wednesday, may 30, 2007
click here for the latest from attack machine
Attack Machine is switching to blogging software. This will be the last post on this format. We will keep this site's content up indefinitely.
To access the new site, go to www.attackmachine.com/blog
tuesday, may 29, 2007
spoken like a true socialist
Senator Hillary ("It takes a village") Clinton reveals her true colors.
Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined a broad economic vision Tuesday, saying it's time to replace an "on your own" society with one based on shared responsibility and prosperity.
How's this for sharing: I'll be responsible for my prosperity, you be responsible for yours...and so on.
The Democratic senator said what the Bush administration touts as an "ownership society" really is an "on your own" society that has widened the gap between rich and poor.
"I prefer a 'we're all in it together' society," she said. "I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none."
I'd prefer you shut up and go live in Cuba, where they're all in it together, like it or not.
And to think that Hillary likes to compare herself to Margaret Thatcher!
burt on dennis miller show tonight
Catch Burt Prelutsky on Dennis Miller's radio show tonight. You can listen over the 'net live or via download.
Burt is scheduled to come on around 8:30 pm, Pacific time.
Milking muslims
The head of the Hadith Department in Al-AzharUniversity [in Egypt], Dr. Izzat Atiyya, recently issued a controversial fatwa dealing with breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa stated that a woman who is required to work in private with a man not of her immediate family - a situation that is forbidden by Islamic law - can resolve the problem by breastfeeding the man, which, according to shari'a, turns him into a member of her immediate family.
let's impeach bush!
The Anchoress has a must-read takedown of Joy Behar, one of The View's resident twits. In one long quote, Behar displays the rank ignorance combined with righteous indignation that characterizes so much of the left today.
do-nothing democrats
After 140 days, however, congressional Democrats left town with no significant accomplishments, one long-delayed bill finally enacted into law, and lots to make fun of. There was no increase in morality, no magically bipartisan era, no sweeping enactment of a coherent agenda for change, akin to what Republicans promised in their Contract With America in 1994. Instead, the 110th Congress has been a combination of "now I'll get mine" and "now you'll get yours!"
It hasn't been pretty. And it isn't likely to get better. Only those who were paying very careful attention last fall saw this coming.
The seeds were planted in the strategy for winning last fall. Democrats Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel saw a road to getting back majorities in the Senate and House. Their strategy built on Republican negatives: public anger over scandals involving Mark Foley, Jack Abramoff, and Tom Delay, special interest earmarks, inflated spending, and a war that - judging from the daily drumbeat of bad news in mainstream media - was going badly without clear purpose or end-game. Rather than push hard-core liberal themes that lost elections for a dozen years, Schumer and Emanuel followed a different path. Their plan was to find moderates or even conservatives to run as Democrats in potential swing districts, criticize the Bush Administration and Republicans, talk a lot about hope and civility and bipartisanship, and let the candidates say whatever their constituents wanted to hear. The strategy worked, giving Democrats majorities in both Houses of Congress.
Frankly, if you've got a Congress controlled by Democrats, isn't a do-nothing Congress the best you can hope for?
double talk
Though he said Memorial Day shouldn't be politicized, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama used a visit to a war monument Monday to repeat his call for better services for veterans.
fred on the web
On the realities of web campaigns:
Of course, Mr. Thompson is yet to announce a presidential run and launch an official campaign website. And he has used the web to this point. For example, he recently responded to Michael Moore via YouTube and has a radio blog / podcast on the ABC Radio Networks website. Neither of these efforts show in the top five Google results.
Without an official web presence in sight, those googling Mr. Thompson have to piecemeal what he states about his policy positions and agenda.
Interestingly enough, the rest of the field is very aware of Mr. Thompson and this vulnerability. Again, turn to Google and query "fred thompson". Take a peak at the "Sponsored Links" in the right-hand sidebar and you will likely see "Mitt Romney in 2008." The Romney campaign is utilizing Google's Pay-per-Click service, which allows them to bid on keywords of their choice, with the intent of winning (and paying for) Google traffic.
Buying competitor keywords is a common web strategy and one that other campaigns (and many businesses) are also employing (e.g., "John McCain for President" is a sponsored result for the search "mitt romney"). Yet it is one that, at a minimum, requires a definitive home on the web - something that Mr. Thompson still lacks. While it is still early in the presidential season, if Mr. Thompson does proceed on the campaign trail, he is going to have some catching-up to do with his web initiatives.
Google and other search engines, which act as the primary gatekeepers for information on the web, often must be convinced of the credibility and usefulness of newly launched websites. Even if his team launches an official site, it will take some time and effort to combat the present search results and gain a prominent position on the search engines (my advice would be to purchase and utilize the www.Fred08.com domain, which is now owned by the Draft Fred Thompson 2008 Committee and ranks second for "fred thompson" on Google).
On the other hand, people may not search Google for campaign information. Rather they follow links from blogs or links sent to them via email, aka viral marketing.
an alternative theory of unions
People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn't quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it.
Oddly enough, it was working with startups that made me realize where the high-paying union job came from. In a rapidly growing market, you don't worry too much about efficiency. It's more important to grow fast. If there's some mundane problem getting in your way, and there's a simple solution that's somewhat expensive, just take it and get on with more important things. EBay didn't win by paying less for servers than their competitors.
Difficult though it may be to imagine now, manufacturing was a growth industry in the mid twentieth century. This was an era when small firms making everything from cars to candy were getting consolidated into a new kind of corporation with national reach and huge economies of scale. You had to grow fast or die. Workers were for these companies what servers are for an Internet startup. A reliable supply was more important than low cost.If you looked in the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as the new model isn't delayed.
In other words, those workers were not paid what their work was worth. Circumstances being what they were, companies would have been stupid to insist on paying them so little.
Read on.
monday, may 28, 2007
newsweek's puritans
...explain how to ruin your barbeque.
laugh of the day
A photo. As one commenter said, "that is both awesome and disgusting."
america's honor
Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.
Read it all.
Donate your unused airline miles to Operation Hero Miles.
a memory on memorial day
During the all-too-brief time that I was fortunate enough to spend embedded with the 1-4 Cavalry in Baghdad, I met a number of truly great men. One of these was Robert Dixon, a 27-year-old Private First Class from Minneapolis with just over twenty months in the army. Private Dixon, like so many of the other young men in the Quarter Cav, was on his first combat deployment of any kind, having departed from Fort Riley, Kansas in February of 2007.
The first few months of this deployment have had their share of successes for the newly formed unit. But the cost has been high: the Quarter Cav has also suffered some devastating losses. Within the span of a week in April three men were lost in separate incidents - one to a sniper, and two to individual Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).
That second IED took a terrible toll on the second platoon of Quarter Cav's Alpha troop. Striking the Platoon Sergeant's vehicle, the blast not only killed one soldier, but it wounded two others so severely that they had to be medically evacuated from the area, and eventually from the country. Sergeant First Class Gannon Edgy, the Troop's senior scout, was the only man to walk away from the wreckage, with his physical health intact, but his crew decimated.
profile in incompetence
Investors Business Daily has begun a ten-part series on Jimmy Carter, who they dub "the worst president in US history." It's hard to argue, especially when you consider his record on:
The economy:
Carter inherited a tough economy, but made it much worse. When he left office:
- Interest rate, 21%.
- Inflation, 13.5%.
- Unemployment, 7%.
- The so-called "Misery Index," which Carter used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election, 20.5%.
Foreign policy:
- in the name of "human rights" cut off support for our ally, the Shah of Iran, opening the door for Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini established the first modern Islamic regime, a role model for the Taliban and jihadists to follow. And when the U.S. Embassy was stormed that November and 52 Americans taken hostage for 444 days, America's lack of resolve was confirmed in the jihadist mind.
