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September 27, 2010

Drive-By

Rachel who? Poll: Bill O'Reilly is popular, but Rachel Maddow is unknown to likely voters

"We have become a culture where making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does." Ken Blackwell, co-author of "The Blueprint". Via The Clue Batting Cage

Congress prepares to punt on spending, spend the fall campaigning

The Living Hell known as Obama's Gitmo: Guantanamo Bay rations detainees' ice cream portions ... and ... Gitmo Detainees Serve Time By Playing Games, Talking to Family on Skype, Taking Classes

Empowering the underpants inspectors: 10,000 TSA employees get secret clearances

Wiretapped phones, now Internet? To better track criminals, U.S. wants to be able to wiretap online communications.

Shannon Love on "Why Leftists Are Elitist:" "Elitism isn't defined by who benefits, elitism is defined by who decides."

Star Power! This Weak: Christiane Amanpour Leads ABC To Worst Ratings Since 2003

File under: "No problem. I"ve done this thousands of times." Segway owner Jimi Heselden dies after riding one of his machines off cliff

UN plan for 'alien ambassador' a case of science fiction?

10 Hateful Anti-Woman Acts By Leftist “Feminists,” Part 1

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:05 AM | Your Say (5)

September 26, 2010

Mind Forged Manacles

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"In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear."

-- Blake

Michelle Antoinette Gives UN Dignitaries Things She Didn't Want From Her Potemkin Garden ォ HillBuzz

Nigeria = A “Gulf Disaster” Every Single Year. | Little Miss Attila “I care, I care, I care: I want less drilling where the environmental standards are strictest, and more drilling where they are lax. La la la la la—I can’t hear you!”

Lost in the BozoZone Again @Friday Night Lights ォ Jaded Haven "The driver eventually found her way back to the school and seemed to be on solid footing as she pulled out of the school parking lot for her second delivery attempt of the day."

Thoughts From a Country Mouse - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest

The shift from the world of Norton, Ralph, Trixie and Alice to the world of Ferris Bueller or even Roseanne is changing the way the country thinks about government. A post-urban nation is looking for post-progressive politics. I don’t think we’ve found the answers yet, but if history teaches us one thing, it is that we shouldn’t underestimate the political creativity and, ultimately, the common sense of the American people.

Question: When is the last time any “landmark” legislation brought down the cost of something?

Glenn Reynolds:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits -- self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. -- that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn't produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

William M. Briggs, Statistician on The Mathematics of Boneless Pork Rectums

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:11 AM | Your Say (2)

September 23, 2010

Whip Around

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Check those paychecks ladies: CARPE DIEM

Christina Sommers in today's NY Times on the proposed "Paycheck Fairness Bill," which would make it easier for women to file class-action, punitive-damages suits against employers they accuse of sex-based pay discrimination. Q: Now that young, childless, single women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts in large metro areas (21% more in Atlanta), couldn't men also file class-action lawsuits if this bill passes?

Wake up! He's a communist!

When what we eat, drink, drive, say, do for a living, how much money we make and where we live is dictated by our government, those who were dedicated liberal voters will grit their teeth because they're too arrogant to ever admit they were wrong. When pockets of the stunned, deluded variety of liberal voters finally put down their bongs and declare "Hey, man – you can't, like, do this to us! We have rights …" – they're going to catch a bullet in the head.

Yeah, Right. Cleveland Police: Accepting handgun registration applications

Applicants will need to bring photo identification, specifically a government issued drivers license, passport, Ohio identification card, or military identification. All applicants should bring all handguns unloaded and securely wrapped to the police district of their choice.

Ex-Marine Gunning for Barney Frank's Job
At last, a candidate who's got the moxie and the resume to challenge the architect of the crash and "Worst Person in the [Congress]!"

Sean Bielat For Congress: When he's not killing terrorists, he's building fuckin' robots. -- Ace of Spades HQ

See also sisu's "Barney Frank: Politically fat and campaign lazy?"

As well as Pajamas Media's "The Battle for America 2010: Might Barney Frank Lose?"

File Under: "Books Written by the Brain Dead:" Retired NORAD Officer's New Book Predicts a Tentative Worldwide UFO Display on October 13, 2010

A newly-published book by a retired NORAD officer predicts October 13, 2010 as the tentative date for a fleet of extraterrestrial vehicles to hover for hours over the earth's principal cities. Author says the event to be the first in a series intended to avert a planetary catastrophe resulting from increasing levels of carbon-dioxide in the earth's atmosphere dangerously approaching a "critical mass."
Global Warming. Is there anything it can't do?

Posted by Vanderleun at 12:06 PM | Your Say (6)

September 19, 2010

Kids, don'thave hippies for parents.

