Drinking and Driving

Utah’s Legislature sent Gov. Gary Herbert a measure lowering the state’s legal threshold for drunken driving to a .05 percent blood-alcohol content Wednesday – a bill that will make Utah’s DUI threshold the lowest in the nation if Herbert signs it into law as expected.

I have mixed feelings about this. I don't see anything wrong with having a beer or a glass of wine with dinner and then driving home. The article points out that the vast majority of crashes with intoxicated drivers are when drivers have twice the current legal limit (.08 BAC). That kind of bears up with what I read in the papers when someone is arrested for DUI after a crash.

A .05 BAC level sounds to me to be more driven by moralization and modern prohibitionist tendencies than any desire to address the issue of drunks killing people on the roads.

Spawn of Bundy Hates the Federal Government. Unless They Can do Something For Him. Then That's Just Peachy.

A company that said Spawn of Bundy owns got a $530,000 loan from the Feds. So while he says that he hates Uncle Sam, he has no problem with taking Uncle Sam's gelt.

Meanwhile, the men he's supposed to be helping reported to prison on Monday. They are likely all too aware that any hopes of obtaining clemency evaporated when the Spawn and His Ilk occupied that building in a bird sanctuary.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. I've heard that the government expanded it by buying up failing ranches during the Great Depression. Whether or not those ranchers were happy to sell out, they did, and, given the tenor of the times, they likely got well above market value for their land.

By the way, if anybody has a claim for being dispossessed by the government from that land, it's the Paiute Indians.

Vanilla ISIS Needs a New Supply Officer

They forgot the Doritos and Red Bull.

Seems to me that cutting the power and phones should have been done within minutes, if not hours. Kill all of the cell towers in range, block the roads so they can't be plowed, and let those fuckers freeze and starve whilst being ignored.

And then prosecute them once they come down from the place.

Teatards' Hope for Revolution (and "Fuck You, Wordpress.")

BadTux posted an entry about the Wingnuts' hoping that things like the Bundy Ranch Bozos and the PA Cop-Killer will lead to a violent revolution and why they're so wrong about that.

I tried to leave a comment, but I couldn't. Seems that there is something going on with Wordpress that you can't leave comments unless you have a Wordpress blog. Or unless you give Wordpress the ability to access your Goggle+, Facebrecch or Twitter data. I have a Wordpress blog, but it's more of a placeholder for when Google's Blogger is cranky (or I get pissed off).

So, if you're read BadTux's entry, this is my comment to it:

What they're hoping for is a sort of revolutionary positive feedback loop, with a cycle of violence and repression that eventually leads to enough people being pissed off at the government to join them. They're thinking of either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War as role models.

Problem there, of course, was that in both wars of rebellion, it was the rich leading the way. It was many of the rich merchants who were losing money because of British tax and trade policies. It was the rich who owned plantations that were worth squat without slaves.

This time around, the 1% is on the side of government. Because they've pretty much bought it from top to bottom.

Wait for the Rats to Start Leaving SS Bundy

Clive Bundy used his media star power to blast out some incredibly racist shit:

I'm sure that there will be folks decrying how The Mooching Rancher is too unsophisticated to know that uttering racist bile in front of a rolling camera is a bad idea.

Bundy and his defenders are proving the truth of Dr. Samuel Johnson's saying that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel".

UPDATE: The longer video, which is supposedly not as racist. In a pig's eye.