Thursday, December 11. 2008
 Is a Christmas Tree a fire hazard?
Yes, if it's near flame or frayed wires (as in photo). No, if it's kept watered, and you use common sense.
"The Architect," Karl Rove gives advice to Repubs. I don't care how Repubs do all that much. I do care how Conservative/Libertarians do in the future, though.
Here's the one we were half-remembering, with a number of memory errors: 
A commenter let us know about this comprehensive Calvin and Hobbes site. I didn't see the one we were looking for, but I did like this one: 
The NYT today not only covers for Obama, but they completely refuse to report the facts that every internet user knows.
 Is Big Garbage too big to fail?
Would you cousin-humping rednecks stop buying guns? Why to worry about the deficit. Stossel Walter Williams reminds us that bankruptcy doesn't mean you go out of business Chuck Colson receives Presidential Medal for his Prison Fellowship work. Newsweek tries to use the Bible to support gay marriage The 51% rule for marriage Cool photos: Polar bear chasing photog Image via Synthstuff
Christmas Dog 
Hannukah Venison Deer 
Wednesday, December 10. 2008
I couldn't find that one, BD, but here's another for now: 
Years ago there was an excellent Calvin and Hobbes toon. In it, Calvin was either writing a journal and/or taking photos or drawing pictures. Hobbes asks him why he's doing it. Calvin replies that he is pre-shaping his past for his eventual run for the Presidency. As I recall it, it entails a portrait of a noble young Calvin, studying a book. If any reader can find a copy of that toon, we'd love to see it again. The reason it came to my mind today is obvious.
We posted the other day about Yankee taxes and our general unfriendliness to business. Liberals and Lefties never seem to wonder where the money comes from for all of their plans and schemes. Well, in my CT, it's not going to come from these folks, because they made a plan for their families, and they won't let the product of their lifetime of blood, sweat and tears be fleeced by the greedy pols in Hartford.
Gateway. Here's the proof. We were right earlier: Axelrod told the truth to cover his own ass and to protect his own credibility. A day later (yesterday), he said he misspoke. Now, it's clear that he was right the first time. What a tangled web we weave... Despite the stammering, you cannot deny that Obama lies with authority. Still, everyone must be wondering what else he lies about: it's only natural to wonder, because pols typically try to sanitize, if not mythologize, their pasts - but usually not their pasts of four weeks ago. The internet is a relentless truth-detector. Time and reality grind away. Thus does the bloom come off the rose.
 Why? Because there is no accountability, no escape, and nobody who bothers to understand you and what your life is about. You are as helpless as a Frenchman. Just look at Oceania, or the EU - or even at Washington. That's why I am a member of The Federalist Society.
Freedom, not control, is our goal here at Maggie's. Mega-governance is Imperialism gone wild. Rachman at FT looks at World Government.
Feds want a little friendly conversation with Jesse Jackson Jr. Those little chats with the Feds rarely end up well for the chatee, because they are full of traps and snares - and they have a terrifying power to destroy you. Watch out for when they thoughtfully ask "Would you like some coffee?" Everybody's guilty of something, and they know it.
A quote from JR Nyquist on Negative Numbers and the Road to Serfdom: The only way the economy can heal is through the market. However painful the healing process, only the market can bring about full recovery. Government cannot do it. Friedrich Hayek offered a remarkable explanation of this in The Fatal Conceit. He wrote: “The creation of wealth is not simply a physical process and cannot be explained by a chain of cause and effect. It is determined not by objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to guide further decisions.” In other words, wealth is created by the market. Hayek further warned: if you do not trust the market, then you no longer believe in freedom or capitalism. In that event you are a socialist on the road to serfdom.
Car of the Future: The Pelosi GTxi Fun stuff from Paglia, including ripping Dick Cavett Searching the world for clues to asthma Why do we believe in Santa? Dumb question, if you ask me. Axelrod now says he misspoke. I think he spoke an inconvenient truth. Do you believe in "The March of History"? I do not.
