I'm not this way because I listen to Rush, I listen to Rush because I am this way.
Made In America
From Scottish Parts
The Important Questions
10:40 pm, 3/8/10
Joseph Stack and the Liberal Blood Libel
4:39 pm, 2/19/10
If you haven't read the manifesto of Joe Stack, you should.
From reading it, it's clear that Joseph Andrew Stack subscribed to a series of conspiracy theories that filled his head with anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-Bush rage. He quotes Marx, bemoans the failure of ObamaCare, and blames the string of failures that marked the last twenty years of his life on Ronald Reagan's tax cuts. Far from being "anti-tax", his real problem appears to have been that he didn't feel others were paying enough in taxes, that, in his view, "the poor" "die" for "the mistakes" of "the wealthy". 95% of his ode to class warfare would hardly seem out of place as a "Special Comment" by Keith Olbermann, and much of it is fundamentally identical to what you see on the signs of ski-masked anarchists setting fires at G8 meetings. It's like some awful tribute to Operation: Mindcrime.
Daily Kos:
We've grown to expect those antics from the dementia patients at DailyKos and Oliver Willis, but much more deeply alarming is the speed with which the mainstream media ran with the idea that simply because he tried to kill people over taxes, he's obviously somehow tied to the Tea Party movement, even if it's impossible to articulate how:
The New York Times:
While I'm not the biggest fan of how the Tea Party movement playing out, to see "serious journalists" so eager to go this far, some of them obviously smirking at their keyboards as they try to "carefully" imply the Tea Party movement's guilt by association not merely in the promulgation of policies which the press is biased against but in murderous terrorism is disturbing, particularly since it that flies in the face of the known facts. It runs with the radical left's fetishistic belief that those who disagree with their views aren't merely people who honestly believe differently than they do, but people who are evil, Timothy McVeighs in waiting, or as reprehensible Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson has claimed, people who actually want Americans to die.
It's a baseless blood libel, and while political partisans say regrettable things, people of conscience have a reason to be outraged when they see it creeping it into the news content of their daily newspaper.
Update: Jonathan Capehart, the author of the offending Washington Post blog excerpt above, has since clarified his intentions, but still seems to miss the point. It's obvious to everyone that he was "careful" in choosing his words, and that he selected the excerpts that supported his point. That's why people are disgusted. Complaining that he was "careful" to choose words that don't technically call everyone on the right a terrorist is asinine. He should've known better than to think it wouldn't cause significant offense, particularly when he was, by his own admission, ignoring the excerpts that undermine his point.
From reading it, it's clear that Joseph Andrew Stack subscribed to a series of conspiracy theories that filled his head with anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-Bush rage. He quotes Marx, bemoans the failure of ObamaCare, and blames the string of failures that marked the last twenty years of his life on Ronald Reagan's tax cuts. Far from being "anti-tax", his real problem appears to have been that he didn't feel others were paying enough in taxes, that, in his view, "the poor" "die" for "the mistakes" of "the wealthy". 95% of his ode to class warfare would hardly seem out of place as a "Special Comment" by Keith Olbermann, and much of it is fundamentally identical to what you see on the signs of ski-masked anarchists setting fires at G8 meetings. It's like some awful tribute to Operation: Mindcrime.
Seven years of powerTo the left, all of this somehow means that he was obviously a right-wing extremist, and that conservatives and libertarians are to blame for his crimes.
The corporation claw
The rich control the government, the media the law
To make some kind of difference
Then everyone must know
Eradicate the fascists, revolution will grow
The system we learn says we're equal under law
But the streets are reality, the weak and poor will fall
Daily Kos:
Just like the 9/11 terrorists, he had no regard to innocent lives either in that building or on the ground. He is no different, he is no hero, and he was incited to do what he did, because of the Limbaughs, Becks and Hannitys who day after day only play on people's misery and fears because of their own personal agenda. They need to be forced to own up to this.Democratic Underground:
Tea Party Terrorist Crashes Plane Into Government BuildingComments at Oliver Willis:
Joe Stack was a Reagan republican. Sorry nazis, he's one of you, he's a right winger.Janeane Garofolo:
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly created the atmosphere for a Joe Stack!Someone even rushed to distribute "evidence" that Stack had donated to Ron Paul, ignoring that it was obviously the wrong Joe Stack.
We've grown to expect those antics from the dementia patients at DailyKos and Oliver Willis, but much more deeply alarming is the speed with which the mainstream media ran with the idea that simply because he tried to kill people over taxes, he's obviously somehow tied to the Tea Party movement, even if it's impossible to articulate how:
The New York Times:
In April 1990, a firebomb packed with a tea bag - a reference to the Boston Tea Party - and addressed to the I.R.S. was placed in the mail in Royal Oak, Mich. It exploded, injuring a postal worker.NY Mag:
In fact, a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.Time
Toward the end of what appears to be his final note, Stack wrote, 'Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.' (See the making of the Tea Party movement.)The Washington Post's "Post-Partisan" Blog:
There's no information yet on whether he was involved in any anti-government groups or whether he was a lone wolf. But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.It just is, right?
While I'm not the biggest fan of how the Tea Party movement playing out, to see "serious journalists" so eager to go this far, some of them obviously smirking at their keyboards as they try to "carefully" imply the Tea Party movement's guilt by association not merely in the promulgation of policies which the press is biased against but in murderous terrorism is disturbing, particularly since it that flies in the face of the known facts. It runs with the radical left's fetishistic belief that those who disagree with their views aren't merely people who honestly believe differently than they do, but people who are evil, Timothy McVeighs in waiting, or as reprehensible Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson has claimed, people who actually want Americans to die.
It's a baseless blood libel, and while political partisans say regrettable things, people of conscience have a reason to be outraged when they see it creeping it into the news content of their daily newspaper.
Update: Jonathan Capehart, the author of the offending Washington Post blog excerpt above, has since clarified his intentions, but still seems to miss the point. It's obvious to everyone that he was "careful" in choosing his words, and that he selected the excerpts that supported his point. That's why people are disgusted. Complaining that he was "careful" to choose words that don't technically call everyone on the right a terrorist is asinine. He should've known better than to think it wouldn't cause significant offense, particularly when he was, by his own admission, ignoring the excerpts that undermine his point.
The Second Wave
3:57 pm, 2/19/10
Last month, the New York Times finally caught on to the idea that mortgage relief, long billed as a noble effort to help people hang on to their homes, may have actually made things much worse, duping struggling families into wasting more money on assets that were doomed from the day they signed the mortgage.
The terror of the moment, however, is what will happen when this temporary aid ends:
Since she's just wiped out her savings, she might want to think about putting that in the bank, because there's a good chance that when these programs end, her new home's value will resume its downward spiral.
Oh, and about commercial real estate?
As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.Now, this week, comes the equally shocking discovery that subsidizing more home sales isn't going to help, either.
Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.
Mr. Katari contends that banks have been using temporary loan modifications under the Obama plan as justification to avoid an honest accounting of the mortgage losses still on their books. Only after banks are forced to acknowledge losses and the real estate market absorbs a now pent-up surge of foreclosed properties will housing prices drop to levels at which enough Americans can afford to buy, he argues.
"Then the carpenters can go back to work," Mr. Katari said. "The roofers can go back to work, and we start building housing again. If this drips out over the next few years, that whole sector of the economy isn’t going to recover."
Elkhart also symbolizes the failure of federal efforts to turn around the housing slump at the heart of the economic crisis. Housing in this community has become almost entirely dependent on a string of federal support programs, which are nonetheless failing to prevent a fall in prices and a rise in mortgage delinquencies.I've said it before, and I'll say it again: politicians talking about how to "fix" the housing market are defrauding Americans. The crash was the fix, and these efforts are only desperate fights to pump some air back in to the bubble, prolonging the agony and racking up more public debt that we have no foreseeable means to pay back.
More than one in 10 mortgage holders in Elkhart is seriously behind on payments. The median sales price has plunged to the level of a decade ago. Many homeowners owe more than their home is worth, freezing them in place for years. Foreclosures recently hit a record.
To the extent that the real estate market is functioning at all, people here say, it is doing so only because of the emergency programs, which have pushed down interest rates on mortgages and offered buyers a substantial tax credit.
Equally important is an expanded mortgage insurance program run by the Federal Housing Administration, which encourages private lenders to accept borrowers with small down payments. The government takes the risk of default.
A few years ago, only one in 10 buyers in Elkhart used the housing agency program. Now about half do. Across the country, the agency has greatly expanded its reach so that it now insures six million mortgages.
The terror of the moment, however, is what will happen when this temporary aid ends:
The first step could happen as early as next month, when the Federal Reserve has said it will end its trillion-dollar program to buy up mortgage securities. That program has driven mortgage interest rates to lows not seen since the 1950s.One thing they have been successful at, though, is getting a few people into more homes that they can't afford:
Yet it is uncertain whether the government can really pull back without sending housing markets into another tailspin. "A rise in rates would kill us all by itself," Ms. Swartley said.
The Obama administration has offered few ideas about reforming the housing market. Proposals for the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage holding companies taken over by the government at the height of the crisis, were supposed to be introduced with the president’s budget this month. They were not.
Heather Stevens, a 23-year-old nurse here, is closing on a three-bedroom house this week. Since her loan was insured by the Federal Housing Administration, she had to put down only 3.5 percent of the $74,900 purchase price.Thanks, Congress!
Stevens had to come up with only the $2,600 down payment, which still took all her savings. But the best part is the $7,500 tax credit. She will use that to remodel the kitchen. "If it wasn't for the credit, we would have waited to buy," said Ms. Stevens, who is getting married this year.
Since she's just wiped out her savings, she might want to think about putting that in the bank, because there's a good chance that when these programs end, her new home's value will resume its downward spiral.
Oh, and about commercial real estate?
"I think we'll see slow improvement this year," said Mac Wilson with Thalhimer/Cushman & Wakefield. "It can't get any worse."In the movies, that's always what somebody says just moments before it gets worse.
Minimum Wage Increased, Teens and Minorities Hardest Hit
4:00 pm, 2/12/10
A Ball State University study has further confirmed what a lot of us already knew: that minimum wage hikes can destroy jobs.
This is hardly the first study to reach that conclusion, and it's remarkable to me that some people can so casually and uncritically believe that raising the cost of unskilled, inexperienced labor does not reduce the demand for it. However, that's precisely the argument that many minimum wage advocates make, treating it as if it were some sort of free lunch for the poor, often citing the controversial work of economists David Card and Alan Krueger.
Even accepting the premise that it doesn't increase net unemployment, it ignores the elephant in the room, which is that with the pay artificially inflated, the jobs become attractive to stronger candidates who may not have been willing to consider them before, but are quite likely hired over the less qualified. Minimum wage laws, then, still fail to effectively transfer opportunity and wealth to the poor, instead transferring unemployment to the poor and denying them important opportunities to acquire skills and work experience, in turn denying them one of the best routes out of poverty.
Even assuming little or no negative impact on total employment, however, seems generous, and that's precisely what the new study addresses. Anecdotally, in the aftermath of Rod Blagojevich's 2005 minimum wage increase in Illinois, newspapers reported that food service workers immediately saw reduced hours and consumers saw increased prices. In fact, my favorite local pizzeria actually went out of business entirely as a result. Somehow, I find it preposterous to hold that this created an increase in consumption sufficient to create alternative jobs for those who lost theirs, and that's what makes arguments like those put forward by Paul Krugman so frustrating:
The price floor created by the minimum wage is largely harmless (also, largely pointless) when it's trailing the natural market price for that type of labor, but the study raises questions about whether or not Congress has started to push it too far, doing real damage to the working poor and to the economy.
Ball State's study of part-time workers monitored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the wage increases prompted companies to cut back on hiring, said CBER director Michael Hicks.Policy brief here.
"Instead of hiring a dozen teens to work a popular summer restaurant or theme park, a company would hire six or less," Hicks said. "Instead of filling positions that required no skills, companies were making do with what they had. In the long run, this hurt young, unskilled workers."
Nationally, the minimum wage increased from $5.15 an hour in 2007.
Hicks said that creating lower minimum wages for students and new hires could help preserve jobs. He also noted that a "tenure-scaled" minimum wage might prompt employers to hire unskilled workers at lower wages.
This is hardly the first study to reach that conclusion, and it's remarkable to me that some people can so casually and uncritically believe that raising the cost of unskilled, inexperienced labor does not reduce the demand for it. However, that's precisely the argument that many minimum wage advocates make, treating it as if it were some sort of free lunch for the poor, often citing the controversial work of economists David Card and Alan Krueger.
Even accepting the premise that it doesn't increase net unemployment, it ignores the elephant in the room, which is that with the pay artificially inflated, the jobs become attractive to stronger candidates who may not have been willing to consider them before, but are quite likely hired over the less qualified. Minimum wage laws, then, still fail to effectively transfer opportunity and wealth to the poor, instead transferring unemployment to the poor and denying them important opportunities to acquire skills and work experience, in turn denying them one of the best routes out of poverty.
Even assuming little or no negative impact on total employment, however, seems generous, and that's precisely what the new study addresses. Anecdotally, in the aftermath of Rod Blagojevich's 2005 minimum wage increase in Illinois, newspapers reported that food service workers immediately saw reduced hours and consumers saw increased prices. In fact, my favorite local pizzeria actually went out of business entirely as a result. Somehow, I find it preposterous to hold that this created an increase in consumption sufficient to create alternative jobs for those who lost theirs, and that's what makes arguments like those put forward by Paul Krugman so frustrating:
Here's how the fallacy works: if some subset of the work force accepts lower wages, it can gain jobs. If workers in the widget industry take a pay cut, this will lead to lower prices of widgets relative to other things, so people will buy more widgets, hence more employment.It wouldn't. It's also a perfectly dishonest question to ask, because nobody's talking about a "general cut in wages". The "subset" is the critical issue, the concern being the wage of those who might otherwise not have a job at all and be unable to consume anything other than what they can buy with entitlements taken from everyone else's wages. For them, an increased minimum wage really provides nothing, since a ten percent raise for someone whose income is zero is, well, still zero.
But if everyone takes a pay cut, that logic no longer applies. The only way a general cut in wages can increase employment is if it leads people to buy more across the board. And why should it do that?
The price floor created by the minimum wage is largely harmless (also, largely pointless) when it's trailing the natural market price for that type of labor, but the study raises questions about whether or not Congress has started to push it too far, doing real damage to the working poor and to the economy.
The Blapprentice
3:14 pm, 2/12/10
In what may turn out to be one of the more delicious ironies of 2010, Rod Blagojevich is officially slated as a contestant on "The Celebrity Apprentice".
I'm actually going to watch this, primarily because I hope to live vicariously through Donald Trump and see Blagojevich get fired all over again.
I might even record it.
I'm actually going to watch this, primarily because I hope to live vicariously through Donald Trump and see Blagojevich get fired all over again.
I might even record it.
This Has Not Been Thought Through
2:46 pm, 2/12/10
A brilliant scheme by British police officers aiming to try something new to reduce burglaries: attempt to commit them themselves.
#1) Police officers will inevitably be injured by frightened civilians. It's already common enough to find residents arrested and tried for using excessive force against intruders. Adrenaline-charged residents, hearing their burglar's claims that he is a police officer, will likely find the idea so insane that they simply don't believe it and resume the beating.
#2) Some legitimate burglars, when caught in the act, will likely try falsely identifying themselves as police officers and even present false identification. Some residents, aware of this "program", may very well buy it and fail to report attempted burglaries.
Officers have begun testing windows and doors at night as part of a campaign to increase home security.Understandably, some area residents are displeased with the idea. Two outcomes of this brilliant scheme that I can predict right now:
If they find one open, they are under orders to knock on the door and drag sleepy residents from their beds and lecture them.The move is part of an initiative called Operation Golden which aims to slash burglary rates in Macclesfield, Cheshire.
#1) Police officers will inevitably be injured by frightened civilians. It's already common enough to find residents arrested and tried for using excessive force against intruders. Adrenaline-charged residents, hearing their burglar's claims that he is a police officer, will likely find the idea so insane that they simply don't believe it and resume the beating.
#2) Some legitimate burglars, when caught in the act, will likely try falsely identifying themselves as police officers and even present false identification. Some residents, aware of this "program", may very well buy it and fail to report attempted burglaries.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
11:02 pm, 2/8/10
February 4th: Illinois Democrats learn that Scott Lee Cohen, their nominee for Lieutenant Governor, liked to cheat on his taxes, once got himself arrested for holding a knife to the throat of his prostitute girlfriend, and was being sued for tens of thousands of dollars of back child support. It's not like he can claim he didn't have the money, since he'd just blown millions of his own money on his primary race.
February 4th: Cohen's ex-wife, Debra, who looks alarmingly like the current wife of "Dog" the Bounty Hunter, speaks, arguing that he's not really a bad guy: he only tried to rape her because of all the illegal steroids he was taking at the time. (This may not have been especially helpful, but maybe that was the script she had to read to finally get him to cough up the child support.)
February 5th: Cohen, apparently using the word differently than we do, declares that he is "not an embarrassment" to the Democratic Party.
February 7th: What may be the shortest-lived editorial in Chicago Tribune history, "Don't Forget, He Won", attempting to defend Cohen against the threats and intimidation drifting out of the Democratic Party machine, appears on the Tribune's website, then, purged, disappears down the memory hole.
February 7th: Cohen's ex-girlfriend decides it's time to help.
If it hadn't been for Blair Hull's problems with cocaine and spousal abuse coming out before the primary, Barack Obama would've no doubt lost the Senate nomination, and if Jack Ryan's divorce allegations hadn't been held until after, it's probable Obama would've lost the race to the Republican, and remained in the shadows of American politics forever. Cohen might very well have been a relative paragon of public decency compared to some of the people that might be under consideration now, and it's interesting to wonder how different the race might already look had people taken notice of his arrest record just a few days earlier.
"I have no intention of stepping down or stepping aside. When the facts come to light, after my ex-wife and ex-girlfriend speak, the people of Illinois can decide, and I will listen to them directly," said Cohen. "I tried to tell everyone about this early on."February 4th: As it turns out, Cohen really did try to everyone, informing Chicago Sun-Times reporter Mark Brown.
Let the record reflect that on the very day last March that Scott Lee Cohen announced his campaign for lieutenant governor of Illinois, he voluntarily disclosed he had once been arrested in what he described as a domestic battery case involving a live-in girlfriend.Given their prior track record, I don't know why Brown would expect anything else. Still, the audacity to blame voters for not knowing what he refused to report? Impressive.
The problem for Cohen was that he made his announcement to me, and I wasn't taking him very seriously.
How was I to know way back then that the Democratic voters of Illinois would be so dumb as to elect him, brainwashed by millions of dollars in advertising about his job fairs?
February 4th: Cohen's ex-wife, Debra, who looks alarmingly like the current wife of "Dog" the Bounty Hunter, speaks, arguing that he's not really a bad guy: he only tried to rape her because of all the illegal steroids he was taking at the time. (This may not have been especially helpful, but maybe that was the script she had to read to finally get him to cough up the child support.)February 5th: Cohen, apparently using the word differently than we do, declares that he is "not an embarrassment" to the Democratic Party.
February 7th: What may be the shortest-lived editorial in Chicago Tribune history, "Don't Forget, He Won", attempting to defend Cohen against the threats and intimidation drifting out of the Democratic Party machine, appears on the Tribune's website, then, purged, disappears down the memory hole.
February 7th: Cohen's ex-girlfriend decides it's time to help.
The ex-girlfriend who accused Democratic Lt. Governor nominee Scott Lee Cohen of threatening her with a knife said Saturday she "does not believe he is fit to hold any public office.''February 7th: Cohen waits until the middle of the Super Bowl to quietly step aside.
Even for Chicago, known for weird political moments, Cohen's departure was odd. Cohen, who departed the race after it became public that he had once held a knife a prostitute ex-girlfriend's throat and had a history of using steroids, held a press conference. During Super Bowl halftime. In a bar. At a table. With his emotional son crying into his father's chest.February 8th: The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn:
Maybe you didn't feel bad for Scott Lee Cohen on Sunday night when you saw him biting his lip and blubbering through his announcement that he was withdrawing as the Democratic Party's candidate for lieutenant governor.Frankly, I doubt that he's any less savory than anyone Michael Madigan will now appoint to the ticket. That person will just have made sure that none of it is in writing in a courthouse somewhere, awaiting a FOIA request from the Tribune.
He's not a sympathetic character in many ways. His past contains a greater than average number of unsavory episodes and allegations, and it was vain and foolish of him to invest more than $2 million of his own money imagining he could carry all that baggage across the finish line in November for a high state office.
Still. I felt a pang for the guy.
If it hadn't been for Blair Hull's problems with cocaine and spousal abuse coming out before the primary, Barack Obama would've no doubt lost the Senate nomination, and if Jack Ryan's divorce allegations hadn't been held until after, it's probable Obama would've lost the race to the Republican, and remained in the shadows of American politics forever. Cohen might very well have been a relative paragon of public decency compared to some of the people that might be under consideration now, and it's interesting to wonder how different the race might already look had people taken notice of his arrest record just a few days earlier.
Audi, For One, Welcomes Our Environmentalist Overlords
11:22 am, 2/8/10
For the first 40 seconds of this Audi Super Bowl ad, I was amused at what appeared to be cruel satire of the Green movement.
Then, upon learning what the ad was for, and that it was apparently meant to be pro-Green, I found myself thoroughly confused: did the advertising team at Venables Bell & Partners really think that dystopian images of an environmentalist police state are the best way to get everybody excited about improving their gas mileage? The message here, it seems, is that Audi is approved by some sort of environmentalist fedayeen with which we should eagerly comply, for fear of being dragged from our homes in the night.
Hah! Hah. Hah?
If that's supposed to make "being green feel so right", it's only in the sense that North Koreans must "feel so right" when they avoid the forced labor camps. The ad isn't just tonedeaf and creepy, it's so misguided that even the New York Times says it "puts the 'mental' in 'environmental'". No matter how many bonus points they may get for finding a way to make Cheap Trick vaguely terrifying, when even the NYT is mocking you for taking environmentalist agitprop too far, you've clearly crossed some sort of line.
When Will Ferrell did it, it was obvious parody, but Audi's ad is apparently meant to be taken somewhat seriously:
Audi continues the mighty struggle to explain this campaign:
Update: Equally clueless, Grist writer David Roberts is still struggling to decode the message:
Jim Geraghty:
Update: Michelle Malkin:
Then, upon learning what the ad was for, and that it was apparently meant to be pro-Green, I found myself thoroughly confused: did the advertising team at Venables Bell & Partners really think that dystopian images of an environmentalist police state are the best way to get everybody excited about improving their gas mileage? The message here, it seems, is that Audi is approved by some sort of environmentalist fedayeen with which we should eagerly comply, for fear of being dragged from our homes in the night.
Hah! Hah. Hah?
If that's supposed to make "being green feel so right", it's only in the sense that North Koreans must "feel so right" when they avoid the forced labor camps. The ad isn't just tonedeaf and creepy, it's so misguided that even the New York Times says it "puts the 'mental' in 'environmental'". No matter how many bonus points they may get for finding a way to make Cheap Trick vaguely terrifying, when even the NYT is mocking you for taking environmentalist agitprop too far, you've clearly crossed some sort of line.
When Will Ferrell did it, it was obvious parody, but Audi's ad is apparently meant to be taken somewhat seriously:
Every day consumers around the globe are faced with a myriad of decisions in their quest to become more environmentally responsible citizens....Now consumers have help, from the Green Police.Hopefully, the judge is still the one who will be there to judge, since everyone who rejects the "humorous...guidance" and decides "incorrectly" is promptly handcuffed and arrested, including the actual police. Sadly, one has to assume that the "Green Police" can't risk a proper trial given the overwhelming likelihood of jury nullification of these stupid "offenses", so maybe it's more of a Judge Dredd scenario, culminating in summary executions.
As part of the lead up to their third consecutive Super Bowl ad, Audi has created a fictional Green Police unit that are caricatures of today's "green movement". The Green Police are a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment. They're not here to judge, merely to guide these decisions.
Audi continues the mighty struggle to explain this campaign:
Coincidentally, there are numerous real Green Police units globally that are furthering green practices and environmental issues.Given the introduction we've just had to the concept, learning that it's really happening should make everybody feel better, right?
The green police are simply here to help provide answers to the tough environmental decisions we're faced with daily.Their answers are just as tough as the decisions, slamming peoples' heads into counters and stuffing them into the back of electric squad cars, but don't worry! They're here to "help".
Update: Equally clueless, Grist writer David Roberts is still struggling to decode the message:
The thrill at the end, when they guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police -- not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you're looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that? Why offer escape from a moral dilemma your audience doesn't acknowledge exists?Roberts, fulfilling the stereotype of the envirocultis, is apparently unaware that normal people can believe that a choice is morally right but simultaneously recognize that the idea of turning the force of the law on those who simply disagree can be offensive and evil. Who cares about their "moral authority"?
The ad only makes sense if it's aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police -- people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do.
Jim Geraghty:
"I don't know if Audi's Super Bowl commercial, featuring a draconian and ruthless "Green Police" jailing citizens for making any choice that wasn't green, will sell a lot of cars. But I'll bet it sells a lot of copies of Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg."(Via Instapundit)
Update: Michelle Malkin:
Audi's bottom-line corporate message is that the Green State is here to stay and that capitulating to it - and capitalizing on it, as Audi has - is the path to survival.Perhaps we should accuse corporations of "Green profiteering", or, perhaps more aptly, brand them as "collaborators".
The Dark Side of the RINO
1:02 am, 2/5/10
Plenty of people have made the joke about playing Carly Fiorina's surreal "Demon Sheep" ad to the music of Pink Floyd to see what would happen, but I don't think anybody thought that it would actually kind of work:
Do not watch this while high. I am pretty sure that you will freak. Completely. Out.
Given that the song, "Sheep", does seem to stay in time so perfectly, I have to assume that Fiorina's people really did put an awful lot of thought and effort into this, specifically intending the Pink Floyd angle, which makes it that much more unfortunate. This really did happen on purpose.
RedState calls the ad an "own goal of the first magnitude".
Do not watch this while high. I am pretty sure that you will freak. Completely. Out.
Given that the song, "Sheep", does seem to stay in time so perfectly, I have to assume that Fiorina's people really did put an awful lot of thought and effort into this, specifically intending the Pink Floyd angle, which makes it that much more unfortunate. This really did happen on purpose.
RedState calls the ad an "own goal of the first magnitude".
A tragic and avoidable self-beclowning...The key message to this ad is:The Corner's Maggie Gallagher wasn't sure what to think:
1. Don't use PCP and make political ads.
2. Gee I didn't see a message.
3. The Fiorina campaign is run by a bunch of tools.
4. Tom Campbell is more likely to spend your money than Fiorina.
I think Carly Fiorina just put out an ad in which she tells voters: "I am the real sheep in this race."The Fiorina campaign, on the other hand, seems to feel that the world has just failed to grasp their marketing genius:
Critics have suggested that sheep might not be the best metaphor for the ideal sort of Republican - since it typically connotes politicians who march, unthinkingly, in lockstep with their leaders. But [spokesman Julie] Soderlund says the naysayers have it wrong.If you have to explain it, it probably isn't working.
"The demon sheep at the end is meant to be a wolf in sheep's clothing," she said. "That's the whole point, that he's trying to pass himself off as a purist on fiscal matters while his record suggests the opposite."
“I probably should’ve mentioned this during the primary, but…”
11:51 pm, 2/4/10
Where do they find these people? On Tuesday, Illinois Democrats turned out to choose wealthy pawnbroker Scott Lee Cohen as their candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Sure, organized crime ties are common enough in the pawnshop business, and the nature of the industry might raise some alarm with class-consciousness types, but, somehow, he was their man.
Imagine their surprise, then, to open the newspapers today and learn that Cohen is a former steroid user and tax evader who skipped out on $50,000 in child support and, perhaps trying to really build solid credentials for a future career as a Chicago Democrat, got himself arrested for holding a knife to the throat of his girlfriend, a prostitute.
Hilariously, there appears to be no known mechanism by which Illinois Democrats can force him out. Acting Governor Pat Quinn, who managed to edge out Comptroller Dan Hynes for the nomination by less than a single point, has asked Cohen to step aside, and Cohen has declined, complaining that he doesn't understand what the "whirlwind" is about and that he "tried to tell everyone about this early on."
I guess there was just never a good time, was there?
Update: Dan Curry, via Twitter:
Imagine their surprise, then, to open the newspapers today and learn that Cohen is a former steroid user and tax evader who skipped out on $50,000 in child support and, perhaps trying to really build solid credentials for a future career as a Chicago Democrat, got himself arrested for holding a knife to the throat of his girlfriend, a prostitute.
Hilariously, there appears to be no known mechanism by which Illinois Democrats can force him out. Acting Governor Pat Quinn, who managed to edge out Comptroller Dan Hynes for the nomination by less than a single point, has asked Cohen to step aside, and Cohen has declined, complaining that he doesn't understand what the "whirlwind" is about and that he "tried to tell everyone about this early on."
I guess there was just never a good time, was there?
Update: Dan Curry, via Twitter:
Pat Quinn now wants sleaze running mate off ticket. Funny how he didn't feel that way in 2006.Not "hah hah" funny, really.
The Pelosi Rule
10:10 pm, 2/4/10
The Department of Defense calls shenanigans on Nancy Pelosi.
The jet trips often racked up liquor bills that would put a small cruise ship to shame and were also being requested to fly her grandchildren around. Small wonder that Pelosi believes "it shouldn't be that public officials have to watch their backs every moment".
Update: Heh:
Given that Jack Murtha apparently had no problem publicly threatening the Department of Defense over initial perceived resistance to Pelosi's demands, I'd be interested to know what, exactly, prompted this clarification of the rules.
No, you can not have a free ride home. No, you can't bring the kids.Pelosi's overbearing and demanding expectations regarding military aircraft are well-documented, including in documents released last year by Judicial Watch.
While accepting their newly-acquired role as "shuttle service" for the Speaker of the House, the Department of Defense is attempting to draw a line in the sand regarding congressional transportation with an updated directive on DoD Support for Travel of Members and Employees of Congress. Some of the language in the newly-released regulation (dated 15 January, 2010 - the first update since 1964) appears to be the direct result of lessons learned in dealing with Nancy Pelosi.
In response to a series of requests for military aircraft, one Defense Department official wrote, "Any chance of politely querying [Pelosi's team] if they really intend to do all of these or are they just picking every weekend?...[T]here's no need to block every weekend 'just in case'..." The email also notes that Pelosi's office had, "a history of canceling many of their past requests."Probably off doing Department of Defense things.
One DOD official complained about the "hidden costs" associated with the speaker's last minute changes and cancellations. "We have...folks prepping the jets and crews driving in (not a short drive for some), cooking meals and preflighting the jets etc."
