Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - Albert Einstein

Monday, February 08, 2010

When the infamous Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad ran last night, the reaction of the room—spanning the gamut from rock-ribbed conservative to pantywaist liberal was, “That’s it?” It was very low key and didn’t actually say the A-word at all.

NOW was, of course, terrifically disappointed.  They’d geared up to denounce the ad and then it didn’t say anything?  Oh, well.  They’ll try the next best thing: accusing it of promoting violence.

Yeah, you knew that was coming.

In an attempt to fall in line with the humorous nature of most Super Bowl commercials, the Focus on the Family in-game ad shows Tebow tackling his mom and his mother playfully scolding him for interrupting her.

In remarks that are raising eyebrows from pro-life advocates, NOW president Terry O’Neill said that bit of the ad glorified violence against women.

“I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don’t find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself.”

O’Neill’s reaction drew guffaws even from hardcore abortion advocates.

Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice, told the Times that NOW is way off base.

“It’s absurd to claim that this is an endorsement of violence against women,” Kissling said. “These people came across as affectionate, loving, funny and happy.”

NOW wasn’t alone in trying to play the domestic violence card.

Abortion advocate Amanda Marcotte had this post on Twitter that has drawn a reaction from pro-life advocates: “Hey Mom! Tried to kill you from the womb and failed. How about a blind side tackle? Violence against Moms.”

Really?  Really?!  You really think this ad was telling people to beat up their mothers?

You just can’t win with these people.  In the end, the crime that Tim Tebow has committed is that he disagrees with them on their signature issue. And he does so much more reasonably than they defend their signature issue.  So whatever it takes, his opinion must be degraded.

Murtha, died today due to complications from Gall Bladder surgery.
To his Family i send my deepest respects.

Special election forthcoming.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

I don’t know if you watched the Super Bowl and the ads.  But there was one ad for the “green police”, which shows people getting the SWAT treatment for not recycling, using incandescent bulbs and overheating their hot tubs.  It wasn’t a funny ad or a good one because it’s a little too close to the truth.  I think we’re actually headed there at some point.

I’ll post up a youtube when I find it.

Update: It’s strange to talk to younger football fans (I’m 37, I’m not old).  They have no memory of when the Super Bowl was an annual joke.  Right after groundhog day, the AFC champion would poke his head out, see the Cowboys or 49ers and get destroyed.  Indeed, that was why the commercials became such a big deal because the game was so lousy.  From 1984 through 1995, the average margin of victory was 23 points and the games weren’t even that close.  Since 1996, the average margin of victory has been ten points with at least eight or nine of the 15 games in doubt until the last moment.  We were this close to overtime tonight.

Update: Here’s the ad:

My hope for the tea party movement has long been that it would crystallize around a set of concrete issues to brandish against both parties.  Tax reform, for example, or serious budget cuts (including entitlements and defense) or market-oriented healthcare reform.

My fear for the tea party movement, on the other hand, has been that it would get hijacked by lunatics, political opportunists or both.  This weekend Tea Party convention ticked those fears up a notch.

First, the lunatics.  There were plenty to be found, from Roy “death to homos” Moore to Tom Tancredo.  But the low point was Joseph Farah giving a warmly received speech in which he trumpeted birtherism.  Libertarian Dave Weigel has some details about a confrontation Farah had with Andrew Breitbart afterward (after calling Weigel a Marxist and the Washington Independent a socialist newspaper).

[Breitbart said], “We have a lot of strong arguments to be making, and that is a primary argument. That is an argument for the primaries that did not take hold. The arguments that these people right here are making are substantive arguments. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were all won not on birther, but on substance. And to apply to this group of people the concept that they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–”

“It is a winning issue!”

“It’s not a winning issue.”

“It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility–”

“You don’t recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order.”

“Nothing exposes the president’s–”

“Then prove it!”

“The press isn’t asking the question–”

“Prove it!”

“Prove what?”

“Prove your case.”

“I should prove, what, a birth certificate that may or may not exist?” Farah had gotten irritated. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t even understand the fundamental tenets of what journalism is about, Andrew. It’s not about proving things. It’s about asking questions and seeking truth.”