- broadcast American weakness to the world, opening the door the Soviets to invade Afghanistan
- sat back helplessly as the Soviet Union was using Cuban troops as a sort of communist foreign legion to plant the hammer and sickle around the world.
- Castro sent 50,000 troops to aid the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and fight the pro-Western anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in its efforts to foist communism in the former Portuguese colony. At one point, Cuban troops were stationed in 20 sub-Saharan African nations.
Read it all.
sunday, may 27, 2007
bad guys winning the media war
Lorie Byrd writes:
An aspect of the war on terrorism that gets too little attention, yet is as important as any other, is the media war. Whether they realize it, members of the mainstream media are participants in the war on terrorism, and nowhere is that more evident than in Iraq.
Blogger Bill Roggio, who has embedded as a journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan, says the enemy’s documents reveal that much of their strategy revolves around manipulation of the media. An enemy unable to beat us on the battlefield is employing a strategy of attacks planned specifically for maximum media coverage and effect.
Roggio recently told the Christian Science Monitor that most mainstream media reporters “display a lack of knowledge of counterinsurgency and the role the media plays in an insurgency’s information campaign.” He says al Qaeda and insurgent groups frequently choose their targets to get specific media coverage they desire.
He cited the way a suicide attack in the Anbar province was reported as an example. “U.S. success in Anbar was immediately negated when al Qaeda conducted a suicide attack in Ramadi in early May, and The Associated Press ‘reported’ that the attack dealt ‘a blow to recent U.S. success in reclaiming the Sunni city from insurgents.’ Al Qaeda conducted the attack to generate such an opening paragraph.”
maybe pinch sulzberger should embed
JEFF EMANUEL explains how the embedding program is changing the minds of hostile journalists:
While I was at the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad on my recent trip to Iraq, a pair of Spanish journalists--a newspaper reporter and a photojournalist--walked in, fresh from their embed with the 1-4 Cavalry of the First Infantry Division (the unit with which I embedded only days later). They had spent two weeks amongst the troops there, living and going on missions with them, including house-to-house searches and seizures, and their impressions of these soldiers were extremely clear.
"Absolutely amazing," said David Beriain, the reporter (and the one who spoke English), said of the young Cavalry troops. "In Spain, it is embarrassing--our soldiers are ashamed to be in the army. These young men--and they seem so young!--are so proud of what they do, and do it so well, even though it is dangerous and they could very easily be killed." Mr. Beriain explained that the company he had been embedded with had lost three men in the span of six days while he was there--one to a sniper and two to improvised explosive devices, both of which had blown armored Humvees into the air and flipped them onto their roofs. Despite this, he said, and despite some of the things they might have said in the heat of the moment after seeing another comrade die, the soldiers' resolve and morale was unshaken in the long term, and they remained committed to carrying out their mission to the best of their ability for the duration of their tours in Iraq.
It was in the process of performing that mission, of coping with the loss of loved ones, and of just being themselves as American soldiers that these young men were able to win over the admiration and affection of more than one journalist who had arrived in their midst harboring a less-than-positive opinion of the Iraq war, and of those who were tasked with prosecuting it.
"I love those guys," Mr. Beriain said, looking wistfully out the window of the media cloister in the Green Zone that is the Combined Press Information Center. "From the first time you go kick a door with them, they accept you--you're one of them. I've even got a 'family photo' with them" to remember them by. "I really hated to leave."
ants volunteer to fill pot holes
Scientists from the University of Bristol observed that, when ants were foraging on rough terrain, some of them used their own bodies to plug potholes.
They even chose which of them was the best fit to lie across each hole.
The technique provided the rest of the group, which can number 200,000, with a faster route between prey and nest.
how to retire at age 41
If you were to take 20% of your annual income starting at age 20 and put it in a S&P 500 index fund, that index fund continues to grow at the long-term historical rate (12%), and you received a 4% raise each year, you could walk away from your job and live off the interest at age 41 matching your current salary, or quit at 43 and be able to give yourself a 4% “raise” each year from the interest, which is probably the better plan because it combats inflation. Raise the amount to 25% and you’re done at age 38 and able to live in perpetuity at age 40.
Obviously, some people are going to balk at this and state that it “can’t” be done. The truth is that it can be done if you have the willingness to live below your means and authentically behave as if 20% of your total salary doesn’t exist.
what i want to be when i grow up
by Burt Prelutsky
There are two jobs I often find myself daydreaming about. One of them is being a radio talk show host. The other is being president of the United States.
Between the two, there are far more downsides to being the Commander in Chief. In fact, the main upside to my being president is that I’m the only person I know with whom I agree on all the major issues.
On the negative side of the ledger, there’s the weather in Washington, D.C. Living, as I do, in Los Angeles, I’m accustomed to wearing tennis shorts the year round. On top of which, I can’t remember the last time I put on a necktie. I’m not even sure if I still own one.
Then there’s the matter of raising half a billion dollars in order to even have a chance of getting elected. I have a certain amount of chutzpah, but, even so, I’m not sure I’m cut out to ask perfect strangers to cough up $500,000,000 just so I can get a job.
Furthermore, one can’t get around the fact that, as president, I would have to spend an inordinate amount of time in the company of such long-winded, sanctimonious gasbags as Charles Schumer, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi. And let us not overlook those mind-numbing press conferences. Just getting out of bed in the morning and knowing you’re going to have to put up with Helen Thomas later that same day must be as depressing as waking up the day on which root canal or a colonoscopy is scheduled.
Those are some of the reasons I am confounded by President Bush’s pussyfooting around with the Democrats. When the likes of Harry Reid and John Murtha announce that we’ve lost in Iraq, why doesn’t Bush denounce them as Fifth Columnists? What’s he got to lose? He’s got less than two years to go, and he continues sucking up to people who have spent the past six years calling him every name in the book. Even a lame duck doesn’t have to be that lame. He’s behaving like a high school nerd who, after three years of nonstop wedgies, is still trying to make the cool kids like him.
The best thing about me as president is that every time a Democrat accused me or a fellow conservative of doing something for political reasons -- which, on the face of it, is just about the silliest thing one politician can say about another -- I would use my bully pulpit to ridicule them. I would, for instance, point out that Harry Reid is totally beholden to Nevada’s gambling interests and the billboard industry; that Robert Byrd was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan; that William Jefferson gave new meaning to the term “cold cash;” that Ted Kennedy let a young woman drown; and that Dianne Feinstein who, like all the other lefties, is all for repealing the Second Amendment, was once caught, like some gangster’s moll, packing a rod in her purse.
The fact of the matter is that virtually everyone in our nation’s capitol has feet of clay, and there’s nothing I can think of that would be more fun than stepping on their little clay toes.
Some of you are probably shaking your head and going “tsk tsk.” My approach, I’m guessing, doesn’t strike you as being appropriately diplomatic and statesmanlike. And you’d be right. When I hear that President Bush has called Senator Kennedy the most effective legislator in Washington, it makes me gag. You can call it tactful, but I call it shameless pandering. What’s more, when he insists that Islam is a religion of peace, I want to slap him silly.
The truth is, my chances of becoming president are even worse than John McCain’s. Besides, all things considered, I’d really prefer to have my own talk show. The hang-up with that particular gig would be having to pronounce certain names in the news. I can barely handle my own name, but I’d really need to take a deep breath and a running start in order to get through a minefield consisting of such tongue-twisters as Seung-hui Cho, Pervez Musharraf and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
malaria, ddt and me
The 2007 World Health Assembly is wrapping up and people are commemorating the birthday of Silent Spring author Rachel Carson. Meanwhile, millions of Africans are commemorating still more deaths from a disease that the chemical she vilified could help control.
I just got out of the hospital, after another nasty case of malaria. I've had it dozens of times. I lost my son, two sisters and three nephews to it. Fifty out of 500 children in our local school for orphans died from malaria in 2005.