The documents also detail correspondence from intermediaries for Speaker Pelosi issuing demands for certain aircraft and expressing outrage when requested military planes were not available. "It is my understanding there are no G5s available for the House during the Memorial Day recess. This is totally unacceptable...The speaker will want to know where the planes are..." wrote Kay King, Director of the House Office of Interparliamentary Affairs.
The jet trips often racked up liquor bills that would put a small cruise ship to shame and were also being requested to fly her grandchildren around. Small wonder that Pelosi believes "it shouldn't be that public officials have to watch their backs every moment".
Update: Heh:
So, if they freeze the military budget as Pelosi wants, will they still use military aviation as a personal airline & babysitting service?I'd be happy if they just did away with the open bar.
Given that Jack Murtha apparently had no problem publicly threatening the Department of Defense over initial perceived resistance to Pelosi's demands, I'd be interested to know what, exactly, prompted this clarification of the rules.
Spain Super Serious
6:45 pm, 2/3/10
If you've been following the news in Europe at all, you've heard about Greece's debt problems and the ensuing crisis it's created for the European Union and, potentially, for the Euro currency itself.
With other weaker European economies in danger of following after Greece and fears growing that stronger European economies might be dragged in with them, Spain wanted to send a message.
At every turn, those reforms have been foiled by riot-prone mobs who have no intention of working even a single additional moment to get their state-guaranteed benefits. Now that the short-sightedness is finally coming home to roost, it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out in the short-term, and, in fact, whether the European Union itself will survive the next decade.
Given widespread opposition in many European countries to surrendering their national sovereignty under a European Constitution and the apparent urgency felt by Eurocrats to consolidate their power, I wouldn't bet on it. The Lisbon Treaty, after all, only passed Ireland (the only country where they couldn't suppress a public referendum) after two attempts, and then only through fear and intimidation that cashed in on economic worries.
At some point, something is going to happen that pushes the wrong people over the wrong line, and resentment will probably build rather rapidly. The real question is whether Europeans will blame each other, falling back on traditional animosities, or direct their anger at the institutions of the European Union itself.
With other weaker European economies in danger of following after Greece and fears growing that stronger European economies might be dragged in with them, Spain wanted to send a message.
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister, said in Davos this week: "We are a serious country and we will fulfil our promises."Their plan for fulfilling those promises was to do the inevitable: rein in their fiscal policy and increase their retirement age, to 67. Predictably, workers are displeased, and it's now unclear whether Spain will be able to follow through. A Fistful of Euros:
Unfortunately, enthusiasm for the new-found seriousness doesn't seem to have lasted long, since this just morning (and only three days after that strong demonstration of will for change) the Spanish press inform us that Elena Salgado - faced with strike threats from the main trade union organisations - is having second thoughts, and is willing to be "flexible", since the proposal for pension reform, was only that, a proposal which is up for negotiation.It was six years ago that European leaders admitted their dream of unseating the United States as the world's leading economic power was a Quixotic farce, and five years ago that the Central Intelligence Agency predicted that the European Union would collapse by 2020 without massive welfare entitlement reforms.
At every turn, those reforms have been foiled by riot-prone mobs who have no intention of working even a single additional moment to get their state-guaranteed benefits. Now that the short-sightedness is finally coming home to roost, it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out in the short-term, and, in fact, whether the European Union itself will survive the next decade.
Given widespread opposition in many European countries to surrendering their national sovereignty under a European Constitution and the apparent urgency felt by Eurocrats to consolidate their power, I wouldn't bet on it. The Lisbon Treaty, after all, only passed Ireland (the only country where they couldn't suppress a public referendum) after two attempts, and then only through fear and intimidation that cashed in on economic worries.
It was lashing with rain but that wasn't the full reason Paul Callaghan was finding it hard to muster up the enthusiasm to mark his X. "I'm here because I have a vote and, basically, I've been told what to do with it," he said gloomily as he stood outside one of Dublin's polling stations in O'Connell Street on Saturday afternoon. "I've no job and neither has my wife. Every time I turn on the television some politician tells me that only the EU can save this country now. I don't want to do it, I feel disloyal, but today I am voting yes. It isn't how I voted 16 months ago, but I've been left feeling I have no choice....We all have this horrible feeling that we will be made to do this referendum over and over again until we return the answer they want."The final signatory, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, gave what may be the most openly disdainful signing speech in recent memory.
Veronica Meehan, who lost her job six months ago and the day before polling had queued outside the city's Marks & Spencer's store along with 699 other hopefuls vying for a part-time Christmas job, said she resented voting yes but felt she had no other choice. "...Part of me feels I have been brainwashed. That unless I vote yes and turn myself into a European the Irish economy will never be in the state to provide people like me with employment.
Siobhan Keenan, who had braved the now torrential rain, stood huddled in a doorway patiently waiting. Her concern, she said, was the loss of the ideal that Ireland has always held dear. "...I am voting yes, but I feel that I have been bullied into it. Ireland has always been proud of its independence. Today we are letting it slip away. Now we will be swamped in a wider Europe."
At some point, something is going to happen that pushes the wrong people over the wrong line, and resentment will probably build rather rapidly. The real question is whether Europeans will blame each other, falling back on traditional animosities, or direct their anger at the institutions of the European Union itself.
That’s an insult!
5:36 pm, 2/3/10
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, was unhappy with left wing Democrats who wanted to steamroll moderate Democrats and pass even more liberals policies than they already were:
To disability activists. Heh.
"F---ing retarded," Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.Emanuel, realizing the gravity of this remark, has apologized repeatedly.
To disability activists. Heh.
That Was Fast
5:16 pm, 2/3/10
Sadly, Illinois Republicans aren't getting Adam Andrzejewski for Governor, but, hilariously, Illinois Democrats are getting Alexi Giannoulias for Senate:
The police sirens are kind of a nice touch.
Giannoulias, interestingly, appears to have had no professional experience whatsoever aside from his work at his family's bank and a brief stint on a Greek basketball team, yet that was no obstacle to getting endorsed by Barack Obama for Illinois State Treasurer. That's apparently how far a few connections can take you in Chicago.
No significant professional achievements, a suspicious background full of shady characters, and a brief and unimpressive career in state government? Hey, it was enough to get Obama his Senate seat. Maybe Giannoulias can aim to run against him in the 2012 primary: he'll be just as qualified.
The police sirens are kind of a nice touch.
Giannoulias, interestingly, appears to have had no professional experience whatsoever aside from his work at his family's bank and a brief stint on a Greek basketball team, yet that was no obstacle to getting endorsed by Barack Obama for Illinois State Treasurer. That's apparently how far a few connections can take you in Chicago.
No significant professional achievements, a suspicious background full of shady characters, and a brief and unimpressive career in state government? Hey, it was enough to get Obama his Senate seat. Maybe Giannoulias can aim to run against him in the 2012 primary: he'll be just as qualified.
Getting a Rise
4:04 pm, 2/3/10
If you work in an environment that is frequently televised, you should probably not be looking at pornography. You'll end up on YouTube.
Media Bias Blinders…Activate!
4:43 pm, 2/2/10
Founding Bloggers on the apparent local media blackout of Lech Walesa's endorsement of Adam Andrzejewski for Governor of Illinois:
Last week, Nobel Laureate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and former president of Poland, Lech Walesa, traveled to Chicago to endorse a political candidate for governor of Illinois.Don't worry, they're just fringe radicals! Nothing to see here. (Video at the link.)
Who he endorsed doesn't matter. The fact that he is here endorsing anyone at all should be considered newsworthy.
Unfortunately for Chicago residents, and the Polish community specifically, if you get your news from the city's local television stations, you might not have even known that he was in town, let alone that he attended a Tea Party, and endorsed Adam Andrzejewski for governor.
The Word Is “Fear”
6:28 am, 2/2/10
Five things to watch in the Illinois primary.
Under normal circumstances, Democratic workers would be pulling out all the stops to grease the wheels for establishment candidates such as Quinn and Giannoulias. But with a Blagojevich trial scheduled for June, it's not entirely clear that the machine will be operating at peak efficiency.Good.
"What's left of the machine is really fractured, not only impacting the governor's race but the Senate race. Frankly, workers are more afraid of going to jail," Kurth said.
Andrzejewski for Governor
12:05 am, 2/2/10
So it seems that Rush Limbaugh is pushing Adam Andrzejewski in Tuesday's Republican primary. Bruno Behrend at Extreme Wisdom has been a stalwart Andrzejewski supporter from day one, and had been trying to get me on board, but until the last few weeks, I hadn't been able to invest enough time in politics to make heads or tails out of the race.
However, the last week alone has been quite remarkable, in that Andrzejewski, an unknown running on an anti-corruption and limited government platform in a state where government is so bloated and chronically corrupt that it defies the comprehension of mortal men, has attracted the public endorsement of former Polish President and anti-Soviet freedom fighter Lech Walesa, rallying conservatives, libertarians, and the Polish community in Chicago, the world's largest outside of Poland.
Now, internal polling at the Andrzejewski campaign is said to suggest that he may be only a few points behind, and that was presumably prior to any much-needed exposure Limbaugh's endorsement will generate tomorrow.
I was remiss to not have found the time to give this race the attention it warranted months ago, but given the choice, Adrzejewski, though still an underdog, has a solid message for the times, for Illinois state government, and for an Illinois GOP desperately in need of new... well, new everything. I've spent years chronicling just some of the epic waste, criminality, and incompetence of Illinois state government (too much of it bipartisan) on this blog, and I hope Illinois readers will take tomorrow's opportunity to signal their disapproval.
Update: The Hill's John Feehery argues that the outcome will really be about Obama's budget.
However, the last week alone has been quite remarkable, in that Andrzejewski, an unknown running on an anti-corruption and limited government platform in a state where government is so bloated and chronically corrupt that it defies the comprehension of mortal men, has attracted the public endorsement of former Polish President and anti-Soviet freedom fighter Lech Walesa, rallying conservatives, libertarians, and the Polish community in Chicago, the world's largest outside of Poland.
Now, internal polling at the Andrzejewski campaign is said to suggest that he may be only a few points behind, and that was presumably prior to any much-needed exposure Limbaugh's endorsement will generate tomorrow.
I was remiss to not have found the time to give this race the attention it warranted months ago, but given the choice, Adrzejewski, though still an underdog, has a solid message for the times, for Illinois state government, and for an Illinois GOP desperately in need of new... well, new everything. I've spent years chronicling just some of the epic waste, criminality, and incompetence of Illinois state government (too much of it bipartisan) on this blog, and I hope Illinois readers will take tomorrow's opportunity to signal their disapproval.
Update: The Hill's John Feehery argues that the outcome will really be about Obama's budget.
All of these Illinois Republicans are campaigning on the long-term fiscal situation in this country. All of them are getting significant traction on the issue of out-of-control Washington spending. And all of them, should they win, will be faced with the tough choices that come with declining revenues and expanding interest payments.Yes, they will. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal notes, the ship of state is taking on water so fast that voters seem to have at least partially forgotten about Rod Blagojevich.
President Barack Obama consciously invoked Abraham Lincoln's memory when he started his campaign in Springfield, Ill. The imagery was inspirational, and because Obama was our first very serious black presidential candidate, it was historically fitting.
But there was another Illinois politician who left a mark on our body politic who might serve as an inspiration to these young guns. Everett Dirksen was the one who said, "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money."
The Obama budget has hundreds of billions here and hundreds of billions there, and that budget is making the taxpayers very nervous. The next generation of Illinois leaders, led by Kirk, will have to deal with this spending spree for the rest of their political careers.
The race, which ends with Democratic and Republican primaries on Tuesday, has become a contest to convince voters who best can pull the state out of a financial ditch.Speaking of weak leaders who guided people right into a ditch, isn't that how a lot of people view McKenna's time at the helm of the Illinois GOP?
In the Democratic primary, current Gov. Patrick Quinn and Comptroller Daniel W. Hynes, who are roughly tied in recent polls, have battled over short-term borrowing to pay state bills. The Republican primary is a close race between former Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan; state Sen. Kirk Dillard; and Andy McKenna, the former chairman of the state Republican Party.
The state budget deficit could exceed $11 billion. The pension fund is nearly $80 billion underfunded. Unemployment, at 10.8%, is among the worst in the country. Michigan, ground zero for the auto industry's collapse, is the only state with a higher ratio of residents leaving to those moving in over the past 12 months, according to a United Van Lines survey.
"Jobs, population growth, economic growth-it's all going in the wrong direction, and that was true before the downturn," Mr. McKenna says. "People blame weak leaders who allowed spending to get reckless."
Has anyone brought him his machine gun yet?
11:11 pm, 2/1/10
Two years ago, I posted a story about Jacob Zuma, the ultra-corrupt "proud Zulu warrior" who, incredibly, seemed on course to take the reins as President of South Africa.
Supporters, able to put aside that his personal theme song was entitled "Bring Me My Machine Gun", that he could not stop singing it everywhere he went (including during his own trials and in the middle of sessions of parliament), and that he apparently liked to rape family friends as a hobby, sealed the deal last year. Zuma is now in charge, celebrating the birth of his 20th child.
Or seventh, depending on whether or not he marries his other fiancee first.
Supporters, able to put aside that his personal theme song was entitled "Bring Me My Machine Gun", that he could not stop singing it everywhere he went (including during his own trials and in the middle of sessions of parliament), and that he apparently liked to rape family friends as a hobby, sealed the deal last year. Zuma is now in charge, celebrating the birth of his 20th child.
His latest offspring, a girl, was reported on Sunday to have been born in October to Sonono Khoza, 39, the divorced daughter of Irvin Khoza, according to the country's Sunday Times newspaper. Mr Khoza is the chairman of the organising committee for the football World Cup finals to be held in South Africa later this year.Mr. Khoza was reportedly not altogether thrilled with the news, but the family is now supposedly "excited" at the prospect of their daughter becoming Zuma's sixth wife.
Mr Zuma, 67, is a proud Zulu traditionalist, and as well as his polygamy - he married his third current wife and fifth overall, Thobeka Madiba, earlier this month - he has had a number of children out of wedlock.
Or seventh, depending on whether or not he marries his other fiancee first.
The Big Question
10:41 pm, 2/1/10
The Hill asks:
With a $1.27 trillion deficit projected by economists, will approving President Barack Obama's $3.8 trillion budget hurt Democrats in November?Yes, but not nearly as much as it's going to hurt the rest of us. On the other hand, once the inflation hits, that may seem like a fairly trivial number.
In light of the iPod Mini, this is the iPod Maxi. Alternately, the Maxi Pad.
12:30 am, 1/28/10
After doing some reading about the new Apple iPad, I have to agree with the conclusions of Gizmodo's Adam Frucci. I'm obviously just not enough of a hipster to "get it".
I'm an iPhone owner, and I think the Fisher-Price interface and technical limitations are perfect for a handheld mobile device, particularly one that primarily functions as a phone. However, all they've done with the iPad is removed the phone, made it several times larger and heavier, and handed it back to the consumer. It seems like a toy, a gigantic, clumsy iPod Touch, and, as far as I can tell, little more.
You still can't view Flash on the web, so it's not really a web device. You can't multitask, so it's not a productivity device. It's too large to be a convenient PDA. It isn't a phone. The screen is improperly proportioned to be an ideal media viewer. So what is it supposed to be? If it can't actually replace the netbook in a user's briefcase or backpack, does that user really want yet another expensive gadget when it offers them the same limited connectivity as the phone in their pocket?
I'm an iPhone owner, and I think the Fisher-Price interface and technical limitations are perfect for a handheld mobile device, particularly one that primarily functions as a phone. However, all they've done with the iPad is removed the phone, made it several times larger and heavier, and handed it back to the consumer. It seems like a toy, a gigantic, clumsy iPod Touch, and, as far as I can tell, little more.
You still can't view Flash on the web, so it's not really a web device. You can't multitask, so it's not a productivity device. It's too large to be a convenient PDA. It isn't a phone. The screen is improperly proportioned to be an ideal media viewer. So what is it supposed to be? If it can't actually replace the netbook in a user's briefcase or backpack, does that user really want yet another expensive gadget when it offers them the same limited connectivity as the phone in their pocket?
State of the Union Address
12:22 am, 1/28/10
I'll have more thoughts on this in the next day or two as I go through the full speech, but when Gibbs told us to expect President Obama to tell Congress why Americans are angry, I had hoped that this would mean Obama was going to first point a finger at himself, then slowly draw it across the room, leveling it at each member of Congress, one by one. I feel so disappointed.
At 3:00 AM, she’d prefer to be sleeping.
10:56 pm, 1/27/10
As it turns out, Hillary Clinton isn't really that interested in a challenging, 24/7 job.
Good thing she wasn't trying to get an even more stressful job, right?
Good thing she wasn't trying to get an even more stressful job, right?
Signs of Decline
9:10 pm, 1/27/10
In the UK:
1) Job advertisements requesting reliable workers denied on the basis that they discriminate against the lazy.
2) Schools punishing children because their parents work hard and make responsible financial decisions.
3) ABBAWorld, the worst theme park on Earth.
1) Job advertisements requesting reliable workers denied on the basis that they discriminate against the lazy.
2) Schools punishing children because their parents work hard and make responsible financial decisions.
3) ABBAWorld, the worst theme park on Earth.
Not So Secret Now
9:02 pm, 1/27/10
The Washington Post has learned, via senior White House officials, that Obama has personally approved secret operations against terrorists in Yemen.
I hope nobody tells Dianne Feinstein.
The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen.He probably figured it would never come up, since it's a secret.
I hope nobody tells Dianne Feinstein.
The Teleprompter is Skynet
11:04 pm, 1/26/10
You know, even giving him the benefit of the doubt, Obama just sets himself up for the teleprompter jokes now:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Obama Speaks to a Sixth-Grade Classroom | ||||
| ||||
Apparently, We’re All Really Screwed
6:55 pm, 1/26/10
The Supreme Court's recent campaign finance ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, freeing corporate entities to donate to politicians on free speech grounds, gripped the left in an elegantly synchronized apoplectic fit. ChicagoNow blogger Stephen Markley's reaction neatly summarizes the thinking:
Besides, what? Now judicial review is only a good thing when it creates the results Democrats desire? In all seriousness, putting aside the horrors that can be easily justified in the name of "the public good" (who's to say that "Big X" is wrong, and why shouldn't voters be free to decide for themselves instead of having the concerns of major players in the debate suppressed?), it should be obvious that corporations would like to spend as little of their money as possible on politics and will only spend as much of it as actually gets a result. The real causal relationship here is not that large contributions cause otherwise honest politicians to turn into William Jefferson, it's that many politicians are effectively running a protection racket, and the scope of the harm they can do to those who slight them guarantees that their clout will be richly rewarded, one way or another. If there's anything voters should have learned from watching the death spiral of Rod Blagojevich, it's that even children's hospitals and the media are not safe.
(Personally, I learned the healing value of laughter, but my Blagojevich experience was somewhat different from most people.)
Aware of this dynamic, some executives are already worried:
In Citizens United, the Supreme Court set out to address a very real and undemocratic injustice, "reforms" so restrictive that they criminalized private citizens who chose to work together as a non-profit corporation to finance the creation of a political documentary. As Matt Welch suggested, "let's boil it down to the essential words: Political documentary, banned, government." That's a poisonous and reprehensible notion, and in resolving it, they correctly reasoned that if they can't bar non-profit corporations from financing political advocacy and are exempting media corporations, they also can't arbitrarily bar other for-profit corporations. All the decision reaffirms is that the real responsibility lies with us. We elect our politicians, and no campaign donation or advocacy campaign can be so vast as to force our hand at the ballot box. If we want to dry up the money from special interests we don't support, all we have to do is stop rewarding abuses of power with our votes on election day. The money will quit flowing just that quickly. In the meantime, if we can't be trusted to actually consider what the few politicians on our ballot support and who supports them, then all the reforms in the world serve only to hide the fact that we have no idea what we're doing. There is no legislation that can fix that.
Update: Reason's Steve Chapman:
Campaign Finance: We Are All Really ScrewedClearly, we're all going to die in a fire caused by the safety regulations that will now be overturned, because up to this point, special interests have had little influence on the system. It's only a matter of time before the tobacco companies cram billions of dollars down the throats of innocent, helpless political candidates, leading unwitting voters to elect a Congress which passes mandatory, universal "cancer-for-all" legislation. Organized crime syndicates will be able to use front organizations to funnel money to their political allies, something which has never happened before. (Imagine the crazy, topsy-turvy world where some sort of "mafia" might use the noble labor unions in this way, or where an Islamic advocacy group might rake in massive funding from foreign backers. Unheard of.)
Like I said yesterday, last week might have been one of the worst in modern American history.
People have not yet grasped the far-reaching and terrifying ramifications of this. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is basically the 9/11 of government corruption: It has opened the floodgates to a new, frightening era.
This ruling essentially opens the door for any corporation (and unions--big whoop), from Big Oil to Big Food to Big Health Insurance to spend as much money as possible defeating candidates who oppose their profits in the name of silly things like "the public good." It's not just corporations either: countries like China could very easily foot the bill to pick and choose candidates that will have policies beneficial to their interests. Hell, even al-Qaeda could set up a multi-national corporation and start funding their preferred candidates.
Besides, what? Now judicial review is only a good thing when it creates the results Democrats desire? In all seriousness, putting aside the horrors that can be easily justified in the name of "the public good" (who's to say that "Big X" is wrong, and why shouldn't voters be free to decide for themselves instead of having the concerns of major players in the debate suppressed?), it should be obvious that corporations would like to spend as little of their money as possible on politics and will only spend as much of it as actually gets a result. The real causal relationship here is not that large contributions cause otherwise honest politicians to turn into William Jefferson, it's that many politicians are effectively running a protection racket, and the scope of the harm they can do to those who slight them guarantees that their clout will be richly rewarded, one way or another. If there's anything voters should have learned from watching the death spiral of Rod Blagojevich, it's that even children's hospitals and the media are not safe.
(Personally, I learned the healing value of laughter, but my Blagojevich experience was somewhat different from most people.)
Aware of this dynamic, some executives are already worried:
Dozens of current and former corporate executives have a message for Congress: Quit hitting us up for campaign cash.It's a legitimate complaint, but public financing is certainly not an answer. The most disorganized, lazy, and unpopular candidates shouldn't be artificially elevated to the same level as others. Voters, whether they're acting on behalf of their economic concerns or their home and family, should not have to see any of their resources diverted to political causes they disagree with and should be free to support those that they do as much as energetically as they like. It's a marketplace of ideas, not a commune, and if we don't trust our politicians enough to let them accept donations freely and transparently, it's insane to think that they can be trusted to handle public financing responsibly, or even in a way that serves any purpose other than consolidating their power and securing their station. (Consider the Solomaic wisdom with which they've handled ballot access and redistricting.)
Roughly 40 executives from companies including Playboy Enterprises, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's, the Seagram's liquor company, toymaker Hasbro, Delta Airlines and Men's Wearhouse sent a letter to congressional leaders Friday urging them to approve public financing for House and Senate campaigns. They say they are tired of getting fundraising calls from lawmakers - and fear it will only get worse after Thursday's Supreme Court ruling.
In Citizens United, the Supreme Court set out to address a very real and undemocratic injustice, "reforms" so restrictive that they criminalized private citizens who chose to work together as a non-profit corporation to finance the creation of a political documentary. As Matt Welch suggested, "let's boil it down to the essential words: Political documentary, banned, government." That's a poisonous and reprehensible notion, and in resolving it, they correctly reasoned that if they can't bar non-profit corporations from financing political advocacy and are exempting media corporations, they also can't arbitrarily bar other for-profit corporations. All the decision reaffirms is that the real responsibility lies with us. We elect our politicians, and no campaign donation or advocacy campaign can be so vast as to force our hand at the ballot box. If we want to dry up the money from special interests we don't support, all we have to do is stop rewarding abuses of power with our votes on election day. The money will quit flowing just that quickly. In the meantime, if we can't be trusted to actually consider what the few politicians on our ballot support and who supports them, then all the reforms in the world serve only to hide the fact that we have no idea what we're doing. There is no legislation that can fix that.
Update: Reason's Steve Chapman:
It is often argued that corporate speech may be banned because corporations enjoy certain privileges afforded by law. But it's a longstanding constitutional axiom that the government may not require the surrender of constitutional rights in exchange for state-furnished benefits - say, barring criticism of Congress by residents of public housing.John Stossel:
Once you grant the government that sort of power, it is bound to expand. Newspapers could be forbidden to make endorsements. Right now, media companies are exempt from the ban. But why should a newspaper be free to spend money urging voters to support a candidate, while other companies are not?
So now we are being served dire warnings that "corporate money ... may now overwhelm both the contributions of individuals and the faith they may harbor in their democracy." (Are similarly freed wealthy labor unions potted plants?) But the same Post editorial conceded that corporate money was "never lacking in the American political process." So what's the difference?The difference is that the Supreme Court has reminded Congress that there's actually a Constitution, and that they're actually bound by it. This angers the Leviathan.
Bipartisanship Means They’re Working Together, Against You
6:53 pm, 1/26/10
Both parties share one important plank in their platforms: neither Democrats nor Republicans are all that serious about reducing the deficit.
We learned it from watching you, Keith
3:36 am, 1/21/10
I'll leave you with Keith Olbermann's most recent bout of hysteria.
...said the rabid, emotionally unstable, hyper-partisan shill.
He says Brown should have been "laughed off the stage" by conservatives as "unqualified" and "a disaster in the making" at any other time in our history? Are liberals even allowed to bring that up with Obama still in office?
The reference is obvious, but what's the implication here? That conservatives had a point?
Update: Despite the predictable the initial reaction (summary: "we just weren't liberal enough"), it seems that some Democrats are quickly realizing that the ship is, in fact, sinking, and are now moving to "distance themselves" from the whirling Obama vortex of destruction:
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: "I am very upset by what he's not done in terms of rights of gays and lesbians."
Paul Krugman: "He wasn't the one we've been waiting for."
At least we might finally get some "change". Even John McCain is afraid that he might not be conservative enough to keep his seat, and California Republicans are locking on to Barbara Boxer:
...said the rabid, emotionally unstable, hyper-partisan shill.
He says Brown should have been "laughed off the stage" by conservatives as "unqualified" and "a disaster in the making" at any other time in our history? Are liberals even allowed to bring that up with Obama still in office?
The reference is obvious, but what's the implication here? That conservatives had a point?
Update: Despite the predictable the initial reaction (summary: "we just weren't liberal enough"), it seems that some Democrats are quickly realizing that the ship is, in fact, sinking, and are now moving to "distance themselves" from the whirling Obama vortex of destruction:
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: "I am very upset by what he's not done in terms of rights of gays and lesbians."
Paul Krugman: "He wasn't the one we've been waiting for."
At least we might finally get some "change". Even John McCain is afraid that he might not be conservative enough to keep his seat, and California Republicans are locking on to Barbara Boxer:
"We hope Barack Obama will do for Barbara Boxer in November what he did for Martha Coakley this week."Heh. As I said after the election, the Democrats overplaying their hand here and destroying themselves was as inevitable as sunrise.
Apparently, I’ll get there just in time for the massive tsunami.
11:34 pm, 1/20/10
I had wanted to post a substantial bit on the Brown victory today, as well as a few bits of trivia, but ended up at the office until 11 PM. The weather here is absolutely awful, and has been for some time, so I'm taking the girlfriend away to swim in a pool of spiced rum in the Bahamas this weekend, leaving Friday morning.
Naturally, I couldn't have picked a better time to be near the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault.
Anyway, I won't be around this weekend, and I'm not sure if I'll get the posting done before I go.
However, I hope you guys have a great weekend, and I'm really happy to see some of the familiar faces who are still around. Posting resumes Tuesday.
Really.
Naturally, I couldn't have picked a better time to be near the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault.
Anyway, I won't be around this weekend, and I'm not sure if I'll get the posting done before I go.
However, I hope you guys have a great weekend, and I'm really happy to see some of the familiar faces who are still around. Posting resumes Tuesday.
Really.
The Default Explanation
8:31 pm, 1/18/10
Massachusetts Democrats, watching the Martha Coakley trainwreck from front row seats, figure out who's really to blame.
Even in light of the ad misspelling Massachusetts, Coakley's claim that there are no terrorists in Afghanistan, her staffer apparently shoving a reporter to the ground, her claim that devout Catholics don't belong in the emergency room, her bizarre attack on Curt Schilling, and that insane mailer accusing her opponent of wanting to deny care to all rape victims (a particularly unwise choice considering that Coakley is known as having once refused to charge a powerful union boss's son then set him free without bail despite his having been arrested for literally raping a baby with a curling iron)?
Ed Schultz extolling the virtues of election fraud certainly didn't help, nor did the union members getting caught taking payoffs to show up carrying Coakley signs.
How about this site, put together by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, purporting to document "Brown's Lies", but which essentially amounts to complaints about two murky votes on women's health (Greyhawk: "Did they really think emphasizing Brown's opposition to forcing Nuns to perform abortions was a vote-getter for their side?"), the apparent dark secret that he is actually a Republican, and, incredibly, that he has supported a couple of tax and fee increases.
What mini-Machiavelli at the DSCC thought that might be the smoking gun that would turn the election around for them? Democrats accuse Scott Brown of raising taxes? That's not just the pot calling the kettle black, that's the pot hurling reprehensible racial epithets.
I mean, I'm just throwing this out there, but Martha Coakley and the Democratic Party may very well have a hand, however small, in her political demise.
For any mixed feelings anyone anywhere on the political spectrum might have about Brown, they shouldn't be mixed at all about Coakley. Putting aside ideology, on principle alone, her campaign deserves to go down in screaming flames.
Update: Representative Chris Van Hollen, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tries to defend Coakley and ends up putting his foot in the Chappaquiddick:
Is Coakley's race some kind of practical joke?
As audience members streamed out of Pres. Obama's rally on behalf of AG Martha Coakley (D) here tonight, the consensus was that the fault for Coakley's now-floundering MA SEN bid lies with one person -- George W. Bush.Really?
Even in light of the ad misspelling Massachusetts, Coakley's claim that there are no terrorists in Afghanistan, her staffer apparently shoving a reporter to the ground, her claim that devout Catholics don't belong in the emergency room, her bizarre attack on Curt Schilling, and that insane mailer accusing her opponent of wanting to deny care to all rape victims (a particularly unwise choice considering that Coakley is known as having once refused to charge a powerful union boss's son then set him free without bail despite his having been arrested for literally raping a baby with a curling iron)?
Ed Schultz extolling the virtues of election fraud certainly didn't help, nor did the union members getting caught taking payoffs to show up carrying Coakley signs.
How about this site, put together by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, purporting to document "Brown's Lies", but which essentially amounts to complaints about two murky votes on women's health (Greyhawk: "Did they really think emphasizing Brown's opposition to forcing Nuns to perform abortions was a vote-getter for their side?"), the apparent dark secret that he is actually a Republican, and, incredibly, that he has supported a couple of tax and fee increases.
