Thursday, March 27, 2008

"Swiftboating" Hillary

One of the most enjoyable things about this donk campaign season is watching the Dem's "chickens comin' ho-o-o-o-o-o-ome..... to roost!"

All that rot we keep hearing about Bush "stealing" the election. Gore winning the popular vote but losing the election. This vote should or shouldn't count. Wanting to change the rules in the middle of the game because following them didn't get you the result you desired. Kerry got "Swiftboated". Every vote should count. Identity politics -- the suckling toddler of the Progressive movement.

Well here we are ... one Democratic candidate will likely win the popular vote, and the other may very well get the nomination. People who served with Kerry questioned his version of events, and that was "unfair" -- but now people who were in Bosnia are questioning Hillary's version of events, and that's ok. It's ok for blacks to be racist -- we won't run them out of town on a rail, but we will if a white person even accidentally appears to touch the "race" line. Hillary wants to count votes that were invalidated by the Democratic party -- and in said invalidation the Democratic party "disenfranchised" voters from two states. Some votes count more than others... like 10,000 times more than others (superdelegates)....

Everything they accused the Republicans of in 2000 and somewhat again in 2004 ... they're doing and they expect everybody to turn a blind eye to the hypocrisy.

Pass the popcorn.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Dems Tiptoe on Gun Control?

According to this article, there are 300,000 NRA members in the next big state -- Pennsylvania. And on April 16, Obama and Clinton are set to debate in that state, Obama trying to keep his edge, Clinton trying to gain one. It also happens to be the 1 year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre.

With 42% of households (that would report such a thing) have guns, 54% of Union member households there have them.

Now everybody, and I do mean everybody -- progressives and NRA folks alike, wants the same thing here. That is, the same result. That result would be people don't get killed on a massive scale by people with guns.

The Progressive (therefore, Democratic) point of view is that to solve this you get rid of guns. Now they know they can't do that in one fell swoop, so they don't usually say this out loud (though many have been caught saying just that) -- but they say they want to limit access to guns. Like only "allow" one gun purchase a month, a year... whatever. Ultimate goal being no guns at all. Can't buy this kind of gun. Can't buy that kind of gun. Can't OWN this kind of gun. Can't use that kind of ammo.

But of course what that that translates to in the real world is no legal guns. Just like when liquor was outlawed, there was no legal liquor. But liquor there was and a huge, violent black market developed around it.

You know, kind of like gangs and drugs. Also illegal. Also still a problem. Only people don't usually hold a bag of drugs to your head while they take your wallet or empty your cash register or rape you. Not quite as effective.

So although they don't believe that the result would be only bad people having guns, and good people with nothing to defend themselves against those people -- that's excactly what history and common sense tells us would happen.

This would give the bad guys a huge advantage.

We didn't want shootings at schools, so we banned guns from schools. Guess what? We still have shootings at schools, because criminals, by definition, are willing to break laws. And on top of that, the shootings at schools are much worse now. Because the criminals are confident that nobody at the school will have the ability to stop them. They hold a monopoly on power, which is what it's all about for these mass murderers: A temporary feeling of being all-powerful.

Now pro-second amendment people, the NRA especially included, don't want shootings at schools, either. However, they believe if there are a few regular people around with guns who aren't afraid of being arrested for simply having one ... that should one of these crazed people start cappin' people, he won't get far. And the fact of the matter is far fewer of them will even get started because they will not have that assurance of having a monopoly on power.

In the article Clinton is reported to have said that her father took her hunting and she once shot a duck. (Under sniper fire!)

Queue Suzanna Hupp: "People, the second amendment is not about duck hunting."

Also, in the article, Mrs. I've Never Been Proud of America Until Now Obama is reported to have said that she worries about urban handgun violence but realized while driving in Iowa that she might want a gun for protection in a rural area.

In a rural area???? How about in an urban area, where your need for protection is substantially greater?

Frankly, Mrs. "O", I feel far safer out in rural areas than I do in urban areas. And more people per capita have guns in rural areas.

Think about that!

