How the lazy blogger blogs, part the third (for today anyway)

h/t Dependable Renegade

Bill Keller wins – meet the new Joe Lieberman

The once (and never-again-please-I-beg-you) Editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, steps up to speak out about Syria:

As a rule, I admire President Obama’s cool calculation in foreign policy . . . frankly I’ve shared his hesitation about Syria, in part because*, during an earlier column-writing interlude at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.

*Good old Bill, predictable fellow that he is, still thinks it’s all about him. (The whole sorry thing is here.)

Of course, there are important lessons to be drawn from our sad experience in Iraq: Be clear about America’s national interest. Be skeptical of the intelligence. Be careful whom you trust. Consider the limits of military power. Never go into a crisis, especially one in the Middle East, expecting a cakewalk.

Now, here we go . . .

But in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.

Looks like he got over that gun-shyness thing just in time for Sock It To Me: Chapter II. I think John McCain and Ms. Graham should have the guy over for a few cocktails and high fives.

It’s not like she’s Fox & Friends! She’s Peggy Noonan, my dears, Peggy Noonan

Charles Pierce at Esquire tells us today that Wall Street Journal columnist and TV pundit, Peggy of the Noonans, thinks Obama was rude to Dubayew Thursday down at that library opening. She scolds:

He veered into current policy disputes, using Mr. Bush’s failed comprehensive immigration reform to buttress his own effort. That was manipulative, graceless and typical.

Here’s what the fake President said, what Noonan described as ‘graceless’:

Seven years ago, President Bush restarted an important conversation by speaking with the American people about our history as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. And even though comprehensive immigration reform has taken a little longer than any of us expected, I am hopeful that this year, with the help of Speaker Boehner and some of the senators and members of Congress who are here today, that we bring it home – for our families, and our economy, and our security, and for this incredible country that we love. And if we do that, it will be in large part thanks to the hard work of President George W. Bush.

And there was this:

Back to the point. What was nice was that all of them-the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons-seemed like the old days. “The way we were.” They were full of endurance, stamina, effort. Also flaws, frailty, mess. But they weren’t . . . creepy.

PIERCE: Back when the Clintons actually were in the White House, Peggy Noonan called the First Lady at the time, among other things, “a highly credentialed rube,” a “person who never ponders what is right,” and “a squat and grasping woman.” But not creepy, not like the current First Family.

(Psst, Peg doesn’t like the Kenyan much. And as she’s speaking here in family plurals – FLOTUS and the daughters? Also creepy. )

The Twitter and the ‘Twixt and the ‘Tween

Any reader of this blog knows of my fondness for comparing the financial and circulation differences between big name liberal and conservative publications. Previous entries (here and here) have compared only print publications. So how about the some presence on social media? Let us look at The Twitter and see who’s got the followers.

To begin, the big boys:

• The New York Times – 8,207,190 followers
• The Wall Street Journal – 2,730, 128 followers
• The Washington Times (just for the fun of it) – 70,187 (Remember that one next time it’s used as a source on radio or tv.)

Okay, how about some individuals who dispense wisdom financial and economic?

• Rick Santelli (patron saint of the Tea Party) – 13,958
• Paul Krugman – 1,003,471
• Larry Kudlow – 58,592

What about cable teevee’s 9:00 p.m. stars?

• Sean Hannity – 668,302
• Rachel Maddow – 2,568,204

And a few miscellaneous big names:

• Michelle Malkin – 508,521
• Michael Moore – 1,521, 596
• Rush Limbaugh – 356,322
• Matt Drudge – 184,243 (fading in fame?)
• Bill O’Reilly – 364,663

Who has followers in the millions? Same story as with print media.

How Obama fails after he wins

Maureen Dowd, who often makes my teeth hurt as much as Wolfe Blitzer, gets it exactly right today. The gun purchase background check legislation should have passed the Senate and could have passed the Senate, if it had just a little push from the Oval Office.

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system . . . It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him . . .

President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that’s not how adults with power respond to things. . . .

The president was oblivious to red-state Democrats facing tough elections. Bring the Alaskan Democrat Mark Begich to the White House residence, hand him a drink, and say, “How can we make this a bill you can vote for and defend?”

