HEY, I THOUGHT EVERYBODY WAS GOING TO LOVE US ONCE OBAMA WAS PRESIDENT: “Demonstrators shout slogans against U.S. President Barack Obama during a protest in Istanbul April 5, 2009. The placards read ‘Go away Obama’.”
Related: Smoke on the water.
DAVID GELERNTER: Welcome to Cold War II.
MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: “The bungled trial of former GOP Sen. Ted Stevens tainted more than just the Justice Department. It probably tipped the balance of a close election, and the fallout from that is far from over.”
UNION OFFICIALS SLAM NEW YORK TIMES over Boston Globe mismanagement.
Plus, this: “One union official pointed out to the Globe brass that company managers received bonuses earlier this year.” Quick: Send busloads of protesters to their homes!
HEY, WAIT, I THOUGHT UNDER AN OBAMA ADMINISTRATION THEY’D LISTEN TO US OUT OF LOVE: U.N. Security Council fails to agree on North Korea reaction.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Obama Makes Some Tough Business Decisions.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
TIGERHAWK: “The rich countries so rapidly going into hock are going to need some more children in short order or the old folks will suck the life blood out of them.” Frightful charts at the link. Meanwhile, I have suggested one approach to ameliorating the problem.
RASMUSSEN: Number of Democrats in Nation Declines During March. “In March, the number of Democrats in the nation fell two percentage points while the number of Republicans fell by half-a-point. Democrats continue to have a sizable advantage in terms of partisan identification, but the advantage is smaller than it’s been since December 2007.”
MOSQUE UNHAPPY about nearby restaurant serving alcohol.
UPDATE: Various readers are reminded of the Grendel’s Den case.
WHITE HOUSE AIDES’ TARP ties.
Plus this: “As he prepared to take a job in the White House at the end of last year, David Axelrod sold the political consulting firm that helped elect President Barack Obama for $2 million to a group of consultants who helped steer Obama’s campaign.” Some background on that here.
Good thing the administration’s standing up to those greedy businessmen!
FROM NETBOOK COMPUTERS to inexpensive “Nettop computers.” The bottom line is that computers are getting better and cheaper faster than manufacturers can load them up with stuff to maintain a price-point.
FROM THE G-20, A TELLING OMISSION. I think we’ll see the word “free” dropped from a lot of things.
CAN OBAMA SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET? “When Mother Jones and Jules Crittenden agree, isn’t that a sign of the apocalypse?” Cats and dogs, living together . . ..
HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE HURTLES INTO ACTION!
The U.S. House of Representatives have finally gone into action after months of ducking investigating Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y) for questionable financial dealings, Sen. Chris Dodd (D.-Conn) for alleged sweetheart mortgage deal, and Rep. John P. Murtha for taking illegal contributions.
The case that is taking their esteemed attention is for a speeding ticket that was given to Rep. Zach Space (D-Conn). The serious offense was that he drove 65 in a 50 mph traffic zone, and was given a warning for driving with an expired.
Nice to know they’ve got their priorities in order.
LIFE-PROLONGING: “If you look at the math on which the developed world is betting the future, government health systems will have huge incentives to develop ever greater institutional biases against ‘life-prolonging.’” There is, however, a better way.
TIGERHAWK notes that Atlas Shrugged is still moving up in the Amazon rankings.
BOB OWENS ON BLOOD LIBEL FROM THE LEFT: “The best minds progressive politics has to offer have apparently met on their little list and determined that—eureka!—it is the fault of the evil right wing neocon media that an unemployed sociopath ambushed and killed three police officers in Pittsburgh that were responding to a domestic violence call placed by his mother.” I’m sure the subject was analyzed with JournoList’s usual compassion and analytic objectivity.
I love the reference to “his Klannish (nearly progressive) hatred of Zionism.” Yeah, it fits.
UPDATE: Kos going “full-metal moonbat?”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Standing up against hate speech.
MORE: “Don’t forget who Kos is.”
Plus, more echo-chamber hate speech from Media Matters shill Oliver Willis. Why not just paste the talking points directly from JournoList? Oh, wait . . .
STILL MORE: Ouch. Kos Finally Finds A Cop Killing Revolutionary He’ll Criticize.
FINALLY: Jim Treacher emails: “Oliver Willis is for banning violent video games, presumably. And I’m sure he thinks the Beatles should’ve been locked up along with Charles Manson. Just kidding, that would only be if he actually had principles and wasn’t just trying to score cheap political points from the murder of police officers.” I was an early booster of Oliver Willis’s blogging career, but the move to Media Matters seemed to undercut his promise. Or perhaps my judgment was simply wrong from the beginning.
BEST ALBUMS OF 2009 SO FAR. Not sure it’d be my list, but . . . .
RASMUSSEN: 57% Want Military Response to North Korea Missile Launch.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “Where the hell were they on election day?”