Breitbart tensed up after that insult. “Right.”

When Andrew Breitbart is the sane one, we’re in trouble.  I have no idea why a “journalist” like Farah, whose website started well but has become increasingly unhinged, was invited to speak.  But now the Tea Party movement is contaminated with his birther lunacy.  Thanks a lot.

Yes, there were plenty of people there who were not indulging in raging lunacy.  But which narrative do you think the MSM is going to pick up?  The radicalism of Moore, Tancredo and Farah?  Or the sensibility of anyone else.

The highlight of the conference was last night’s speech by Sarah Palin.  Wearing both an Israeli and American flag, she delivered a standard GOP boilerplate speech that had no substance but plenty of snarky attacks on the President unworthy of a third-rate blog.  The lustily cheered speech—which I watched with increasing dismay—was so much a Republican campaign speech that at least one commenter thinks this spells the beginning of the end of the parties:

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

He then throws up his hands:

But the media now have their definition of what it means to be Tea Party. This convention gave them simplistic nativism, birtherism, media bashing, homophobia, and a heavy does of neoconservative foreign policy.

...

And that is no tea party at all.

I’m not that pessimistic.  I think ... OK, maybe hope is the right word ... that this will serve to calve off some less useful parts of the tea party movement.  A certain portion can scuttle back to the Republican Party—they were clearly never comfortable being out in the big wide political world on their own.  Another can scuttle over to Farah and his brand of crazies.  Maybe we can send them all to Kenya to dig up birth documents.

The rest—the beating heart of this country’s conservative temperament—will continue to push on, to hold both parties accountable and to find sensible policies to promote.  With or without an official movement or a media-approved leader, we continue to circle Washington and will continue to toss politicians out off office until they get the message—the real message, not some dry-cleaned political bullshit and certainly not some crazy conspiracy theories.

That’s the hope anyway.

Post Scriptum: Sarah Palin joked, once again, about Obama’s use of a teleprompter.  I dunno, Sarah, it could be worse.  Instead of handling nearly an hour of questions from the opposing party extemporaneously, he could be responding to softball questions with cheat notes on his hand like a high school debate club member.

Do you really needs a note to tell you to “lift American spirits”?

Saturday, February 06, 2010

What is wrong with New York schools?

A 12-year-old Queens girl was hauled out of school in handcuffs for an artless offense - doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker, the Daily News has learned.

Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.

“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the girl wrote, adding the phrases “Lex was here. 2/1/10” and a smiley face.

But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.

She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said.

She’s still suspended.  Believe it or not, this is not the most offensive part of the story:

Alexa is the latest in a string of city students who have been cuffed for minor infractions. In 2007, 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser was placed under arrest for writing “okay” on her desk at Intermediate School 201. And in 2008, 5-year-old Dennis Rivera was cuffed and sent to a psych ward after throwing a fit in his kindergarten.

A class action lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union last month against the city for using “excessive force” in middle school and high schools. A 12-year-old sixth-grader, identified in the lawsuit as M.M., was arrested in March 2009 for doodling on her desk at the Hunts Point School.

This sounds like “scared straight” bullshit run amuck.  There’s exercising proper discipline and there’s citing like nutcases.  Someone in the Big Apple needs to learn the difference.

You know, its one thing to show respect for other cultures, its another to make a ass of your self doing it. Especially when you are President of the United States and the custom is for the leader not to bow before another head of state, or the mayor of Tampa. 
I have to wonder does he even think before he acts?

The second picture is from Tampa mayor Pam Lorio own web page, i assume that it was taken a second after the bow, but you can see that it probably was not taken out of context. that is unless he was looking at her shoes and admiring them. Does our president understand how this appears to other national leaders and their peoples?
Why is he doing this?
Where is his protocol people at?
Or maybe he just likes shoes?
Lets look at the the last few bows.

Is it the shoes? You be the judge.

