What’s up?
I’m working now blogging with AOL’s new Political Machine blog site. The idea is to eventually transfer traffic back to card credit debt debt relief stop,credit card debt relief,credit card debt relief nonprofitapplication card credit instantapplication canadian card credit line,credit card application on lineunited airline credit cardaspire visa credit card payment,aspire credit card,aspire credit card paymentcard credit debt elimination programapply card credit onlinecard credit discover offercapital one credit card applicationapplication card credit providian,providian credit card applicationge card services online credituk cashback credit cardaccount card credit merchantbusiness card credit processing smallvisa reward credit card,card credit point reward visambna america credit cardcard credit debt off pay ways,pay off credit card debt0 intrest free credit card,free credit report no credit card needed,free credit cardcard credit history no visa,no credit history credit card,card credit credit history no peopleconsolidate credit card loanaccess card credit mbna online0 12 card credit interest month,0 card credit fee interest no transfer,0 interest credit cardcard credit debt reduction solution,debt reduction solution credit cardinstant online approval credit cardcard company credit debt negotiation,card credit debt negotiation,credit card debt negotiationprepaid visa credit cardmerchant services credit card processingcard consolidation credit debt onlinecalculator card consolidation credit loa ?,calculator card consolidation credit,credit card consolidation calculatoramerican express credit card account,american express credit card,american express gift credit cardonline credit card payment,card credit ge online payment service,card credit online payment verizonbest card credit dealcredit card debt counselingcalculator card consolidation debt creditcard consolidation credit debt servicecircuit city credit card applicationcard christian consolidation credit debtaccess account card credit sears,sears credit card account,account card credit sears0 interest rate credit cardcingular free mp3 ringtonestv and movie ringtones,tv ringtones,tv ringtones 24download free alltel ringtonesmotorola ringtones composerfree nextel real ringtonescell onto phone ringtonesfree downloadable mp3 ringtonesmuch music ringtonesdownload free real ringtones verizonfree real tone ringtonesdownload free mobile ringtones virgin this site, and add some high quality partners for ThoughtCops. In the meantime, I’ll be focusing a bit more of my energy on AOL. If you want to see what I’m up to, you can find it here.
Juan Williams begs the busing question
I shouldn’t have to think this hard, and it makes me suspicious.
Juan Williams begs the question in his analysis of “Little Rock 50 years later.” He laments Supreme Court decisions that reigned in busing and housing patterns have led to de facto segregation, decades after de jure discrimination was stomped out. Then comes what to me looks like sleight of hand:
This trend toward isolation of poor and minority students has consequences — half of black and Latino students now drop out of high school.
Integrated schools benefit students, especially minorities. Research on the long-term outcomes of black and Latino students attending integrated schools indicates that those students “complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools.”
The question begged is cause or effect. Are the home environment of the integrated families who are already doing better economically and socially themselves the real variable? Is it the superior facilities or instruction that makes the difference? Or is it integration per se — simply being around white people — that improves life chances?
Williams’ blanket statement cries out for qualification. I suspect that the research has been done and the answers are not to his liking. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to think this hard about his claim.
Refuse to choose
Sign in the crowd at the Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia:
“We refuse to choose between Islamic fundamentalism and American imperialism.”
Yep, we’ll just sit here until all of you go home. Have your war. Bomb Israel. Kill all the Jews. Execute the gays and the adulterers. Immolate the world waiting for the twelfth Imam. Go ahead. And you, U.S. warmongers, go ahead and bomb them back. Use your cruise missiles and your Stealth Bombers. Obliterate Tehran. Send in your troops and just occupy the whole frickin Middle East.
Go ahead. But we will not be a part of it. We refused to choose.
That’s not a mistake: It’s malfeasance
I always teach my kids the diff between an accident and negligence. When they break something and say, oh, it was an accident, I say, well, accidents happen, but negligence is avoidable.
But then there is a whole nuther category: malfeasance. It’s not a mistake when you meant to do it and got caught. Whatever the New York Times might think:
The liberal advocacy group should have paid $142,000 for the ad calling the U.S. commander in Iraq “General Betray Us,” not $65,000, the paper’s public editor wrote yesterday.