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"Hi and welcome to U.W. Whitewater! My name is Marijuana Pepsi Sawyer." -- Academic Advising & Exploration Center

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:25 AM | Your Say (37)

September 14, 2010

Math Still Hard. Teaching and Nursing Still Easy

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CARPE DIEM: 142 Women Enrolled in Grad School Per 100 Men, and Women Outnumber Men in 7 Out Of 11 Fields
This is more evidence that men have become the second sex in higher education. And here's a prediction: The fact that men are underrepresented in graduate school enrollment overall (100 men for every 142 women), and underrepresented in 7 out of 11 graduate fields of study will get almost no media attention at all. Additionally, there will be no calls for government studies, or increased government funding to address the problem, and nobody will refer to this gender graduate school enrollment gap as a "crisis." But what will get media attention is the fact that women are underrepresented in four of the 11 fields of graduate study like engineering and computer science, which can likely be traced to some kind of overt or unexamined gender discrimination.

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:51 AM | Your Say (18)

September 12, 2010

Princess Putz Talks Tough

Janet Napolitano vows to keep up fight

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11 with a speech Friday in New York vowing to keep up the fight against terrorists and to “to enlist the nation in its own collective security.”
Excuse me, but when has this person done anything to increase the security of anyone except drug lords and illegals swarming over the borders?

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:23 AM | Your Say (10)

"Poverty on track to post record gain under Obama..."

"The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty." -- Yahoo! News Change you can believe in!

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:16 AM | Your Say (4)

September 11, 2010

Lileks on the Long War and American Quislings, 11 September 2003

They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long. -- LILEKS (James) The Bleat

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:34 AM | Your Say (7)

September 10, 2010

9/11 Conspiracy Theories - Debunking the Myths - World Trade Center

Proof only the insane ignore:


"Melted" Steel
Claim: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."

FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800ー to 1500ーF, not hot enough to melt steel (2750ーF). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength窶蚤nd that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks." -- Popular Mechanics

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:44 PM | Your Say (17)

September 8, 2010

Here's to You, Affirmative-Action Man of Genius!

Like a Dog: The Origins of Barack Obama'€™s Petulance

Promoting Obama offered blanket exemption from even the suggestion of prejudice — a sort of cheap flip of a "get out of jail free" card than ensured liberal elites could otherwise pursue their sheltered lives without guilt or worry over demands for daily interaction with most African-Americans. Elect Obama, worry not what he did -- and at last live guilt-free lives in seclusion. That is a serious charge that should not be made lightly, but the emphasis on Obama's diction, pigment, and appearance -- €” rather than his actual record -- is not my own.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:23 PM | Your Say (3)

Buck Up, America

The truth of America’s problem today is this.

We are not caught up in a Malthusian crisis of mass shortage and starvation. We are being crushed under the riches being pumped out by a cornucopia of wealth and abundance. We don’t need to get by with less; we need to figure out how to harness the floods of abundance now inundating our landscape. And as we achieve that, we are going to live better, grow faster and, I very much suspect, dramatically improve the quality of the environment. -- Walter Russell Mead'

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:34 AM | Your Say (3)

September 7, 2010

History regrets to inform liberals that their dreams are as dead as the Dodo

After much premature partying,

we regret to say that The End of History has not come; that the European Union, far from sweeping the world, is fighting for its financial existence. It is our sad duty to inform you that Hope and Change has given way to a fatalistic acceptance that most people will have to keep working till they drop. Richard Trumka writing in AOL says, "This Labor Day, more of our grandparents may be working a cashier's line, waiting tables or preparing lessons for the first day of school." But the consciousness of crisis has not been matched by a willingness to consider liberal solutions as part of the problem. That would be blasphemy. -- Belmont Club » A Wider Broom

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:32 PM | Your Say (4)

Answers to the Name of "Lucky"

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Sit! Stay! Roll over! Speak! "Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they're not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog," said the president.


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Well, if that's the case he's Lucky he's not the president of Iran:
Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a ruling which upheld that all dogs are unclean and advertisements about keeping, buying, and selling dogs are forbidden. The new fatwa also outlaws ads promoting dog food and shops that sell dog accessories. Keeping dogs as pets, according to the Tehran Times, has become remarkably common among Iranians, particularly those living in metropolitan areas. Police have been assigned the task of confiscating dogs from people who walk them in public. The confiscated dogs are destroyed and burned in incinerators. -- Canine Culls: Dog's Doomsday in Iran

Posted by Vanderleun at 10:13 AM | Your Say (13)

September 6, 2010

A Horribly Cheap Topical Joke That iowahawk Somehow Managed to Milk Into an Entire Blog Post

Didja hear about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac narcissist President?

He laid awake nights wondering if he was really Dog.


