Excerpted from The Obama Temptation:
Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama. But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created.
Liberalism is the yin to conservatism’s yang. We need each other and can’t make America a better place without the constant tug and pull of conflict between the two ideologies. What in many countries is a source of revolution, our war of ideas with liberalism and theirs with conservatism makes us both better. It forces us to come up with new approaches to solving problems in order to compete in the marketplace of ideas. This is a free market that Obama, no matter what his proclivities, cannot shut down.
Ok, that's the setup. Now for the dénouement:Turns out, according to sources we have in Texas, that Nick Lampson's wife is not even registered to vote in Texas 22.
She lives in Beaumont, TX - at an address well outside of the district - and this is where she is registered. She's in the 2nd District, and is represented by Republican Ted Poe. The address is on Collier Road in Beaumont.
Why does this matter? Well, two weeks ago, Democrat Congressman Nick Lampson's cronies accused Pete Olson of voter fraud. They claimed he had voted improperly in a Connecticut Special Election while he was working for Texas in Washington, D.C.
Even the most basic research shut down this wacky theory. It turned out that on the day of the supposed vote, Pete Olson was traveling from Capitol Hill to Texas on Senate business in his role as Chief of Staff for Texas Senator John Cornyn. He has the airline receipt to prove it.
And as you might expect, it also turned out that Connecticut does not require a photo ID or signature from anyone casting a vote. Of course, the idea that Olson would somehow go from 1998-2005, voting like clockwork in nine different elections (according to the Democrats' own records), and interrupt it to drive up to Connecticut to participate in an unimportant special election just doesn't pass the smell test. Well, for anyone but crazy liberals who happen to be supporting Nick Lampson, like Matt Glazer and others.
Pete Olson's experience shows us why you should be required to show a government issued photo ID before voting. But let's hope Nick Lampson wasn't counting on his wife's vote - if he gets it this year, something's wrong.
Triangulum, aka M33, is the second closest major galaxy - after the Andromeda Galaxy - at a mere three million light years. It's also generally considered the most distant object, though M81 (twkeve million light years away) has been observed by a few experienced observers, and of course there was an event earlier this year, which for a short time was a naked eye object at 7.5 billion light years. M33 is a good sized galaxy - third largest in the Local Group, which, of course, also include Andromeda and the Milky Way.
Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.
Mukasey's remarks "appear premature based on the facts and evidence that congressional investigators and the inspector general have uncovered so far"
I suppose if we are thinking about turning our country over to the second Carter term — or the first McGovern — it shouldn't surprise anyone to see Russia go into its Aghanistan mode ... or Czechoslovakia ... or Hungary ... or (as Roger reminds us) Georgia.
It is the worst sentence I have ever heard of. It demonstrates an unseriousness about the war and the stakes involved.
material support to our enemies, [...] actually protected bin Laden and transported weapons for al Qaeda,
This is one of the most memorable galactic images I've seen. Two vivid spirals, obviously interacting with each other, each in its own plane. What a beautiful sight. Collectively known as Arp 271, they comprise another selection in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Also designated as NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 the pair is about ninety million light years away and spans about 130,000 light years. Click the image for the APOD page, click the image there for a closer view,
Twisted, distorted spiral NGC 3718 and its companion NGC 3729 seem to be locked in each other's gravitational embrace. Both are fairly large, somewhat peculiar spiral galaxies located relatively nearby at about 52 million light years. They're about 150,000 light years from each other, or approximately fifty percent more distant than the estimated diameter of the Milky Way. In the night sky they can be found in Ursa Major near what may a familiar sight to some visitors to this blog, the Hickson Group of galaxies, another beautiful and somewhat anomalous tableau. As usual this is an APOD image. Click once for the APOD page, click the image there for a more detailed look.
Between the foreground dust clouds and diffuse gas (a bit of our own galaxy - an Integrated Flux Nebula - and the intergalactic background, this strikes me as a canonically beautiful image. The galaxies in the background compose the M81 group of galaxies. M81 (Messier 81) itself with M82 (Messier 82) are a gravitationally locked pair interacting visibly, as I've blogged in the past. This is an APOD image."Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse... there is no evidence that this danger is 'immediate' or 'urgent'," the court said.
Welcome to the next four years. These people have plunged the country into two failing/failed wars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. (Also, they pulled off a housing crisis and a healthcare crisis and an environmental crisis and when an entire city drowned the administration left the black people to die.) There’s no alibi: when conservatism had its chance to govern, this is what it yielded. If I was one of them, I’d bitch about Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Jeremiah Wright or whatever was necessary to distract people from what I did when I had the chance to do it. Get ready for years and years and years of this puerile and tiresome nonsense.The whole post is about partisan whinging among people on the public payroll - and is worth reading in its own right. But, this paragraph stands out as a crystalline depiction of current reality.
This nicely situated galactic collision is close enough and oriented such that we have an extremely good, detailed snapshot of the ongoing interaction between two apparently merging galaxies. One hundred million light years away, it's almost in our neighborhood (the furthest visible galaxies are thirteen billion light years distant), located in the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, the nearest supercluster except for our own.