Clark Hoyt said in his column that MoveOn was not entitled to the cheaper “standby” rate for advertising that can run any time over the following week because the Times did promise that the ad would run Sept. 10, the day Petraeus began his congressional testimony. “We made a mistake,” Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis was quoted as saying.
Lowest level ever?
Does this sound plausible?
Arctic sea ice melted to its lowest level ever this week, shattering a record set in 2005 and continuing a trend spurred by human-caused global warming, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said Thursday.
Compared to 2005, the previous record-low year for Arctic sea ice, this year has had a decrease of more than 386,100 square miles. The ice hit its lowest level Sunday, and refreezing has already begun in some places, according to satellite imagery used by the center.
Surely they mean “in recorded history,” or something like that. Surely this doesn’t include the periods when much of North America was lush tropical jungle with dinosaurs? I doubt that it includes the medieval warm period, during with Nordic settlements flourished on Greenland and Leif Erikson discovered Newfoundland and named it Vinland in reference to its lush vegetation?
I wish reporters would be more precise. Looking at the NSIDC site, it seems that the “lowest level ever” really means since 1979, which reflects the absurdly short time frame of this whole hysterical dialogue in historical perspective.
More sick cultures in rehab
LA Times engages the freaky dowry crimes in India, which, oddly enough, seem to involve an awful lot of woman on woman violence. This one involves women who beat and even kill their daughters-in-law to extort dowry or to punish them for inadequate dowry:
Yet Devi, 27, is one of the lucky ones: Her name was not added to the list of thousands of wives who are beaten to death, burned alive, electrocuted, poisoned, pushed out windows or otherwise killed horrifically every year because their husbands’ families are dissatisfied with the dowries they bring to the marriage and continue to demand more.
In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, a woman was killed over dowry every 77 minutes in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. The total of such homicides was 6,787, but experts suspect that the true figure is much higher, because many dowry killings are not reported. Even when they are, most of the killers go unpunished.
Another reminder that Western values have much to offer a world steeped in creepiness everywhere you look — much of it aimed at women. This includes China’s infanticide and abandonment of girls, genital mutilation by Muslims in Egypt and Africa, and, of course, the Indian issue outlined here.
That’s kids for ya
This sophomore MIT electrical engineering student is one crazy gal:
According to an MIT Web site, Simpson is from Kihei, Hawaii, and a sprinter on the school’s swim team. A personal website that purports to be hers includes this description: “In a sentence, I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student, I love to build things and I love crazy ideas.”
Like this one, for example: she shows up at Logan airport
wearing a board with nine lights over a hooded black sweatshirt, and carrying a putty substance that turned out to be Play-Doh, when she went to meet a friend at the airport at about 8:40 a.m., officials said.
Experts say she is lucky she wasn’t shot dead.
Ethanol: an end to the reign of error?
—“You mean there was no steak, no cream pies, no deep fat, no hot fudge?”—“Those were thought to be unhealthy, exactly the opposite of what we now know to be true.”
Sleeper, 1973
The heyday of ethanol may be soon over, if anyone is willing to forgo the ample political benefits of pretending they didn’t read this:
Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised.
So, the whole biofuel business appears to be worse than the disease, since most US biofuel is from corn, while most EU biofuel is from rapeseed.
Dr Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, used the findings to calculate that with the US Senate aiming to increase maize ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse gas emissions from transport will rise by 6 per cent.
This has led scientists to call for greater scrutiny of alternatives to fossil fuels. Might one also hope that it would lead to greater scrutiny of the convoluted computer models behind the global warming stampede itself? Don’t, so to speak, hold your breath.
Giuliani on guns: unconvincing but irrelevant
In my mind, the gun issue for Giuliani is — like Romney’s abortion stance — about authenticity, not policy:
At one point, he came close to disavowing a lawsuit against gunmakers that he initiated while mayor of New York.
The 2000 lawsuit sought to hold gunmakers liable for shootings with illegal guns (the case, by chance, was heard this week in a federal appeals court). At the time, Giuliani called it an “aggressive step towards restoring accountability to an industry that profits from the suffering of others.”
Yesterday, Giuliani backed away from the lawsuit, saying he might not uphold it if he were a judge.