You wanna take my guns away from me in the city where I am more likely to need them because you think it's spooky in the country where people have guns but rarely shoot each other. What, because there are too many white people? (Hey, they'd level that charge at me if I said I thought I needed protection in the inner city). Or because you feel the police can't protect you out there? Well they already can't, and indeed are under no obligation to -- protect you in urban areas where you need it far more!!!!

How about this? Let the majority of Americans, law abiding, free, self-reliant citizens continue to be allowed to buy however many guns and whatever kinds of guns they like, because the bad guys are gonna do it, too and the good guys deserve to be able to level the playing field*.

That oughtta be in some sort of Bill of Rights somewhere.

Oh that's right. IT IS!!!!!

*And aren't progressives all about level playing fields? The one they're trying to design is vertical!

Why Would Gore Want to be President?

He's making far too much money scaring people about Global Warming.

What a gig.

A Tale of Two Houses

I've brought this up before, but in this election year it bears bringing up again -- especially in an age where people believe that the Democratic party is the Party of Civil Rights, and, as addressed here, the Republican Party is anti-environment. They don't care about it. Nay, they even delight in its destruction.

And so, when reading a paper by Lord Christopher Mockton, I ran across this little tidbit again, I thought it ought to be put out there again for people to read and digest.










House #1: Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every 'green' feature current home construction can provide. The house has 4 bedrooms and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet holds geothermal heatpumps circulating water through pipes sunk 300 feet deep. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses one-quarter of the electricity used by a conventional system. Rainwater is collected in a 25,000-gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks, then into the cistern, from which the garden is irrigated.

House #2: A 20-room mansion with 8 bathrooms, a pool and poolhouse, and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs to over $2,400. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home.

This house is not in the Northern or Midwestern snow-belt. It's in the South.

House #1, near Crawford, Texas, belongs to President George Bush. House #2, near Nashville, Tennessee, belongs to Gore.

Al can't be too worried about rising sea levels in the near future. He bought a luxury condo by the bay in San Fransisco in 2005.

A man with a carbon footprint as big as Al's and a recently purchased condo by the oceanside can't be nearly as concerned about global warming and rising sea levels as he pretends to be.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Another Hupp Quote

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of."

-- Suzanna Hupp



update: There are several good quotes by her and by others out here.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Suzanne (Suzanna) Hupp

Why did I not hear about this lady until this weekend?

This is some of the best articulated, powerful testimony I have ever seen in defense of the Second Amendment.

Go see the video. If you don't want to, her final statements are powerful enough in print (below). Still, I encourage you to go watch the video.

I'm mad at my legislators for legislating me out of the right to protect myself and my family. I would much rather be sitting in jail with a felony offense on my head and have my parents alive.

As far as these so-called assault weapons, you say that they don't have any defense use. You tell that to the guy that I saw on a videotape of the L.A. riots, standing up on his rooftop protecting his property and his life from an entire mob with one of these so-called assault weapons. Tell me that he didn't have a legitimate self-defense use.

Just one final statement, I've been sitting here getting more and more fed up with all of this talk about these pieces of machinery having no legitimate sporting purpose; no legitimate hunting purpose. People, that is not the point of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting. And I know I'm not going to make very many friends saying this, but it's about all rights, all of our rights to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there.

Certifiable

This evening this nobody went to read his favorite blog -- you know, the one that nobody reads -- and I went to leave a comment on his post. He was talking about IT certification, outsourcing, etc. I went on and on. And decided to make it a post of its own over here. Because, it's long, and this ties in to so many things -- many of which I'm sure I haven't covered... but I think faster than I type, even faster than I read, so I didn't get it all. But here's what I got:

It's about a lot of things. It's about avoidance of responsibility. It is built on the idea that you can bypass the need to understand something, even going so far as to ignore the value of said understanding.

If I hire somebody who is "certified", my rear end is "covered" if it doesn't work out. "Hey, I hired a certified System Administrator. What more do you expect?"

And so we find one more thing that Morgan and I have in common. We are problem solvers. We have had jobs that were basically "outside the box" jobs that our CIO's didn't really understand, and it made them nervous. But we also had some smart people in our organizations somwhere between us and the CIO that did recognize the value of a general problem solver.