Virtually every Ugandan family has buried babies, children, mothers and fathers because of this disease, which kills 100,000 of us every year. Even today, 50 years after it was eradicated in the United States, malaria is the biggest killer of African children, sending 3,000 to their graves every day.
In between convulsions and fever, I thought about the progress we're making – and about those who would stop that progress. I ask myself, why do some people care more about minor, hypothetical risks to people or animals than about human life?
Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reversed 30 years of bad policy and reauthorized DDT to help combat malaria in Africa, by spraying it on the walls of houses to keep mosquitoes out. The World Health Organization (WHO) also came out strongly in support of DDT.
Both reviewed decades of scientific studies and concluded that using DDT this way is perfectly safe for people and the environment. So did Uganda's Ministry of Health and National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA). European Commission President Barroso said Europe supports the right of countries to use DDT, in accord with Stockholm Convention and WHO guidelines.
DDT has worked in South Africa and Swaziland. USAID is now using it in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Zambia. Uganda and other African countries are preparing to add DDT to indoor-spraying programs.
We don't see DDT as a "magic bullet" that can eradicate malaria by itself. We don't advocate outdoor spraying with it. But we strongly support spraying tiny amounts on houses – as part of comprehensive strategies that also include other insecticides, larvacides and better sanitation to control mosquito populations, Artemisninin-based combination drugs to treat patients, and bednets, education, better hospitals and sound management practices.
No other chemical, at any price, does what DDT does. It keeps mosquitoes from entering homes, irritates the few that do enter, so they don't bite, kills those that land, and reduces malaria rates by 75% – all with a single inexpensive spraying once or twice a year.
Read on.
saturday, may 26, 2007
bringing home the bacon
there they go again
How awful has the New York Times become? In a story about disputes between Europe and the US over greenhouse gas emissions, there is this:
The United States has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because of concerns about damage to the American economy. Bush administration officials have also balked because China and India are not part of it.
Alert readers know the Kyoto Treaty was a dead issue under Clinton. The US Senate voted unanimously against any treaty that excluded China and India. Bush was governor of Texas at the time.
The version of the story on the Times website excludes an ending that was published in the LA Daily News. The DN picked up the story off the NYT wire yesterday evening. The original version contained the italicized sentence:
Both Ms. Merkel and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain have, in private talks with President Bush, pushed for the United States to agree to the European proposal. Blair, whose approval ratings in Britain have suffered enormously because of his close association with Bush and the war in Iraq, in particular would like to be able to demonstrate that he was able to extract something from the United States for his trouble.
First, the sentence is an editorial opinion in a news story. Who is to say that liberating Iraq from a mass murderer is not an accomplishment in itself? (Read the two final paragraphs of the item just below this.)
It also assumes that Blair was led by Bush to do something he disagreed with. Hardly. As Rich Lowry wrote:
Long before President Bush arrived in the White House, Blair championed the idea that the West should intervene to stop human-rights abuses in other countries, putting morality above respect for the borders of sovereign countries. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that Bush embraced a version of this expansive vision, essentially making him a convert to the Blair view rather than the other way around.
In the debate regarding the Iraq war, Blair merely applied his principles of liberal interventionism that had led him to support a war against another aggressive, human-rights-abusing dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in the Balkans. In an April 1999 speech, Blair linked Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as “dangerous and ruthless men” who had “brought calamity on their own peoples.” Stopping one had been right, and so was stopping the other.
Permalink
how funny is iraq?
“Don’t abandon us,” pleads Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister of Iraq, in Friday's Washington Post. "There is no denying the difficulties Iraq faces," he writes, "and no amount of good news can obscure the demons of terrorism and sectarianism that have risen in my country. But there is too much at stake to risk failure, and everything to gain by helping us protect our hard-won democratic achievements and emerge as a stable, self-sustaining country."
I'll quote one more passage, and then I have a question for you. "Iraqis are standing up every day," writes Zebari, "and we persevere because there is no other option. We will not surrender our country to terrorists. They have failed to cripple the elected government, and they have failed to intimidate us into submission. Iraqis reject their vision of a future whose hallmarks are bloodshed and hatred."
My question is, what's your first reaction to Zebari's words? Do you find them heartening? Do you find them unpersuasive? Do they depress you, or perhaps anger you? Whatever your reaction, I'll bet you didn't find Zebari's plea to be amusing. Yet that was just the reaction of one Arab-American academic. He dismissed it with a one-liner, mocking it by writing, "This is rather funny," and mocking Zebari by calling him an "Iraqi puppet."
That academic is named Asad AbuKhalil, and he typifies much that is repulsive about the pan-Arabist poseur. AbuKhalil has made what little reputation he has by sneering both at the West and at Middle Easterners who think that Western liberalism has any merit.
Read on.
For those who didn't read Zebari's piece, here's the opening:
Last weekend a traffic jam several miles long snaked out of the Mansour district in western Baghdad. The delay stemmed not from a car bomb closing the road but from a queue to enter the city's central amusement park. The line became so long some families left their cars and walked to enjoy picnics, fairground rides and soccer, the Iraqi national obsession.
Across the city, restaurants are slowly filling and shops are reopening. The streets are busy. Iraqis are not cowering indoors. The appalling death tolls from suicide attacks are often high because of crowding at markets. These days you are as likely to hear complaints about traffic congestion as about the security situation. Across Baghdad there is a cacophony of sirens from ambulances, firefighters and police providing public services. You cannot even escape the curse of traffic wardens ticketing illegally parked cars.
terrorists have rights, too
...says the Democrat Senate.
The bill is aimed primarily at increasing legal protections for the hundreds of people captured by the United States and held for years on suspicion of terror ties without a trial. Only those selected for prosecution — typically the most high-profile suspected terrorists — are guaranteed legal counsel and other rights when they go to court.
The legislation has raised red flags at the White House as potential veto bait and among congressional Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), who said he was concerned that aspects of the bill may go too fa
symbolism and immigration
by J.C Phillips
When confronted with complex questions, politicians have a tendency to hide behind symbolism. Posturing in the raiment of righteousness makes a certain amount of political sense in the short run. It requires little skill and less courage. The public is assured of one’s virtue and there are seldom any consequences that follow bad policy made in earnestness. It is in a sense playing with the house’s money. It is however a short term strategy, which is why symbolism is not a hallmark of statesmen.
Republicans might keep this in mind as they consider the current immigration bill sitting before the senate.
There is a mindset among some Republicans that the symbolism of passing comprehensive immigration reform is more important than the substance of that reform. The presumption is that failure to pass this legislation will turn Latino voters away from the Republican Party just as Black voters have never forgiven Republicans for their opposition to civil rights legislation.
Of course, it was the Democratic Party that opposed civil rights legislation and Republicans that broke the filibuster. Robert Byrd (D-W-VA.) was particularly adept at the filibuster and is currently known as the conscience of the Democratic Party, which suggests that the political memory of a community is not as long as Republican symbolists might imagine nor is the loyalty of any community built upon one issue.
Democrats, of course, are no better. They too are convinced that the road to political power runs through Tijuana, which might explain why the Democratic leadership made every attempt to speed this bill through the process with as few specifics as possible and with even less debate. Details tend to muddy symbolism.
If this bill fails, Republicans will be blamed. However, it is also more than likely that if this bill is passed, Democrats will receive all the credit. And Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the sponsors of the bill, will have long since left the table when the tab must be paid. It therefore behooves Republicans to remain true to conservative principles and “promote the general welfare” of all Americans as opposed to the specific welfare of a burgeoning politically powerful constituency.
Bipartisan supporters of this reform bill assure us this current incarnation will do for America what previous reform did not do. Our borders will be secured, businesses will be penalized for hiring illegal workers, English will be required to ensure assimilation and there are all sorts of triggers and rules to guarantee compliance.
