There are things to like about Mitt Romney. But after this I’m not voting for him.
Instead of apologizing for the Massachusetts health-care debacle, he’s still defending it. And he’s parroting the “47 million uninsured” lie.
Forget you, Mitt.
Next!
31 July, 2009
Behold, the god who bleeds
Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer come to parallel conclusions about The Messiah.
Obama isn’t supposed to be a typical politician. He was supposed to be The One. He was supposed to change Washington. Transcend race. Fix souls. Bake twelve-minute brownies in seven minutes.
and
Yesterday, Barack Obama was God. Today, he’s fallen from grace, the magic gone, his health-care reform dead. If you believed the first idiocy — and half the mainstream media did — you’ll believe the second. Don’t believe either.
Fun with Steganography
This is cute.
And here’s a special message just for Buttle’s World readers:
0100010001110010011010010110111001101011001000000111100101101111011101010111001000100000010011110111011001100001011011000111010001101001011011100110010100100001
30 July, 2009
Tortured Data Alert
People who believe in claptrap like numerology will find this amazing. People who understand selective thinking will find this hilarious.
Why I’ll Never Join the AARP
In a nutshell.
In short, stick around D.C. for any length of time during the past three decades and you likely figured out that AARP’s national office was and is today a key player on the side of Big Government, higher taxes and more bureaucracy.
The group has no PAC, which creates a patina of non-partisan respectability, but a look at the political contributions of the people working in AARP’s Washington office exposes the real AARP.
Ice Under Pressure
This may be the most obvious mashup ever, unless you’re one of the few who didn’t know that one-hit wonder Vanilla Ice ripped off sampled Queen and Bowie. Nicely done, though. (H/T Agrapha)
Saturation
Allahpundit makes the case (via Twitter) that The Messiah will hold a photo-op “anywhere, and I do mean anywhere.”
One lady has figured out how to keep seeing Him on “every channel and station“.
The Publisher of NewsBusters.org, Brent Bozell, wrote his syndicated column about the media’s full-court Obama press just this week. In which he accurately points out that while the journalistic class remains utterly infatuated with the man, it appears that the American people are begining to reach their saturation point.
Gee, ya think?
29 July, 2009
Thug-In-Chief
The Messiah continues to demonstrate that, whichever side He’s on, it’s not America’s nor that of the rule of law.
The U.S. government revoked the visas of four members of Honduras’s de facto government Tuesday, escalating the pressure on officials there to reinstate the president, who was kicked out of the country a month ago. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not identify the Hondurans whose visas were yanked, but he indicated that other officials also could have their visas revoked. He said U.S. authorities were reviewing the visas of all members of the current government and their dependents.
and
MEXICO CITY — The Obama administration has pulled the plug on an electronic billboard outside the American diplomatic mission in Havana that was used to tweak the Cuban government with pro-democracy messages and became a symbol of the bad blood between the two countries.
Reminds me of someone else who has, apparently, never met a thug he didn’t like.
Amateurism + Immaturity = Disaster
Thomas Sowell warns of impending disaster.
Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and of what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power. Often this has been accompanied by an ignorance of history, including the history of how many people before him have tried similar things with disastrous results.
28 July, 2009
I shot a man in Weno
Is that a whirring sound I hear coming from Hendersonville, Tennessee?
26 July, 2009
Watermelons
I’ve called the environuts watermelons for ages: Green on the outside, red on the inside. Antonia Senior sees specific parallels.
We are at the early stage of the green movement. A time akin to pre-Bolshevik socialism, when all believed in the destruction of the capitalist system, but were still relatively moderate about the means of getting there. We are at the stage of naive dreamers and fantasists. Russia was home to the late 19th-century Narodnik movement, in which rich sons of the aristocracy headed into the countryside to tell the peasants it was their moral imperative to become a revolutionary class. They retreated, baffled, to their riches when the patronised peasants didn’t want to revolt. Zac Goldsmith and Prince Charles look like modern Narodniks, talking glib green from the safety of their gilded lives.
Indulge me in some historical determinism. We, the peasants, are failing to rise up and embrace the need to change. We will not choose to give up modern life, with all its polluting seductions. Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists.
The old two-cow analogy is a useful one. You have two cows. The communist steals both your cows, and may give you some milk, if you’re not bourgeois scum. The fascist lets you keep the cows but seizes the milk and sells it back to you. Today’s Green says you can keep the cows, but should choose to give them up as their methane-rich farts will unleash hell at some unspecified point in the future. You say, sod it, I’ll keep my cows thanks. Tomorrow’s green, the Bolshevik green, shoots the cows and makes you forage for nuts.
Joltin’ Joe
Biden: We have always been at war with Eurasia.
