Four years ago, I pointed out that Newt needed to lose some weight if he wanted to run for president.
Apollo posted this at 12:45 PM HKT on Friday, April 9th, 2010 as Is It 2012 Yet?
April 9th, 2010
Guess Who’s Running for President
April 8th, 2010
A Very Small Man
I’m always impressed – though never surprised - at how little Barry understands himself or his office. A person of normal self-awareness should know that this sort of crap does absolutely nothing but demean him. I mean, sure, no one ever said that Sarah Palin was an expert on nuclear weapons. But no one ever said Barry was an expert on nuclear weapons either. Is he not aware that that’s the correct and blazingly obvious response to his jackass commentary?
She’s a citizen with an opinion, and if his best response to her is pointing out that she’s not an expert – not that she’s wrong, merely that she’s not an expert – that’s weak. Really, genuinely, effing weak. And that he think it’s appropriate for the president to run off at the mouth in this manner is a shame.
Apollo posted this at 11:03 PM HKT on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, CHANGE!
Imagine That
My favorite line uttered by a political figure in the last decade, from the great Don Rumsfeld:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.
This is true for every aspect of public life, and part of the Hayekian opposition to centralized planning is that unknown unknowns will always foil even the greatest planning.
Nowhere, perhaps, is it truer than in the realm of climate change, which is based on new, highly speculative, and even more highly political science. For example, if there’s one thing we’ve always been taught about global warming, it’s that cows are a serious problem. But now it turns out, that’s at least partly wrong.
Or not; I mean, I’ve no reason to believe there’s not another unknown unknown lurking out there that negates this study. That’s the problem with making dramatic, economy-wide regulations all based on climate change science. If what we know on the subject could fill an encyclopedia, what we don’t know would fill a library.
Apollo posted this at 12:58 PM HKT on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 as Convenient Truth
April 7th, 2010
The Odd DoubleThink of Dr. Andrew Sullivan OBGYN
By now many of you are familiar with the Grand Patriarch of the Church of the Holy Obama and his penchant for rooting out every detail of Sarah Palin’s life (and vagina). He is particularily famous for his Odd Lies of Sarah Palin series (link), in which he chronicles every misspoken statement, misremembered fact and political exaggeration as part of some nefarious grand lie of The Blessed Madonna of Wasilla (remember I’m not exactly a Palin fan).
So color me shocked, SHOCKED (he says in his best Claude Rains impersonation) when I come across this post, which seems to indicated that The Holy O may have *gasp* lied and exaggerated his back story for political benefit. Dear god I almost fainted. From this Sullivan draws this insightful conclusion:
Not that big a deal – but interesting.
I’m not one to be crass (oh who the hell am I kidding I love being crass) but at this point Obama should get himself tested.
Jamie posted this at 4:13 PM HKT on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 as What Ever Happened to Andrew Sullivan?
Ahmadinejad to Obama: “We Will Defeat You Again.”
I once spoke to someone who had traveled extensively in Syria. His favorite part of the country? Their monuments to their smashing 1967 victory over Israel.
I think of that when I read this “threat” from Ahmadinejad to Obama:
If you set step in [President George] Bush’s path, the nations’ response would be the same tooth-breaking one as they gave Bush.
Ah yes, like that time when Iran lead a coalition of dozens of countries to invade America and overthrow George Bush. Or that time when Iranian airpower supported indigenous rebels to overthrow America’s Christianist government.
Yes, it’s true, the nations of the world certainly got the better of George W. Bush. Obama has much to fear, indeed.
Apollo posted this at 12:30 PM HKT on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 as George Bush Rules!, Mullah Mullah--whoa baby let my people go
April 6th, 2010
Willful Ignorance About the Tea Party
Above all else, I hate lazy journalism:
As a nascent grassroots movement with no registration or formal structure, there are no racial demographics available for the tea party movement; it’s believed to include only a small number of blacks and Hispanics.
