novatownhall blog

It turned out to be a pretty fantastic trip aboard the Tenacious charter boat of Deale, Maryland.

(The full photo round up is over at Digital Camel.)

Captain Jacob Henderson (left) and First Mate Karl of the Tenacious are definitely the bomb. I will eventually be posting a video of the trip but suffice it to say for now that these two combine excellent fishing skills with outstanding customer relations. If you’ve ever been out on a Chesapeake charter boat, you know the latter is not part of the typical skill set. If you are planning a family outing, and especially one that might involve kids or normal goofball adults who don’t like to get yelled at simply because they only go fishing once a year, you can’t go wrong with the Tenacious.

I’ve been out on many, many fishing boats all over the country, and I’ve only met one or two other crews that were nearly as good as these two guys.

Kevin (right), the Digital Camel majordomo who put the trip together, and his brother Steve, who is the mischievous sort of elder brother, and with whom I naturally therefore have an affinity.

We had seven fishermen, and caught the limit of one BIG striper each. Most were 34″-39″ and heavy. Everyone went home with many pounds of rockfish fillets. A good day. Go read more about it!

Why I am watching the CNN broadcast with a moderate level of enjoyment, besides the sparkling statesmanship and soaring rhetoric:

An hour ago Hillary had an 8% lead; now with about 85% of precincts reporting she has a 10% lead and the trend is going toward 12% in the next few minutes.

Heh. Chaos, you have to love it.

UPDATE: Blame it on white people.

More on that emerging theme, here.

Well, they do comprise about 65% of the electorate, so I guess you can blame most everything on them.

But much as I hate to be responsible for Democratic activists learning the right lessons about anything, I feel compelled to note that the reason Barack Obama got walloped in Pennsylvania likely has less to do with the fact he is black than with the fact that he is so comfortable among people who hate America.

Exhibit 1. Exhibit 2. Exhibit 3.

UPDATE II: Looks like she is having trouble extending beyond a 200,000 vote lead. That’s a big lead, but with 94% reporting she really needs to step it up, dagnabit.

UPDATE III: Jeffrey Toobin on CNN just now: “This is the train wreck scenario.”

UPDATE IV: Oh, and also Exhibit 4. Ya think having a completely warped, elitist world view might have something to do with the thumping? Plenty of voters “cling” to religion, last I heard, some of them not in the least bit bitter.

UPDATE V: With 99% of precincts reporting, it looks like Clinton wins by 10%. Right now it’s actually about 9.8%. That’ll do – it’s a 214,000 vote advantage. A big part of the story when the “electability” question comes up will be the clobbering she put on Obama in so many Pennsylvania counties. She beat him soundly among church-goers and massively among Catholics. She should be in the race until August if she can just resist the urge to make up easily disprovable stories. A tall order, I grant you.

UPDATE VI: Did anyone notice Ron Paul got 16% of the vote in the Republican primary, to Huckabee’s 11%. (and McCain’s 72%). I guess Paul just peaked too darn late.

This came to me recently and I just wanted to share it.  If you don’t know who Sheriff Joe is I would suggest you go read the book.  He is a criminals’ and liberals’ worst nightmare and the best thing that ever happened to a part of Arizona (yes, I just excluded John McCain).

Update on Joe ArpaioOh, there’s MUCH more to know about Sheriff Joe!Maricopa County was spending approx. $18 million dollars
a year on stray animals, like cats and dogs.  Sheriff Joe
offered to take the department over, and the County
Supervisors said okay.The animal shelters are now all staffed and operated by
prisoners. They feed and care for the strays.  Every
animal in his care is taken out and walked twice daily.  He now has prisoners who are experts in animal nutrition
and behavior.. They give great classes for anyone who’d
like to adopt an animal. He has literally taken stray dogs
off the street, given them to the care of prisoners, and
had them place in dog shows The best part?  His budget for the entire department is
now under $3 million Teresa and I adopted a Weimeraner
from a Maricopa County shelter two years ago. He was
neutered, and current on all shots, in great health, and even had a microchip inserted the day we got him.  
Cost us $78.The prisoners get the benefit of about $0.28 an hour for working, but most would work for free, just to be
out of their cells for the day. Most of his budget is
for utilities, bu ilding maintenance, etc.  He pays the
prisoners out of the fees collected for adopted animals..I have long wondered when the rest of the country would
take a look at the way he runs the jail system, and copy
some of his ideas. He has a huge farm, donated to the
county years ago, where inmates can work, and they grow
most of their own fresh vegetables and food, doing all the
work and harvesting by hand.  He has a pretty good sized
hog farm, which provides meat, and fertilizer. It fertilizes
the Christmas tree nursery, where prisoners work, and
you can buy a living Christmas tree for $6 – $8 for the
Holidays, and plant it later.  We have six trees in our
yard from the Prison.  Yup, he was reelected last year with 83% of the vo te.Now he’s in trouble with the ACLU again.  He painted all his buses and vehicles with a mural, that has a special hotline phone number painted on it where you can call and report suspected illegal aliens. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement wasn’t doing enough in his eyes,
so he had 40 deputies trained specifically for enforcing
immigration laws, started up his hotline, and bought
4 new buses just for hauling folks back to the border.  
He’s kind of a ‘Git-R Dun’ kind of Sheriff. 

