Political Pablum
Today's proof of global warming (via Don Surber)
World may not be warming, say scientists - Times Online
Breaking News: "Global Warming" Really Means"Cooling" or maybe "Climate Change" - Big Journalism
Climate scientists admit fresh error over data on rising sea levels -- The Observer
African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC - Telegraph
Many meteorologists break with science of global warming - KansasCity Star
Sen. Dodd requests sledding waiver for Capitol Hill | Washington Examiner
you're talking about unreal money."
The news today is.... Obama to raise 10-year deficit to $9 trillion
If 1 trillion dollars is unreal money, how unreal is nine trillion dollars? It is 9 (Nine!) times more unreal than this:
Obama makes pitch for budget priorities "I didn't come here to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation...."
Congressional auditors say will Obama's budget will generate $9.3 trillion in red ink over the next decade.
When I hear a politician say,
"Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy."am I entirely alone when what I hear echoing in the background is
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal?"
Now I don't know about you, but I much prefer the beginning of Lincoln's speech to the dissembling appropriation of his tone adopted by Obama. Not that it is wrong to echo great men, but it is dubious when you do so for the ends of personal ambition. It becomes more dubious when Lincoln could get his task of binding up the nation's wounds done in about 270 words while Obama's "guilty but with an explanation" plea is pushing 5,000.
It is even less appealing when, to make your case, you have to go on and on about the original sin of America -- still not paid off, dammit! And then haul in your grandmother muttering racial epithets, and close with a poignant anecdote about a beleaguered young girl struggling with a mother who has our time's favorite poignant disease -- cancer. No speech it seems is complete without the appearance of a cancer sufferer, unless it is a cancer survivor.
Slate's designated blogboy Bill Saletan is hoist by his own keyboard tonight. He begins to tell his tale according to the voices in his head by slamming Senator Bill Frist for a slip of the tongue:
Frist opens with a Dole-esque gaffe of his own. His prepared text accuses some Democrats of not wanting "seniors" to participate in the drug program. Frist accidentally calls them "senators." This slip takes place just as Frist is about to accuse Democrats of caring more about politics than patients. Evidently it's Frist who has politics on his mind.But Frist is not the only one having trouble with his mode of expression tonight. Just a bit down the page Saletan writes:
"Elizabeth Dole delivers the fist significant speech of the night."Frist, First, Fist... it's all the same when we rely on our spell checkers rather than our brains, isn't it Bill?
But then, maybe he meant it. I missed Dole's speech. Maybe it had a lot of punch.
Not all balloons were trial
AFTER SEVERAL HOURS READING AROUND THE UBER-BLOGSPHERE, A CONSENSUS is beginning to emerge. While Kerry said a lot of things and hit a lot of cliches out of the park, and spent weeks preparing, and days practicing gestures ( love that little thumbs up move), history will record that the single most discussed line was:
"Go balloons. Go balloons. ... I don't see any balloons....I want some goddamn balloons..... Where the f**k are the balloons?...."
-- The CNN Director over an open audio line. CNN International as well. Executions will commence at dawn.
As for the speech itself, well, as my wife commented here earlier on a different subject, "Please sleep soundly tonight knowing that your suggestions have fallen on blind ears."
LOOKING LIKE HE'D RATHER BE AT HIS PROCTOLOGIST'S OFFICE, John Kerry today appeared with Dennis Kucinich (D -- PLANET MONGO) to accept his endorsement, and the sixteen Area 51 space aliens that he controls.
In brief remarks, Kerry said: "Now that we've become the party so desperate for votes that we've got folks in San Francisco working to hand them out to illegal aliens, I saw no reason to deny those people who are stopping by the planet to bore holes in our cattle the franchise. I welcome my good friend Dennis Kucinich and all his clones into the big tent of the Democratic Party..... okay, you can take that tentacle out of my pants now."
"SANDY BERGER is my friend, and he has tirelessly served this nation with honor and distinction. I respect his decision to step aside as an adviser to the campaign until this matter is resolved objectively and fairly." -- Statement by John Kerry on Samuel R. Berger
Clear, terse and to the point. I don't want to hear any jokes like, " I respected Sandy Berger before I disrespected him," okay?
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Kerry Campaign , an office manager for Kerry-Edwards informed the press that Berger was not allowed to clean out his files before being escorted, pantless, from the premises.
"So what if I throw like a girl. There were girl Kennedys too."
WHEN WE DO OUR ELECTION POLL, OUR FIRST QUESTION WILL BE TO PASS OUT THESE GLOSSYS AND ASK: "Do you really want to give control of the real football to these boys?"