ANN ALTHOUSE: A love story.
Plus, a roundup of the missing links.
POLITICIZING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: Jennifer Rubin investigates. “Under the Bush administration, Sens. Patrick Leahy and Chuck Schumer would be certain to drag the attorney general in front of the cameras and start hammering away at the first hint that he had given insufficient attention to career attorneys’ legal research or neglected legal restrictions on the government’s policy objectives. But now they have zero interest in quizzing the Democratic administration’s top lawyer. Some public pressure might be brought to bear on them, but they are unlikely to be swayed by pleas for them to fulfill their Constitutional obligations. So where are the Republicans?. . . . For now, we are left to ponder whether Holder is serving up just what the administration wants to hear (as was alleged in his role in controversial Clinton-era pardons) or whether he really is the man of integrity his supporters claimed him to be. Right now the available evidence suggests he is a compliant figure uninterested in providing objective legal advice and constitutional discipline for an administration badly in need of both.”
MARK HEMINGWAY: Tie a yellow ribbon.
SAVING ENERGY: How to replace or insulate your windows.
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Undersea mating habits of the stars.
IN THE MAIL: From David Gaider, Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne.
ANOTHER TEA PARTY PROTEST IN SANTA BARBARA:
With cries of “Repeal, recall, revolt!” several hundred demonstrators took to downtown Santa Barbara’s streets Saturday to protest big government and big spending.
“I’m here because I’m worried about the direction our country is going,” said Anita Dwyer, a Lompoc resident.
Billed as Santa Barbara’s “Big, Cool Tea Party,” the gathering attracted people from as far away as Oregon as taxpayers turned out to voice their discontent over the way President Obama and Congress are handling the U.S. economy, with increased taxes and spending. Sacramento was singled out for its share of criticism, too. . . . The event, sponsored by Santa Barbara County Tea Party, was one of hundreds of similar demonstrations taking place across the country. The tax revolts are based on the 1773 Boston Tea Party in which a group of colonists dumped more than 300 cases of English tea into Boston Harbor as a protest against British taxation. The British responded with several harsh measures that united the colonists in their quest for independence and foreshadowed the Revolutionary War.
Lots more Santa Barbara photos in this gallery. Also, there’s lots of tea party information here and here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a picture of rock star Lloyd Marcus at the Santa Barbara protest, taken by Helene Bidwell. He’s the author of this Tea Party anthem.
ED WHELAN: Look Who’s Politicizing Justice Now.
Intense controversy has flared in recent years over a previously obscure but high-powered office in the Department of Justice — the Office of Legal Counsel. OLC has traditionally provided the final word to executive branch officials on the meaning of the Constitution and federal statutes. Disputes over whether it faithfully carried out its assigned role in national security matters during the Bush administration have erupted on newspaper front pages. Whatever the merits of those disputes, virtually everyone has agreed that it is imperative that OLC provide high-quality legal advice that is not slanted to advance a president’s policy agenda — and that the president and his top advisers respect that advice.
But now it appears that we have an attorney general who is himself running roughshod over OLC.
Read the whole thing.
THUS I DO REFUTE IT: Obama calls for world without nukes.
North Korea defied the United States, China and a series of United Nations resolutions by launching a rocket on Sunday that the country said was designed to propel a satellite into space, but that much of the world viewed as an effort to prove it is edging toward the capability to shoot a nuclear warhead on a longer-range missile.
Sigh.
MARK LEVIN’S Liberty and Tyranny is now number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
NOW THEY’RE ATTACKING “PASSIVE DRINKING.” Which is interesting, since there’s actually no such thing, telling me that the anti-alcohol crusaders are a dishonest lot.
Can we regulate meddling like tobacco? Or better yet, treat it like they treat crack in Singapore?
TIMELY: Psychology Today: A Field Guide to Narcissism. “Deep desire to be at the center of things is served by extreme self-confidence, a combination that makes narcissists attractive and even charming. Buoyed by a coterie of admiring friends and associates—protected by the armor of positive self-regard—someone with a mild-to-moderate case of narcissism can float through life feeling pretty good about himself. Since they feel entitled to special treatment, they are easily offended, and readily harbor grudges. Yet narcissists are often very popular—at least in the short term. . . . A narcissist can be hard to identify, in part because he is likely to be much more fascinating than you would expect for someone so self-absorbed, and in part because you wouldn’t think someone with such self-regard could be so defensive and needy.”
I’VE DESIGNED-IN A RANDOMNESS COMPONENT just to foil the reverse-engineering efforts.
PHOTOS: The world’s most amazing holes.
CHARLES JENNINGS: Banning overseas tax havens won’t solve anything.
BRINGING BACK the glamorous mustache.
LIST: “TOP LIBERTARIANS on Twitter.“
AMANDA RIPLEY on using Twitter for emergency communications.