This is interesting:

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

It may surprise you—in more ways than one—but I agree with Greenpeace here.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that the IPCC report was sloppy, poorly referenced and pitifully supervised.  The flaws uncovered in the IPCC report do not disprove the idea of global warming nor prove a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.  Uninformed speculation about Himalayas glacier melt thirty years in the future and strange references to half of the Netherlands being below sea level don’t alter temperature records or basic science.  They do, however, show, once again, that the doomsday scenarios being flogged by the Left are even less likely.  They do show the extreme lack of skepticism many on the Left have toward wild claims of global disaster.  It’s yet another reason to get their hands of the wheel of environmental policy.

I once assisted an advisor in writing a review article on an astronomy topic.  One of my assignments was to go through all the references and make sure they said what we thought they said.  It was mind-numbing work but I did find a few flawed references.  That’s actually not that unusual because references tend to be passed on from article to article with few investigators going to the original source to be sure of the claim.  But when you’re talking climate science, with trillions of dollars and, supposedly, the fate of the planet at stake, I think it behooves you to aim for a higher standard than that used in the East Yachupitsville Geology Bulletin.  Pachuri didn’t.  And he need to take responsibility for that.  No one will trust the science if such sloppy work is not only ignored but rewarded.

Pachauri’s defense is hilarious:

Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.

In other words, they liked him before the knew that he was more interested in glad-handing and grand-standing than in doing rigorous science.  This is the equivalent of Clinton’s defenders saying he shouldn’t have been impeached because he was elected.

This will never happen, but the IPCC would be very wise to replace Pachauri with a climate skeptic.  Someone like Bjorn Lonborg or Pat Michaels.  I guarantee you they would make sure every part of the next report was scrutinized.  And it would have a lot more credibility with a skeptic at the helm.

Friday, February 05, 2010

I don’t think there’s a better encapsulation the slippery language of our current President than this:

“We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately,” Barack Obama declared last November.

Sit back and marvel at its pure Orwellian doublespeak.  But if you’ve been following this blog, you know it’s not out of line with everything the Democrats have done lately.  Every special interest bill is cast as standing up to special interests.

Apparently, the taxpayer is now a special interest while grasping unions and farm interests are general interests.

Update: Actually, more like the quote of a couple of years ago.  It’s an old quote.  Still, it’s amazing how cow-towing to special interests while claiming to do the exact opposite is the one promise the Democrats have delivered on.

Yesterday I discussed the fate of Greece and the collectivist culture that took over nad has gotten them where they are today. Today I will tackle the next likely domino, Portugal. d

Portugal moved towards a political crisis on Thursday night as its finance minister appealed to opposition parties not to defeat the minority Socialist government over a regional finance bill that he said would undermine the country’s international credibility. In a televised address, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said opposition proposals to allow the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores to increase their debt would have “grave consequences for Portugal’s public accounts” and send “the worst possible message” to financial markets. Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said opposition proposals to allow the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores to increase their debt would send ‘the worst possible message’ to financial markets.

His warning came as Portuguese bonds and shares came under fire for the second day running as concerns over sovereign debt spread from Greece to other high-deficit countries in the eurozone. The Lisbon stock market fell almost 5 per cent on Thursday, the biggest daily fall since November 2008, and bond yields rose to new highs amid doubts over the ability of Portugal to consolidate its public accounts. The cost of insuring Portuguese debt against default also rose to a record high.

Like the economy of Greece, that of Portugal is living on borrowed time. The same problems that are threatening to bring down Greece are doing the same in Portugal. Only unlike the current socialist Greek government that has realized the fit has hit the shan, and is doing something to try and delay the inevitable, the current socialist government of Portugal is being accused of manufacturing a crisis to prevent their parliament, which is dominated by a coalition that actually wants to make change of direction and avoid the inevitable and complete collapse of the Portuguese house of cards, from doing anything.

The world is watching and reacting to the Greek and Portuguese meltdown going on. And I am sure that what is happening here in the US is influencing the run as well.

Looks like the people that produce American Idol know how to capitalize on controversy. I have to admit I don’t watch any reality TV. If I recall correctly the first reality show was Survivor. My wife wanted me to watch it with her. 15 minutes into it I told her I had had enough. She asked why and I told her that a show called Survivor was a joke unless the morning after the first night spent wherever the camera panned to a bloody and battered survivor cooking some jerky over a fire after a hard night of making sure there was no one left standing, asking for his booty. Not this stupid stuff. If we are going to do the whole bread and circus thing to distract the masses, I want it to be done like the Romans did. I doubt that even Howard will make me want to watch this brain damaging stuff though. 

