let's postpone this ending

a scary story, via instapundit

pull over

swerving left

speaking truth to power

there's nothing i could add to the title or the article

poor decisions

Wearing sackcloth and ashes, Obama chastised himself and everyone who voted for him by saying “we cannot continue to excuse poor decisions”.

update: He also returned the $600 million he used to purchase the presidency, saying "We cannot give the appearance of using tax dollars to reward leaders who have done a poor job."

the alarm

keeps ringing

never forget

sorry, i just couldn't help contradicting my previous post.

forget globally

act locally

understand?

a random quote, out of the past, and out of context. dad recently found a little note in a little gideon's new testament in his book collection. it's handwritten, but we can't tell whose handwriting it is. it says:

"I know you believe you
understand what you think
I said, but I'm not sure
you realize that what you
heard is not what I meant."

Beck, Rush*, Thinking

*not the great rock band, that other guy.

There's an old pop-culture question that goes "are you an Elvis guy or a Beatles guy?" When conservatives eventually win the culture war, do you suppose people will start asking "are you a Rush guy or a Beck guy?"?

My answer would be "neither", leaning slightly towards Beck. While I agree with a lot of what both men have to say, it's because I have reached those conclusions for myself, and I dislike the "dittohead" bandwagon phenomenon, no matter which part of the political spectrum it's in.

VDH: pleas for sanity

go read them all:

Do No Harm
Turmoil
Flip Flops
Suggestion Box
Mad Men

power grab

dude, stop insulting orcs like that

;)

profiles in cowardice

"It is time to re-evaluate the words and actions of the war's opponents in the stark light of a history that proved them wrong."

On this sixth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq, there is finally a consensus among supporters and opponents that we've won the war. The surge that Bush launched and Democrats opposed has been successful and, as a result, Iraq has become a Middle Eastern democracy, an anti-terrorist regime, and an American ally.

It would be hard to imagine a more remarkable turnabout or a more comprehensive repudiation of conventional political wisdom. Yet this has not led to a comparable reappraisal by critics of the war of their previous attacks, or to any mea culpas by Democrats who launched a scorched earth campaign against the president who led it, and continued it for five years while the war dragged on.

The Democratic attacks on the war described America's commander-in-chief as a liar who misled his country and sent American soldiers to die in a conflict that was unnecessary, illegal and unjust. This made prosecution of the war incalculably harder while strengthening the resolve of our enemies to defeat us.

(T)he Democrats' modus operandi seems to be to approve something and then, when it becomes politically expedient, to act as if they were opposed and outraged all along. This is what they did with corporate bonuses, for example, and its what they did with Bush and the Iraq war. No one will ever mistake these guys for profiles in political courage.

It's also interesting to me that ever since it became clear that the war was essentially over, that we had won, and that Bush had largely been vindicated, we've heard next to nothing about Iraq in our media. They don't want to remind people, I guess, how terribly wrong they were about it.

read the rest of both links

T38

Much has been said of the long service life of the B52, but there's another pentagenarian aircraft still in service. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the first flight of the T38 Talon, the world's first and most produced supersonic trainer.

I remember watching T38s and T37s flying around our town on training flights out of the (now closed) Reese AFB. Some of those planes might have been piloted by the last Crown Prince of Iran.

bloodbath

unfortunately, algor is less easily sated than the mayan deities:

Back in 1500... the Aztecs figured the climate debate was over, and that if you wanted rain and sunshine and other such blessings, it was simple enough what you had to do – sacrifice 20,000 lives a year to the right gods.

In the year 2009, it's an equally sure thing in the minds of some that carbon in the atmosphere is going to fry us unless we put the welfare of millions on the line, and here is the latest on President Obama's plan – it could cost industry almost $2 trillion over an eight-year period.

That hefty sum to be paid out to a cap-and-trade carbon tax would snatch money from the pockets of consumers far more than rising oil prices did, hinder economic growth and instill other ways generate human misery, and all in the name of what?...

...carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, that it is crucial to life and that it is a "bit player" in the atmosphere... at least "90 percent of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor," and that the issue is whether the carbon dioxide will "substantially increase water's contribution" to causing something awful.

The evidence from measurements of all kinds is that it won't, said Happer, pointing out that "the current warming period began about 1800, at the end of the little ice age," when there wasn't a big increase in carbon dioxide.

It wasn't fossil fuels that did the warming deed – a good deed, by the way – and a war against these energy-producing, societal benefactors would therefore be as futile in controlling climate as slicing open bodies with a ceremonial knife and ripping out hearts.

revolting!

here's a much better way to spend april 15th

TOTUS

uhh got a pic 4 d http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/23/fun-with-totus-teleprompter-of-the-united-states/ n like d malocaltent gimme wurdz 2 tipe on d blog makurz

sellers' remorse

when will it set in?

shocking!

Another great Michael Ramirez IBD cartoon

quote of the week?

quote of the year! via dustbury:

How come when I put my AmEx bill on my Visa, it’s stupid, but when the government does it, it’s stimulus?

insensitive remarks

who slipped this one in the teleprompter?

Leno asked Obama if the White House bowling alley had been replaced yet with a basketball court. Obama, who scored a 37 while bowling on the campaign trail and whose bowling skills became the butt of jokes, said that he had been practicing and recently bowled a game of 129.

“No, that’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said mockingly.

“It was like Special Olympics, or something,” Obama replied.

a better punchline would have been "it was like the kos kidz or something".

"Right"ing Wrongs

AP: US endorses UN gay rights text

"The United States supports the U.N.'s statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity and is pleased to join the other 66 U.N. member states who have declared their support of the statement," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

"The United States is an outspoken defender of human rights and critic of human rights abuses around the world," Wood told reporters. "As such, we join with other supporters of this statement, and we will continue to remind countries of the importance of respecting the human rights of all people in all appropriate international fora."

...and I will continue to remind the UN of the importance of respecting the human rights of Israel in all appropriate international fora.

Unpopular At Any Speed

Those wimpy hybrids don't survive market crashes well either.

...automakers believe they have little choice but to make more hybrids. Though car buyers are losing interest, politicians are pushing them as key to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and limiting the global-warming gases that cars emit into the atmosphere.

In January, President Obama called on the industry to "thrive by building the cars of tomorrow" and prepare for federal and state regulations that could push average fuel economy above 40 miles per gallon by 2020.

"The automakers are in the situation of needing to pacify politicians that are in the position to bail them out with expensive fuel-efficient cars," said Rebecca Lindland, auto analyst with IHS Global Insight. "But shouldn't it be more about satisfying the needs of the American consumer?"

Silly Rebecca. The American consumer has no idea about what is really in his best interest. Only our overlords in Washington DC truly understand the complex issues of mass transportation, personal safety, economics, and environmental sustainability necessary to produce an automobile that perfectly satisfies the needs of the American consumer while simultaneously freeing us from dependence on foreign oil and saving the planet.

For years, liberals and environmentalists have been peddling conspiracy theories about "big" industry working to keep innovative, fuel-efficient automobiles off the market. But as this story clearly illustrates, the truth is that Americans prefer dependable, well-understood technology in their cars. They want cars that are not overly expensive to repair or maintain. They also prefer them to be big enough for comfort and to provide a reasonable amount of protection in a crash. Tiny exotic cars simply fail to live up to these basic requirements.

In other words, it will take nothing short of a catastrophe to force Americans to drive hybrid or electric automobiles in large numbers. And it seems most likely at this time that such a catastrophe will be the direct result of government planning, combined with good old government mismanagement and inefficiency.

If Americans don't buy these cars voluntarily, then how will American automakers recoup the billions of dollars that they have been forced to spend on their design, manufacture, and marketing? You guessed it -- more government bailouts and subsidies -- and government contracts to purchase the vehicles, since no one else wants them. It's not a stretch to imagine Ford and GM in five years, stuck on permanent Federal government life support, shackled by the regulations and restrictions attached to the money, building eco-weenie cars that only hippies, cheap Europeans, and government agencies will buy; while foreign automakers like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Isuzu, BMW, and Daimler take over the larger American consumer car market with dependable, safe, and efficient gasoline-powered automobiles.

