The Grain of Truth

From the Mailbag, this morning is a classic example of how a joke isn’t funny unless there’s a grain of truth at the center of it.

Community Service
 
 One day a florist went to a barber for a haircut. After the cut he   asked about his bill and the barber replied, “I cannot accept money  from you. I’m doing community service this week.” The florist was   pleased and left the shop.
 
 When the barber came to open his shop the next morning, there was a  “thank you” card and a dozen roses waiting for him at his door.
 
 Later, a cop came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay his bill,   the barber again replied, “I cannot accept money from you. I’m doing   community service this week.” The cop was happy and left the shop.
 
 The next morning when the barber arrived at the shop, there was a   “thank you” card and a dozen donuts waiting for him at his door.
 
 Later that day, a college professor came in for a haircut, and when he  tried to pay his bill, the barber again replied, “I cannot accept  money from you. I’m doing community service this week.” The professor  was very happy and left the shop.
 
 The next morning when the barber opened his shop, there was a “thank   you” card and a dozen different books, such as “How to Improve Your   Business” and “Becoming More Successful.”
 
 Then, a Congressman came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay   his bill, the barber again replied, “I cannot accept money from you.   I’m doing community service this week.” The Congressman was very happy   and left the shop.
 
 The next morning when the barber came to the shop to open up, there  were a dozen Congressmen lined up waiting for a free haircut. 

 And that, my friends, illustrates the fundamental difference between  the citizens of our country and the members of our Congress.
 
 Received from Michael B. Wright, Tampa, FL.
 
 —
 Rate this funny at
 http://www.gcfl.net/archive.php?funny=20090731
 
 Brought to you by GCFL.net: The Good, Clean Funnies List A cheerful
 heart is good medicine… (Prov 17:22a) Mail address: GCFL, Box 100,
 Harvest, AL 35749, USA

(Nod to Donna)

President Obama’s polling numbers are sinking faster than  Teddy Kennedy’s Oldsmobile.    It does seem appropriate, from Boston.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy received another high honor today, courtesy of President Obama.

The longtime Massachusetts senator is one of 16 recipients of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. It is awarded to individuals who “make an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public, or private endeavors,” the White House said, and “this year’s awardees were chosen for their work as agents of change

Mr.  President:   We can and should do better than awarding the nation’s highest medal to a drunken killer

Mary Jo Kopechne was not available for comment.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere….The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is The “Stop Look and Listen” Edition

• KRUGMAN GETS A DOSE OF REALITY ON HEALTHCARE:  >I wonder if it’ll take. (Vid)
• REMOVING ALL DOUBT: Over at The Corner, Andy McCarthy looks at a piece by Deb Burlingame. Both of them examine… somewhat disbelievingly, the recent withdrawal of security measures surrounding Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, by the Obama Justice Dept.  In another article, Andy looks at another situation with Holder and Obama, this time involving the intimidation case against the Black Panthers. As if we needed any further proof that this administration is at least misguided, we keep seeing more. But who, I wonder, is paying attention? And why are Deb and Andy the only people I’ve head about the Reid thing from?
• MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE LEFT:  Byron York at his new perch at the Washington Examiner points up the latest polling trends… and says it’s not good new for Obama, or for the Democrat Congress.  Even MSNBC says Obama’s losing ground, particularly on the health care issue. Good Lord… if you can get even MSNBC to admit it… Gallup says Obama’s reached a new low…   Rasmussen says Obama approval’s sliding past 48%…    VDH remarks yesterday at The Corner that:
  

  

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Team Obama knows that just as the Great Depression and FDR’s eloquence led to a radically new statism, so too the late 2008 meltdown and Obama’s charisma have given the Left an historic chance to enact a doctrinaire liberal agenda that otherwise polls poorly.The key will be to rush through as much as possible before last year’s panic and Bush become ancient history — and Obama’s own soaring rhetoric becomes trite and boilerplate.

  The problem for Obama at this stage… (And with him the rest of the left) is that not only has the current set of problems become decidedly his own… meaning he can no longer blame Bush for them… but his boilerplate rhetoric has become obviously so… and that boilerplate is gathering substantial amounts of rust, as his promises all backfire on him, one by one, and people who suffer under programs like the one he’s pushing, report in such as  Theodore Dalrymple.    Hanson concludes:

  Unpopular presidents cannot enact unpopular legislation, no matter how once popular they were, no matter how much they blame their predecessors and Wall Street greed.
  Obama is about one or two more gaffes away from a stampeding herd of House Democrats.

  Just so. And I submit that the House Dems are a trailing indicator, here… that they’d not be nervous in the House if they didn’t understand that they are already in serious trouble on all this, and that the former Obama supporters are already looking for the exit.  As such, I regard the ‘great news’ that Waxman managed  to get a delay on the health care vote until after the recess, for example… to be great news for America… once the house members take recess, get back to their districts and see what a firestorm of opposition to Obamacare there is, there’s a very small chance indeed of it’s passage as currently pushed by the White House.  

•  SOCIALISM IN THE AGE OF COMMUNICATION:    You know, in reading Theodore Dalrymple’s notes, linked again here, and in watching the reaction to Obama and company of late, one gets the decided impression it would be all so much easier on the socialists among us to gain their socialist wet dreams, if we didn’t have a nearly universal ability to exchange information on an almost instantaneous basis. The people exchanging ideas and learning from each other’s mistakes is why most socialist regimes so solidly isolate themsleves.  Allowing your subjcts to learn the ideas you’re pushing have fatal flaws from the standpoint of the subjects, is not a way to get such ideas passed into the law of the land. All this is a tangent of course, from his discussion on the repercussions of ‘healthcare being a right” which of course is a more foundational question. He’s arguing principle, while I’m arguing consequences. But I have to tell you the line drawn between those two angles gets very thin indeed, when Dalrymple points out:
  

  When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.

  

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Moreover, the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.

  The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.

  Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so.

  The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population. This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.

  Amazing comments… particularly when you keep in mind that in real life the man is an MD. To my point, then, measure your own reaction to these thoughts from Dalrymple, and multiply them by a few hundred million times. Think that’s not going to cause some serious second thoughts against the socialist idea of ‘healthcare is a right”?  Can socialism, of whatever strain, be established in a country that has free and open communications?  Hmmm.  Maybe that’s why Socialists are also prone to  wanting the government to run the news.

•  THE SUBSTANTIAL PENALTY FOR LATE WITHDRAWAL:  Reynolds notes Tracy Quan, who in turn questions the recent chatter about how ‘pulling out’ works.  I have to say, I have my doubts as well.  And it’s not like pregnancy is the only issue. And of course it’s all the guy’s fault if she gets preggers, anyway, right? (Do you know how often I’ve heard that line over the years? Mostly, from women I’d not have been caught dead with, of course. )
• OH, FOR PITY’S SAKE: Don’t these morons remember Seamus Finnagan saying: “Eye of rabbit, harp sting hum, turn this water into rum…”…(boom) ?  And that was in the very first book/movie!  Common, guys… I mean, it’s not like this is a new element.  Oh… and since they waited for the movie to show up, it’s clear they’ve not actually read the book, right? So much for the vaunted literary gravitas of the New York Times. Let them drink their weak tea, all right?
•  After all…..  Obama had a beer… even if it was a weak one.

Eric Holder

The reprobate who is attorney general,  Eric Holder has called for a national conversation on race.   Holder throws this piece of fat into the fire,  from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder says he was racially profiled years ago.

The nation’s first black attorney general, Holder tells ABC News that, as a college student, he was stopped by an officer while driving and told to open his trunk for a search.

And a bit more fat for the fire, and this time from Blondie, b/k/a  Ann Coulter, Human Events:

Ann Coulter

Before liberals declare that this a case of racial profiling and move on, how about liberals produce one provable example of racial profiling that isn’t a hoax

Holder isn’t much of an attorney and even less of an attorney general.    Holder alleged that he was racially profiled, yet preseents utterly no evidence, aside from being stopped.    For all I know, and for all Holder knows, Holder could well have matched the description of  a suspect, much as Professor Gates did, when Holder was stopped by Officer Friendly.   Not knowing the specific reason he was stopped, it is utterly impossible for Holder to determine if he was racially profiled or not.

Yet like the good racist he is,  when two explanations exists, one pointing to racism and the other to good police work, Holder, much like his boss, picks the explanation which points to racism, and states it as it it were a fact.

Coulter suggests that allegations racial profings are largely hoaxs.   I say to Holder, can you prove Coulter wrong and show that your allegation, too, wasn’t yet another hoax?    After all, as a member of the the bar, you made an allegation of a crime.    Therefore there should   be some proof of your allegations, or like your boss, do you simply make things up? 

I say, it would improve the racial atmosphere in our nation if the nation’s chief law enforcement officer would stop simply making up allegations of racism.   What say you?

When I noted this in a discount book rack in my local grocery store, I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it and sharing it with you. The book was being sold for a $1.99. Someone had apparently decided they didn’t want the toilet paper after all and put it on the shelf next to the Biden book. The TP was selling for $2.49. 

Draw your own conclusions.

Sorry for the quality… it’s a cell phone cam and the light wasn’t very good. Part of the focus problem was I couldn’t stop laughing.

Welcome one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the Green Beans Edition

• RECESSION? WHAT RECESSION? Surber says Durable goods orders are still off. It would appear that wishful thinking doesn’t work in terms of ending a recession.  You can’t simply declare it over, economy to respond as such.  You actually have to do something about it.  Like, getting government out of the way the economy.  The sad part is, had Obama done that, that is to say had he actually reduced government intrusion into our lives, and into our pocketbooks, this recession would have been over months ago.  You know as well as I do he’s not going to do that.
• ANOTHER DEMOCRAT UNDER AN ETHICS PROBE: Michelle Malkin fills us in.  remember when this was about draining the swamp, Mrs. Pelosi?
• SPEAKING OF MICHELLE: Her new book didn’t stay too long at Number 2. It’s now number one. I note with pleasure that Mark Levin and Glenn Beck are also doing pretty well  being in the top ten, as well.  Gee… there seems a bit of a trend, here.
• THE DEATH OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT: Mark Steyn:
  

  

  Mark Steyn

  Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on.