What mini-Machiavelli at the DSCC thought that might be the smoking gun that would turn the election around for them? Democrats accuse Scott Brown of raising taxes? That's not just the pot calling the kettle black, that's the pot hurling reprehensible racial epithets.
I mean, I'm just throwing this out there, but Martha Coakley and the Democratic Party may very well have a hand, however small, in her political demise.
Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), speaking with a gaggle of reporters after the event, said that while state Sen. Scott Brown (R) offers voters a quick fix, in reality, the problems created by "George Bush and his cronies" are not so easily solved.You might even vote for someone like Barack Obama. Maybe that's why former Obama voters are defecting!
"If you think there's magic out there and things can be turned around overnight, then you would vote for someone who could promise you that, like Scott Brown," Kennedy said.
For any mixed feelings anyone anywhere on the political spectrum might have about Brown, they shouldn't be mixed at all about Coakley. Putting aside ideology, on principle alone, her campaign deserves to go down in screaming flames.
Update: Representative Chris Van Hollen, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tries to defend Coakley and ends up putting his foot in the Chappaquiddick:
"Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?" Van Hollen said.Wait, who are we talking about here?
Is Coakley's race some kind of practical joke?
Poorly Conceived Battle Cries
8:26 pm, 1/18/10
President Obama:
"We want our money back."Ironically, once the debt catches up to us, that'll probably be his opponent's campaign slogan.
While there, she dodged many snipers.
7:57 pm, 1/18/10
Hillary Clinton is the political "Topper", the Dilbert character who always has to one-up everybody else's anecdotes:
Really, it didn't sound good enough to say that she spent some time in Haiti? It has to become her actual honeymoon destination?
The Clintons have a long-running involvement with Haiti, where they spent their honeymoon.According to her book, her honeymoon was in Acapulco. Bill's going to be ticked.
Really, it didn't sound good enough to say that she spent some time in Haiti? It has to become her actual honeymoon destination?
Barack Obama Doesn’t Care About Black People
6:07 pm, 1/17/10
Longtime readers of Free Will may recall this blog's extensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
Of the things that Bush screwed up, the one for which he was perhaps most widely criticized was the one that was legitimately not his doing. The police power, which provides for general safety issues like rescue work and evacuations, lies directly with the states, and Blanco was so fabulously irresponsible with that power that she not only rejected offers of evacuation help from Amtrak and other organizations with transportation resources at their disposal, but apparently had not even contemplated implementing the longstanding emergency evacuation plan until, by her own admission, Bush called her on the phone, wondering why she wasn't doing anything. Even when the evacuation did get started, it's as if nobody could find a surviving copy of the plan, so they just winged it.
Federal support ramped up in a few days, as Lousiana had been promised all along. All they had to do was hold down the fort until the cavalry arrived, but instead, New Orleans burned because the state of Louisiana's monolithic Democratic political establishment, rather than taking charge, expended every ounce of available effort pointing fingers in every possible outward direction, with Senator Landrieu even threatening to "punch" anyone who tried to suggest that they had performed with anything less than transcendent and shining genius. Blanco's non-performance was such a liability that rather than suffering the slings and arrows of a public which had seen nearly two thousand citizens die, she wisely chose not to run for another term, paving the way for voters to call a mulligan.
There's no doubt that FEMA's ultimate response was poorly coordinated, but no more so than would be expected from any agency which was picking up the slack from a number of other failed institutions, and trying to honor responsibilities that should have never been passed to it. There's also no doubt that Brownie did not, in fact, do a heck of a job, and Bush blundered in saying that he did. However, there's also little else the federal government could have been asked to do to alleviate the initial suffering or loss of life in New Orleans. That's what state and local agencies are there for, and Democrats who pretended otherwise, shielding Blanco from the public retaliation she so richly deserved, have never been properly held to account for it.
However, the media's narrative was already written, and, as too often happens, rather than fighting back, Republicans running for federal office raced to promise to fix problems that were outside of their jurisdiction to begin with. Democrats, of course, tripped all over themselves vowing to fix them even harder.
I bring this up because of this article, regarding Obama's apparent inability to round up the unicorns and sprinkle fairy dust over Haiti, something that, if the Democratic fury about Bush's handling of Katrina had any merit at all, should be a cakewalk for the Great One, since he cares and Bush didn't:
Presidentin', as it turns out, is hard work, and the institutional failures in Haiti are killing people in real time. The very best efforts of a lot of good people, as it turns out, aren't nearly enough to overcome the obstacles in front of them. However, you can expect little media comment on the topic beyond this post on a Newsweek blog, because those obstacles are not really Obama's fault, anymore than they were Bush's. Disaster management is hard, especially when you're trying to do it in a place where the infrastructure and local institutions have utterly crumbled, or, in Haiti's case, where they barely existed in the first place.
Actually, some people would say that about Louisiana, too, but I digress.
When you look at it that way, it would only be fair if Obama were scapegoated just the same, wouldn't it? After all, Democrats claimed that it was unreasonable to blame local officials during Katrina because the disaster was just "too big" for them to handle, and the federal government should've been expected to take total responsibility. Putting aside that we now know Blanco explicitly blocked Bush's efforts to do just that, Democrats can hardly duck out of this one by simply claiming that Haiti's disaster is "too big" for the world's leading superpower. Even under Bush, we were supposed to be able to save everyone in New Orleans, so there's no good reason that Obama shouldn't be able to save everyone in Port-Au-Prince, is there? Can't he fly around the Earth in reverse and unwind the earthquake, like in Superman?
An obvious answer, of course, would be that it isn't our job to save Port au Prince, but why not? Democrats acted as if only gross Presidential incompetence could explain what we saw in Louisiana and, now, in Haiti. It's supposed to be easy to save a broken city, Americans are supposed to be able to show the rest of the world how disaster relief is done, and admitting that it's more complicated than that would ruin the Katrina narrative.
Obama should, if we're interested in fairness, be held to at least the same standard on his commitments in Haiti as Bush was held to in New Orleans.
It's that, or the Democrats and liberal journalists who tore Bush apart over Katrina are going to let this slide, reminding us how the double standard works and suggesting that those individuals are, in fact, the vile hypocrites and opportunists Republicans accused them of being at the time.
I fully expect the latter.
(In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I worked with Michelle Catalano of the late A Small Victory to organize a charity drive and bring a truckload of school supplies to displaced children who had been sent to Baton Rouge and Houston. Now, if you have anything to spare, I encourage you to give to Doctors Without Borders, which has 800 personnel in Haiti, currently working without facilities, providing the life-saving skills that are most needed there right now. (Of course, you could give to the American Red Cross, but it's entirely possible that you could swim to Haiti with the money in your teeth before it will do the same good.)
Update: Instapundit:
Update: Greetings to all the Instapunditeers. Sadly, I don't have an RSS feed up for you to subscribe to, and have only recently resumed blogging after an extended hiatus, but if you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll make the site a part of your regular routine, as there's a lot more regular content coming.
Of the things that Bush screwed up, the one for which he was perhaps most widely criticized was the one that was legitimately not his doing. The police power, which provides for general safety issues like rescue work and evacuations, lies directly with the states, and Blanco was so fabulously irresponsible with that power that she not only rejected offers of evacuation help from Amtrak and other organizations with transportation resources at their disposal, but apparently had not even contemplated implementing the longstanding emergency evacuation plan until, by her own admission, Bush called her on the phone, wondering why she wasn't doing anything. Even when the evacuation did get started, it's as if nobody could find a surviving copy of the plan, so they just winged it.
Federal support ramped up in a few days, as Lousiana had been promised all along. All they had to do was hold down the fort until the cavalry arrived, but instead, New Orleans burned because the state of Louisiana's monolithic Democratic political establishment, rather than taking charge, expended every ounce of available effort pointing fingers in every possible outward direction, with Senator Landrieu even threatening to "punch" anyone who tried to suggest that they had performed with anything less than transcendent and shining genius. Blanco's non-performance was such a liability that rather than suffering the slings and arrows of a public which had seen nearly two thousand citizens die, she wisely chose not to run for another term, paving the way for voters to call a mulligan.
There's no doubt that FEMA's ultimate response was poorly coordinated, but no more so than would be expected from any agency which was picking up the slack from a number of other failed institutions, and trying to honor responsibilities that should have never been passed to it. There's also no doubt that Brownie did not, in fact, do a heck of a job, and Bush blundered in saying that he did. However, there's also little else the federal government could have been asked to do to alleviate the initial suffering or loss of life in New Orleans. That's what state and local agencies are there for, and Democrats who pretended otherwise, shielding Blanco from the public retaliation she so richly deserved, have never been properly held to account for it.
However, the media's narrative was already written, and, as too often happens, rather than fighting back, Republicans running for federal office raced to promise to fix problems that were outside of their jurisdiction to begin with. Democrats, of course, tripped all over themselves vowing to fix them even harder.
I bring this up because of this article, regarding Obama's apparent inability to round up the unicorns and sprinkle fairy dust over Haiti, something that, if the Democratic fury about Bush's handling of Katrina had any merit at all, should be a cakewalk for the Great One, since he cares and Bush didn't:
Anger built Saturday at Haiti's US-controlled main airport, where aid flights were still being turned away and poor coordination continued to hamper the relief effort four days on.Angry mobs, starving people wandering aimlessly, corpses piling up in the streets, international criticism, people shouting wild conspiracy theories about how the President doesn't really care about the victims? Cripes, is anybody ever going to get all of those poor people out of the Superdome?
"Let's take over the runway," shouted one voice. "We need to send a message to Obama," cried another.
Control remained in the hands of US forces, who face criticism for the continued disarray at the overwhelmed airfield.
The crowd accused American forces, who were handed control of the airport by Haitian authorities, of monopolizing the airfield's single runway to evacuate their own citizens.
The disorder even appeared to cause diplomatic ripples, with French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet telling reporters he had lodged a complaint with the United States over its handling of the Port-au-Prince airport.
"I have made an official protest to the Americans through the US embassy," he said at the Haitian airport after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away.
A spokesman for the French foreign ministry later denied France had registered protest, saying "Franco-US coordination in emergency aid for Haiti is being handled in the best way possible given the serious difficulties."
"The Haitians haven't been notified about the arrival of planes. And when they do land, there's no one to take charge and a large amount of goods are arriving without coordination," said Haitian government official Michel Chancy.
On Port-au-Prince's streets, the consequences of the coordination breakdown are clear, as traumatized and starving quake survivors approached passing foreigner and begged them for food.
Presidentin', as it turns out, is hard work, and the institutional failures in Haiti are killing people in real time. The very best efforts of a lot of good people, as it turns out, aren't nearly enough to overcome the obstacles in front of them. However, you can expect little media comment on the topic beyond this post on a Newsweek blog, because those obstacles are not really Obama's fault, anymore than they were Bush's. Disaster management is hard, especially when you're trying to do it in a place where the infrastructure and local institutions have utterly crumbled, or, in Haiti's case, where they barely existed in the first place.
Actually, some people would say that about Louisiana, too, but I digress.
When you look at it that way, it would only be fair if Obama were scapegoated just the same, wouldn't it? After all, Democrats claimed that it was unreasonable to blame local officials during Katrina because the disaster was just "too big" for them to handle, and the federal government should've been expected to take total responsibility. Putting aside that we now know Blanco explicitly blocked Bush's efforts to do just that, Democrats can hardly duck out of this one by simply claiming that Haiti's disaster is "too big" for the world's leading superpower. Even under Bush, we were supposed to be able to save everyone in New Orleans, so there's no good reason that Obama shouldn't be able to save everyone in Port-Au-Prince, is there? Can't he fly around the Earth in reverse and unwind the earthquake, like in Superman?
An obvious answer, of course, would be that it isn't our job to save Port au Prince, but why not? Democrats acted as if only gross Presidential incompetence could explain what we saw in Louisiana and, now, in Haiti. It's supposed to be easy to save a broken city, Americans are supposed to be able to show the rest of the world how disaster relief is done, and admitting that it's more complicated than that would ruin the Katrina narrative.
Obama should, if we're interested in fairness, be held to at least the same standard on his commitments in Haiti as Bush was held to in New Orleans.
It's that, or the Democrats and liberal journalists who tore Bush apart over Katrina are going to let this slide, reminding us how the double standard works and suggesting that those individuals are, in fact, the vile hypocrites and opportunists Republicans accused them of being at the time.
I fully expect the latter.
(In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I worked with Michelle Catalano of the late A Small Victory to organize a charity drive and bring a truckload of school supplies to displaced children who had been sent to Baton Rouge and Houston. Now, if you have anything to spare, I encourage you to give to Doctors Without Borders, which has 800 personnel in Haiti, currently working without facilities, providing the life-saving skills that are most needed there right now. (Of course, you could give to the American Red Cross, but it's entirely possible that you could swim to Haiti with the money in your teeth before it will do the same good.)
Update: Instapundit:
Dr. George Milonas writes: "If Obama thinks Bush is such an incredible incompetent, why did he send Bush to help rescue the Haitians? Does he hate black people that much that he is willing to inflict Bush on them?"I think we're starting a meme.
Update: Greetings to all the Instapunditeers. Sadly, I don't have an RSS feed up for you to subscribe to, and have only recently resumed blogging after an extended hiatus, but if you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll make the site a part of your regular routine, as there's a lot more regular content coming.
You Are Advised
4:52 pm, 1/17/10
Consider this article from attorney, former police officer, and gun rights activist Ed Stone:
Schubert, meanwhile, is going to appeal, again.
The message here appears to be that Massachusetts cops can harass you, handcuff you, and potentially brutalize you for lawfully exercising a right explicitly protected in the Constitution, that you may be arrested and charged with a felony for trying to document any of it, and that there's a pretty good chance that the courts will back them in the whole exercise, depending on how willing the officers are to lie about the manner in which you attempted to capture their conduct. You may very well spend years trying to clear your name.
Lovely. I can understand why some people just pack up and leave.
A United States Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld the constitutionality of pointing a gun at any citizen daring to carry, lawfully, a concealed weapon in public....The case stems from a lawyer who sued a police officer after he was detained for lawfully carrying a concealed weapon while in possession of a license to carry concealed. According to the case opinion, the lawyer, Greg Schubert, had a pistol concealed under his suit coat, and Mr. Schubert was walking in what the court described as a "high crime area." At some point a police officer, J.B. Stern, who lived up to his last name, caught a glimpse of the attorney's pistol, and he leapt out of his patrol car "in a dynamic and explosive manner" with his gun drawn, pointing it at the attorney's face....in light of this article from the Boston Globe's Daniel Rowinski:
Officer Stern "executed a pat-frisk," and Mr. Schubert produced his license to carry a concealed weapon. He was disarmed and ordered to stand in front of the patrol car in the hot sun. At some point, the officer locked him in the back seat of the police car and delivered a lecture. Officer Stern "partially Mirandized Schubert, mentioned the possibility of a criminal charge, and told Schubert that he (Stern) was the only person allowed to carry a weapon on his beat."
The attorney sued in federal court, but the District Court threw out his suit, ruling that Officer Stern's behavior is the proper way to treat people who lawfully carry concealed pistols. Mr. Schubert appealed, and the First Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling.
Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager's mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording. Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.Fortunately, both of these cases were eventually dropped, but others have been upheld, one by the state's highest court, with the apparent distinction between whether the recording itself was considered a public act or a covert one. That's asinine, if you consider citizens to have any right to monitor their government at all, since officers inclined to abuse their power would also be inclined to tone it down when they know they're on camera.
"One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,'" Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, "my phone was seized, and I was arrested."
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.
Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.
Schubert, meanwhile, is going to appeal, again.
The message here appears to be that Massachusetts cops can harass you, handcuff you, and potentially brutalize you for lawfully exercising a right explicitly protected in the Constitution, that you may be arrested and charged with a felony for trying to document any of it, and that there's a pretty good chance that the courts will back them in the whole exercise, depending on how willing the officers are to lie about the manner in which you attempted to capture their conduct. You may very well spend years trying to clear your name.
Lovely. I can understand why some people just pack up and leave.
Everything comes with gravy and mayonaise.
4:44 pm, 1/17/10
Apparently, there's a "Quebec Brand".
Premier Jean Charest, his economic ministers and Quebec's diplomatic representatives in the United States met Thursday to elaborate an action plan to broaden Quebec's economic, cultural and education ties with the United States....A Quebec official said the U.S. initiative concerns all sectors and will be focused on a Quebec brand, noting that the Quebec-based Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion have made their mark in the U.S. market.Heh.
Happy New Year, Two Thousand and Ten.
2:53 pm, 1/2/10
I've been overextended this month, and have ended up neglecting the blog, but I did want to say happy New Year. I hope your holidays, whichever ones you may celebrate, were enjoyable and safe. I'll be posting more this week.
…which is what a lot of people expected to find.
11:11 am, 11/23/09
Late last week, hackers broke into the systems of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, Britain's leading "climate change" research center, and made off with in excess of a thousand documents, including hundreds of emails to and from the unit's director, Phil Jones, communicating with other climate scientists around the world.
Jones was a major contributor and active proponent of the claims and proposals contained in the official report issued by United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change, the document waved around these days to justify terrorizing children, terrorizing adults, terrorizing more children, and implementing an international super-bureaucracy to stifle economic growth around the world in the name of the environment.
If you support those justifications and believe they're backed up by objective scientists with the world's best interests at heart, those documents may be somewhat disappointing for you.
The emails are chock full of talk of concealing and destroying data and evidence (most likely illegally), seemingly frank discussions of massaging the data to get desired results, and coordinated efforts to silence critics, some of which involve Michael Mann, creator of the infamous "hockey stick graph", the popular image that purports to show sudden and continuing increases in global temperature coinciding with the industrial revolution, but based on methodology that came under fire because, well, he appeared to be doing exactly what Jones now admits outright that they're doing.
To me, this seems to support some of the very worst claims made about the IPCC, including scientists who claimed that their research was dismissed out of hand and their names used against their will when their research produced the "wrong answer". Jones appears to be unwilling to refute the authenticity of the emails, claiming simply that he "can't remember" what he meant by "hiding the decline".
Andrew Bolt, blogging for Australia's Herald Sun, has been doing a masterful job of exploring these documents and the (predictably limited) commentary from the international press, and I encourage you to check out his site. I suspect my long-standing suspicion, shared by many others, may be all too accurate: many prominent "climate change scientists" are, in fact, in the climate change business. No anthropogenic climate change means no grant money and no clout, so there's going to be a perpetual anthropogenic climate change emergency, whether there really is or not.
Jones was a major contributor and active proponent of the claims and proposals contained in the official report issued by United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change, the document waved around these days to justify terrorizing children, terrorizing adults, terrorizing more children, and implementing an international super-bureaucracy to stifle economic growth around the world in the name of the environment.
If you support those justifications and believe they're backed up by objective scientists with the world's best interests at heart, those documents may be somewhat disappointing for you.
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,Yeah, it's the data's fault.
...I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.
=====
Mike,
...Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
=====
Mike,
And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.
====
Phil,
...So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean - but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately....It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".
Tom.
=====
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
...The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
The emails are chock full of talk of concealing and destroying data and evidence (most likely illegally), seemingly frank discussions of massaging the data to get desired results, and coordinated efforts to silence critics, some of which involve Michael Mann, creator of the infamous "hockey stick graph", the popular image that purports to show sudden and continuing increases in global temperature coinciding with the industrial revolution, but based on methodology that came under fire because, well, he appeared to be doing exactly what Jones now admits outright that they're doing.
To me, this seems to support some of the very worst claims made about the IPCC, including scientists who claimed that their research was dismissed out of hand and their names used against their will when their research produced the "wrong answer". Jones appears to be unwilling to refute the authenticity of the emails, claiming simply that he "can't remember" what he meant by "hiding the decline".
Andrew Bolt, blogging for Australia's Herald Sun, has been doing a masterful job of exploring these documents and the (predictably limited) commentary from the international press, and I encourage you to check out his site. I suspect my long-standing suspicion, shared by many others, may be all too accurate: many prominent "climate change scientists" are, in fact, in the climate change business. No anthropogenic climate change means no grant money and no clout, so there's going to be a perpetual anthropogenic climate change emergency, whether there really is or not.
It’s One of the Requirements
8:32 pm, 11/19/09
Oh, So That’s What He’s Good At
7:37 pm, 11/19/09
One of the conventional cover stories for Barack Obama's broad inexperience is to assert that he's a Constitutional law scholar, so, you know, he's got that going for him.
Of course, that narrative doesn't really explain this tremendous blunder:
Then, of course, there's today's revealing stammerfest from U.S. Attorney General Eric holder:
In fact, the entire exchange proceeds more or less in this fashion:
Of course, that narrative doesn't really explain this tremendous blunder:
President Barack Obama appeared to be taking a page from Richard Nixon's playbook Wednesday when he seemed to declare the suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed guilty and deserving of the death penalty....which is funny, because I was given to understand that the whole point of giving this sleaze a civilian trial with a jury was so that the outcome wouldn't be prejudiced by political concerns, such as the kind that might come into play if the President of the United States declares that the defendant will be found guilty and executed.
In Nixon's case, he pronounced cult leader Charles Manson guilty of several murders while Manson was being tried in a California state court for killing actress Sharon Tate and others.
Obama, in a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, said those offended by the legal rights accorded Mohammed by virtue of his facing a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him."
Obama, who is a lawyer, quickly added that he did not mean to suggest he was prejudging the outcome of Mohammed's trial. "I'm not going to be in that courtroom," he said. "That's the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury."As the Telegraph notes, all it takes is one closet Truther on the jury who decides that Obama's comments are proof of a conspiracy, or any other possible formulation of superstition and prejudice triggered by his carelessness, to wreck the trial. In all likelyhood, it will work out in the end, but it's still imbecilic.
Nixon quickly withdrew his remark as well, saying, "The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances."
But Manson tried to use the comment to his advantage. He stood up in court the next day and showed jurors a newspaper with the headline, "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares."
The judge took the unusual step of asking jurors their reaction to the headline. "If the president did say that, it was pretty stupid of him," one juror, William T. McBride II, said.
Then, of course, there's today's revealing stammerfest from U.S. Attorney General Eric holder:
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, let me ask you this. Okay, let me ask you this. Let's say we capture him tomorrow. When does custodial interrogation begin in his case? If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?As much as Holder may have a point about nothing bin Laden says after his capture actually mattering, it seems to have never occurred to the man that we might need to interrogate people we capture on the battlefield prior to their civilian trials, so the nation's top lawyer had never really considered the problem before making this decision, or even the issue of how to try bin Laden should he ever be captured.
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Again I'm not -- that all depends. I mean, the notion that we... We have captured thousands of people on the battlefield, only a few of which have actually been given their Miranda warnings. With regard to bin Laden and the desire or the need for statements from him, the case against him at this point is so overwhelming that we do not need to...
In fact, the entire exchange proceeds more or less in this fashion:
I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know...Well, I think...Well, that might be the case. I don't know. I'm not...I'd have to look at all of the evidence, all of the...It would depend on how -- a variety of factors....Again I'm not -- that all depends....It would not be something -- (inaudible)......but don't worry, Obama is a Constitutional law scholar.
They Were Told There Would Be No Community Spirit
9:49 am, 11/18/09
Let's say you're a public employee in a Pensylvania city, and a helpful young man steps up to help clean the city's streets. What should you do?
Some would congratulate him for his civic spirit, but others would have their union file a grievance with the city.
However, instead of being glad they have a new path to clear, Balzano wants to "look into" the person who did the work. In spirit, it's basically racketeering: "no work gets done in this city without our say-so, or else". Maybe the city should be hiring Eagle Scouts, instead.
Some would congratulate him for his civic spirit, but others would have their union file a grievance with the city.
In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.When you think about it, that's odd, because even before the layoffs SEIU workers apparently had no inclination to clear the path. Whether it's because nobody told them to or because they didn't bother to is beside the point: it simply never happened, and it doesn't seem like it was ever going to unless someone stepped up.
Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city's largest municipal union.
Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.
"We'll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails," Balzano told the council....given the city's decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said "there's to be no volunteers." No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.
However, instead of being glad they have a new path to clear, Balzano wants to "look into" the person who did the work. In spirit, it's basically racketeering: "no work gets done in this city without our say-so, or else". Maybe the city should be hiring Eagle Scouts, instead.
For example, the city currently does not have an electrician available because of the layoffs and an employee on an extended sick leave. As a result, the city has been forced to hire an outside union electrician to oversee the installation for the popular Lights on the Parkway holiday display.How kind of them.
"In the spirit of the holiday, we decided to let that go," Balzano said.
It Must Be a Stupid Question
4:57 pm, 11/17/09
International ANSWER is reportedly back, and violently assaulting Tea Party activists.
In the video, ANSWER Florida is quoted as inviting their followers, by email, to come join the "militant confrontation" and "beat back" the protesters.
We are beginning to see way too many echoes of the 1930s, as national socialist and Marxian socialist thugs try to drive competing political views off the streets. The worst offenders so far have been the Service Employees' International Union, which has repeatedly sent its members out into the streets to beat up anyone who isn't toeing the Obama line on issues like socialized medicine.While drawing parallels to the 1930s might be a bit premature, ANSWER, the organizing force behind many of the violent black bloc protests leading up to the Iraq War, isn't just a "Communist group", it's a thinly-disguised Stalinist front for the Worker's World Party, an organization that praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square and has been labeled a terrorist group by the FBI.
Most recently it's International ANSWER, a hard-core Communist group supported by shadowy funding sources that have never been made public, but appear to consist of a handful of rich people.
In the video, ANSWER Florida is quoted as inviting their followers, by email, to come join the "militant confrontation" and "beat back" the protesters.
China Is Here, Mr. Obama
10:31 am, 11/16/09
Obama in Shanghai:
In fact, that's already how China handles public discourse on internet censorship, even outside of China, thanks to the assistance of helpful United Nations staffers.
Update: Of course.
President Barack Obama gave China a pointed, unexpected nudge to stop censoring the Internet access of its own people, offering an animated defense of the tool that helped him win the White House - and telling his tightly controlled hosts not to be wary of a little criticism.That's certainly a polite way of addressing it, since that is precisely why China censors the internet: to avoid being held accountable and to prevent people from thinking for themselves. Indeed, Obama's call to end censorship will, itself, be censored.
"I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable," Obama said Monday in a town hall with students during his first-ever trip to China. "They can begin to think for themselves."
In fact, that's already how China handles public discourse on internet censorship, even outside of China, thanks to the assistance of helpful United Nations staffers.
The day before Obama spoke out on Internet censorship, officials from the United Nations were reportedly doing their best to support the Chinese position. On Sunday, Open Net Initiative, an anti-censorship group, held a reception as part of the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The reception was interrupted when IGF security officials entered the event and demanded that a poster mentioning the Great Firewall of China be removed. When event organizers refused, the UN officials removed the poster themselves.It's a nice sentiment and, unlike many of Obama's other foreign encounters, not a complete blunder (it took the President only a month or two to so inflame the British press that on both the left and the right there was talk of "the end of the special relationship", and last month he managed to find himself attacked by French President Sarkozy as an appeaser, an irony lost on no one), but Obama may as well be in 1938 Berlin talking about how free speech and a free press will help make Germany more tolerant of ethnic minorities.
The poster in question was advertising a new book called Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace, which was being introduced at the reception. One organizer said he planned to file a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Commission over the dispute.
Update: Of course.
President Barack Obama prodded China about Internet censorship and free speech, but the message was not widely heard in China where his words were blocked online and shown on only one regional television channel.
Free Health Care Is Not Free
10:08 am, 11/16/09
Gallup notes an interesting shift in public opinion:
More Americans now say it is not the federal government's responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage (50%) than say it is (47%). This is a first since Gallup began tracking this question [in 2001], and a significant shift from as recently as three years ago, when two-thirds said ensuring healthcare coverage was the government's responsibility.I could burn up a page citing Democratic betrayals of voter trust as possible causes or I could join some conservative bloggers in citing this as proof that the Tea Parties are "working" and that American voters understand federalism, but the bottom line is that government-mandated health care can sound great until people find out what it's going to cost and how much harder it's actually going to make many people's lives. Just three years ago, the number who wanted federal intervention peaked at 69%, but the public debate over the issue has separated the ideological theory from the economic reality. Many voters signed on with the Democrats for unicorn-fueled hope and change that would deliver these services for free, and are now realizing that even on the liberal left's flagship issue, that will not be forthcoming.
Life Isn’t Fair
4:29 pm, 11/13/09
Via reader Dairenn, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pressed on the alarming jail sentences that the House version of ObamaCare imposes, chooses not to bother denying it, and, when pressed by KOMO 4 News' Shomari Stone, declares it "very fair". Confronted by CNSNews, she also mocks people who ask her to explain where the Constitution grants the federal government this kind of power, her office dismissing it as "not a serious question".
Asked the same question, Hawaii's Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka admits that he doesn't know if the Constitution provides for it (perhaps a rather more significant admission than declaring that you didn't bother to read the employee handbook at your new job), but it's OK, because they're "helping" people.
Hilariously, Pelosi's blog, The Gavel, has posted a "mythbuster" on the topic which does no such thing. Instead, it defends the notion and euphemistically rebrands it "the shared responsibility provision". That's ironic, since we already share responsibility: the issue they claim they're trying to address, of free riders abusing public programs that absorb the cost of treating those who can't pay, was created by other government programs which Pelosi also champions.
How is this not just another round of squeezing American taxpayers, this time under the threat of imprisonment, to reward lobbyists? After all, as The Huffington Post found, the Obama White House itself is apparently more than willing to hand billions of American taxpayer dollars over to the pharmaceutical industry (and further wreck Medicare) in order to get this so-called "reform" passed.
Besides, remember during the Bush administration, when Democrats feigned outrage at violations of our civil liberties and declared themselves champions of the Constitution in the hopes of finally reconnecting with American voters? Reason Magazine:
Asked the same question, Hawaii's Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka admits that he doesn't know if the Constitution provides for it (perhaps a rather more significant admission than declaring that you didn't bother to read the employee handbook at your new job), but it's OK, because they're "helping" people.
"But in ways to help citizens in our country to live a good life, let me say it that way, is what we're trying to do, and in this case, we're trying to help them with their health....It's an idea of making it possible for people and this is what it's all about," he said. "I don't look upon that as a penalty but as a way of getting help with health insurance."This isn't car insurance, where the states own the roads and can define criteria you must meet to drive on them, leaving you the option of not driving. The 2.5% fee you must pay to avoid jail is a fine for choosing, as an American citizen, not to buy insurance from a private insurer. It's essentially a transfer of wealth to the health insurance companies Democrats have been demonizing all along. (The affordable public option, after all, turns out to be more expensive than private coverage.)