I've never been "certified" in anything save for the two bachelors degrees I have and hey, maybe you want to count the high school diploma, too... that's a certification.

But any more, "certification" means you sat through a course -- and, depending on the quality of the instructor and/or the training company, you were simply able to regurgitate what the instructor said ... and sometimes not. Sometimes it's just sitting through the course. Here's your paper. Such courses can open cognative doors for someone who understands things and builds his worldview on understanding things rather than memorizing things. To those who get by on memorizing things, it's just a hoop and a badge for jumping through said hoop. When's the bagel break? Is there gonna be soda this afternoon?

I don't have that job anymore. I liked it. I was like a one-man swat team. People would come to me with problems they couldn't solve and say, "can you do this" ... and I'd think for a minute and almost always say "yeah". And I'd find a way to get it done. Sometimes I'd just verbalize a plan and others did it. More often, I did it myself, or did something that others then improved on.

Then I got a widget boss, who wanted everything counted and how much time did you spend doing this and what training have you been to this past year and what are your goals -- all things practically impossible to articulate for someone in the position I was in -- at least to someone who wanted to show their value by showing their boss how many widgets his department made in a department that did not make widgets.

So I bailed.

I now have a job where I don't get to do much of that. In many ways it's boring. I don't get to play McGyver much -- and that's my favorite role. The skill set I had in what I leaped to was not as extensive as the skill set I had to deal with the problems brought to me in the previous job. I jumped in, sank deep, and only now am I beginning to see the surface of the water 3 years later. But I've been able to do the job because I know stuff in general, not because I'm certified in anything.

I talk to tech support folks on the phone, and maybe 1 in 5 of them (if you're lucky) seem to have the skills it takes to model a problem and try to come up with a solution. The other four are reading from "if this, try that, if that, try this".... which only gets you so far. Most non-trivial problems are going to have a "this" which isn't listed in the decision tree, and then they're just stuck and in these cases I end up solving the problem on my own more often than not.

It occurs to me that this is the way progressives want to run the world. They want all the problem solvers to map out their decision trees so nobody has to think and everybody can be "cross trained" to do anything by being handed a knowledgebase.

Knowledgebases are cool and useful. But they are no substitute for problem solving skills, and problem solving skills aren't something you can objectively test for.

Ahem... for which you can objectively test ;-)

It's the way the UN runs. There's no need to think critically about this global warming thing. We have a team of certified experts who all agree it's happening and we're causing it. Hey, we sent inspectors in and they didn't find any WMD in Iraq. Therefore, Bush lied (but Clinton et. al. didn't when they said the same thing but did nothing about it. But I digress.)

Experts say the war was in Iraq was lost by winter, 2007. They're "certified".

Expert? My favorite definition actually came from a [probably very progressive] lady I used to work with.

Expert:

Ex: from has been. Spurt: A drip under pressure.
Here's your sign? Here's your card!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Just Words

Apparently, not only is Barack a blatant plagarist ... he applies the beliefs he mimicks selectively.
Be sure to click on the "Old Barack" YouTube link.

So Geraldine Was Right

Link after link on the web today talked about how great Obama's speech was. How he succeeded in overcoming the Reverend Wright controversy.

To be fair, there were probably just as many links to articles saying why it wasn't good enough and why he failed. That may be because I use a news portal that is friendlier to links to articles with less progressive points of view.

But let me put it this way: if it were a white candidate who made the same kinds of remarks about blacks, no speech, no matter how well-crafted, would ever recieve praise outside of the David Duke crowd.

Obama benefits from being [half] black. That's all Ferraro said. She didn't say it was affirimative action (although clearly a lot of white people openly state that they're basically voting for him because he's black and they have been steeped in affirmative action dogma for most of their lives). She said that he benefits in this campaign from being black. That is demonstrably true.

Individual Right

On the second amendment....

If a guy with a gun or a knife or a chain or a baseball bat, or a few thuggish buddies threatens my life and limb to take from me something that is rightfully mine, or take from one of mine something that is rightfully theirs, why should I not be allowed to threaten his life and limb to make him think twice about it?

And if he does think twice about it and decides it's still a go, why should I not be allowed to back that threat up with immediate and decisive action?