TO THOSE OF YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO
HE IS THE MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF
AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER
THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY: Sheriff Joe Arpaio (In Arizona ) who created the ‘ Tent City Jail’:He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them..
He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights Cut off all but ‘G’ movies.He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects.Then He Started Chain Gangs For Women So He
Wouldn’t Get Sued For Discrimination.He took away cable TV Until he found out there was
a Federal Court Order that Required Cable TV For Jails
So He Hooked Up The Cable TV Again Only Let In The
Disney Channel And The Weather Channel.

 More On The Arizona Sheriff:With Temperatures Being Even Hotter Than Usual In Phoenix (116 Degrees Just Set A New Record), the Associated Press Reports:About 2,000 Inmates Living In A Barbed-Wire-Surrounded Tent Encampment At The Maricopa County Jail Have Been Given Permission To Strip Down To Their Government-Issued Pink Boxer Shorts.On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were
either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the
tents, which reached 138 Degrees Inside The Week Before.
Many Were Also Swathed In Wet, Pink Towels As Sweat
Collected On Their Chests And Dripped Down To Their
PINK SOCKS.‘It Feels Like We Are In A Furnace,’ Said James Zanzot, An Inmate Who Has Lived In The TENTS for 1 year. ‘It’s Inhumane.’Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent
city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink,
and eat bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic.  He said Wednesday that he told all of the inmates:
‘Its 120 Degrees In Iraq And Our Soldiers Are Living
In Tents Too, And They Have To Wear Full Battle Gear,
But They Didn’t Commit Any Crimes,
So Shut Y our Damned Mouths!’
Way To Go, Sheriff! Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be a lot less crime and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be punished for their crimes – not live in luxury until it’s time for their parole, only to go out and commit another crime so they can get back in to live on taxpayers money and enjoy things taxpayers can’t afford to have for themselves.      

 I’m not advacating a pig farm in Loudoun County (unless it is in the open area out west.  Pigs are smelly creatures) but much of his principles could be applied here.  I’m up for it.  How about you?

Has anyone seen this on MSM? Or Fox, or some such? This is a big deal.

Western North Dakota has large oil reserves. By some estimates, it has more oil than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A federal government geologist estimated a formation called the Bakken shale holds 400 billion barrels of oil.

Just curious as this is a far bigger find than the Brazilian abiotic field. I am wondering when, if ever, this could lead to a decrease of the price at the pump.

Blogging may be more intermittent and more incoherent than usual the next 48 hours because I will be in the Baltimore vicinity with my good friend, NVTH commenter and Digital Camel majordomo Kevin and his family fishing for stripers in the Chesapeake. El Jefe will be there, the Steves will be there … I guarantee this will be legendary.

Just like last time.

What we have going for us this time is we are much closer to the striper spawning season, so we may get the opportunity to catch much larger fish. What we have going against us is the weather is supposed to be questionable, with rain and possible storms forecasted. On the whole, I like our odds because the particular bad weather aspects will impact fishermen more than fish, and insofar as we are manly enough to overcome the elements we will get the job done.

Stay tuned, this should be interesting.

Potentially really important news (hat tip to Instapundit, who needs a “hat tip” from NVTH like Microsoft needs a bumper sticker on my truck).

Lost in the big news last week — the race for the Democratic nomination, the reeling U.S. economy, the ongoing life/death saga that is “Dancing with the Stars” — came word that a new deep-water exploration area off the coast of Brazil could contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil…

In 1999, Gold published “The Deep Hot Biosphere,” a paper that postulated that coal and oil are produced not by the decomposition of fossils, but in fact are “abiogenic” — the product of tectonic forces; i.e., deeply embedded hydrocarbons being brought up and through the earth’s mantle and transformed into their present states by bacteria living in the earth’s crust.

If “fossil fuels” are in fact produced from within the Earth, and not as the result of the decomposition of ancient jungles, and “peak oil” is a flawed concept, it really would change everything.

Methane has been discovered on a moon of Jupiter, which was likely not ancient dinosaur and newt habitat, so the theory has plausibility.

Much more here.

The Capital Area Alliance Against Illegal Immigration was formally introduced today (includes video of the news coverage). This is a coalition of ten organizations in Virginia, Maryland and DC. All of the main local groups advocating for immigration enforcement at the state and local levels have formed an executive committee to coordinate efforts.

Greg Letiecq of Save the Old Dominion, Help Save Manassas, and of course Blog Fu, heads up the Virginia delegation. Help Save Loudoun and a variety of other groups are participating. From the Fox News coverage:

Ten groups from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., announced Thursday they’re joining forces to fight illegal immigration in the region surrounding the nation’s capital.

The newly-formed Capital Area Alliance Against Illegal Immigration hopes to pool the resources and knowledge of member organizations to end what it calls “political and legislative support for illegal immigration” in the region.

“Crime, unfortunately, doesn’t know political boundaries too well,” said Greg Letiecq, executive director of Save the Old Dominion and leader of the Virginia branch of the Alliance.

Chuck Floyd, head of the organization’s Maryland arm, agreed.

“We’re going after them with this particular group and trying to coordinate policies in the region, because we find that Virginia, Maryland and D.C. are not on the same sheet of music when it comes to enforcing policies,” he said.

Floyd, Letiecq and Washington branch leader Bill Buchanan praised some of the Virginia General Assembly’s recent political moves, including passing bills that revoke the license of a business found hiring illegal immigrants and to deny bail to illegal immigrants.