In 1994, when Congress was considering a universal health care plan proposed by then-President Clinton that included a mandate that all individuals purchase health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) studied the issue and discovered that the federal government had never in the history of the United States mandated that individuals purchase any good or service.
"A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," said the CBO. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."
Hilariously, Pelosi's blog, The Gavel, has posted a "mythbuster" on the topic which does no such thing. Instead, it defends the notion and euphemistically rebrands it "the shared responsibility provision". That's ironic, since we already share responsibility: the issue they claim they're trying to address, of free riders abusing public programs that absorb the cost of treating those who can't pay, was created by other government programs which Pelosi also champions.
How is this not just another round of squeezing American taxpayers, this time under the threat of imprisonment, to reward lobbyists? After all, as The Huffington Post found, the Obama White House itself is apparently more than willing to hand billions of American taxpayer dollars over to the pharmaceutical industry (and further wreck Medicare) in order to get this so-called "reform" passed.
Besides, remember during the Bush administration, when Democrats feigned outrage at violations of our civil liberties and declared themselves champions of the Constitution in the hopes of finally reconnecting with American voters? Reason Magazine:
"There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do," [third ranking House Democrat James] Clyburn [(D)] replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"Even the Commerce Clause, one of the most basic cornerstones of federalism, is "not a serious question" for these people.
It was a rare flash of honesty from an elected official, revealing not only Clyburn's ignorance of the Constitution but his overt hostility to the document’s system of checks and balances.
For Veteran’s Day
5:03 pm, 11/11/09
Reason Magazine follows the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight, carrying World War II veterans and terminally ill veterans of other conflicts to Washington, D.C.
New York State’s Midlife Crisis
10:34 am, 11/11/09
Democratic New York Governor David Paterson's campaign ad, last week:
Paterson, already unpopular for his proposed tax on everything New Yorkers like ("sporting events, alcohol, Internet downloads, shopping, taxis, soda, movie tickets, cable TV") to be levied against what are already some of the most overtaxed people in the nation, certainly hasn't learned much from the mass exodus out of the state.
It shouldn't require empirical evidence to realize that this is a terrible idea, but the Manhattan Institute's City Journal did the research anyway, focusing on comparisons between California (in a similar boat) and Texas.
Even billionaire activist Tom Golisano finally gave up and formally emigrated to Florida, making essentially the same point in a farewell editorial piece.
As the New York Times explains, forcing drivers to get the new plates isn't just a mere fundraising scheme.
No, the design is meant to "reflect New York's force and its resilience."
I'm confused, too. Apparently, this is accomplished by going retro and imitating the horrible look of the New York license plates of the late 1970s. After all, the 1970s were such a good time for New York City.
"When you become governor, you learn you will make mistakes," the narrator says of Mr. Paterson. "But in the depths of an historic recession, you take what you have learned and have the strength to do what's right for the people of New York."Paterson, this week:
Paterson: NYS Will Be Broke Before Christmas - Says Only Way To Fix Problem Is To Have Immediate Cuts To Education, HospitalsI wonder what he learned.
Paterson, already unpopular for his proposed tax on everything New Yorkers like ("sporting events, alcohol, Internet downloads, shopping, taxis, soda, movie tickets, cable TV") to be levied against what are already some of the most overtaxed people in the nation, certainly hasn't learned much from the mass exodus out of the state.
More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.Paterson's "emergency response" to the state's ongoing and worsening situation has consistently been to try to raise taxes on the increasingly smaller (and increasingly poorer) tax base, while simultaneously cutting the services that working New Yorkers depend on.
The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.
What's worse is that the families fleeing New York are being replaced by lower-income newcomers, who consequently pay less in taxes.
It shouldn't require empirical evidence to realize that this is a terrible idea, but the Manhattan Institute's City Journal did the research anyway, focusing on comparisons between California (in a similar boat) and Texas.
Unpacking the numbers is even more revealing - and, for California, disturbing. The biggest contrast between the two states shows up in "net internal migration," the demographer's term for the difference between the number of Americans who move into a state from another and the number who move out of it to another. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more Americans moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas saw a net gain, in an average week, of 1,544 people. Aside from Louisiana and Mississippi, which lost population to other states because of Hurricane Katrina, California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.Texas, the article suggests, focuses their resources on the fat tail services that benefit the overwhelming majority of Texans, while California squanders huge sums placating narrow special interest groups like public service unions.
As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period. Conservative researchers' technical explanation for this phenomenon is: "Well, duh." Or, as Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year: "People, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states."
At this point, defenders of the high-benefit, high-tax paradigm push back. Remember the other half of Tiebout's equation, they say. There's no need for a state to be like Texas if its high taxes and extensive regulations are part of a package deal that yields more and better public goods and an attractive quality of life.
But that, it turns out, is a big "if."...California is decidedly lacking. The biggest factor accounting for California's loss of population to the other 49 states, bond ratings that would embarrass Chrysler or GM, and state politics contentious and feckless enough to shame a banana republic, has to be its public sector's diminishing willingness and capacity to fulfill its promises to taxpayers. "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California," Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com and a presidential fellow at Chapman University in Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times this past March. "Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class."
Similarly, the CEO of a manufacturing company in suburban Los Angeles told a Times reporter that his business suffered less from California's high taxes than from its ineffectual services. As a result, the company pays "a fortune" to educate its employees, many of whom graduated from California public schools, "on basic things like writing and math skills." According to a report issued earlier this year by McKinsey & Company, Texas students "are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age," though expenditures per public school student are 12 percent higher in California.
Even billionaire activist Tom Golisano finally gave up and formally emigrated to Florida, making essentially the same point in a farewell editorial piece.
Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things -- registering to vote, changing my driver's license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate -- in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually. By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I'll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing's certain: That money won't continue to fund Albany's bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.Paterson didn't create this mess, but now that the engines have gone out, he certainly seems intent on piloting the plane the rest of the way into the mountainside. Perhaps emblematic of this are the horrible new New York license plates, revealed today, which are so hideous that it may serve to keep people from leaving New York simply so they won't be laughed at by motorists in other states.
As the New York Times explains, forcing drivers to get the new plates isn't just a mere fundraising scheme.
No, the design is meant to "reflect New York's force and its resilience."
I'm confused, too. Apparently, this is accomplished by going retro and imitating the horrible look of the New York license plates of the late 1970s. After all, the 1970s were such a good time for New York City.
The 1970s were a low point in city history as a fiscal crisis almost pushed it into bankruptcy, crime rates soared, and homeless people crowded sidewalks as public services crumbled.Now, the whole state gets to relive Carter-era Manhattan. At this rate, New York State is going to quit its job, dye its hair, divorce its wife, and buy a motorcycle before New Year's.
Almost a million people fled New York's Mean Streets during the decade for the safer, more stable suburbs, a population decline that took more than 20 years to reverse.
The Pelosi Tax Test
9:47 am, 11/11/09
Liberal Democrats have used the healthcare bill to secretly replace your usual, inflation-indexed taxes with taxes that will devour larger and larger portions of the economy over time.
All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year are about to experience the change they haven't been waiting for: the return of income tax bracket creep. Buried in Nancy Pelosi's health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren't real.With the unprecedented scope of the deficit spending that we're seeing, assuming 4% inflation may turn out to be very generous. Part of the reason this became such an issue at the beginning of the Reagan years was because, during the stagnant, recessionary 1970s, inflation had been known to exceed 10%.
As for the business payroll penalty, it is imposed on a sliding scale beginning at a 2% rate for firms with payrolls of $500,000 and rising to 8% on firms with payrolls above $750,000. But those amounts are also not indexed for inflation, so again assuming a 4% average inflation rate in 10 years this range would hit payrolls between $335,000 and $510,000 in today's dollars. Note that in pitching this "pay or play" tax today, Democrats claim that most small businesses would be exempt. But because it isn't indexed, this tax will whack more and more businesses every year. The sales pitch is pure deception.
Americans of a certain age have seen this movie before. In 1960, only 3% of tax filers paid a 30% or higher marginal tax rate. By 1980, after the inflation of the 1970s, the share was closer to 33%, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of tax returns.
These stealth tax increases - forcing ever more Americans to pay higher tax rates on phantom gains in income - were widely seen to be unjust. And in 1981 as part of the Reagan tax cuts, a bipartisan coalition voted to index the tax brackets for inflation.
Too Many Bullet Points
10:45 am, 11/10/09
No matter how bad the meetings at your office are, new details about Hasan's early fascination with Islamic extremism should remind you that it could be much worse.
Meanwhile, CNN is caught "retouching" the news.
I suppose you can't really call it the telephone game, since they're repeating the inaccuracies perfectly.
The title of Hasan's PowerPoint presentation was "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military."...Hasan's presentation lasted about an hour. It is unclear whether he read out loud every point on each slide.Ah, that old chestnut.
Under a slide titled "Comments," he wrote: "If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the 'infidels'; ie: enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ie: suicide bombing, etc." [sic] The last bullet point on that page reads simply: "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"
Meanwhile, CNN is caught "retouching" the news.
He said he "was sitting in about the second row back when the assailant stood up and yelled 'Allahu akbar' in Arabic and he opened fire," Foster said Monday on CNN's "American Morning."Actually, Foster wasn't referring to that at all, and it's plainly obvious from the video. At the link, Mudville Gazette has the video and misleading story. As Greyhawk explains:
Foster, 21, said he wasn't clear about whether the gunman said those exact words, noting that "with that much adrenaline, you tend to forget things."
From the day this story broke, CNN has run with a storyline that the killer's actions are typical of all military members - that he's a typical soldier - which means his victims were just like him. As evidence to the contrary mounted they ignored it, but here they willfully and intentionally re-wrote an eyewitness account to make it fit their narrative - something altogether different.As is too often the case, other media outlets (here, San Antonio's Express News) are now citing CNN's misrepresentation as a source.
I suppose you can't really call it the telephone game, since they're repeating the inaccuracies perfectly.
If You See Something, Say Something
6:04 pm, 11/9/09
Saturday, President Obama warned Americans not to “jump to conclusions” about Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan until we had “all the facts”.
Granted, the facts were somewhat preliminary at the time, but it’s not like people were pulling out their jump to conclusions mats to see if they would get to arbitrarily persecute a minority today. A man on a military base killed over a dozen Americans and wounded over three dozen others while shouting “Allahu Akhbar”, and, as NPR had reported the day before, he was apparently known to colleagues for his tendency to hijack psychology lectures and use them as an opportunity to pull out a Koran and warn that infidels would have their heads cut off. His defense of suicide bombing and his anti-Semitic sentiments had even caused some friction with the other Muslim soldiers, who were understandably cool towards his views.
As one of Hasan’s fellow medical professionals at Walter Reed Army Medical Center reportedly put it:
“When I heard the news about Hasan, honestly my first thought was ‘That makes a lot of sense. That completely fits the person I knew.”
Even with what had been made public at that point, tying Hasan’s “quirky” behavior to militant Islamism was less of a “jump” and more of a “leisurely stroll” to conclusions, one that should’ve been made much earlier.
“I told him, `There’s something wrong with you,’” Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.”
Danquah assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s “anti-American propaganda,” but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.
“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”
As Tim Blair notes, many media outlets were quick to make actual unfounded leaps, ignoring the little that was known to paint Hasan’s decision to shoot a teenage girl in the back as a natural consequence of his association with the United States Army.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
...and before you state the obvious, that Hasan never saw combat, the Guardian has it covered:Thursday’s deadly rampage raises a red flag over the issue of combat stress...The most common disorder linked to combat stress is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm.
Time identifies this as “Secondary Trauma”, a condition which is presumably similar to secondhand smoke, but kills everybody else.Hasan did not fit the classic pattern of a stressed soldier. But someone listening day after day to troops describing the tension and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up as damaged as those facing combat at first hand.
In fact, what’s known appears to point to Hasan’s problems significantly predating his ironic career as a psychologist: the Telegraph ties Hasan to the radical American-born imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, implicated as a spiritual leader to some of the 9/11 hijackers and arrested in Yemen in 2006 while spending quality time with Al-Qaeda militants.
“Hasan’s eyes ‘lit up’ when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base”.
That article wouldn’t stand alone, but there are other reports indicating that Hasan attempted to maintain contact with Awlaki later. Awlaki certainly has no ambiguity about his feelings regarding Hasan:
Awlaki said the only way a Muslim can justify serving in the U.S. military is if he intends to “follow in the footsteps of men like Nidal....Nidal Hassan (sic) is a hero. He is a man of conscience...”
Quite a few Muslims would beg to differ, but Awlaki must be so proud. Hasan seemingly even loves strippers, which seems to be a recurring theme.
The Times, They Are A-Changin’
10:42 am, 11/9/09
As both of the longtime readers who still check this site know, I’ve made a number of attempts to get Free Will up and running at speed again over the past two years, all of which have ended up slipping away from me for one reason or another. The last serious effort was probably right after the election, when I wrapped up my work on a campaign which had entirely precluded blogging, given the scope of my time commitment. That was a sad thing for me, because my work encompassed some of the most interesting issues and controversies at the time, and I would’ve loved to have been addressing them here instead of there. What I wrote about the election, however, seems to have held true:
There are going to be very practical limits to Barack Obama’s political capital, because his party wants “change” that looks nothing like what voters want, and Obama is going to be helpless to find a happy compromise. There’s clearly no mandate for socialist reforms: 84% of Americans prioritize economic growth over an “equitable” distribution of wealth. The bailout package was opposed by a hearty majority of voters, as is an offshore drilling ban. Democrats weren’t elected to “give their ideas a chance”. Half of all Americans believe that this Congress, a Democrat-controlled Congress, is no better than a random sample from the phone book, and three quarters believe that their elected legislators don’t even understand the bills they’re passing.
To predict that the Democrats will massively overplay their hand in this environment is to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the next Pope will be a practicing Roman Catholic. They will inevitably confuse this for the mandate that they also wrongly thought they had received in 2006.
...and that’s exactly what’s happened. Obama’s promises of transparency, restraint, and fiscal responsibility were farcical, and in the aftermath of the incredible failure and predictable corruption surrounding the stimulus, Republicans have won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey while House Democrats were barely able to form a majority to pass their flagship bill: a poorly understood and most likely unconstitutional package of health care reforms that satisfies no one and that is loaded with unpleasant surprises for an already disgruntled electorate.
As for Free Will, I’m back in a place where I feel like I would be in error not to resume blogging. There’s too much going on, and this blog, which was originally created so that I’d have a venue for discussing on politics and economics in a way that engages people who are actually interested, is something I should be doing. You might notice that I’m fiddling with the templates, simplifying the layout and cleaning up the markup in ancticipation of finally getting things up to snuff around here. Very shortly, I’m going to have the RSS feed fixed and incorporate some new features, but for the moment, the index and comment templates are updated, and I’m going to resume posting on a regular basis, as well as import some things I’ve written for other purposes on recent issues.
Free Will is back online.
Forrest Gump II: The Final Countdown
8:49 am, 2/18/09
"Now, because I had been a football star, and a war hero, and a national celebrity, and a shrimpin' boat captain, and a college graduate, the city fathers of Greenbow, Alabama decided to get together and offer to let me destroy the Earth."
Why is everyone being so mean to that guy?
4:41 pm, 1/29/09
Rod Blagojevich, removed from office by a unanimous vote of the State Senate, and just to drive the stake home, they unanimously passed a motion from holding any further office in the State of Illinois.
Finally, the Lego Man is gone. Get him to trial so he can get his prison time started.
Finally, the Lego Man is gone. Get him to trial so he can get his prison time started.
Merry Christmas, Everybody
5:00 pm, 12/24/08
I hope everyone's getting to enjoy a great Christmas (or your holiday of choice) and New Year's with their loved ones.
My checked luggage is still in D.C., but I spent all night going by rental car from Houston to Dallas, listening to crazy Mexican Christmas carols on the radio to stay awake.
Barreling up I-45, I began to detect a theme: the Sam Houston Tollway, Sam Houston University, Sam Houston National Forest, a sixty foot, gleaming white statue of Sam Houston. Also, it's crazily confusing if street signs dramatically change colors, typefaces and positioning six times in twelve blocks, as they seem to do in the vicinity of Addison.
In any case, here's this year's amusing Christmas photo:
Backstory here.
Drive safely, I hope to blog Friday.
My checked luggage is still in D.C., but I spent all night going by rental car from Houston to Dallas, listening to crazy Mexican Christmas carols on the radio to stay awake.
Barreling up I-45, I began to detect a theme: the Sam Houston Tollway, Sam Houston University, Sam Houston National Forest, a sixty foot, gleaming white statue of Sam Houston. Also, it's crazily confusing if street signs dramatically change colors, typefaces and positioning six times in twelve blocks, as they seem to do in the vicinity of Addison.
In any case, here's this year's amusing Christmas photo:
Backstory here.
Drive safely, I hope to blog Friday.
Patrick Fitzgerald is from the future. Go with him if you want to live.
4:57 pm, 12/22/08
The narcissistic personality disorder is strong with this one.
The "powerful forces" and "political lynch mob" arrayed against him might better be described as "the voting public". His defense attorney, Ed Genson, can't even look reporters in the eye when he calls this a "witch hunt", because he knows Blagojevich is, in fact, a witch.
Governor Rod Blagojevich is out there. He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until the general fund is empty.
The "powerful forces" and "political lynch mob" arrayed against him might better be described as "the voting public". His defense attorney, Ed Genson, can't even look reporters in the eye when he calls this a "witch hunt", because he knows Blagojevich is, in fact, a witch.
Governor Rod Blagojevich is out there. He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until the general fund is empty.
The Man Who Does Everything Right
9:06 pm, 12/15/08
Last week, the Blagojevich situation looked set to paralyze state government entirely:
Meanwhile, caught red-handed, on tape, trying to sell a United States Senate seat and extorting firings from the most prominent media outlet in his state, Governor Blagojevich (who had a 4% approval rating before the scandal), has now taken a formal position: "You ain't got nothin' on me, coppers!"
Right.
One result of the long-running deadlock in Springfield is that Illinois has lost billions of dollars in federal funds, money we could have used for roads and bridges.Which, obviously, nobody would sign. Facing state prisons running out of food and nursing homes kicking their patients out, state officials and bond attorneys have reached an agreement to simply revise the language, which apparently now states that the governor's situation is, in fact, incredibly dire and that any whacky and surreal thing at all could happen.
On top of that, state government is facing a $4 billion to $5 billion shortfall. Some Medicaid providers, including hundreds of doctors, haven't been paid for care they gave to patients six months ago.
A plan to borrow $1.4 billion to speed up those payment checks has hit a huge snag. As part of every big borrowing, Attorney General Lisa Madigan has to sign a formal document. Part of it states that there is no litigation or controversy that threatens the governor's ability to serve in office.
Meanwhile, caught red-handed, on tape, trying to sell a United States Senate seat and extorting firings from the most prominent media outlet in his state, Governor Blagojevich (who had a 4% approval rating before the scandal), has now taken a formal position: "You ain't got nothin' on me, coppers!"
Chicago defense attorney Ed Genson proclaimed that the governor is not guilty, will not resign, and instead will fight the charges against him.What he's got here is golden, and I don't blame him for not giving it up for nothing. However, "not guilty" != "innocent". If he fights the charges and wins, he's still done something wrong, and he's still unfit to pick up drycleaning. This is just the tiny portion of his total wrongdoing that the Feds happened to catch on tape.
"He's not stepping aside," Genson told reporters outside his Chicago office building. "He hasn't done anything wrong. We're going to fight this case....I think the case is not what it seems and I think that when it comes to pass, you'll see it's not what it seems and you'll find that he's not guilty."
Blagojevich has not spoken to the press yet. He left Genson's offices just before his attorney did, saying that he was looking forward to talking to the general public.As long as he's wearing an orange jumpsuit, I'm fine with that, but I expect he's thinking more along the lines of "whoever pays me the most for the rights". According to a memo distributed to Blagojevich's neighbors by his wife, we can only assume that what he's looking forward to saying is "!@#$ you".
"I can't wait to talk to you guys and to have a chance to be able to say the things I'm looking forward to saying," Blagojevich said. "But there's a time and place for all of that and I'll, uh, we'll soon let you know when it's gonna be."
The state's first lady avoided any specific mention of her husband's arrest and the resulting crisis engulfing state government. Rather, she had a three paragraph typewritten note delivered to homes along their Ravenswood Manor block, blaming the media for the inconvenience.This is the media's fault.
The note begins: 'Dear Neighbor, My husband and I would like to apologize to you and your family for the media barrage that has descended on our neighborhood.''
She goes on to write that she hopes the media attention will subside, "not only for the sake of our children, but also for you and your family.''
Right.
Corruptevich: The Legend Continues
7:42 pm, 12/12/08
Rod Blagojevich has now spent longer making it clear he has no intention of resigning than Eliot Spitzer spent deciding if he should. A few thoughts:
1. The media has barely scratched the surface of what's gone on.
Up to this point, national media coverage has revolved almost exclusively around what's contained in the federal complaint. Obviously, this is driven by the fact that it indirectly involves Barack Obama, but it does not accurately reflect how Rod Blagojevich ultimately ended up in handcuffs or what's really wrong in Illinois. The press is finally starting to dig a little deeper, but there may never be an accurate portrayal of how Blagojevich has systematically turned state government into a criminal enterprise. It's a rare man who thinks nothing of his daughter receiving a $1,500 check for her 7th birthday from a former campaign staffer, just days after giving the staffer's wife a well-paid state job (though she had, herself, failed the state's qualifying exams). Millions of Illinoisans have suffered from the crumbling of state government, and billions of public dollars, both state and federal, have been diverted and squandered in the (apparently incompetent) efforts of Rod Blagojevich to enrich himself and his associates.
Numerous top Blagojevich associates have already been indicted over the years, including Tony Rezko, slumlord and scammer of minority-business programs, and Chris Kelly, the "roofing contractor" whose sister was made head of the Bureau of Real Estate Professions five days after getting her real estate license and who Blagojevich's own father-in-law warned the world was selling state appointments for $50,000. Like Al Capone, they got him on tax evasion.
Dominic Longo, head of the hilariously-named "Coalition for Better Government" (a motley crew of Chicago Democrats with mafioso-nicknames and questionable pasts), ultimately turned on Blagojevich, accusing Blagojevich of ruining Longo's reputation, despite Longo himself being a convicted felon and vote fraudster. The cast of bizarre characters is endless, from a tire-slashing union activist to a cigar-smoking lycanthrope.
Once you get past the idea that the Blagojevich administration is a political organization, his suicidal decisions and insane policies start making a lot of sense: every policy is a confidence game, every photo op is a shakedown, and every newly-created office has an angle. Shortly after his election, a federal judge had to intervene to stop him from giving an effective monopoly over telecom service in Illinois to Mayor Daley's own brother.
In March, it was revealed that Blagojevich had allowed a million dollars to be sent to "the wrong place", an "error" that left the landmark Pilgrim Baptist Church without promised fire-reconstruction aid but which subsequently uncovered a festering pool of shady activity involving FBI informants, a "school" that had "mistakenly" received the money but which was also facing nine civil suits and owing substantial back taxes, a questionable gubernatorial pardon of one of the teachers, and, naturally, Tony Rezko.
Then there's Central Management Services, the state agency tasked with controlling costs. Their mission, as it turned out, was only taken ironically: the agency was so thoroughly corrupt that CMS employees were apparently getting fired because their crooked schemes were foiling the crooked schemes of other CMS employees. A 140-page independent audit revealed that of the six hundred million dollars in savings Blagojevich attributed to CMS, fewer than one hundred million could actually be identified, leading CMS to try and fail to accuse the Auditor-General of corruption, and Blagojevich to claim that they just had "different ways of doing business".
Despite the CMS mission, contractors, including IPAM, a subsidiary of Mesirow Financial, were found to be billing the state for things like parties to celebrate winning CMS contracts. IPAM lost their contract, but a year later, Mesirow was allowed to manage a billion dollars of bonds for the Tollway Authority, itself a hive of scum and villainy, part of a Department of Transportation seeded with unqualified Blagojevich lackeys dubbed "local agency liaisons" and used as a means for Blagojevich to give a six-figure job to his drunk-driving childhood friend Daniel Stefanski, a guy so dirty that the Teamsters, of all people, claimed Stefanski's presence had corrupted their organization.
We now know that even dying, poverty-stricken children were not beyond the grasp of Blagojevich's extortion racket, and the odds are that Republic Windows and Doors did not happen without someone, somewhere, writing a substantial check to purchase Rod's "divine intervention". How about the FamilyCare debacle, in which Blagojevich's attorneys admitted that they "can't identify participants or contact them, monitor premium payments or refund them, and don't even know how much they've collected in premium payments or where the money is"?
Legislators and auditors who got in the way of Rod Blagojevich found themselves blacklisted, as Blagojevich personally tormented his enemies by eliminating funding for anti-gang programs, floodwalls, pandemic flu preparedness, and other spending intended to protect the very lives of Illinois citizens. As part of his insane war to force the legislature to approve his budget, he even took the police power itself hostage, threatening to lay off 90% of the Illinois State Police if he didn't get his way.
Comptroller Dan Hynes even refused to sign some of Blagojevich's checks, opting to have vendors sue the state before he'd help Blagojevich squander more of the state's scarce resources on epic misadventure at a time when the state was sending as little as six bucks and change as "payments" against multi-million dollar debts owed to healthcare providers.
In a just world, forensic accountants would make their careers hunting down everyone involved in creating this disaster, and it would become a literal textbook case for corruption among criminal justice students. We shouldn't be demanding Rod Blagojevich's resignation, we should be demanding seppuku, or perhaps that he be locked up in Arkham Asylum.
2. It is entirely possible that Rod Blagojevich is completely out of his mind.
I'm hardly the first person to suggest this, but Blagojevich has exhibited frightening paranoia since early in his administration. One of his first public embarrassments was the discovery that his office was diverting Department of Corrections prison psychologists to the Orwellian business of monitoring and analyzing media coverage of his leadership. This is a man who is so obsessed with appearances that a bodyguard was tasked with carrying his hairbrush (codenamed "the football", both for it's colossal size and as a reference to the nuclear launch codes carried with the President).
This is a man who, when Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn declined to accept a security detail, simply added Quinn's security detail to his own, then purged experienced bodyguards in favor of his handpicked, inexperienced cronies. The end result was a massive detail that posed a danger to themselves and others, creating a spectacle at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, drinking on the job, chasing skirt, losing their guns, and ramming Volkswagens while doing 90 mph on the shoulder. Blagojevich brought them with him, wherever he went, even closing roads in places as far away as California (apparently without permission of the host states) so that he could speed his motorcade along and make sure everyone "knew who he is".
This is a man who opted to live in Chicago instead of the state capital, because he "didn't want his daughter to change schools". Instead, he billed taxpayers for his staff to take thousands of flights back and forth to Springfield.
The governor's budget director flies on state aircraft nearly once every 2 1/2 days as he tries to find ways to control costs.This is a man who was repeatedly dinged for ethical concerns over his habit of putting his name in large print all over state publications and websites, at times much larger than the word "Illinois", and who spent half a million dollars on new tollbooth signs for no apparent reason other than to be able to see his own name in lights.
When Eliot Spitzer first came under scrutiny in the incident with Bruno, there were widespread rumors that he had abandoned telephone communications to avoid leaving a trail. Instead, communications were conducted by messengers. By comparison, Blagojevich, fully aware of the scope of the investigation into his administration, didn't just use phones, he even had his wife on the line. Something is certainly wrong with this picture, but whether it's simply a matter of epic vanity, arrogance, and stupidity or a legitimate mental imbalance is unclear. Blagojevich father-in-law Mell says that he's now only concerned about the welfare of his daughter and granddaughter, and he should be: they're in the hands of what may be a narcissistic sociopath.
3. For Blagojevich, this is but another scam.
You might think this is the worst week of Rod Blagojevich's life, but he appears to have accepted his inevitable indictment long ago. The FBI's complaint documents him casually discussing his "legal situation" and plotting to give himself the Senate seat both to escape impeachment from the Governor's office and to give himself access to financial and political resources currently beyond his reach that would be needed to fight the Feds.
Dragged away from his home in handcuffs, Rod Blagojevich simply posted bail and went back to work, presumably to resume criminal activity. Insane or not, his current thinking is almost certainly that he now has an unprecedented opportunity to extort money and favors from all the people he could otherwise rat out to the Feds, something he is highly motivated to do, given that he may very well be facing the prospect of dying in prison. He thought he could get Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to fund his future, so his reality is pretty distorted.
4. Barack Obama thinks that we're all stupid.
It may very well be that nothing untoward happened between the Obama and Blagojevich camps. However, Obama's attempt to make this go away by pretending that they had no idea what was going on, that they hadn't discussed it with Blagojevich, and that we're all crazy to ask makes him look like he's lying in our faces. Indeed, he is, and Philadelphia's Democratic governor Ed Rendell agrees.
Of course they had contact about this, and if the Obama administration is all about transparency and honesty, they should provide complete answers to Politico's Seven Blago Questions for Obama. Instead, they're allowing Blagojevich questions to be censored on their new "Open for Questions" site.
Frankly, if Rahm Emanuel did indeed sell Blagojevich out, he should step right up so we can give him his medal, but instead, they're badly mishandling this. Emanuel claims he's receiving daily death threats, and that's just sad. There's no reason to believe to believe Emanuel has done anything wrong. However, if Emanuel is surprised and outraged that refusing to talk to the media is causing them to intrude further into his life rather than to back off, he must be incredibly naive about what MSM journalists actually do for a living.
5. The Blagojevich arrest should not be allowed to be the end of this.
The culture of corruption that bred the Blagojevich administration does not exist in isolation on the 16th floor of the Thompson Center. It rippled in from Chicago, and has rippled out to pollute nearly every facet of state government. Resolving this requires an extensive and sustained outrage from the electorate, and whipping it up requires getting the public to understand not just that what's happening is wrong, but that it's doing harm in the lives of Illinoisans and to taxpayers nationwide. It is not acceptable, it never was, and the perpetrators should be hounded relentlessly.
My God, It’s Full of Stars
12:24 pm, 12/9/08
Yesterday, Rod Blagojevich defiantly brushed off the news that his phones were tapped:
There's no excuse for being "stunned". I got over that five years ago when the brazen criminality of Rod Blagojevich became so painfully obvious simply from reading the paper. Since this blog started, I've written about four hundred posts on Blago's corruption and incompetence, pretty much shouting into the darkness, even while partisan Democrats still tried to assert that Blagojevich was merely a "victim" of the "right-wing smear machine".
You didn't need a degree in political science to put this one together, you just had to have a healthy skepticism of politicians from the most corrupt political machine in America, and a willingness to admit that they're visibly destroying the state. I called this exact scheme with Obama's Senate seat six months ago. Somehow, despite it all being right there in the papers, he managed to get reelected, and the public consensus that his corruption exceeds the typical background noise for Chicago Democrats has really only started to come together in the last year or so.