Life, Liberty, and the Persuit of Happiness includes the right to defend all three. It says so right in the Bill of Rights.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Never Batted an Eye?

Morgan's excellent post on Progressives behaving like bad husbands aside, this particular part of the Wrong Wreverend Wright's tirade is just nakedly wrong.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye."

--"Rev" Wright
Bullshit.

There was lots of eye-batting before, during, and ever since. Everyone acknowledges how horrific it was. It was a painful decision that Truman and others agonized over. A tough decision between evils that he made nonetheless. America has never been proud of killing civillians. America not only bats an eye, but winces in pain when she thinks of it.

It's this kind of intellectual dishonesty upon which progressives build their worldview, and hopefully the rot inherent in it will continue to cause it to crumle in the end.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Jet Engine Shark Jump

All this race insanity in the political campaign jumped the shark a long time ago, before the time where if someone [white] uttered the word black

Racist!!!!
would be the first thing out of somebody else's mouth.

But this article really takes the cake. Apparently Orlando Patterson felt the need to go back and find the biggest great-white (oops) shark he could possibly find and a set of nuclear powered jet-skis and go back and re-film the jumping.

In 3-D.

I couldn't believe anyone actually went this far when I read a reference to the article in another story. So like I'm prone to doing, I went and checked it out.

There it is. And it's not satire. He's serious. And apparently expects us to take him seriously.

He's talking about Hillary's "who do you want to answer the red phone?" commercial.

Orlando says the real message of this commercial is that you wouldn't want a black man answering the phone.

On. What??? Planet??????

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery,
Well, I'd say that probably puts him a little too close to the subject, then. If you look hard enough for signs of something in everything, you will find them whether there's actually anything there or not. [Things I Know #16]

I'm too sure that the Clinton campaign sat up until 4:00am one morning figuring out just excactly how to subtly get the message across that you don't want to vote for Obama because he's black!!!! Patterson's like Paranoid Brother in Undercover Brother.

And they did it by ... showing a sleeping blonde white girl and some vaguely hispanic kids. So.... Clever.

Clearly that meant the President was there to protect them from a black man! Because as we all know, the President primary job is domestic law enforcement. And did we mention there were no black kids? Yeah, it was just like that scene in "Birth of a Nation" where all the black men were lurking in the bushes, only without the black men in the bushes. Yeah. That's it. But they were there, because of what you didn't see. Any black kids in the commercial.

The further in to the story you get, the more awe and wonder you have at the sheer delusion this guy must live under.

Political Fall Guys

In this day and age of hypersensitivity (and I wish it weren't so, but that's where we are right now) time and time again we've seen people involved in this campaign or that one say something "terrible" and then resign from the campaign.

I just thought of this -- so I can't imagine the political machines haven't thought of it.

What you need to do these days to conduct a "negative" campaign is recruit a sufficiently large number of people who are willing to be "fall guys" for your campaign. It might even be their only contribution. You recruit them, they hang around for a while, and then one day they are told "we need somebody to say this."

Well, candidate X wears purple polka-dotted underwear.
The media gasps. The pundits pontificate. Your comment gets publicity. The fall guy resigns. The damage has been done. The candidate condemns the comment. Wink, wink; nod, nod. On the inside. But on the outside, it's solemn head wagging and lip biting.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Make sure you have enough fall guys to make all the charges you want to make, but not make.

Contribution in kind.

Or would that be contribution UN kind? ;-)

Silly Race Cards


You'd think that people would have had enough of silly race cards
But I look around me and I see it isn't so -- oh no
Some people want to fill the world with silly race cards
What's wrong with that?
Michael Tomaski

Race for the White House

In an article entitled "It's OK to hope for a black President", Brit Michael Tomasky asks:

Is it all right for Obama supporters to back him in part because he's black?

This isn't the same thing as his race being an advantage for him, which was Ferraro's argument.
First of all, I don't think that was Ferraro's argument at all. As a matter of fact, all Ferraro was saying was excactly what Tomasky is saying without the explicit judgmentalism. Ferraro was saying that a lot of people want to vote for him at least in part, and often in very large part, because he's black. That's just a fact. She should not be punished for it.

