We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
After five years of being coddled and protected by intoxicated fans, the MSM, and the slobbering hosts of the TV talk show carnivals, Obama has no clue what to do when his facts and positions are challenged: Barone: Thoughts on the first presidential debate.
Apparently Obama is a good shmoozer, but he has no idea about what his job is.
Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo.
Romney was having fun. The O just wanted to go home and turn on the TV.
Best line from Romney: “I’ve been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Romney said in the most devastating understatement of the night.
Obama was totally uncomfortable in the debate forum. As Tom Stemberg, Co-founder and former CEO of Staples said to Neil Cavuto, following the debate, “President Obama is terrific on his feet when no one is challenging him to the facts.”
What viewers saw last night was the real Obama — slow-witted, unable to think effectively on his feet, desultory in his pre-debate preparation, and thoroughly unimpressive without his beloved teleprompter.
My email from Barack at 12:42 am:
Bird Dog --
I hope I made you proud out there explaining the vision we share for this country.
Now we need to go win this election -- the most important thing that will happen tonight is what you do (or don't do) to help in the little time we have left:
Romney slaps down Obama assertions throughout the debate. Romney: "Everything he described is inaccurate." Then adds the wham to the slam with specifics and statistics. At the end of part one, about jobs, Obama even says to the moderator:"Jim, you may want to move on to another topic," needing the bell to survive. The rest of the debate, took the same course, across the deficit (Romney: "you've been President four years" and employment is down and the economy, too); energy (Romney says that all the growth in oil and gas production is on private land while government land permits have been halved); entitlements (Romney won't rob Medicare to fund Obamacare); Obamacare (Romney says that private enterprise and individual choices, state by state, is better and more efficient than centralized dictates); regulation (Romney describes how Dodd-Frank created 5 too big to fail banks and failed to define "qualified" loans, so has stifled bank lending; Obama blames Wall Street for economic meltdown, avoiding the Democrat Congressional pressure to have loose lending standards.)
In the last round, Romney continues to pummel with specifics Obama's generalities, and tells Obama that Obama "is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts." Final Lehrer question for fast answer: how to break Congressional gridlock? Romney describes his successful experience working across the aisle and he will continue to do so, not to "compromise principle" but be "collaborative". "We need to have leadership in Washington to get the job done" among Democrats and Republicans. Obama says he has and will take ideas from anyone. (Gag alert!) But, "occasionally you have to say no." (That's all we've actually seen from Obama to Republican proposals.)
Final spin by each: Obama says he has "faith and confidence" in the American people. He'll continue to do the same as he has done. Romney says "this is about the course of America" which leads in "very different directions", Obama's a continued "middle class squeeze", joblessness, lack of growth, health premiums increase by $2500 per family due to Obamacare, and "devastating" cuts to our military versus growth and security through unleashing free enterprise and individual freedoms.
PBS's Jim Leher did an outstanding job of covering the most pressing domestic issues, without any bias at all. Instant commentators on TV give the edge to Romney. Usual apologists for Obama says Obama looked "rusty" while Romney looked confident, comfortable, was politely aggressive, came across well, and won the debate. (Examples from Memeorandum here, here, here, and more here, and that's in just the first few minutes after the end of the debate.) If the liberals on TV are giving Romney the edge, you know that it was a Romney slap down!
CNN instapoll has it 67% win for Romney, 25% for Obama. 82% say Romney did better than expected. In effect, Romney went direct to the people, past the liberal press coverup for Obama. -- Email from a reader: Obama looked like he was "seeking his internal teleprompter." -- Excellent summary of details of the debate from Jennifer Rubin.
It is a signal event when even some from the political left who has long sided with pro-Palestinian assertions wakes up and recognizes the horror that is Hamas.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally removed its military and residents from Gaza, leaving behind the infrastructure and commercial ventures Israel and Israelis had built. Muslim Brotherhood's spawn, Hamas, then took control over Gaza away from the Palestinian Authorities Fatah. Since, Gazans and Hamas have destroyed that inheritance and live off the charity of others, mostly Western. The thousands of rockets fired into Israel are excused by Western apologists.
But, the human rights abuses by Hamas against Gazans is finally being recognized by some in the anti-Israel camp.
In general, I thought of myself as someone who harbored few delusions about Hamas. Unlike an alarmingly large contingent of self-proclaimed leftists, I’ve never been willing or able to ignore the Islamic fascism that is the lifeblood of the group’s ideology, and that makes ridiculous any notion of it as a “resistance”. I confess, however, that I used to suspect there to be a degree of exaggeration and/or Zionist propaganda in the stories I would read about its moral policing.