-- iowahawk

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:58 PM | Your Say (1)

September 5, 2010

In California, Democrats run lying cadaver for governor

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Voted Most Repulsive Candidate of 2010 by the Cast of "Alien Nation"

We all know California is infected with more than one sickness unto death, but to go from The Terminator to The Return of the Night of the Living Dead is really too much. Looks like he'd like to have voters one-by-one with fava beans and a nice Chianti. And as for his "veracity:"

Jerry Brown says he'd be a frugal governor
To which my sainted mother would say, "Yeah. Right."

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:45 PM | Your Say (9)

"Work is not rabbit...

...It will not run away."

There is nothing wrong with having a job, he argued, but it becomes a moral danger when it begins to occupy too large a place in one's mind. Granted, it must take up a large proportion of one's waking hours, in the weekdays, but the person who carries his job about with him like a snail his shell, may become more snail than human. --- David Warren

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:52 PM | Your Say (1)

Take Two Students, Please

Both borrowed over $60,000 to finance an "higher-ed degree" and both graduated in 2000.

But one majored in advanced chemistry, he currently declares an annual income of around $210,000, and is fully employed with two dependents. This graduate makes regular interest and principal payments, and only owes $5K on his student loans. And the other student majored in Transgender studies and Foreign Relations, only makes $35,000 each year ( teaching at his alma mater), and he has no dependents. Over the past ten years, this student has only paid $500 to principal. -- Chicago Boyz More on the Higher-Ed Bubble

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:27 AM | Your Say (5)

Asian Man Driving Front Loading Washing Machine Is Attacked By Ninjas On Roller Skates. Film At Eleve... Film Right Now.

From the demented The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys

Posted by Vanderleun at 7:22 AM | Your Say (4)

"I have neither a working 8 track....

nor the fuel to fly my B-52 that far, so I'm selling both my nukes to the first terrorist group that will promise to use one of them on San Francisco." -- Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:40 AM | Your Say (2)

Remember when the left cared a"Remember when the left cared about Important Things?"

Historians will surely record the summer of 2010 Blogging as the Parking-Space Era. -- Sonic Charmer

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:35 AM | Your Say (0)

Don Colacho

A modern man is a man who forgets what man knows about man. -- #1,810

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:25 AM | Your Say (1)

September 3, 2010

Ezra Klein, WaPo "Economics" Putz for Whom Math is Hard

Question. Who is Klein's WaPo Silver Daddy that he can keep sucking down paychecks?

"Another month, another grim jobs report. We lot [sic] 54,000 jobs in August. Most of those -- in fact, 114,000 of them -- were expiring census jobs." -- Ezra Klein - August jobs report: 54,000 jobs lost; unemployment rate hits 9.6 percent

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:49 PM | Your Say (4)

Treason, Like a Rotting Fish, Moves from the Head Down

Charles Krauthammer - Our distracted commander in chief

"If this is true, then Obama's military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate members of Congress, pass health care and thereby maintain a president's political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out. But Obama sees his wartime duties as a threat to his domestic agenda. These wars are a distraction, unwanted interference with his true vocation -- transforming America."

Posted by Vanderleun at 6:30 PM | Your Say (2)

On Facebook

IJWTS:

"Nothing, but fucking NOTHING, is EASY on Facebook. It's their value proposition."

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:28 PM | Your Say (1)

Kids Today: "Get Off My Browser!"

If you are Mom-who-resurrects-horrible- dead-Windows-machines-one-last-time

(after infestation by virtual bedbugs and Tviruses from teen boy’s internet explorations) you will remind your teen boy (who tends to be absent minded) “Don’t leave anything in your history that might shock your Father. “ -- Retreiver @ From The Borderline Socipathic Book for Boys | Little Miss Attila

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:24 PM | Your Say (2)

The Episcoslamic President: "Christianity by Blackberry"

Lauer can pretend to believe this horseshit, but nobody else does.

Earlier this year NBC's Matt Lauer asked Obama why he has not chosen a church to attend. Obama said that his presence might distract other parishioners窶殿 compunction not shared by his predecessors. Instead, he makes do with a daily devotional email from a group of pastors. Christianity by Blackberry, one might call it. No wonder folks are confused. -- The President窶冱 Pastoral Emails サ Spengler | A First Things Blog
I just don't know how folks like Lauer can get the taste out of their mouths at night.

Or, as commenter Rodrigo put it: "If Obama were to murder Lauer's family and burn down his house, he'd be thrilled the President visited his home."

[Bumped for the snark factor]

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:00 PM | Your Say (18)

The Kids Are NOT Alright

Even if you go into the ‘learned professions’

you are going to have to be entrepreneurial and flexible. Technology is going to rock your world and economic changes and upheavals are going to change the rules on you over and over. This is not how the knowledge professions (law, medicine, teaching, the civil service) used to work. In the old days, you got the right degree from the right school, got a job with a good employer and rose steadily through the ranks through a long and increasingly distinguished career. At the end you had a safe pension.

