February 09, 2010
Ripping Birtherism in the Media
The birthers remind me of the freaks who occasionally show up in court with long diatribes about how the Federal Reserve, in conjunction with the Trilateral Commission, is acting unconstitutionally under their idiosyncratic view of the 16th Amendment, which all boils down to meaning that they don’t have to pay taxes. Oh, and the gold fringe on the flag in the courtroom makes it a flag of admiralty, meaning the court has no jurisdiction over them. The judge usually nods, and the deputies haul the "sovereign citizen" off to jail. And I laugh.
Kurt Schlichter at Big Journalism is dead-on accurate.
The handful of Birthers in fringe media outlets undermine and dilute legitimate criticism of the Obama Administration, and those outlets that aspire to keep the fever-dream alive should be marginalized and then ignored.
Love him or hate him, Barack Obama was duly elected by a solid majority of our fellow citizens. You can't revise that history, but you can take on his policies and head on... and those who insist on muddying the waters as they indulge conspiratorial fantasies should be ashamed of their obstructionism, if nothing else.
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NPR Drone Hopeful That Bush Billboard is Ironic
I find his attempt at deflection amusing:
At first glance, it would seem to be from some person or group who isn't thrilled by President Barack Obama's performance so far -- unless it's a more ironic message from those who didn't think too much of Bush and want to remind voters about him.
The message he is referring to is a billboard along the side of I-35 that contains the photo of a smiling George W. Bush and the simple question, "Miss me yet?"
The message is long-running internet meme against the perceived incompetencies of Barack Obama's administration, with variations of the saying with the same image of Bush being very simple to find online. Several minutes of Internet research would have should that this message is firmly directed against the Obama Administration.
Apparently, due diligence isn't to be performed if it obstructs your goal of muddying the waters in favor of "your guy."
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February 08, 2010
Murtha Dead
It's a shame. I was hoping he'd last long enough to at least get indicted, and apologize to those Marines he smeared.
From the comments: "I wonder if Obama will speak of his time as a member of the Marine Corpse"
Update: ABSCAM Jack.
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Selling Fear and Politics
Because she could not recite the alphabet, Joshua Tabor shoved his daughter face-down into a bowl of water. When authorities came for her, she was found cowering in a closet, covered in scratches and bruises.
Joshua Tabor is mentally ill and an unfit father. No sane person disputes that.
The UK Daily Mail, however, sensationalizes the brutality with the headline "U.S. soldier 'waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn't recite alphabet.'"
Tabor's sadistic act—as described by the Daily Mail itself—isn't waterboarding or remotely similar to it. Tabor's act of brutality was drowning. Waterboarding, as brutal as it is, only simulates drowning, and is done by professionals in controlled conditions. Tabor could have very easily killed his daughter.
By purposefully mis-characterizing Tabor's brutal act, the Daily Mail both minimized the life-threatening abuse of his daughter and simultaneously made an (as yet) unfounded correlation between his being a soldier and his suffering some sort of post-combat mental condition, when they did not know at press time if he was ever deployed.
It is cheap political grandstanding from a newspaper that has the obvious goal of warning UK readers that if their soldiers continue to fight in Afghanistan, their children could be next.
The Daily Mail should be ashamed of themselves, but they would have to be capable of feeling shame first.
A U.S.-based version of the story provides both more facts, and less editorializing.
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February 07, 2010
The Night The TEA Party Ended
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February 04, 2010
Gotta Love That Vaunted Harvard Education
There's a world of difference between a corpsman and a corpse-man.
For most people.
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I Guess They Don't Throw Fruit Anymore
DC Caller's Jim Treacher was injured in a hit-and-run yesterday:
I was more than halfway there when a black SUV made an illegal left turn and hit me head-on. I absolutely had the right of way. I yelled something like, "Are you really doing this?" as it hit me before I could move. I landed on my face on the street and smashed my glasses and scraped my hand and immediately I knew something was wrong with my left knee. I lay there screaming and cursing for I don't know how long, and a crowd of people gathered and told me to hold still.
Treacher's knee was broken. Pretty rough criticism, if you ask me.
According to witnesses, the vehicle that made the illegal left turn, ran Treacher down, and then sped away without stopping, belonged to the Secret Service (update: State Department security?).
Watch out, Jon Stewart.
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February 03, 2010
Apology Unacceptable
As I noted yesterday, Tim Shriver of the Special Olympics simply isn't in a position to accept Rahm Emanuel's apology for calling the netroots "f—ing retarded."
