Over the past year and a half, the mongrel hordes have inched closer. I can hear their labored breathing now, just on the other side of the castle door. We have raised the Terror Alert to Red. We are on Defcon 5.

Three months ago, as far as I knew, Jackson Memorial hospital was chugging along, providing the health care safety net. Now suddenly, JMH is on life support. How does such a big institution tip over the edge and fall so far so fast? The same way a family business or a family or a person does.

People, I believe, are naturally optimistic, and we may refuse to see or recognize the train coming at us in the tunnel. Hubris blinds us… “It can’t happen to me.” But when it does happen to you, maybe you recognize that you are not so very special. You’re just one in 6 billion similar souls on a rock circling a star. You are not smarter, faster 0r stronger. You are not immune to disease, divorce, disappointment.

Or you just blame Government regulation, Jewish bankers, the Civil Rights Act and that bitch who cut you off on I-95.

But choices must be made. Time must be spent on critical tasks, even as the list grows smaller. The mongrel horde is awakening with renewed energy now; we must man the turrets, prepare boiling oil and bar the doors. The dike must be plugged. The hole must be filled. The bilge must be pumped, there’s a lot of work to be done to cleanup this mess. And that leaves no time for blogging. It ain’t because I don’t love you anymore. I just got to focus elsewhere for the foreseeable future. This is the sound of a blog falling off the “To Do” list. Ciao, Hasta la vista, Adios, Sayonara, Bye Bye!

Can you imagine if the Democratic Party buys all the pictures of Rothstein with Crist? Probably going to be a lot of “anonymous” bidders as the subjects in these photos buy back this crap to keep it out of public view… most of this will be burnt the day after it is delivered.

A timeline provided by the State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, showed that an initial check of the suspect based on his father’s information failed to disclose he had a multiple-entry U.S. visa. The reason was that AbdulMutallab’s name was misspelled.

“That search did not come back positive,” said one official, who called it a quick search without using multiple variants of spelling.

“Failed to connect the dots” or however you phrase it is just another way of saying “mentally lazy.” Somewhere, a real person with a real name entered some info on a super-secret CIA/NSA/DHS computer and got a blank. When you are actually trying to protect the country, it’s probably a good idea to run a few alternative spellings. This is not like lifting boxes or digging trenches. It really does not cost the individual security analyst much in time or effort to run a few searches instead of one. Sorry, can’t run any more searches, gotta go pick up my dry cleaning!

The consequences of not running those few other searches, the consequences of mental laziness, is a madman on a plane with explosives sewn in his underwear. The job of those protecting our whole entire country is not to simply act like the McDonalds order-taker. We expect these folks to try alternatives. Hey boss, I couldn’t find anything spelled exactly like this, but if you take out the space, this guy comes up. Think it’s him?

Advice to Marco: Watch out, when those guys get behind you, there’s no telling what they may do.

TAMPA – A radio station’s turkey-frying stunt turned into a recipe for disaster this morning when an attempt to cook the frozen bird in a van resulted in the vehicle catching fire.

Courtesy of the Tampa Tribune

PAHOKEE, Fla. — When Palm Beach County announced a few months ago that unemployment in this small farm town had reached “depression levels” of more than 30 percent, residents were not surprised. Pahokee these days produces two things: college football prospects and nostalgia for a time when work was plentiful.

Read the entire, somewhat depressing NYT article here.

Wall Street is reporting record profits in 2009 while everyone else in the country suffers. Wall Street is preparing huge bonuses in 2009 while everyone else in the country scrimps and saves. Americans are angry. The stimulus money was not spread around evenly and the suffering, it seems, has not been spread equally either. That’s why Americans are so angry at Wall Street. Main Street suffers, Main Street pays and Wall Street profits.

Main Street America is a resilient bunch. They make cars, unclog drains, generate electricity, build houses, print stuff, sell stuff, move stuff, clean stuff and repair stuff. Wall Street bankers claim they are indispensable grease in the wheels of commerce. Until there are no more stories about small business unable to get loans, until %30 percent down is history, until putting up your own home as collateral is history, the Wall Street bankers ain’t doing their jobs.