Random Thoughts

Take their keys, please

When I first got my driver’s license at age 16, my dad told me, “Driving isn’t a right, it’s a privilege.” I told my teens the same thing when they got their licenses. Why then do we think that once we’ve gotten a license, barring any run-ins with the law, that license ought to be ours until the day we die?

Why do we let people who are clearly past the age where they can drive safely continue to do so until someone–and invariably it’s not them, it’s some helpless passerby–dies?

I’ve long thought that there ought to be annual mandatory drivers tests for everyone over 70 years old.

Elderly woman gets 9 months in church crash

SANTA ANA - A 75-year-old woman who fatally ran over an 89-year- old woman in a church parking lot and left the scene was sentenced Friday to nine months in jail, with the possibility of home confinement.Ana Maria Torres fatally struck Jessie Pound on Aug. 26, 2007, as Torres drove out of the parking lot of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Placentia. Pound was walking to her church, Placentia Presbyterian Church, 849 N. Bradford Ave. The two churches share a parking lot.

Although witnesses said they could hear Pound’s head being crushed as it was run over, Torres left the scene and drove to a family function in Corona.

In a non-jury bench trial last month, Orange County Superior Court Judge David A. Thompson found Torres guilty of felony hit and run causing death, misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter by unlawful act with gross negligence, and providing false information to a police officer, along with a sentencing enhancement for causing great bodily injury.

At Friday’s sentencing, Torres continued to proclaim her innocence, prompting the judge to say he didn’t see any “true remorse.”

…Deputy District Attorney Jason Baez said he did not seek the maximum sentence of four years in prison because of her age, but still recommended jail time because Torres “repeatedly lied” to authorities as they investigated Pound’s death.Baez said Torres lied to police about which Mass she attended that morning and initially claimed she walked to church, even though Pound’s DNA was found on a piece of her slacks that were found under Torres’ 1991 Mercury Cougar, Baez said.

Speaking in Spanish, Torres claimed on Friday that she was manhandled by a police officer and that he refused to give her her medicine while she was in custody.

“I am not guilty, the guilty one is outside,” Torres said through the court’s translator. She pointed to her arm, “Look at this,” as if pointing to a scar or injury, “When he pull me out of the car he told me, ‘Killer. I’m going to incarcerate you.’

…Torres’ statement took her defense attorney, Gary Pohlson, by surprise, but he argued that it was further proof that she did not know she ran over Pound.“To a certain degree it’s extremely hard to talk right now because I didn’t expect her to say that,” Pohlson said. “But I’m glad she did because I truly believe she does not believe she did this crime.”

Thompson was not impressed.

“At the end of the day she’s not remorseful,” Thompson said. “She denies her actions and it’s not credible given the nature of the evidence presented.”

Anna Marie Torres

There’s something horribly ironic about an elderly woman lying about where she attended mass after killing someone in the church parking lot. Do you suppose she confessed that before the next mass? Either she’s truly an awful person, or she’s so mentally enfeebled by age that she really is incapable of recognizing what she did. Either way, she ought to have had her license and car keys removed long before she ever encountered Jessie Pound.

We really need to get people like this off the road before they run someone over.

Comedy gold

My nominee for the best write up on Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize:  Frank J. Fleming at Pajamas Media with “The ‘I’m-Not-Bush’ Prize and its Uselessness.”

It’s like they have a Nobel Prize for Unicorns to hand out, and since there really isn’t anyone who makes much sense for it, they just hand it out to whoever fits their political agenda. And, being part of the international community — which is stupid — the committee’s choices have started to be just mind-numbingly ludicrous until they reached the low point on Friday morning.

Obama was nominated for the Peace Prize twelve days into his presidency — before he even began to aspire to become as useless as he’s been so far — and somehow this Nobel committee came to the conclusion that he did something worthy of an award. Their justification for giving him the prize, in its entirety?

“Hee not Booosh! Scroo u Booosh!”

…An awesome response would be for Obama to bomb Iran’s nuclear facility the day after receiving the prize, but that’s something a man would do. That’s something Reagan would do. Obama’s too much of a sissy for awesomeness like that, and that’s why the international community loves him. So, in my opinion, should Obama have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? Of course he should have; it’s a useless-moron prize. Obama is the most prominent useless idiot out there right now; I can’t name a better candidate.

Even SNL can’t resist mocking the situation.

And as far as cartoon fodder goes, it’s priceless. Check out TMFo at Christmas Ghost.

This entire administration would be pure comedy gold, if only our country’s future wasn’t at stake.