Fitzgerald took a dramatic step to stop Blagojevich today rather than continuing to gather evidence. My guess is he wanted to stop him before he could poison the Senate with his appointment. Longtime readers know that seeing Blagojevich go to prison has essentially been this blog's primary purpose, so let me put it in writing, to avoid any confusion: this arrest makes me very happy. The only reason it took me this long to post about it is because I've been working nights this week, and didn't find out until I woke up two hours ago to several voicemails, emails, and instant messages wondering why I haven't posted about this yet.
This is like Christmas morning.
They've also arrested Blagojevich's chief of staff, John Harris, who apparently was involved in a separate conspiracy involving the Service Employees International Union and, in some undefined and apparently non-implicatory way, Barack Obama.
Update: A reader emails:
Update: The complaint.
What a relief that the Feds didn't let him finish his term before taking action. He didn't deserve to go out with his dignity intact. Today was a good day.
Update: Ironically, today is United Nations International Anti-Corruption Day. Tomorrow is Rod Blagojevich's birthday.
An instant message from my father: "It's Rod Blagojevich's birthday tomorrow, but he had his surprise party today."
A defiant Gov. Rod Blagojevich says anyone who wants to tape his conversations should feel free to do it openly because doing it "sneakily" smells like Watergate, the scandal that brought down former President Richard Nixon.It did smell like Watergate, if you imagine that Blagojevich is, in fact, playing the role of his political hero, Richard Nixon. The reason federal investigators didn't give Blagojevich a "heads-up" is for much the same reason that cops sometimes get no-knock warrants.
"This is America, you know, and I'd appreciate if you want to tape my conversations, give me a heads-up and let me know," Blagojevich said.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested on Tuesday on charges he brazenly conspired to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder in what a federal prosecutor called a "corruption crime spree."Stunned?
Blagojevich also was charged with illegally threatening to withhold state assistance to Tribune Co., the owner of the Chicago Tribune, in the sale of Wrigley Field, according to a federal criminal complaint. In return for state assistance, Blagojevich allegedly wanted members of the paper's editorial board who had been critical of him fired.
"We were in the middle of a corruption crime spree and we wanted to stop it," Fitzgerald said Tuesday, calling the corruption charges against Blagojevich "a truly new low."
Federal investigators bugged the governor's campaign offices and placed a tap on his home phone and Chicago FBI chief Robert Grant said even seasoned investigators were "stunned" by what they heard on the tapes.
There's no excuse for being "stunned". I got over that five years ago when the brazen criminality of Rod Blagojevich became so painfully obvious simply from reading the paper. Since this blog started, I've written about four hundred posts on Blago's corruption and incompetence, pretty much shouting into the darkness, even while partisan Democrats still tried to assert that Blagojevich was merely a "victim" of the "right-wing smear machine".
You didn't need a degree in political science to put this one together, you just had to have a healthy skepticism of politicians from the most corrupt political machine in America, and a willingness to admit that they're visibly destroying the state. I called this exact scheme with Obama's Senate seat six months ago. Somehow, despite it all being right there in the papers, he managed to get reelected, and the public consensus that his corruption exceeds the typical background noise for Chicago Democrats has really only started to come together in the last year or so.
Fitzgerald took a dramatic step to stop Blagojevich today rather than continuing to gather evidence. My guess is he wanted to stop him before he could poison the Senate with his appointment. Longtime readers know that seeing Blagojevich go to prison has essentially been this blog's primary purpose, so let me put it in writing, to avoid any confusion: this arrest makes me very happy. The only reason it took me this long to post about it is because I've been working nights this week, and didn't find out until I woke up two hours ago to several voicemails, emails, and instant messages wondering why I haven't posted about this yet.
This is like Christmas morning.
Blagojevich considered appointing himself [to the United States Senate]. The affidavit said that as late as Nov. 3, he told his deputy governor that if "they're not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it."Not only was Rod Blagojevich, the most loathed Democrat in America, the only Democratic governor who managed to prove less popular than Kathleen Blanco in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, still trying to weasel his way into the Presidency of the United States, but he was hoping to have a more powerful office from which to weasel his way out of the criminal charges he so richly deserves. Ironically, the fact that he deserves them is why his hopes of running for President were dashed in the first place.
"I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain," Blagojevich allegedly said later that day, according to the affidavit, which also quoted him as saying in a remark punctuated by profanity that the seat was "a valuable thing - you just don't give it away for nothing."
The affidavit said Blagojevich also discussed getting a substantial salary for himself at a nonprofit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions.
It said Blagojevich also talked about getting his wife placed on corporate boards where she might get $150,000 a year in director's fees.
He also allegedly discussed getting campaign funds for himself or possibly a post in the president's cabinet or an ambassadorship once he left the governor's office. He noted becoming a U.S. senator might remake his image for a possible presidential run in 2016, according to the affidavit. And he allegedly said a Senate seat would also provide him with corporate contacts if he needed a job and present an opportunity for his wife to work as a lobbyist.
"I want to make money," the affidavit quotes him as saying in one conversation.
The affidavit said Blagojevich expressed frustration at being "stuck" as governor and that he would have access to greater resources if he were indicted while in the U.S. Senate than while sitting as governor.
They've also arrested Blagojevich's chief of staff, John Harris, who apparently was involved in a separate conspiracy involving the Service Employees International Union and, in some undefined and apparently non-implicatory way, Barack Obama.
Under the plan, Blagojevich would appoint a new senator who would be helpful to the president-elect and in turn get a job as head of Change to Win, a group formed by the union. The union would get an unspecified favor from Obama later.Illinoisans aren't even going to give him that.
Nothing in the court papers suggested Obama had any part in the discussion. In fact, Blagojevich allegedly said in the same conversation that Obama most likely would not appoint him as secretary of health and human services or to an ambassadorship because of the negative publicity that has surrounded the governor for three years.
One day later, according to the affidavit, Blagojevich allegedly told an associate he knew Obama wanted a specific Senate candidate but "they're not going to give me anything except appreciation." He finished the remark with an expletive.
Update: A reader emails:
Q: What did one Illinois prison inmate say to the other?Heh.
A: "The food was better when you were Governor."
Update: The complaint.
What a relief that the Feds didn't let him finish his term before taking action. He didn't deserve to go out with his dignity intact. Today was a good day.
Update: Ironically, today is United Nations International Anti-Corruption Day. Tomorrow is Rod Blagojevich's birthday.
An instant message from my father: "It's Rod Blagojevich's birthday tomorrow, but he had his surprise party today."
It’s My Birthday
9:01 am, 11/8/08
Accordingly, I may not be around.
Here comes the Change, everybody!
7:54 pm, 11/6/08
The latest episode of South Park nails the amusing euphoria of Obama supporters, and the apocalyptic woe of some McCain supporters. (Some of us already went through the stages of grief long ago.)
Meanwhile, everything is proceeding according to plan:
1) Democrats misinterpreting their mandate:
2) Obama supporters already feeling let down:
"Every generation," says Brian J. Noggle, "must live through its own 1970s."
Update: Iowahawk:
Meanwhile, everything is proceeding according to plan:
1) Democrats misinterpreting their mandate:
"This is a tectonic-plate election, one of those once-in-a-generation times where people not only define change, but define a new relationship with government," said New York Sen. Charles Schumer, the lead campaign strategist for Senate Democrats. He added that voters want a government that is "more activist, more involved" in the economy and their lives.How many times have you heard this in the last two decades? This year, voters thought "change" meant a dramatic end to business as usual in Washington. Liberals think it means America has given the least popular Congress in history a blank check to implement the long-rejected progressive agenda. Schumer may as well be playing with matches in a fireworks factory.
2) Obama supporters already feeling let down:
"I want my money today! It's my money. I want it right now!" yelled one former campaign worker.Eerie, isn't it? Like looking into the future.
The large gathering of around 375 people prompted police to call in extra officers and set up temporary barricades....Eventually people did start getting paid, but some said they were missing hours and told to fill in paperwork making their claim and that eventually they would get a check in the mail.
"Still that's not right. I'm disappointed. I'm glad for the president, but I'm disappointed in this system," said Diane Jefferson.
"Every generation," says Brian J. Noggle, "must live through its own 1970s."
Update: Iowahawk:
Although I have not always been the most outspoken advocate of President-Elect Barack Obama, today I would like to congratulate him and add my voice to the millions of fellow citizens who are celebrating his historic and frightening election victory.... It reminds us of how far we've come, and it's something everyone in our nation should celebrate in whatever little time we now have left.Read the whole thing.
A Brief Summary of the Election
5:45 pm, 11/5/08
A Brief Summary of the Election
--- We're safe from a Senate Democratic supermajority. Upside: Nancy Pelosi's worst high crackpottery may be largely neutralized. Downside: Nancy Pelosi's worst high crackpottery may go largely unnoticed.
--- Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina? Thanks, Bob Barr! Of course, McCain had this coming. Somewhere between the amnesty and the bailout, enough conservatives realized that even if they had dinner on the table before he got home, McCain was never going to stop beating them. If only McCain had had a stronger showing, Barr could've cost him even more states.
--- On schedule, it's a manufactured international crisis! Wait, is it this one?
--- Newark, New Jersey's Democratic Mayor, Cory Booker, on MSNBC last night:
--- Young voters remain incredibly unreliable and disinterested. The "historic" turnout? 1% higher than in 2004..
--- After surprising opposition from leaders like former Governor Jim Edgar, the Illinois Constitutional Convention referendum failed by a large margin. Northern Illinois University political science major Alex Hari explains:
--- If Philadelphia Republicans managed to dodge the Black Panthers "guarding" their polling places, they probably could've followed this gentleman's advice and voted "a couple times". CNN reporter's startled response: "I think that's against the law, but it's OK."
--- There's no denying the importance of Obama's historic moment last night and I have no intention of diminishing it, but while I'm no fashion guru, even I think that Michelle Obama has purchased the dress of the apocalypse.
--- "We're also smelling just a little bit of weed in the air. Haven't been to many political events where you smell that."
--- Rock the Vote, the New York Times, and the respective New York State and New York City Boards of Elections have joined forces to point fingers at each other in the bungling of tens of thousands of voter registrations. On their Blog, Rock the Vote promises to find the real killers.
--- Al Franken appears to have failed in his bid for the Senate, which is good news, because physicists have long suspected that Franken's presence in the Senate Chamber would rip the fabric of spacetime. Predictably, his campaign ended with him saying embarrassing things that remind everyone why he deserved to lose.
--- Actually, about Obama's speech last night:
Hah!
--- We're safe from a Senate Democratic supermajority. Upside: Nancy Pelosi's worst high crackpottery may be largely neutralized. Downside: Nancy Pelosi's worst high crackpottery may go largely unnoticed.
--- Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina? Thanks, Bob Barr! Of course, McCain had this coming. Somewhere between the amnesty and the bailout, enough conservatives realized that even if they had dinner on the table before he got home, McCain was never going to stop beating them. If only McCain had had a stronger showing, Barr could've cost him even more states.
--- On schedule, it's a manufactured international crisis! Wait, is it this one?
--- Newark, New Jersey's Democratic Mayor, Cory Booker, on MSNBC last night:
"I want to luxuriate in the racial deliciousness of our country!"Bonus points when he's asked about the "problems" facing Newark, and is overcome with visible terror for a good thirty seconds. Apparently, there weren't supposed to be any questions about Newark.
--- Young voters remain incredibly unreliable and disinterested. The "historic" turnout? 1% higher than in 2004..
--- After surprising opposition from leaders like former Governor Jim Edgar, the Illinois Constitutional Convention referendum failed by a large margin. Northern Illinois University political science major Alex Hari explains:
"Every state has their own constitution. Voters in this election decided if they wanted changes to be made to the state constitution."Thank you, John Madden. Thoughts on the challenges faced by the "yes" movement from "yes" movement leader Bruno Behrend.
--- If Philadelphia Republicans managed to dodge the Black Panthers "guarding" their polling places, they probably could've followed this gentleman's advice and voted "a couple times". CNN reporter's startled response: "I think that's against the law, but it's OK."
--- There's no denying the importance of Obama's historic moment last night and I have no intention of diminishing it, but while I'm no fashion guru, even I think that Michelle Obama has purchased the dress of the apocalypse.
--- "We're also smelling just a little bit of weed in the air. Haven't been to many political events where you smell that."
--- Rock the Vote, the New York Times, and the respective New York State and New York City Boards of Elections have joined forces to point fingers at each other in the bungling of tens of thousands of voter registrations. On their Blog, Rock the Vote promises to find the real killers.
--- Al Franken appears to have failed in his bid for the Senate, which is good news, because physicists have long suspected that Franken's presence in the Senate Chamber would rip the fabric of spacetime. Predictably, his campaign ended with him saying embarrassing things that remind everyone why he deserved to lose.
--- Actually, about Obama's speech last night:
Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston....and in the living room of William Ayers.
Hah!
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.I'm still waiting for this guy to tell me where we're going.
I promise you - we as a people will get there.No, seriously. Where are we going?
Perspective
6:51 pm, 11/3/08
Over the last six months, professional obligations have caused me to miss a lot of opportunities to participate in the blogosphere, which has been depressing. I originally imagined I'd have the willpower to continue blogging at a normal pace, but being surrounded by this election cycle all day, every day, pretty much beat that out of me.
However, from the Democrats' embarrassing mistake in opposing offshore drilling to the comical spectacle that they billed as their convention, I missed out on opportunities to say some things that probably needed to be said. Still, I think what I've been working on will prove significant, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow night, to the extent that I might have my work vindicated. Even if we don't get what we wanted, we've done damage in places it needed to be done.
As for the Presidential race, I'll say the same things here that I've told others:
Barack Obama isn't going to win by the dramatic 10 and 12 percent margins some polls are suggesting, it's going to be more like 5. Still, we're losing this election. John McCain made huge mistakes, let down his base, and Obama had money, a willingness to shift to the right in his rhetoric, and an anti-incumbent, anti-Bush current running in his favor. McCain's powerful strategic choice in Sarah Palin turned out to be an epic tactical error, and his handling of the bailout was a disastrous miscue that all but ended the race for him.
The bailout package was, indeed, "bipartisan", but only in the sense that both parties were working together against us. It left me disgusted enough that I'm opposing anyone who voted for it, for any office, forever. With the Early Voting collapse of the "Write in Fred Thompson" suicide pact I'd made with friends, that leaves me forced to join them in voting for Bob Barr.
However, if McCain has failed conservatives, Obama is already preparing to fail America:
Maybe I'm being needlessly harsh, but it seems as if "hope" is a fallback for people who have trouble with economics. Consider this poor woman, who thinks that, somehow, under Obama, she "won't have to worry about putting gas in her car, won't have to worry about paying her mortgage".
What?
Democrats accuse Republicans of using "the politics of fear", while warning from the other side of their mouth that if they aren't elected to office, our children will never have a future and might even be killed in a natural disaster caused by carbon emissions. Feminist Erica Jong warns that "blood will run in the streets", and, in a dramatic overestimation of the commitment and small arms proficiency of Obama supporters, that an Obama loss will spark a "second American civil war".
We're told, live on major news networks, most dramatically by apparent rabies sufferer Keith Olbermann, that we're the ones somehow suppressing dissenting viewpoints, even as Barack Obama bans disapproving newspapers from his plane and blacklists stations that ask his running mate pressing questions, even as a left-liberal radio host wishes death on Joe the Plumber for defying "Him" and liberal Democrats try to reimpose the so-called "fairness doctrine" on conservative commentary.
Truly, as Mark Steyn has noted, satire is dead.
Still, no matter what you hear on your favorite cable news network, this is not the most important or contentious election in American history and the nation is certainly not "more divided than ever". It's another Presidential election between two perfectly fallible human beings who are ignorant of many things, and we do have these elections like clockwork. We will do it again in four years, and the media will doubtlessly describe that, too, as the most important election in our history, as if our very lives hinge on the outcome.
A certain percentage of voters believe that the sheer power of their faith in Obama will somehow grant him the power and the wisdom to solve all their problems, a fallacy that would quickly be dispelled by a good civics course. In truth, real reform and good governance requires constant vigilance from an informed electorate that realizes the Presidency is only one piece of the puzzle, not faith in "change" or "experience" or any other buzzword a campaign pays to place on television. If government is full of hypocrites or sell-outs, it's primarily because we don't pay enough attention to stop electing them.
Jeffrey Kuhner, writing for the Washington Times, fears the end of days for individual liberty and free markets.
To predict that the Democrats will massively overplay their hand in this environment is to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the next Pope will be a practicing Roman Catholic. They will confuse this for a mandate, and then they'll burn for it. The next few years are, ultimately, going to be about getting the GOP back on track.
However, from the Democrats' embarrassing mistake in opposing offshore drilling to the comical spectacle that they billed as their convention, I missed out on opportunities to say some things that probably needed to be said. Still, I think what I've been working on will prove significant, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow night, to the extent that I might have my work vindicated. Even if we don't get what we wanted, we've done damage in places it needed to be done.
As for the Presidential race, I'll say the same things here that I've told others:
Barack Obama isn't going to win by the dramatic 10 and 12 percent margins some polls are suggesting, it's going to be more like 5. Still, we're losing this election. John McCain made huge mistakes, let down his base, and Obama had money, a willingness to shift to the right in his rhetoric, and an anti-incumbent, anti-Bush current running in his favor. McCain's powerful strategic choice in Sarah Palin turned out to be an epic tactical error, and his handling of the bailout was a disastrous miscue that all but ended the race for him.
The bailout package was, indeed, "bipartisan", but only in the sense that both parties were working together against us. It left me disgusted enough that I'm opposing anyone who voted for it, for any office, forever. With the Early Voting collapse of the "Write in Fred Thompson" suicide pact I'd made with friends, that leaves me forced to join them in voting for Bob Barr.
However, if McCain has failed conservatives, Obama is already preparing to fail America:
Barack Obama's senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week's election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harbouring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.Interesting. Who's fault would those ridiculous expectations be?
One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, "so there's not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair".
Maybe I'm being needlessly harsh, but it seems as if "hope" is a fallback for people who have trouble with economics. Consider this poor woman, who thinks that, somehow, under Obama, she "won't have to worry about putting gas in her car, won't have to worry about paying her mortgage".
What?
Democrats accuse Republicans of using "the politics of fear", while warning from the other side of their mouth that if they aren't elected to office, our children will never have a future and might even be killed in a natural disaster caused by carbon emissions. Feminist Erica Jong warns that "blood will run in the streets", and, in a dramatic overestimation of the commitment and small arms proficiency of Obama supporters, that an Obama loss will spark a "second American civil war".
We're told, live on major news networks, most dramatically by apparent rabies sufferer Keith Olbermann, that we're the ones somehow suppressing dissenting viewpoints, even as Barack Obama bans disapproving newspapers from his plane and blacklists stations that ask his running mate pressing questions, even as a left-liberal radio host wishes death on Joe the Plumber for defying "Him" and liberal Democrats try to reimpose the so-called "fairness doctrine" on conservative commentary.
Truly, as Mark Steyn has noted, satire is dead.
Still, no matter what you hear on your favorite cable news network, this is not the most important or contentious election in American history and the nation is certainly not "more divided than ever". It's another Presidential election between two perfectly fallible human beings who are ignorant of many things, and we do have these elections like clockwork. We will do it again in four years, and the media will doubtlessly describe that, too, as the most important election in our history, as if our very lives hinge on the outcome.
A certain percentage of voters believe that the sheer power of their faith in Obama will somehow grant him the power and the wisdom to solve all their problems, a fallacy that would quickly be dispelled by a good civics course. In truth, real reform and good governance requires constant vigilance from an informed electorate that realizes the Presidency is only one piece of the puzzle, not faith in "change" or "experience" or any other buzzword a campaign pays to place on television. If government is full of hypocrites or sell-outs, it's primarily because we don't pay enough attention to stop electing them.
Jeffrey Kuhner, writing for the Washington Times, fears the end of days for individual liberty and free markets.
New Deal-Great Society liberalism has put America on the path to creeping socialism. The Democrats are now on the verge of completing it. A socialist America will be a poorer, weaker America. More importantly, it will spell the end of American exceptionalism - the experiment of a free people in constitutional self-government.I don't believe that's likely to happen. Whether his promises are sincere or he's a closeted radical Marxist, there are going to be very practical limits to Barack Obama's political capital, because his party wants "change" that looks nothing like what voters are signing up for. He's going to be helpless to find a happy compromise, as there's clearly no mandate for socialist reforms: 84% of Americans prioritize economic growth over an "equitable" distribution of wealth. Democrats weren't elected to "give their ideas a chance", they were elected in the hopes that they might give the public's ideas a chance for once: right now, half of all Americans believe that this Congress, a Democrat-controlled Congress, is no better than a random sample from the phone book, and three quarters believe that their elected legislators don't even understand the bills they're passing.
Once that happens, there will be no turning back. There will be a conservative movement after an Obama victory. However, it will be one fighting a desperate, rear-guard action. Like the conservatives in Canada or Western Europe, the question will no longer be how to stop the statist juggernaut but how to manage it.
To predict that the Democrats will massively overplay their hand in this environment is to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the next Pope will be a practicing Roman Catholic. They will confuse this for a mandate, and then they'll burn for it. The next few years are, ultimately, going to be about getting the GOP back on track.
He’s Honored To Get What We All Want To See
4:02 pm, 10/31/08
He's Honored To Get What We All Want To See
He's kind of like Jesus, but not in a sacriligious way.
Really, isn't that what he's implying here? That voters are just too stupid to understand how precious his genius is?
Incredibly, the Constitutional Convention referendum process is already being bungled by Blagojevich's co-incompetents:
He's kind of like Jesus, but not in a sacriligious way.
"All of those things happened because we had to push and prod and fight through the system to get it done for people, and if I get bloodied up in the process, and there are some times when people are just not generally approving, I feel honored to get my ass kicked for the people," Blagojevich said.Well, in that case... Monday Night Rehabilitation!
Really, isn't that what he's implying here? That voters are just too stupid to understand how precious his genius is?
For the current election, Blagojevich has come out against a referendum calling for a new state constitutional convention.Of course he has.
He said it might limit his power to get around the state General Assembly to get things done.In fact, it's almost guaranteed to do exactly that. The more Blagojevich promotes that fact, the more likely it is to pass.
Incredibly, the Constitutional Convention referendum process is already being bungled by Blagojevich's co-incompetents:
An Illinois appellate court affirmed the trial court's remedy for the "downright misleading" and unconstitutional ballot: hand out a flyer to voters telling them to disregard the referendum "Explanation" and "Notice" that are printed right on the ballot.Irony.
The bottom line is that citizens will vote on a ballot that a court has ruled is unconstitutional.
He’s a Victim of the System
4:10 pm, 10/28/08
He's a Victim of the System
The video surveillance system.
This is how it starts, petty theft, tire slashing, vote fraud. Then, you get bold, and rob your own armored cars.
Soon, the transformation will be complete, and Beard will be eligible to run for high office in Illinois.
The video surveillance system.
The head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library was fired Tuesday, just days after it came to light that he had twice been arrested for shoplifting.The DVDs? Season 4 of "House".
Director Rick Beard was placed on administrative leave last week after The (Springfield) State Journal-Register reported his arrests for stealing DVDs and neckties, but he continued to receive his salary.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich formally fired him on Tuesday. Beard was notified by telephone, said Dave Blanchette, spokesman for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.
Beard made nearly $250,000 a year as director of the museum and the foundation.
He was charged in August with trying to steal $40 worth of DVDs from a Springfield Target.
And he was charged with misdemeanor theft last year after being caught allegedly trying to steal $300 worth of neckties at a Springfield shopping mall.
This is how it starts, petty theft, tire slashing, vote fraud. Then, you get bold, and rob your own armored cars.
Soon, the transformation will be complete, and Beard will be eligible to run for high office in Illinois.
Munchausen’s Syndrome Strikes Again
11:00 pm, 10/25/08
Munchausen's Syndrome Strikes Again
You know Ashley Todd, the McCain campaign volunteer who pulled the idiotic stunt where she pretended to have been assaulted by an Obama supporter?
Turns out, her antics had previously gotten her thrown out of a group of Ron Paul supporters.
I didn't realize it was even possible to get thrown out of a Ron Paul group. I assumed they all wore capes and masks to protect their identities.
You know Ashley Todd, the McCain campaign volunteer who pulled the idiotic stunt where she pretended to have been assaulted by an Obama supporter?
Turns out, her antics had previously gotten her thrown out of a group of Ron Paul supporters.
I didn't realize it was even possible to get thrown out of a Ron Paul group. I assumed they all wore capes and masks to protect their identities.
This Must Have Been Done by Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot
10:23 pm, 10/24/08
This Must Have Been Done by Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot
Illinois' "other" Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, in a remarkable moment of clarity:
Illinois' "other" Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, in a remarkable moment of clarity:
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin wishes he could blame Republicans for the mess and dysfunction paralyzing Illinois state government these days, but he knows he can't.Don't worry: once we elect a product of the Chicago Democratic machine, shining beacon of good governance that it is, to the Presidency, everything will be puppies and unicorns in no time.
"This mess is our creation, Democratic creation, and there are no excuses for what has happened," Durbin, a Springfield resident and the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said in an interview Thursday with The State Journal-Register editorial board.
Durbin said he's tried to work more closely with Blagojevich on key issues, but doesn't get his phone calls returned regularly. He said he doesn't know what it will take to fix the problems or whether he or anyone else in Washington could help cut through the morass.
He Loves You Even More Now That You Hate Him
10:07 pm, 10/24/08
He Loves You Even More Now That You Hate Him
Point:
Point:
Gov. Rod Blagojevich may be the least liked politician in America. A new poll shows only 10 percent want him re-elected in 2010. Add that to the 13 percent who approve of Blagojevich's job performance -- that's even worse than President Bush's 18 percent approval ratings. The Chicago Tribune poll surveyed 500 likely voters last week.Counter-Point:
The governor has become such a polarizing figure that both Republicans and Democrats are using him in negative ads. State Sen. Debbie Halvorson, a Democratic candidate for Congress in the 11th district, is now using the contributions of businessman Marty Ozinga, her opponent, to Blagojevich as a reason to vote for her.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich today blamed his low approval rating on the faltering economy and said he thinks voters would give him a third term in office if he was running on the Nov. 4.What did he blame it on after Hurricane Katrina, when he somehow managed to rank worse than Governor Blanco?
He said he was confident that if he was on the ballot today that he'd "win by 10 points or better."That's technically correct. If he was on the ballot today, he'd be unopposed.
"I love the people of Illinois more today than I did before," Blagojevich said. "And if it's a case of unrequited love at this point, I'll just have to work extra hard to get them to love me again."In some jurisdictions, that'd be enough to get a restraining order. However, it looks like the feds would prefer to skip straight to prison.
HELLO WORLD
8:05 pm, 10/22/08
HELLO WORLD
That's right, the blog is back online. I have, literally, not had time to repair a MySQL table until now.
Life gets better November 4th. Or, depending on how "big picture" I want to be about it, much, much worse.
That's right, the blog is back online. I have, literally, not had time to repair a MySQL table until now.
Life gets better November 4th. Or, depending on how "big picture" I want to be about it, much, much worse.
Bicycle Wars
4:34 pm, 9/28/08
Bicycle Wars
A debate is inspired among multiple factions of Chattanoogan readers following an epic letter describing bicyclists as "screaming and crying" "morons" in "little clown suits".
A debate is inspired among multiple factions of Chattanoogan readers following an epic letter describing bicyclists as "screaming and crying" "morons" in "little clown suits".
I get over to Signal Mountain Road and Dayton Boulevard and another little clown with little blinking lights runs this red light while all us motorized vehicle drivers obey the law. And I'd have given a hundred dollars to have been over at the tunnel the other day and saw the little clown scream at the car that passed him, and when the car stopped a police officer got out and read him the riot act. I'd bet the little clown had to walk over into the woods and shake his little clown suit out....Over a dozen emotionally-charged responses follow, including one from the most unfortunately-named man in the American South, Savage Glascock.
These clowns need to learn that $3,000 or $4,000 aluminum Barnum and Bailey bicycle are 'no' match for an automobile. Stay off the roads. No one wants to drive home at two or three miles an hour and watch you sweat and turn red in the face.
Go to a gym and get in shape. And when you can keep up in traffic, ride your B&B kiddie bike on the road, morons.
Let’s just be safe and assume the money was stolen.
7:53 pm, 9/26/08
Let's just be safe and assume the money was stolen.
Often, recordkeeping anomalies are a sign of fraud.
Often, recordkeeping anomalies are a sign of fraud.
In a lawsuit filed by a lawyer and two business-group representatives, Blagojevich lawyers admitted they had virtually no record of [the FamilyCare health insurance] program.Rod Blagojevich can't be trusted to pick up lunch.
They said the administration can't identify participants or contact them, monitor premium payments or refund them, and don't even know how much they've collected in premium payments or where the money is. That, along with the Legislature's rejection of the program, raised ''severe concerns,'' Judge Fitzgerald Smith wrote in issuing the court's opinion.
The Democratic governor asked the Legislature last year to expand state-subsidized health care by raising income limits, adding 147,000 people at a cost of about $40 million. The Legislature refused, as did a legislative rules-making body and Secretary of State Jesse White.
But Blagojevich began enrolling newcomers. The administration continued even after Circuit Judge James Epstein issued his April injunction. It took another court order to get Blagojevich to stop.
Greg Baise, president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association and a plaintiff, called the lack of records ''appalling'' and said it's likely plaintiffs will ask the judge to appoint an outside monitor to ''unwind'' the program because Blagojevich can't be trusted.
Great Success
6:03 pm, 9/25/08
Great Success
At last, the day I've been living for.
At last, the day I've been living for.
Could Illinois Governor Blagojevich suffer the same fate as convicted former Governor George Ryan?Could he? Could he?
Sources tell CBS 2 News Chicago that Federal agents claim to have enough evidence to indict Blagojevich on fraud and conspiracy charges.I hope they don't plan on letting him finish his term. He deserves to go out in flames, not like a decent public servant.
Moonbat Shot Down
7:13 pm, 9/8/08
Moonbat Shot Down
Apparently, NBC has finally noticed that frothing lunatic Keith Olbermann is not a professional journalist.
Apparently, NBC has finally noticed that frothing lunatic Keith Olbermann is not a professional journalist.
MSNBC is replacing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as co-anchors of political night coverage with David Gregory, and will use the two newsmen as commentators.Personally, I think the tipping point came during the Democratic convention, when Olbermann angrily proclaimed, as part of his theoretically neutral coverage, that an Associated Press reporter should "look for a new job" after daring to criticize The Obama's speech. Even for Olbermann, who usually plays fast and loose with reality and fills America's living rooms with unhinged rants, that was over the line.