Personally, I don’t care about the racial demography of tea party protests. But there are, in fact, numbers regarding tea party racial demography. A Gallup poll released a mere day before this story came out gave a pretty good breakdown, showing tea partiers to be only slightly whiter than America at large (79% vs. 75%).
Maybe the poll was wrong. Maybe it measured things other than what the writer wanted to talk about. Maybe, but I don’t know, because the journalist didn’t even mention it. While ignoring a scientific poll, though, the writer does find time for idle speculation, fueled by little more than media preconceptions, about the very thing measured by the poll (”it’s believed to include” – what is this, legends of Atlantis?)
Hack, crap, lazy journalism.
P.S.
McGlowan believes the tea party movement has been unfairly portrayed as monolithically white, male and middle-aged, though she acknowledged blacks and Hispanics are a minority at most events.
Breaking news from the AP – minorities are in the minority!
P.P.S. Asians are about 5% of the population. Why is it that when people grumble about racial bean counting, they never count those beans?
Apollo posted this at 11:25 PM HKT on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 as Journalism
“I’m a Southside Kid”
Utterly embarrassing. Why politicians feel the need to adopt phony baloney team loyalties, I’ll never understand. Is it that hard to say, “I’m more of a basketball guy. Can’t say that I watch much baseball”? The slouchy, non-baseball cap, the inability to name a favorite player (and stupid pretension that he’s really from Chicago!), and that THROW! Good grief, that THROW! As Rush pointed out today, not even girls throw like that.
Just say it Barry: “I don’t like baseball.” Sure, it’ll make you a bad American. Probably a Muslim. Perhaps a puppy-torturing Communist Atheist Muslim. Who burns American flags and Corvettes, and smokes Gauloises. But at least it’ll be the truth.
Apollo posted this at 4:28 PM HKT on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 as Amer-I-Can!
April 5th, 2010
It’s Not News…
If a congressman doesn’t care about the Constitution; but it’s worth mention when one admits it.
Tom posted this at 8:50 AM HKT on Monday, April 5th, 2010 as Health Care, We don't need no stinkin' Constitution
April 3rd, 2010
The End of Hope and Return of Reality
If I had artistic license to to summarize American leftist utopian politics with a single story, it would look an awful lot like this.
The endless rambling, the inability to limit his answer to a single point, the ultimate refusal (or inability) to answer the initial question, the obliviousness to the audience, the preachy tone on far ranging and largely irrelevant subjects – this guy is nothing more than a well-meaning professor who has, through a set of circumstances that would make Oedipus tilt his head sideways, managed to get himself in way, way above his head.
Since he became a major figure in the 2008 (really, 2007) Democrat primaries, I’ve maintained that I know this man forwards and backwards. He’s the leftist college professor who never personally espouses views in front of his class, but merely informs them that even the most moon-bat crazy leftist has a valid point.
But now he can’t merely be the professor advising students of the views of others. The passage of healthcare means that he must actually defend his own position.* This is something that is completely alien to him, and something, ultimately, he cannot do. He cannot comprehend the minds of those who disagree with him, thus he cannot address their concerns.
Neither this speech nor this date is particularly historic. But I’m planting a marker and predicting the future from here. Increasingly, this presidency is going to be defined by long or undisciplined ramblings. When a president gives a 17-minute tangential response to a citizen’s simple observation that “We are over-taxed as it is,” it is not evidence of a well-ordered mind, but rather the sign of bad things to come.
*I hardly think the Obamacare that passed much resembled the Obamacare that Obama might have crafted on his own. He’s stated before, in fairly stark terms, that he’s a single-payer kind of guy. It is genuinely ironic, in the truest sense of the term, that a popular president elected on a particular health care platform is going to get destroyed because he has to defend the Scheissewurst that eventually emerged from the Congressional Sausage Works.
Apollo posted this at 6:33 PM HKT on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, CHANGE!, I have seen the future. . .