All that being said, I'd consider buying an Aptera if and when its hybrid system proves itself... for fun, and in addition to a real car.

change!

hope it continues? yes we can!

JList?

JHivemind.

have some sense of perspective

Have you ever seen one of those charts that progressively compares the relative sizes of the planets to the sun to other stars, or the animation that zooms out from an atom to the known universe? These are even scarier.

outrage

every time you hear "outrage", "bonus", "aig", "madoff" in the news, remember where the outrage should really be directed:

We should be outraged that congress irresponsibly wrote the TARP legislation in such a way as to put no restrictions on how the money would be spent.

We should be outraged that congress irresponsibly pressured financial institutions to make loans to people who had no way to pay them back, thus precipitating the mess we're in.

We should be outraged that congress votes themselves outstanding health insurance, retirement benefits (they're vested after only five years of service at age 62), and a hefty salary ($174,000 for rank and file members) with automatic pay raises, all from the public purse.

We should be outraged that congress puts hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful earmarks in appropriations bills that are often little more than ways to reward supporters back home.

It's certainly arrogant and disgraceful that AIG executives accepted those bonuses (The company was apparently required by contract to give them), but no more disgraceful than the behavior of our political leadership in Washington who abuse their power everyday by taking money from taxpayers and using it, either directly or indirectly, for their own personal gain.

Barack Obama promised he would end this sort of politics, but so far from ending it he's simply turned out to be an enabler of it. That should outrage us, too.

back to the future?

it's hip to be square!

mental illness in the real world

some causes
some symptoms
some recoveries

to boldly spend

...what nobody has spent before!

today's ant and grasshopper

A brilliant retelling, sad but true.

I never liked that movie

The Manchurian Candidate

O, now he tells us

Now that the big 0 has ramrodded his socialist spending plan through Congress without allowing questions about the pork-bloating attached to it, now he says "the national crisis is not as bad as we think"?!?

Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation's "confidence builder in chief," Obama said Americans shouldn't be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was "highly optimistic" about the long term.

The president's proposals for major health care, energy and education changes in the midst of economic hard times faced skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as senators questioned his budget outlook and the deficits it envisions in the middle of the next decade.

The plan must positively reek if even beltway Democrats complain about the pork.

But Obama, speaking to top executives of the Business Roundtable, expressed an optimistic vision and called for patience.

This sounds like a line common to bank heist movies - "This will all be over soon. Everybody stay quiet and nobody will get hurt."

Richard Parsons, chairman of beleaguered Citigroup Inc., asked if Obama could offer some help in a national battle "between confidence and fear."

"A smidgen of good news and suddenly everything is doing great. A little bit of bad news and ooohh , we're down on the dumps," Obama said. "And I am obviously an object of this constantly varying assessment. I am the object in chief of this varying assessment."

No sir, Mr President, you are the SUBJECT. You are the fearmonger, and your policies are exacerbating the problems you claim to be solving. The best thing you could do for our country would be to resign now, and take your crooked cronies somewhere they might be appreciated. I hear Mugabe's hiring...

"I don't think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say," Obama added. "Things two years ago were not as good as we thought because there were a lot of underlying weaknesses in the economy. They're not as bad as we think they are now."

Translation: "Give my socialist agenda time to work, and in a couple of years these will seem like the good old days. You haven't seen anything yet."

update: even Das People's Democratic Republic of Europe balks at the big 0's spending ideas!

we of little faith, O

via C.S.M., we can hope, can't we?