Thanks to Allahpundit, I now know that Shriver gets this, even Emanuel isn't bright enough to figure it out on his own, and apologized again.
He's... uh...
Nevermind.
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Mixed Messages
So I've noted the approving left-wing applauding of Admiral Mullen's stand on repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," allowing gays to open serve in the military. For the record, Mullen's thoughts on the matter more eloquently reflect my own general belief that we should thank and applaud anyone willing to serve in our nation's military.
But have you noticed that many of the same characters that applaud the possible end of DADT are those who have stood solidly against our servicemen being used in actual wars?
Somehow, I doubt their motives.
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"You Lie! " Government May Lose 824,000 Jobs In Revision
The U.S. may lose 824,000 jobs when the government releases its annual revision to employment data on Feb. 5, showing the labor market was in worse shape during the recession than known at the time.
Drudge cites this Bloomberg claim and claims that the government's original data had been purposefully manipulated to show things were better than what they really were.
Really? The same people who encouraged climate change scientists to exaggerate data for their political benefit would do the same with economic data? I'm shocked.
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Rough Audit? Probably Not.
Over at the John Locke Foundation's Right Angles blog, Jon Ham asks what I think about the Internal Revenue Service's intended purchase of 60 shotguns:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
The firearm in question does not seem to exist on Remington's Law Enforcement web site (at least by that model number), but the specs sound somewhat similar to a variation of the Wilson Combat/Scattergun Technologies Border Patrol Model.
I don't think there is any reason to worry about rank and file IRS agents showing up at your door with these shotguns. Instead, they seem like they would likely be used by the Criminal Investigation agents that focus on "Illegal Source Financial Crimes; and Narcotics Related and Counterterrorism Financial Crimes." They would presumably be raiding terrorist cells, drug cartels, and organized crime, er, organizations that participate in money laundering, tax evasion, and other socially unacceptable behavior under their jurisdiction who tend to go heavily armed.
But I'd still be nice to all IRS agents, just in case.
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February 02, 2010
A Trumped-Up Appeal to Authority
Ben Smith notes that Sarah Palin wants Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel fired for calling progressive critics "F—ing retarded" at a weekly strategy session.
Emanuel seems to think he's absolved of the insensitivity of his comment because he called Tim Shriver, chairman and CEO of the Special Olympics, to apologize.
I'm sure Shriver was gracious in taking Emanuel's call, but who elected Shriver to a position where he has the authority to absolve Emanuel for his insult?
I find the White House's attempt to dismiss this juvenile outburst with a faux-sincere call far more insulting than the initial offense. It asserts that Shriver is somehow a spokesman for an entire slice of the American population, and that his acceptance should nullify the anger of families and caregivers upset over his choice of words.
The Obama Administration has the ability to make bland speeches and write economy-crippling budgets, but it does not have the power to pass out absolute moral authority to individuals they intend to use as props.
2/4 Update: Heh. One of the rocket scientists at left-wing snark blog Sadly, No has shrieked "Ah-hah!" because he discovered that if you Google this site for the word "retarded," you get 80 hits.
Oh, the hypocrisy!
Of course, if you actually look at the the search she ran, you'll see that the vast majority of the hits were from comments people left on the blog—and the majority of those came from liberals.
I didn't bother to read all the results, but scanning over them, it appears that the only times I used the word was to use the verb form to denote something or someone with slowed mental acuity or growth, such as this example that they cited (and of course truncated):
I've long thought that the mental acuity of the average leftist was highly retarded by a wall of anti-Bush agi-prop (hence the tagline, "liberalism is a persistent vegetative state"), but even still, I was blown away by the blatant paranoia, open delusions, and thinly-veiled hatred of American soldiers manifested on liberal blog Talk Left, regarding the killing of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The only other time I've used the term that I can find was when I criticized one of the local news media outlets for using the verb version in a way I thought was somewhat insensitive.
In essence, Sadly No! based an entire blog entry on the facts that:
- they lack the reading comprehension to understand my problem with Rahm Emanuel wasn't so much his use of the term "retarded," but how he sought to cover himself politically with an appeal to authority
- they are either too lazy to differentiate bloggers from blog commenters, or are too dim to understand the difference, and
- they can't can't tell a noun from a verb.
I don't expect much from the formulaic schtick writing of Sadly, No, but this is a sad effort, even for them.
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