Maggie's Farm

This is so true, from Samuelson in the WaPo:

The big lie of campaign 2008 -- so far -- is that the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, will take care of our children. Listening to these politicians, you might think they will. Doing well by children has now passed motherhood and apple pie as an idol that all candidates must worship.

"We will do whatever it takes to make America a better country, to give our kids a better future," says Mike Huckabee, winner of the Republican Iowa caucuses.

"We will deliver for our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren," claims Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic winner in Iowa.

"We're going to reclaim the future for our children," says Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Actually, these are throwaway lines, completely disconnected from reality.

Whole thing here.

"Whaddya gonna say? If there must be Democratic candidates in the world, I suppose a win for stealth-lefty Clinton is preferable to a win for far-lefty Obama or loopy-lefty Edwards. That victory speech, though— oy! “Young people who can’t afford to go to college to fulfill their dreams…” As I used to say when my mother told me to finish my greens because kids were starving in Africa: Name one. And why is going to college the only way to fulfill your dreams? And why should I care about some fool teenager’s fool dreams anyway?"

John Derbyshire, as quoted by Theo

The WSJ greatly expands it's free opinion site, as of yesterday. Smart move, Rupert. 

Take a look: it's got books, "Taste", Arts and Leisure, Taranto's Best of the Web plus the "Opinion Journal Federation" of websites.

At this point, the WSJ main site is handling the internet as well as, or better than, any other of the MSM, (although the NY Sun is doing a great job too) and will force the (still marginal, I believe, in the larger scheme of things but not without some influence) blogworld to reconsider what we/they can do best.

Meanwhile, the clever MSM like the WSJ is absorbing and integrating the best of the blogworld. Since my crystal ball broke when I dropped it a few years ago, I do not know what the best role of the blogworld might be, but it's probably in opinion and entertainment, and info which is either not mass-market or is neglected by the MSM.

Stay tuned! It will be interesting.

I have always gotten a kick out of this portrait of the ineffectual and depressive Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf ll (1552-1612) as Vertumnus - Roman God of the Seasons, by Milan-born Guiseppe Arcimboldo.

Turbulence? Tex Johnson rolls a Boeing 707 (h/t, Theo)

Where is the world's largest Beaver dam?

We have heard the stories that the largest is somewhere in Three Forks, MT, but the best data I can find is that the largest is in Wood Buffalo Park in northern Alberta.

It is 2790 feet, or about a half mile in length. It makes sense that the longest dams would need to be built on gently-sloping, slow-moving wetlands in order to impound a good volume of water, while most Beaver-sized streams can be effectively dammed with shorter lengths, or a series of shorter lengths, as in the photo below (from this excellent Beaver photo site):

My old Dad always said: “Never drink on an empty stomach: always have a beer or two first”, and he was probably right.

Kim du Toit, in a piece a week ago on holiday drinking

From an alert reader:

Whatsa matter, don't you read your own webpage? From Maggie's Farm recently:

Come on. You don't really think that woman is not going to win the democratic primaries, do you? If you were immortal and omniscient you wouldn't have enough power or time to ferret out all the cul-de-sacs of influence, fellow travelers, yes-men installed like ticks in government and NGO sinecures, and just plain access to money her and her husband have all over this planet. The emo kids, afraid that George Bush was listening to Al Qaeda phonecalls because he secretly wanted to find their stash of doobies, don't understand that rules are for Republicans. Hillary just goes down the hall and opens the file cabinets and plops a pile of FBI files on some toad's desk. They're not kidding around, and never have been. And they've been at it thirty years. There'll be a live boy or a dead girl or a horse's head in everybody's bed the minute they pull even with her in the polls, and they'll never even know where it's coming from. Not exactly.

The press, currently infatuated with the most liberal version of a democrat and the most unelectable version of a Republican, will get over unrequited Obama love right quick and fall behind Hillary,right after she's through having people mention that her Democratic opponents are crackhead madrassah psychos and have love children behind their noble cancer-ridden wife's back. And that's where Ron Paul! comes in.

Her husband never really won an election, you know. You can go on any Internet opinion playpen and hear all about how popular Bill is --and was -- but he never even cracked 50% of the vote on his re-election. Hillary's in the same boat. It's likely she'd have a hard time getting half the vote, even though 45% of the electorate is in the bag for a Democrat. Hello, Ross Perot!

It's hard being right all the time, but we must try to bear up under the strain of it.