We have heard it all before and familiarity with government promises breeds skepticism. It also breeds cynicism largely because with symbolism, words tend to lose their meaning.
Illegal immigration, for instance, becomes indistinguishable from immigration. Images of the huddled masses are invoked along with references to America’s noble immigrant history. Suddenly opposition to hordes of illegal’s streaming across our borders makes one a racist.
“Amnesty” is not amnesty. The day after this bill is signed into law, 12 million illegal immigrants will be granted temporary legal status that is renewable indefinitely. If the end result is the same, does it matter if in the strictest sense of the word this is not amnesty in the way bureaucrats define amnesty?
There is little reason to believe that a government that has heretofore been lackluster in enforcement of immigration laws will suddenly find religion with a thousand pages of new laws. Also unclear is why people who have shown a propensity to eschew rules will suddenly follow new rules that require cash payments and standing in line to fill out forms.
But there is a more important question: if those Republicans currently supporting the bill are correct and the true challenge is winning the political loyalty of the Latino community, why on earth would any constituency ally themselves with a party that values political expediency over its core principles. Alas, it is a question they will never have to answer. Another benefit of working in the shadows of symbolism.
friday, may 25, 2007
mother's little helper
morons on the march
A nitwit Congressman from Michigan, one Bart Stupak, reintroduced legislation to fight "gas price gouging" and got it passed. As he noted on his web site in 2005:
The actions were based on Stupak’s F.R.E.E. Act, Federal Response to Energy Emergencies Act
How revealing to use FREE as your acronym. We all want free gas, right? And don't we, as loyal Americans, deserve it? Durn tootin', we do. We're mad as hell and...
The legislation would penalize individuals or companies for taking "unfair advantage" or charging "unconscionably excessive" prices for gasoline and other fuels.
Opponents said the language was too vague and that the Federal Trade Commission, which would enforce the law, has not clearly defined price gouging.
"I don't know what `unconscionably excessive' means," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.
The bill's chief sponsor, Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, said he had no doubt the FTC would be able to determine price gouging once the agency had a law to uphold.
Apparently price gouging is like pornography: you know it when you see it.
How about tax gouging? When the federal income tax was first instituted, someone insisted it be capped at 10 percent. He was laughed off as absurd; after all, who could imagine the federal government seizing a greater percentage than what people tithed?
And who could imagine a tax system that lets half of its citizens pay effectively nothing?
The Democrats ain't done with their energy fixes. When the Senate gets the bill it plans more genius.
Senate Democrats said they would take up energy legislation — including price gouging — next month after they finish an immigration bill.
That energy measure would require that vehicles get better mileage and that 35 billion gallons of ethanol serve as a substitute for gasoline by 2022 — a sevenfold increase over today's levels.
"Our legislation will dramatically increase American-made and grown renewable fuels production," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Oh yeah, ethanol. Food for fuel. Jack up food prices on the poor.
Why not drill in ANWAR?
To understand how gas prices work, read this article from How Stuff Works. Email the link to Bart Stupak while you're at it.
Permalink
itunes for birds
I have a friend from South Africa who nows lives nearby. He introduced me to a webcam that remains focused on a watering hole called Nkorho Stream. You can drop in at any time and see what wildlife happens to be happening by. At night, they switch to an infrared camera.
To get there, visit Africam and choose the Nkorho Stream. You'll get a short commercial, but after that it's just nature.
So, anyway, my buddy works at home and likes to leave the webcam site open on his browser for much of the day. With the great climate here in So Cal, he leaves his sliding glass door open onto his back yard.
One day he was outside and heard the distinct call of a Loerie, aka the Go-Away Bird.
He assumed that call was coming from his office, but, no, he'd shut his browser down. Loeries are not supposed to live in So Cal. Intrigued, he got his binoculars and began hunting the source of the Loerie call.
He quickly found a mockingbird sitting in his tree, rattling off the Loerie routine. Apparently, he'd been tuning in the webcam feed himself and picked up some new tunes off the internet.
Permalink
thursday, may 24, 2007
time waster
earth as art
NASA images of the Anti-Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Click for full size.
teen outsmarts climate experts
She was working for a little extra credit and got it right.
Last week, NewsBusters readers were introduced to Portland, Maine’s fabulous fifteen-year-old, Kristen Byrnes, whose website “Ponder the Maunder” marvelously takes on anthropogenic global warming myths including those being advanced by soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore.
As will be revealed post haste, this newest – and likely youngest – member of the growing list of folks skeptical about man’s role in climate change actually walks the walk better than she talks the talk.
Yet, despite her youth and precocious scientific acumen, it seems quite unlikely that she’ll be sitting down with Matt Lauer or Diane Sawyer any time soon to discuss her research concerning one of the most popular subjects on the media’s front-burner. Why?
Read on.
facts? they don't need no stinkin' facts!
"Fact-checking in publishing." It's such a quaint notion. It thrives on the belief that if publishers checked the facts, the truth would out. But on many levels, most publishers -- especially book publishers -- don't want to check the facts and, truth be told, seldom do. Book publishers are not interested in truth, they are interested in stories; stories that sell.
Having worked for more than 30 years in book and magazine publishing, I had many chances to view the "fact-checking" element at work in both fields and, although it was rigorous in magazines, it was close to non-existent in books. Even the much-vaunted "fact checking at the New Yorker" is pretty much a myth at this point; the kind of myth that lets the current phase of The New Yorker slide on by as a "dependable" source. But it really is about 50% BS now. And for book publishers it always was 95% BS.
Today's New York Sun published an article, Carter Publisher May Be Accused Of Damaging CBS's Reputation, which notes:
"A CBS subsidiary, Simon & Schuster, will be accused of damaging the reputation of its parent company by publishing Mr. Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." Carol Greenwald, the treasurer of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, a CBS shareholder, plans to criticize the publisher at the meeting..... According to a statement shown to The New York Sun, Ms. Greenwald, who calls Mr. Carter's book "error-filled," plans to ask that a fact-checking system be set up to prevent material errors in books Simon & Schuster publishes and that a code of ethics be adopted for its publishing division."
I wish Ms. Greenwald well in her quest, but would advise her to pack a lunch, dress warmly, and take plenty of water on her quest because she'll be gone for a long, long time.
That's not because she's wrong. It is because she's right.
The Carter book is chock-a-block full of lies and distortions and weasel phrases that are the hallmark of the sad and irritating career of the worst President the United States has had and the worst it is likely to have. But lies are as much a part of Carter's post-Whitehouse career as the phrase "I'll never lie to you" was part of his initial appeal. That numerous associates of the risible "Carter Center" have resigned because this time the lies were too thick to be swallowed smoothly in exchange for a check is well documented.
But to think that Simon & Schuster are going to spend one penny on a "fact-checking" system or a "code of ethics" is simply foolish. Book publishers don't do that and not because, as was stated in the same article:
"It's not realistic," the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, Sara Nelson, said. The call for publishers to have "full-on fact checking" does not make economic sense, she said, as they publish a lot of books.
Publishers won't do it because they not only don't have to (it would be costly, but not nearly as much as the millions they lavish on their pet authors), but because fact-checking our many fanciful and forthrightly lying authors would not be in the publishers' interests. Publishers know when authors are lying but, as long as the lies map to the publishing industry's internal view of itself, that's just fine with them. It's not about being "true," but being "true to your school."
carrying a big stick
Nine U.S. military ships entered the Gulf on Wednesday for a rare daylight assembly off Iran’s coast in what naval officials said was the largest such move since the 2003 Iraq war.
U.S. Navy officials said Iran had not been notified of plans to sail the vessels, which include two aircraft carriers, through the Straits of Hormuz, a narrow channel in international waters off Iran’s coast and a major artery for global oil shipments.
why, what is that scent stench you're wearing?
The makers of the famously pungent Stilton blue cheese have launched their own perfume.