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home . . . ”

. . . Obama should have pressed his buddy [Sen Tom Coburn]: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

This is where Obama fails. He needs to remind himself that he is “the most powerful man in the world” and then he needs to get his hands dirty.

I was kind of hoping they could make it

The Westboro Baptist Church will picket Roger Ebert’s funeral on Monday, because he obviously asked for it. They’re very clear about that in their statement:

“American entertainment industry publicity leech Roger Ebert took to Twitterverse to mock the faithful servants of God at Westboro Baptist church, just days before he received the horrifying summons.”

To be fair, the tweets were pretty obscene. You may want to close your eyes:

Once more, Ebert . . .

“Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

I’m adding this to my QUOTES page right now. At The Week, they’ve compiled more Ebert quotes.

An elegant and kind man with a poet’s touch

Roger Ebert, who died yesterday, began blogging in earnest some years back after cancer robbed him of speech. He racked up millions of hits and every post generated hundreds of comments.  I’ve written about him a few times. From March of 2010:

I discovered his blog a few months ago and was enchanted – a fine writer, a profoundly human man and very very brave. He’s wasting away from cancer – can no longer speak or eat. He doesn’t even have a jaw anymore. And yet he blogs. And he cares. And he has his finger on the pulse of the humanity that is us. I wish I knew him.

Roger Ebert’s Journal was much more than movies; while he chronicled the challenges of his illness he also wrote – always elegantly – of so many other things – of politics, music, art, children and cooking.

He and I were born in the same year, so when he wrote of his own youth, which he often did - as often happens with those battling terminal illnesses - I went back in time with him. Like in this passage from a very recent post titled “How I am a Roman Catholic”:

The nuns at St. Mary’s were Dominicans. They lived in a small square convent behind the school, holding six nuns (some taught two grades) and a cook and their housekeeping nun, who kept a sharp eye trained on us through her screen door. We had humble playground equipment, a swing set and two basketball hoops. Our principal sport was playing King of the World. This involved two boys standing on a log, each trying to push the other off. The housekeeper would open the screen door and shout, “If you break your necks, you have only yourselves to blame.”

It was from these nuns, especially Sister Nathan and Sister Rosanne, that I learned my core moral and political principles. I assumed they were Roman Catholic dogma. Many of them involved a Social Contract between God and man, which represented classical liberalism based on empathy and economic fairness. We heard much of Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum”–”On Capital and Labor.”

I’ll miss him and his writing but I’ll go back now and again to the archives. There is wisdom there.

Let us leap once again without looking: how something ordinary becomes a threat to the Republic, a threat I tell you!

Another crime at our schools!

Something old becomes new because a few days ago FOX & Friends found out about it, or  more accurately, found out about a little part of it, and that was all they needed to sputter into outrage, along with the entire right-wing noise machine – especially since the word Jesus was uttered without the genuflect.

We all know how this goes: it’s a tiresome formula - raise the noise level sufficiently to feed the audience and they’ll keep coming back.

Here’s the story from a column by Frank Cerabino at The Palm Beach Post (he’s a favorite read for me):

 An adjunct professor at FAU teaching an intercultural communications class was following a textbook exercise that called for students to write the word “Jesus” on a piece of paper and instructing them to step on the paper.

“Most will hesitate,” the handbook says. “Ask why they can’t step on the paper. Discuss the importance of symbols in culture.”

One student  objected to the voluntary classroom exercise, and made a complaint to the news media, saying his professor told him to “stomp on Jesus” and that he was suspended from class for his refusal to participate. . .

In fact, the student was suspended for threatening the Professor.

. . . [the instructor] was following an exercise written by a professor at a Catholic college in Wisconsin, an exercise that has been used for 10 years in colleges without incident . . . the exercise was designed to be an affirmation of faith and a recognition of the emotional power that disrespect of religion carries — a way for students to understand the strong reactions other cultures have to disrespect for their own religion.

Our 30% Governor said that “the professor’s lesson was offensive, and even intolerant, to Christians and those of all faiths who deserve to be respected as Americans entitled to religious freedom.”  Which was the very point of the classroom exercise. But no matter.

He even offered an apology to the student and called for an investigation.

Maybe before our indicted-for-Medicare-fraud-former-hospital-executvive governor cranks up the old investigation machine, he might look at saving the taxpayers a few bucks -  he could just read a full news account.  But that wouldn’t get him into the middle of the story.

