Monday, July 28. 2008
 Giving yourself totally to your spouse. The only way it works, I am told.
Politics and the international criminal court. This sounds like a big problem for Chrysler The Mountain Pine Beetle I'm not interested in the Edwards story, only in the media's effort to suppress it A Richard Cory effect? Shrinkwrappped Bailouts privatize gains but socialize losses. Kudlow Women still complaining about their blogs. We'd better not mention how rich we are all getting from writing for Maggie's Farm. Obama's "world tour" gave him a good bump in the polls. In the same week, McCain's astonishingly lame campaign couldn't even get him to an oil rig for a photo op. Related: Annoy your liberal neighbors (surely you must have some) "First, Lose Three Straight Elections: Britain's Conservatives are finally emerging from the wilderness. Republicans can learn from them." Fred Barnes Is "race and ethnicity" a reporter's beat? Am Thinker. Good grief. Al Qaida's appetite for civilian blood. Belmont The ebbing of the power of the Shiite militia. Politics and taxes. McArdle Texas: still a booming economy
Sunday, July 27. 2008
A big h/t to Vanderleun, who is supposedly on vacation but isn't, quite. He found this piece at the Independent by an Irish journalist who had covered Africa, Writing what I should have written so many years ago. One quote: The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability. Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die. Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa. Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.
 We missed this one: Global warming causes kittens. No doubt predicted by Climate Models. Related, from Al Gore to the Brits:
As your parliament moves forward to debate legislation this session, it is essential that you imagine this not solely as a scientific discussion or even a political dialogue, but as a moral moment where we decide who we are as human beings, and what obligation to the future we feel is appropriate for us to accept as part of our responsibility in this generation. At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation and the habitability of the earth for our species.
Good grief. He wanted to be the Messiah, but Obama one-upped him in that department. Now, he's just a regular crank again. Why it's so hard to teach students these days. h/t, Minding the Campus I have felt this way about power tools many times. AP stunningly acknowledges that the surge has worked spectacularly. Ace They went down fighting hard. Villainous. Sons and warriors. The NEA is our Taliban. Moonbattery Maybe appointing his transition team was a bit premature. Related, via Classical Values: The New Republic has a pretty good article up explaining European misconceptions of America. The article especially looks at Obama's recent German rallies and how those rallies feed European misconceptions. Europe's favorite dream: a post-Bush America cut down to size and chastened, a meeker and more modest America, a more "European" (that is, a more social-democratic) America, which at last casts off some of its nastier capitalist habits. An America that is a lot more like us Europeans who have forgone power politics and sovereignty in favor of communitarian politics and integration.
From Insty: MICHAEL BARONE: "Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. . . . In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao)."
Why would Maliki vote for Obama? Krauthammer What Dr. Roy Spencer said to the Senate
Saturday, July 26. 2008
Quote from Surber: Maliki got Obama off the hook in Iraq. But Berlin was a bridge too far. He became a rock star. And like many American celebrities on a high from European adulation, Obama knocked his native nation. I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.
He went on to say he loves his country, but the damage was done. He slammed the country. Factual, yes. But totally unnecessary. He apologized overseas for”mistakes” ahem “around the world” in a nation we liberated and protected for 45 years at a great cost of treasure, as critics of Iraq say. He apologized to a nation that exterminated 6 million Jews — two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe before the start of the war — for America? That is surreal even for an Ivy League egghead. His praise of German’s love of freedom was a joke. Germans no more love freedom than they love Jews.
You do not knock America in a foreign country, to suck up to their America-envy, in a campaign. Maybe he should run for office in Germany? Fortunately, German groupies do not vote in the USA. I think people just want McCain to give them a reason to vote for him. Powerline shares this McCain response ad:
Obama's on a different planet. John Bolton. Sing it along with me, kids. And if you combine that song with this one, you've got the Obama campaign in a nutshell.
McCain hits hard: Powerline Media misses the big story: Pajamas The only place the Dems want to drill: Michelle
Friday, July 25. 2008
 I am off to sea again - see y'all on Monday, God willing. Try to have as fine a weekend as I will. The stripers are biting off Montauk. Stripers, not strippers.
