Dinner at the White House

A parable.

Once upon a time, I was invited to the White House for a private dinner with the President. I am a respected businessman, with a factory that produces memory chips for computers and portable electronics. There was some talk that my industry was being scrutinized by the administration, but I paid it no mind. I live in a free country. There’s nothing that the government can do to me if I’ve broken no laws. My wealth was earned honestly, and an invitation to dinner with an American President is an honor.

I checked my coat, was greeted by the Chief of Staff, and joined the President in a yellow dining room. We sat across from each other at a table draped in white linen. The Great Seal was embossed on the china. Uniformed staff served our dinner.

The meal was served, and I was startled when my waiter suddenly reached out, plucked a dinner roll off my plate, and began nibbling it as he walked back to the kitchen.

“Sorry about that,” said the President. “Andrew is very hungry.”

Read the whole thing.

Road Trip!

First Private Commercial Satellite Launch

SpaceX has done it.

Here’s the windup…

I’m not a baseball fan, so I’ll have to trust Andy McCarthy on this. Which I’m pretty comfortable doing. He’s certainly right about the video clips.

Though it’s not a widely appreciated fact, we right-winger sports nuts have long known that the sports press is among the media’s leftiest precincts.  So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at how little was said (as in nothing at all) about the reception President Obama received last night when he came out on the field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the baseball all-star game in St. Louis.  It was a packed house (over 50,000 in attendance), and the jeers were easily discernible.

Update:

Now it’s First-Pitchgate!

Another Oversimplification from the Republicans

It simply cannot be this uncomplicated.

Fixing the Kidney Shortage

Virginia Postrel has an excellent article at The Atlantic on what it would take to reduce the frightening backlog of people waiting for new kidneys: money. No, not increased government spending. In fact, it would be less. This is a good reminder of why money was invented in the first place: Barter doesn’t work very well.

You might think that such a superior treatment would be standard. But kidneys are hard to come by. In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the official waiting list, all hoping that someone will die in just the right circumstances and bequeath them the “gift of life.” Last year, only 16,517 got transplants: 10,550 with the cadaver organs allocated through the list, and 5,967 from living donors. More than 4,000 on the list, or about 11 a day, died. And the list gets longer every year.

There should be no stigma associated with accepting money for donating a kidney.

The Emperor’s New Plumage

Charles Krauthammer says The Messiah likes his plumage.

Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama’s intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers — the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) — induced the curtailment of anyone’s programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.

A lot of people talk about The One’s “intelligence”. I’d like to know why. What evidence have you seen that He is actually smart? I’ve seen plenty that he’s ruthless and perhaps clever, but the man’s a verbal cripple without a teleprompter (to a greater extent than W ever was) and His administration has been a non-stop string of blunders and gaffes. One coworker said He was “f-ing brilliant” because he edited the Harvard Law Review. But He didn’t write anything there.

Snobbish and full of himself, yes. Smart? Show me.

Back to Krauthammer:

Obama doesn’t even seem to understand the ramifications of this concession. Poland and the Czech Republic thought they were regaining their independence when they joined NATO under the protection of the United States. They now see that the shield negotiated with us and subsequently ratified by all of NATO is in limbo. Russia and America will first have to “come to terms” on the issue, explained President Dmitry Medvedev. This is precisely the kind of compromised sovereignty that Russia wants to impose on its ex-Soviet colonies — and that U.S. presidents of both parties for the past 20 years have resisted. (emphasis added)

Unions. Feh.

Unions are immoral. There are at least two reasons:

1. When two parties enter into a voluntary contract without fraud, no third party has any right to void that contract.
2. Violence is not an acceptable business practice, and violence is the only tool unions have.

This commercial, which the Union Thugs don’t want aired, sums up the violence they and their goons in congress want to do to both workers and employers.

Do or Die

Here’s an amazing story from Afghanistan, along with video. (Note: the squeamish may want to just read the story.)

Pfc. Channing Moss of the United States Army was serving in Afghanistan in March 2006 when disaster struck. His convoy was attacked by Taliban fighters with small arms and rocket propelled grenades. Moss, manning an MK 19 machine gun in the turret of his Humvee, was struck by an RPG — and survived.

Lawyers Writing Lawyer Jokes

You just can’t make this stuff up.

A lawyer in Florida filed a motion to force his rival to upgrade to newer shoes, on the grounds that his homely old hush puppies gave him an unfair advantage by projecting an air of unsophisticated honesty to the jury.

Speaking of lawyers, I had some fun recently with a class-action lawsuit notice that came in the mail. The lawyers wanted my permission to get information regarding certain transactions between me and my insurance company, pending the suit being named a class action. There were two forms, one to agree and one to object.

I filled out the objection form, naturally. Where it asked for reasons I wrote:

a) I expect all my transactions to be private. b) I am opposed to class action lawsuits in general. c) I think that trial lawyers are poo-poo heads.

I hope that has to get read aloud at some legal proceeding or another.

Wise Latina Watch

Sotomayor not only made the pro-racist decision in Ricci, but may have tried to make the decision disappear.