Back at FOX Mike Huckabee came forth with my favorite comment: “People wonder what’s wrong with higher education, This is what’s wrong with higher education.” Right there is a good argument to stop the dangerous teaching of Engineering or the Classics. Of course had he paid more attention when he was pursing his own higher education, he might have been inspired to learn the whole story.

Sorry FOXers, this isn’t about ‘envy’ or whatever your current word is.This is danger, a threat the future of the nation.

What David Frum called the conservative entertainment complex continues to dismiss and even mock any expressed concern about income inequality in the United States. They honestly don’t know what they’re talking about. This is one of the very best explanatory videos I’ve ever watched. It’s pretty viral right now, so you may have seen it. If not, take the full six minutes to watch; every moment of this is clear, precise, informative and ultimately of course quite alarming.

Any country that lets this continue dooms itself to oligarchy, to instability, civic unrest . . . a nasty future awaits and denying it doesn’t make it not so.

h/t friend Brian. (Nice to see you at the theatre too!)

I’m going with sexy in a boy/girl kind of way

Over at Buzzfeed, responding to the urgent yet eternal need to fill space with any and all arcana the little webloggers can think up . . . they’ve morphed everyone’s favorite cable talking heads so we have an O’Reilly/Maddow, an S.E. Cupp/Toure (one of the better ones) and on . . . missing from the fun are Matthews, Hannity, a few others. Here’s my favorite – it really works!

Who is authoring this new character, “Joe Scarborough”

In the last recent months, credible media have begun treating Joe Scarborough as a serious thinker with something to say. He’s penning op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post and appearing on Sunday news (not a high standard, but he’s there).

Most recently he engaged in an infamous exchange with Paul Krugman on the Charlie Rose show where, as if hosting the Tim Matthews Memorial Wanna-Be Gottcha’ Competition, he went after Krugman in an unusual and nearly hostile exchange. (Rose usually keeps that sort of argument from developing because his audience isn’t into it. But he didn’t that night.)

I watch Morning Joe if I watch morning TV (hey, it’s a step up from Honey Boo Boo, so give me credit for that). What I’ve seen, regularly, is the Scarborough routine wherein he instantly adopts as his own whatever his guest has just said. He does this almost every day. And heads around the table nod. Irksome.

And now this escalation, so I ask: what outside entity is creating this new persona. Who is crafting – maybe for network TV, maybe for politics yet again – the 2013 edition of Joe Scarborough? Because I don’t think he’s steering that ship.

Coulter isn’t stupid; maybe she was just drunk?

Too many cocktails perhaps – how else to explain these clips. I always saw the woman as an opportunist (a smart one, she identified an emerging market early on and fed it with titles like Slander(!), Treason(!)*, Godless(!), Demonic(!) and Mugged (by guess who!) among other illustrious works.

Judge for yourself. (And what ever happened to her? I’ve not seen her around.)

* For anyone who’s forgotten, this one was the defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Another gun tragedy

John Hinderacker of the Powerline blog – once a big deal (quite undeserved) and now not so much – is out of ammunition and can’t go play today.

But I couldn’t shoot because, with the exception of 100 rounds of 22LR and the loaded 9 mm magazines that I keep at home for purposes of self-defense, I was out of ammo.

And the stores don’t have any more which we’ve been hearing about, for reasons we’ve also been hearing about. But here’s a new one, to me anyway:

How about the fact that government agencies are buying up billions of rounds? There have been lots of news reports and lots of rumors, but no clear explanation of why the federal government has invested so massively in ammunition–including the most popular civilian calibers–over the last year. One way or another, it seems that there is a story here. But for it to be pursued, we would need “reporters.” Remember them? Nah, that was a bygone era: you probably don’t.

Maybe he should talk to this guy whose articles:

. . . have appeared in National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, American Experiment Quarterly, and newspapers from Florida to California.

His name is John Hinderacker.

 

Hi.

Much been happening around here? I just took a quick look at activity stats and it seems I’ve some catching up to do. Perhaps you’ve noticed the unbloggy bug is going around (election season withdrawal?); I got hit hard but am getting back up on my feet.