Respect: Why it's not a bad thing to be named Gambino. I think I'll change my name from Junkie to Gambino. Rick Moran outdoes himself. One quote: Strip aside the rhetoric and the mesmerizing presence on the stump and you are left with a rather ordinary, rather inspid liberal with visions of a planet united and America a slavish partner to the goals and aspirations of the bureaucrats at the United Nations – the US an emasculated presence while our own vital interests take second place to those preaching the gospel of universal brotherhood. This has been a dream of the new left for 60 years. And Obama, the word made flesh of that dream, is just the man to fulfill that destiny.
The loony hypochondriacal Mold Scam. The world is full of mold. The outdoors is full of mold. Mold Rules the earth. It will probably inherit the earth. Are guys really better at Math? Stop looking at that gal on the right. She's good at math and navigation. Definitely Divine Providence. Insty Berlin Yes, Baghdad No. WSJ. As I seem to recall, we occupied West Germany and Berlin, didn't we? Liberals plan to return to The New Deal. There will be some serious reaction if they try to pull this stunt. h/t, Driscoll Health Care 2008: A Political Primer. New Atlantis Things just aren't all that bad on Main Street. Unless you work on Wall Street. "Underrepresentation" and "overrepresentation." Thompson. I am deeply, deeply concerned that straight men are underrepresented in costume design. Fathering autism. WaPo. Everybody wants to blame. Tony Snow knew better. Hey. What the heck is a "community activist"? Is that a, like, job? Or what is it? Quote from Malanga, at City Journal: Community organizing’s roots stretch back to the 1930s and Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Rules for Radicals. But it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious plan to end poverty through massive federal spending that the Alinsky model—grassroots organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood—really took off. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to neighborhood groups, convinced that they knew better than Washington what their communities needed. The federal funds, eventually supplemented by state and local tax dollars, helped create a universe of government-funded community groups running everything from job-training programs to voter-registration drives—far beyond anything Alinsky could have imagined. Some 3,000 local social-services groups were soon receiving government funding in New York City alone. Many were new, but the money also helped turn traditional charities that had operated on private donations into government contractors. Those who led these social-services groups became advocates, unsurprisingly, for government-funded solutions to social problems. To defend and expand their turf, organizers began heading into the political arena, wielding the power they had accumulated in neighborhoods to build a base of supporters. In New York, operators of huge social-services groups like Pedro Espada in the Bronx and Albert Vann in Brooklyn won election to state and federal posts after heading up large, powerful nonprofits. By the late 1980s, nearly 20 percent of New York City Council members were products of the government-funded nonprofit sector, and they were among the most strident advocates for higher taxes and more government spending. In other cities, too, from Chicago to Cleveland to Los Angeles, the road to electoral success increasingly ran through the government-funded social-services sector. Spending directed to these groups boomed through both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Normal, competent folks don't go into politics. It's a well-known fact. They do real jobs that produce money and do not cost us money. Photo from Theo is a favor to cheer up our blog pal Bruce Kesler who used to post at Democracy Project. It's a long story.
 Is marriage really for white people?
Obama says he will remake the world. Gimme a break. Related: "Citizen of the world"? And Here's Roger Kimball: When I first encountered Obama’s rhetoric, my chief feeling was one of mild nausea. Over time, feelings of alarm have outstripped the nausea: Obama’s clichés, I realized, were not simply, not only, empty platitudes. They were also menacing adumbrations of a megalomaniac narcissist who really did believe he was a man of destiny and wouldn’t have the slightest hesitation about embarking on the effort to “remake the world.” All that is worrisome enough. Combined with the utter lack of critical perspective—rather, combined with the stunning adulation–accorded to Obama by the so-called mainstream press and you have a recipe for disaster.
The invention of Scotland. NY Sun Strange "bias incident" at U of Minnesota The new Housing Bill hammers the taxpayer Al Gore refuted, by Patrick Michaels
From The Sacramento Bee: 
Thursday, July 24. 2008
John H at Powerline: "If committed by a Republican, this would be a gaffe of historic proportions." So true. This guy is phoney baloney, but he has one heck of a road show. PS: Here is The Committee
 More on the scary powers granted to the EPA by the scientists on the SCOTUS.
