the huge truck strikes him.

The red taillights fade into the distance; leaves skitter along the road in the chill autumn breeze. The road is a dark and quiet place.

* * * * *

Howard and June pulled off the road and stared into the dark night. They sat in the car, silent, as they had done each Halloween for the past ten years.

Howard glanced at his wife, saw the tears glistening on her cheeks in the dashboard light. He took her hand and gently squeezed it. She squeezed his in return, her eyes never straying from the dark road ahead.

"We should've been with him," she murmured.

Howard said nothing. They'd been over this before. Many times. Everything that could've been said had been.

"He shouldn't've been out here alone," she whispered.

Howard turned away, stared out the windshield. "He couldn't wait, June. We told him to wait for us. You know that." His voice was quiet, gentling.

"We should've been with him," she whispered again.

Howard watched the dark, windy road and sighed.

At last, June sniffled, patted his hand, and scrabbled through her purse for her hanky. It was her signal that it was time to go. Over until the next Halloween.

Howard started the car, glanced in the mirrors, and pulled out. The headlights illuminated the road, and the swirling leaves ahead. He drove slowly and carefully.

* * * * *

The red taillights fade into the distance; leaves skitter along the road in the chill autumn breeze. The road is a dark and quiet place.

The boy is eight years old. Dressed in a brand-new Batman costume, the cape a swirling dull sheen in the twilight, he skips along the dark road. He carries an empty sack in his hand. Halloween is just beginning. The mask he wears limits his vision, and he watches the roadway a few feet ahead to avoid holes and roadkill. He doesn't want to ruin his new costume.

2008: Phillies Are The Champs

So the World Series is over, the ballplayers can come in out of the rain and chilly winds, and we can move on to Football and Ice Hockey.

The Philadelphia Phillies are the Champions of Baseball, once more. They last won the Series in 1980. So the 80 - 08 signs were very nice and poetic. A fairly young team, with a very old manager, the Phillies did everything they had to do to get to the world championship and win it. Reaching the National League Championship the experts made a point of telling us they couldn't win in Los Angeles against the Dodgers because the Phils hadn't won a single game there all season. So the Phillies went to L.A and won two out of three to take the pennant. Coming into the World Series, the Phillies were proclaimed underdogs and ignored the naysayers to win it all.

Ben Walker reports:

The Philadelphia Phillies have won the World Series, capturing the decisive fifth game 4-3 over Tampa Bay in a clinching game that took two days to complete following Monday night's rain delay.

Pedro Feliz drove in the winning run for the Phils in the bottom of the seventh inning. Phillies relievers J.C. Romero and closer Brad Lidge pitched scoreless ball from there.

When Lidge struck out Eric Hinske in the ninth to end it, the Phillies began celebrating their second World Series title in team history, and first since 1980. Lidge successfully closed all 41 save opportunities in the regular season and all seven such tries in the postseason, including two in the World Series.

Well done, Philadelphia Phillies!

I grew up in the suburbs to the northeast of Philadelphia. I remember listening to the games on the radio and hearing about Johnny Callison in the field and Jim Bunning on the mound, was confused by the collapse of the '64 Phils under manager Gene Mauch, shook my head at the insane antics of Richie Allen. And suffered through losing season after losing season.

By the time the Phillies had become steady contenders I was living in Southern California - the home of the hated Dodgers! I had to experience the rise of the Phillies at a distance. The 1980 march to the World Series was magical, but scary, too. The Phillies had been cursed with collapses for decades - The Whiz Kids of the 1950s are legendary! - and every game lost seemed to hint at another collapse. The power of Mike Schmidt, the on-field excitement of Pete Rose, the pitching wizardry of Steve Carlton was exciting and wonderful! We had our hopes. And we had our fears. Oh, please, not another collapse. Please?



But the Phils won! And they remained contenders for a few more years culminating in a World Series in 1983. But Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles destroyed the Philadelphia hopes that year with his two, game-five home runs to beat the Phils. Phillies fans turned into a Philadelphia version of Cubs fans: "We'll get 'em next year!"

Yeesh!

It took a decade for the Phillies to return to the Series. But 1993 was not to be the second winning World Series for them. Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit a 3-run homer in the ninth inning of Game 6 to turn the Phillies into World Series losers.

But this year - 2008! - was the year. World Series Champions again! A tough team to love, those damned Phillies. But how can you not?

Whoo-Hoo!

Handling Capitalists Ayers-style

Here's what it boils down to. Obama is a Socialist. He has good friends who have helped him up the political ladder from the start. They are also Socialists. Some are terrorists. Obama can claim otherwise, but this supposedly terribly smart man cannot realistically claim he doesn't know what these creepy beasts think and espouse. Terror is their tool and the American populace was the target.

From Pajamas Media writer Bob Owens:

When Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn led the domestic terrorist group Weather Underground in 1969, a chance meeting led Army veteran Larry Grathwohl into joining the group. Grathwohl served as a courier, running messages between the group’s leadership (called the “Weather Bureau”) and individual cells that were to carry out attacks.

Grathwohl was also an informant for the FBI.

In an interview from the 1982 documentary No Place To Hide that recently surfaced, Grathwohl discussed what the Weathermen intended to do after overthrowing the U.S. government, including what they would do with those Americans who refused to embrace communism.

I asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.

And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”

Twenty-five million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

And they were dead serious.

"This isn't the William Ayers I knew." That's the explanation of Barack Obama. In fact it's how he deals with every revelation regarding his criminal associates once their words and deeds come to public light.

Me, I take them at thier words. They cannot be trusted with the lives and fortunes of Americans. And their Sock Puppet, Obama, cannot be trusted either.

Re-education camps and mass executions, America? Anyone?