One thing I did observe over these recent days is that poor old Grampa McCain  is still railing at anyone and everyone to ‘get off my lawn!’.

But the Sunday gasbags must like that;  he remains the reigning champion for appearances at those (sooo tired) secular services -  I believe it’s 88 times on Meet the Press alone.

I think the old dear needs people to believe that Vietnam Iraq was a necessary and just war.

Where is Dylan Ratigan?

Neither his website nor his Facebook page show any activity after June 2012.   Many of us remember his infamous “rant heard round the world” on his MSNBC show in  August of 2011, after which nervousness ensued in various quarters. It was full of ugly truths and made plutocracrats across the planet very very uncomfortable. And, I’m sure, angry. Shortly after, Ratigan abruptly announced he was ending the show and said he’d be launching some kind of collaborative activist entity. He put up a website, got on the Twitter and FB, sold his loft in NYC and went – where?

Here is a vid of the rant, and  his own follow-up post about it. The transcript itself is below the fold if you would rather read, but the passion in the video is powerful and I think it’s well worth the three plus minutes of your time.

I picked up most of this at a blog called The Golden Age of Gaia which is, unsurprisingly given the name, a very metaphysical place. (The post is here.)

Dylan Explains his rant:

I’m Mad As Hell. How About You?

August 10, 2011

Yesterday, on TV, I exploded. I spent two minutes giving a primal yell at our political system, demanding the extraction of our money and dignity end. It was my most heartfelt and emotional moment on television, ever.

And the emails poured in. I hit a chord, because it’s something we all feel. Take a look.

With the markets in turmoil and the global financial architecture groaning under the weight of fraud and corruption, it’s a good time to think about what leadership would look like. Believe it or not, we have had good leadership, purpose, integrity, and aligned interests in this country.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy faced a dilemma — how could he direct our intense competitive passion with the Soviet Union in a direction other than war? The answer was his call for America to beat the Soviets to the moon. Kennedy understood power; if he did not lead us towards peaceful productive competition, that same animus would have turned violent (see this key memo on the real rationale for the space race). So he took the passion and focus of our society, the technology of war and missiles, and turned it into a great mission to explore space. He gave us a shared goal.

But that’s not the full story. Kennedy also demanded we use the finest scientists and engineers to design the rockets, and made sure that the path to the moon was based on the best possible solution to get there. For large rocket boosters, he was open to chemical, nuclear, liquid fuels, or any combination. He did not put a commission of astrologers in charge, and he did not put political cronies with no scientific background in charge of designing the rockets.

How very vulgar – and how typical – of Rupert Murdoch

He loves to peddle the tawdry and twist reality. His London papers, The Sun and the recently-deceased  criminal enterprise The News of the World, do and did regularly soil the streets of that city. Here, The New York Post carries the same tawdry gene. 

As is the case with the always-failing Moonie-owned Washington Times, the paper hasn’t earned a single dime in profit since Murdoch bought it in 1993. For a few years, he even dropped the price to 25 cents to prop up circulation (about 600,000). For comparison’s sake, The New York Times sells – in the City alone – about a million and a half papers every day and still makes a tidy profit.

That price by the way? The 25 cents? That was the cheapest single issue price in the country. (Have you noticed that keyboards no longer have a key for the cent sign.)

To support this rich man’s toy and to keep it on the streets so as to maintain a powerful voice advancing his own interests, both political and financial, costs Murdoch $70 million a year, almost a billion and a half dollars since ’93.

Calling Lou Dobbs . . .  your show on the FOX Business Channel might want to report on such an epic business fail.

Bits: Guns and Fox and meth and cross-dressing priests and CNN

Bit the first: Why do I turn on Fox News? Why?

Right now, they are covering:

1.  rallies at strip malls all around the country for Gun Appreciation Day and
2. threats on the life of the prez of NRA which, as reported by Fox, are  likely the fault of President Obama because he’s been mean and  demonizing the NRA. (Well, that’s obvious!)

Kind of nice how Gun Appreciation Day falls on the MLK Holiday weekend, isn’t it.

Bit the second: in news from my old backyard, a cross-dressing Monsignor in Bridgeport CT  has been arrested for dealing crystal meth. He had been pastor at the Catholic Cathedral there before he resigned last summer.

