I think Kathryn Lopez is correct here. Palin decided not to play along. She’s the governor of a flippin’ state: I have never seen such a person asked such a condescending question. For everyone griping about Palin not giving enough interviews, look what she gets when she gives interviews. Twisted quotes, stupidity (“are we in a holy war?“) and idiotic condescension (from Katie Couric, no less!). As bad as Palin has been in her interviews, the journalists have been even worse.
Fire them all, and get me some monkeys and typewriters.
Thomas Sowell, one of the brightest economists today, opposes the bailouts:
It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.
Phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make much more sense than letting politicians play politics with them again, with the risk and expense being again loaded onto the taxpayers.
Jonah Goldberg, one the best political analysts today, supported the bailout but is rightly dropping scorn on both parties:
On Sunday evening, Republican House Minority Leader John A. Boehner explained his considered opinion on the $700-billion Wall Street bailout plan: It’s a “crap sandwich,” he said, but he was going to eat it.
Well, it turned out he couldn’t shove it down his colleagues’ throats. The bill failed on a bipartisan basis, but it was the Republicans who failed to deliver the votes they promised. Some complained that Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi drove some of them to switch their votes with her needlessly partisan floor speech on the subject. Of course Pelosi’s needlessly partisan. This is news?
The Republican complaint is beyond childish. Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, a man saturated with guilt for this crisis, nonetheless was right to ridicule the GOP crybabies on Monday. “I’ll make an offer,” he added. “Give me [their] names and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are and maybe they’ll now think about the country.”
Goldberg’s conclusion sums up how I feel right now:
I loathe populism. But if there ever has been a moment when reasonable men’s hands itch for the pitchfork, this must surely be it. No one is blameless. No one is pure. Two decades of crapulence by the political class has been prologue to the era of coprophagy that is now upon us. It is crap sandwiches for as far as the eye can see.
It takes a misanthrope to see a bright side in all this, so here ’tis: the stock market is almost certainly going to drop, so now is the time to increase 401(k) contributions if you can. Buying cheap and waiting for things to rebound is a good idea when you’re young. If you’re old—well, talk to a professional (not me).
The New York Sun ceases publishing today. They fought to get a foothold in New York City, and did so with panache. It was an effort worthy of Don Quixote, trying to build a newspaper when the newspaper industry is slowly dying. Perhaps Cyrano de Bergerac can best pay tribute to the Sun:
All my laurels you have riven away… and my roses;
yet in spite of you there is one crown I bear away with me.
And tonight, when I enter before God, my salute
shall sweep away all the stars from the blue threshold!
One thing without stain, unspotted from the world in spite of doom
mine own and that is… my white plume!
The New York Sun, RIP.
Hubbard posted this at 9:23 AM CDT on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 as Uncategorized
In 2006 (immigration), 2007 (immigration), and now 2008 (bailout), the most significant legislation of the year has failed despite having the support of the administration and the leadership of both parties in the house that defeated it. I don’t know what this means.
Apollo posted this at 3:06 PM CDT on Monday, September 29th, 2008 as Politics
In 1984, after serving time for armed robbery, Troy Chapman murdered Scott Chandler. He’s serving a 60 to 90 year sentence. Chapman has been busy trying to atone, but his attempts to do so lead to him equating evil with insanity [emphasis added]: Read the rest of this entry »
Hubbard posted this at 11:01 AM CDT on Monday, September 29th, 2008 as Grace, Grumblin Mumblins
The Post ran a live “fact check” during Friday’s debate. You can start to pick up that, perhaps, this isn’t going to be the most substantive, even-handed reporting when the first fact they decide to check is McCain’s “wild exaggeration” that the Normandy invasion was the “greatest” ever. Aside from arguing semantics over the meaning of “greatest” (perhaps he meant morally greatest, you nitwits; greatest in the sense of “had the best, most lasting impact on history;” there are several meanings of “greatest” that would apply to Normandy, none of which the “fact checker” seems inclined to credit), is it really the purpose of supposed fact checkers to tweak candidates for rhetorical comments like that?
Anyhow, the point where I stopped reading was the 10:12 “fact check.”
McCain accused Obama of wanting to stage “military strikes” inside Pakistan, which is a misleading account of what Obama famously said in 2007: That he would be willing to go after Al Qaeda targets inside that country with or without the approval of the Pakistani authorities.
“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.
You got that? Obama wasn’t saying we’d launch military strikes into Pakistan. He was saying we’d pay the local constable to serve warrants inside Pakistan, I guess. Or maybe we’d launch “love strikes” inside Pakistan to capture al Qaedas. But don’t you dare say he was advocating “military strikes”: That’s misleading!
The media performance this year is shameful and shameless. The whole lot of them ought to lose their jobs.
Is Barney Frank the most disheveled man in public life? The weight, wearing shirts that fit him 40 pounds ago, the hair, that speech problem that makes him sound like he’s perpetually inebriated. Aside from the fact that he was one of the people leading the charge for Fannie and Freddie to loosen their lending standards, he’s a horrible spokesman for the Democrats to have on any issue. He looks like he had three hours of sleep after a two day bender and rolled out of bed ten minutes ago.
