Archive for 2011

GEORGE WILL ON OBAMA: “He went to Massachusetts to campaign against Scott Brown; Brown is now a senator. He went to New Jersey to campaign against Chris Christie, who’s now governor. He went to Virginia to campaign against Bob McDonnell, who’s now governor. He campaigned for the health-care plan extensively, it became less popular. He campaigned in 2010 for the Democrats, they were shellacked. He began, in a sense, his presidency flying to Copenhagen to get Chicago the Olympics; Chicago was the first city eliminated. There is no evidence that the man has the rhetorical powers that he is relying on.”

ON JON STEWART: “Now look at him. It’s seven years later, and he’s aged like a president. . . . Stewart isn’t just being a bully here. He is being disingenuous, and he knows it. Worse, he’s tapping into the collective fantasy without knowing it.”

EUROPE’S DEBT CRISIS THREATENS AMERICA. “Last week, the mighty Federal Reserve moved to help European banks that have been having trouble finding people who are willing to lend them money. . . . A crucial mechanism linking financial players in the United States to the problems in Europe involves credit default swaps, those insurance-like products that did so much damage during the 2008 financial crisis.”

Related: Europe’s Troubles Pose Real Threat.

THE WONK WHO WASN’T THERE: “As one of the commenters at the Brothers Judd blog notes, the Home Alone analogy cuts both ways — Summers is admitting that there are no grown-ups in the Obadministration, and inadvertently including himself amongst the small-fry.”

CRASS CAREERISM: Bloomberg’s Ambition To Be Treasury Secretary Seen Behind His Backing of Obama’s Jobs Plan. In Bloomberg’s defense, though, this explanation at least suggests he’s ambitious — as opposed to stupid, which he’d have to be to support the “plan” on the merits.

UPDATE: Reader Hale Adams writes: “You are entirely too charitable to Mr. Bloomberg in forgetting that ‘ambitious’ and ‘stupid’ are NOT mutually-exclusive qualities.”

FROM “DAYS OF RAGE” TO “DAYS OF FAIL:” Nationwide Anti-Capitalist Revolution Flops. “Down in L.A., there were so few authentic protesters, that the LaRoucheites comprised a significant proportion of the attendees.”

Plus: “Are you a white man? If you’re a white man, then shut the fuck up about race, because you don’t know shit other than how to rape and kill.”

VIDEO: Tornado Damage In the Smoky Mountains. “On a clear day from the Look Rock tower on the Foothills Parkway, the tornado damage looks like a power line cut through the mountains. Up close, the impacts are mind-boggling. . . . While the park periodically suffers wind damage from events such as straight-line winds and mountain waves, this was the first time that a full-fledged tornado has been known to hit the Smokies. The tornado’s footprint materializes in the backcountry without warning. One minute, you’re hiking in a mature second-growth forest; the next, you’re standing in a clearing where the trees have been toppled in the same direction.”

GALILEO: Rick Perry Takes On “ObamaCentrism.” “Although Fallows may think that he’s the one who really knows the first thing about Galileo, he may not know the second and the third thing — including what the Church’s main beef with Galileo was, and the position of Galileo’s scientific contemporaries on the subject of heliocentrism. The latter is especially important to Perry’s analogy, since he was talking about disagreements among scientists, both in Galileo’s time and now.”

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

SPENGLER: Erdogan Has Good Reason To Be Crazy. “If the Obama administration and the New York Times are pulling their hair out over the disintegration of Arab society, consider how Tayyip Erdogan must feel. His economic boom is about to come to a crashing end, and his country is doomed demographically to split up when Kurds outnumber Turks not long from now, as I argued here recently. And his ambitions for Turkish hegemony in the Muslim world have run directly into an existential crisis that is long past solution. That would make anyone crazy. Don’t think of the Turkish leader as an outpatient who lost his meds. In the spirit of political correctness, we might call him ‘existentially challenged.'”

UPDATE: Is Turkey After Israel’s Gas?

ED DRISCOLL: THE GUTENBERG GALAXY GOES DIGITAL. “Being able to read a book anywhere, and carry the digital equivalent of a massive stack of them onto an airplane via my Kindle, laptop or Android Tablet is a godsend. (Especially since I never know how bleary I’ll be once I get on a plane, I can raise or lower the brainpower my reading material requires accordingly without stuffing my carrying-on bag full of ‘analog books.’)”

I finished Steve Stirling’s Tears Of The Sun on my iPhone. I love the cross-platform sync — at home I’ll read on my iPad, but when I’m out and about I can call up whatever I’m reading on my iPhone and go right to wherever I stopped. Very handy. My only complaint is that the Kindle App for iPhone won’t sort archived items by recency, only by title and author.

STILL STUCK IN THE 1950S: Hollywood portrays Mississippi as a brutal backwater, while in the real world, black people are migrating back to the South because they find it a friendlier, more congenial place.

Half a century ago, insecure white bigots needed to put down black people so they’d have someone to feel superior to. Now they use Mississippi. But they’re still stuck in the past.

UPDATE: Juliette “Baldilocks” Ochieng writes: “My matrilineal great-grandparents fled Mississippi for Oklahoma and, later, California. I’m seriously considering returning to my roots. Oxford sounds nice.” I think it is nice.