This is an annual re-posting These wreaths -- some 5,000 -- are donated by the Worcester Wreath Co. of Harrington, Maine. The owner, Merrill Worcester, not only provides the wreaths, but covers the trucking expense as well. He's done this since 1992. A wonderful guy. Also, most years, groups of Maine school kids combine an educational trip to DC with this event to help out. Making this even more remarkable is the fact that Harrington is in one the poorest parts of the state. 
Tuesday, December 9. 2008
Andrew Breitbart will address lonely California Conservatives with his Big Hollywood. (h/t Scott at Powerline)
In Chicago, 1921 and 2008. You can't make this stuff up. Read this bit as he tries to make a deal to sell Obama's seat to Obama's choice. Between Rangel and Blago, the greedy Dems are in it up to their necks. Editor's note: Woops. Complaint includes Obama-Rezko land deal. Is this Whitewater Redux? If Dems love money so much, why don't they get a real job and produce something useful, like so many Repubs do? Also, via Slate: The person who looks great in this sordid affair, in fact, is Barack Obama, whom Blagojevich refers to by another name. According to the indictment: ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants ... are telling him that he has to "suck it up" for two years and do nothing and give this "motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him."
Also, one Lib: Blago a victim. Some are such insane partisans that it blinds them, or corrupts them. I can see defending pitiful Larry Craig, but not this scumbag, who is just the tip of a huge iceberg. Also, many posts at Gateway
We haven't encountered a worthy "Candidate for Best Essay of the Year" lately. Here, VDH makes a plea for a classical education in his essay in City Journal, Humanities Move Off-Campus. One quote:  Over the last four decades, various philosophical and ideological strands united to contribute to the decline of classical education. A creeping vocationalism, for one, displaced much of the liberal arts curriculum in the crowded credit-hours of indebted students. Forfeiting classical learning in order to teach undergraduates a narrow skill (what the Greeks called a technê) was predicated on the shaky notion that undergraduate instruction in business or law would produce superior CEOs or lawyers—and would more successfully inculcate the arts of logic, reasoning, fact-based knowledge, and communication so necessary for professional success.
A therapeutic curriculum, which promised that counseling and proper social attitudes could mitigate such eternal obstacles to human happiness as racism, sexism, war, and poverty, likewise displaced more difficult classes in literature, language, philosophy, and political science. The therapeutic sensibility burdened the university with the task of ensuring that students felt adjusted and happy. And upon graduation, those students began to expect an equality of result rather than of opportunity from their society. Gone from university life was the larger tragic sense. Few students learned (or were reminded) that we come into this world with limitations that we must endure with dignity and courage rather than deal with easily through greater sensitivity, more laws, better technology, and sufficient capital.
My temptation is to quote the whole thing. By coincidence, we read today via Insty that Harvard is scrapping The Canon. I'm like hip to that. Groovy, dude. How advanced! How Progressive! Let's do Maya Angelou and Sting and cool shit like that! Can you dig it? Photo: Harvard College
This from our guest poster Bruce Kesler, who has a long history of writing about Vietnam: The election of Vietnamese refugee Joseph Cao as a Republican in the most heavily Democrat congressional district in America (11% Republican), drawn to elect a Black (2/3rds Black population), comes as a surprise to some. Reasons given center around his community service record in post-Katrina New Orleans, the utter corruption of incumbent William Jefferson, and the reduced turnout of Blacks in this ballot postponed because of Hurricane Gustav. Various lessons are being proposed: Republican leadership call it an example of the results of a broader ethnic base and better ethics, calling for more. BlackVoices blog says a new generation of Black politicians cannot just count on racial solidarity but must demonstrate better ethics and effectiveness. Democrats expect a better candidate to reclaim the district in 2010, but expect a fight. While probably just a temporary balm to bashed Republican egos, this election of the first Vietnamese to Congress is notably ignored in all the state-run Vietnam news agencies which usually never miss an opportunity to herald the many accomplishments of refugee Vietnamese as if its own. Like refugees from communist oppression in Cuba or Russia, the Vietnamese in the US lean heavily Republican, the Vietnamese by 2-1. The lesson they’ve learned is that American ideals and policies are more to be valued than among many US natives who take them for granted or, even, denigrate the US compared to tyrannical regimes and ideologies. I’m probably unique among bloggers in writing many dozens of detailed, well-documented blog posts over the past few years about the ongoing political and religious repression in Vietnam and its ethnic cleansing brutality toward its minorities. And, probably nothing else I’ve written about has generated less interest. I won’t belabor the reader here with a repetition, but point those interested to a few good, brief introductory sources: Human Rights Watch “Speaking Up for Vietnam,” (many, many reports and analyses at HRW’s website); Former USAID worker and POW in Vietnam, tireless human rights advocate Mike Benge’s latest summary; the Montagnard Foundation’s report on ethnic cleansing (and ongoing tracking of it); and denuding of its and neighboring Laos and Cambodia’s rainforests.