I saw Brad Sherman on Fox earlier. He looked smart, and he dressed like a Congressman (i.e. in a nondescript suit with a nondescript tie). He inspired confidence that there are serious people working on a serious issue. The only confidence Barney Frank inspires is that the cheap aftershave market won’t crash.
In much the same way that Iraqis were once willing to put aside their differences to fight the Coalition, new intelligence shows that long-time schisms within the Animal Kingdom have been aside in their fight against humanity.
Color me confused. I’m as libertarian as they come. I hate government intervention in the free market, but sometimes, and I believe Ms. McArdle will back me up on this, it may be necessary to forestall total financial collapse. The reports coming out this evening regarding the contentious meetings at the White House over the bailout plan anger me to no end. THIS is the issue that the House Republicans have chosen to take a stand on? They spent like drunken sailors for 6 years on things that are largely unnecessary (like massive prescription drug entitlements) and yet with the potential collapse of the entire financial system on the line, they suddenly find their fiscal conservative balls?
The current crop of Republicans are a massive joke. They deserve the political spanking they are about to receive.
Jamie posted this at 10:08 PM CDT on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 as Uncategorized
In 1984, Rob Riener, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer introduced us to Spinal Tap — a fictional British rock band that is at varying times a satire on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and probably half a dozen other British Invasion bands — with their fake documentary This Is Spinal Tap.
For anyone who hasn’t seen This is Spinal Tap, I cannot possibly recommend it too much. Besides having a hilarious script and some of the best chemistry between actors I’ve ever seen, the songs in the film manage to be just good enough for you to believe ‘Tap had once been to popular, while being just bad enough enough for you to be certain that you wouldn’t have been one of the people who would have liked them.
In one of the deleted scenes, the band endorses a meat pastry with the painfully awful brand name of ‘Rock ‘n Rolls’:
While shopping at the supermarket the other day, my girlfriend called my attention to this new product endorsed by Hannah Montana:
Global warming, credit crises, nuclear war with Russia, Iran, or North Korea…these are all things we are right to worry about to one degree or another. However, in times of perceived chaos and impending doom, it’s worthwhile to keep a larger perspective on the scope of our problems. Whatever’s going on here on Earth, the truly poop-your-pants scary things are happening elsewhere. You want something to worry about?
The solar wind “inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system,” which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses’ solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
“With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength,” said Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system,” added Smith.
Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.
Yikes. Nothing will come of this – life’s been around on Earth for quite some time, and that wouldn’t be the case if destructive cosmic rays reached us on a routine basis. Or maybe not. Maybe this is a once in a billion years cycle and all life on Earth is to die before the election, and then we’ll never know who won. It’s worth pondering how little we know of space, and how uncontrollable it is. No one gives the sun a second’s thought, but we are completely and totally at its mercy.
Apollo posted this at 1:47 AM CDT on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 as Philosophy
I think that she and her husband and their kids come across gutsy, spirited and real. I have significant disagreements with her about any number of social and economic issues but I find her an appealing person and I think that it’s best to say that Senator McCain looks like he knew what he was doing. He picked somebody who gave him a lot of energy, a lot of support.
Now imagine a world where today’s Democrats had said something along those lines when Palin was nominated and then gotten back to attacking John McCain. Does anyone think John McCain’s acceptance speech would have attracted more viewers than Obama’s had it not been for the media’s anti-Palin frenzy? Would McCain have gotten such a big bounce and spent a week clearly in the lead? Would McCain have been able to raise so much money and negate much of Obama’s cash advantage? I don’t think so. That approach would have been not only the smarter thing to do, but also the decent thing to do. I’ll leave to it you to decide whether it’s intelligence or decency the Obamaniacs were lacking. Though could there be a less predicted outcome than me wishing Obama had behaved as decently as Bill Clinton? Yeesh.
Of course, Clinton has his own ends. Says he won’t campaign for Obama until “after the Jewish holidays,” so as not to offend the Jewish vote in Florida. Is it possible to read that without chuckling? If so, go read the story where he talks about “the cracker vote.”
Apollo posted this at 11:41 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
It’s election season, so the leftwing blogosphere is demonstrating its class by smearing John McCain’s chief of staff. From the Puffington Host (No link to this garbage) (H/T):
Mark Buse is not just a Chief of Staff for a homophobic United States Senator, but he is helping that Senator get elected to the White House.
Does Mark Buse fit the Barney Frank rule? Without a doubt. While McCain voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, he supports amending state constitutions defining marriage as between a man and a woman. McCain knows our country needs everyone who wants to serve in the military and he knows that DADT is wrong, yet he swings to the right on repealing it.
Worst of all, and a demonstration of his inability to act rationally and with the country’s best interests at heart, he picked someone who, if she becomes president (very likely), will be the most homophobic in American history.
With that in mind, and after confirming the information with two other sources, I decided it was time to present Buse the Roy Cohn Award for working against the interests of the lesbian and gay community while living as a gay man.
After dropping in some more smears, the Puffington Host says this about its source for the rumors:
My source, who did not know if Buse and his partner had an open relationship had a brief sexual encounter with Buse alone. The source, due to work considerations must remain anonymous.
A profile in courage, if ever there was one. The source should be named for this to be believable—and also so everyone knows that he makes Judas Iscariot look like St. Thomas More.