It claims to "recreate the earthy and fruity aroma" of the cheese "in an eminently wearable perfume".
The perfume, blended by a Manchester-based aromatics company, features a "symphony of natural base notes including yarrow, angelica seed, clary sage and valerian".
bastard of children of men
Mark Steyn explains why the film version of Children of Men missed the mark:
There are zillions of bad movies, but Alfonso Cuarón's film Children Of Men is bad in an almost awe-inspiring way. They should teach it in film school as the acme of adaptation. Mr. Cuarón's previous films (including A Little Princess and one of the groovier Harry Potters) were perfectly fine, and certainly different directors will approach the same property in entirely different ways. But, with Children Of Men, he's managed to spend a ton of time and money, hire a fine cast, lavish inordinate care and attention to detail on the film's design and cinematography -- and yet completely miss the point of the book. More revealingly, the way in which he misses the point portends a difficult future for Hollywood in the years ahead.
So the author would not regard the reflexive expletives as an improvement. But more importantly, she might wonder about their accuracy. In the book, the infertility of man has been followed by a declining interest in penetrative intercourse. The state frantically sponsors government porn stores promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to maintain sexual desire just in case man's seed should recover its potency. It's not working: "Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women's magazines." In such a world, would "fuck" survive as an epithet? As for "Jesus Christ!", that too would be less likely to pass their lips -- because in a world with no future, whether one regards global infertility as evidence of God's anger or that He is indeed dead or (for a third group) that this is a kind of slo-mo Rapture, very few are as careless about faith as we turn-of-the-century profaners are.
wednesday, may 23, 2007
sssh. don't tell a soul.
The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.
fraud
Every aspect of the current immigration bill, and of the arguments made for it, has “fraud” written all over it.
The first, and perhaps biggest, fraud is the argument that illegal aliens are “doing jobs Americans won’t do.” There are no such jobs.
Even in the sector of the economy in which illegal immigrants have the highest representation — agriculture — they are just 24 percent of the workers. Where did the other 76 percent come from, if these are jobs that Americans won’t do?
The argument that illegal agricultural workers are “making a contribution to the economy” is likewise misleading.
For well over half a century, this country has had chronic agricultural surpluses which have cost the taxpayers billions of dollars a year to buy, store, and try to get rid of on the world market at money-losing prices.
If there were fewer agricultural workers and smaller agricultural surpluses, the taxpayers would save money.
What about illegal immigrants working outside of agriculture? They are a great bargain for their employers, because they are usually hard-working people who accept low pay and don’t cause any trouble on the job.
But they are no bargain for the taxpayers who cover their medical bills, the education of their children, and the costs of imprisoning those who commit a disproportionate share of crime.
Analogies with immigrants who came to this country in the 19th century and early 20th century are hollow, and those who make such analogies must know how different the situation is today.
People who crossed an ocean to get here, many generations ago, usually came here to become Americans. There were organized efforts within their communities, as well as in the larger society around them, to help them assimilate.
tantrum ends?
For five years we have been lectured that George Bush ruined the trans-Atlantic relationship. But now we see pro-American governments in both France and Germany, and a radical change in attitudes from Denmark to Holland to Italy. The truth is that the Europeans neither hated nor loved Bill Clinton, whom they on occasion privately seethed at for not exercising leadership, or George Bush who swaggered and talked tough to them during the lead-up to Iraq and seemed to them to be rudely unilateral. Instead, after getting their teen-age anger out, they are starting to see that the United States did not fabricate Islamic radicalism nor order them to let in and then not assimilate millions of now angry Muslims.
For all the cheap shots, the European public is worried about importing half their natural gas from Vladimir Putin, who now bullies Eastern Europeans, former Soviet republics, and dissidents well beyond his borders on the premise that his oil wealth and nukes ensure Europe can’t and won’t do anything.
Europeans know they won’t or can’t stop the Iranians from getting a nuke, but hope someone—that is, the United States—will. And from the Spanish flight from Iraq after the Madrid bombing, the spectacle of the British naval personnel in Iranian hands, and the continental paralysis after the Danish cartoons and other serial Islamic affronts to free expression, Europe knows that radical Islam is both dangerous and has little respect for either European moral authority or force of arms.
premature obituary
This is one of those big think-piece cover stories editors send out in hopes that we'll all start buzzing about it:Is the American era over?
For a generation raised to wave the banner of triumphant Western democracies, and nursed on the mother's milk of American exceptionalism, the very idea seems an affront. Predominance is regarded as an American birthright. Less than a decade ago, the United States was held out as the rarest of historical anomalies, a lone superpower leading the world. Today, such talk of boundless promise already seems part of a receding past.
That's an arresting first sentence, but pretty much everything that follows is the same-old same-old. James Kitson quotes various eminences - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Francis Fukuyama... Do you sense a pattern here? Apparently, the end of the American era dates to the 2002 State of the Union Address.
But, if the jig is really up, you could just as easily make the case that it dates back to what Mr Kitson considers that golden age "less than a decade ago" - ie, America's holiday from history, when the wise old foreign-policy stability fetishists had nary a word to say about resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west which makes traditional great-power clubs like the G7 about as relevant to the future as dinner theatre in Florida. The Great Men cited by Kitson were in large part responsible for the illusions of the Nineties - for the complacency (Scowcroft), inevitablist theories of history (Fukuyama) and failure to understand long-term threats (Brzezinski). It may be that the Bush Doctrine proves the wrong answer to those threats, or that we have roused ourselves too late or too tentatively. But the idea that America could have lived in the Brzezcroftyama Golden Moment for eternity is the kind of intellectual laziness partly responsible for our present woes.
If America is over, this essay is not the autopsy.
tuesday, may 22, 2007
sympathy from the infidel
In an unprecedented effort to rally popular support, al Qaeda is apparently trying to refashion its image from an ultra-conservative, radical Islamist group with clear and precise goals — the ultimate being to implement sharia law around the globe — to what the liberal West has long had a soft spot for: a romanticized revolutionary movement of the “Ché” variety, fighting to overthrow oppression and exploitation (which, as the usual story goes, are products of U.S. greed and aggression).
Speaking to the many “under-privileged” of the world in his most recent interview, al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri declares: “That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world, to know that when we wage jihad in Allah’s path, we aren’t waging jihad to lift oppression from Muslims only; we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind, because Allah has ordered us never to accept oppression, whatever it may be…This is why I want every oppressed one on the face of the earth to know that our victory over America and the Crusading West — with Allah’s permission — is a victory for them, because they shall be freed from the most powerful tyrannical force in the history of mankind.”
American blacks, however, are Zawahiri’s primary targets. For a traditional Arab Sunni who despises everything borne of the West, Zawahiri spends an inordinate amount of time praising and quoting Malcolm X — who, though a convert to Islam, was still very much a by-product of the U.S. Zawahiri’s interview even portrays video-clips of the political activist preaching about freedom and fighting: “Anytime you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free.Freedom is something you have to do for yourself. The price of freedom is death.” Also included is a lengthy excerpt where X delineates the differences between “house-negroes” (an epithet Zawahiri later applies to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) and “field-negroes” (“real men” who fight and kill to avenge their honor). Based on this unexpected “African-American” interlude, it is clear whom Zawahiri has in mind for an audience: probably characters like D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammad, who went on a shooting spree randomly murdering Americans shortly after 9/11.
gore's chutzpah
Anklebiting Pundits on Gore's new book and media tour:
Basically we can sum this up in a few words: “If only those brain-dead TV-addicted polluters had elected me….”. Dare I say his rock-star…no, god-like status among the nutroots and Hollywood has gone to his head, to the point where sanity is an afterthought. He really does believe he has all the answers for everything. Arrogance, thy name is Gore.