My President should fail when he tries to mirror the actions of Hugo Chavez. He should fail when he tries to implement the policies of anti-Semitic, anti-Christian bigots at the New York Times. He should fail when he seeks to negotiate with “moderate” terrorists (AKA - murderers, thugs and enemies of America that have killed many of our men women and children). He should fail when he plans to use tax payer money to bail out corporate entities that stand no chance of success because their business models suck. He should fail when he initiates a cap and trade system that will raise taxes on all Americans based on the false claims of idiot Global Warming activists. I don’t want my President to succeed when he declares that the war on terror is a failure when it isn’t. My President should fail when he cancels voucher programs that allows kids to seek better schools because the ones their government set up are failing them. My President should fail when he passes executive orders based on lies about Stem Cell research, lumping embryonic stem cell research into an exclusive category as if adult stem cell research isn’t every bit as promising, if not more promising, less risky and a perfectly viable moral alternative. These are all fail worthy offenses.

Americans should tell their President no, not in my name, when he acts like a dictator instead of a leader. We should hope for failure on each of these radical agenda items and every radical one that precedes or follows them. We are not obligated to stand by silently. We should do just the opposite. This is why we have the right to free speech.

I have little faith or hope for the kind of change being ushered in by a man whose administration spends its time plotting ways to attack private citizens for having different views. I have little hope that a man that appoints a tax cheat to run the treasury can be trusted to do the right thing on any other front. I have little faith or hope in a man that would use the power afforded him by the American people to steal money from successful people and redistribute it like candy to his next generation of voters. I want him to fail because he is failing us by acting like the ultimate weasel that we all knew he was.

States' Rights

Eleven of the states remind the Big O of the Tenth Amendment:

(The 10th Amendment) is as valid today as it was when it was first made in the 1780s. The poor 10th. With the exception of the 3rd - quartering troops - all the other amendments are part of our everyday life, granting us freedom of speech, the right to keep guns, the expectation of due process and trials by jury, but the 10th stands out there at the end, largely unthought about... until events happen like President Obama’s efforts to force the federal government down the throats of the states.

In response to the stimulus bill’s federal demands on states receiving stimulus money, 11 states have applied the 10th amendment and stood up to Obama: Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. All 11 have have introduced bills and resolutions schooling the prez on the 10th Amendment, telling him it protects their rights and the peoples’ rights by limiting his power.

...not that states are always right, but it is easier to restrain individual state corruption than distant and unresponsive federal corruption.

let's hope for change

The results of affirmative action are even more dangerous in the Formerly Caucasian House than they are in the business world.:

President Obama likes to compare himself to Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but both of these men struggled with much worse than Mr. Obama is facing, and FDR was further handicapped with the after-effects of polio. If it is true that President Obama feels overwhelmed now what will he feel like if a terrorist attack is thrown into the mix or if the media should turn on him and subject him to the same relentless daily criticism to which George W. Bush was treated. It'll doubtless be enough to drive him back to the cigarettes.

The nation's voters took an accomplished high school quarterback and put him directly into the Super Bowl. The results have so far been predictably unpretty. The White House is no place for on-the-job training - not even for a candidate who can seduce a nation with mellifluous promises of Hope and Change. Nevertheless, we're still only in the opening minutes of the game. Things might get much better for Barack Obama just as they did for Bill Clinton after a shaky start. Or, it may be that the President is indeed out of his depth, in which case we're in for a turbulent four years.

to abortionists, on choice

Surely Catholic hospitals should be free to choose whether or not to keep their doors open?

party like it's 2009

Quoth Obama "Let them eat cake" - or perhaps more accurately "Let's have their cake and eat it too"...?

another meme

...except i don't have 25 albums to list. these are my five "blockbusters":

Audion by Synergy
A Passage In Time by Dead Can Dance
Faith Hope Love by King's X
Mark II by Sorten Muld
Fearful Symmetry by DA

Non-Galt

As much as "going John Galt" might appeal to me, I found some higher reasons not to do so:

Caesar's taxation policies weren't fair either.

Our current hardships are relatively light.

Wage and tax slavery are not nearly as bad as actual slavery.

Doing good will silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.