What Tomasky is saying, is, in fact, insidious. He's saying that what she is saying is correct and that it's ok.

But here's my test of whether or not it's good. If you can replace "Black" with "White" and "White" with "Black" and it's still ok, then it's ok. If you can't, then you've got some philosophical inconsistencies to deal with.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Distilled Wisdom

If you've read me much, you are aware that I'm really impressed by concise statements that pack everything they need to say in while remaining easy for most people to grasp. Things you know in your head but tend to have to ramble a bit to explain because it hasn't been distilled to its verbal essence. Statements like these are great tools for holding ideas up to the light of reason. And I plucked this one out of Morgan's post from this morning:
When has a whiner ever gotten something the whiner was whining about wanting, and stopped whining?
This applies to appeasment of all kinds. In child rearing. Reparations for slavery. Apologizing to various demographic groups for all sorts of stupid stuff. Terrorism. Flouting 17 U.N. resolutions and your cease-fire agreements and complaining about sanctions as well as forms of physical enforcement.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Spitzer

Supersaturation again. Another story that won't go away anytime soon. It's for the people of New York to deal with.

But my question is... has anybody else noticed that Silda Spitzer is just a little bit hot? ;-) Or is it just me? Kind of like a more mature Jennifer Aniston.

Just sayin's all.

Which begs the question.....

Monday, March 10, 2008

Bullcrit

Wow. I clicked on through from Mark Steyn to read this guy's tirade, and I've got to say -- clearly this guy's never read or listened to any Mark Steyn unless it was little clips and soundbytes taken out of context on purpose.

I, for one, have read the book this guy claims (at first) to be critiquing cover to cover. At the end after adjusting slightly for some of Mark's criticisms of his Bullcrit (that's when you critique someone's work based on other reviews of the work rather than bothering to read it for yourself) goes on to say that since he read someone else's review and things that other people had to say about Steyn in other publications ... and "oh yeah, America Alone" (probably excerpts from it in the "sources" he hand-wavingly cites) that it's really no big deal that he didn't actually read the book -- because he's just expressing his opinion...

... about a book he clearly didn't read. Which makes his opinion worth less than the electrons used to transmit it over the net.

If he had, many of his snarky questions would easily have been answered, particularly the ones concerning demographics. It's math, man. If cultural Europeans are not breeding at a replacement rate and Muslim immigrants are breeding at baby boomer rates, a couple of generations is all it will take. And to be fair, he wasn't "claiming" (in the article, not the book -- I think the book puts it farther into the next century) that it was definitely 40% by 2025. The quote is:
By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025.

Not excactly a ringing endorsement that the claim will be borne out. It's obviously a "high ball" estimate - and not one he made himself. I wonder if this guy buys Al Gore's 20 foot sea-level rise projections?

I've never read anything by Mark Steyn that would lead me to believe he's any sort of bigot -- quite the contrary. And I've read quite a bit of Steyn. He sounds like a perfectly reasonable, open-minded, well-read person who isn't averse to saying things that hyper-sensitive politically correct-ologists might find out of line with their doctrine.

And doctrine it is. Progressivism has become a religion in and of itself with dogma that is not to be questioned and comes with all of the self-righteous indignation that the worst religious zealot ever dreamed of.

Read the book, dude. Steyn's no bigot no matter what you've read. But he won't sugar-coat facts, either.

And if you think people like Steyn are the only people a new Caliphate would send packing, Islam has even less tolerance for athiests than it has for Christians.

Some Overdue Whittle-ing

I started reading Whittle's latest (it was posted back in early January) quite some time ago, but got busy near the end of part I and hadn't gotten back to the essay since then. Tonight I've gone back to read the whole thing, and found this distillate of verbage:

Why is it that the fielded military can adopt Boyd’s concept of agility and maneuverability, but the political leadership remains absolutely blind to the fact that this battle may or may not be won on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah and Ramadi, but it absolutely can be lost on the CBS Evening News? One would think the insurgents would need a multi-billion dollar, worldwide high-tech satellite network to spread their propaganda. But, being the generous people that we are, we have gallantly lent them ours.
Nobody beats Bill. Sums up my thoughts excactly. For all the talk of how many have been killed and how long this war has gone on, how much shorter would it have been and how many fewer lives would have been lost if it were obvious from the beginning that our own fifth column at home were not going to play along with the "insurgents'" game, if they had not been actively rooting for, aiding, and abetting the other side?