Since his resignation, he has been receiving a stipend from the Diocese and they had intended to keep paying it until:

 . . .  reading in the Connecticut Post that Wallin, 61, is accused by federal authorities of making so much money from selling the drug that he purchased an adult sex shop in North Haven named The Land of Oz to launder the money, Wallace said the diocese may stop the payments.

May stop paying him. May.

Sources with knowledge of the case told the Connecticut Post that while pastor, Wallin was observed dressing as a woman and was visited in his residence by men dressed as women who performed sex acts with him in the cathedral’s rectory. The sources said an assortment of sex toys was found in Wallin’s residence.

I guess Mother Church can be allowed a sigh of relief on that particular. It, at least, was consensual.

And bit the third: CNN has been covering the Inauguration since early this morning from a cold outdoor location facing the Capital. Because you can’t grab a seat too early. Or because they think it’s the Superbowl maybe?

That’s kind of comforting actually.  Seeing CNN be CNN reminds me that some of the world’s silliness has survived the world’s madness.

The guns, the doctors and the utter nonsense being repeated as fact

Snuggling with #4

As penance for some less than cordial behavior I exhibited over the weekend toward someone who was in the particular instance totally blameless, but had nevertheless been asking for it for a long time . . . as penance, this morning I exposed myself without any protection to a full five minutes of poisonous rant from the morbidly obese, four times married, indicted drug user, college dropout and all around moralist Mr. Rush Limbaugh, that arbiter of all things right and proper.

He had his size XXXXLLLL underwear in a knot – doctors! are! again! required! to! go! after! the! guns!  They must tell Obama. And name names. The ‘authorities’ said so. (the whole silly transcript is here under the headline “Regime deputizes gun-snitch doctors”).

Bet you didn’t know that long, long ago, doctors were required to inquire of their patients about whether there are firearms in the home. And to report. To the authorities. Whoever they are.

Who knew? Not me. Never heard of it. But there it was, hidden from us all until  Obamacare, which has now been revealed to be just a ploy to get our guns. Or something.

(Recently, some brave governors have gotten laws passed to put a stop to this outrage! The courts are slapping down the governors right and left but what else can we expect – they are, after all ‘in on it’.)

Writing about this stuff doesn’t capture the depth of the looney. But I must continue my penance to its logical conclusion and take words of Rush, from the mouth itself, and show them to be nothing but his brand of million-bucks-a-minute tonic for the rubes.

Sayeth the chubby one (after some cautiously phrased qualifiers):

So now doctors are being ordered  . . . to get information from them about gun ownership . . .   Doctors are now, quote, unquote, “permitted,” unquote, to do this. It makes ‘em deputies, agents of the state. Look at the position this puts the doctors in  [if they don't report].  The doctors are now under the thumb of Obamacare.  They had better comply.

And Rush gives us some history:

What’s happening here is this. For the longest time doctors have been required to ask parents and kids about this. I remember when this started, doctors were instructed to ask kids to rat out their parents on guns they had. That’s some years ago.

Total nonsense. The American Association of Pediatrics, as a policy (not a requirement) urges its practitioners to counsel parents of young children about the dangers of firearms in the home. There is no reporting requirement. The government is not involved in any way. The AAP guidelines are here.

On to where the ACLU is per FatBoy:

 Don’t ask me where the ACLU is.  I mean, anything to get rid of guns, the ACLU’s right there. Leftists are leftists, and that comes first with them.

Where the ACLU actually is, per their own website:

For seven decades, the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view [guns are about militia, not about an individual right].

The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.’s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

The ACLU disagrees . . . . We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.

This doctor/guns/government nonsense has been circulating via mass emails from the fringe for some time now. (A related history here from Snopes.) I first heard of it a few weeks ago when a family member informed me that this has been going on and that doctors have been helping the guvmint build a database so they can – let’s say it together – get! the! guns!

Meh but I’m tired of this.

Breathless headlines – threat alert off the charts!

Drudge makes his editorial contribution again to the important issues of our day. Well played, Matt. That ought to get the page views up nicely .. . .

Fuel to fire, or, how to incite the opposition

I like Michael Moore. He has been the  authentic artistic voice of the abandoned industrial cities of the mid-West and has grown into a successful and talented film maker and provocateur. I like him. And we need provocateurs always, but as a film director might concede, timing is everything.

