The Lasso of Truth

I wake up every morning with large breasts, too...

In fact, I paid good money for the affliction.  But I haven't found it hinders my dating prospects.

Maybe Ms. Meghan should consider the appeal of a gal who sprinkles the word "like" into every sentence as if it's a Tourettes-like tic.  I've found that to be as bad as a cold sore, for inspiring respect and attraction in the opposite sex.

But that's just me.

Handwringing

To kill or capture?  To publish the death shots or not to publish?  Jeepers.  I even hear it took the supposed leader of the free world 17 hours to decide if he even wanted them to go in at all!

But now that the deed is done, I've been hard pressed to find an opinion on the whole brouhaha that sounds right to me.  Until now.

It started last night, when I heard one of the administration apparatchiks detailing the information that was being gathered from the site, and the various agencies sifting through it, and how much of the information was useful, etc.  I though to myself, if I was in charge, I'd probably want to keep the enemy guessing about whether I got anything useful, and how much of it there was.  Make them have to scramble and worry.

This morning though, that instinct went one step further when as a rare treat I heard Oliver North on my daily morning show, opining that the best approach would have been to keep the whole business under wraps.  And he's right.

Keeping the enemy in the dark that their leader is dead, even holing up in his safe house for a few days, to gather more information from live sources (possibly) would have been a much better strategy.

Unfortunately, that is not how Obama and his pep squad roll.  Oliver North was right about that too...this president is all about the victory laps.

Whole interview here...

11_0506_oliver_north

 

The new Sherriff wears bunny slippers

So much for America being the world's police force...

My point is that across the depths of Africa--from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south (and dare I say South Africa itself?) and in Congo and Sudan and a dozen countries besides--the killers and the humiliators are free to kill and humiliate without even a chastising from the United States. So where are the idealists and youthful human rights champions? Nowhere. Darfur was only an issue when they could taunt George Bush about it.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Irrefutable proof that Democrats are stupid.

The question now is, are people who vote for Democrats equally stupid?

This should be good

Sarah Palin says she's considering a Presidential run in 2012 and I'm thinkin'...

How much fun will the debates be, with her and the Big O?  One snippy little comment in that lilting flirty tone and a saucy wink to the camera, and Barry will be left sputtering and dumbstruck.  I predict he calls her "little lady" within 15 minutes of the first appearance.

And Mamma Grizzly will have chocolate eclair for dessert every single day.

Festivus comes early!

The next time one of your public-service-working neighbours complains about layoffs and contract cutbacks, I suggest you remind them that it's all in the name of "human rights"...

Representatives from 47 nations are set to gather Friday in Geneva for a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council with plans to address the human rights abuses of one country in particular: the United States of America.  Joining in the airing of grievances against the U.S. are various left-wing interest groups and American labor unions.

On the agenda for Friday’s gathering are the testimonials of select organizations and individuals who, for the first time ever, plan to claim the U.S. is violating global human rights — including allegations of discrimination against Muslims, police brutality and wrongful detention of certain political prisoners. The exercise comes as part of the UN’s “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), a rotating periodic examination of various countries‘ human rights records by the council’s members — a council which includes such countries as China, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia.

Pelosi's Damaging Competence

And one misguided journalist's delusional sycophancy...

But amid the wreckage of Tuesday's GOP rampage, there's one person for whom I feel awful: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She's losing her job not because she does it poorly but because she does it so well.

Pelosi would never ask for, or even accept, my sympathy - that's not her style. Her place in history was secure the moment she became the first woman to take possession of the speaker's gavel. Still, she squeezed every drop out of her four-year tenure. To string together a couple of sports cliches, she came to play and she left it all on the field.

I regret that the nation has never come to know the actual Nancy Pelosi. Most Americans are probably familiar only with the caricature that her political opponents sketched - the effete "San Francisco liberal" who knew nothing of America outside her mink-lined cocoon, where the taps ran with chablis and nourishment consisted of unpronounceable French cheeses, served on silver platters by waiters who were certainly gay, and quite possibly married.