George Will Sums it up...

The Debate is Over™

“People only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”

Thursday, March 06, 2008

My Sharia More

Dudes ... this just in from Mark Steyn:

A while back I mentioned Harvard's decision to ban men from its pool and fitness center six times a week in the interests of "accommodating" Muslim women. Our pal Michael Graham picks up the theme:

In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.

At Harvard, that’s called progress.
Well put. And thus "progress" comes full circle. In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.

UPDATE: Oh my. Upon reading Michael Graham's article I just can't leave the very next part out:

When I asked Harvard spokesman Bob Mitchell about this new Sharia-friendly policy, he denied that they were banning anyone. “No, no,” he told me, “we’re permitting women to work out in an environment that accommodates their religion.”

By banning all men from the facility, right?

“It’s not ‘banning,’ ” he insisted. “We’re allowing, we’re accommodating people.”
This is why I won't vote Democrat any time soon. It's the party that represents people who spew this crap -- and expect us all to take it seriously.

A peek inside the mindset

So I'm talking to a guy at work the other day. Moved here after having lived in New York City. He lived there when crime was really bad. Nice guy.

I asked him if it was frustrating not being allowed to defend himself. You know, by carrying a gun.

His reaction surprised me. The gist of what he said was that gang members and people who killed their girlfriends had guns. Respectable people did not.

It took a minute for me to interpret what he actually said into that, but that's basically what he was saying. Wow.

So in this mindset, simply having a gun puts you in the same class as gang members and murderers. The gun itself is a cultural signifier -- and in his crowd it signified criminality. Or possibly "Bubba-ality".

No wonder they want to "get rid of them".

They still don't get, apparently, that there are laws against robbery, against armed robbery, against murder, against selling drugs on the street. And those laws don't stop these people from doing these things. Why do they think a law against getting a gun would stop them from having one?

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

The press is literally swarming The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.

It isn't?

Of course it is! I mean, this is important!

Oh, I forgot, The Debate is Over™.

Maybe they invited the wrong people.

RealClimate.org predicted that no real scientists would show up at this conference.

Well ...

We have with us, tonight and tomorrow, more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change, from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United States.

They come from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton, Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University.

From George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook, John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics.

From The University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

And from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I apologize if I left anyone out.

These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?


One more time, for the uninitiated:

Monday, March 03, 2008

What Really Matters

...what really matters in a campaign what are the basic beliefs. What is one's view of the role of the federal government? We believe government ought to be empowering people. We ought to trust people. The other side tends to want to empower government.

We believe taxes ought to be low. They want to raise taxes. We believe we ought to be on the offense against an enemy. That this isn't -- this War on Terror is not just a simple law enforcement matter. It requires all assets, all hands on deck to protect the American people. We believe in the transformative power of freedom. In other words, there's certain principles, and that's what I look for in these candidates.
Yes, we should not forget this. And by the way that was George W. Bush, quoted above in an interview with Chris Wallace on Feb 10.

He's right. We keep bringing up these little differences of opinion on what to do about this or that, and no candidate is going to agree with you on everything. But we should still vote for the candidate who best agrees with our overarching world outlook.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Spying on Ordinary Americans

In a response to a headline once again asserting the claim that "Ordinary Americans" are being spied upon by the government via our telecommunications companies... Morgan boils it down in this paragraph:

I think it’s high time we had a serious debating or reckoning about what exactly an Ordinary American” is. If I’m born in Pakistan to a Jordanian father and a Palestinian mother, grow up in Saudi Arabia, get recruited by Al Qaeda, work my way up in the structure to the point where Osama bin Laden trusts me to do some plotting with other terrorist officers over a cell phone which, while I’m using it in Syria, sends some signals over a network where American telecommunications interests could reveal a record of my calls to the CIA — maybe not getting sued for it — um…does that make me an “Ordinary American” even though I’ve never personally been to America?