Photographer: Kevin Herrera

Dateline: Santa Monica, CA

As of tomorrow, you can’t have your store merchandise given to you in a single-use plastic bag, and a paper one will cost you an extra dime . . .

They are making speed limits slower all over town and encouraging everyone to stop driving and move to bikes . . .

Restaurants have to send your leftovers home in paper boxes, even though they leak . . .

WE have an extra 1/4% sales tax, just because the city REALLY needs more of our money.

But . . .

It’s A-OK to show up on the 3rd Street Promenade in your Victoria’s Secret or Calvin Kleins in order to score some “free stuff”!

ANYTHING FOR FREE STUFF

Nearly naked shoppers rush into the Desigual boutique on the Third Street Promenade on Tuesday morning. About 150 people showed up in their underwear as part of a promotion. Those in undies were able to select two clothing items and take them home at no cost.

Gotta love the perv in the blue shirt with the camera . . .

From Bill Keller, Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890). Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.

But I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon (the text, not the Broadway musical) or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. It matters to me whether a president respects serious science and verifiable history — in short, belongs to what an official in a previous administration once scornfully described as “the reality-based community.” I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.

And I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed.

(Emphasis in the above is mine.)

Reminds me a lot of the type of rhetoric I heard as a kid when Jack Kennedy was the Democratic nominee. There were many in small-town Oklahoma who were worried that Kennedy’s “fealty” would be to the Pope and not to the constitution. Enlightened folks, like my parents, may have not liked his politics, but I never heard that crap spoken at my house. Now, it’s not the under-educated, but the over-educated elites among us that are terrified of someone with religious faith.

We sure have fallen deep down the rabbit hole . . .

Sarah Palin is making some big announcement in Iowa on Sept. 3rd, so I guess we’ll know pretty soon. Most commentators are calling this her first campaign commercial. If so, it’s a good one!

What can we say?

For a third night the city of London has been ravaged by rioting youths. Progressives attribute this to joblessness and the lessening of social services. I attribute it to thuggery!

We saw this happen out here in LA in the early 90s after the Rodney King verdict, when South Central erupted into chaos beginning with the severe, near fatal beating of Reginald Denny — who would have guessed it, but the man convicted of mayhem in the Denny beating (one of the “L.A. Four”) was arrested a few weeks ago on suspicion of murder.

I bring that to mind so as to say, it could happen here . . . again.

We saw near chaos conditions in Wisconsin over the Governor signing the bill ending collective bargaining by state workers, and now there are recall elections going on today as Progressives try to undue what the newly-GOP-controlled legislature has wrought in their efforts to bring fiscal sanity to their state government.

The civility of the Progressive movement and its members in Congress has also been on full display recently with the painting of the “Tea Party” folks as the “American Taliban”. Yes Virginia, those mostly white, middle to older aged protesters who gather in mass, make patriotic statements and promote fiscal responsibility, and then clean up after themselves before leaving are a force to be deathly afraid of — according to the main-stream media and Progressive commentators everywhere. Those nice, family-lovin’ SEIU members and New Black Panthers who shut down state government buildings with their protest and intimidate voters at the polls are folks to be revered and honored for standing up for the “little people”.

To fully understand what Progressives want for our country, just mosey over and read their proposed “Contract for the American Dream”, which is a total nightmare for anyone with any sense of fiscal responsibility. Regardless, good Lefties just can’t ever get enough of someone elses money, as witnessed by today’s Michael Hiltzik LA Times piece, “Political leaders unwilling to address economic fix: stimulus”:

A new economic stimulus package is needed to put people to work for state and local governments and on public initiatives that improve education, transportation and quality of life. Without it, Washington will be ignoring the lessons of the 1930s.
{…}
In short, although the private sector had not yet stepped up hiring and the Federal Reserve was tightening credit, the government stopped priming the fiscal pump and instead took water out of the bucket.

The result of the new austerity was the severe recession of 1937-38 — the double-dip sequel to the Great Depression. Congress and the Roosevelt White House responded with the most aggressive stimulus program of the New Deal period — stepped up public works construction and housing assistance, and a $3.75-billion relief program.

The new spending evoked shrieks of dismay from conservatives — Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia condemned the “present orgy of spending” and demanded a balanced budget and a ruthless purge of relief rolls. But it halted the recession in its tracks.

I thought that the position that Roosevelt’s spending was not what caused the end of the Great Depression, but for WW2 things would have remained pretty dour for a lot longer . . . might even have been the end of this great experiment. Hell of a way to clean up an economic mess, though — and not an option in this day and time of weapons of mass destruction.

Take another look at the photo above, and then think about the incidents at the Wisconsin State Fair over the weekend.

It’s obvious, for some out there among us, we’re only a gnat’s eyelash away from barbarism at any given moment in time. They don’t really need a reason . . . they just have to be in the mood.

This “we” forget to our peril . . .

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

We mourn the loss of 30 of our finest young men this past weekend, including 22 brave U.S. Navy Seals. May God be with them and their families.

ABC Channel 7 here in LA has a photo gallery of 20 of the fallen, with some personal information and recollections about each of them.