Let’s start with his contentions about TV and the effects he alleges it has on the American electorate. If TV really is having this mind-numbing addictive effect that has allegedly tricked people into accepting the very-liberal contention that a tie between Iraq and 9/11 was made, then how does this explain why TV viewership is way WAY down lately? An addict typically doesn’t give up their addiction without an intervention of some sort to break the addiction, so I fail to see how Gore’s assertion holds any water here, or that it even does in the first place. We’re not as mind-numbed and addicted as he asserts apparently. And since internet useage is the highest it’s ever been, I think we’re taking care of his proposed solution on our own, without his or the Government’s “help”.
Then we have his assertion that he could’ve stopped 9/11 if he was President. He basically heaps the entire responsibility for 9/11 on the Bush Administration, somehow looping everything that the administration has done since 9/11 to prevent terrorist attacks into this assertion that those actions somehow distracted the Administration from stopping 9/11(the ‘unchecked power’ accusation). He then claims that analysis of the information available, not just more of it, would’ve led to the capture of the terrorists(and of course he states that’s exactly what a Gore administration would’ve done right to the letter).
Let’s be clear on something: the hijackers were entering the country as early as January of 2000, under the Clinton/Gore watch. And it was not lack of analysis nor lack of availability of data that allowed them to be here and carry out 9/11. Rather, it was a lack of communication between the CIA and FBI in the year plus leading up to the attacks. Part or possibly all of the reason for this lack of communication: the Gorelick wall, erected in 1995 under the Clinton/Gore watch. Note that none of this was brought up during yesterday’s interview, which goes to show why it’s kind of ridiculous to have a George Stephanopolous-hosted show interview anyone from the Clinton Administration. You’re more likely to get a cry, a hug, and someone saying ”That mean ol’ George Bush” in the interview than an actual challenge to any of Gore’s assertions.
edwards passes the buck on his haircut
A staffer picked the $400 barber, says the Breck Girl in this video, "I wasn't involved."
Why, shucks, where would anyone get the idea that John Edwards is fussy about his locks?
monday, may 21, 2007
jimmuh cracks corn
Best of the Web notes Jimmy Carter's latest lob at President Bush, calling him the "worst in history."
President Bush, naturally, didn't deign to answer Jimmy Carter's latest cavils, but a spokesman, Tony Fratto, did say this: "I think it's sad that President Carter's reckless personal criticism is out there. I think it's unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments."
This prompted the following hilarious observation from Reuters:
Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday's sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.
In the fun-house world of Reuterville, Osama bin Laden is a "freedom fighter," and the tradition of ex-presidents to defer to the current president is flipped on its head.
The Carter problem was anticipated by Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in Federalist No. 72:
Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?
Hamilton was actually arguing against term limits for the president--the idea being that bitter exes, barred by law from seeking the office again, would, well, go around acting like Jimmy Carter.
But what's Carter's excuse? He served only one term, so there is no constitutional bar to his being elected again. Why doesn't Carter put his money where his mouth is and seek the Democratic presidential nomination? After all, he's only a few years older than Mike Gravel, and he may be the only guy who can beat Hillary Clinton. He's been against the Iraq war since at least 1991, when Barack Obama was in diapers and Al Gore was a neocon war monger.
As Hamilton noted, "There is no nation which has not, at one period or another, experienced an absolute necessity of the services of particular men in particular situations; perhaps it would not be too strong to say, to the preservation of its political existence." Jimmy Carter, your country needs you!
sucker job
Instapundit has two poll questions today:
Should Jimmy Carter run for President in 2008? So far, the score is 74% yes / 26% no.
Would you vote for Jimmy Carter if he ran for President in 2008? So far, the score is 3% yes / 97% no.
Run, Jimmuh, run!
perfect job for slackers
Doing nothing and selling your carbon credits.
a one-story skyscraper?
devil in the details
Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement and inadvertently killed millions of human beings.
Her apocalyptic 1962 novel Silent Spring imagined a world devastated by pesticides and other chemicals. Carson, who had worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, had a hand in writing a news release with this:
"DDT may have undesirable and even dangerous effects unless its use is properly controlled," said a news release, which Carson helped write.
The hysteria that followed led to the banning of DDT, contrary to it own scientific studies, by the EPA.
By then, DDT had done its magic in erradicating malaria from the United States. (The Centers for Disease Control is located in Atlanta because that was once the heart of America's malaria zone.)
For the Third World, it meant strings attached to US aid that forbade the use of DDT, even when "properly controlled." That meant death.
In the years since her death, Carson's conclusions about DDT have remained controversial. This year, during a hearing meant to honor Carson in Annapolis, State Sen. Andrew P. Harris (R-Baltimore County) said her book had helped scare people away from a pesticide that could have saved numerous human lives.
"In the end, you know, people are dying of malaria that don't need to die" because of bans on DDT, Harris, a doctor, said in an interview this week.
Junk Science keeps a running clock of malarial deaths here.
sympathy for another liberal "devil"
I've long thought that Ashcroft was a misunderstood figure. One interesting example is the drubbing Ashcroft received for the following statement from December 2001, responding to critics of the Patriot Act:
[T]o those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve[.]
The media was completely clueless about what Ashcroft meant by this, and most people simply assumed that he meant that making civil libertarian objections to Bush Administration practices helped terrorists. I always thought Ashcroft meant something dramatically different. When Ashcroft made those remarks, in December 2001, he knew something that most people didn't: many criticisms of the Patriot Act had been surprisingly dishonest. It was embarrassingly common for critics of the legislation to make bogus claims about what the Patriot Act did. (Why that happened is a really interesting question; I haven't seen anything like it before or since.)
Ashcroft must have been deeply annoyed by this, because it was creating a false impression both within the U.S. and abroad that the government had responded to 9/11 by imposing a police state. So Ashcroft criticized those who were trying to scare people with bogus claims of lost rights -- that is, illusions of lost liberty, or, to coin a phrase, "phantoms of lost liberty." But the press and the public didn't understand what Ashcroft meant, so his language was completely misunderstood.
It goes without saying that Ashcroft was no card-carrying member of the ACLU. But I think his role was more complicated than many have assumed, and I'm glad to see that a more nuanced and accurate picture is surfacing.
d'oh! the simpsons are spent
Fox's The Simpsons notched its 400th episode last night, which is quite an accomplishment. Often brilliant, the show's writing has suffered for at least the past three years. Perhaps one out of four episodes is consistently funny.
The 400th was not one of them. In fact, it was awful. If the producers could not come up with a funny show to celebrate such a milestone, one must assume either they don't care or just can't get it up anymore.
The show did manage to recycle some liberal nonsense.
Kent Brockman, the show's pompous TV anchor, accidently blurts out a profanity and fears for his job until he realizes no one was watching. That is, except for religious Ned Flanders, shown combing the tube for something to get censorious about. Ned's uproar gets Brockman fired.
Again, we're being told that religious blue noses are restricting free speech. If so, who'd they get fired?
On the other hand:
- Don Imus was fired for his "hos" joke
- Radio host Dave Lenihan was fired for a slip of the tongue, saying "coon" instead of "coup" despite catching himself immediately and apologizing.
- A white staffer of Washington DC's mayor was fired for using "niggardly" in a meeting. Although the word means miserly, he was forced out for being, yep, insensitive.
- Larry Summers was forced out as president of Harvard for suggesting that innate differences might explain why there are more high level male scientists than female. Summers didn't even say he believed it; he was just raising it as a point of debate.
- The Senate Democrat caucus wrote a letter to Disney-owned ABC last year threatening trouble if ABC did not make changes to a 9/11 docudrama.
The latter is true censorship because it was government imposing limits on speech.
Permalink
burt on tv today
Burt will be on Court TV at noon discussing Phil Spector, who is on trial for murder. Burt went to the same junior-high and high school as Spector.
