I went out to the patio this morning and my bearded iris opened its first beautiful spring flower. The bulbs went into the pots in January and now the results are coming out. Please click on the image below to view this very beautiful flower.

With the passage of the Porkulus and Omnibus, a provision to levy a new tax on tobacco products will soon go into effect. Folks out there will be paying almost double for a pack of cigarettes.

Now, during the campaign, Obama made sure to tell low-income voters that they would benefit from the taxes he would enact on the ‘rich.’ What he failed to tell the smokers among those low-income folks, was that they would be paying ’sin taxes.’

I hope all you smokers out there that voted for this disaster of a president enjoy paying your eighty dollars a carton.

Obama? He don’t care - he can afford the tax on his butts.

Planet Gore posted this picture of Times Square in New York City showing the effect of ‘Earth Hour.’ The top panel is Times Square before Earth Hour. The bottom panel is Times Square during Earth Hour. Damsel and I notice that only a couple displays are off. (Snark!) This is virtually, a fart in a windstorm.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We are fastidious recyclers, composters and rarely run more lights in the house than are barely needed. However, we’re also extremely skeptical of the motivations of the Greenbat crowd when they insist man-made energy consumption to be the cause global warming. They only need to look skyward at high noon to see the ‘Glow Ball‘ responsible for climate warming (and cooling).

As for our household, we celebrated ‘Earth Hour’ by watching ‘Cops’ and ‘America’s Most Wanted’ on the 42-inch plasma HiDef big screen with the full-on surround sound and each using a laptop to look at John Walsh’s AMW.com website.

UPDATE: More Sour Hour: Al Gore Mansion snubs Earth Hour.

This nice white daisy looked just so perfect and symmetrical that I wanted to post it on the blog today. Click image to enlarge.

Finally! My poppies were late coming out this year, but they’re finally coming out just in time for California Poppy Day on April 6th next week.

I took this picture of one of the poppies out back this morning. Click on the image to enlarge.

Some information on the California poppy from WikiPedia:

The California poppy is the California state flower. It was selected as the state flower by the California State Floral Society in December 1890, winning out over the Mariposa lily (genus Calochortus) and the Matilija poppy (Romneya coulteri) by a landslide, but the state legislature did not make the selection official until 1903. Its golden blooms were deemed a fitting symbol for the Golden State. April 6 of each year is designated “California Poppy Day.”

California poppy leaves were used medicinally by Native Americans, and the pollen was used cosmetically. The seeds are used in cooking.

The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve is located in northern Los Angeles County, California. At the peak of the blooming season, orange petals seem to cover all 1,745 acres (7 km²) of the reserve.

Jonah Goldberg, author of “Liberal Fascism” and regular author at NRO’s “The Corner,” responds to an earlier post on the topic of paranoia at both extremes of the political spectrum:

Re: Paranoia for Thee But Not For Me

Man, a lot of liberal readers didn’t like my earlier post about liberalism and the paranoid style. Most aren’t being jerks about it, but they simply have a really hard time coming to grips with the fact that the paranoid style isn’t necessarily a right-wing phenomenon. Among the complaints: They nitpick my examples, as if I was trying to be exhaustive. They say Republicans have conspiracy theorists as public officials while my examples of liberals are simply activists and celebrities. They say that conservative conspiracy-nuts are embraced by Republican officials, but no Democrat embraces paranoid style types of the Left.

It’s all a bit exhausting. But here’s the problem. I conceded up front that conservatives can be conspiracy theorists and paranoid. So about 85% of this tu quoque stuff is gratuitous. The point wasn’t that the Right is immune to this stuff, it was that liberals are blind from similar — and often more prevalent — stuff on their own side. So they end up, like Packer, thumbsucking about the supposedly scary paranoia of the Right while ignoring the paranoia of their own side.

But if it’s examples you people want, I was barely scratching the surface. Cynthia McKinney? Does no one remember her? It’s worth noting that she recently said — as a matter of fact — that the National Guard rounded up blacks in New Orleans and massacred them in the woods. In fairness, she’s not in office anymore, but she wasn’t much less of a whackjob when she was in Congress. Meanwhile, Maxine Waters is still in Congress and she’s hardly immune to the paranoid style. If my interlocutors do not want to stipulate this point, I could have a grand time entering exhibits AAA through ZZZ to buttress the assertion. Michael Moore? He thought OJ was innocent and that George Bush was keeping Osama Bin Laden on ice for an October surprise or something. He sat in Jimmy Carter’s box at the 2004 Democratic Convention and was wildly embraced by the Democratic leadership when his Fahrenheit 9/11 movie came out. Jim Moran? I suppose his blame-the-Jews stuff would have been just as quickly forgiven from a Republican. Don’t even get me started on Walt and Meersheimer. Charles Rangel and Major Owens routinely said Newt Gingrich was “worse than Hitler” (Owens’s words) and that the Contract with America was part of a “genocidal” campaign.