The Reckoning

 

Can't wait.

***UPDATE:  Could there be shenanigans afoot, with Diebold voting machines?  This email went out to Diebold customers today:

From: Client Services [mailto:cssupport@diebold.com]
Sent: November 2, 2010 1:55 PM
To: Client Services
Subject: Diebold Services Outage 11/2/2010

Dear Valued Customer:

An internal communication issue has been identified. It may be affecting Advisor, Opteview, RemoteLink, DTS Transaction Processing, Mobile Banking and SERAS. We are troubleshooting this issue and will provide updates as they become available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused your institution, your customers, or members.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the Client Services Support Desk.

CLIENT SERVICES SUPPORT DESK
Diebold, Incorporated | Integrated and Managed Services
Toll-free: +1 877.878.4894 | cssupport@diebold.com www.diebold.com | Innovation Delivered.

Mighty coincidental...

Just perpetually anti-establishment

Perhaps too much political hay has been made of the public consternation shown by Moe Tucker, to a party which one would expect her to rally behind.  It's not to say that the reams of analysis on this particular defection are wrong or even misguided.  Most people who have cared to comment know a lot more about American politics than I ever will.

In my experience though, I have met folks who staunchly identify themselves primarily as rebels -- but not against anything in particular, other than the prevailing sentiment of the day.  As such, they tend to switch allegiances part way through life and characterize it as some sort of revelation when in actual fact, it's nothing more than switching teams for the sake of perpetually being on the side of the societal underdog.

Back in Moe's heyday, being a rebel meant dying your hair funny colours, piercing strange parts of your body, listening to bad anarchist alt-rock and shouting for the take down of the establishment, etc.  Now that those "values" or attitudes have become mainstream, these aging rebels need something else to be angry and disenfranchised about.  What better underdog team these days, than the conservative side of the aisle?

Then again, maybe the complaints are genuine.  They are certainly justified.  I just suspect there are some people who will always assume the contrarian role on any question.  And principled stands, these are not.

What I want to know is...

When will they be sending a bill to the "government" of Saudi Arabia, for the additional security implemented in the US ever since 16 of their citizens lit a few fires of their own?

In fact, it's not out of line to bill them for the clean up, too, I guess.

The nation's luminaries meet in Aspen

To brainstorm...

“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.

“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

Sounds good so far.  But wait, did I say luminaries..?

This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin.

Oh, nevermind. 

h/t

Year of the Conservative Woman?

They say it's now.  I'm hoping it's 2014...

GOP primary voters, a deeply conservative bunch, don't appear to have much of a problem with strong women in public life anymore. Not only that: The GOP is consciously trying to turn gender into a selling point. This isn't just the march of equality; it's a strategy. Republican strategists say female candidates should run well this year, when voters are dissatisfied with incumbents of both parties, because women are, by definition, outsiders; they're not members of the "old-boys club."

"lack of experience" was on Obama's resume, too

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Kagan had a "sterling reputation" and was "unquestionably qualified" to serve on the Supreme Court, calling her lack of judicial experience "refreshing."

Lack of judicial experience...because that's what you want on the nation's highest court.

Narcissist In Chief

Nevermind the sludge-covered birds and the oily coastline, it was Father's Day.  Where were Malia and Sasha..?

"I think that a little time to himself on Father’s Day weekend probably does us all good as American citizens that our president is taking that time,”

At least Tony Hayward was spending the time with his son.

How's that whole BP oil thing going..?

You're safe, America.

The White House is tirelessly burning the candle at both ends to get things done.

Homer Simpson for President!

Savvy...

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.

Isn't he the one who gave an iPod -- apparently the scourge of civilization as we know it -- to the Queen of England, as an official state gift?

Obviously someone else loaded it for him, then.  Good grief.

h/t

Obamacare

Through a science fiction prism...

We've heard a lot of hype, on both sides, about the healthcare reform bill President Obama signed today. But how will it really affect our future? Here are five dystopias it may save us from, and one it could cause.