No one is going to ratchet up gun control in America any time soon. The Democrats tried that in 1993, got burned in 1994 and have never forgotten it. You don’t lose a sitting Speaker of the House in an NRA district without feeling the pain. The Dems have gone underground on that issue ever since. Don’t look for a president of either party to chance it. It thus differs from other hot-button base issues, like immigration amnesty, where Bush was in a position to alienate the base in a close battle.
The NRA may go to the mattresses on this just to prove they can, to maintain their aura of political potency. But I seriously don’t think the policy implications are there, now or any time in the near future.
Israel, incoming!
We’ve found the WMDs … in Syria … surrounded by Iranian engineers, many of whom are now dead. Iran wasn’t kidding the other day when it said that its escalating investments in Syria were “strategic.”
Jane’s Defense Weekly said the July 26 explosion took place at the site of a joint Iranian- Syrian project to fit short-range ballistic missiles with chemical warheads. It cited Syrian defense sources as saying that fuel caught fire during a test to fit a Scud C missile with a mustard-gas warhead.
“The blast dispersed chemical agents across the storage facility and outside,” the publication quoted the sources as saying. The chemicals included VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent.
On the day of the explosion, Sana, Syria’s state news agency, said [lied, claimed, alleged, asserted?] the blast struck a military complex outside the city of Aleppo, killing at least 15 soldiers and wounding 50. The agency said the blast was caused by “the combustion of sensitive, highly explosive material caused by extremely high temperatures” at a military weapons depot.
Jane’s said that in addition to the 15 Syrian troops killed, “dozens” of Iranian weapons engineers died. It said the chemical weapons program was part of a strategic cooperation accord between Syria and Iran that was signed in November 2005.
But then, as the Left keeps telling us, Iran is not fomenting violence in Iraq and Syria does not present an immediate threat to Israel. I suppose it’s time to get Nancy Pelosi back out to Damascus in her hijab to see if she can leverage her botox smile and talk the off the ledge. Because it never hurts to talk …
[Note above that when the rogue Syrian regime announces what Janes Defense Weekly exposes as a lie –about chemical weapons, no less — the Syrian statement is “said.” But when a U.S. official announces that violence is down in Iraq, and no one offers any data to counter it, the U.S. statement is “claimed.”]
Germans compromised on Iran
Germany is a huge economic partner of Iran, and is struggling to respond to pressure to clamp down that relationship in sanctions against the Mullahs. Some are incredulous that a country with Germany’s past wouldn’t be more sensitive to the ethics of dealing with one that has Iran’s announced ambitions:
“Germans either can’t, or won’t, see the kinds of people with whom they are doing business,” said Nasrin Amirsedghi, an Iranian writer and critic of the Tehran regime, who distributed protest leaflets outside the meeting. “How can this country, with its history, ignore such things?”
Chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned Ahmadinejad, saying in a speech in February 2006, “A president that questions Israel’s right to exist, a president that denies the Holocaust, cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany. We have learned our history.”
But the human mind is almost infinitely malleable when self-interest is at stake. As long as there is a shred of shadow of ambiguity for German business men to hide behind, expect them to drag their feet.
Meanwhile, of course, China and Russia will flout the civilized world with glee.
The world’s tiniest violin …
… is wailing for Barry Manilow, who refuses to go on The View to be interviewed if Elisabeth Hasselbeck. The whiny butt of a million jokes has just coined a new one:
“I had made a request that I be interviewed by (co-hosts) Joy (Behar), Barbara (Walters) or Whoopi (Goldberg), but not Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Unfortunately, the show was not willing to accommodate this simple request so I bowed out,” he said in a statement on his Web site (http://www.manilow.com).
In an earlier statement to the news Web site TMZ.com, which broke the news, Manilow said Hasselbeck was “dangerous” and “offensive.”
Of course, it’s typical of the loony left to label as “dangerous” anyone who disagrees with them. But forget politics: here’s the question I want someone to as Barry: “Does listening to your own sappy saccharine pablum ever make you want to wretch?”
Viva la difference
Why can a floozy entertainer stand before the cameras and mock Jesus at the Emmy awards, whereas people everywhere walk on eggshells about Muhammad, and the Swedish government grovels across oceans to find someone to apologize to when a random journalist makes a borderline reference?