Thursday, February 04, 2010

The Best Magazine on the Planet takes on the Liberal Echosphere:

I’ve really gotten jaded by this sort of hysteria and outrage.  Even if I thought that the Citizens United case were bad decision, I wouldn’t be proclaiming the end of democracy.

Good thing that those liberal commentators like Maddow and Olbermann aren’t as prone to hysteria and conspiracy theories as those nutbag Right Wingers.

Look, I’m a fairly tolerant guy.  I think we are way over-protective of kids these days.  I think people freak out way too often when it comes to kids and ... well, just about anything.  Just today, I read about an absurd SWAT call-out for a kid with a cap gun and a near suspension over a lego gun.  I’m an avid reader of Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog (from which I’m getting this story).  So you’re not dealing with a nervous nellie here.

So it means something when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot:

And yet, that’s what the world it is getting: A new line of lingerie for girls 9-14 aunched by Miley Cyrus’ little sister, Noah, and Miley’s Hannah Montana co-star, Emily Grace Reaves. Or so sez BoingBoing.

Does anyone else remember the furor when Miley took those sexy, shirt-free photos with Annie Leibovitz? Basically claimed she had no idea she had no shirt on, and daddy had walked off to make a malted or something? Back then, I blamed Annie. Now I blame Disney. Sexy young girls sell and don’t they know it. Apparently it’s a hop, skip and a jump from princess to pole dancer.

The salient Free-Range Kids issue here? It’s the KIDS part. Kids love to play dress up — they even love to look grown up and alluring. I sure loved wearing my mom’s old evening gowns! But why foist upon girls this tawdry ideal of sexiness, dredged from the strip club?

I’m hesitant to post this link, which has pictures of the offending apparel.  But these really look trampy.  If I had a teenage daughter who dressed that way on her own, she’d be grounded faster than you can say “Hannah Montana”.  If I dressed my pre-teen daughter like that, I’d hit myself so hard I’d never know what hit me.

I disagree with Skenazy in part; I think the problem is the parents, not the evil corporation.  You have to wonder the thinking of someone who hears the words, “We want to use your daughter to hock tawdry clothing at kids” and says, “OK!”

So the Greeks are pissed at their government and on a war path, and threatening more strikes because they do not like the bitter pill decades of communist and/or socialist economics is now forcing them to swallow.

Greek tax collectors and customs officers walked off the job on Thursday, kicking off a spate of strikes against government austerity cuts designed to halt a financial crisis caused by massive debt. Both groups embarked on a two-day walkout ahead of industrial action called by civil servants, doctors and Communist-backed workers on February 10 and a general strike called by Greece’s main umbrella union on February 24.

“We have already made sacrifices and will accept no more cuts,” the chairman of the customs officers’ union Argyris Sakellaropoulos told Flash Radio. The unions are on the warpath over a government austerity programme that they say has progressively become harsher under pressure from the European Union and market speculation that has hurt Greek finances and rattled the euro.

Anyway, for those that don’t know the issues facing the Greeks, it is one that Obama and democrats are hard at work recreating here. The country has been in love with collectivism for decades now and has lived large on borrowed cash and time. Over generous benefit packages, unrealistically low retirement ages, social spending run amok, people that are always ready to party but absent when it is time to work, and a system that can virtually be paralyzed by ultra powerful unions that can make the country grind to a screeching halt, have reduced the Greek economy to a joke. The country suffers from a staggering debt, but because it is now part of the EU they can’t just devaluate the currency yet again, as it had done many times in the past, and pretend all is well. The Greek government has to take drastic & painful measures precisely because it waited until the last possible moment to admit that the pace of the existing scheme was unsustainable.