Throughout the primaries and summer, MSNBC argued that Olbermann and Matthews could serve as dispassionate anchors on political news nights and that viewers would accept them in that role, but things fell apart during the conventions.
The tipping point appears to have come during the GOP convention when Olbermann criticized MSNBC for showing a Sept. 11-themed video prepared by the Republicans.
During her acceptance speech last week, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin talked about the "Washington elite" not accepting her qualifications for the job. Some delegates on the convention floor began chanting, "N-B-C, N-B-C."How MSNBC thought this was going to work is beyond me. Having Olbermann anchoring serious political coverage eliminates any appearance of impartiality that they might want to have. There's no escaping his persona, which is, to put it mildly, not generally associated with factual accuracy or intellectual honesty. It's like asking Bill O'Reilly to anchor the coverage. You can't do it without fostering a general sense that something untoward is going on. In Olbermann's case, it clearly was.
Olbermann began to have difficulty keeping his opinions in check, or simply stopped trying.
He sarcastically dismissed GOP pundit Pat Buchanan on the air after Buchanan said the Republicans had been enlivened by the entrance of a conservative Republican.
"Those reading US Weekly with the picture of her and her youngest daughter with the word 'scandal' written across it won't be so happy," Olbermann said.
He expressed little sympathy at another point when GOP anger at rumors over the Internet about Palin were being discussed.
"We'll see if people feel sorry for unfounded rumors on the Internet," he said. "If that's the case, Senator Obama's probably standing up and cheering and waiting for people to feel sorry for him."
Perhaps most embarrassing, Joe Scarborough was discussing positive developments in John McCain's campaign at one point when Olbermann was heard on an offstage microphone saying: "Jesus, Joe, why don't you get a shovel?"
All the drama made MSNBC a punch line when top NBC anchor Brian Williams appeared on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" last week. "Is there no control?" host Jon Stewart asked him. "'Is it 'Lord of the Flies?'"When Jon Stewart, whose show, in his own words, is on after "muppets making crank phone calls", says your news organization is acting like a bunch of petulant, bloodthirsty children, you may have a legitimate problem. His perfectly valid analysis of the problems with Crossfire preceded the surprising death of the show by only a couple months.
A sheepish Williams said that every family has a dynamic of its own.
"But does MSNBC have to be the Lohans?" Stewart said.
Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America." Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion....and yet, CNN, like the rest of the MSM, still fails to deliver, and their public trust continues to collapse, just like the rest of the MSM.
Palin FTW
10:32 am, 9/6/08
Palin FTW
Three weeks ago, I was sitting at a bar talking to a couple of friends about why Sarah Palin was a great, outside-the-box choice for McCain's running mate, but acknowledging that it would never happen. Imagine my surprise to find myself, a few days ago, explaining to another group of friends why Sarah Palin had been the best choice, from a strictly strategic point of view, that McCain could've possibly made. At this point, I'm pretty sure it's all been said all over the blogosphere already, but I'll lay it out anyway.
Put aside your partisan feelings for a second. Put aside that she's a moral authority on the most heated issue of this election cycle (oil production), put aside the question of whether women will come out in droves to vote for her (if just one in one hundred do, that's still a huge score; and many studies show women as more pro-life than men).
Instead, consider this:
1) The effective lines of attack available to the Democrats require them to burn down their own house in order to get to Palin. Accusing her of being too inexperienced to be Vice-President reminds the world that Barack Obama, someone who is, at the most generous, equally inexperienced, wants to be President. Mocking her for hunting and her teenage daughter for having a teenage boyfriend who, as rural teenage boys do, describes himself as a "redneck" only reminds the hundred million plus Americans who don't really see anything wrong with that they have nothing in common with national Democrats. One brilliant criticism even suggests that with a pregnant daughter and a child suffering from Down's Syndrome, Palin is too "distracted" to be Vice-President. To make that argument, you have to trash decades of feminist support for the idea that women can choose to blend a home life with a high-profile careers (which is already generating feminist backlash), assume that the wife is automatically the primary childcare provider, and quietly accuse single mothers and the disabled, both theoretically Democratic demographics, of being harmful burdens on their loved ones.
2) The Democrats, having anointed themselves the party of women, cannot allow the first woman in the White House to be a conservative, pro-life Republican. They must do anything and everything they can to stop it. Failure to do so would upset the decades-old balance that the Democrats depend on to remain a viable party.
Democrats should be trying to play this cool, but they can't control themselves. They have a rabid fear of Palin becoming President in 2016 and forever undermining the Democratic Party's reputation as the champion of women. They're forced to go nuclear, and every insane rumor imaginable has been vomited forth in just a few short days. Thousands of canned letters to the editor and blog comments spreading this transparent, goofy nonsense are popping up everywhere. The net result is that Sarah Palin is now more popular than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or John McCain. A majority of Americans, though slight, believe the media is conspiring against her. There's palpable desperation, becase the ideological left, lacking shared moral premises with mainstream America, can't understand why their attacks aren't just failing, but are blowing up in their face.
That's to be expected, because these are the same people who thought that accusing John McCain of being wealthy was an effective attack, unaware that Americans, as a rule, like seeing people get rich, and don't begrudge it to war heroes.
McCain held this for the ideal moment, waiting for Obama to pick a boring, formulaic running mate and to almost completely run out of steam, unable to generate significant results from either his ridiculous "European Tour" or the convention. Obama had said everything he had to say, repeatedly, and Americans were already tired of hearing it. It's then that McCain decided to do something unusual, to throw Obama's little checkerboard onto the ground and start setting up a chess set. It seems to be working.
Now, there's still room for it to all go horribly wrong, for something truly bizarre to come out of the sky about Palin, for Obama's campaign to get their head together, but at least based on what's known, I think it's now entirely McCain's race to lose.
Update: Oh, and this stupid thing?
First, we all know how that ended. Second, Jesus had a real job: he was a carpenter. Third, apparently, some leftists still don't see that trying to compare Obama to Jesus makes Obama less popular, and makes his supporters seem like dangerous lunatics.
Three weeks ago, I was sitting at a bar talking to a couple of friends about why Sarah Palin was a great, outside-the-box choice for McCain's running mate, but acknowledging that it would never happen. Imagine my surprise to find myself, a few days ago, explaining to another group of friends why Sarah Palin had been the best choice, from a strictly strategic point of view, that McCain could've possibly made. At this point, I'm pretty sure it's all been said all over the blogosphere already, but I'll lay it out anyway.
Put aside your partisan feelings for a second. Put aside that she's a moral authority on the most heated issue of this election cycle (oil production), put aside the question of whether women will come out in droves to vote for her (if just one in one hundred do, that's still a huge score; and many studies show women as more pro-life than men).
Instead, consider this:
1) The effective lines of attack available to the Democrats require them to burn down their own house in order to get to Palin. Accusing her of being too inexperienced to be Vice-President reminds the world that Barack Obama, someone who is, at the most generous, equally inexperienced, wants to be President. Mocking her for hunting and her teenage daughter for having a teenage boyfriend who, as rural teenage boys do, describes himself as a "redneck" only reminds the hundred million plus Americans who don't really see anything wrong with that they have nothing in common with national Democrats. One brilliant criticism even suggests that with a pregnant daughter and a child suffering from Down's Syndrome, Palin is too "distracted" to be Vice-President. To make that argument, you have to trash decades of feminist support for the idea that women can choose to blend a home life with a high-profile careers (which is already generating feminist backlash), assume that the wife is automatically the primary childcare provider, and quietly accuse single mothers and the disabled, both theoretically Democratic demographics, of being harmful burdens on their loved ones.
2) The Democrats, having anointed themselves the party of women, cannot allow the first woman in the White House to be a conservative, pro-life Republican. They must do anything and everything they can to stop it. Failure to do so would upset the decades-old balance that the Democrats depend on to remain a viable party.
Democrats should be trying to play this cool, but they can't control themselves. They have a rabid fear of Palin becoming President in 2016 and forever undermining the Democratic Party's reputation as the champion of women. They're forced to go nuclear, and every insane rumor imaginable has been vomited forth in just a few short days. Thousands of canned letters to the editor and blog comments spreading this transparent, goofy nonsense are popping up everywhere. The net result is that Sarah Palin is now more popular than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or John McCain. A majority of Americans, though slight, believe the media is conspiring against her. There's palpable desperation, becase the ideological left, lacking shared moral premises with mainstream America, can't understand why their attacks aren't just failing, but are blowing up in their face.
That's to be expected, because these are the same people who thought that accusing John McCain of being wealthy was an effective attack, unaware that Americans, as a rule, like seeing people get rich, and don't begrudge it to war heroes.
McCain held this for the ideal moment, waiting for Obama to pick a boring, formulaic running mate and to almost completely run out of steam, unable to generate significant results from either his ridiculous "European Tour" or the convention. Obama had said everything he had to say, repeatedly, and Americans were already tired of hearing it. It's then that McCain decided to do something unusual, to throw Obama's little checkerboard onto the ground and start setting up a chess set. It seems to be working.
Now, there's still room for it to all go horribly wrong, for something truly bizarre to come out of the sky about Palin, for Obama's campaign to get their head together, but at least based on what's known, I think it's now entirely McCain's race to lose.
Update: Oh, and this stupid thing?
First, we all know how that ended. Second, Jesus had a real job: he was a carpenter. Third, apparently, some leftists still don't see that trying to compare Obama to Jesus makes Obama less popular, and makes his supporters seem like dangerous lunatics.
That’s More Like It
2:27 pm, 8/31/08
That's More Like It
The Hurricane hasn't even hit yet, and Louisiana officials, while they're clearly doing better this time, are still in traditional disarray.
The Hurricane hasn't even hit yet, and Louisiana officials, while they're clearly doing better this time, are still in traditional disarray.
With about 2,000 Louisiana National Guardsmen stationed in New Orleans, neighboring Jefferson Parish has seen few troops sent to help police so far despite repeated requests to the state, the parish's emergency planner said.In fact, the Louisiana National Guard is barely sure who's coming.
"I'm very frustrated that we've got twice the population to protect than New Orleans," said Deano Bonano, the emergency planner.
His comments come on the heels of a National Guard announcement that 300 soldiers in the 2nd Squadron, 108th Cavalry Regiment are departing Shreveport en route to Jefferson to bolster the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office ranks.
Bonano said he was unaware of the Guard's announcement and added that he was told troops aren't expected to arrive until tonight.
"We don't know who is coming or how many are coming," he said.
Whether all 300 soldiers en route from Shreveport will be in Jefferson Parish is unclear. A National Guard press release says all of the soldiers will be in Jefferson helping the Sheriff's Office.This time around, though, when other states offered to help, Louisiana has actually bothered to respond. National Guard elements from Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Missouri are already on their way.
Spc. Qualan Jefferson, a squadron spokesman, said elements of his unit are going to the Morial Convention Center -- in New Orleans -- and to Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner.
Bonano he was told the troops will deploy to the Alario Center near Westwego, where the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office would dispatch them out for security missions.
It’s Almost Like They’re a Real State
5:33 pm, 8/28/08
It's Almost Like They're a Real State
New Orleans, prepare for glory.
New Orleans, prepare for glory.
With forecasters warning that Gustav could strengthen and slam into the Gulf Coast as a major hurricane, a New Orleans still recovering from Hurricane Katrina's devastating hit drew up evacuation plans.Evacuating? What a remarkable idea! Trains and buses? It's almost like they figured out who is responsible for emergencies.
Taking no chances, city officials began preliminary planning to evacuate and lock down the city in hopes of avoiding the catastrophe that followed the 2005 storm. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin left the Democratic National Convention in Denver to return home for the preparations. Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency to lay the groundwork for federal assistance, and put 3,000 National Guard troops on standby.
If a Category 3 or stronger hurricane comes within 60 hours of the city, New Orleans plans to institute a mandatory evacuation order. Unlike Katrina, there will be no massive shelter at the Superdome, a plan designed to encourage residents to leave. Instead, the state has arranged for buses and trains to take people to safety.
At a suburban Lowe's store, employees said portable generators, gasoline cans, bottled water and batteries were selling briskly. Hotels across south Louisiana reported taking many reservations as coastal residents looked inland for possible refuge.Also? Rifles.
Alive
6:05 pm, 8/25/08
Alive
I've been in the Catskills and vicinity for two weeks as part of an ongoing (and escalating) project I've been involved with. Worse yet, while I was up there, the laptop died, and Hewlett-Packard's warranty service was unusually useless on the matter. Expect resumed posting tomorrow.
Update: OK, maybe not tomorrow. Maybe more like, uh, Thursday.
I've been in the Catskills and vicinity for two weeks as part of an ongoing (and escalating) project I've been involved with. Worse yet, while I was up there, the laptop died, and Hewlett-Packard's warranty service was unusually useless on the matter. Expect resumed posting tomorrow.
Update: OK, maybe not tomorrow. Maybe more like, uh, Thursday.
Admitting He Has a Problem is the First Step
9:42 pm, 8/8/08
Admitting He Has a Problem is the First Step
In the course of a confession you probably saw coming a mile away (and stop asking yourself "...if he's not the father and the affair ended two years ago, why was he at the hotel?"), a root cause is revealed:
In the course of a confession you probably saw coming a mile away (and stop asking yourself "...if he's not the father and the affair ended two years ago, why was he at the hotel?"), a root cause is revealed:
"In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic," Edwards said in trying to explain his behavior.No! John Edwards, the Democratic Party's silky pony boy, the man who even the New York Times now calls a "Ken doll", narcissistic? Not this man!
The Opening Ceremonies
5:28 pm, 8/8/08
The Opening Ceremonies
I'm having a lot of laughs watching the Beijing Opening Ceremonies with a Cold War historian. Nevermind what an obvious Soviet hand-me-down the Chinese national anthem ("March of the Volunteers") is, the narrator just feeds you straight lines as he tries to dance around the gigantic elephants in the room.
"...the Mogao Caves, which are wonderfully preserved Buddhist artworks in a cave in the remote desert..."
"By 'wonderfully preserved' he means that the caves were too far away for the government to destroy during the Cultural Revolution."
(dancers using their bodies to paint a traditional Chinese artwork on a giant canvas)
"So, if they're taking us through Chinese history here, when they get to Mao, are they going to come out and set that painting on fire?"
They are putting on an impressive show, but I can hardly wait to see how they deal with it when they get to about 1940.
Update: They skipped it. They cut right from the medieval era to 1978. Dead serious.
I'm having a lot of laughs watching the Beijing Opening Ceremonies with a Cold War historian. Nevermind what an obvious Soviet hand-me-down the Chinese national anthem ("March of the Volunteers") is, the narrator just feeds you straight lines as he tries to dance around the gigantic elephants in the room.
"...the Mogao Caves, which are wonderfully preserved Buddhist artworks in a cave in the remote desert..."
"By 'wonderfully preserved' he means that the caves were too far away for the government to destroy during the Cultural Revolution."
(dancers using their bodies to paint a traditional Chinese artwork on a giant canvas)
"So, if they're taking us through Chinese history here, when they get to Mao, are they going to come out and set that painting on fire?"
They are putting on an impressive show, but I can hardly wait to see how they deal with it when they get to about 1940.
Update: They skipped it. They cut right from the medieval era to 1978. Dead serious.
Why would anyone do this?
10:36 pm, 8/5/08
Why would anyone do this?
Just in case you ever need it, not that you ever will, here's a website featuring selected readings from the Book of Mormon, in Klingon.
This here internet has everything.
Just in case you ever need it, not that you ever will, here's a website featuring selected readings from the Book of Mormon, in Klingon.
This here internet has everything.
It’s an Old Joke
2:23 pm, 8/5/08
Incandescents Didn’t Start the Fire
7:50 pm, 8/3/08
Incandescents Didn't Start the Fire
When I wrote this post, I omitted references to the fire hazard created by compact fluorescent lightbulbs because, supposedly, there is no true fire hazard, and "heat and possibly a small amount of smoke" are actually a normal behavior when the bulb burns out. In practice, that seems to be a potentially significant problem, as Green Living reports:
Meanwhile, James Lileks, commenting at Tim Blair's blog, has his own horrifying encounter with CFLs.
When I wrote this post, I omitted references to the fire hazard created by compact fluorescent lightbulbs because, supposedly, there is no true fire hazard, and "heat and possibly a small amount of smoke" are actually a normal behavior when the bulb burns out. In practice, that seems to be a potentially significant problem, as Green Living reports:
However, a couple of weeks ago I noticed the typical acrid smell of an electric fire in the sitting room. I couldn't see any fire but the stench was getting stronger and it seemed to be particularly bad just under the light. I thought we must have some problem with the wiring. I turned the lights off, checked outside whether there was smoke coming out somewhere, even crawled up into the attic space - but I couldn't see anything unusual.No, it's not a bad batch. According to National Geographic's Green Guide, this means they're working correctly, and the Democratic Congress, in their infinite and progressive wisdom, expects you to deal with it.
The following day I noticed that one of the light bulbs in the sitting room was "dead". When I tried to unscrew it, it cracked at the base, just where the glass goes into the plastic encasing - not good, given that CFLs contain nasty mercury. We quickly evacuated the kids, opened all the windows, I made sure the thing didn't break completely, carefully sealed it in a plastic bag and got rid of it.
Then last week I again noticed this awful smell, this time in the bedroom. I looked up and saw thick black smoke coming out of our ceiling light!...Two of the three CFLs in the lamp were partially blackened inside and there were signs that the plastic base had started to melt and burn.
Maybe I was just unlucky and this was simply a bad batch.
Meanwhile, James Lileks, commenting at Tim Blair's blog, has his own horrifying encounter with CFLs.
They finally brought out some dimmable CFLs, so I tried one. Eight dollars. Never mind the ghastly light, which would be fine if I wanted to shoot a movie scene that took place in a Soviet morgue, and never mind the way the bulb 'dimmed' by going from Much Light to No Light with little difference in between; never mind the palsied flicker that announced the bulb was on. What bothered me the most, I think, was the fact that it broke after one use. Died out of shame, perhaps.It's little wonder this bill won't take effect for several years: Congressional Democrats get to act like they're helping, without facing angry voters. If the technology was truly ready for consumers, there'd be no need for the delay.
Took it back to the store, and they offered to take it off my hands to handle the mercury. But that would cost another dollar.
Good Thing None of These People Had Guns, or Else This Might’ve Happened
9:59 pm, 7/31/08
Good Thing None of These People Had Guns, or Else This Might've Happened
In ever-safe Canada:
In ever-safe Canada:
A man sleeping on a Greyhound bus as it rolled across the Canadian Prairies was killed and decapitated by his seatmate as horrified passengers fled to safety in the night, witnesses and police said on Thursday.According to witnesses, he stabbed his victim "40 or 50 times", and after dropping the head, returned to mutilate the body.
"The attacker was standing up right over top of the guy with a large hunting knife -- a survival, Rambo knife -- holding the guy and continually stabbing him, stabbing him, stabbing him in the chest area," Caton told CBC Television.
The attack continued as other passengers fled the bus and waited for police, Caton said. He said he, the driver and another passenger desperately tried to hold the bus door closed to prevent the attacker from leaving.
"He calmly walks up to the front (of the bus) with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," Caton said.
You’re Invited
2:42 pm, 7/30/08
You're Invited
Bruno Behrend, the man behind Extreme Wisdom, will be the speaker at a Chicago conference to discuss the probable upcoming Illinois Constitutional Convention.
I just got off the phone with Behrend, and he lays out a compelling case, arguing that while it's plausible an even more destructive document would come out of the convention, what everybody should agree on is that what's in place now is unacceptable. He describes it as having "opened Pandora's box 40 years ago", and this being the chance to close it. "The bad guys control every office, they control every party. This is our last chance to change something for the better," he says. He also cited Rich Miller's stance, that everyone knows the foxes are in charge of the hen house, but that the "no"-vote crowd is contending that the only viable option is to continue buying more chickens.
Bruno Behrend and John Bambenek have a book out, Illinois Deserves Better.
Interestingly, a poll, conducted by Ask Illinois, found that a majority of voters believe former Governor George Ryan would be a better governor than Rod Blagojevich.
George Ryan is in federal prison.
Bruno Behrend, the man behind Extreme Wisdom, will be the speaker at a Chicago conference to discuss the probable upcoming Illinois Constitutional Convention.
The Constitutional Convention issue creates exciting opportunities for the citizens of Illinois to dramatically improve our state. Attendees will hear about all of the new developments that have taken place regarding the convention in the last few months. The presentation will focus on how the current political climate, along with the convention mechanics, will allow citizens to re-organize around sound policies instead of the status quo where strong, ethical leadership is sorely lacking. The presentation will be short, so as to allow the audience to get in the maximum number of questions.Spread the word. I remain a bit of a Constitutional Convention skeptic, being of the mind that the electorate that gave Blagojevich a second run isn't the electorate that should be sending delegates to a convention, and worried about what ultra-progressive claptrap might come out the other side of such a project. However, Bruno Behrend's tireless efforts on this matter have done a lot to convince me that this monumental task is being steered by people who don't believe failure is an option.
Speaker: Bruno Behrend - is host of the Extreme Wisdom Radio Show on WKRS 1220 AM broadcasting out of Waukegan, Illinois and co-author of "Illinois Deserves Better - the Ironclad Case for an Illinois Constitutional Convention" with John Bambenek. www.extremewisdom.com and www.illinoiscitizenscoalition.com
Time: 6:30 pm cocktails and/or dinner & networking
7:15 pm announcements
7:30 pm presentations start
The Lincoln Restaurant requires a minimum order from each person of $5.00 to secure our private room. A suggested donation of $3.00 would also be greatly appreciated. All donations cover the costs of holding each meeting such as handouts, nametags, door prizes, PR, small gifts of appreciation for the speakers, etc.
RSVP PLEASE (with head count / names) – this is very helpful for everyone!!! by sending an email to: TownhallChicago@aol.com or call 312.420.3115
Please arrive before 7:30 PM, so we can start and respect those who are on time.
Lincoln Restaurant
4008 N. Lincoln Ave. & Irving Park Rd. & Damen Ave. (4000 N, 2000 West)
Chicago, IL 60618 Tel: 773.248.1820
I just got off the phone with Behrend, and he lays out a compelling case, arguing that while it's plausible an even more destructive document would come out of the convention, what everybody should agree on is that what's in place now is unacceptable. He describes it as having "opened Pandora's box 40 years ago", and this being the chance to close it. "The bad guys control every office, they control every party. This is our last chance to change something for the better," he says. He also cited Rich Miller's stance, that everyone knows the foxes are in charge of the hen house, but that the "no"-vote crowd is contending that the only viable option is to continue buying more chickens.
Bruno Behrend and John Bambenek have a book out, Illinois Deserves Better.
Interestingly, a poll, conducted by Ask Illinois, found that a majority of voters believe former Governor George Ryan would be a better governor than Rod Blagojevich.
George Ryan is in federal prison.
Kneel Before Obama
1:22 am, 7/30/08
Kneel Before Obama
I wish I'd been the first to catch this.
I wish I'd been the first to catch this.
 Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life. In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them. This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. |
 I am General Zod. Listen to me, people of the Earth! Today I bring a New Order to your planet! Each of you... each man, each woman, each child - all will march proudly together in this New Order! There is no longer a need for separate nations in this world, no need for petty squabbles between one group and another. All of you will work together, strive, produce, and sacrifice together - and all for a common goal! It is useless for you to resist as it is for me to annihilate you. You will only bring death and destruction upon yourselves, while I will lose the potential products of your labor. There is now one law, one order, one ruler who alone will determine your collective destiny! One force before which all of you shall kneel forever! In return for this submission you will have my generous protection! In other words - you will be allowed to live. |
Blasted Helmet
1:55 am, 7/29/08
Blasted Helmet
One of the problems my new schedule has caused is a backlog of stories that seemed important or particularly humorous, but are no longer current. Yet, going back through my archive of links allows me to see stories start to evolve into one of history's many hilarious spectacles. Consider, for example, these scenes from life at the site of the Democratic National Convention:
April 17th:
One of the problems my new schedule has caused is a backlog of stories that seemed important or particularly humorous, but are no longer current. Yet, going back through my archive of links allows me to see stories start to evolve into one of history's many hilarious spectacles. Consider, for example, these scenes from life at the site of the Democratic National Convention:
April 17th:
Protesters will not be confined to "cages" during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and the city wants to get away from the long lines of shoulder-to-shoulder, riot-gear-clad police that typified security at the national conventions in Boston and New York, Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown said today.May 18th:
Fried foods are forbidden at the committee's 22 or so events, as is liquid served in individual plastic containers. Plates must be reusable, like china, recyclable or compostable. The food should be local, organic or both.June 25th:
And caterers must provide foods in "at least three of the following five colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white," garnishes not included, according to a Request for Proposals, or RFP, distributed last week.
"I think it's a great idea for our community and our environment. The question is, how practical is it?" asks Nick Agro, the owner of Whirled Peas Catering in Commerce City. "We all want to source locally, but we're in Colorado. The growing season is short. It's dry here."
The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA. Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: "That just doesn't exist."July 22nd:
Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Ms. Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap. She hired an Official Carbon Adviser, who will measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed. The Democrats hope to pay penance for those emissions by investing in renewable energy projects.
To police the four-day event Aug. 25-28, she's assembling (via paperless online signup) a trash brigade. Decked out in green shirts, 900 volunteers will hover at waste-disposal stations to make sure delegates put each scrap of trash in the proper bin. Lest a fork slip into the wrong container unnoticed, volunteers will paw through every bag before it is hauled away.
"That's the only way to make sure it's pure," Ms. Robinson says.
Coors Brewing Co., in Golden, Colo., will donate biofuel made from beer waste to power the convention's fleet of flex-fuel vehicles. A green star for the convention -- but it has rankled die-hard liberals, who boycotted Coors in the 1960s and '70s to protest hiring practices that they said discriminated against blacks, Latinos, women and gays.
The committee hosting the Democratic National Convention has used the city's gas pumps to fill up and apparently avoided paying state and federal fuel taxes. The practice, which began four months ago, may have ended hours after its disclosure. An aide to Mayor John Hickenlooper released a statement Tuesday evening saying that Denver 2008 Host Committee members would pay market prices for fuel and would also be liable for all applicable taxes.July 22nd:
"It's pure propaganda. The rush to pass these so-called 'dangerous weapons' ordinances have the sole purpose of manipulating the public into thinking that those conducting free speech during the DNC are going to beat cops with sticks and squirt them with urine," said Tom Mestnik, street puppet coordinator for Re-create 68.July 23rd:
Denver firefighters have learned of a house full of urine being stored to throw at police.July 28th:
One of the headlines projects in the DNCC's green initiative for the Denver Convention[, the Wray windmill,] has yet to produce any clean energy. But that didn't stop the DNCC from including it in its four projects that delegates can buy carbon offsets for.July 28th:
The DNC also produced a movie about the Wray windmill project where their director of greening asked students in the town, "What does it feel like to live in Wray and know you are generating clean power?" [despite the fact it isn't generating any].
Mayor John Hickenlooper told radio host Mike Rosen, who writes a column for the Rocky, that Tent State University's plans for a sleepover [in City Park] for as many as 50,000 protesters are out of the question.July 28th:
The mayor also told Rosen that the city might turn on the sprinklers if the protesters don't abide by Denver's 11 p.m. curfew.
The host committee is as much as $10 million short in fundraising, and financial difficulties have forced it to cancel two dozen parties for delegates. Denver officials are scrambling to deal with the logistical challenges of Barack Obama's acceptance speech being held at an outdoor stadium instead of in the arena where the rest of the convention will take place. Even special daisies that the city bred partly to show off for the convention are failing to sprout.I can hardly wait. You can spot Mayor Hickenlooper in this photograph because, incredibly, he's the guy who has his helmet on backwards.
Criticism has been so harsh that this month the host committee felt compelled to issue a news release defending its much-mocked catering guidelines, which recommend organic produce and color-coordinated meals and discourage fried food.
[Mayor] Hickenlooper referred to the event as the "blasted convention" and compared it to a summer he spent painting a house for which he was never paid.
What He Hath Wrought
12:45 am, 7/29/08
What He Hath Wrought
Dan Curry notes that the New Yorker has brought forth the most terrifying revelation of our age:
That defense didn't last long with Blagojevich, but recent video evidence of what happens when Obama's teleprompter goes on the fritz really does seem to point to the latter:
Obama - He helped bring Illinois change you can believe in!
Dan Curry notes that the New Yorker has brought forth the most terrifying revelation of our age:
That year, [Obama] gained his first high-level experience in a statewide campaign when he advised the victorious gubernatorial candidate Rod Blagojevich, another politician with a funny name and a message of reform. Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama's, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich's campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich's victory. He and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor," Emanuel said. "We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." A spokesman for Blagojevich confirmed Emanuel's account, although David Wilhelm, who now works for Obama, said that Emanuel had overstated Obama's role. "There was an advisory council that was inclusive of Rahm and Barack but not limited to them," Wilhelm said, and he disputed the notion that Obama was “an architect or one of the principal strategists."In fairness to Obama, everything Blagojevich says is a lie, so it's entirely possible that, in fact, Obama merely once ate at the same restaurant where these meetings were being held. On the other hand, it's possible that the thousands of pages of evidence I've sorted through indicating that Illinois is governed by one of the most perfectly feckless career criminals in gubernatorial history, in fact, contain the clues that answer the riddle underlying every Obama controversy: "Is he really that bad, or is he just so incredibly dopey and naive that he had no idea what happened?"
That defense didn't last long with Blagojevich, but recent video evidence of what happens when Obama's teleprompter goes on the fritz really does seem to point to the latter:
David Axelrod, the preeminent strategist in the state, declined to work for Blagojevich. "He had been my client and I had a very good relationship with him, but I didn't sign on to the governor's race," Axelrod said. "Obviously he won, but I had concerns about it. . . . I was concerned about whether he was ready for that. Not so much for the race but for governing. I was concerned about some of the folks - I was concerned about how the race was being approached." Axelrod's unease was warranted. Blagojevich and people close to him have been tied to a seemingly endless series of scandals. The trial of Tony Rezko revealed that Rezko used his influence in the Blagojevich administration to profit from companies seeking business with the state. There is speculation that Blagojevich will be the next governor to be indicted, and the Democratic Speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan, has raised the issue of impeachment.In fact, Blagojevich is such a disaster that his reign of terror has culminated both in a widespread demand for the addition of a recall provision to the state constitution and a call for the entire document to be scrapped and rewritten. He is the destroyer of worlds, a mini-Mugabe notable among modern history's failed leaders not just for the sheer scope of his incompetence and mismanagement but for the unanimous disrespect it has earned him.
Obama - He helped bring Illinois change you can believe in!