From Burt, September 2004:
MEA CULPA
As a rule, I could be described as a totally guiltless person. It isn't simply that I make every attempt to lead a blameless life, but, on those terribly rare occasions when I do slip the tiniest bit, I tend to find truly excellent reasons why others are actually at fault. Or, as I once told my son when he attempted to use me--I being his alleged role model in this instance, although in no others--as his reason for having done something he shouldn't have: "Your grandmother was a gold medal winner when it came to instilling guilt, but even she met her match when it came to me. So, don't you even think about it."
However, no matter how much I try to twist and turn, I fear that my days as the teflon man have come crashing to a halt. You see, I hold myself partially to blame for Phil Spector's current problems. The question I can not avoid asking myself is whether he would he now be indicted for murder were it not for me and my good intentions.
As a classmate of Phil's, I was in attendance the first time he performed in public. The occasion was a school assembly at L.A. 's Fairfax High, back in the mid 50s. Although nearly half a century has passed, I remember it as if it had happened last week. But that's how it is with major disasters. I'm sure that the people who witnessed the crash of the
Hindenburg will never forget it, either. And, as disasters go, the Hindenburg couldn't hold a candle to Phil's voice.
Five hundred of us sat stunned as he strummed his guitar and sang. At least we assumed it was singing. The idea that anyone with that nasally, Bronxish wheeze would dare to vocalize outside the confines of his shower redefined chutzpah for us. The end of his performance was greeted with absolute silence. After a few moments, moved solely by compassion for a fellow human being, my best friend and I started to applaud. Soon, the other students joined in. To our collective horror, this so buoyed Phil's spirits that he did an encore!
A short time after graduating from Fairfax, Phil, who had seemed destined to be our class's Least Likely to Succeed, began making his mark on the music world, albeit not as a vocalist. When we congregated at the Ambassador Hotel for our 10 th reunion, Phil was the one who showed up in a limo that he actually owned, along with three bodyguards whose sole function was to ensure that none of us got within ten yards of the man.
Is it any wonder that I'm so guilt-ridden? If only I hadn't encouraged Phil that fateful day, I can't help wondering if he might not have become a happy, well-adjusted, accountant, and been spared the drugs, the booze and now the murder.
At the very least, we'd have been spared that really awful encore!
sunday, may 20, 2007
iowahawk channels lileks
Some background: the Minneapolis Star-Tribune took away James Lileks' column and assigned him to write straight news. Y'know, fires, city council meetings and such.
Iowahawk imagines one of the first stories under the Lileks byline:
St. Paul Council Mulls Supplemental Sewer Levy
James Lileks
Star Tribune Metro News“Sewers are icky.”
“Why’s that?” I whispered, looking up from my PowerBook.
“Because they’re filled with poo.”
Gnat squirmed uncomfortably on the hard maple bench in front of me and offered a stinkface. I couldn’t tell whether the face was from the thought of icky poo, or a residual miffiness that I had cancelled our regular weekly trip to Chuck E. Cheese for an evening of sparkling sewer debate at the St. Paul City Hall. Can’t say as I blame her; I’ve never made a secret of my loathing for that particular rodent-themed dining establishment, but I have to admit that even the aging ‘90s-era animatronicons at Chuck’s floor show are marginally more lifelike than St. Paul’s Public Works Committee.
I shushed Gnat gently, and she returned to her Dora the Explorer coloring book we bought on the Thursday trip to Target. The child wields a deft Crayola, I have to say, even though the latest 64-color palette leaves a lot to be desired. Whatever happened to burnt umber? I thought about the bold yet muted earthtones of Binney & Smith’s 1966 edition, and how they were dumped unceremoniously for the psychedelic Pop Art hues of Peter Max following the crayon industry’s Summer of Love. Such is progress.
“Why do sewers cost money?”
“Because someone has to build and maintain them,” I explained.
those crazy kids
...are now "flipping" backpacks.
When he returned, he found that his backpack was not where he had left it. It only took Dizio a few seconds to spot it in the far right-hand corner of the room, but the damage was already done.
His backpack had been flipped. "Backpack-flippings," incidents in which students unzip a backpack, turn it inside out, and then re-stuff it with books, have become an everyday occurrence at Charter.
why god made criminals dumb
What a cashier first thought of as a practical joke turned into no laughing matter for a Ranson man who was arrested Wednesday after using women’s underwear and a lighter shaped like a small gun in an attempt to rob a convenience store.
Steven Clay Stephenson, 34, of North Mildred Street, was arrested shortly after the attempted robbery when he was caught with another man after stealing a tire. Police found both the lighter, shaped like a small caliber pistol, and three lug nuts from the stolen tire when they searched him. He was charged with attempted armed robbery, driving under the influence, petit larceny and having improper registration.
Petit larceny?
how drycleaning works
From the fine folks at How Stuff Works.
fred thompson vs. moore
On the day of the first Southern-state Republican debate on the Fox News Channel, one undeclared GOP candidate performed a media leapfrog.
With the help of one 38-second video clip and a great sense of humor, Fred Thompson, the former U.S. senator from Tennessee who is one sock away from dipping his toe into the race for the White House, remained just as relevant as the other GOP candidates.
And thanks to Michael Moore, the Hollywood documentarian who just can't help himself, Thompson delivered what, in time, could become his watershed moment. On Tuesday morning, Mark Corallo, the undeclared Thompson's frontman, had clicked on to the massively popular Internet news aggregator, the Drudge Report, to find that Moore had challenged Thompson to a political duel, also known as a debate.
"Within the space of about five minutes we decided to do a quick video response," Corallo recalled from his Washington office. He called Thompson and asked if he wanted to "have some fun today" and respond to Moore with a quick video.
Thompson's response was "pure Fred," Corallo said:
"Give me a camera. I already know what I am going to say," said Thompson.
Two phone calls and one camera later, Thompson was ready to go. One "take" later -- with no script, no booking time in a studio and no opposition research or talking points -- Thompson was shot into cyberspace.
Thompson scorched Moore in his witty video, dangling an unlit (Cuban?) cigar alongside a civics lesson that pointed out the perils of Moore's collaborating with the fickle dictator Fidel Castro.
alternate take on france and sarkozy
The story has been all over the media: Nicolas Sarkozy might not be an easy man to like but France is the “sick man of Europe” and tough love is what it needs. If its new president’s odes to the liberating power of work
and paeons to “the France that gets up early” grate on the ears of his 35-hour-work-week nation, so be it.
Yeah, yeah, Sarko made few friends in the riot-prone banlieues when he called the locals “scum” and threatened to clean up the projects with a Kärcher power hose (a German brand, no less). But at least he promised them jobs and not more empty socialist rhetoric. Having missed the train of globalization, the French economy is collapsing under the strain of a creaky welfare system and a chronic incapacity to create jobs.
By rejecting the neoliberal creed, France has turned its back on modernity. Aware of its decline, the nation pines for its lost grandeur, a risible notion so quintessentially Gallic English doesn’t even have a word for it. The pro-US, pro-Israel, tax-cutting, union-busting Sarko is France’s best hope for breaking with the gloomy years of the past.Nice story. Too bad it bears so little connection to reality. France faces serious problems but they are none of the above. Oddly, to get the country all wrong seems a bit of an art form in the U.S. media. On any given day, Tom Friedman can be found berating the French for “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” Friedman’s genius is to suppress in the reader the commonsense reaction—Indian engineers have no life—and improbably redirect the pity toward the French. That takes some skill.
Read on.
saturday, may 19, 2007
language police
Michael Moore, explaining the flap over the trip to Cuba in a press conference, said, "This administration flaunts the law, flaunts the constitution."
What's wrong with that? Flaunting means to display ostentatiously. Given the superiority of our constitution, we should flaunt it.
Flout, on the other hand, means to treat with contemptuous disregard. Example: I flout the polemics of Michael Moore and the PR stunts he uses to promote them.
are you a good decision-maker?