And we remain the losers

I really don’t care who wins the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, Al Gore has one, as did Yassar Arafat. Clearly, they’ll give the thing to just about anyone. Still, it does make me feel rather nauseous to think that a man can be given a Nobel Peace Prize merely for talking about what he wants to do, who took office only two weeks before the Prize nomination deadline. Amazing. But then again, the man in question got to the presidency on nothing more substantive than that by which he gained the Nobel Prize, so in a weird, rather eerie way, it all fits.

It doesn’t make life in these United States one whit better for anyone beside the President either. We don’t need a Nobel Prize winner, we need a person who is actually doing things.

At this moment, many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit. The President who leased his immense inaugural good will to the hungry appropriators writing the stimulus bill, who has not stopped negotiating health-care reform except to say what is nonnegotiable, whose solicitude for the wheelers and dealers who drove the financial system into a ditch leaves the rest of us wondering who has our back, has always shown great promise, said the right things, affirmed every time he opens his mouth that he understands the fears we face and the hopes we hold. But he presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part travesty, part tragedy; wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best-intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a President needs to take a real risk - and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his hometown does not remotely count.

Ah well, Obama doesn’t need to do anything to get applause. He merely needs to exist.

And then I think about nominee Greg Mortenson, and my heart aches.

Compare this to Greg Mortenson, nominated for the prize by some members of Congress, whom the bookies gave 20-to-1 odds of winning. Son of a missionary, a former Army medic and mountaineer, he has made it his mission to build schools for girls in places where opium dealers and tribal warlords kill people for trying. His Central Asia Institute has built more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a mission which has, along the way, inspired millions of people to view the protection and education of girls as a key to peace and prosperity and progress.

Thing is, Greg Mortenson doesn’t need a Nobel Peace Prize. His ego, unlike that of the current US President, does not demand public notice. Winning–or not winning–a clearly meaningless award will not change him at all. He will go on dedicating the days of his life to true service of others, working “in the trenches,” unknown by most of mankind even while making a very real, lasting change in the lives of others.

Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Prize either. I’d say Mortenson is in excellent company.

Locutusprime at Brutally Honest explains the true worth of this dubious prize:

The Nobel Peace prize is nothing that is won. It is simply given. And it is nothing more than the door prize awarded by the collective thinking of anti American Marxist and communist around the world. It has absolutely less than nothing to do with the origins of its original inception or concept. The prize is nothing more than a booby prize awarded by the anti west, anti capitalism, anti democracy cabal of Marxist communist dissidents and their dregs in academia.

Confederate Yankee underscores the absurdity of it all:

Nobel committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland was pressed by the media to explain why Obama deserved the award, and could only offer this defense: “As to whether the prize was given too early in Mr. Obama’s presidency, he said: ‘We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do’.”
Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prizefor campaigning for President.

Wordsmith at Flopping Aces posits that Bush really ought to be credited/blamed for Obama’s Nobel.

Neo-neocon reminds us of the inherent bias of the Nobel commitee, and that 1990 Nobel winner Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the fall of the Soviet Union.

American Power considers the ramifications of Obama’s Nobel Prize upon Afghanistan and Iraq.

And The Anchoress thinks that Michelle ought to have shared in the award.

Edited to add…

A look at the nominees who were passed over. If anything underscores the worthlessness of a Nobel Peace Prize, a comparison of relative accomplishments ought to do it.

Copenhagen Fail

I was amused to hear that the 2016 Olympics went to Brazil. I guess the IOC must be racist. After all, anyone who doesn’t think whatever Obama wants is The Right Thing To Do must be a racist, right? Isn’t that what Jimmy Carter said? And we all know what a great president he was.

Donald Sensing offers a spot-on explanation of the whole point behind Obama’s Copenhagen Fail:

So why did Obama go to Copenhagen? It was not really to see Chicago through. Like everything else in his life, Chicago was simply a tool to serve a purpose and selection of the city as 2016’s venue was not actually important to that purpose.

The purpose of the trip was simply to splash Obama’s photo on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, to provide video of him basking in the personal adulation of the European crowd, an adulation that remains very real there even while Obama’s popularity slides at home.

H/T Brutally Honest. Sensing’s entire article is well worth the read as he illuminates with startling clarity the Obama administration:  It’s a Peter Principle Presidency.  Back in February, Kyle-Anne Shiver at The American Thinker noted shortly after Obama took office, “The perfect collision of Murphy’s Law with the Peter Principle has arrived to explode in our faces.”

Even ultra-liberal comedy powerhouse Saturday Night Live is pointing out the obvious:

(H/T Flopping Aces). It would be funnier if it weren’t so darned true.