Those NH polls sure had me fooled. From Rick Moran:

I have been following politics for 35 years and cannot recall such a universal, all encompassing and ultimately, totally overblown media frenzy about a candidate that turned out to be so extraordinarily wrong. There’s a lesson there for us somewhere but frankly, I am too stunned to see it at the moment. Political pros were even swept up in Obamania and fell victim to being in love with the sound of their own voices pouring superlatives and encomiums on the senator from Illinois.

and

In addition to women, Hillary captured the over 55 vote and those who make less than $50,000 a year. The significance of her victory in those groups cannot be lost on Obama. Oldsters vote in greater numbers than any other age group. And those who make under 50 grand a year vote Democratic in large numbers.

Does this mean we don't have to keep hearing about "change"? Here's Jules on "change":

CNN notes key issues of “hope” and “change.” I hope things don’t change too much, because while there is always a lot of tinkering around the edges that might improve this situation or that, this remains one of the wealthiest nations in the world, providing all its citizens and a lot of non-citizens opportunities to advance themselves unmatched anywhere else in the world; the nation most seriously committed to the social welfare of all by means other than burdensome, motivation-killing socialism; the nation most seriously committed, having bled and paid heavily on this score, to equality and protection for all in matters of race and religion; and whether the rest of the free world likes to admit it or not, it relies on us to ensure its security. The “hope” and “change” mantras in such a privileged country frankly sound like adolescent whining.

Image: Thanks, Buddy

Quoted from Dr. Bob:

But in the end you decide to trust this crazy guy who has already footed the bill for your get-out-of-jail-free card. Of course, he already knows what a pathetic sonofabitch you are, and having spent the big bucks to get you off the hook, is fully prepared to do the heavy lifting necessary to transform you into the useful and happy partner — dare I say friend? — which he’s always envisioned you to be. But first you need a major cleanup, starting from the inside out, since a whitewash is never gonna cut it. Extreme makeover needed — on the inside. The outside will take care of itself, in time.

This, my friends, is what we call sanctification.

An extreme makeover, from the inside out. Sounds painful.

Painful? Kinda-sorta. Read the whole thing.

I'd enjoy this more with just their playing instead of the dopey video:

This "change" mantra is a joke. Change what, exactly?

I think it's kinda like American Idol (which I have never seen): change the face on the TV. Vote 'em off the screen.

Roger on Making Change.

From Ken Rockwell's opinion on the subject:

Just about any camera, regardless of how good or bad it is, can be used to create outstanding photographs for magazine covers, winning photo contests and hanging in art galleries. The quality of a lens or camera has almost nothing do with the quality of images it can be used to produce.

Quoted from Shrinkwrapped:

Barak Obama is a fairly conventional, mainstream Democratic liberal, albeit without the rage, while Mike Huckabee appears to be a fairly conventional Republican populist, also without the rage and with a more overt religious patina than the present occupant of the White House.  Both appear to be offering the Federal government as the ultimate protector against the vicissitudes of modern life and the dispenser of largesse to favored constituencies; neither, at least yet, offers much of a paradigm shift.  (I do not count Huckabee's "fair tax" since any proposal attacked by liberals and conservatives alike is unlikely to be enacted by a Democratic Congress for a Republican President.)

My sense is that Obama and Huckabee are running for Parent in Chief of an anxious and regressed nation. 

Yesterday on FNS, Brit Hume pointed out the contrast between the high percentage of Americans who tell pollsters that they are personally doing well and the equally large majority who report that America is on the wrong track.  Making sense of this apparent paradox is difficult, but allow me to make the attempt.

Read the whole thing.

Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words "tequila slammer" would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker's head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state's whim. They'd have thought you a paranoid loon.

Samizdata commenter Ian B., posted as a Samiz. Quote of the Day

It's boat-buying season. The charming but sturdy Annabel Lee is for sale at Yacht World:

h/t, Small Dead Dentists

This is astonishing news - that people are actually talking about it. Her national polls are tanking. They say she will be running out of money, too.

What was the foundation for her campaign, with all of its trappings of inevitability? Is it possible that very few Dems ever really found her an attractive candidate? And why on earth did she ever let her husband campaign for her? That is dumb dumb dumb: as somebody noted somewhere, we never saw Dennis Thatcher campaigning for Maggie.

Update: Many, like Blue Crab, smell a rat.

From Slow Learning by Laurie Fendrich in Chronicle of Higher Ed, about her mother in law:

I can’t help but wonder, as I watch colleagues pulling out their hair over the mucky writing of their college students, whether we didn’t lose something important when we abandoned the kind of education Mary Jayne Shields enjoyed. Even though she experienced an admittedly slower, duller, more metronomic approach to learning than many high-school students are subjected to now, that ancient pedagogy served her quite well. Perhaps it even explains why she could write beautifully, whereas so many of our college students can barely write at all.

Read the whole thing.