Here’s what the “entertainer” had to say upon accepting the reward:
In accepting the Emmy for her show “My Life on the D-List,” Griffin said that “a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.”
She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, “This award is my god now!”
Of course, she’s factually out of line. I would be astounded — as in shocked — if anyone in recent memory had thanked Jesus for an Emmy. Just not that kinda subculture, ya know? Oh, for the record, we are told that E! edited her comments before airing. But I suspect that just means taking out the foulest allusion that didn’t make it into print. The gist of the slur would be unobjectionable. The Hollywood slobbering over sensitivity and diversity doesn’t encompass Christianity.
But what is the response to this affront? Some theater group in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee takes up a collection and buys a full page ad in USA Today. Asking for what? Nothing in particular. Basically just expressing disappointment, it seems:
Russ Hollingsworth, general manager of The Miracle Theater, said members of the theater’s cast were tired of celebrities joking attitudes toward Jesus. The theater is sponsoring a petition on its Web site, http://www.miracletheater.com.
“When word reached our cast that a Hollywood celebrity had stood before TV cameras and said such vulgar things about Christ, they were incensed,” he said. “It’s just not OK anymore to mock Christians and Jesus with impunity.”
Well, guys, you’re wrong. It is still OK. And it’s OK because they know full well that you aren’t going to riot and smash windows and burn flags and kill people over it. That’s the difference between you and the Islamists. Viva la difference.
Thank goodness for professional journalists
I’ve noted before the habit the media has of using “supposedly” to cast doubt on terror charges in situations where the neutral “allegedly” is called for. Another obvious gambit is to use the word “claimed,” rather than “said” or “stated,” to cast doubt on a speaker’s assertion.
In this case, it’s a military report that violence has fallen dramatically off in Iraq since the surge began:
Violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level for 18 months, the deputy American commander claimed today.
The authors can’t really find a substantive objection to the numbers, so they just kind of randomly throw this out:
But US Democrats point out that much of this analysis is contradicted by independent studies, while the anti-war group Moveon.org branded Gen Petraeus as “General Betray Us” in a full page newspaper advertisement which accused him of “cooking the books” for the White House.
… again confirming the sneaking suspicion that Democrats see themselves as the enemy in this war, and randomly repeating the baseless slander on General Patreaus from MoveOn.org.
Thank goodness for professional journalists. Who else would take a press release from the military and frame it in hostile, mindless drivel for our reading pleasure?
Hillary’s slander pander
Clinton voted against a symbolic Senate measure condemning MoveOn.org’s slander of General Patreaus. More pandering to the Hard Left fringe.
MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad, the resolution states, “impugns the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all the members of the United States Armed Forces.”
Clinton and Dodd voted against it, and can prepare for some Netroots love. Also, at this point there’s nobody stirring on the right in the primary, though you can expect to hear about this piece of symbolic politics in the general, if Hillary’s the nominee.
Biden and Obama were absent.
You can equivocate, but it ain’t equivalent
So six black teenagers jump this white kid and beat the crap out of him in rural LA. This occurs subsequent to a handful of white teenagers hanging nooses from a tree, in a patently grotesque racist gesture that got them suspended from school, but they were not prosecuted for a crime because, apparently, they didn’t commit one. Now thousands of protesters are rallying in defense of the so-called “Jena Six.”
”What we need is federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice,” Sharpton told the AP. ”Our fathers in the 1960’s had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing.”
The six black teens were charged a few months after three white teens were accused of hanging nooses in a tree on their high school grounds. The white teens were suspended from school but weren’t prosecuted. Five of the black teens were initially charged with attempted murder. That charge was reduced to battery for all but one, who has yet to be arraigned; the sixth was charged as a juvenile.
The symbolism of the noose there is horrific, and it cannot be countenanced. However, there is a vital distinction that the protesters seemed to have missed. The noose was symbolic. The beating was physical assault and battery.
If you want a white on black racial parallel, go to West Virginia, where an unthinkably sick and violent racist crime was perpetrated by a handful of white inbred hillbillies, and they should be locked away for life for it.
Making excuses for this kind of violence by pointing to offensive but nonviolent provocation sends a really, really bad signal. Assault and battery is inexcusable, and community leaders should be in the business of teaching self-control and peaceful problem-solving, not cathartic revenge.