Velcro and mustard seeds. SISU Obama throws his father under the bus. Related: Dino notes orgasm at the NYT. Related: "A 12-step program is needed." Neoneo "I'm from the past and I'm here to help." Sipp Socialized medicine and longer life. Pajamas "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. Driscoll Gun-hating family produces Olympic shooter. "Yes, it is socialism and yes, it is happening here." Classical Values 'Toon from Theo. It's wrong, though. Without mosquitoes, we would have no Gin and Tonics. The Good Lord works in mysterious ways.
 Image borrowed from Anchoress in "President of the World?" That flyer creeps me out.
And this quote from Obama, at American Thinker, also creeps me out with its implication that the State's job is to provide my life with meaning: "They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them -- that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness."
The last person in the world I'd want to discuss the meaning of life with is a politician. There is an immature grandiosity operating here, and I find it disturbing. What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.
But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.
Wednesday, July 23. 2008
 A mini digital Rolleiflex, via Neato.
Amtrak rides high, with gas prices. Mankiw What makes Obama possible? It's domestic In pursuit of teen purity. Time Climate denier update. Related: 32,000 scientist deniers. Including Freeman Dyson. Still a good idea not to overdevelop your taste in wine. Obama at Yad Vashem. Bad move, Barry. Jews are kinda sensitive about the holocaust. You can't wait until somebody prepares your answer. Via Driscoll: "Free piece of advice to the lovelorn Maverick: Perhaps McCain should leave the media mockery to others who haven't had their lips planted on the MSM's backside for decades."
From LiveScience comes the news that Antarctica may have been a dramatically warmer place at a geologically-recent time. Summertime temperatures could have averaged in the mid-50s fahrenheit along the coast -- comparable to New York in October, at a time when Antarctica was already sitting squarely over the south pole. Today, summer temperatures hover around 25 degrees at the same location. Co-author David Marchant said "climatologists are uncertain exactly what caused this intense period of cooling."
 Obama still opposes the surge. Related: The Quayle Test
Stuff white people like: Unpaid internships 5 things McCain should say, but won't DNA, the law, and human genetic diversity Fantasy doctor visit. One sample: Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.
Iraq update, via Am Thinker: - US troop and Iraqi civilian fatality rates are at their lowest points since the war began in 2003.
- Today Iraq has legitimate elections, a constitution and a functioning parliament. It is considered more politically free than virtually any country in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait.
- Gross Domestic Product has almost tripled, from $20.5B (US dollars) in 2002 to $60.9B in 2008.
- Oil production in each of the last three months (May-July 2008) has exceeded the peak pre-war estimated rate of 2.5 million barrels per day. Oil exports now bring in about $7 billion per month, and rising.
- Pre-war, only 4 to 8 hours of electricity were available per day nationwide, on average. In July 2008, electricity was available an average of almost 12 hours per day, an improvement of 50% to 200%.
- There are more than twice as many registered cars, more than 10 times as many telephone subscribers and more than 50 times as many internet subscribers.
- Under Saddam, Iraq had no commercial TV or radio stations and no independent newspapers or magazines. Zero. Today it has dozens of TV stations and hundreds of radio stations, newspapers and magazines.
- More children are in school, and more doctors, judges and security personnel have been trained and are being trained.
