you look kind of canadian, boy.

Our closest border with Canuckistan is about an hour north of us (the Derby Line/Stanstead I-91 crossing), and the second-closest one is two hours away in Vermont.
Imagine my mild surprise when, on the way back from town with the kids, I ended up in a U.S. Border patrol checkpoint right on I-89 outside Lebanon, NH, [...]

of unintended consequences.

One of the side effects of Senator Kennedy’s death has been the metaphorical pee-pee dance in which the Massachusetts House Democrats have engaged.  With Kennedy’s Senate seat unfilled, they’re looking to pass a law that lets the governor pick an interim replacement for the job, so MA won’t have just half its Senate votes in [...]

spending what you don’t have.

So the budget deficit is going to hit 1.7 trillion dollars this year.  Mind you, that’s just the gap between government expenses and government revenue for the current tax year, not the national debt.
It’s kind of difficult for most people to envision just how much money we’re talking about here, so I’ve done a few [...]

a vote for gun control is a vote for thunderdome.

Every martial art that involves direct unarmed hand-to-hand fighting has weight classes.  This is done because a bantamweight boxer will get his clock cleaned by a heavyweight ninety-nine out of a hundred times.  Sending a 115-pound fighter up against a 220-pound fighter is simply not an even contest, because the heavyweight can deal (and absorb) [...]

a higher standard of conduct.

So this California police officer pulled over a female motorist for speeding, and then decided it would be a good idea to force her to perform oral sex on him under threat of lethal force.
Now, I’m lukewarm on capital punishment as it is applied and implemented in this country, because it’s unevenly and arbitrarily doled [...]

forcing you to do what’s good for you.

Interesting factoid, and a short object lesson on government-mandated common sense:
Massachusetts has a mandatory seatbelt use law.
Massachusetts has a 67% seatbelt use rate.
New Hampshire has no mandatory seat belt law for adults.
New Hampshire has a 69% seatbelt use rate.
(Details here.  If you read the Comments section of that article, I will not be held responsible [...]

asset forfeiture abuses, episode 52,966.

Asset forfeiture laws are greatly flawed in many respects.  Their fatal flaw, however, is that they give the seizing agency a financial incentive to perform as many seizures as possible.
That’s how you end up with two-stoplight towns in East Texas systematically pulling people over for minor infractions like doing 37 in a 35MPH zone, and [...]

reason #2836 why i love new hampshire.

So the government of Taxachusetts is miffed because the subjects of the Volksrepublik go shopping in our state, where there’s no sales tax.  One of their targets is a tire chain called Town Fair Tire, which has a few shops in southern NH, and a lot of shops in MA.  The state of MA ordered [...]

a purveyor of fine bull.

Bernie Madoff had much of his stuff seized by the Feds recently, including his 55-foot custom yacht “Bull”, a smaller 24-foot boat called “Little Bull”, and his multimillion-dollar Palm Beach property.
“There were bulls everywhere,” [a deputy U.S. Marshal] said. “Large statues of bulls, small statues of bulls, bull bookends.”

Kind of funny that the guy running [...]

won’t you save the queer-hating dodo?

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”  –Friedrich Nietzsche
Yesterday, on the way back from the dentist with the kids, I heard a commercial on the radio that annoyed me greatly.
Apparently, Vermont has a same-sex marriage bill floating around in Montpelier, and the commercial was in opposition [...]