The Bush administration, focused on the Middle East imbroglio, has been relatively weak in challenging Vietnam’s oppression, while encouraging the import trade from Vietnam that generates a $10+ billion deficit but enriches some US firms and entrenches the political rulers of Vietnam by creating a more prosperous, mostly quiescent urban class. Still, some in Vietnam are not so easily bought off, leading to labor strikes against more exploitive wages and conditions than even in China and the majority Buddhists and the Catholics refusing to buckle under to the state churches that are allowed. Tensions will increase as the international economic tanking slows Vietnam’s export-driven growth.
Returning to Joseph Cao, he has been heavily involved in Boat People SOS, founded to help Vietnam’s refugees. One would expect him to be a voice in Congress for Vietnam’s oppressed. But, one should expect him to concentrate more upon his district’s domestic concerns, especially if he is serious about an uphill re-election in 2010.
The new Obama administration, looking to relax US pressure on another communist relic in Cuba, is not likely to take up Vietnamese human rights more strongly. If Cao’s voice on Vietnam’s suffering population is to be magnified, it will require more Americans and Congressmen taking an interest in Vietnam’s oppression. The Vietnam Human Rights Network has easy links to most every international report on Vietnam, including from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Reporters Without Borders, and many more, all condemning Vietnam’s continuing oppression.
Another worthy cause is the Vietnam Healing Foundation run by my good friend R.J. DelVecchio, former Marine combat photographer in Vietnam and frequent visitor since. It is the only one that tries to aid severely wounded and destitute former South Vietnamese soldiers who continue to be denied basic food or medicine by Vietnam’s regime.
Whether Joseph Cao’s election promises any lasting relief to the US from more ethical Republicans or Black politicians is open to serious question. More important to Americans’ ethical relief would be more support for Vietnam’s long-suffering people.
 From a piece at Moonbattery:
Democrats have learned their lesson from the HillaryCare debacle: don't give the voters time to figure out what you're doing to them.
Precisely. It's the same old story: Manufacture a crisis, create noise for gummint to step in, and before you know it you have lost more freedom and choice. And money, too.
 One good thing about Obama is that he smokes. Maybe he'll help make tobacco cool again. (I have read that Hillary smokes too, but I can't prove it.)
Mrs. O might consider some of these smoke-eater candles for the President-Elect's Christmas stocking. We don't want the Oval Office smelling like an ashtray...or do we? Ancient joke re smoking: "Do you smoke after sex?"
"I don't know. I never looked."
 Recession: As the money goes away, so do the toxic wives:
'You loser!" screamed Katie, aiming a vase at her husband. "You've destroyed my life,'' she continued, hurling it. "Just look at my hair, look at my nails! You loser, you jerk, you nobody."
Recession: Women, minorities, and BS artists hardest hit Why New England is in the dumper: Least economic freedom Why do the mentally ill die younger? Life without auto unions in Brazil. Sounds good to me. With union jobs, there's little chance for advancement beyond a union job no matter how good or ambitious you are. If you think the Big 3 were bad before... Teaching analytical thinking: "They see the problem, but they don't see into the problem...." From Surber: They told me that if I voted for John McCain, our troops would remain in Iraq, the tax cuts for the rich would stand, and we would get a third term of Bush at the Pentagon. I did. And they were right.
From the WSJ: “What we’ve done in higher education,” said an administrator, “is let our dreams and aspirations dictate our cost structure.” For colleges, the dream is over...
Welcome to reality.
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