And while I struggle against slandering our recently-elected Communist-in-Chief, I will still speak out against his foolish and destructive policies, and know that the solution to our problems cannot be solved with mere politics.

p.s. if you want this condensed to a bumper-sticker-sized phrase, how about "shrug the socialists, not your morals."?

p.p.s. there's some advice for "the bad guys" too ;)

Demopathy

Go read every word of this article:

The America that defeated Nazi Germany, fascist Japan and finally the Soviet Union, giving in to a pack of provincial chicken thieves?!

You have let your own good be turned against you. What the Schmeissers and Mousers and Arisakas and Kalashnikovs couldn’t do, a few socialist clowns and liars got away with, without a scratch.

Do you think that’s democracy? That’s demopathy, a disease of democracy that allows parasitic entities to take democracy over and turn all that makes democracy good into bad, all that makes democracy sane into crazy, Freedom into slavery, pride into shame, truth into lie, the good into the bad, and, perversely, the bad into the good. The rats have taken over the ship and strut their stuff around like the ship belongs to them and even more, like they have built it and nobody ever helped...

perspective on poverty

Viewpoint:

I don't know how the disparity between today's rich and poor is relevant or meaningful or particularly disturbing. Wealth and poverty are relative. What difference does it make if one person has enough income to be comfortable, but someone else has a hundred times as much? What difference does it make if that gap widens every year as long as the "poorer" person is not regressing in absolute terms. The inequality that Dionne and Wallis should be talking about, and rejoicing in, is the inequality between our contemporary poor and those who were wealthy in almost every other period of human history.

I say they should rejoice because our poor are astonishingly wealthy, at least in material goods, compared to almost everyone else who has ever lived, even the wealthiest people.

A multi-millionaire from a hundred and fifty years ago actually had a lot less and in many ways had it a lot harder than most Americans living below the poverty line have today...

read the rest.

deliberate destruction?

yes, obviously

update: need a picture?

it is a cult

just like "dissent is patriotic", "separation of church and state" seems to have disappeared from the left's lexicon.

what's a picture worth?

let's see: 1000 words into eleventeen-gazillions equals...

A vast _____-wing conspiracy?

Conference calls + marketing machines + deep-pocketed anti-Americans + chicago corruption + gullible voters = obama presidency

Words Mean Things

from House of Eratosthenes (edited):

The paradox is this: The electorate wants to make the final decision. But they need to be led like a child. If they aren’t led like a child, they end up picking whoever is taller. Or whoever they’d most like to see on American Idol. These are symptoms not quite so much of a dissolving society (although it is that), as a lack of leadership.

Look at Ronald Reagan. Yes, he was more "fun" than Jimmy Carter, and he was more fun than Walter Mondale. But he didn’t win those elections because he was a fun guy; we didn’t talk that much about hopey-changey charismatic goodness in 1980 and 1984. He won them because we had spirited debates about policies. We had spirited debates about policies because Reagan took control of the debates and made sure that’s what they were about. And then it became blindingly obvious that his opponents’ policies were just-plain-bad.

(Elections have) descended into a high-school popularity contest, and it’s done that because of a lack of leadership from all of the candidates...

---

Things that we should be hearing about all the time, not just during election campaigns... but during election campaigns especially. The air should be thick with these words.

• Liberty.
• Freedom.
• Opportunities.
• Individual Ambition.
• The chance to make yourself all you can be.
• Higher standard of living.
• Defense.
• Victory.
• Limited government.
• States’ rights.
• Sovereignty.

Those will fit on bumper stickers... although, by themselves, they do not quite make the point. The point is that, as Americans, whether we lean right or lean left, we all should be living and breathing these things, every waking moment of every day — and then dreaming about them as we sleep. Something is viciously wrong with our country if & when that is not the case.

update re "they need to be led like a child": I think a better way of stating this would be that, as Thomas Jefferson said, the electorate needs to be well-informed.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."

Hence the leftists' perpetual push to take over schools and the media, and silence all opposition.

To obama supporters

I ask a question usually asked during campaign season: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"