[..]

Could the new healthcare reform law eventually lead to the government taking over the healthcare industry completely? Sure, it's possible. A lot of people are not so secretly hoping that will happen. We could find ourselves living in 1984, or Brazil, or any of a number of other statist dystopias where the government controls everything.

Just a matter of time..?

I read this book once, where the government passed sweeping regulations, to redistribute from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

When the new laws came into place, many of the educated and hard-working started abandoning their places, or withdrawing their talents. 

In order to stem the bleed of talent, the government made more laws forbidding people from leaving their jobs, restricting their choices and movements, enslaving them, and all for the greater good.

Thank gawd it was only a book.

The New World Order

While I seriously doubt that any active politician in America has the stones to repeal the gigantic millstone which was just foisted around the necks of the American public, I'm also not wholly convinced by this piece of cynicism...

All this talk about backlash and Republican landslides is very premature. The Democrats just purchased 30,000,000 new votes. In November, the Democrat machine will drive through the low income neighborhoods in buses with loudspeakers warning people to get on board and vote against the evil Republicans promising to “steal” their “right” to free healthcare. And it just might work.

The flaw here is that it relies on that same 30,000,000 people -- the ones who couldn't be bothered to make any provisions for their own personal health care -- to get off their LaZboys and actually vote...assuming they can survive the queue at Emerg.

I won't hold my breath.

GASP! Aggressive sanctions?!

They're shaking in their boots, no doubt...

Obama, who had made the goal of pursuing dialogue with Iran a cornerstone of his administration's foreign policy at the beginning of his presidency, said he had been successful in getting the international community to isolate Tehran.

"As we've seen, the Iranian government has been more concerned about preventing their people from exercising their democratic and human rights than trying to solve this problem diplomatically," Obama said in an interview on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Bret Baier.

"That's why we're going to go after aggressive sanctions. We haven't taken any options off the table. We are going to keep on pushing," Obama said.

Keep on pushing...right off the cliff.

de-Arabised: Like delousing, but far more expensive

In my books, if you're ticking off both the missile-lobbing, Semtex crowd and the sympathetic Marxist squish taking their side, it's a fine day's work...

A defiant Mr Netanyahu appeared to be digging in despite clear indications that the Obama administration is now demanding the scrapping of plans for 1,600 new Jewish homes, whose announcement overshadowed last week's visit to Israel by the US Vice-President Joe Biden. Mr Netanyahu's stance appeared to guarantee, after a highly charged week, the protraction of a stand-off in which a full-scale diplomatic row blew up at the start of Mr Biden's visit and appeared to abate at the end of it. But it was then reignited by demands from Hillary Clinton and an angry White House that Israel make amends for the "insulting" announcement just as indirect negotiations with the Palestinians had finally been arranged.

Still awaiting word on when Obama will "run out of patience" with the kidnappings, suicide bombings and constant threats being waged from the other side of that border.

Not just violence

...but violence, with a pop-culture context...

 
They at least deserve credit for making this one slightly more subliminally clever.

Punchline...media punching bag...

Or political punch to the face..?

Until now, I have doubted whether Palin was the one to carry these big ideas forward. Her performance has staggered between brilliant and disastrous. She gave a terrific acceptance speech at the Republican Convention and cringe-inducing interviews after. She did an awful job explaining her sudden departure from the governor’s position in Alaska.

Having now seen her in action, what I now see is that her conservatism is in her bones, people relate to her and most of the mainstream media will never get her.

She has radar for the aspirations of regular people, causing her to speak past many journalists and what she probably thinks are their dorky questions. Many in the media could spend hours listening to Barack Obama pontificate about Copenhagen or his outreach to the Muslim world. Palin couldn’t care less. She’s all about controlling spending, lower taxes, safe streets and borders and practical solutions for the environment, healthcare and education. That’s it.

Terrific timing.

How about suggestions then?

Sayeth the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism...

Terrorists are not 100-feet tall.