“Our balanced approach recognizes that there is no silver bullet, no single thing, that can address the many and complex needs of America’s vast economy,” Biden writes. “The act was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period — not a jolt that would last only a few months.”
“Since when?” asks the office of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), which already has been at work on this balmy Sunday morning looking up some of Biden’s and the president’s earlier comments on the subject.
As recently as June, at a roundtable in New York, Biden called the Recovery Act “an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start.”
In March, the vice president said ”the Recovery Act, as we call it, provides a necessary jolt to our economy to implement what we refer as ‘shovel-ready’ projects.”
And in November, as a new White House in planning was assembling its new economic team, President-elect Barack Obama said: “The most important thing to recognize is that we have a consensus, which is pretty rare, between conservative economists and liberal economists, that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape and that is focused on the 2.5 million jobs that I intend to create during the first part of my administration. We have to put people back to work.
25 July, 2009
He Said/V.I.P. Said
Mark Steyn does a beautiful job with GatesGate.
As to the differences between the professor’s and the cops’ version of events, I confess I’ve been wary of taking Henry Louis Gates at his word ever since, almost two decades back, the literary scholar compared the lyrics of the rap group 2 Live Crew to those of the Bard of Avon. “It’s like Shakespeare’s ‘My love is like a red, red rose,’ ” he declared, authoritatively, to a court in Fort Lauderdale.
As it happens, “My luv’s like a red, red rose” was written by Robbie Burns, a couple of centuries after Shakespeare. Oh, well. Sixteenth-century English playwright, 18th-century Scottish poet: What’s the diff? Evidently being within the same quarter-millennium and right general patch of the North-East Atlantic is close enough for a professor of English and Afro-American Studies appearing as an expert witness in a court case. Certainly no journalist reporting Gates’s testimony was boorish enough to point out the misattribution.
Like I said: Not even a real academic.
24 July, 2009
Speaking of Buffoonery
This idiotic pronouncement from The One is, at least, exactly what we expected when He got elected.
President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but “victory” in the war-torn country isn’t necessarily the United States’ goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview.
As I’ve asked before: If He were, hypothetically, a narcissistic, America-hating Marxist what would He be doing differently?
23 July, 2009
Creationism on the Right and on the Left
OneSTDV has a chart with something to infuriate everybody except us secular conservatives. It’s funny because it’s true.
Update:
This article on conformity seems apropos.
Bully Pulpit
The Messiah’s behavior last night was boorish and inexcusable. Besides beating up on doctors while telling His health care lies, He completely botched the question about the arrest of Henry Gates.
The correct response would have been, “I’m the President of the United States. I do not comment on local police matters.” Instead He beat up on the cops, saying they “acted stupidly”. To quote a favorite Coen brothers movie, “Who looks stupid now?”
Well, the police report makes Gates look like a real a**hole. Pretty stereotypical for a Harvard professor, I’d say. Officer Crowley, to his credit, is sticking to his guns.
And just look at all the white cops surrounding Gates:
It seems obvious who the real racists are here, and their names are Gates and Bully-In-Chief Obama.
Update:
This is too funny. Turns out that Officer Crowley is a racial profiling expert.
Another Update:
Heard on the radio last night: “You can tell a Harvard man, you just can’t tell him what.”
Final, Probably Update:
Oh, no wonder he behaved like such a crybaby. Gates isn’t even a real professor. Or, more acccurately, is a professor in a completely bogus, racist department.
22 July, 2009
Pardon me, Vanity Fair, but your snark is showing
This too-clever-by-half edit of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech says to me that Vanity Fair could use better editors. Of course, the snark starts with editing a transcript and not the speech prepared as written. Granted, if Peter Robinson had turned in this speech to Reagan the Gipper would have sent it back. But some of the speech is clearly just extemporaneous speech. Editing punctuation on a transcript is not a criticism of the original speaker.
Setting that aside, let’s look at a couple of their “improvements”.
Original speech:
From the shores of Maine and California to the tip of Barrow, we live in peace because centuries ago many fought for something far greater than themselves, and so many continue to fight for us today.
Vanity Fair wants to make it:
From the shores of Maine and California to the tip of Barrow, we live in peace because 233 years ago many brave men and women fought for something far greater than themselves, and so many continue to fight today.
How does adding “brave men and women” improve the sentence? Worse, the wonkish 233 years is a clumsy replacement for the perfectly adequate “centuries”. Nobody thinks that centuries means exact multiples of 100 years, for crying out loud.
