Just a couple days into the 3rd Annual “Help Me Get to CPAC” Begathon and we are already nearing 4% of our goal of $800. And that was from one donation. From an Obama voter.

Yeah.

I know you enjoy reading the blog, and I know times are tight right now. I’m not asking you to empty your bank account to pay for a hotel room in DC. I’m simply asking you to buy me a coffee.

You’d buy one of your favorite blogger’s a coffee if we were at McDonald’s, right? A coffee at McDonald’s runs a buck. That’s all.

If you can afford to buy me a coffee, hit the donate button below and donate. I promise to put it to good use getting interviews like the one below with Richard Dreyfuss. Yes, that Richard Dreyfuss:

No, he was not drunk. He just was there.

Please consider donating:

Manning the X-ray can be tedious, but you get used to seeing the usual things. You would think that a .38 would be something that screamed, “I’m different!”

Not to one TSA officer, who spotted the gun AFTER it had passed them by and entered the “frosting free zone.”

And by “frosting free zone,” I mean on the plane and away from the terminal:

A plane left the gate at DFW Airport with a gun on board before transportation officials alerted the pilot about the problem, FOX 4 has learned.

Airport spokesman David Magana said a 65-year-old woman from Little Elm, Texas had a gun in her carry-on bag that got through the security checkpoint .

By the time the woman took her bag and walked away, a TSA agent scanning the D-30 checkpoint noticed the .38-caliber handgun.

That’s spin. The woman couldn’t grab her bag and leave until after the bag had been scanned. The gun should have been noticed before it left the x-ray. It should have been controlled and the woman should have never gotten near it.

This was a complete failure of the system.

Perhaps the TSA was too busy looking for cupcakes to actually spot a GUN!

But at least the TSA officer is a union man now, and will most likely get reassigned to wanding people down, instead of the unemployment line.

A discount store in New York had six toy guns in stock, complete with the giant brick of safety orange on the end of the barrel.

The state still said they were too realistic and fined the store $5,000 for each gun, saying they were “illegal and dangerous.”

Yeah, dangerous:

City regulations bar the sale of realistic toy weapons.

…

A spokeswoman for the city’s Consumer Affairs department said the fine was appealed, but upheld.

“Realistic-looking imitation guns are illegal and dangerous, and just last week, a 15-year-old in Texas was killed while holding one of these guns,” she said.

If a kid in Texas was killed while holding one of those guns, wouldn’t what killed him be dangerous? I mean, if a police officer is looking at a 15 year old kid holding a plastic gun with an orange brick on the end and still squeezes off a couple of rounds, I would think the danger there is a trigger happy cop.

However, that’s not what happened. The 15-year-old in Texas wasn’t holding a toy gun. He was holding a pellet gun…outside the middle school office…and he pointed it at the police:

Take a look at the gun in that video. You can see why police would think that was real. It’s not a toy.

Bureaucrats like the ignorant woman above don’t care about a business going under, as long as it’s for the kids. And facts? Facts don’t matter. Rules and regulations matter.

Now pay your fine, citizen, and move along.

Given the opportunity to approve an oil pipeline from the Canadian oil fields to your gas tank, President Obama has decided to go ahead and pass on the deal.

And blame someone else for it:

Though the project promises thousands of temporary jobs for the recovering U.S. economy, Obama said a February deadline set by Congress would not allow for a proper review of potential harm from the $7 billion Keystone XL project.

“As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment,” Obama said.

That’s brilliant.

After destroying offshore drilling in the Gulf, now Obama is keeping oil from a friend because the Eco-Marxists might not donate as much to his campaign, and let’s be honest, that’s really what this is about.

The Canucks have already said they will reapply, but if you think this was anything but a conclusion based on politics, read this:

The State Department’s main objection – the route through the Sand Hills and over the Ogallala Aquifer – has been addressed. TransCanada agreed to move the pipeline and had the wholehearted backing of the Nebraska legislature and the state’s governor the most it agreed to do so.

The pipeline had the support of state governments along the rest of its route through the U.S. After the next election, if President Barack Obama is re-elected, he would have far less to fear from project opponents. And if a Republican is elected, Keystone XL surely would have been approved. Now, the big question is how long the new permit application process will take.

The Republicans set themselves up to take the blame with their 60 deadline, but ultimately it was Obama who said no. And he said it to appease the environmentalists in his base, not because the State Department was worried about not getting all the facts.

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on Speaker Newt Gingrich today, focusing on his days as a college professor. It’s interesting and I suppose says something about the man, but here’s what I took away from it:

That’s apparently Newt Gingrich, before he was famous.

I looked at that and saw Dwight Schrute from The Office. Think I’m wrong?

Maybe it’s me, but if he wasn’t running for president, I’d bet he would be farming beets near Scranton.

Reddit, Wikipedia and some other sites are blacked out today in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

Don’t know what that is? It’s bad legislation, plain and simple. And you need to help stop it.

Learn about it here:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued new regulation, without a vote from the American people or Congress, yet just as enforceable as a law, that creates a bureaucratic nightmare.

While the Clean Water Act (CWA) and its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit requirements have been in effect since 1972, Farm Futures magazine shows how these new regs could overburden the small farmer:

EPA, on October 31, 2011, promulgated what it called a Pesticide General Permit (PGP) under the CWA for governmental entities such as mosquito control or irrigation districts and left row crop farming alone.

EPA’s new PGP covers the following:

• mosquito and other flying insect pest control;
• weed and algae pest control on the water and the water’s edge
• animal pest control such as trying to kill fish, lampreys and mollusks; and
• forest canopy pest control where pesticides will necessarily have to be applied over and deposited into water.

So what?  You get a permit and you can spray, right?

Not so much:

What is important about the PGP is that it opens a window on the type of information EPA or environmental groups may attempt to obtain from tillage agriculture producers in the future.

For example, the entities that EPA will regulate will have to submit a pesticide discharge management plan. This plan includes the following elements under Section 5.1.  EPA require a  Pesticide Discharge Management Team, Problem Identification; Pest Management Options Evaluation; Response Procedures; Spill Response Procedures; Adverse Incident Procedures; and Documentation to Support Compliance with Other Federal Laws.

The pesticide discharge team must identify all the persons on that team, their contact information as well as each person’s responsibilities. This type of detail may be acceptable for a government agency supported by tax revenue, but it is unlikely most agricultural operations could support this bureaucratic framework.

Although it’s a lot of red tape, more than a small family farm might be able to handle, a large corporate farm would have no problem incorporating this into its already established infrastructure.

As Doug Ross says:

what’s the real motivation behind this regulatory nightmare? To make farming so difficult, so onerous, so bureaucratic, that small farms will simply give up and sell out to huge corporations; you know, the kind that have an incestuous relationship with Congress. With the state. It’s Crony Capitalism 101, folks.

Exactly.  It’s the same reason farm subsidies are set up the way they are.  This new system is just a hiccup to a corporate farm, but it could be fatal to a family farm, which shows why a limited government is safer to the average American, regardless of vocation.  A limited government, constrained within the limits of the Constitution, would not have an EPA to dictate these regulations.

They would not be in bed with corporate farm lobbyists looting the American people and pushing family farms out of the business.

Smaller, limited governments promote freedom, not crony capitalism.