Meanwhile, a huge swath of economic liberalism for decades has been dedicated to the idea that a coalition of cartoonish big businessmen — Mr. Monopoly, Mr. Peanut, Thurston Howell III, Col. Sanders and the rest of the Pentavirate, Joe the Camel — conspire to ruin the environment, poison food, and exploit the downtrodden. Then there’s the whole phrase “the vast right-wing conspiracy” which was not coined with a sense of playful irony. Al Gore’s “people vs. the powerful” spiel crossed the line more than once into populist nonsense, if you ask me. And are people really going to make me look up every nutcase theory about Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and the rest? I mean do I really have to keep going? Because I can. I mean we can rev-up the Way Back machine and start talking about what the Kennedy Assassination did to liberalism, for starters.

The point is that when liberals and leftists spout conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions — as they have for generations now — it’s written off by the liberal establishment as either an isolated incident, or an understandable exaggeration or, simply, the truth and therefore not a conspiracy theory. And: It Is Annoying.

My emphasis added. Goldberg is an excellent writer - and an excellent ‘talking head.’ I plan to get his book and read it one of these days. I think it might be entertaining.

Cobbled together from some of the range videos over the past weekend . . .

We always get midweek shooting withdrawals, and this helps.

For a couple of years now, these freesias have popped up in the spring to grace the flowerpots for a few days. This one is a ‘blue-mauve’ variety with a delicate, pleasant fragrance. Click image to enlarge.

I also have some red and pink ones elsewhere in the garden.

WikiPedia says this about freesias:

Freesias are very popular garden plants, grown for their often strongly scented flowers ranging from white to yellow, pink, red and blue-mauve. They are widely cultivated and readily increased from seed. Due to their specific and pleasing scent, they are often used in hand creams, shampoos, candles, etc.

When the International Conference on Climate Change met last month in New York, the purpose was not that of politicizing climate change, but rather to present the actual and relevant science on the topic. John Hinderaker at Power Line wrote about the ICCC event in his post today. “Dispelling the Global Warming Myth.”

I found these two graphics to be highly informative - both serve to show the normal oscillatory behavior of the climate cycle. The second chart demonstrates how divergent the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data is from reasonable scientific expectations.

The first chart shows the actual temperature oscillations since the last great ice age, which was just about over some 12,000 years ago:

The second chart shows the oscillations after recovering from the little ice age with observed data for the last 130 years and projections in both directions on the time axis. Note the little green arrow which is pointing to a red dot where we are today - significantly below the so-called trend predicted by IPCC’s alarmists.

We had another good outing today. The range opens at 11AM on Sunday, and we were there a few minutes after 11. Inside the range, there were several booths occupied, but nobody had started fining yet. Just as we got our target sent out on the trolley, it seemed like everyone simultaneously started shooting as though the range master had called out “commence firing!” The range erupted with shots fired loud and not so much, ‘booms,’ ‘bangs,’ and ‘pops.’ It was kinda neat.

Looking around at the crowd in the range, we saw the usual regulars who we see every week. We make eye contact with them and nod ‘hello.’

Image: Damsel draws a bead on the target with her Para Warthog (Clickee Bigee)..

We saw a Dad giving his son a first lesson. I winced when I saw ’sonny’ gripped his Dad’s Glock with his thumb on the rear of the slide. Dad quickly corrected sonny before he could dislocate his thumb.

There were several parties with women participants. There was a bunch who rented a shotgun and were amusing themselves with the recoil and large holes that the 12 gauge rounds left in the target - new people I guess.

On the way out, I bought ammo for next week. They were still out of 9mm reloads, but I still have some on hand in the safe at home. The guys at the range seem to think that the shortage of guns and ammo is going to relax soon.

The range is alive and well. I am comforted by the resurgent interest in the shooting hobby - no doubt as a result of the threats to the sport by the politicians that manipulated their way into power in this country. The more of us that understand guns and the second amendment, the better our chances to prevent the gun grabbers from their quest.