Bicyclist Attack
12:20 am, 7/27/08
Bicyclist Attack
This blog, March 6th:
At least one bicyclist claims that, in this case, they merely "nicely asked the guy to wait", when the motorist tried to back out anyway and ended up hitting at least two bicyclists. In the past, their deliberate obstruction of traffic has sparked drivers to initiate violence, so it's not impossible this guy did, too, but why the bicyclist thinks they have any kind of right to ask anyone to wait for them to finish breaking the law is beyond me. Their "mass" has no special standing of any kind, and if he did hit two people, it's the scene of an accident, not a justification for a violent riot.
It would seem that in practice, the event is really designed to prove how unfriendly and selfish hippies are toward people who actually use the streets for their intended, lawful purpose. Some communities have organized alternative events with named like "Courteous Mass" and "Critical Manners", for bicyclists who want to go on a nice group ride but want nothing to do with this crap. Concerned motorists should drive prepared, properly equipped to harsh a rampaging Critical Masser's mellow.
Update: Reader John, in comments, notes that in situations like the above, he prefers to depend on "a stick" to mace.
Let's compromise.
This blog, March 6th:
I've never trusted bicyclists.In Seattle, Friday:
Seattle Police spokesman Mark Jamieson says that on Friday between 100 and 300 bicyclists were riding down a street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, blocking traffic on both lanes, when a man and a woman in a Subaru station wagon tried to pull out of a parking spot.Critical Mass is a typical "direct action" event held in cities around the world. "While the ride was originally founded with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to bicyclists," says Wikipedia, "the leaderless structure of Critical Mass makes it impossible to assign it any one specific goal." In practice, they use a number of deliberate tactics to deliberately block traffic, are reportedly often drinking, and this isn't the first outbreak of violence. In Chicago, they're often tailed and escorted by police to prevent this kind of incident, while other police forces have struggled to find effective tactics to deal with the rides.
But some of the bicyclists blocked them, sat on the car and began banging on the vehicle. Words were exchanged between the male driver and the bicyclists.
The driver feared being assaulted and backed up, but bumped a biker and enraged the group. In response, some of the bikers smashed the windshield and rear window. He tried to drive away but hit another bicyclist.
The car stopped a block down and the bicyclists surrounded the car. One biker punched the driver through an open window and another used a knife to slash the tires.
When the driver got out of the car a male suspect struck him with an unknown object in the back of the head. The driver was later taken to the hospital.
At least one bicyclist claims that, in this case, they merely "nicely asked the guy to wait", when the motorist tried to back out anyway and ended up hitting at least two bicyclists. In the past, their deliberate obstruction of traffic has sparked drivers to initiate violence, so it's not impossible this guy did, too, but why the bicyclist thinks they have any kind of right to ask anyone to wait for them to finish breaking the law is beyond me. Their "mass" has no special standing of any kind, and if he did hit two people, it's the scene of an accident, not a justification for a violent riot.
It would seem that in practice, the event is really designed to prove how unfriendly and selfish hippies are toward people who actually use the streets for their intended, lawful purpose. Some communities have organized alternative events with named like "Courteous Mass" and "Critical Manners", for bicyclists who want to go on a nice group ride but want nothing to do with this crap. Concerned motorists should drive prepared, properly equipped to harsh a rampaging Critical Masser's mellow.
Update: Reader John, in comments, notes that in situations like the above, he prefers to depend on "a stick" to mace.
Let's compromise.
Obama’s World Tour
7:13 pm, 7/24/08
Obama's World Tour
It's entirely possible that there's a perfectly good explanation for this, but it looks bad:
Meanwhile, local foreign-person Bob Bennekers respectfully disagrees with Barack Obama's insistence that we should all learn foreign languages:
Obama acts like Europeans learn English because they want to impress Americans, or because learning a foreign language is cool in Europe. That's ridiculous. Internationally, whether you're talking about Europe or India, learning multiple languages isn't some frivolous exercise to give you that "edge" on a resume, to make you feel better about yourself, or to impress foreigners. It's a practical part of life. That's why they aren't studying Swahili, they're studying English, the common language of science and commerce, and the languages of their neighbors, people they meet regularly. In America, our neighbors already speak English. There are no particular languages we can teach in schools that will ever have the kind of relevance English, German, and French have in the Netherlands - even Spanish meets that criteria in only a few parts of the country.
Now, that's not to say people shouldn't learn another language, if they want to or have a use for it, or that schools should not offer the courses. However, pushing widespread bilingualism through our public schools is a ridiculous and wasteful notion, because no teenager can reasonably be expected to decide which languages his future goals will require. Spending two years learning to find the bathroom in everyone's favorite dying language is a huge mistake when so many students can barely write a coherent paragraph in English. Teaching basic economics, programming languages, or some other practical skill would do a great deal more to improve a student's quality of life after graduation than studying beginner's German.
In my own life, I've learned enough French to read the general news, but when I set out to do that, I did it purely for sport and because I had the time to invest, not because I thought I simply "should" know a second language for the sake of being bilingual. I'll spend my time doing what's valuable to me, rather than something that's valuable to Barack Obama, but ultimately useless to the people who depend on me and irrelevant to my own happiness. When I have children in school, I'd also prefer it if the school system respected my son or daughter enough not to waste their time imposing language studies on them that won't actually help them accomplish their goals. There's nothing to be ashamed of in not knowing a second language, and that Obama thinks it's "embarrassing" that he himself does not know one speaks chiefly to the deluded egoists he apparently hangs out with, not the state of the nation.
Update: Ow.
It's entirely possible that there's a perfectly good explanation for this, but it looks bad:
1:42 p.m.: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday. "Barack Obama will not be coming to us," a spokesperson for the US military hospital in Landstuhl announced. "I don't know why." Shortly before the same spokeswoman had announced a planned visit by Obama.If you're running for President of the United States, and already making yourself look just a tiny bit presumptuous...
4:49 p.m.: Obama enters the luxury Ritz Carlton hotel wearing a T-shirt, black sweatpants and white trainers -- apparantly to work out in the hotel's gym. He kept up the campaigning on the way there, smiling and waving at tourists and other onlookers.
"It is not going to be a political speech," said a senior foreign policy adviser, who spoke to reporters on background. "When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally."...you might want to avoid the appearance of skipping out on meeting wounded American soldiers to hit the treadmill.
"But he is not president of the United States," a reporter reminded the adviser.
Meanwhile, local foreign-person Bob Bennekers respectfully disagrees with Barack Obama's insistence that we should all learn foreign languages:
In Holland (where I come from) it was mandatory to learn three languages (English, French and German) at high school. This makes sense for Holland as a small country. It does not make sense for Americans, since English is a world language and Americans already speak it.Not so much that we'd be "sophisticated", but because he actually thinks it's "embarrassing" that most Americans learned languages that are not useful within thousands of miles of their homes and will probably never play a significant role in any part of their lives. That is to say, not that it would be an admirable goal, but that it would correct what he views as a fault.
Because some Americans may visit Europe, should all Americans learn French? What about German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, etc.? French does not get you very far in Germany. It seems Obama wants Americans to learn a foreign language just to be "sophisticated."
Obama acts like Europeans learn English because they want to impress Americans, or because learning a foreign language is cool in Europe. That's ridiculous. Internationally, whether you're talking about Europe or India, learning multiple languages isn't some frivolous exercise to give you that "edge" on a resume, to make you feel better about yourself, or to impress foreigners. It's a practical part of life. That's why they aren't studying Swahili, they're studying English, the common language of science and commerce, and the languages of their neighbors, people they meet regularly. In America, our neighbors already speak English. There are no particular languages we can teach in schools that will ever have the kind of relevance English, German, and French have in the Netherlands - even Spanish meets that criteria in only a few parts of the country.
Now, that's not to say people shouldn't learn another language, if they want to or have a use for it, or that schools should not offer the courses. However, pushing widespread bilingualism through our public schools is a ridiculous and wasteful notion, because no teenager can reasonably be expected to decide which languages his future goals will require. Spending two years learning to find the bathroom in everyone's favorite dying language is a huge mistake when so many students can barely write a coherent paragraph in English. Teaching basic economics, programming languages, or some other practical skill would do a great deal more to improve a student's quality of life after graduation than studying beginner's German.
In my own life, I've learned enough French to read the general news, but when I set out to do that, I did it purely for sport and because I had the time to invest, not because I thought I simply "should" know a second language for the sake of being bilingual. I'll spend my time doing what's valuable to me, rather than something that's valuable to Barack Obama, but ultimately useless to the people who depend on me and irrelevant to my own happiness. When I have children in school, I'd also prefer it if the school system respected my son or daughter enough not to waste their time imposing language studies on them that won't actually help them accomplish their goals. There's nothing to be ashamed of in not knowing a second language, and that Obama thinks it's "embarrassing" that he himself does not know one speaks chiefly to the deluded egoists he apparently hangs out with, not the state of the nation.
Update: Ow.
Obama noted that in a break from his whirlwind schedule "we've got some down time tonight. What are you guys gonna do in Berlin? Huh? Huh? You guys got any big plans? ... I've never been to Berlin, so ... I would love to tour around a little bit."Maybe he could've checked out the nightlife at Rammstein.
Atlas Shrugged: The Musical
9:32 pm, 7/21/08
Atlas Shrugged: The Musical
An angry defense of Pierce Brosnan's vocals in Mamma Mia!, from ABBA singer Benny Anderson:
Pierce Brosnan can't sing. With all possible respect for the guy, who is one of everyone's two favorite James Bonds, who I've enjoyed in every movie I've ever seen him in, there was no harmony at all. It was like a bull walrus trying to warn his mate of an approaching polar bear, and I'm concerned that it might compromise the structural integrity of some older theaters.
Update: Via a reader, behold:
...also, from one of the cruelest reviews yet:
An angry defense of Pierce Brosnan's vocals in Mamma Mia!, from ABBA singer Benny Anderson:
"Everybody complains that Pierce can't sing and it p****s me off. I think he has a great voice. He couldn't sing 'Nessun Dorma' but neither could I - and I was in ABBA. "It's like saying Bob Dylan can't sing. It's just not fair. He has a good voice."I saw yet another preview on The Daily Show, and you know what?
Pierce Brosnan can't sing. With all possible respect for the guy, who is one of everyone's two favorite James Bonds, who I've enjoyed in every movie I've ever seen him in, there was no harmony at all. It was like a bull walrus trying to warn his mate of an approaching polar bear, and I'm concerned that it might compromise the structural integrity of some older theaters.
The 61-year-old Swede also revealed how Catherine Johnson's script for the musical - which raked in a phenomenal £1 billion worldwide as a theatre production before being adapted for the big screen - convinced the band to allow their tracks to be used.Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Update: Via a reader, behold:
...also, from one of the cruelest reviews yet:
The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take "Mamma Mia!" to be a useful contribution to that debate....I thought that Pierce Brosnan had been dragged to the edge of endurance by North Korean sadists in his final Bond film, "Die Another Day," but that was a quick tickle with a feather duster compared with the agony of singing Abba's "S.O.S." to Meryl Streep through a kitchen window. Somebody, either a cheeky Swede or another North Korean, has deliberately scored the number a tone and a half too high, with visible results: swelling muscles along the jawline, tightened throat, a panicky bulge in the eyes.Sometimes, Hollywood gives you a movie you don't even need to go see to mock mercilessly.
Technology > Sustainability
12:39 pm, 7/20/08
Technology > Sustainability
In recent years, Australia, much of Europe, and the United States have all passed upcoming bans on familiar incandescent light bulbs, even though the alternative, CFL, has some issues. They don't last nearly as long as advertised in ceiling fans, or in enclosed or recessed lighting, and can take several minutes to properly light up in cold, outdoor settings. More importantly, their lifespan is significantly reduced by being switched on and off frequently. This is fine in a commercial setting, where the lights are on all day, but in a residential setting, where people normally only use a few of their lights at a time, protecting the bulb's lifespan would mean leaving lights on instead of flipping them off before leaving the room.
Accordingly, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has noticed at least one community, Traer, Iowa, where a 1987 swap of 18,000 incandescents for CFLs (dubbed the "Great Light Bulb Exchange") resulted in an 8% increase in energy consumption. (Despite this, Traer Municipal Utilities was given an "Energy Innovator of the Year Award".) With the subsidies that low-income energy consumers already receive, in many areas the higher initial cost of installing CFL may mean that they lose more money than they save.
Finally, as you've probably heard by now, the bulbs contain mercury, leading to warnings that they should, if possible, not be disposed of in your regular garbage, that a drop-cloth should be put down when changing bulbs, and that if you break one, you should open the windows, shut off your climate control system, evacuate the room for at least fifteen minutes, then come back, put on rubber gloves, and, without using a vacuum cleaner, recover every possible scrap of the bulb and double-bag it. (Exactly what you should do if you live in a building where the windows don't open is unclear, and even unbroken bulbs must be double-bagged, in preparation for their inevitable breakage in the garbage truck.)
Used safely, they're the inconvenient low-flow shower heads of home lighting. Of course, most people won't use them safely.
However, as usual, markets and technology were already well on their way to answering the incandescent bulb question, and to making CFLs obsolete, without government intrusion:
In recent years, Australia, much of Europe, and the United States have all passed upcoming bans on familiar incandescent light bulbs, even though the alternative, CFL, has some issues. They don't last nearly as long as advertised in ceiling fans, or in enclosed or recessed lighting, and can take several minutes to properly light up in cold, outdoor settings. More importantly, their lifespan is significantly reduced by being switched on and off frequently. This is fine in a commercial setting, where the lights are on all day, but in a residential setting, where people normally only use a few of their lights at a time, protecting the bulb's lifespan would mean leaving lights on instead of flipping them off before leaving the room.
Accordingly, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has noticed at least one community, Traer, Iowa, where a 1987 swap of 18,000 incandescents for CFLs (dubbed the "Great Light Bulb Exchange") resulted in an 8% increase in energy consumption. (Despite this, Traer Municipal Utilities was given an "Energy Innovator of the Year Award".) With the subsidies that low-income energy consumers already receive, in many areas the higher initial cost of installing CFL may mean that they lose more money than they save.
Finally, as you've probably heard by now, the bulbs contain mercury, leading to warnings that they should, if possible, not be disposed of in your regular garbage, that a drop-cloth should be put down when changing bulbs, and that if you break one, you should open the windows, shut off your climate control system, evacuate the room for at least fifteen minutes, then come back, put on rubber gloves, and, without using a vacuum cleaner, recover every possible scrap of the bulb and double-bag it. (Exactly what you should do if you live in a building where the windows don't open is unclear, and even unbroken bulbs must be double-bagged, in preparation for their inevitable breakage in the garbage truck.)
Used safely, they're the inconvenient low-flow shower heads of home lighting. Of course, most people won't use them safely.
However, as usual, markets and technology were already well on their way to answering the incandescent bulb question, and to making CFLs obsolete, without government intrusion:
Researchers at Purdue University have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of "solid state lighting," a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted.So far, it's only been cost-effective to install LEDs in bulk, in large facilities such as grocery stores, where there's a lot of cash flow to cover the initial cost.
The technology, called light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, is about four times more efficient than conventional incandescent lights and more environmentally friendly than compact fluorescent bulbs. The LEDs also are expected to be far longer lasting than conventional lighting, lasting perhaps as long as 15 years before burning out.
But LED lights now on the market are prohibitively expensive, in part because they are created on a substrate, or first layer, of sapphire. The Purdue researchers have solved this problem by developing a technique to create LEDs on low-cost, metal-coated silicon wafers, said Mark H. Oliver, a graduate student in materials engineering who is working with Sands.
"When the cost of a white LED lamp comes down to about $5, LEDs will be in widespread use for general illumination," Sands said. "LEDs are still improving in efficiency, so they will surpass fluorescents. Everything looks favorable for LEDs, except for that initial cost, a problem that is likely to be solved soon."
Migros expects to sink energy use 80%, including lower air conditioning costs due to the low waste heat generation of light emitting diodes....In addition to the waste reduction achieved by this long life-span, LEDs do not use harmful mercury nor lead. And there is one last, perhaps less obvious, advantage to LED lighting in a supermarket: LEDs emit no ultraviolet nor infrared light, minimizing spoilage of foodstuffs.I would love to see someone challenge the Congressional ban on incandescent bulbs on Constitutional grounds.
The Dark Knight
9:31 pm, 7/19/08
The Dark Knight
Just got back from the theater, evening showings are still selling out here. The Dark Knight is highly recommended: with only a couple of minor missteps, the film is dark, gritty, and everything you'd expect after Batman Begins, if not more. It feels more like a tense crime drama than a superhero movie, and the story is even more plainly driven by philosophical struggle than Batman Begins, with a number of scenes that wouldn't feel out of place in an Ayn Rand novel: "fairness" is a tool for rationalizing evil, the law is incapable of defining justice, the rejection of reason is a symptom of madness, and well-intentioned utilitarians, driven by fear, threaten to undo the (frankly Randian) good.
...and yes, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is every bit as deeply twisted and amazing as people say it is. I'm tempted to say that the movie could've just been two straight hours of him delivering a disturbing monologue and fidgeting with a knife and still been a hit.
Just got back from the theater, evening showings are still selling out here. The Dark Knight is highly recommended: with only a couple of minor missteps, the film is dark, gritty, and everything you'd expect after Batman Begins, if not more. It feels more like a tense crime drama than a superhero movie, and the story is even more plainly driven by philosophical struggle than Batman Begins, with a number of scenes that wouldn't feel out of place in an Ayn Rand novel: "fairness" is a tool for rationalizing evil, the law is incapable of defining justice, the rejection of reason is a symptom of madness, and well-intentioned utilitarians, driven by fear, threaten to undo the (frankly Randian) good.
...and yes, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is every bit as deeply twisted and amazing as people say it is. I'm tempted to say that the movie could've just been two straight hours of him delivering a disturbing monologue and fidgeting with a knife and still been a hit.
At The Movies
9:43 pm, 7/17/08
At The Movies
Last night, I made the horrible mistake of getting 10,000 B.C. on pay-per-view.
This film is bad. Within fifteen minutes, I felt like I would've preferred sitting through Springtime for Hitler. Every line is ridiculous (they don't have a separate word for snow, calling it "white rain"), and either the neolithic era was one of unprecedented racial diversity, or walking from Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa is something that can be casually described as taking "many days", since the proto-European hero, D'Leh, whose people are identified by wearing their hair in dreads, leads what appear to be the combined armies of the ancestors of the Zulus, Nubians and Ethiopians against some kind of Egyptian/Babylonian cult led by a group of murderous, pyramid-building Tibetans who wield technology a good 7,000 years ahead of the period, explained away by the implication that they came from Atlantis.
People magically come back to life after receiving mortal wounds, because if they didn't, it'd ruin the alleged "plot". A sabre-tooth tiger spares D'Leh, in thanks for once having freed it from a trap. Dinosaurs are too cliched, so D'Leh is instead attacked by (already extinct) terror birds, oversized, tree-climbing, man-eating ostriches. Every death scene is hilarious, and at 45 minutes, I quit caring what happened to the characters. Instead, I hoped for some cavegirl skin, only to have my hopes further dashed when the credits rolled with D'Leh's climactic discovery of corn, which I can only assume his people called "maize".
Never before have I seen people work so hard to assemble such an elaborate pile of crap, which they clearly took completely seriously. According to Wikipedia, the director (who brought you The Day After Tomorrow) used unknowns (but somehow, got Omar Sharif to narrate, proving that Sharif's career is truly over) because, in his own words, "if like, Jake Gyllenhaal turned up in a movie like this, everybody would be, 'What's that?'"
Apparently, he feared that familiar faces would ruin the "realistic" prehistoric setting.
I'm not kidding.
On the other hand, had he hired successful actors, his film might've contained what industry insiders refer to as "acting".
So, feeling the need to cleanse my palette, I tried to catch the midnight premier of The Dark Knight tonight. Once I got past the three guys dressed as the Joker having a smoke out front, the cashier told me they were sold out.
"Uh, I know it's midnight, but is there an alternative?"
"Mamma Mia!. We have lots of seats for Mamma Mia!."
Of course they do. Based on the previews I've seen, the film synopsis goes something like this:
Last night, I made the horrible mistake of getting 10,000 B.C. on pay-per-view.
This film is bad. Within fifteen minutes, I felt like I would've preferred sitting through Springtime for Hitler. Every line is ridiculous (they don't have a separate word for snow, calling it "white rain"), and either the neolithic era was one of unprecedented racial diversity, or walking from Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa is something that can be casually described as taking "many days", since the proto-European hero, D'Leh, whose people are identified by wearing their hair in dreads, leads what appear to be the combined armies of the ancestors of the Zulus, Nubians and Ethiopians against some kind of Egyptian/Babylonian cult led by a group of murderous, pyramid-building Tibetans who wield technology a good 7,000 years ahead of the period, explained away by the implication that they came from Atlantis.
People magically come back to life after receiving mortal wounds, because if they didn't, it'd ruin the alleged "plot". A sabre-tooth tiger spares D'Leh, in thanks for once having freed it from a trap. Dinosaurs are too cliched, so D'Leh is instead attacked by (already extinct) terror birds, oversized, tree-climbing, man-eating ostriches. Every death scene is hilarious, and at 45 minutes, I quit caring what happened to the characters. Instead, I hoped for some cavegirl skin, only to have my hopes further dashed when the credits rolled with D'Leh's climactic discovery of corn, which I can only assume his people called "maize".
Never before have I seen people work so hard to assemble such an elaborate pile of crap, which they clearly took completely seriously. According to Wikipedia, the director (who brought you The Day After Tomorrow) used unknowns (but somehow, got Omar Sharif to narrate, proving that Sharif's career is truly over) because, in his own words, "if like, Jake Gyllenhaal turned up in a movie like this, everybody would be, 'What's that?'"
Apparently, he feared that familiar faces would ruin the "realistic" prehistoric setting.
I'm not kidding.
On the other hand, had he hired successful actors, his film might've contained what industry insiders refer to as "acting".
So, feeling the need to cleanse my palette, I tried to catch the midnight premier of The Dark Knight tonight. Once I got past the three guys dressed as the Joker having a smoke out front, the cashier told me they were sold out.
"Uh, I know it's midnight, but is there an alternative?"
"Mamma Mia!. We have lots of seats for Mamma Mia!."
Of course they do. Based on the previews I've seen, the film synopsis goes something like this:
The story of a spoiled, wealthy English girl's delightful discovery that her mother used to have unprotected sex with multiple partners, leaving her with three potential fathers, all of whom she will now confront in the most awkward manner possible. Told through the awful music of 1970s Swedish dance band ABBA, as sung by Pierce Brosnan.It sounds about as much fun as being strangled to death with a pink feather boa. I went home.
Blackening the Name of Science
11:32 pm, 7/13/08
Blackening the Name of Science
When they created Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, they kept the mold, and used it as the model for all hilarious stereotypes of leftists:
Because it essentially absorbs all things and gives nothing back, "a black hole" is an appropriate term for an incompetent government bureaucracy. Calling it "a black man", on the other hand, could be racist, but there is no relationship between the two terms. For it to be a "white hole", it would have to produce energy and matter endlessly, and consume nothing, which, if that were to occur in a government agency, would cause a paradox that would destroy the very fabric of spacetime.
It became a "big deal" because people love to laugh, in this case, at Price. What's worse, he couldn't just say "I was only kidding", he has to insist that he had a point:
Why is everyone oppressing me?
When they created Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, they kept the mold, and used it as the model for all hilarious stereotypes of leftists:
In a discussion among county commissioners Monday, Kenneth Mayfield (white) said a county office seems to have become a "black hole" for paperwork.Except that it wasn't a teachable moment, unless Price meant for himself. It was a moment that made Price look laughably ignorant and over-sensitive. A black hole absorbs all matter and energy that comes within its event horizon, emitting (for all practical purposes) nothing. Since no visible light escapes, it appears black, just like a black coffee table, which absorbs the full spectrum of visible light and emits very little of it back to your eye. (This is also why someone wearing a black shirt on a summer day gets hotter than someone wearing a white one: the absorbed energy is turned into heat) It is, as Mayfield protested at the time, "a science term".
That prompted an "Excuse me!" from John Wiley Price (black), who declared the term racially loaded and offered "white hole" as an alternative. Justice of the Peace Thomas G. Jones (black) then joined in, demanding an apology from Mr. Mayfield (still white).
Mr. Mayfield refused, saying later, "Anybody who's offended by that statement needs serious psychiatric help."
I talked to Mr. Price on Thursday, and he's astounded that this has become such a big deal. He said it's unfortunate that Judge Jones escalated things by asking for an apology.
"It was never meant to be more than a five-second teachable moment," he said.
In that regard, Mr. Price isn't backing down from his initial comment. He said a racially sensitive person seeks to avoid using "black" in its many negative forms.
Because it essentially absorbs all things and gives nothing back, "a black hole" is an appropriate term for an incompetent government bureaucracy. Calling it "a black man", on the other hand, could be racist, but there is no relationship between the two terms. For it to be a "white hole", it would have to produce energy and matter endlessly, and consume nothing, which, if that were to occur in a government agency, would cause a paradox that would destroy the very fabric of spacetime.
It became a "big deal" because people love to laugh, in this case, at Price. What's worse, he couldn't just say "I was only kidding", he has to insist that he had a point:
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price is sticking to his comments that the term "black hole," which a colleague used, is racist. Price also says language such as "angel food cake" and "devil's food cake" are also racially insensitive.Everyone I know likes Devil's Food Cake better. Why is he racistly associating the inferior cake with white people? Why does the proverb warn that the white devil is worse than the black? Why do the evil undead have pale skin? Why is the villain in the The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe the "White Witch"? Why are atomic bombs associated with a "white flash"?
Why is everyone oppressing me?
What, no bad puns?
11:15 pm, 7/13/08
What, no bad puns?
Top Democrat Congressman Edward Markey (MA), father of the ridiculous daylight saving time extension and creator of terrible jokes, thinks global warming caused the Battle of Mogadishu. He also blames it for the conflict in Darfur, rather than a genocidal Islamist regime.
So, which is it, is global warming causing droughts or floods in East Africa?
Top Democrat Congressman Edward Markey (MA), father of the ridiculous daylight saving time extension and creator of terrible jokes, thinks global warming caused the Battle of Mogadishu. He also blames it for the conflict in Darfur, rather than a genocidal Islamist regime.
So, which is it, is global warming causing droughts or floods in East Africa?
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time…
7:07 pm, 7/7/08
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...
Most Hudson Valley towns are wonderful little villages, like model train sets. However, there have been strange events in the tiny, isolated Dutchess County hamlet of Oniontown:
Area residents have apparently pushed for some time to get the name of the road leading to the neighborhood changed, in the hopes of somehow disassociating it. Rumors of the unspeakable are widespread, and frankly, it's hard to imagine the YouTube mockery is the real cause of the backlash, since it's hard to imagine there's a great deal of internet access there. More likely, the YouTube videos have just prompted more outsiders to visit the area, making it a "target-rich environment" for the Oniontowners. As one forum thread warns, "avoid this place, lest ye be sacrificed to their God".
Most Hudson Valley towns are wonderful little villages, like model train sets. However, there have been strange events in the tiny, isolated Dutchess County hamlet of Oniontown:
Two teenagers who drove to Oniontown after a series of YouTube videos portrayed the hamlet as a run-down, backwoods dump were pelted with rocks by an angry group of young residents, authorities said.In discussing this with a friend who grew up near Oniontown, it seems that it's the kind of place people use an insult: rival high school football teams would torment his by cheering them as the Oniontown team. In fact, he went on to vehemently deny that he had ever visited Oniontown in his life, as if that's the kind of thing that would bar you from donating blood. The word "Hooverville" came up. After watching one of the videos, that word is entirely correct, and if you Google Map it, you can see the giant piles of crap from space.
The two 17-year-olds from Mahopac, about 30 miles south of Oniontown, suffered head and face injuries.
State police investigator Eric Schaefer said it wasn't the first time out-of-towners were attacked by local residents.
"The biggest recommendation at this point is for everybody to stay out of there," Schaefer said. "Anybody that doesn't belong there, anybody that's not a resident, just stay out of Oniontown."
Area residents have apparently pushed for some time to get the name of the road leading to the neighborhood changed, in the hopes of somehow disassociating it. Rumors of the unspeakable are widespread, and frankly, it's hard to imagine the YouTube mockery is the real cause of the backlash, since it's hard to imagine there's a great deal of internet access there. More likely, the YouTube videos have just prompted more outsiders to visit the area, making it a "target-rich environment" for the Oniontowners. As one forum thread warns, "avoid this place, lest ye be sacrificed to their God".
Downstate
10:28 am, 7/7/08
Downstate
Spent last night eating in Little Italy then went over to Yankee Stadium to catch what will probably be the only game I'll see at before they move into the new ballpark. Yankees beat the Red Sox 5-4 in the 10th inning, and A-Rod tied Mickey Mantle's record. I could hardly have asked for a better game. Great night.
Update: Reader Tim in Ohio submits:
Spent last night eating in Little Italy then went over to Yankee Stadium to catch what will probably be the only game I'll see at before they move into the new ballpark. Yankees beat the Red Sox 5-4 in the 10th inning, and A-Rod tied Mickey Mantle's record. I could hardly have asked for a better game. Great night.
Update: Reader Tim in Ohio submits:
Pfft. Screw the Yankees.My attitude is that anyone who hates the Red Sox is my friend. Plus, it's Yankee Stadium, man.
Protect The Children From The Environmentalists
9:09 am, 7/7/08
Protect The Children From The Environmentalists
It has long seemed that global warming hysteria is deliberately designed to terrorize impressionable children. Evidence of the effects are everywhere. Certainly, this crap isn't working on adults.
Now, there's a name for the associated psychological problems, thanks to the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry:
Still, if he dies of dehydration, he can be sainted by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
It has long seemed that global warming hysteria is deliberately designed to terrorize impressionable children. Evidence of the effects are everywhere. Certainly, this crap isn't working on adults.
Now, there's a name for the associated psychological problems, thanks to the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry:
We describe a patient with climate change delusion, a previously unreported phenomenon. A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an 8 month history of depressed mood ... He also ... had visions of apocalyptic events...It might help if they were to fill up a swimming pool so he can relax for a while.
The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of 'millions of people' through exhaustion of water supplies. He quoted 'internet research' to substantiate this. The patient described that 'I feel guilty about it', had attempted to stop drinking ... He was unable to acknowledge that the belief was unreasonable when challenged."
Still, if he dies of dehydration, he can be sainted by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
What A Long, Strange Trip It Is
7:45 pm, 7/5/08
What A Long, Strange Trip It Is
This week, I've slept in two motels in the Hudson Valley, as well as a Prohibition-era mansion. Important project. Futile, but important.
I hope everyone's having a fantastic Fourth of July weekend with their loved ones.
This week, I've slept in two motels in the Hudson Valley, as well as a Prohibition-era mansion. Important project. Futile, but important.
I hope everyone's having a fantastic Fourth of July weekend with their loved ones.