Inspiration via: Allah
"I served in the War in Vietnam, I served in the Revolution. Did I mention my wife is African?
"My name is John Kerry and I approve this message."
Not content with a stronger America symbolized by a Vice-President with Clairol hair, candidate Kerry today also promised a stronger America with no teeth.
I must confess that when the underwhelming news of Kerry selecting Edwards
filled me with inertia this morning, my pre-caffinated brain immediately went into free association mode. For not particular reason, I received the following messages concerning Kerry's mind-numbing choice:
Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut, Sometimes You Don't
"The closer you get, the better he looks."
"Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer. / You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer."
"Hate that gray? Wash it away."
I suppose it is the sign of a weak mind to leap from the momentous non-event of a veep naming to a series of advertising and second rate Beatles lyrics from John Lennon's late smack abuse period, but maybe it is just the sign of a mind relieved by knowing that, at last, our long national nightmare of "Who could it be?" is over.
John Edwards. Who knew? Well, to judge by the repainted "Kerry-Edwards" airplane, huge "Kerry-Edwards" billboards, vast hand-held "Kerry-Edwards" placards, and reams of other printed detritus, several printers and sign makers did.
(Memo to the vast throngs of "investigative" reporters swarming all over this story for the last aeon: Try a little legwork in the paint and print shops on your beat. You might get a scoop that doesn't spell Gephardt. If there are too many printers for you to cover, take the hint and look at those few companies that can actually paint on the outside of jet airplanes.)
So now we have it. The choice will come down to two teams: one a couple of former CEOs who have actually run companies before going into politics, and two lawyers who have spent their lives either in politics making things hard for companies to succeed, or bribing politicians while preparing to sue companies that succeed.
A choice, not an echo-echo.
Why is this man laughing?
CNN, ALONG WITH EVERY OTHER MEDIA OUTLET with nothing better to do, is busy telling us that: Speculation over Kerry VP pick soars, while the Washington Post Reports that Kerry Says He Believes Life Starts at Conception.
Perhaps, just as soon as he gets a concept, the life of the Kerry Campaign can begin.
Then again, if it actually became a "Kerry Campaign" instead of a "Hate Bush Campaign," Kerry would soon be buying another posh country estate in Mondale Land, just down the road from Dukakis Estates.
It is becoming clearer with every passing day that nobody, but nobody, gives a tinker's dam what Kerry thinks, what his positions are or are not, and whether or not he has the character to govern. His entire campaign is being run around the theme of "I am the Not-George."
Shameful for him, and even more shameful for his supporters.
Will he have a concept for a veep soon? Who knows, who cares? It doesn't matter who as long as that person is the Not-Cheney.
A dozen candidates, over two years in the making, one bazillion hours of news cycles, and the Democratic Party comes up with a slate of Not-holes. Somehow, it all fits.
Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) plans to announce his vice presidential running mate in an e-mail to the 1 million subscribers to his campaign Web site.Series 2, Episode 24: How Not to Be SeenBut he didn't say when.
--
Yahoo! News - Kerry to Announce Running Mate in E-Mail
Cut to a wide-angle shot of hedgerows, fields and trees.)
Voice Over (John Cleese): In this campaign there is a Democratic candidate for President. He cannot be seen. In this campaign, John Kerry's main hope of being elected lies in his not being seen. In this posting we hope to show you how John Kerry plans on not being seen by the American electorate, before or after the election.
(Caption on screen: 'NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY, POST-DEANIAC SERVICE FILM NO. 42 PARA 6. "WHY JOHN KERRY IS NOT TO BE SEEN"')
Voice Over: In this film we hope to show how not to be seen. This is GENERAL WESLEY CLARKE of Clintonville. he wants to be President. He can not be seen. Now I am going to ask him to stand up. General Clarke, will you stand up please?
In the distance General Clarke stands up. There is a loud gunshot as Clarke is shot in the buttocks. He crumples to the ground
Voice Over: This demonstrates the value of not being seen.
Cut to another location - an empty area of scrubland
Voice Over: In this picture we cannot see MR. AL SHARPTON of Hustlerville on the Hudson. Mr. Sharpton is a professional buffoon with a haircut that is suspected of being an alien life form. Mr. Sharpton has never been elected but often indicted. He too wants to be President of the United States or at least collect a lot of money for pretending. Mr. Sharpton will you stand up please?
To the right of the area Mr. Sharpton stands up. A gunshot rings out, and Mr. Sharpton leaps into the air, and falls to the ground and begins to prattle on various talk shows. Cut to another area, however this time there is a bush in the middle
Voice Over: This is GOVERNOR HOWARD ("Aieeegahhhhhh!") DEAN of Upper Babboon's Bunghole, Vermont. Governor Dean would you stand up please. (after a pause - nothing happens) Governor Dean has learnt the value of not being seen. However he has chosen a very obvious piece of shrubbery.