Almost certainly, this is not going to happen to you. -- Back To School - Walter Russell Mead

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:46 PM | Your Say (3)

In which Sippican fisks Popular Mechanics down to a bloody stump...

Sippican Cottage: Hey, It's Time For Pointless Lists Of Tools Compiled By People That Think Defragging Hard Drives Is Heavy Construction

Circular Saw - "Nothing beats a circular saw for speed and convenience when it comes to making straight cuts on a variety of materials." Well, a table saw does. By a large margin, actually. And if you have a circular saw, that crosscut saw you told everyone to buy is going to end up on eBay some day, covered with rust but with the teeth still razor sharp. But soldier on, skinny glasses dude, I'm warming to your delirium tremens approach to prose and pounding on things

Posted by Vanderleun at 1:11 PM | Your Say (1)

September 1, 2010

End of Combat Operations in Iraq Spells Defeat for MSNBC

No Kombat = Kollapse of Kwislings:

MSNBC spent the last seven years cheering for the defeat of U.S. troops in Iraq and the nation’s complete failure post-Saddam. Now those troops will return home victorious, Iraqis will have the chance to build their version of a shining city on the hill, while for MSNBC the lesson learned is: “no defeat is as bitter as the defeat you suffer, while cheering for the defeat of others.” -- Big Journalism
Drive them fast to their tomb.

Posted by Vanderleun at 11:54 PM | Your Say (3)

Green Martyr with "Embiggened" Ideas Go Boom

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The Sayings of Lee: My Demands
FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

The most interesting thing about Lee's ideas is that they are simply monstrously enlarged versions of mainstream Leftwing notions.

Promoting birth control in Third World countries, abolishing all advanced combat systems, ridding the world of the Judaic-Christian heritage, Climate Change, building down the US economy, handing out subsidized housing -- what could go wrong? Nothing out of the ordinary in that, is there? But one way to detect logical fallacies is to see what happens when you scale them up. Those harmless ideas when projected onto a horizon ten miles high and fifty miles wide are so awe-inspiringly crazy that either you say "What the f*ck? "or "Why not?" James Lee said "Why not?". -- Belmont Club » The Temple of Dagon
Later.... Environmental Militant James Lee Shot and Killed After Taking Hostages at Discovery Channel Headquarters - ABC News
Manger said the suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.
Okay for today, but.... who's next?

Posted by Vanderleun at 4:34 PM | Your Say (11)

Third Party Voters Get the Government They Despise

neo-neocon asks and answers, "Democrats or Republicans: does the difference make a difference?"

As I see it, what the Republicans did wrong in the early years of the twenty-first century involved the flaws and frustrations inherent in government itself, a slow bleed of integrity and an accretion of power and of corruption by money. Such imperfections seem to be part and parcel of all government窶覇xcept for some ideal, Platonic one that exists only in our imaginations or legends. The remedy is not to opt out, it is to work for those who seem to be most resistant to such temptations, and to hope they continue to avoid them as long as possible, and then to toss them out as soon as they succumb.

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:45 PM | Your Say (3)

The Summer of George: The economy is dismal, but one man is enjoying a recovery.

"The Summer of Recovery," the finale of the first full season of "Obama,"

a midseason replacement that premiered to hype and high ratings but is now struggling and may face cancellation: "Barack uses his trillion dollar stimulus to create the best summer ever--the 'Recovery Summer'--but wastes hundreds of billions on things like studies on how cocaine affects monkeys, investigating the link between yoga and hot flashes, bus-stop art, international ant research, and an upgrade to the statehouse and political offices in Topeka, Kan. Eventually, the economy ends up barely ambulatory." -- Daniel Loomis writing to Taranto @ The Summer of George - WSJ.com

Posted by Vanderleun at 2:22 PM | Your Say (0)

"The single greatest item in the history of clothing:"

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PERFECT SHIRT via Tim Blair HT: BFHat

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:56 AM | Your Say (7)

Redecorated Oval Office? "It's yellow"

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It’s certainly brown. I hate the table, which looks like it was saved from a rusty Borg cube. Otherwise it has a nice autumnal feel – sedate, calm, subdued. If I was called there I would find the colors soothing, but it does sort of have a 4:00 PM-in-America feel to it. -- Lileks, The Bleat.

Posted by Vanderleun at 9:12 AM | Your Say (9)

Beck: "that very American thing: A practical visionary."

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion.

They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world -- and to potential political allies who are not religious -- is critical. -- Chicago Boyz I Think I See What Glenn Beck is Doing

Posted by Vanderleun at 8:25 AM | Your Say (0)