NEWSDAY: Northport Harbor “tea party” protests big government.
Chanting “Give us rain, give us thunder, we won’t let the government plunder,” a crowd of more than 300 sloshed through puddles to protest what they believe to be government tyranny by dumping two boxes stamped “tea” into Northport Harbor.
“I’m very unhappy with the administration, where they are bringing the country . . . we don’t need bigger government,” Theresa Baron, 41 of East Northport, said at the Freedom Friday Tea Party. “Let the free enterprise work. The government doesn’t have to solve every problem.”
Read the whole thing. Video at the link.
RAND SIMBERG is liveblogging the Space Access Conference. So is Jeff Foust. More here.
WHAT MONEYBALL missed.
DO-IT-YOURSELF magazines made easy.
AS SEEN ON TV: Testing out the slap chop.
AN INTERVIEW with Michio Kaku on Physics Of The Impossible.
ORAL HISTORY: Some firsthand reports on surviving the Great Depression.
IN THE MAIL: From Joshua Elder, Mail Order Ninja.
CONOR CLARKE: Are newspapers vital?
SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS to arrive six years early.
CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Shockingly, The Senator From AIG Might Be In Trouble. I don’t think he has crabs, though. That’s just the public anger talking. . . .
THE GUARDIAN decodes Obama.
MARKETS HEADING FOR A triple dip?
RICK MORAN on the Binghamton immigration center massacre.
Meanwhile, these thoughts are still relevant.
Plus, blaming cable news saturation coverage: “Once again the cable news programs are going wall to wall covering the latest mass shooting. All other programming is on hold. I’ve said this before. When the news shows do this they are guaranteeing the next atrocity. A twisted desire for fame and attention drives some of this. Recall that when the networks were having a problem with streakers at televised football games, they simply turned their cameras away. The problem evaporated. These mass shootings are a little more complicated, and news organizations cannot completely ignore them. But they don’t need to stop everything to cover them.”
If any other industry were similarly culpable and exploitive, the news media would pillory them as unfeeling profiteers.
Plus, police lameness? “Police said they arrived within two minutes. . . . Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers.” Jeez.
MORE ON PITCHFORKS, FROM MOE LANE:
So, I guess this leads to the next question, Mr. President. You say that there are pitchforks out there, and maybe there are. But are you really standing between them and the bankers?
Or are you trying to get the bankers to stand between them and you?
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Me And My Pitchfork.
COMING SOON: Yuri’s Night.
MORE INSIDER JOURNOLIST EXCERPTS, from IowaHawk.
HMM: “My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
The pitchforks that he’s been assiduously stirring up. But this pitchfork business works all sorts of ways . . .
UPDATE: “Either way, they’re getting forked.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh.
INTRODUCING the “coping classes.”
WOMEN’S RAZOR AD: Mow the Lawn. “This UK TV commercial for the Wilkinson Sword Quattro for Women Bikini razor would probably stir up some serious controversy in the US.” Really? Well, maybe for the racial stereotypes.
BAD NEWS: No Dog Is Truly Hypoallergenic.
HELP FOR WRITERS: Michael Totten sends this link to The Freelancer’s Survival Guide.
SAYUNCLE: “I think it’s a good thing for liberals to arm themselves.”
PRIME TIME for astronomy.
IF ALL THE UNSOLD NEW CARS WERE ELECTRIC: “So I’m reading this Wall Street Journal article on surplus cars in storage and the thought occurs to me: If only these cars were all electric they could be used for grid load balancing while they were waiting to be sold. All those batteries could shift electric power from night to day.”
PHONY PETITION NUMBERS? “The DNC arrived at its 642,000 figure by making three photocopies of each petition.” If the Tea Party folks did this, they’d be loudly mocked by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
UPDATE: Reader Robert Long writes: “My wife has two names, a first one and a middle one. Next time I have sex with her can I claim to have had sex with 2? I knew it’d happen one day!” Sure, it’s the new math of hope and change.
TOM VANDERBILT: Lessons from ants regarding non-selfish routing.
IS BILL KELLER morally confused?
THE (SQUANDERED?) INHERITANCE: Mark Bowden on Pinch Sulzberger and the New York Times.
I respect people who avoid the spotlight, and a reluctance to be publicly vivisected is a sure sign of intelligence. But ducking interviews is an awkward policy for the leader of the world’s most celebrated newspaper, one that sends a small army of reporters—approximately 400 of them—into the field every day asking questions. Still, I could understand Arthur’s decision. After presiding or helping to preside over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the publisher and chairman of the Times had recently begun to appear overmatched. Two of his star staffers were discovered to have violated basic rules of reporting practice; he had been bullied by the newsroom into firing his handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines; and he had spent much of the previous year in a confusing knot of difficulty surrounding one of his reporters and longtime friends, Judith Miller. For an earnest and well-meaning man, the hereditary publisher had begun to look dismayingly small.