[B]y electing on Feb. 15, 2008, to dispose of the case by a cursory, unsigned summary order, Judges Sotomayor, Rosemary Pooler and Robert Sack avoided circulating the decision in a way likely to bring it to the attention of other 2nd Circuit judges, including the six who later voted to rehear the case.
And if the Ricci case — which ended up producing one of the Supreme Court’s most important race decisions in many years — had not come to the attention of those six judges, it would have been an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review. The justices almost never review summary orders, which represent the unanimous judgment of three appellate judges that the case in question presents no important issues.

Maybe it’s “wise” as in “wise guys”.

Are You Ready for the Future?

Because I’m not sure I am.

War on Science?

I’ve often heard the Left’s meme about the Bush Administration’s “War on Science”, but never any evidence for it. It now appears that the Messiah’s new science czar, John Holdren, is not going to start any war on science. Rather, he’ll start a science war on us.

Among Holdren’s bright ideas as of 1977:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

You might point out that this was a long time ago. Fine, but should anybody who held such violent ideas, and who was so spectacularly wrong about “overpopulation” be in charge of evaluating the science on, say, anthropogenic global warming?

Of course, he’d get along fine with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who recently said:

“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Why do I get the feeling that I might be one of those populations?

Child Abuse

The web site that supposedly hosts this video is “under construction” so here’s a LiveLeak link to that wonderful Hamas kiddie show where, in this episode, the children of a suicide bomber watch a re-enactment of her attack.

If you need any further evidence that Islamic Jihad is a sick, vile, putrid, hateful and vicious culture, then you’re just not paying attention.

Siding With the Thugs

The sanctimonious buffoon in the Oval Office is showing all the disrespect for the rule of law and respect for thuggish dictators that one might expect from, say, a garden-variety Chicago machine politician. Andy McCarthy has the goods:

In the Los Angeles Times today, my friend and former colleague Miguel Estrada, one of the nation’s best legal minds, provides the definitive explanation of why the ouster of aspiring dictator Manuel Zelaya was not a “coup,” as the Obama administration mind-bogglingly claims.  In fact, the removal of Zelaya from office was compelled by the Constitution of Honduras.  That is, it represents, through and through, the rule of law the Obama administration would rather pay lip-service to than heed.  As Miguel explains, the only dubious aspect of the episode is Zelaya’s transfer to Costa Rica when, as a matter of law, he should have been arrested and tried for treason (power grabs of the type Zelaya attempted, Miguel notes, are officially defined as treason under Article 4 of the Honduras Constitution).

Bottom line: Hugo Chavez wants Zelaya in, the law of Honduras says Zelaya must be out; Obama sided with Chavez.

And The One who said he’d raise the world’s opinion of us still has some things to learn from the French.

The Boy Who Never Grew Up

VDH has a colum up about Michael Jackson. It is typically thoughtful, but I have some nits to pick. This observation is on the money:

In truth, almost everything about the Jackson persona proved to be fantasy — an Oz-like projection on the screen powered by a strange fellow behind the curtain desperately struggling with gears and levers.

But this?

How then will posterity assess Michael Jackson? Thriller remains the best-selling record of all time, and a number of his others were nearly as successful. His stage magnetism rivaled that of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. And yet few of Jackson’s hits are memorable in the way that dozens of songs of the Beatles or Bob Dylan continue to reverberate timelessly through popular culture.

I think Dr. Hansen underestimates both the music and its influence. The title song of that album is deeply embedded in the culture. In fact, I have a funny story to tell. At the WALL-E wrap party I heard there’d be a surprise at about 10:00 if I hung out in this one area. Meanwhile, I had noticed quite a few unaccompanied young women who didn’t seem to be with anybody in particular and didn’t quite fit in with the crowd. Well, at the appointed hour they formed up into a triangle and Thriller pumped out of the sound system. They did the whole dance, and then led everybody, Pied-Piper style, to the dance floor. Turns out they were the 49ers cheerleaders hired just for that gag. (I work with the best people in the world.)

There are other Michael Jackson songs which will be around for a good long while. Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Billie Jean, and Bad are all as instantly recognizable as any Sinatra tune. A few, like Human Nature, are also as sublime as anything from Dylan.

Here is where I think VDH has just missed the target:

The kindly and soft-spoken Jackson may have given millions to children’s charities and built a child’s dream theme park at his Santa Barbara Neverland ranch. He even talked in near-childlike fashion. And yet, on two occasions, the children’s advocate was accused of sexual molestation of boys. He settled out of court in one instance and was acquitted in a criminal trial on the second, but Jackson strangely said he saw nothing wrong in sharing his bed with minors.

I believed Jackson. I don’t think he saw a thing wrong with sleeping with boys because he still was, or desperately wanted to be, a boy himself. (NB: He was acquitted.) Was Jackson messed up? Wholesale. He was as normal, though, as anybody was likely to be having been robbed of his childhood, made insanely successful at a tender age, and having such an abusive creep for a dad. I mean, so creepy that he used the occasion of his son’s tragic death to pimp his own record label.

