Mark Fiore has a new one up that you should view as a cautionary tale. People shouldn’t gloat.

On a much stranger front we have Paul the Spud over at Shakespeare’s Sister talking about the Reptilicon reaction to the new Happy Feet cartoon feature with a link to The Carpetbagger Report coverage of conservative cartoon craziness.

Get a grip. These are children’s cartoons. The commercial cartoons are designed to sell toys and such, not launch a political campaign. If they can hold the attention of a small child for more than a minute and give that child’s parent a moment to relax, they are a roaring success. Having spent most of the last week in the company of a two-year-old I understand what parents are enduring, so I would knight SpongeBob SquarePants if he could provide some peace and quiet, I wouldn’t be questioning his sexuality. And what are these perverts doing watching all of these children’s shows: is The Wheel of Fortune too intellectual for them?

Because we live in a tourist area that has a lot of foreign visitors during the colder months when the Federal government messes around with the rules on entry, we take a major hit.

The Pensacola Beach Blog post, Who Rules, and the Associated Press story, Homeland Security Announces New Passport Rules, highlight something that is going to hurt our local economy, and the economies of the communities along the Mexican and Canadian borders.

After January 23, 2007 American citizens are going to be required to carry a US passport to re-enter the US from any other country. It used to be that you only needed a driver’s license or birth certificate to cross the border.

It costs $110 for an adult and $95 for a child to be issued a passport and it takes months. The days of a quick day trip over the border are gone.

This on top of the reduction in time on the visitors permits that Canadians once received for trips to the US are really cutting into the winter tourist season.

Exactly what problem is being addressed by these new requirements? Nothing in them addresses the real problems of controlling the borders; hell, you can’t even locate the border between Canada and the US in North Dakota as most of the markers have gone missing over the years.

This is another waste of time and money to produce a Potemkin solution for a non-existent problem. They don’t want to really take the time to study the real problems and then plan real solutions; they just want to appear to be doing something. If I were a conspiracy theorist I would wonder how long until we needed to produce a passport at state lines?

It was afternoon and I was on my way to a chemistry class. I had stopped for a drink of water when the news came over the speakers in the classrooms.

For those who weren’t alive at the time: remember what you felt on September 11, 2001 for a taste of November 22, 1963. It was a massive change for the worldview of my generation and it marked the beginning of a period of disruption and decline in the civility of American society. Arthur had died and Camelot fell.

At his inauguration John Kennedy made the point: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

The colors of my world will never be as bright as they were on November 21, 1963.

The last six years have been a nadir in American life. Hopefully we can recapture some of the greatness America once represented.