Tuesday, July 22. 2008
 A lonely candidate: McCain was met by just one reporter on his arrival in New Hampshire today. Probably a local stringer, too. All the national guys are following the celebrity Madonna Britney Lindsay Lohan Obama. They did this with Bill Clinton too. Watch them make McCain invisible. Meanwhile, we have Obama Uber Alles. And we have showtime with fake interviews in the Middle East. Good grief. This isn't a campaign. It's pure Hollywood. When the guy has no script or isn't expounding platitudes to the adoring masses, he speaks pure mush-mouth gobbledlygook that makes you ask "What the heck did he say?" He is a natural performer as long as you don't ask him a question. This election season is becoming surreal. The press only acted like they loved McCain because he was a Repub "maverick" - so they would look "balanced." We all knew that would happen. Now they want the real deal - a camera-friendly extreme Leftist. Can you imagine the reportage if McCain had been associated with right-wing bombers? As American Thinker notes: An analysis of federal election records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 margin over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans . 235 journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans -- a margin greater than 10:1. An even greater disparity, 20:1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain. Searches for other newsroom categories (reporters, correspondents, news editors, anchors, newspaper editors and publishers) produces 311 donors to Democrats to 30 donors to Republicans, a ratio of just over 10:1. In terms of money, $279,266 went to Dems, $20,709 to Republicans, a 14:1 ratio.
The great Shelby Steele in the WSJ. One quote: ...it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.
and Normally, "black responsibility" is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites. When Mr. Obama uses this language, whites of course are thankful. Black leaders seethe. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama's sacrifice of black leverage has given him a chance to actually become the president. He has captured the devotion of millions of whites in ways that black leveragers never could. And the great masses of blacks -- blacks outside today's sclerotic black leadership -- see this very clearly. Until Mr. Obama, any black with a message of black responsibility would be called a "black conservative" and thereby marginalized. After Obama's NAACP speech, blacks flooded into the hotel lobby thanking him for "reminding" them of their responsibility.
I've given it a week, and this story never became a big deal in the MSM. The 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq. I guess this remarkable fact just doesn't fit the media's political narrative. Inconvenient truth, for sure.
 NYT: A new frontier for Title IX - Science?!?
Summary of all of the climate skeptics. Their numbers are growing daily, while the earth cools. KFC in Fallujah (h/t, LGF) The growing bans on photographing children. There's an assumption that everybody is a pedophile. More on that IRS tax data that we posted about yesterday There is no system. AVI Information about the Hoyts, whose triathlon video we posted on Sunday. For one thing, Dad is 65. For another, the son is not retarded.
Monday, July 21. 2008
From Insty: MCCAIN OPED RESPONDING TO OBAMA REJECTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES. People are going to start to think the press is in the tank for Obama or something. Oops -- too late!
Powerline seconds it. The Obama-intoxicated press is the political scandal of the year. This all makes Dan Rather look like an amateur.
in California: 
The AP may now be dead as an objective news organization. Driscoll Should ministers be mandated reporters of child abuse? Dr. X No more Peking Duck in London's Chinatown. By order of the EU. Does it matter whether McCain was right about the war? Just One Minute An Englishman's home is no longer his castle. NYT: US should invade Pakistan. WTH? Susan Estrich is nervous about the polls A claim that Obama's birth certificate is a forgery. Atlas. Let's see whether the AP investigates this tip. Or Dan Rather...
Sunday, July 20. 2008
 Cuba to encourage private farming. Commie farming isn't producing enough food. Change is happening there.
Self-defense as a "natural right." Volokh Dems still want a gas tax increase. That is unwise. The End of the World Conference. h/t, Insty Scholarship money for duck-calling kids How much do college students really learn? The problem with brooms. Palis claim Israel sending rat armies against them China's shiny new execution vans The cost and future scarcity of electricity I still think the notion of the scientists on the Supreme Court ruling that CO2 is a pollutant is like the Pope ruling that the earth is flat. Possible consequences of the Supreme's ruling. LGF: "The mainstream media are slobbering all over Barack Obama’s overseas dog and pony show, with a barrage of uncritical coverage and shameless partisan promotion." As Roger Kimball puts it: ...the propaganda, the image, the ideology, is beyond criticism because it is accepted not as a description of a political platform but a charismatic performance whose goal is not expression of limited policies but a sort of magical unity. In such cases, hesitation is evidence of faithlessness while criticism assumes the lineaments of heresy.
Related: Hailed by media critics as the fluffiest, most toothless, and softest-hitting coverage of the presidential candidate to date, a story in this week's Time magazine is being called the definitive Barack Obama puff piece.
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