Later on, Vanity Fair substitutes God for faith (they aren’t really the same thing) without improving the sentence at all. And they want her to look dumb for saying Seward was in Lincoln’s cabinet instead of Andrew Johnson’s. Yes, Seward’s purchase of Alaska happened in Johnson’s administration, but he was a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, too.
Those aren’t the only bad edits. Glass houses, anybody?
I’m not a huge Palin fan, and I’m not trying to be an apologist. The thing I like most about her is that leftists like these at VF treat her with such disdain. They must be very afraid of her.
Star Trek: Generations, an in-depth analysis
This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in quite a while. The guy is really good (I especially like the dead-wife runner). While watching, I realized two things:
- I’ve never seen Star Trek: Generations
- There’s no way the film could be as entertaining as this review.
There’s some language, mostly bleeped.
Incompetent Buffoon Watch
How’s that “regaining respect for America abroad” thing going, Mr. President?
The Obama administration has managed to open a wide gap between itself and some of America’s most reliable allies, those of Central Europe. In the recent Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe, some of the most magnificent freedom fighters of the region, including former presidents Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa of Poland, have warned that the U.S. should not take their countries and peoples for granted.
Britain Death Watch
Yet another reason why I have no desire to even visit England: It is clearly now a police state, where it’s illegal to even photograph the coppers.
Waylett and his long-term friend John Innis, 20, were stopped under the Terrorism Act in Lodge Road, St John’s Wood, west London, after the actor took a photograph of a police patrol as they drove past.
When that kind of behavior is illegal, there are no meaningful freedoms left.
21 July, 2009
Would You Buy A Used Czar From This Man?
The Thug-in-Chief, after throwing a few radicals under the bus, reaches into his limitless supply of criminal revolutionaries as he doles out yet another Czar-ship.
Our rallying cry was for justice; our demand was that the System be changed!
Yes, the Great Revolutionary Moment had at long last come. And the time, clearly, was ours!
So we stole stuff.
Y’know, stole stuff. Radios, tennis shoes. Well, not everybody, of course.
Update, and bumped:
How’s that cease-fire in the “war on science” going, Mr. President?
Jones’s Wikipedia entry notes that he is a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Founded by astronaut-turned-parapsychologist Edgar Mitchell, the Institute declares itself in mission statement to be “a nonprofit membership organization located in Northern California that conducts and sponsors leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness.” It also goes on to say that it “explores phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models, while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor.” The first part of that statement is correct, but as far as commitment to scientific rigor goes, you won’t find it at this institute.
MSM: Not evil, just dumb
John Stossel pleads for patience with his brethren. This was from a talk he gave last year.
Buy American?
Seems patriotic, doesn’t it? Well, if you listen to socialists, maybe. Remember Smoot-Hawley and what it did to this country? If not, Reason TV has an updated parable for you that asks the musical question, Is your iPod unpatriotic?
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
How the hard-liners took control of Iran.
“It is not a theocracy anymore,” said Rasool Nafisi, an expert in Iranian affairs and a co-author of an exhaustive study of the corps for the RAND Corporation. “It is a regular military security government with a facade of a Shiite clerical system.”
20 July, 2009
Evolutionary Insight
A potential mechanism has been found for what seem to be “leaps” in evolution. For example, there is no middle ground on the number of wings on an insect or limbs on a primate. So how is the “jump” made? It could be “partial penetrance.”
“If you take a bunch of cells and grow them in exactly the same environment, they’ll be identical twin brothers in terms of the genes they have, but they may still show substantial differences in their behavior,” says Avigdor Eldar, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at Caltech and the paper’s first author. These sorts of variations—or noise, as the researchers call it—can actually allow a mutation to have an effect in some organisms but not in others. For example, while some genetically variable cells will show the expected effect of the mutation, others may still behave like a normal, or wild type, cell. And still others may do something else entirely.
“These mutant cells don’t only show a different morphology,” Eldar notes. “They show more variability in their behavior. In a population, you can see a mixture of several different behaviors, with some cells doing one thing and others doing something else.”
Remembering Shifty
I’ve already ReTweeted this.
When Powers died, to little fanfare in June, a man named Mark Pfeifer (retired from Dow Jones) was appalled by the disproportionate amount of coverage given to Michael Jackson. He penned an e-mail about a chance encounter he had had with the humble war hero at the Philadelphia airport. The e-mail went viral as friends forwarded to friends.
Take a moment to remember Shifty Powers today.
Great footage of that One Small Step
Here, thanks to Bad Astronomy is some great footage of Neil Armstrong taking that giant leap for mankind.
Update:
You can read the entire mission transcript. A coworker found a nice exchange on page 295:
CAPCOM Roger. Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chango has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill for immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is only standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not recorded.
SC Okay, we’ll keep a close eye for the bunny girl.