I’m all for shining a harsh light on the obscure recesses of racism in the South or anywhere else. But Sharpton and the gang are not doing their friends any favors by excusing this behavior.
A Sister Souljah moment that wasn’t
Richard Cohen, a reliable but generally thoughtful liberal, is disappointed at Hillary’s caving on the MoveOn.org slam on General Patraeus. Hillary of all people — whose husband Bill made a defining break with his Sister Souljah moment in 1992, in which he repudiated that grotesque racist comments of a hip hop queen, and thereby solidified his credentials at the center — should have known better.
Here’s what Cohen has to say:
The MoveOn.org ad was the moment for Clinton to rise above hackdom. It was a moment for her to insist that the business of politics, not to mention governing, is made even uglier and more difficult when people who merely differ with one another resort to insult. It was a moment for her to say that an Army general, under orders and attempting to fulfill a mission, should not be so casually trashed - especially since she herself has been on the other side of the Iraq war issue and said things she must now regret. And it was a moment for her to trot out her favorite phrase and use it, not in her own defense for once, but in defense of someone else. That moment is gone now - maybe because for Hillary Clinton it never arrived in the first place.
Intriguingly, the MoveOn add was less a challenge to the Republicans or the General than it was to the Democratic candidates. It was a gauntlet thrown down by the Hard Left to the Democratic field, and none but Joe Biden had the guts to brush it aside.
Gingrich the visionary?
David Broder has an interesting piece on Gingrich today. If Gingrich is right, the current field of Republicans has little chance of countering Hillary. But Gingrich, who benefited the last time a Clinton was in office, has hopes for what might follow:
Gingrich is brimming with ideas on these subjects, but he is realistic enough to suggest that it may be five years before public opinion — and other politicians — are ready to embrace some of them.
That five-year estimate is significant. It would run to the end of the next presidential term. Gingrich has a low opinion of the ingenuity and independence shown so far by the GOP field, and he predicts that the battle for the nomination will be long. Even the Feb. 5 massing of primaries in big states is unlikely to produce a clear winner, he says, and the result may be “chaos” or a brokered nominating convention.
By contrast, he says, Hillary Rodham Clinton faces few obstacles to winning the Democratic nomination. And he leaves reporters with the feeling that he thinks a Hillary Clinton presidency would provide fertile ground, just as Bill Clinton’s did, for a Republican revival.
Inconvenient truths
Pete DuPont has a review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book on global warming. There’s a lot to chew on here, but one nugget stands out to me. Remember all the talk about killer heat waves? No one talks about killer cold waves, or all the lives that might be saved by milder winters:
Global warming is supposedly killing people. The 35,000 deaths from the August 2003 European heat wave were, in Al Gore’s view, an example of what “will become much more common if global warming is not addressed.” But the actual data put things in perspective. Whereas 2,000 people died in the United Kingdom in that heat wave, last year the BBC reported that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales were about 25,000 each winter, and 47,000 a year, in the winters of 1998 to 2000. Similarly, in Helsinki, Finland, 55 people die each year from heat and 1,655 from cold. In Athens, Greece, a much warmer place, the deaths from excess heat are 1,376 each year and the deaths from cold 7,852. All told, Mr. Lomborg calculates that about 200,000 people die in Europe each year from excessive heat, and 1.5 million from excessive cold.
Ethanol is a gas
IHT has a good editorial on the ethanol nonsense, citing escalating grain prices that are causing economic and politic stress around the world. And the politics and pork of it drives the policy, with governments trying to favor their own producers. Add to that the environmental costs of raising the grain and processing it, and you get marginal benefits at enormous cost:
The economics of corn ethanol have never made much sense. Rather than importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, the United States slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. Then the government provides a tax break of 51 cents a gallon to American ethanol producers - on top of the generous subsidies that corn growers already receive under the farm program.
Corn-based ethanol also requires a lot of land. An OECD report two years ago suggested that replacing 10 percent of America’s motor fuel with biofuels would require about a third of the total cropland devoted to cereals, oilseeds and sugar crops.
Meanwhile, the environmental benefits are modest. A study published last year by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that after accounting for the energy used to grow the corn and turn it into ethanol, corn ethanol lowers emissions of greenhouse gases by only 13 percent.
