Kudos to the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles. Folks who frequent this site know all too well I’m no fan of government by nature, but you have to tip your hat whenever it’s warranted. This past Sunday we realized that, because we changed our e-mail a few months ago, we never received our vehicle registration renewal notifications from the DMV. (Here in Arizona you can have all that kind of thing done online.) For our 2003 Saturn, we visited the DMV website and paid our fee. For the 1999 Saturn, I had to get an emissions first, which I did on Monday. 24 hours later, we received our license plate tags in the mail and everything’s good. The DMV here (unlike the clowns in Massachusetts) have always shown themselves to be competent and responsive, which is all one can expect from government these days.

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A zing to Barack Obama, for continuing to ratchet up the angry rhetoric against Americans whom he represents as President of the United States. To encourage Hispanics to “punish our enemies”, and to tell Republicans – once again employing his tired “car in the ditch” metaphor – they need to “sit in the back” (a curious use of words for an African American, wouldn’t you say?) serves no good purpose whatsoever. Not only does that kind of rhetoric diminish the office he holds (something he has shown himself to be extremely adept at since his inauguration), but it divides the very people he promised to unite during his 2008 campaign. No wonder his approval ratings are tanking, reaching new lows every week.

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Kudos to the Wolong Panda reserve in China’s Sichuan province and the progress they have seen in increasing the number of pandas born in captivity. I enjoy reading success stories like this since they typically seem so few and far between.

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A zing to The View’s Joy Behar for calling Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle “a bitch”, and telling her to “go to hell” on national television. Why anyone would watch the pathetic shrills on The View is beyond me, but there is absolutely no place on national television for this kind of hatred and language Behar used. What does it say about the state of our culture when a Juan Williams can be fired from NPR simply for expressing his own discomfort when traveling on an airplane with people dressed in traditional Muslim garb, and Behar keeps her job after this hateful and offensive screed?

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Pool temp: 68 degrees