One of the best reasons to be a philosemite in our time is sheer gratitude at the disproportionate contribution Jews have made to the advance of Western civilization, and to our understanding of the world, this past two hundred years. The U.S.A. dominated the 20th century in culture and technology, to the great benefit of all mankind, in part because of the work done in math and science by the great tranche of pre-WW2 immigrant Jews from Europe.
On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left — to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol — to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar — and once you've started giving a handout, it never ends.
ERIC MULLER UNCOVERS a truly unforgivable act by John Yoo. A Dukakis endorsement! Hell, I voted for Dukakis myself. Remember that if you find yourself starting to repose much trust in my political judgment.
bjkeefe has taken note of a truly inspired bit of snark. If you’re familiar with Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism then you might recognize the Ezra Klein blurb as a spot on parody.and a bit more from Drum:...The proposal to give new tax breaks to homebuilders and banks is yet another example of the pernicious trend of privatizing profit and socializing losses, which is gnawing away at faith in the system. Dilute the shareholders, not the taxpayers.
The lesson here is this: Republicans will never give up. No matter what the problem at hand is, the solution is a corporate tax break of some kind. They will never allow a bill to pass Congress unless there's a tax cut included, no matter how stupid or misguided. Period.
provoked the idea for this picture.
So, admittedly Jonah’s cover image is ultimately more clever than my parody. Still, Jonah’s book is about the most irritating political stunt in the past little while. A little more snark seems like just the right thing.
My heart goes out to people who don't have the luxury of prudence.
I'm afraid Michelle Obama doesn't get it. Auditioning for the role of First Lady of this great, godawful land, her task is to beam at her husband as if every day was the first page of a lifelong adventure novel unfolding like a succession of blue skies (with a few storm clouds around to build character through adversity), nod with agreement at each sage talking point, applaud metronomically at conclusion of said point, and then wave a big buh-bye to the crowd as if victorious confetti were falling.He goes on helpfully, providing guidance through the complexities of McCainian language and usage.
That's how it's always been done and breaking with tradition now risks frightening punditry's pale males with retractable penises who are intimidated by strong black women such as Michelle Obama, Oprah, Aretha Franklin, Toni Morrison, and, of course, Kathy Griffin.
Current Democratic Party dogma holds that international trade is bad; or, at least, imports are bad.
David Harris is the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. He has posted an interesting account of the censorship of the AJC's weekly radio ad by the New York Times-owned radio station WQXR
are we just making up special rules for the Clintons?
The press is focused on where all that money ($109 million) came from. Fair enough. But where did it all go? This seems like a genuine mystery.
Hillary already has to file an annual financial disclosure form with the Senate, and the 2006 form shows that the bulk of the Clinton family fortune is invested in Citibank deposit accounts and a qualified blind trust. The 2007 form will be disclosed in a couple of months. What more is there to know?
That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.
Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says.
Over the next month and a half, she says, she faced a series of hurdles. She would be discouraged from reporting the incident by several KBR employees, she says. She would be confused by the lack of any written medical protocol for sexual assault (as the only medical person on site, she treated herself with doxycycline). She would wander through a tangled maze of interviews with KBR and Army investigators about the incident without any clear explanation of her rights. She would be asked to sign several documents agreeing not to publicly discuss the incident, she says. She describes having her computer--which she saw as her lifeline, her main access to the outside world--confiscated by KBR staff as "evidence" within hours of receiving her first e-mail from a stateside lawyer she had reached out to for help.
And eventually she would find herself temporarily assigned to sleeping quarters between two Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) officials, who, she says, assured her that it was for her own safety, since her alleged assailants were at the same camp for questioning; they roamed freely. When she wanted to move about the camp to get meals etc., she was escorted.
Meanwhile, the largest turbine manufacturer is...General Electric, and by a mile. They now own half the market for turbines, and nearly half of generating capacity.
So don't be surprised when you see GE lobbying for carbon-cap legislation that would effectively subsidize wind-power (even where it is already profitable). Green is also the color of money.
James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.
“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.
[Walter L. Wagner] is not mollified. "They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”
'Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.'
There are very few individual stars in this image. In fact almost every object in the photograph is a galaxy, to closely paraphrase the APOD blurb. It's a picture of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies, a large, dense cluster of over one thousand galaxies, located about 320 million light years distant from us and found near the North Galactic Pole, which means that we would present as a face on spiral to an observer in any of the galaxies in this cluster. So, the “new” bin Laden tape is threatening a “reckoning” with Europe over the Mohammed Cartoons. The Religion of Perpetual Outrage strikes again:
Reverend Wright's rhetoric is apparently boilerplate Black Liberation Theology. Most people who attend churches where this is a fairly common thread aren't going to feel as if it's particularly remarkable, and it's not. Born in the heat of the civil rights movement in the 1960's, it expresses feelings that are real enough, and, withholding judgment on whether they're still appropriate, they certainly were forty years ago.
The Mice. So called because of their long tails, the result of apparent ongoing collision between these two striking galaxies. According to APOD, they are "likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies," and are about 300 million light years distant.