Moore did no favors today for Chuck Hagel nor for the likely contentious confirmation battle to come once Obama, as expected, nominates Hagel for Sec Def. Moore penned a column for The Huffington Post. Here’s a bit:

But what you probably haven’t seen — because everyone has forgotten — is that back in 2007, Chuck Hagel went totally crazy and told the truth about our invasion of Iraq. Here’s what he said:

“People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.”

Hagel was and is a brave and pretty honest guy. He shares many of the qualities that make people like Chris Christie – candid, fearless. But Moore’s is a voice that inflames the right and when he stands up publicly for Chuck Hagel, I fear he makes the coming battle even  more difficult because we may now expect an even louder torrent of outrage from the usual suspects.

I’m reminded of a single line of movie dialogue from the 90′s. The film was The American President (one of my favorite films and in many ways a perfect movie). As the prez, Michael Douglas says “And we’re gonna get the guns. If we have to go door to door, we’ll get the guns.”

That probably didn’t help either.

Debt good. But, dear Elvis, don’t tell the American people

Here’s a year end roundup (aka The Wonky Awards) from Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog at The Washington Post. While wonky indeed, he’s presented it all in such a way that even we economically illiterate get the drift. It’s a terrific piece of work and challenges much of  the conventional narrative, but don’t expect any corrections in the media script – plain facts aren’t sexy.

This one strikes me as the most revealing example of media failure – every time a politician or partisan warns we’re going to become Greece!!!, the punditocracy ought to use this information to inform any discussion.

As we endlessly debated deficits and debts this year, every so often it was worth surfing over to the neglected corner of the Treasury.Gov Web site where they track the inflation-adjusted yield on government debt. Those quick jaunts were always a good reminder that everyone in politics was completely insane.

The thing you worry about when you have high deficits is that the market will lose its confidence in your ability to repay your debts. The place you’d see the market losing its confidence is in high interest rates on government debt — that would be a signal that the market is pricing in some risk of default. But all this year, the real yield on three- , five- , seven- and, occasionally, even 20-year government debt has been negative. Negative! The world is so dangerous that the market will literally pay us to keep their money safe.

If any corporation could borrow for less than nothing, they’d see that as the opportunity of a lifetime. We can borrow for less than nothing at a moment when our infrastructure is crumbling and millions are out of work. But instead of taking advantage of this amazing opportunity, we’re actually cutting our support to the economy and arguing exclusively about how to reduce our deficits. It’s embarrassing.

Okay, I’d like Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick too

From Crooked Timber: Eric Loomis, a blogger at Lawyers, Guns and Money is in the crosshairs – he has landed on an intertubes hit list, where Glenn Reynolds, the genuinely frightening Michelle Malkin, Town Hall, The Daily Caller and only Elvis knows who else have not only climbed aboard the tired outrage train, but are actually charging him with ‘eliminationist’ rhetoric. First, here’s what he said on Twitter:

“I was heartbroken in the first 20 mass murders. Now I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.”

Pretty threatening, eh? But metaphors be damned, these folk know a genuine threat of violence when they see one.

Back to Crooked Timber:

[the first shot came from] right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds [who] earlier voiced his anger over the State Department’s lax provision of security in Benghazi by demanding, “Can we see some heads roll?” . . . other conservative voices have joined in. The Daily Caller says Loomis “. . .  tweets demanding death for National Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre.” . . .  And just this morning, Michelle Malkin wrote at National Review Online: “So, it’s come to this: Advocating beheadings, beatings . . . Blood-lusting hate speech must not get a pass . . .”

By the way:

Loomis has already been questioned by the Rhode Island State Police, who told him that someone had informed the FBI that Loomis had threatened LaPierre’s life. . . .

Give it a rest girls.

Time Magazine got it wrong

Their no longer so eagerly-awaited “Person of the Year’ issue is out and they’ve chosen President Obama. That’s a FAIL.

Look, I’m an Obama fan. I think he’s acquited himself quite well as president and I continue to hold a little bit of hope that he might do more this term. But still, FAIL.

US Presidents are always consequential. Always. But this year, I think the most consequential person on the planet was a 14-year old girl.

Person of the Year should be Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who stood up for women’s rights, for human rights and continued to do so even as the Taliban threatened to kill her. Still she stood as tall as a person can stand.