Also, check out Negative Liberties and Obama Newspeak:

This is the newness of Obama in our history. Leftists like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter lived real lives. Both served in the military. Both seemed to have been genuinely religious. Both worked in private business. Both came from states that were conservative, and so they had to defend their political philosophies. Barack Obama, by contrast, has lived a life of utter sameness. There are no bumps or rough edges or hints of individuality at all.


It is not just his life, so marinated in rote theory, that makes Obama unique. He is an early prototype of a new creature in our lives: Orwell's children, if you will. These are the people who can honestly believe that September 11th was an "inside job" or that the CIA invented crack cocaine to hurt blacks. This is the generation which has grown up with no intellectual or cultural system of checks and balances.

The Great 2008 Depression! *snicker*

Just how wrong can our Mainstream Media be? In fact just how wrong can so many of our political representatives be? Pretty damn wrong! Oh, anybody with a lick of sense and a modicum of reading skill knows that the meltdown of the Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae institutions were brought aobut by the looting of them by such luminaries of the Left as Barney Frank (D - Pimp Basement) and the Messiah-self-Elect Barack Obama (D - Heaven Itself). Leftists in office have been stealing the taxpayers' money for Eons with little to show the American people other than their palatial Estates and condescending attitudes toward those who pay the bills for them. Whatever the economic problems the country faces, you can be sure that it's been the political Left that has orchestrated it, benefited from it, and pointed the finger of blame on anybody but themselves.

So, too, can any reasonable American recognize the stupidity, cupidity, and utter cluelessness of the MSM in its 'coverage' of the financial turmoil birthed by the American Left. These self-appointed Smart People haven't the foggiest clue about economics or economic theory, nor a single useful idea on how a thriving economy works. As willing handmaidens of the Left, and 'informational' Storm Troopers for The One (D - Sherwood Estates, Nottingham), the American media has ignored fact in favor of fairy tale (Barney Frank, D - Pimp Daddy) and lied to the American taxpayer whose economic well-being is being destroyed by the lies and machinations of the Socialists.

Tough times for American workers? Yeah, some. But not as bad as the MSM and the Leftists have been whining about. The Leftists like Chuckie Schumer (D - Clueless in NY) who can blithely destroy a bank with his ignorant, poorly-timed, public complaints, and still not accept that he may have, just possibly, perhaps, maybe, kinda been a straw that broke the camel's back, are at the root of any economic problems we face. They destroy because they aren't smart enough to know what they're talking about. Thier economic ignorance is second to nobody else's.

I don't know about you, but everytime I see that idiotic Obama ad that intones about rising gas prices, I have to laugh! The gas prices have dropped. Big time! Where they scratched $4/gallon, not long ago, they have now plummeted to $2.48/gallon. Has the MSM bothered to trumpet that news? They sure blamed Bush and Company every time gas prices rose! Where's Bush's credit for lowering the gas prices? Right! You can't give him credit because he didn't lower the prices. Guess what, lying Media and Leftists (but I repeat myself), Bush didn't make the prices rise, either. But policies of the elected Leftists did! Socialists calling themselves Democrats caused the problem. And, certainl;y, Republicans helped them.

So, we're in a Recession, right? The MSM says we are, and we all know what economic experts they are, right?

Pffft!

Randall Hoven, in his article in the American Thinker, says,

The message blasted at us day after day by the Obama campaign and its public relations machine, otherwise known as mainstream media, is that we are in a recession, we have been for essentially the last eight years, and the US is unique in this because of the failed policies of George W. Bush.

We are not in recession. The economy of the last eight years has been fine. And we are doing better than our European know-it-alls who favor an Obama victory. At least that's what the most recent economic data show.
A standard definition of recession is two consecutive quarters of negative real growth. However, the last two quarters of data, January through June, were both positive and in fact the most recent quarter was fairly strong at +2.8%. The preliminary estimate of GDP for the third quarter (July through September) is scheduled to come out this Thursday, October 30. So far, we have had zero consecutive quarters of negative growth. If Thursday's number indicates negative growth, that will still be only one quarter in a row.

Click on the link and read it! Plenty of facts and figures to make even the weakest-kneed of you sit up and take notice. We ain't in a Recession. We may be closing in on one, but we ain't there now. All the MSM and the Socialists are doing is pushing Americans to panic over nothing. By panicing they expect us to turn over the power of the entire government to the very lying, cheating scumbags who have caused so much misery already. Are you going to fall for it?

In a similar, related note, we find this interesting tidbit of news. While the government has been telling us just how hard things are, and how they need to spend billions to make the economy heal, we find the Chairman of the FCC spending $350,000 to sponsor a NASCAR driver. That's your money, folks! It ain't the government's money! The government doesn't have any money it hasn't taken by force from you! That's your $350,000 the FCC Chairman is spending. Why isn't he out the door, holding a box of his office belongings? Why hasn't the Bush Administration begun proceedings to fire this idiot?

Speaking of the sponsorship, Martin said, "I believe this sponsorship is an extremely effective way for the FCC to raise DTV awareness among people of all ages and income levels across the United States who loyally follow one of the most popular sports in America."

As if we haven’t been blanketed by TV Ads about this? As if the US government hasn’t spent millions or billions on this already? Yeah, we need to sponsor a NASCAR driver to make sure the ‘hicks’ who watch NASCAR know all about the DTV switch. Riiiight! Wanna bet the ‘hicks’ are ahead of the curve on this? I have my little, black decoder box. Betcha it won’t be NASCAR fans who start screaming in outrage and confusion once the analog signals disappear. Any takers?

Just wondering. And how is your October going?

Related information: Dow jumps nearly 900 as investors seek bargains

AP tells us, again, that this is the worst financial crisis in 70 years. Clueless at the AP: Fed is expected to cut interest rates again today

Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened