The Snark of the Day, from Ammo Grrrll:
Life, my dear friends and readers, is very, very tough. Nobody escapes unscathed. I am not talking here about the extraordinary courage necessary to storm the beaches of Normandy, go house to house in Fallujah, or raise a flag at Iwo Jima. I am talking about ordinary life. If you can’t stand to have a speaker on campus with whom you disagree – for a speech you aren’t even going to attend! – you are going to fold like a cheap card table at the first sign of any real trouble. How are you going to survive a layoff? Where will you find the strength to take chemo? How are you going to deal with the sudden death of a spouse, the incomparable pain of the loss of a child, the very real possibility of some day ending up with a serious disability?
We pamper our children at their peril. It’s tantamount to denying them vaccinations to shield them from all adversity, challenges, and differences of opinion.
Hat tips: Scott Johnson, Power Line; Sarah Hoyt, Instapundit.
To mangle Eric: “Is the road to Hell paved with delicate snowflakes?”
Learning how to play apprentice.
Memo
From: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus
To: NBC News chairman Andrew Lack
Message: You are fired!
From Bridget Johnson, PJ Tattler:
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus informed NBC News chairman Andrew Lack today that the party is “suspending” its partnership with the network for the Feb. 26 Telemundo/National Review primary debate at the University of Houston.
“The RNC’s sole role in the primary debate process is to ensure that our candidates are given a full and fair opportunity to lay out their vision for America’s future,” Priebus wrote. “We simply cannot continue with NBC without full consultation with our campaigns.”
From CNN:
At 12:30 p.m. Thursday they found out: 14 million people watched, easily making the much-derided debate the most-watched program in CNBC’s 30-year history. Because advertisers paid $250,000 apiece, it was “also the most profitable night in the network’s history,” an NBCUniversal executive crowed.
There was simultaneous crowing and cringing on Thursday. Employees who spoke on condition of anonymity for this story wished for a “do-over” and pointed fingers of blame for the chaotic production. Some pointed all the way up to CNBC president Mark Hoffman, who was also aboard Wednesday night’s charter.
Luck learned there is a price to be paid for carrying Mrs. Clinton water.
I’d like to congratulate RNC Chairman Rance Priebus for actually locating his spine. It’s been missing for so long I had begun to wonder if he’d actually had one at some point in his life.
Pulling the plug on NBC after the performance of their supposed news people was precisely the correct thing to do. It has the added benefit of sending a message to the remainder of the leftist press as well.
However, consider this;
Would Priebus have found that level of courage, much less that level of support in the upper levels of the RNC for that bold and correct action, absent the leadership integrity and sheer guts of Ted Cruz, and the massively loud and supportive rank-and-file reaction to it?
I don’t think so.
So, one lesson to draw here is that what I have been saying in these spaces about the vast majority of Americans being to the right of anything either party has coughed up since Reagan, was precisely correct. My saying the rank and file was sick to death of the go along to get along nonsense that we’ve been dealing with for the last two decades, was equally correct.
But more than that, and far more important is the idea that courage and leadership begets courage and leadership. What we have seen in this instance is both very good and very instructive.
The reaction makes me hope that the leadership of the RNC is finally getting the message from the rank and file. It’ll take a bit more convincing for my part, but this move does look promising.
And the value of having someone the caliber of Ted Cruz in the White House becomes far more apparent.
…. it’s time to hang it up, Jeb Bush
I observe that most people that say God does not exist, on the rather questionable basis that his existence is unprovable, generally speaking and to varying degrees, believe socialism can be successful in its stated goals, despite it’s being proven a failure every time it’s been tried.
Kind of makes me wonder if they thought either concept through completely.
I wonder if Mrs. Clinton believes that the Russian bombers that buzzed the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) were piloted by House republicans? From Washington Free Beacon:
Fighter jets from the USS Ronald Reagan scrambled to intercept two Russian bombers that flew within one mile of the carrier during the latest saber-rattling by Moscow.
“There were two Russian Tu-142 Bear aircraft that approached the USS Ronald Reagan on the morning of Oct. 27 … while the Reagan was operating in the Sea of Japan,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.
The late Soviet Union died from policies of republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George (Forty One) Bush and during their tenure. With Dumbo’s, b/k/a Barack Obama, inept foreign policy and Mrs. Clinton’s* infamous reset button, the Russian Bear is growling again.
[*] Formerly known as the Smartest Woman in the World.
The thought occurs… that instead of allowing Iran to have nuclear capabilities, ostensibly to supply electricity, why aren’t American leftists forcing them to go with solar and wind power?
Ted Cruz, last night, sounded exactly the right note. This is the kind of fighter that the Republican Party has too long been bereft of, and cruise shines all the brighter for the darkness around him.
I must say I’m not to the point of endorsing him as yet, but I would certainly be more comfortable with him at the helm then with Obama Clinton Sanders and just about anybody else that was on the stage last night.
CNBC, and the entire media, is trying to elect the next president. Did CNBC succeed, but not with their anointed candidate? Is the moment where Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, both won the nomination for himself and the election for the republicans, video( with advertisement):
Hat tip and reax: Ace.
Cruz’s Hit on the Liberal Media
Lot of anger about this.
Who could have seen this coming, except everyone with any degree of competency or brain function?
More reax, C. Edmund Wright, American Thinker:
There was a disturbance in the force last night at CNBC’s Republican debate, and it left no doubt of who won and who lost.
[…]
Everything changed when Ted Cruz dressed down Carl Quintenilla and John Harwood – two of CNBC’s far-left commentators – and literally mocked their absurd line of questioning.
Cruz did not just criticize the questions; he made sport of them. He demonstrated just how infantile most of the CNBC crew was (Tea Party originator Rick Santelli not included). Cruz flat-out embarrassed them, and they knew it.
[…]
After the crowd stopped roaring in approval of Cruz’s protest, which took a while, the rest of the Republicans followed the Texas senator’s lead, and there was almost no Republican-on-Republican crime after this exchange. In fact, we then saw numerous examples where Republicans made it clear that any of the ten on the stage would be far preferable to what we have now, and to Hillary Clinton.
We need as president a person, can identify the enemy. The democrats think that Iran is their friend and Israel their enemy. And we need a president can lead. Ted Cruz identified the enemy and the entire viable republican field charged. Well done Senator.
File under: CNBC debate.
The Obama regime’s own inspector general, issued a report indicating as many as three hundred thousand veterans may have died while waiting for medical care from the Veterans Administration, from Washington Free Beacon:
An inspector general report published in September found that as many as 300,000 veterans may have died waiting for healthcare from the VA. Moreover, an independent assessment released the same month concluded that the VA’s network of health systems faces “crises in leadership and culture” warranting a “system-wide reworking” of the Veterans Health Administration.
When asked whether she has any new ideas to solve issues at the VA on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show Friday, Clinton sidestepped the question and accused Republicans of “berating” the federal agency.
The response from Mrs. Clinton, “What difference does it make?” Like Ambassador Chris Stevens et al, evidently the three hundred thousand dead veterans did not make a sufficient donation to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
File under: VA Scandal
President Obama dropped into the Windy City, Chicago, surrounded by his personal security phalanx to complain about too many guns in the hands of the very citizens who pay his salary, from Chicago Tribune:
President Barack Obama returns Tuesday to his hometown, a city that has become a national symbol of gun violence, to speak with police leaders from around the country about the need for tougher firearm laws.
[…]
Obama’s visit comes at a time when Chicago continues to struggle with gun violence. Even on the most recent late October weekend, shootings left 28 people wounded and six killed.
For the year so far, homicides are nearing 400, well ahead of the pace at this point in 2014 and 2013. Through 6 a.m. Monday, homicides had risen 18.5 percent to 391, up from 330 during the year-earlier period, said Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
Amusing, Dumbo, the dim one with big ears, tried to blame Chicago’s murder rate on the State of Indiana’s lack gun laws.
Weaker guns laws in Indiana, for instance, have long been a problem for Chicago police, leading to a steady stream of illegal guns crossing the border and ending up on the city’s West and South sides. A recent report issued by the city said 60 percent of the illegal guns recovered by Chicago police from 2009 to 2013 came from out of state, many from Indiana.
Yet while there are circa three times as many Hoosiers than residents of the Windy City, the City of Chicago has fifty percent more murders than the State of Indiana. It is not lack of gun control in Indiana which is killing the citizens of the Windy City.
What we have here is our own destruction in the making.
It is a free country and if you are of the belief that some how, some way, by God, Bruce Jenner is a woman, such is your belief, and you are entitled to it. However do throw a snit fit if somebody, such a myself, believes that a person with both X and Y chromosomes and male genitalia is a male, even if he does happen to be wearing a dress.
A seventy-six year old woman from Australia. and feminist icon, Germaine Greer happens to believe that surgery and female hormones do not make Jenner a woman. from Guardian(UK):
Germaine Greer has accused TV star Caitlyn Jenner of stealing the limelight from other female members of the Kardashian family, in comments likely to further alienate campaigners who object to the writer and commentator’s views about transgender people.
[…]
She also refused to back down from her position that transgender women, who have begun life as men before undergoing surgery and hormone treatment to become women, are “not women”, saying they do not “look like, sound like or behave like women”.
For the record, I admit that Greer played both the sex card and the age card, but she played them so well. For their part, Greer’s opponents, Rachael Melhuish et al, have played the offended card:
Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer at Cardiff University students union, alleged that Greer has “demonstrated misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether”.
If for the sake of argument you assume that Jenner is not a woman, Melhuish’s argument,such as it is, is null and void. What evidence, if any, does Melhuish have the Jenner is in fact a woman? I say none. And you.
I say, it is not so important how old you look, but rather what is important to look as you have enjoyed the journey to you age,what ever it may be. In the linked Guardian article Greer looks like a person who has enjoyed her journey. Whereas, Jenner, a sixty-five year old man, seems to trying to look like a thirty something tart. In short Jenner is trying to look like a person that he never was and can never be. The man has issues.
Hat tip: Professor Althouse.
I’ve been telling you folks for many years now to regard Snopes as an unreliable source of information.
Advocates of the theory of anthropogenic global warming(AGW) claim the science is settled and some kooks have gone so far as to suggest that those who deny the tenets of AGW be jailed. Yet in the world of real science, a particular scientific theory is never proven. Rather the theory is is demonstrated, or refuted. Never proven.
So while Albert Einstein‘s Theory of Relativity can explain the nuclear bomb, and much more. It is still deemed a theory and never termed as “settled science.” In contrast AGW which incapable of hindcasting yesterday’s weather is for some reason deemed as settled. Real scientists have challenged Einstein‘s theory, from the New York Times:
In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fundamental claims of quantum theory — that objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.
The finding is another blow to one of the bedrock principles of standard physics known as “locality,” which states that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. The Delft study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, lends further credence to an idea that Einstein famously rejected. He said quantum theory necessitated “spooky action at a distance,” and he refused to accept the notion that the universe could behave in such a strange and apparently random fashion.
In particular, Einstein derided the idea that separate particles could be “entangled” so completely that measuring one particle would instantaneously influence the other, regardless of the distance separating them.
The Theory of Relativity is a useful theory with predictive value. Einstien’s theory has been tested a found to work. Yet scientists are still free to challenge the theory. On the other hand, AGW has not predicted anything but its tenets must be taken a Gospel, under the penalty of excommunication.
About all the AGW fanatics has shown is that is that if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in computer model, the temperature increases. What they have not shown is that their computer models model real world weather.
Hat tip: Kate, Small Dead Animals.