What Malala did, what she now stands for, might be as consequential as the Arab Spring is. She’s the Arab Rosa Parks. She’s a hero.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead) 

Please no. (updated)

UPDATE: Engle and his team were indeed captured and held for five days. They were released this morning. Their captors were apparently Assad loyalists.

Tomorrow will be a better day. I can promise it.

I thought we passed this law 40 years ago, but hey, I’ll take it.

. . . beginning at midnight tonight, new Federal Communications Commission rules will bar television networks from blasting viewers with those excessively loud, screamy commercial breaks. . .

Adopted a year ago Thursday, the rules “will require commercials to have the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” the FCC says. The commission was prompted to action last year when Congress passed the “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act“—the CALM Act.

Story here.

Another home run for Rush – let fear and blame reign supreme!

Way to obfuscate Tubby. Way to go!

I tuned in for five minutes yesterday. He was upset about a quadrennial report titled “Global Trends 2030″ which, among other things (things he never mentioned) noted that the US would no longer be the world’s hegemon. Gasp. And, he added, you know who to blame! In fact, it’s been the Kenyan commie’s plan all along Rush told us. The only surprise said The Obese One is that the fake President isn’t making it happen sooner!

Having fed his captive audience, I imagine he then moved on to other horrors perpetrated by the Liberal traitor class and their illegitimate dictator.

Here’s the section of the report that ignited the rant-on-the-radio:

The world the council foresees is one in which the United States is no longer a uniquely dominant global power but remains preeminent because of its legacy strengths, its ability to form coalitions and the reluctance of China to assume a global role.

Scared yet?

But guess what else the report said? Guess what was the real big news?

By 2030, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population will not be impoverished and a politically powerful global middle class could total 3 billion people, up from 1 billion today.

These people, many from what are now developing countries, will be healthier, better educated and connected to the Internet. . .

If Rush wants to worry about something, he might try worrying about this:

The world of 2030 will be one in which the greatest strain within and between countries could be the struggle for resources — food, water and energy — and climate change could severely affect the ability to produce sufficient quantities of each.

Water. For a long  time, that’s been projected to be the most dangerous, damaging and destabilizing threat facing us. If you want to worry Rush, worry about water.

But it might be too hard to make that a Liberal plot, so stick with the easy stuff Big Guy. Then you can just slither on home to that fourth trophy wife.

 

Now I hear the pagans want their solstice tree back

Dare ya’!

One by one our American Christmas traditions have been falling into place – and right on schedule. Last week, the White House tree was delivered, then cyber-Thanksgiving went off with its now world-famous vulgar celebration of mindless consumerism, and tonight is the lighting of the Rock Center Tree. One thing has been missing though – until now.  Fox News has finally launched its traditional War on the War on Christmas. Sleigh bells ring.

I love these guys.

Okay, this is insignificant but honestly . . .

. . . does teh stupid never stop?

On yesterday’s edition of The Janet Mefferd Show, the host and her guest, Matt Philbin of the Media Research Center, took aim at an unlikely vector of liberal ideals: the world of sports. Reflecting on an MRC report, Mefferd said that ESPN and other sports broadcasters are “using their sports platforms really to push this liberal economic and social ideology.” Philbin asserted ESPN hires people with a “liberal pedigree” and its website includes content that is in “support of the gay agenda.”

. . .

Philbin later maintained that sports journalists, like other journalists, have “an antipathy toward conservatives and toward traditional Americans.” The two also took umbrage in particular to the sports network’s supposedly cozy relationship with President Obama: Mefferd was dismayed that ESPN is helping the President “show his softer side” by broadcasting his NCAA bracket selection.

Of course, President Bush, a former baseball franchise owner, previously appeared on ESPN to talk fishing and baseball.

Best part: ESPN’s antipathy toward traditional Americans. I guess then that  that’s their business model which explains why they’re such a failure.

Let us recall that the Media Research Center is considered a true source of the Lord’s truth by the conservative-entertainment complex, who repeat its findings ad nauseam.

From Right Wing Watch - unless they’ve been owned and it’s really from The Onion?

Vote for Malala . . .

. . . for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, here. The actions and courage of this single 14-year old girl may change the world.