Politics
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This says it properly
In convenient book form no less.
The last time I saw him, he was more annoying than Al Franken, which is no mean feat.
HT: Instapundit
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Interesting poll numbers
Bush hits 33% approval or so says Fox, and the affection isn’t going anywhere else. Why isn’t everyone happier about this? America is essentially having a libertarian perception of it’s government (similar to the mid 90’s actually). I’m thrilled, but the rest of the libertarian blogsphere seems to not notice this at all. It’s odd.
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Amazing
Cynthia McKinney actually manages to top her “Negro Tolerance Level” quote with her most recent escapade.
Although nothing is as strange as:
Three Men Charged in ‘Dungeon’ Castration
Three men have been arrested on charges of performing castrations on apparently willing participants in a sadomasochistic “dungeon” in a rural house, authorities said Friday.“It’s extremely bizarre,” District Attorney Michael Bonfoey said in a telephone interview. “It’s incredible the amount of ways that people can find to run afoul of the law.”
Sheriff’s investigators said Richard Sciara, 61, Danny Reeves, 49, and Michael Mendez, 60, admitted performing at least eight surgeries, including castrations and testicle replacements, on six consenting clients over the past year. None of the three is licensed to practice medicine, officials said.
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Each man faces 10 felony counts — five each of castration without malice and conspiracy to commit castration without malice — as well as eight misdemeanor counts of performing medical acts without a license. Each felony carries a maximum three years and three months in prison, Bonfoey said.
Stranger still is that there was already a law against this sort of thing. How often does this sort of thing happen?
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Quick round up
- Blogs to Riches – a good article on the major blog players. I’m not mentioned for some reason.
- Signs That the United States is About to Bomb Iran – it’s more of what the signs would be more than an indicator of occurrence.
- Bikers roll to military funerals to oppose anti-gay protests
They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals.
Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs — explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.
A good article on some fairly spontaneous action against Phelps and his loathsome cadre. Supposedly their intention is to provoke either the police or the military into assault to they can sue.
- In the footnotes of this post, Jane Galt puts it very well with
My favorite moment in the debates came at the “town hall” style one, where Kerry told a pro-life questioner that while he personally agreed with her that abortion was murder, he couldn’t legislate his morality. Pro-choice readers should substitute the words “lynching” for “abortion” and see if this position would overcome their reluctance to vote for a Dixiecrat
That was what turned me off of Kerry too. At that time I was somewhat open to voting for him. Since the course in Iraq is set, I think the president and congress fighting all the time and getting nothing done would be a wonderful thing. Then he said that.
I would imagine his actual position on abortion is more in the middle, most likely mirroring my own strong disapproval, but that statement lost me forever. My original thought on that debate was a bit different. He prefaced that comment with a statement of his Catholicism. My thought was “that’s like saying you’re a vegetarian that eats veal”. But Jane’s remark was much better.
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Thought and line of the moment
An interesting thought from Jesse Walker at Reason’s Hit and Run
But is there anyone in the country who wouldn’t be delighted to learn that the forces behind 9/11 are based in Washington, D.C.? That the enemy is not some exotic conspiracy of mysteriously motivated foreigners who speak impenetrable languages and fade easily into an alien landscape, but a familiar group of Republicans with Middle American accents who would be ousted the moment their cabal came to light? The Bush-did-it theory lends itself to a tidy movie ending, a conclusion far preferable to the endless bloody soap opera we’ve landed in instead.
There are many reasons I don’t believe the president plotted 9/11. The biggest is that I’m just not optimistic enough to think the problem could be eliminated that easily.
But the real winner is in the comments (they’re quite snarky over there these days) with
… and I think we’ve ‘turned the corner’ again, too. Considering how many times we’ve turned the corner in Iraq, I suspect that the country is shaped like a gigantic four-dimensional dodecahedron.
I think 50 years from now all of this will be seen as a negative function of technology and communications more than anything else.
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Extremely well put
You know, to me Wal-Mart is a lot like George W. Bush. It’s not that I’m that big a fan in the abstract, really, it’s just that the viciousness and stupidity revealed in its enemies tends to make me view it more favorably than I otherwise would.
Which says it exactly right. For someone I didn’t vote for and for a place I rarely go (and when I do, it’s usually because of the hours, and not the price) I’ve spent a fair amount of time defending both. Ditto for the pro-lifers. Hmmm.
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Ouch
Kerry has become the Paris Hilton to Al Gore’s Nicole Ritchie on the stage of American politics: creatures whose fame has become self-sustaining; and who remain in the public eye not because of any achievement or acumen, but who are simply famous for being famous.
Kind of like Dan Quayle when you think about it.
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How is this possible
Amazon, Maher to swim in ‘Fishbowl’
“New 30-minute entertainment Web program will make its debut June 1, exclusively on Amazon.com.”How is Bill Maher still popular, much less more popular than ever? His delivery, never a strong suit of his, has gotten more tortured than ever, or at least it was before I quit watching him. He also prefaced every line with “Isn’t it really….”.
I find a lot of left-wing comics (Mark Maron, Jon Stewart has come back quite a bit after a bad slump) funny, so I don’t think it’s that his politics are offensive to me, he just seems about as funny as an episode of Mama’s Family these days.
De gustibus non est disputandum I suppose.
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Quick roundup
- It’s depressing that two senators don’t realize how off they are. If you want to characterize the Republican majority in the House of Representatives negatively, then the proper term is fascism (taken literally, strength in numbers, and a dictatorship thereof) rather than a plantation, the relevant characteristic being oppression of the many by the few. All to work in a racial angle I suppose.
- Tom MacGuire has more interesting thoughts on the NSA wiretapping thing. Still, why not change the law though?
- An interesting post from the Belmont Club “A stone killer is never idle in a lawless Third World country”
- America’s possible action on Iran:. Evidently some lessons were learned from the lack of immediate American response to Afghanistan after 9-11.
- The Great War of 2007 – very scary possible history.
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Sunday rapid fire
- A nice summary of the demographic predicament of the Democratic Party. The Roe Effect is curiously unmentioned.
- 39 Mega pixel digicam! Via Digg.
- A very good article on NRO about the current state of 527 organizations.
…led by the so-called 527 groups, was a broad-based, grassroots effort, it was, in fact dependent in substantial part on just five donors: financier George Soros, Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis, Hollywood mogul Stephen Bing, and the California investors Herbert and Marion Sandler. Together, they spent about $78 million in the effort to defeat the president  more than the $75 million in federal funds that each presidential candidate received to conduct his entire general election campaign. (It was also more than twice what the late-starting top five Republican 527 donors spent on their side.)
The low number of people funding really does explain a lot about the Kerry campaign.
- The Iranians seem to refine technique.
- A good look at what could the scenario with the FISA/NSA case. One thing I would still like clarified: Is it wiretapping when it is recorded, or when someone listens to it? It still seems like a massive amount of datamining to me.
- Blues guitarist Rory Block has an unappealing FrontPage website, but a very interesting life story.
- I intent do explore AJAX more thoroughly when I have more time, but here is a tutorial, and a good open source download site. Here is an AJAX library it seems.