Not so anymore. After meeting last weekend in Jordan with a group of Palestinian journalists that included three arrivals from Gaza, I was appalled to discover the reality is worse than I had dared imagine. Without me even mentioning the subject, they would almost tremble with rage as they described the party’s thuggery, palpably relieved at the opportunity to unload an intolerable weight off their chests.
…How “leftist”! How “revolutionary”!
The Middle East section of Human Rights Watch has long often carried the Palestinian meme as a major critic of Israel. Yet, Human Rights Watch’s latest report on Gaza is summed up in its release headline: “Gaza: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture, Unfair Trials.”
The 43-page report, “Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza,” documents extensive violations by Hamas security services, including warrantless arrests, failure to inform families promptly of detainees’ whereabouts, and subjecting detainees to torture. It also documents violations of detainees’ rights by prosecutors and courts. Military courts frequently try civilians, in violation of international law. Prosecutors often deny detainees access to a lawyer, and courts have failed to uphold detainees’ due process rights in cases of warrantless arrest and abusive interrogations, Human Rights Watch found.
“After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees’ rights, and grants impunity to abusive security services,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Hamas should stop the kinds of abuses that Egyptians, Syrians, and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end.”
Human Rights Watch doesn’t let the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank get off lightly either:
Hamas’s rival in the West Bank, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, arrests and detains Palestinians arbitrarily, including Hamas members or sympathizers, and similarly subjects detainees to torture and abuse. The intra-Palestinian political rivalry remains a significant factor behind many Hamas abuses against detainees in Gaza, Human Rights Watch found.
Western funding, and Western apologists, keeps these two parasites on humanity existing, with little incentive to either decently treat those under their rule, stop siphoning away aid funds into leaders' foreign bank accounts, end hate propaganda among their residents, and cease attacks upon Israelis.
I have eaten Rocky Mountain Elk steaks. Tastes like Elk, ie, similar to Moose. I have friends who hunt them. Bow, not rifle. Good stories, good adventures.
The author points out that we all know that "correlation does not indicate causation", but there is an equally important error often drawn from data: The confusion of statistical significance with real world meaning.
As science grows more powerful and government more technocratic, the stakes of correlation—of counterfeit relationships and bogus findings—grow ever larger. The false positive is now more onerous than it's ever been. And all we have to fight it is a catchphrase.
I love this pic I found while searching for "presidential debate":
It shows the aloof, condescending Obama in his most typical state — and shows an angry, frustrated Romney railing against the system in his most untypical state. Just the way we like it.
And do you know what?
I bet it was posted by a Lefty. He wanted to show Obama as calm and reasoning and Romney as totally unhinged.
Such is the eye of the beholder.
Stage 1: The Primaries
I don't think anyone reading my Republican debate posts was surprised that Romney took the nomination. It wasn't for naught that Mitt won the prestigious 'Most Presidential' award after every debate save one, where he shared it with Jon Huntsman. He speaks a solid platform, he enunciates well, and, more elusively, he acts like a president should act. That's why he kept winning the damn award.
Stage 2: The Conventions
Bottom line? We got a meme out of it ("empty chair") — and the Dems got nothing. Hah!
Stage 3: Rise of the Tea Party
Lurking in the shadows. Waiting in the wings. Step right up, pick yer metaphor.
Personally, I think it's going to be 2010 all over again. For those of you scoring at home, we had a mid-term election two years ago where the Repubs totally clobbered the Dems, taking back the House, almost taking back the Senate, and putting the fear of two words — Tea Party — into every Democrat's heart.
The good news is that you haven't heard a peep from them since then.
Good news, because the MSM didn't get the opportunity to liken them to the Wall Street Occupiers when they were having their fling, and good news because it appears the MSM has forgotten all about them at this point of the game. This false complacency is just fine with us.
The debate is set to fire off at 9 pm Eastern. More details here.
Despite what Bird Dog and many others view as the evil of pagination (spreading a web post over multiple pages), I am purposefully going to split up this post into two parts right here and now.
(And thus 'Doc Scofflaw' once again spits in the eye of convention! He's back, folks!)
In case you are refurbishing any temperate-zone perennial borders this fall, here are some of my pics of some informal borders at the NYBG. Even informal borders need structure: a wall, a hedge, a path - some architecture.
Every plant here has a label, so I remember what a number of them are if you ask in the comments:
A pal had never heard of Murray. Here's an introduction. I find his thoughts about "social capital" most interesting but, on many topics, he is a hard-headed, liberty-oriented thinker.
Here are a few of our Murray links from very recent years:
Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem - Charles Murray examines the cloud now hanging over American business—and what today's capitalists can do about it.
I don't remember it, but, according to the doctor, the first words out of my mouth when I woke up were,
I've had pleasanter experiences.