The bush explodes and you hear a muffled "GointoNewYorkCaliforniaWisconsin ... Aieeegahhhhh!" scream. Cut to another scene with three bushes
Voice Over: Mr. John Edwards of The Dead Kennedys' Theme Park has presented us with a poser. We do not know which bush Edwards is behind, but we can soon find out. (The left-hand bush explodes, then the right-hand bush explodes, and then the middle bush explodes. There is a muffled scream as John Edwards is blown up leaving only his hairpiece.) Yes it was the one with the really beautiful haircut.
Cut to a shot of a farmland area with a water barrel, a wall, a pile of leaves, a bushy tree, a parked car, and lots of bushes in the distance
Voice Over: RICHARD GEPHARDT, of Heartland, USA, has concealed himself extremely well. He could be almost anywhere. He could be behind the wall, inside the water barrel, beneath a pile of leaves, up in the tree, squatting down behind the car, concealed in a hollow, or crouched behind any one of a hundred bushes. However we happen to know he's in the water barrel.
The water barrel just blows up in a huge explosion. Cut to a panning shot from the beach huts to beach across the sea
Voice Over: Ostensible Senator and Democratic Candidate for President JOHN KERRY has been hiding from the electorate ever since his advisors advised him that the less that was known about him the more likely people would be to actually vote for him.
To enhance his position of not being seen Senator Kerry has decided to communicate with the people and the press only by email via his exclusive members only web site. Today Mr. Kerry announced via a cut and paste job on Senator Mrs. Ms. William Jefferson Hillary Rodham-Clinton's Instant Messenger Account on AOL, that he would notify the world of his choice of Vice President through an email message sometime so stay tuned. In the meantime, Senator Kerry would continue to not be seen. But Senator Ted Kennedy told us where he was while in an alcoholic blackout and bartering for another shot of Grandpa's Overcoat.....
The camera pans around and stops on a obvious looking hut, which blows up. Cut to a house with a John Kerry standing out front
Voice Over: And here is Senator John Kerry spending another blissful afternoon not voting in the Senate (he blows up, leaving just his designer jeans. Cut to a shack in the desert) Here is where his billionaire wife lives. (shack blows up - cut to a building) And this is where Al Gore lived who refused to speak to us in anything less than a shout, (it blows up) , so did the feckless gentleman who founded MoveOn.org .... (shot of a house - it blows up) and here .....(another building blows up) and of course here the Democratic National Committee ..... (a series of various atom and hydrogen bombs at the moment of impact)
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
-- Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-- Hillary Clinton, San Francisco, this day -- on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Michael Moore has one good weekend at the movies, Bill Clinton has a good week cranking out his tome, and the New York Times takes a poll showing their boy falling seven or eight points in a month and says George Bush is losing. I like weeks like this since they embolden. empower, and otherwise encourage the standard bearers of the Democratic Party to open their mouths and tell us what is really in their plans for the country.
We should do everything we can to draw more statements like Hillary Clinton's out into the light of day. After all, if we are going to have an election based on the issues, and if one of those issues is who has what plans for your money, it helps to know that "We" (Hillary and her ilk) are going to "take things" (and by taking your money, they will be taking things which you might have bought) "away from you" (It was yours and now it is ours because we can) "for the common good." (Ah, the common good. That ancient shibboleth. That fetish of the nanny state.)
Once upon a time, mommy took things away "for your own good." Now Mommy Dearest has changed. She's going to take things away for "the common good."
A government system dedicated to taking things away from those that have them "for the common good...." Sounds familiar. Wasn't that tried in the 20th century? And it killed how many millions? It all seems so distant now that we eradicated "the evil empire" decades back, but it seems to me the total death toll was somewhere north of 100 million human beings.
Nice to know that Hillary Clinton and the rest of her ilk want to bring that back. Makes the choice this year much, much clearer. And easier too.
THE APT HEADLINE FROM THE AP READS: Court Allows 'Under God' on Technicality, but it is obvious that this will not stand and we will be back in this endless loop as quickly as suits can be filed.
I suggest we just cut to the chase and save everyone the hassle. Let's just have God give up. That's right, He should just give up on this whole sorry nation that feels, at this point in history, compelled to indulge it's fat and overfed legal eagles with debates such as this. Instead, we can simply insitute a new pledge that will give the haters of God what they really desire: A pledge that means so little that it means, well, everything.