Peter Pan was born because J. M. Barrie’s brother was killed, a boy robbed of his life. Michael Jackson was dead inside because he was robbed of his life at an age before most of us were out of kindergarten. His sexualized “acting out” on stage with the crotch grabs, etc. don’t seem unexpected in that context. As VDH correctly notes, fantasy was all he had. While some of it is forgettable (and not everything Sinatra crooned was a winner, either) we’re lucky we got as much good music and dancing as we did from this sad figure.

The story of the real-life Peter Pan was even more tragic than the one in the book.

The Natives are Getting Restless

That’s how the Instapundit presents Jon Stewart’s excursion off the Messiah’s reservation.

Jon Stewart has never made me laugh. Not even once. But his politics are crystal clear. So when he starts taking jabs like this at The One, it means something.

Update:

Boy, they really are getting restless. This from the L.A. Times.

In fact, back in April at one $3.4-billion spending ceremony for the media, Vice President Joe Biden, who’s got a lot of private meetings to attend but was still assigned to drive the stimulus spending hard, said: “This is jobs — jobs!” Creating or saving a gazillion-point-five jobs used to be the main goal.

Not anymore.

More change. That was April. This is July.

Maybe if they can’t “create” jobs they’ll just “save” some.

It’s Mourning in California

Iowahawk pens the obit.

LOS ANGELES – Millions of fans from around the globe gathered along Sunset Boulevard to pay final respects to California today, as a slow moving funeral procession transported the eccentric superstar state’s remains to its final resting place in a Winchell’s Donuts dumpster in Van Nuys. The self-proclaimed ‘King of Pop Culture’ died last week at 160, in what coroners ruled an accidental case of financial autoerotic asphyxiation. The death sent shock waves across the world and sparked an outpouring of grief by rabid fans.

Will California Save Us From The Messiah?

I hope Kevin Hassett is right.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

I don’t know. Instapundit sees it as more of a bust-out.

You don’t have to be a gangster to bust out a joint, just crooked and greedy. What happens is, shady parties worm their way into a legitimate enterprise and then slowly strip it of all assets, reducing it to a hollow shell, driving it into bankruptcy . . . busting it out.

The ability of politicians to learn from their own mistakes, let alone those of others, is easily overestimated.

Update, and bumped:

Matt Welch is encouraged.

But there’s another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

Total Control

This is a very nice spot about what may happen now that Al Franken has stolen the election.

But I have a few questions for the Republican Party:

1. Where the hell were you during the Bush years when you abandoned your core principles and grew government like there was no tomorrow?
2. What have you got to offer besides the incandescently obvious point that having the Democrats in charge will be a disaster?
3. What do you have to offer that’s different than the Democrats?

People need something to vote for, not just against.

Web Site Story

You must like the web, or you wouldn’t be here. And you must like West Side Story or you’d be blind, deaf and probably dumb.

So here’s a mashup sure to make you laugh.

It’s A Disaster!

“Change” Illuminated

Every Breath You Take

The watermelons behind the “global warming” hoax are after Marxism on a scale the old knucklehead himself never dreamed of.

To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.

Just remember: No matter how much or how little money you have, whenever you hear lefties talk about “the rich” they’re talking about you. And they think that the air you exhale is pollution.

Talk about hot air.

Waltzing Matilda

Tom Waits may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but if you aren’t moved even just a little by this, perhaps it’s time to check your pulse.

Michael Giacchino On Scoring “Up”

Yes, that’s Pete playing bass about three and a half minutes in. He’s not just a director and animator, he’s a musician. And he bakes.

“Historic Crack” in Iran’s Mullacracy

This seems like big news. How good it is I’m not sure.

The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.

And this, if true, is good news.

“The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” a diplomatic source said last week.

File that under “the enemy of my enemy”. Israel is not the only country which views Iran with suspicion and dislike.

How We Won the War in Iraq

General Petraeus is widely credited for his successful COIN (Counter-Insurgency) doctrine, and justly so. But someone had to implement that plan where the rubber meets the road. One of those men was  Lieutenant Colonel Jim Crider, already familiar to readers of Michael Yon. His kinetic credentials are impeccable.

He’s also a very smart man. Here (in PDF format) is an article he wrote on what it was like inside the surge. As Thomas Ricks says in the forward:

Crider’s essay is not only about this crucial level of action, it is about a critical time – the “surge” phase of the Iraq war in 2007-2008. Whether or not one believes that the surge ultimately achieved its strategic goal of a political breakthrough (I do not), there is no question that it succeeded at the tactical level. In this work, Crider shows how that happened. He begins by detailing how difficult the winter and spring of 2007 were, with some of the highest levels of violence seen against American troops in the war, at least so far. For many months, his troops, like others in Baghdad, were bombed and shot, with little or no sign of any improvement of security in the city. Some 70 Americans were killed in February, 71 in March, 96 in April, and 120 in May. General David Petraeus later told me that he looks back upon that spring as a “horrific nightmare.” Then, to the surprise of many, in the summer of 2007, the level of violence began to drop precipitously.

Muir Nails It Again

It’s not, of course, just the WaPo.

It Doesn’t Matter Who Votes

All that matters is who counts the votes.