He has been shrinking ever since. In 2001, The New York Times celebrated its 150th anniversary. In the years that have followed, Arthur Sulzberger has steered his inheritance into a ditch. As of this writing, Times Company stock is officially classified as junk.
It’s a sad story, overall.
BRIAN WANG ON PROTESTS AND POLITICS in the United States and China. With tea parties, and some cutting edge math.
TEA: The new coffee? “The culture that brought us pizza as a food group and $20,000 coffeemakers has now discovered tea.” Translation: You can be snobby about tea, too!
UNVEILING A PROTOTYPE HYDRAULIC HYBRID. Diagram of how it works at the link.
QUESTION: When will the buses go by the homes of big-bonus Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives?
IN THE MAIL: George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.
REASON TV: Is your interior designer really putting your life at risk? “Alabama politicians once threatened unlicensed designers with jail time—moving a throw pillow could get you a year behind bars—and 22 states plus the District of Columbia regulate interior designers. Industry groups lobby for such laws because they say unlicensed designers put lives at risk.”
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: I thought Obama promised to get rid of earmarks! And yet:
Who says Members are opposed to earmarks? We hear that the earmark computer in the Appropriations Committee – the earmark database member request system, to be exact — broke down today. Again. This after it was revamped after last year’s overwhelming earmarking.
We also hear that Approps will announce they are extending the earmark request deadline as a result – it’s now 5p.m. Saturday.
I would say to hold on to your wallets — but they’ve already picked your pocket.
A TAX DAY TEA PARTY PROTEST at the Alamo.
UPDATE: 300 U.S. cities will host “Tax Day Tea Parties” and the count is growing.
Check out this map.
HOPE AND CHANGE: Jobless rate jumps to 8.5 percent, highest since late 1983.
UPDATE: “How has that worked so far?”
JURY SAYS WARD CHURCHILL WRONGLY FIRED, awards one dollar damages.
TED OLSON defends Harold Koh.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Blair was denigrated as Bush’s poodle, although his eloquence and influence over Bush were clear to all. In contrast, Gordon Brown is embarrassingly obsequious to Obama, in a way Blair never was around Bush. And in further contrast, Obama shows an airy, polite disdain at being courted in such grubby fashion—while Bush was downright magnanimous in taking advice from Blair.”
UPDATE: Heh.
SOME OF US HAVE BEEN NOTING THIS FOR A WHILE: The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S. “While 90 percent of the guns traced to the U.S. actually originated in the United States, the percent traced to the U.S. is only about 17 percent of the total number of guns reaching Mexico.” Gee, most guns traced to the United States come from the United States. Now there’s a meaningful statistic. I thought the Obama Administration was going to fearlessly follow science without distortion.
Well, okay, I never actually thought that, but a lot of people did claim that. But wait, there’s more:
So, if not from the U.S., where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:
– The Black Market. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.
– Russian crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.
- South America. During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.
– Asia. According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.
– The Mexican Army. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.
– Guatemala. U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns and drugs, including most of America’s cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On March 27, La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.
So when you hear the Mexican Gun Canard, bear in mind that it’s a lie, told by people who want to manipulate American politics with a phony foreign connection.
CHRIS LEHMANN on the lesson of JournoList.
PJTV: NATO at 60.
MARK LEVIN’S LIBERTY AND TYRANNY is still the #1 book on Amazon.
CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Connecticut Voters Revolt Against Chris Dodd. “This is basically an almost unprecedented political revolt against a 30 year incumbent in a heavily Democratic state. Dodd’s popularity had been badly hurt in the last year, in particular by his ties to Countrywide. But the AIG bailout and bonuses seems to have amplified voter anger.”
BOB ZUBRIN: Growing Cap-and-Trade on the Tax Farm.
THE HILL: Members sought TARP cash for banks back home. “Several prominent lawmakers have pressed one of the nation’s top bank regulators to rescue financial institutions in their home states with money Congress allocated for government bailouts. In letters, e-mails and faxes to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), senior senators, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), wrote to agency Chairwoman Sheila Bair and others at the FDIC about applications by constituent banks for bailout funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). . . . Critics, including government watchdog offices, have charged that the TARP process and other decisions behind many of the government bailouts have been influenced by the political climate in Washington. Lawmakers who control the purse strings for the federal government can often sway an agency’s actions by personally lobbying for their constituents back home.”
RAHM EMANUEL: Victim of an extortion scheme?
I DON’T SEE THIS WORKING: “The head of the Alaska Republican Party today called on Sen. Mark Begich to step down from the U.S. Senate, saying that the state’s voters would have re-elected former Sen. Ted Stevens had they known the U.S Department of Justice would abandon its prosecution of him.” They may be right, but if they’d listened to my advice and replaced Ted Stevens before the trial, the question would be moot.