'Tis true.  But they are invariably Muslim.  how about we just start with that for now, hmmm?

Stars fade - wouldn't you rather have a rock?

Barack Obama's presidency, distilled down to a few words...

"the biggest celebrity on the planet"

Like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton.

And a picture of Mao in every living room...

But what I want to know is, are there any of these on the walls?

Because that would be alarming.

"To the Moon, Alice!"

Or not, as it would seem.

Glenn Reynolds muses...

But will Obama back other means of promoting space exploration? My own guess is that he’s actually hostile too space, regardless of budget priorities, but who knows?

It's not that hard to know, actually.

The left has always been hostile to the space program, mostly for one overlying reason -- because it represents the height of human endeavor and is the starkest repudiation of the denialists who prefer to conceive of humans as nothing more than the brutes at the top of the food chain.

Obama may be making all the noises of wanting to shift the focus of space exploration, onto the private sector, but how long before that shift gets paired with a raft of new and stifling regulations, making commercial space flight too onerous and too expensive to bother with?  Because stifling it is the point, you see...

Speaking softly, without the big stick

Every Wednesday morning, John Oakley has John Bolton on his morning show to discuss world events.  My son and I try to never miss it, and it is a highlight of our morning drive to school.

When a 15-year-old emo kid can understand and appreciate your knowledge and eloquence on foreign policy, you’ve achieved a minor miracle.  I can tell you.

Due to this regular contact, I was marginally oblivious to the fact that he was no longer the US ambassador to the UN, or who his replacement was.  I don’t feel so bad though, realizing now that the latest ambassador leaves an impression slightly more memorable than a stump of wood.

Do you get the impression that her colleagues regularly refer to her as wazzername?

While Rice, like all Democrat-appointed US Ambassadors to the UN, also serves in the President’s cabinet, she has nevertheless been absent at many crucial Security Council meetings in New York during some of the world body’s most turbulent times.  Rice was even missing from this week’s Security Council debate and vote to add new Peacekeepers to a beleaguered UN operation in Haiti.  According to several UN veteran reporters and some US Mission staff, Rice has been missing from crucial negotiations on Iran too.  They say that when Rice does attend UN negotiations, she is all too willing to avoid confrontation.  The Permanent Members of the Security Council – the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and China – rely on American leadership to drive issues to a close and force votes.  While the Permanent Members historically complain publicly about being forced to vote or meet on certain issues, without one country driving issues to completion the UN Members will keep talking or find ways to continue fruitless discussions.  After spending 8 years inside the UN and watching the Security Council debate a plethora of issues, I can personally attest to the fact that an effective American Ambassador cannot worry about being the most popular person in the room.  Forcing an end to a UN debate and calling for the Security Council to vote on an issue is never popular.

Over the last year, Rice has avoided tough negotiations and public feuds at the UN and has subsequently produced very few UN resolutions on America’s priority issues.  While other foreign Ambassadors speak fondly of Rice and her ability to make nice at the UN, she has been a weak negotiator for the American people.  Many UN veterans have indicated that Rice’s lack of leadership on the Iranian issue in particular has forced the French Ambassador to pick up the slack in trying to forge a new Security Council resolution to increase sanctions.  The irony that the French are tougher than the Americans on the Iran issue has not been lost on career State Department officials.

Congratulations!

 
So sexy.

I'll leave the complex analysis to others.  For now, I'm just sorry Teddy wasn't still alive to see it happen. 

Obama's "push, not pull" moment

Remember when they said Obama would restore dignity to the office of the President, after the fiasco of the swaggering moron previously in residence..?

Monday night, Obama mistakenly left a White House ceremony honouring two activists' work in Zimbabwe. After finishing his remarks in the East Room, he walked with first lady Michelle Obama into the grand hallway across the main floor of the Executive Mansion. He returned a moment later, a bit sheepishly.

He said with a laugh, "I'm allowed to stay." Then he added, "I never know what I'm allowed to do."

Ya, me too.