After all, removing God from the Pledge is only the first step to getting rid of the Pledge altogether.
When this sad and mindless issue took over the courts of this country last year, I suggested the following Way-New Pledge. I put it to you again:
==
Just in case they decide that God has no little desk in the classrooms of America any longer, here's a new version of The Pledge of Maybe that we published last July:
To: The Central Committee to Make America Nice Instead of Evil
From: Newspeak Central
Re: The Way Cool New Pledge
Dudes,Dudettes, and Others Between Genders,
At your command Newspeak Central has reviewed the "old and in the way" Pledge of Allegiance. After six months of multicultural diversity focus groups this is the new one. We hope you give us hugs for it.
Original Bad Pledge:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag
of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands:
one Nation under God, indivisible,
With Liberty and Justice for all.
Stinky, right? Who can say that with a straight face? Nobody cool, that's for sure. (Our new version is something MTV could make a video of once Justin Timberlake records it.)
Here's our edit and our thinking:
"I " [ Too narcissistic -- Alter to "One may or may not"]
"pledge" [ Too binding, implies a commitment to something no matter what may happen to it -- Alter to "hereby loan on a revocable basis"]
"allegiance" [Just far too antiquated a notion for today's fast time. Change to: "a smidgen of one's attention"]
"to the Flag" [ The Flag? You've got to be kidding. No symbols drenched in blood, betrayal, slavery, corporate greed, unbridled lust of global domination allowed. Let's change it to "to the rainbow of diversity"]
"of the United States of America," [ No way! We are not really citizens of the USA. We're citizens of the, dare we say it? United Cool Nations! Strike and replace with "of the United Cool Places of One World of Really Well Meaning Persons" "Nations" had to go. See below.]
"and to the Republic" [Scratch that. It was the Republican form of government that got Bush elected. The Republic is so over. We'll go for Direct Democracy where we all vote on
Continued...IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY DAN RATHER AND HIS ILK were whining about the overbearing coverage of Ronald Reagan. Wait a minute, it was yesterday. But now it seems we can get back to our media's regularly scheduled fornication festival -- "What Makes America Rotten!"
Today's hot, steaming helping "the badness that is our country" comes to you via the Washington Posts' front page. It's about dogs and the fact that they are scary. Who knew? And 'authorized' scary dogs at that: Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized (washingtonpost.com). (Where's the author of "No Bad Dogs" when terrorists need him, I ask you?)
I'm really pleased to see that the Post and other major media have not been taken too far off their game in the last week. So far I score it:
Major Media Attention on the Death of Ronald Reagan: 1 week.
Major Media Attention on scuzzy Iraq Prison Abuse: 6 weeks and counting.
It's nice to see that these guardians of "the truth," these "professionals," are continuing to pound the citizens of America over the head with their self-inflated poo-poo cushions without the least bit of shame. Yes, they've created a state with their unswerving devotion to the 'public's right to know, to know, to know, to know, to know,' in which we can all say "Two months ago I could not spell 'Abu Gharib,' now I are one."
It's already the case that the onanistic frenzy over Abu Gharib has reduced at least 60% of sentient Americans to the state of "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." I wonder what the Las Vegas line is on when the media will so saturate the population that 100% would sooner fire one full clip from a nail gun into their foreheads than hear "Abu Gharib" one more time.
I know I've locked all my power tools up and mailed the key to my maiden aunt in Heaven.
Today's Pew Study on Public Attitudes Towards the Media pretty clearly shows that traditional media such as the Washington Post and the Network News are heading towards the boneyard of failed businesses at something approaching Warp One. I'm sure they're all sitting around wondering "Why?"
Nope. I take that back. It's 10 AM here. They're probably all ordering broiled fish, a small salad, and a daring wine spritzer at lunch on the expense account in Washington and New York just about now.
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- NOW they tell us?
- Liberals: Always half in love with easeful death
- Unreal Money: Obama Deficit 9 Times More Costly Than the War on Terror
- Well, you gotta cut somewhere.
- Obamanation of the Day, Saturday March 21
- Obama: A Mustard and Relish Sandwich of a Speech
- Trouble Sleeping?
- Leads That Bite the Ass That Wrote Them
- And the most memorable line of the night was....
- Kerry Accepts Alien's Endorsement
- Kerry Takes A Firm Position!
- Abercrombie and Fetch
- The Shameless Suckupathon Continues
- Hair Club for Men Is Taking It to the Street
- This Just Almost In
- John Kerry's Flying Circus
- Two Minds with but a Single Thought
- God Wins on a Technicality
- Okay, Patriotic Break's Over, Everybody Back to Prison