I Feel Sorry For Them
9:17 pm, 7/1/08
I Feel Sorry For Them
CNN journalist Roland Martin opines on the moral rights of criminals, as they relate to the Joe Horn incident:
In this case, what's welcome and worth celebrating is not that the two men are dead, but that the theft of the hard-earned and rightful property of Horn's neighbor was stopped. The deaths are a tragedy, not because Horn was wrong to kill them, but because the two thieves were wrong to stupidly throw their lives away doing wrong to others.
Should it matter that Horn was protecting the property of his neighbor, or is the salient point that he was stopping a crime?
Update: Erik Kurtis Low, however, may be pushing it.
Perhaps he shouldn't have done that.
CNN journalist Roland Martin opines on the moral rights of criminals, as they relate to the Joe Horn incident:
They had it coming." "Tough stuff." "They shouldn't have broken the law." I heard all of those comments and more on my radio show, blogs and other call-in shows, as a nation fed up with crime gave a big "Hooray!" for Horn.Martin is confusing two different issues: the penalty given for a crime that has been committed is different from the action taken to stop a crime. Few would make the argument that it's wrong to use deadly force to stop the rape of a child. The point of contention is whether it does any good to use it once the wrong has already been done.
But I just don't see exactly what there is to celebrate. Two men -- both illegal immigrants and one of them with a conviction for selling drugs -- are dead for stealing some personal effects, and we are supposed to welcome this vigilante justice? (I suppose it's ironic that one week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the rape of a child doesn't merit the death penalty -- one that I disagree with -- many others are celebrating a man not standing trial for the killing of two others who committed robbery.)
In this case, what's welcome and worth celebrating is not that the two men are dead, but that the theft of the hard-earned and rightful property of Horn's neighbor was stopped. The deaths are a tragedy, not because Horn was wrong to kill them, but because the two thieves were wrong to stupidly throw their lives away doing wrong to others.
Yes, the law was on Horn's side, whether he knew that or not when he fired. But when does our core decency come in when we make such life-altering decisions in a snap?Where was the core decency when Hernando Riascos Torres and Diego Ortiz were choosing to break into a family home? Didn't the thieves know the law when they took this risk, voluntarily putting their lives in jeopardy to do something they had no right whatsoever to do?
I think of my dad, who as a child I witnessed chase down two men who snatched a woman's Christmas gifts from her hand in a mall parking lot. If he had a gun, should he have just fired away, protecting this unknown woman's property?What difference does it make that she was a stranger? Is that a factor in Martin's estimation of right and wrong? Isn't going out of your way to help a stranger supposed to be a sort of epitome of right-minded behavior?
Should it matter that Horn was protecting the property of his neighbor, or is the salient point that he was stopping a crime?
I really want to know: Would you have pulled a Joe Horn and racked your shotgun and fired on the men if you were in his shoes?Maybe, maybe not. That decision, however, is up to me, and isn't for journalists (to whom I am an unknown) to cast moral judgment on.
Update: Erik Kurtis Low, however, may be pushing it.
The Utah Supreme Court today threw out the manslaughter conviction of Erik Kurtis Low, who killed a Park City man after the victim gave him a "wedgie."Both men were using cocaine, and Hirschey yanked on Low's underwear so hard he threw him to the ground.
Perhaps he shouldn't have done that.
Slaves to the Earth Mother
8:19 pm, 6/27/08
Slaves to the Earth Mother
A terrible error at the Poughkeepsie Journal, where thousands of papers were delivered to paying customers before anyone realized the opinion page had been smeared with the crazy of local "philosophical activist" Anthony Henry Smith.
An entirely predictable photograph is attached to the article.
A terrible error at the Poughkeepsie Journal, where thousands of papers were delivered to paying customers before anyone realized the opinion page had been smeared with the crazy of local "philosophical activist" Anthony Henry Smith.
The third presidential act shall be to initiate by formal request the creation of an international court of environmental justice as unalienable rights. International Environmental Justice must extend unalienable human rights to include that entity of which the individual is but a part and upon which the individual depends for life and quality of life.Yes, he wants Mother Earth to have rights. In a special International Earth Court.
The seventh presidential act shall be to initiate the reorganization of the corporations. Corporations shall no longer exist for the sole purpose of making a profit for the corporation. The highest priority of the public corporation shall be the public interest it was chartered by the state to serve.He's cribbing from Mussolini here, and what Free Waterfall Junior may not be aware of is that Presidents don't make those decisions, despite his obvious expertise on corporate law and the legislative process.
An entirely predictable photograph is attached to the article.
Warming Cult Watch
11:53 am, 6/24/08
Warming Cult Watch
Another reason not to buy the New York Times, from editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg:
If you'd like to know how your "eco-soul" is faring, the taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation has created "Professor Schpinkee's Greenhouse Calculator", designed to tell children "when they should die", based on how they use "their share" of the planet. As the instructions originally explained:
The average Australian, according to their calculator, should be put into the Carousel from Logan's Run at age nine, although I would've been near my tenth birthday before the Green Death Squads came for me in the night. In fact, getting the stupid thing to allow you to live to thirty, like the people in that movie, is no small feat, even if you agree to become a vegetarian, wear secondhand clothing, and pay extra from a minimum wage income for "green electricity".
It reminds me of the old comic strip about the guy eating his "Eco-Pops" breakfast cereal, when he starts reading the side of the box:
"The world is overpopulated. You consume far too much. Don't you think you've accomplished enough? Your best years are behind you. In the bottom of this box, you'll find a gun..."
Another reason not to buy the New York Times, from editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg:
"Carbon footprint" is to your physical being what "soul" is to your spiritual being.I like to think of it as more of a protective husk of productivity that helps to make sure I don't die in a famine.
If you'd like to know how your "eco-soul" is faring, the taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation has created "Professor Schpinkee's Greenhouse Calculator", designed to tell children "when they should die", based on how they use "their share" of the planet. As the instructions originally explained:
When you're done, click on the [skull and crossbones] to find out what age you should die at so you don't use more than your fair share of Earth's resources!They've since been softened, because the freaks behind this were apparently oblivious to the problem with urging children to suicide.
The average Australian, according to their calculator, should be put into the Carousel from Logan's Run at age nine, although I would've been near my tenth birthday before the Green Death Squads came for me in the night. In fact, getting the stupid thing to allow you to live to thirty, like the people in that movie, is no small feat, even if you agree to become a vegetarian, wear secondhand clothing, and pay extra from a minimum wage income for "green electricity".
It reminds me of the old comic strip about the guy eating his "Eco-Pops" breakfast cereal, when he starts reading the side of the box:
"The world is overpopulated. You consume far too much. Don't you think you've accomplished enough? Your best years are behind you. In the bottom of this box, you'll find a gun..."
Maybe Their Constitution Is Just Pining For The Fjords
10:28 pm, 6/20/08
In 2005, the European Union attempted to push through a "European Constitution", such as it was, with Chirach even holding the French polls open two hours extra to try to give supporters extra time to stuff the ballot boxes, and found that Europeans just weren't particularly interested. Referendums failed in France and the Netherlands, and were also expected to fail in Britain, bringing the process to a humiliating close. However, European "President" Jean-Claude Juncker promised that the glorious destiny of the European Union would not be thwarted, and that this process would be repeated again and again until Europeans chose "correctly". Mark Steyn:
In March, I wrote about the new approach, in which the European Constitution was repackaged as the "Lisbon Treaty", with the will of the people as thoroughly removed from the equation as possible.
With the Lisbon Treaty, "the way forward" was, in so far as possible, to deny the people a chance to express their will at the ballot box, even though polls suggested that as much as 90% of the British public wanted to have one.
"What's wrong" is that for the aristocracy in Brussels and their agitators, having a free, open, and democratic society is really a tertiary concern. Even in some of Europe's worst dens of collectivism, it seems that many people can still smell how corrupt this is.
"If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again," "President" Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.Two Italian academics even proposed that "the European Union must not remain paralysed...it must continue and intensify its efforts to relaunch its policies, even by implementing in advance, where possible, the provisions of the Treaty that do not meet with open opposition."
In March, I wrote about the new approach, in which the European Constitution was repackaged as the "Lisbon Treaty", with the will of the people as thoroughly removed from the equation as possible.
Former French president D'Estaing, author of the original constitution, has promised that "all of the original proposals" are included in the Lisbon Treaty, but "hidden or disguised in some way", lest mere citizens try to form their own opinions.Now, Ireland has voted down the Lisbon Treaty, and European politicians seem to want to push forward anyway
Politicians backing the project have apparently learned their lessons well: Ireland, this time around, will be the only country in which the people are actually given an opportunity to vote on the matter, because a prior legal decision forbids the Parliament from unilaterally surrendering Irish sovereignty. Rumors abound that some European politicians have been "bribed" with the promise of high offices in the unelected European bureaucracy in exchange for their cooperation.
European governments have pledged to continue implementing the EU reform treaty, despite its rejection by Irish voters.Why does this make me think of Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch?
The Irish Prime Minister says there will be no second referendum - which could result in the treaty being scrapped altogether.
"In theory this should kill the treaty dead," said Sky's political correspondent Glen Oglaza.
"The European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said during the course of this campaign that there is no Plan B. Euro-sceptics are pointing out that this was already Plan B - the failed European Constitution was Plan A. They want to know how far down the alphabet we are going to go."
[Mr. Barroso] said he had spoken to Ireland's Premier Brian Cowen and that "he also believed the treaty is not dead, the treaty is alive".
"In a democracy, the will of the people - as expressed at the ballot box - is sovereign," [Cowen] said.Tony Blair had a notable moment of lucidity regarding the original European Constitution: "The evening of the French result, I remember being in Italy with friends, and someone saying, in despair at the vote: "what's wrong with them?" meaning those who voted 'no'. I said "I'm afraid the question is: "what's wrong with us?" meaning "us" the collective political leadership of Europe."
But he added: "We must not rush to conclusions. The Union has been in this situation before and each time has found an agreed way forward."
With the Lisbon Treaty, "the way forward" was, in so far as possible, to deny the people a chance to express their will at the ballot box, even though polls suggested that as much as 90% of the British public wanted to have one.
"What's wrong" is that for the aristocracy in Brussels and their agitators, having a free, open, and democratic society is really a tertiary concern. Even in some of Europe's worst dens of collectivism, it seems that many people can still smell how corrupt this is.
A Little Late To The Party
10:09 pm, 6/20/08
A Little Late To The Party
In 1966, France bailed out of NATO's military command, removing NATO troops from Europe and French troops from NATO, minimizing the hard feelings that would come later when they welcomed their new Soviet overlords with open arms.
Now that the Soviet threat is gone, France would like back in. Sort of.
Predictably, the French left is unhappy with the whole thing.
In 1966, France bailed out of NATO's military command, removing NATO troops from Europe and French troops from NATO, minimizing the hard feelings that would come later when they welcomed their new Soviet overlords with open arms.
Now that the Soviet threat is gone, France would like back in. Sort of.
President Nicolas Sarkozy made the case for greater French participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, saying nothing prevents his country from rejoining NATO's military structures.Given the nature of NATO, that doesn't sound like "full participation". Still, it's an improvement over the last forty years.
But Mr. Sarkozy put the onus on NATO by setting conditions for full French participation; among them, France must maintain freedom to decide whether to send troops to an operation.
Predictably, the French left is unhappy with the whole thing.
Next, They’ll Cast Runes To Solve Equations
2:25 pm, 6/19/08
Next, They'll Cast Runes To Solve Equations
It's a popular complaint among particularly smug leftists that Americans are too religious, let religion get involved in too much of public life, and sometimes let religious dogma override empirical reality. As I like to point out, liberals do it, too. Global warming is a prime example.
More importantly, though, it's not just Americans.
It's a popular complaint among particularly smug leftists that Americans are too religious, let religion get involved in too much of public life, and sometimes let religious dogma override empirical reality. As I like to point out, liberals do it, too. Global warming is a prime example.
More importantly, though, it's not just Americans.
An Ontario mother of an autistic girl is considering legal action against her local school board after a psychic's prediction to a special educational assistant sparked a sexual abuse report to the Children's Aid Society.Fortunately, CAS realized they were dealing with fools and closed the case immediately, but the "educators" responsible have not apologized, maintain that they had a responsibility to report their baseless suspicion, and, as far as I can tell, will likely continue to be given power and influence over Ontario schoolchildren.
Shortly after arriving home, Ms. Leduc received a phone call from Victoria's teacher.
"The teacher said you have to come back to school right away -- it's urgent. My heart was racing," said Ms. Leduc, who went back to the school and met with the teacher, vice-principal and principal.
"The teacher looked at me and said: 'We have to tell you something. We have to tell you that Victoria's EA went to see a psychic and the psychic asked her if she works with a little girl with the initial V. When the EA said yes, the psychic said, 'Well, you need to know that this girl is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"
The school officials then gave Ms. Leduc a list of behaviours that Victoria was exhibiting.
"You must remember that Victoria has severe autism and is entering puberty so she is exhibiting behaviours that are very common with children of this age but, being autistic and not having been taught otherwise, she will exhibit these behaviours in public," Ms. Leduc said.
"The principal looks at me and says, 'We've called CAS.' Then I got sick to my stomach.
"I challenged them and asked if the other children in the class with autism exhibited these behaviours. They said, 'Oh yes, all the time.' But they were not reported to the CAS because they didn't have the psychic's tip."
Progressive Conservative MPP Julia Munroe called the signs in this particular case "questionable."Why blame the psychic? Blame the dopey client.
"It seems like a rather strange set of circumstances," said the children and youth services critic. "Is someone who offers psychic interpretation part of a referral list?"
Barrie shaman spiritualist Tamare White-Wolf said the parent should have been contacted by the school first.
"We can't blame the psychic," White-Wolf said. "A psychic that gives that kind of information is obviously trying to help the child."
Stop Talking About The News
11:25 pm, 6/16/08
Stop Talking About The News
Apparently, the Associated Press has now grudgingly admitted that it's perfectly legitimate for people to quote their stories.
The AP was making the particularly bizarre assertion that quoting even a headline and lede to send readers to a story constitutes a violation. Ironically, some AP licensees, like Yahoo! News and several major newspapers actually encourage bloggers to link and discuss their stories, recognizing that the attention generates traffic that fuels their ad sales. That raises serious questions about the merits of the AP's complaint that it dilutes the value of the intellectual property their licensees pay for. In many cases, people wouldn't see a given story at all if a blog didn't point them to it and get them thinking about its significance.
As far as I'm concerned, bloggers are using a story in a perfectly ethical manner as long as they reasonably limit their excerpts to the portion required to support their point, provide a link to the original story for interested readers to follow, and are running a site where it's manifestly obvious either that the blogger's writings, rather than the excerpted quotations, are the purpose of the site and the primary traffic draw, or that the site's primary purpose is to drive traffic to the original stories (a use that, given the very nature of the web, has to be legitimate).
I can't imagine how else it would work, but people are obviously free to discuss the news. That is supposedly the very purpose of journalism, and it's implied that the information is meant to inform the public and can be cited and quoted as an authority. Accurately paraphrasing the relevant content (a common use that I can't imagine being reasonably challenged) should, in theory, be no less "diluting" than quoting the same ideas directly, and the former is a lot more likely to lead to accidental misrepresentation or inaccuracy, another concern of the AP. Like Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar quoted in the Associated Press article, I sincerely hope that whatever scheme they come up with will be primarily oriented toward keeping their legal department from overreaching, rather than trying to manufacture intellectual property "rights" that lack any basis in law.
Apparently, the Associated Press has now grudgingly admitted that it's perfectly legitimate for people to quote their stories.
NEW YORK (AP) -- The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.I certainly hope the Associated Press is OK with this excerpt. I've certainly seen more than a few instances of newspapers quoting blogs without permission, and this whole line of thinking leads to a conclusion and to a type of confrontation that nobody, including the AP, would want.
The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.
The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.
In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP "doesn't get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows."
The AP was making the particularly bizarre assertion that quoting even a headline and lede to send readers to a story constitutes a violation. Ironically, some AP licensees, like Yahoo! News and several major newspapers actually encourage bloggers to link and discuss their stories, recognizing that the attention generates traffic that fuels their ad sales. That raises serious questions about the merits of the AP's complaint that it dilutes the value of the intellectual property their licensees pay for. In many cases, people wouldn't see a given story at all if a blog didn't point them to it and get them thinking about its significance.
As far as I'm concerned, bloggers are using a story in a perfectly ethical manner as long as they reasonably limit their excerpts to the portion required to support their point, provide a link to the original story for interested readers to follow, and are running a site where it's manifestly obvious either that the blogger's writings, rather than the excerpted quotations, are the purpose of the site and the primary traffic draw, or that the site's primary purpose is to drive traffic to the original stories (a use that, given the very nature of the web, has to be legitimate).
I can't imagine how else it would work, but people are obviously free to discuss the news. That is supposedly the very purpose of journalism, and it's implied that the information is meant to inform the public and can be cited and quoted as an authority. Accurately paraphrasing the relevant content (a common use that I can't imagine being reasonably challenged) should, in theory, be no less "diluting" than quoting the same ideas directly, and the former is a lot more likely to lead to accidental misrepresentation or inaccuracy, another concern of the AP. Like Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar quoted in the Associated Press article, I sincerely hope that whatever scheme they come up with will be primarily oriented toward keeping their legal department from overreaching, rather than trying to manufacture intellectual property "rights" that lack any basis in law.
Knifezilla!
7:07 pm, 6/9/08
Knifezilla!
Thank God this guy didn't have a gun, or else he might've found a way to kill people.
Thank God this guy didn't have a gun, or else he might've found a way to kill people.
A Japanese man rammed a truck into a crowd of shoppers, jumped out and went on a stabbing spree in Tokyo's top electronics district Sunday, killing at least seven people and wounding 10 others.He couldn't have been that tired of life: as soon as police threatened to shoot him, he surrendered.
"The suspect told police that he came to Akihabara to kill people," said Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
"He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything," Akaogi said.
Customer Service Defined
9:18 am, 6/9/08
Customer Service Defined
So I've been working on a major project recently, and I went last night to send an urgent email only to have it shot back to me. The recipient's email provider, Hotmail, has somehow decided that my emails constitute SPAM, presumably because someone else on the same Road Runner IP bloc has been abusing the email. I thought "Hey, I'll just let Time Warner Cable know, get this wrapped up."
Except that the online support email form is apparently broken.
Plan B: Online chat. Surely, a reasonably competent technician would be on the other side and would immediately understand my relatively simple problem, right? All they have to do is open a ticket, paste my error message into it, and...
So I've been working on a major project recently, and I went last night to send an urgent email only to have it shot back to me. The recipient's email provider, Hotmail, has somehow decided that my emails constitute SPAM, presumably because someone else on the same Road Runner IP bloc has been abusing the email. I thought "Hey, I'll just let Time Warner Cable know, get this wrapped up."
Except that the online support email form is apparently broken.
Plan B: Online chat. Surely, a reasonably competent technician would be on the other side and would immediately understand my relatively simple problem, right? All they have to do is open a ticket, paste my error message into it, and...
Fiona Pereira: Hello! Thank you for choosing Road Runner Internet technical Chat. My name is Fiona P. How may I assist you?This is efficient, since I already provided #3 and #4 to get into the chat.
Aaron: Hi there. The email support form seems to be broken, so I figured I'd try this,
Aaron: Hotmail is rejecting emails sent through my Roadrunner SMTP server.
Aaron: This is the error:
Reporting-MTA: dns; hrndva-omta01.mail.rr.com
Arrival-Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 06:07:35 +0000
Received-From-MTA: dns; [74.69.141.13]
Content-Type: text/plain
Final-Recipient: RFC822; [XXXXXX]@hotmail.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mx1.hotmail.com (65.54.245.8)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, we recommend enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail list: http://postmaster.live.com
Fiona Pereira: I'm more than happy to assist you. To get us started, I'm going to need to verify some security information and then we can move on to understanding your setup. We will need to perform some troubleshooting steps together, and I'll be running some tests on my end. Feel free to ask questions along the way. Before we begin, I would like to bring up your account. May I have the following four pieces of information from you please?
1. The account holder's 10 digit telephone number. (xxx-xxx-xxxx)
2. The account holder's Full Name (First and Last)
3. Please tell us your name.
4. May I have your preferred e-mail address? (Preferred e-mail address is the one that you use frequently; it may be different from the Road Runner e-mail address.)
Aaron: 607-XXX-XXXX, should be under XXXXXX, my name is Aaron XXXXXX, preferred email is XXXXXX@gmail.com.Uh oh.
Fiona Pereira: Thank you for providing all the required information.
Fiona Pereira: Aaron, I understand that you are unable to send emails, am I correct?
Aaron: To Hotmail accounts.Do you think she checked any actual "resources", or that this is preprogrammed blowoff #8?
Aaron: Yes.
Fiona Pereira: I have checked my resources and found that there is an outage in your area due to which you are facing this issue. Our Technical Expertise team is diligently working on it and it would be resolved at the earliest.
Aaron: Wait, what kind of outage?Getting support technical from Yoda, I am, yes.
Fiona Pereira: Many of our customers are facing this issue, they're unable to send emails. We're aware of this and our technicians are currently working resolving it at the earliest.
Aaron: OK, but I can send emails. They're being rejected, specifically, by Hotmail, because Hotmail has blacklisted my IP address. So, normally, that would not be the result of an outage, rather something RR needs to deal with administratively.
Fiona Pereira: Please check after some time, if the issue still persists you get contact our concerned department on 866-892-7869 and provide the this ticket number RQST00057088900.
Aaron: If I might ask, is this support center located in New York?She lied to me!
Fiona Pereira: Are you referring to this chat support?
Aaron: Yes, ma'am.
Fiona Pereira: Aaron, we're located at Virginia.
Aaron: OK, thank you very much, Fiona. I will contact RR support again when this does not work tomorrow.Sadly, the "nice morning" shot missed the mark. Turns out it's actually late evening in Bangalore.
Fiona Pereira: You're welcome. For further assistance please log on to our website http://help.rr.com and check for online FAQs. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Aaron: No, that ought to do it. You've been a tremendous help.
Fiona Pereira: Thank you for the compliment.
Aaron: Have a nice morning, Fiona.
Fiona Pereira: I would appreciate if you could provide us with your valuable feedback on the support experience after the end of this chat session. It will help us to serve you better. Please submit your comments at http://surveys.rr.com/chat.
Fiona Pereira: Thank you for contacting Road Runner technical support, again my name is Fiona P, we value you as a customer and appreciate your valuable time. Have a nice day!
Analyst has closed chat and left the room.
The People’s Temple
7:08 pm, 6/3/08
The People's Temple
I see Hillary Clinton has finally given a concession speech, in which she never actually conceded. In fact, she said she'll be "making no decisions tonight", as if it's really up to her.
Besides, frankly, it's a little creepy that she chose to do this in an underground chamber with no cellphone service. Given her awkward references to assassinations and her increasing obsession, when they gave her que and nobody came out, I half expected the doors to seal shut and for Clinton to appear on the wall laughing maniacally, then fill the room with a cloud of nerve gas.
"If I'm going down, you're all coming with me!"
I see Hillary Clinton has finally given a concession speech, in which she never actually conceded. In fact, she said she'll be "making no decisions tonight", as if it's really up to her.
Besides, frankly, it's a little creepy that she chose to do this in an underground chamber with no cellphone service. Given her awkward references to assassinations and her increasing obsession, when they gave her que and nobody came out, I half expected the doors to seal shut and for Clinton to appear on the wall laughing maniacally, then fill the room with a cloud of nerve gas.
"If I'm going down, you're all coming with me!"
All Aboard The Agitprop Train
9:09 am, 6/3/08
All Aboard The Agitprop Train
Construct your own Yakov Smirnoff joke:
In America, prominent liberals like to complain that in "Bush's America", they don't feel their views are being heard, even though they're making that complaint on national television.
In Soviet Russia...
Construct your own Yakov Smirnoff joke:
In America, prominent liberals like to complain that in "Bush's America", they don't feel their views are being heard, even though they're making that complaint on national television.
In Soviet Russia...
On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.Ah, well, that explains it.
His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)
Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.
Onetime Putin allies such as Mikhail Kasyanov, his former prime minister, and Andrei Illarionov, his former chief economic adviser, disappeared from view. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition coalition, was banned, as were members of other parties. Even the Communist Party, the only remaining opposition party in Parliament, says its leaders are kept off television.
And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means television set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg television station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.
When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Putin and Medvedev at Russia's equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.
Political humor in general has been exiled from television here. One of the nation's most popular satirists, Viktor Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of various politicians, including Putin. It was canceled in Putin's first term and Shenderovich has been all but barred from television.
Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on television simply because their views are not newsworthy.
If Anything Qualifies As A Disaster, It’s This Democratic Primary
8:27 pm, 6/1/08
If Anything Qualifies As A Disaster, It's This Democratic Primary
Newsmax:
Newsmax:
As of the end of April, the DNC had brought in $22.8 million this year but had only $4.4 million left to spend. The Republican National Committee, on the other hand, has collected $57.6 million this year and finished April with $40.6 million in its coffers.Hey, maybe not, if this is any indicator.
DNC supporters say the drawn-out race between Obama and Clinton has diverted funds that would otherwise go to the party committee, according to the Washington Post.
Financial records disclose that the DNC has spent $638,000 against presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain this year, almost all of it - $600,000 - on two TV ads that ran on national cable networks.
Neither ad is currently airing, due to budgetary restraints.
DNC spokeswoman Stacie Paxton expressed confidence that donations to the DNC will pick up once the Democrats have settled on their nominee.
As bodies pile up in disaster after global disaster, even the most sympathetic souls can turn away.The similarities are striking.
"Hearing about too many disasters makes some people not give at all, when they would have if it had been just one disaster," says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, who teaches marketing at Golden Gate University and specializes in the factors at play in charitable giving.
"For the vast number of Americans, if they just gave to some disaster far away and then another disaster happens, in their mind that's clumped as `faraway disaster,'" Strahilevitz says. "So they will feel, 'I just gave to a faraway disaster.'"
"It's too much pain, too much tragedy for someone to process, and so we tend to pull ourselves away from it and either close off from it out of psychological defense, or it overwhelms us," says Cynthia Edwards, a professor of psychology at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.
The Prime Directive
6:28 pm, 6/1/08
The Prime Directive
A happy euphemism from this AP story, announcing new photographs of an uncontacted native tribe in Brazil.
Actually, they're pointing arrows at the plane.
A happy euphemism from this AP story, announcing new photographs of an uncontacted native tribe in Brazil.
Actually, they're pointing arrows at the plane.
This Has Been My Day
6:19 pm, 6/1/08
This Has Been My Day
These days, I'm running customer service and tech support for an image hosting company. Guess where half our hardware is located?
These days, I'm running customer service and tech support for an image hosting company. Guess where half our hardware is located?
An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.Representatives of every ThePlanet vendor are apparently on-site, and the fire marshal won't let them power up the emergency generator. Meanwhile, while I'd set out intending to do a series of posts today, I'm trying to explain this to customers.
According to The Planet's website, at about 5 p.m. Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room.
Soviet Assault
12:00 am, 5/31/08
Speaking of World in Conflict, for those who play it, an expansion pack is due out in the fall, Soviet Assault. Like all the other trailers Massive has made for this game, these are really impressive, and since the initial release was as great as the trailers implied, I suspect the expansion will be excellent, as well.
World in Conflict has been such a success partly because of the detailed art and accessible gameplay, but also because Massive Entertainment had a solid grasp of the nostalgia and surrealism inherent in the concept. They were able to milk it for all it's worth to construct both the game's look-and-feel and the campaign mode storyline, producing bits like a firefight in a Burger King parking lot, a jungle warfare scene that turns out to be in front of palm trees in a mall, and Spetsnaz taking over New York Harbor. Alec Baldwin doing the narration makes it impossible to avoid subconsciously associating it with The Hunt For Red October, and the Tears for Fears trailer was inspired. It was great marketing for a great idea.
The imagery of Soviet APCs pouring through the Berlin Wall and Hinds over Paris suggests they're really keeping that going for the expansion. All the new maps for Soviet Assault will be made available for multiplayer battles free of charge, it's the Soviet missions that will be retail-only. If you like strategy games and haven't picked up World in Conflict yet, it's great for your library, with a lot of replay value.
World in Conflict has been such a success partly because of the detailed art and accessible gameplay, but also because Massive Entertainment had a solid grasp of the nostalgia and surrealism inherent in the concept. They were able to milk it for all it's worth to construct both the game's look-and-feel and the campaign mode storyline, producing bits like a firefight in a Burger King parking lot, a jungle warfare scene that turns out to be in front of palm trees in a mall, and Spetsnaz taking over New York Harbor. Alec Baldwin doing the narration makes it impossible to avoid subconsciously associating it with The Hunt For Red October, and the Tears for Fears trailer was inspired. It was great marketing for a great idea.
The imagery of Soviet APCs pouring through the Berlin Wall and Hinds over Paris suggests they're really keeping that going for the expansion. All the new maps for Soviet Assault will be made available for multiplayer battles free of charge, it's the Soviet missions that will be retail-only. If you like strategy games and haven't picked up World in Conflict yet, it's great for your library, with a lot of replay value.
This Actually Happened
11:36 pm, 5/30/08
This Actually Happened
1989 sucked.
Ronald Reagan left office, Miami Vice and Family Ties went off the air, the People's Republic of China murdered about a thousand people at Tienanmen Square, Iran issued a fatwah against Salman Rushdie and his publishers, and Ghostbusters II failed to live up to the original, not in that "oh wow, this sequel doesn't even count" way, but in the way where they tried hard enough that you can't ignore it and have to deal with the mild disappointment. It's a year so generally benighted that Massive Entertainment's Soviet invasion of the United States seems oddly appropriate.
In a year filled with unspeakable horrors, The Artist (Formerly Known As Prince But Now Prince Again) released "Batdance", which became his first single released on the new "compact disc", briefly topped the chart, and made the following video an artifact of American culture which we have since struggled to expunge from our memories:
I'll bet you'd suppressed this memory.
Real news tomorrow. Promise.
1989 sucked.
Ronald Reagan left office, Miami Vice and Family Ties went off the air, the People's Republic of China murdered about a thousand people at Tienanmen Square, Iran issued a fatwah against Salman Rushdie and his publishers, and Ghostbusters II failed to live up to the original, not in that "oh wow, this sequel doesn't even count" way, but in the way where they tried hard enough that you can't ignore it and have to deal with the mild disappointment. It's a year so generally benighted that Massive Entertainment's Soviet invasion of the United States seems oddly appropriate.
In a year filled with unspeakable horrors, The Artist (Formerly Known As Prince But Now Prince Again) released "Batdance", which became his first single released on the new "compact disc", briefly topped the chart, and made the following video an artifact of American culture which we have since struggled to expunge from our memories:
I'll bet you'd suppressed this memory.
Real news tomorrow. Promise.