Greece’s debt stands at more than 294 billion euros ($412 billion), its 12.7-percent deficit is well beyond EU limits of three percent of output for eurozone members and it suffered a triple downgrade of its sovereign debt in December. The government hopes to economise over a billion euros ($1.4 billion) from benefit cuts and operational cost reductions in the public sector. Overall, Athens aims to save over 10.3 billion euros ($14.3 billion) this year with improved tax collection, state cost cuts and reduced arms spending to bring the public deficit to 2.8 percent of output by 2012. The programme also seeks to stabilise Greece’s debt burden—one of the highest in the eurozone—and reduce it to 117.7 percent of GDP by 2012.

Simply put, the socialist experiment has reached the inevitable conclusion - the proverbial brick wall - in Greece, and the house of cards is imploding. Those that have lived high on the hog however, don’t want the free ride to end. The unbelievable part in all of this is that these harsh measures are being initiated by a avowed socialist. Many say that it is all too little, too late. The place is simply now dysfunctional and not willing to do what it takes to even get out of the hole they are in. This same story is also repeating itself in other Eurozone countries like Portugal and Spain – whom had been actually making progress under Aznar a while back before electing Zapatero who literally destroyed all the positive reforms – and even France and Germany are wondering how bad things are going to get. The writing is on the wall.Sooner or later the “free ride” comes to an end.

That TARP money went to prop up all those evil fat cat corporations in the private sector, remember this little covered fact (emphasis mine):

TARP: The OMB director is grilled over the misuse of bank bailout funds for purposes other than intended by Congress. This taxpayer money wasn’t intended to be the administration’s perpetual slush fund. When the specifically targeted and named Troubled Asset Relief Program was enacted, we were told it was a necessary and wise investment. It would stabilize the financial system and keep credit and money moving. We would even get our money back and then some. Many banks didn’t want the money or need it. Some were told to take it or they’d be audited. So they took it. The banks, eager to break free from federal interference, paid the money back with some interest. The money was intended to be returned to the Treasury for deficit reduction. But an administration that touts a token discretionary spending freeze has no such intention. This is more than government failing to keep a promise. This is a patently unconstitutional act, as Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire tried to point out to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag on Monday over administration plans to transfer bailout funds to a new small-business loan program.

TARP was a terrible idea because it basically undermined the principle that those that took bad risks in the pursuit of bigger returns would reap the consequences of those actions, and those that made ridiculously stupid decisions deserved to go the way of the Dodo bird, and make room for others that didn’t do the same. Granted, TARP was enacted by government as a CYA, since they were the ones that passed the laws and rigged the system that forced the lending institutions to hand out money to bad and really bad risks, then, when that was still going nowhere fast, used Fannie & Freddie to create a shell game that makes what was done by the people at Enron look good, and in the end caused the collapse and following recession, so these politicians didn’t want that to come out. But what is being done now, is ludicrous. Another shell game. We are being had.

The usual MSM suspects are again spinning the fact that the reported job loss numbers were drastically off - coincidentally again in the direction that would favor the lie that things are getting better - by claiming that it is an unexpected event that job losses continue to mount as D.C. does everything it can to destroy the private sector.

WASHINGTON – The number of newly laid-off workers filing initial claims for jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week, evidence that layoffs are continuing and jobs remain scarce. The rise is the fourth in the past five weeks. Most economists hoped that claims would resume a downward trend that was evident in the fall and early winter. The Labor Department said Thursday that new claims for unemployment insurance rose by 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 480,000. Wall Street economists had expected a drop to 460,000, according to Thomson Reuters. The four-week average, which smooths fluctuations, rose for the third straight week to 468,750. The figure is the highest in the past two months. Initial claims dropped sharply in late December, raising hopes among economists that layoffs were nearing an end and the economy would soon start generating net gains in jobs.

Of course, when you ask the collectivists in charge what their solution is, they will tell you that it is to spend even more money we don’t have and to be even more belligerent towards the private sector. How hard does all this “government can spend you out of a recession” thing have to fail before we agree that it is a disastrously stupid idea? In the mean time more and more people are, because of lack of viable meployment, almost being guaranteed they can kiss the American dream goodbye. For the party of the little/poor people I have to point out that their policies sure seem to make a lot more of those little/poor people.....