That sounds like me.
When I next woke up, I delivered a line I had practiced just for the occasion:
¡¿Dónde están las chicas calientes?!
That's "Where are the hot babes?", for those of you scoring at home. It's much funnier in Spanish because caliente literally means 'hot', so what I was really asking was, "Where are the women burning up with fever?"
Scoring in the clinic, however, proved more difficult. I couldn't believe the nurses didn't find my swollen, drooling, tube-laden body sexually appealing. I was also hampered by having to use a walker, which allowed the little vixens to scamper merrily away, dagnabbit.
What I'm saying is, my visit to the clinic was utter hell!
They also did some kind of operation, as I recall. The doctor said it was "just like a tonsillectomy — except at the other end." It turned out, however, that he told a blatant lie. I did not get a bowl of ice cream after it was over, like I did when I had my tonsils out when I was 12, so I'm still a little miffed about that.
As for my relatives in Georgia, I must have met 20 new blood relatives and about 3,000 new in-laws. We're a prolific bunch here in the South. While they were in sheer awe of being in the presence of a real, live Californian (granted, it's a small town), I don't think it was until I knocked out Pink Floyd's 'Celestial Voices' on the piano that they realized something different was going on. That piano looked a hundred years old and unquestionably had been played by ten thousand different hands, but somehow I doubt any Pink Floyd had ever been played on it.
I also doubt any Deep Purple had ever been played on my cousin's mandolin, but that's a different story.
Physically, I'm doing okay. Just weak, but that was expected. There's some residual pain but I have a veritable cornucopia of painkillers out there to choose from, lucky me. Besides costs, there are a few other advantages to having an operation in Mexico. One of them is that the doctors aren't hampered by all of that silly 'regulation' stuff and can ladle out the painkillers by the bucketful. I smuggled home dozens of 'samplers' from ten different brands. I'm currently going with Pain-B-Gon™, a finely-tuned mixture of Vicodin, OxyContin, various psychotropic drugs, all laced with the strongest caffeine allowable by law. It really hits the spot!
And let's not forget the real lesson from all this: that it was getting a complete physical that revealed the badness in the first place. As I said in the original Big C post, I was this close to skipping the colonscopy because it is, after all, a pain in the whatsis and takes extra time and money, but I'm obviously glad I didn't. I'm still facing some steep post-operative costs (expensive drugs + 3 visits to the Miami hospital), so if you missed out on the Save-Our-Doc campaign before and would like to help out, you can toss a few clams into the pot here.
Next up? Well, there seems to be some kind of debate going on tomorrow night, although I'm not sure of the details yet. I presume the GOP has exercised its right to use the Substitute Clause and have Newt Gingrich take Obama down a few notches in the warm-up round, but we'll have to see. I'll have a post on it tomorrow.
Again, my deepest thanks to everyone who helped out.
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact."
Conservatives mount strong efforts to undo the damage from media bias, but there is no serious talk in conservative circles about long-term strategies for gaining control of the media and using the media to build the conservative base. Left-wing bias in the media is just accepted as a constant, as immutable, almost as if it is a law of physics. The option of having conservative moderators hitting Obama with hard questions never even seemed to be an option. For the Romney-Ryan campaign, the key questions in the current election are how to point out Obama's record without being accused of negativity by Obama's protectors in the media and how to present their positions so as not to get painted as extremists.
The left's political strategy, on the other hand, has been to gain control of the sources of information that shape the culture and, in so doing, to determine the long-term direction of the nation.
With Dylan's Not Dark Yet. She's too young and pretty to sing this song, but she pulls it off. She borrows Dylan's incredible phrasing. Buddy found this, so you know it's worth it. Trust us:
Here's another lovely offering from Severa with Vlado Kreslin (no idea what they are saying):
I like home-grown tomatoes because they taste good. My gardens have always been "organic" only because I have never had a problem with insect pests - I grow enough so that the bugs and animals can have some - and because I enrich the garden soil with manure and peat moss (which are delivered to my garden center by polluting 16-wheelers). Nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition or good old Gaia, though.
America has been subject to food faddism forever. "Organic" produce is just the latest marketing scam for the wealthy and the body-obsessed. Here's a good update on the topic: Organic Illusions
As we've said here ad nauseum, there are three separate subjects here. First, the politically- and financially-powerful Education Industry. Second, the transfer of culture and knowledge. Third, the interest in learning and the capacity of kids to learn (plus, obviously, the value the family places on curiosity and knowledge).
Judging from what I see and hear daily, we have long reached the point of diminishing returns on the public school front.
Chris Matthews: 
Damn global warming!
George Orwell, via 
'I'm spiritual but not religious' is a cop-out