Take this quiz from Carnegie-Mellon and lead investigator Wandi Bruine de Bruin. Gotta love that name.
rules we speak by
Take a sentence like this: "In the park today, we saw six gorgeous immaculately restored antique flame-red Italian racing cars." That's quite a string of adjectives, but they're placed in order according to a hierarchy that leaves "time, manner, place" in the dust.
This whole question was the focus of the Tip of the Week from the newsletter Copy Editor a couple of weeks ago. A reader had written in: "I deal with a lot of non-native English speakers, and a question frequently arises as to what order to use for a string of adjectives or adverbs. We (editors) know to say '21 large green tables' but why not 'green large 21 tables'? or '21 green large tables'? Is there a rule for this?" Wendalyn Nichols, editor of Copy Editor, responded, "There is indeed a standard order for adjectives, and you’ll find it described in dictionaries and textbooks for learners of English as a second language."
Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:
Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.
Today is Armed Forces Day.
hdmi
Is short for bend over and...
Seriously, when I helped my dad upgrade his TV setup, we got a DVD player that upsamples to 720p. At $79.00, and great reviews from CNET, it was a bargain. But the cable to hook it up? Circuit City wanted $89. Ditto Best Buy.
That's $89 for wire and two plugs versus $79 for a device with a laser, motor, mechanism, circuits, servo, case, remote control and packaging.
Fortunately, cheaper ones can be found on Amazon. But the whole design of HDMI turns out to crappy engineering.
the “a” word
by Burt Prelutsky
In the old days, a rhetorical question that was popular in certain circles was whether you’d buy a used car from Richard Nixon. Whatever your politics may have been, there was no getting around the fact that with his beady little eyes, his widow’s peak and his five o’clock shadow, he wasn’t exactly the image of honesty and integrity we’d all like to see in our elected officials.
I wonder how it is that a similar question is never posed, accompanied by a photo of Ted Kennedy’s sweaty, bloated, booze-besotted face.
Every time the senior senator of Massachusetts opens his yap, I swear I hear a whirring sound I assume are his brothers spinning in their graves. They’d probably be as amazed as anyone that their idiot brother has served, so to speak, 45 years in the U.S. Senate. Which is three years longer than Robert lived and only a year less than John.
His latest achievement is the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill. I realize that Kennedy couldn’t have done it alone. But, then, I’m not sure he can tie his own shoes without assistance. There are many who had a hand in this -- Mel Martinez, John McCain, Patrick Leahy and George W. Bush, just to name a few. But since the president, himself, has seen fit to crown Sen. Kennedy “the ablest legislator in Washington,” I assume he’s the one who deserves the lion’s share of credit for pulling off this coup.
I have been hearing from a lot of people who regard this as a red letter day for America. Frankly, though, I regard it as more of a black letter day. Or, perhaps, considering who the beneficiaries are, the more appropriate color is brown.
For a long time, the most popular example of chutzpah, the Yiddish word for monumental gall, was the guy who killed his parents and then asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan. But we now have an example that at least runs a close second. We have Hispanics who broke the law by sneaking into the country, had a baby at our expense, and then insisted they have the constitutional right to remain here because their kid’s an American citizen. Talk about profiting from the commission of a crime!
Those people, both Democrats and Republicans, who are terrified of uttering the “A” word, insist this piece of legislation isn’t really amnesty. They point out that it requires that American wannabes will have to pay a $5,000 fine over a period of time. But is there anybody out there who actually believes that if they don’t come up with the do-re-mi, they’ll be deported? If so, please give me a call -- I’m looking to sell my deed to Fort Knox.
To give you some idea of what a scam this is, I heard Bush’s mouthpiece, Tony Snow, on the radio this afternoon state that there are 12 million people who are here illegally, and then announce five seconds later: “We have no idea who they are or where they are.”
So, we know nothing about them, aside from their exact number. Talk about your Snow jobs!
My own guess, based partly on the fact that there were slightly over three million of them who received amnesty way back in 1986, courtesy of Ronald Reagan, is that the actual number is upwards of 20 million. If Snow or Bush or Kennedy disagrees with that estimate, let them prove it by limiting this amnesty-in-sheep’s-clothing to no more than 12 million.
Frankly, if all it takes to turn illegal aliens into good honest Americans is for this bunch of Washington weasels to wave their magic wand, I have another small job in mind for them.
How about if they grant amnesty to every criminal in America? After all, don’t we want to bring these fugitives out of the shadows? Many of them, after all, are the fathers of children who are American citizens. I mean, do we really want to split up families by sending these hard-working burglars, bilkers and bank robbers, off to jail?
friday, may 18, 2007
how to lose friends and alienate customers
A guy buys a Lincoln Mark VIII in 1996 and babies it, racking up a mere 66,000 miles. Then the engine cooling fan stops working.
It is often said that cars have become computers on wheels. That sounds cool until you think about how difficult it is to keep a home computer running for a decade, replacement parts and software so difficult to obtain as the years pass. And the explosion of vehicle models has forced dealerships to stock more parts than ever before.
The module in Field's Mark VIII controls the cooling fan and the fuel pump through an eight-pin connector into the car's wiring harness. For whatever reason, the failure has affected only the cooling fan and not the fuel pump.
One day, the car overheated and blew out the radiator. Field put a new $650 radiator into the car. Then mechanics discovered the cooling fan wasn't turning on as the car heated up. The problem wasn't the heat sensor or the fan itself, but rather the module that switches on the fan.
So big deal, buy another, right?
A quick check with the parts department at a Ford dealership turned up an empty bin. The mechanics plugged into Ford's national parts network, which can find parts at any warehouse or any dealership. Not a single module could be found.
Tough luck, says Ford.
the world in pictures
Check out Flickrvision and watch in real time as people upload their photographs from all over the globe.
gore-y details
Reverend Al Gore has a new book coming out and Time brings us an excerpt. This time Al is all worked up about, oh, all kinds of stuff:
A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.
To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
Hmm. Richard Clarke described this scene in Against All Enemies (pp. 143-144)
Snatches, or more properly "extraordinary renditions," were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government.... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law.
Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that.
Gore laughed and said, "That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass."
Gore also bemoaned the way we went to war against Iraq. But Al said:
“Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”
“We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”
Both statements were made on Sept. 23, 2002, part of the Democrats' imagined "rush to war" (that took 18 months!). Gore and virtually anyone with a microphone had their say about Iraq. Even Jeannine Garafalo got airtime. Sheesh.
It would be tedious to go through Al's latest diatribe, but remember these things about Gore-Clinton
- Gore-Clinton violated campaign finance laws, both in spirit and in fact. Remember Al Gore laundering money via the Buddhist Temple?
- Al Gore headed a special commission on airline safety. If Gore-Clinton had followed through on the talk, 9/11 might have been averted.
- Gore-Clinton cynically looked away as 800,000 Rwandans were hacked to death
One more from Gore:
...our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum.
Yeah, no more presidential pardons for those with oodles of cash.
We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science.
Indeed. Al's own movie is a distortion of science.
We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.
The truth, of course, is whatever Al believes it to be, and you'd better no contradict him.
Permalink
war is hell
This old newsreel video clip from the Smoking Gun recalls the rules under which the Greatest Generation won World War 2. And the phrase "martyred" at the end of the video clip has an unaccustomed application.
While people may not want to return to the methods of World War 2, it is dishonest to pretend, as it is now fashionable to do, that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conducted war according to some high moral standard that the Bush administration has somehow betrayed. The current rules of engagement of Bush-Hitler would be unrecognizable compared to that waged by the Greatest Generation, and more to point, compared to warfare conducted by any other country in the world today. World War 2 was the era of unrestricted submarine warfare, unlimited attacks on enemy cities, the development of weapons of mass destruction to counter threats which turned out were nonexistent and the internment of thousands of Japanese-American civilians.