  No kidding, Mark. It’s well said, but I have to tell you that this is an argument we’ve been making here, all along.

• SEE WE TOLD YOU SO: At PJM, Jen Rubin:
  

  

  Jennifer Rubin

  Polls show the public thinks Obama is spending too much and taking on too much power. It is not hard to conclude that Obama has been caught trying to pull off a bait and switch — he ran as a moderate and is governing as a left-winger. With ample evidence that they have been conned, the voters are now registering their disapproval.

  The sad part of this is that it was also predictable.  Those of us on the right were wanting this would happen. here is something for you to ponder; how far left does one have to be to make the Clinton presidency seem a moderate one?  The answer, apparently, is “Obama”

• NO SHOCK HERE: Sonia Sotomayor made it past  the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. It goes to the full Senate, now. Was there ever any real doubt about how this one was going to come out?
• EYEBROWS UP: You’ve gotta wonder about this suspicious death in Jersey, following the corruption arrests there. Something larger going on, I think.
• SYMPATHY: Our Sympathies to the Gateway Pundit, whose mother died earlier today. Why not click over there and drop a comment? I’m sure it’d be appreciated.

Glenn Beck has causes a minor tremor by opining the Barack Obama is a racist, video:

Hat tip video:  TVNewser.

No shat Sherlock!    Obama sat through twenty years of the Reverend Jerimiah Wright’s sermons.   Who’d have thunk:  video:

One of Obama fellow parishioners credited the Reverend Wright with “Leaving a lasting impression.”    As Glenn Beck demonstrates, the parishioner was all so right.   Now I can’t say if Obama was a racist before he sought out and joined Wright’s church.   However for Obama to deny being a racist, after twenty years of Wright’s sermons, would  be like Bobby Bryd attending twenty years of Klan rallies and then deny being a member of the Klan .   It just would not wash, and it does not.

I’ve been pretty much silent on this berth are controversy since its beginning, making only an occasional comment, preferring instead to let DavidL take the lead.  In any event I am pretty much in agreement with what he has been saying.

That said, I notice a post this morning that I find hard to resist, in The Weekly Standard from Mary Katharine Ham:

Mary Katharine Ham

It doesn’t happen terribly often, but I’m with Andrew Sullivan on the need to lay Obama birther-ism to rest— a subject on which he’s been blogging with some energy over the last day.

She then proceeds to take sarcasm to a new level, on a target that richly deserves it, in my opinion.  (Sullivan) You really need a dive into the links that she provides to understand the level of the attack she has unleashed on Saint Andrew The Incontinent.  Her point of course is with regards to a double standard that Solomon is famous for applying to situations like this.  And with him, most of the left.  (If not all….) The point is well taken.

But you know, we just put up a post here yesterday as regards another situation that is amazingly parallel in one respect ; and that of the available documentation , and which documentation the defenders choose to employ and which they do not. The case in question is that of the Gates /Crowley affair. Yesterday, I ran this in the Ramble:

RELEASE THE TAPES: Moe Lane thinks they ought to release the police tapes made during the incident between Crowley and Gates. I tend to agree. I’d be interested in the 911 tapes of the original call, too. I note Tom McGuire making the same noises. Says Tom:

…if the Cambridge Police Dept had besmirched my behavior and deportment by telling people I was “tumultuous” and acting strangely, I would demand the release of the dispatcher tapes to blow away their lies. Ending the cop cover-up would be my idea of a teachable moment – yeah, I would give those guys something to move on, all right (after they were out of earshot), but clearly I am a lesser man.

Yeah, well….. That Gates didn’t DO that seems a solid indication that he doesn’t think his argument would withstand such a release. McGuire goes further, suggesting that if the tapes made Gates look good, they’d already have been released.  He’s got a point, there, kids.

Here’s the parallel; It seems to me that the same point as made as regards Gates,  applies to Obama in the case of his place of birth, and thereby his eligibility for the office he now holds .  If the White House had more substantial documentation than what we have seen thusfar, I figure they probably would have brought it out, already.  If, for no other reason than to shut up the people that they so willingly mock as “conspiracy theorists” etc.  they’ve never been shy about revealing any information that makes democrats look good and republicans look bad, even at the risk of Democrat operatives doing jail time as we saw in Ohio for leaking “Joe the Plumber”s”  personal information.  That they do not bring out that information, speaks rather loudly to the idea that they don’t have more substantial proof, than the rather thin documentation they’ve offered thusfar. And that they then fall into “divide and insult” mode pretty much confirms that they don’t have anything more substantial and wish the whole thing to go away.  If they could, don’t you figure they’d capitalize on exposing the ‘nutcases’ as such? They don’t because they can’t.

As such, this thing hasn’t gone away.

Is Obama and natural born American citizen?  The truth is I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. He may be.  He may not be.    The documentation provided to answer that question in the affirmative is at least thin.

When combined with the rapidly falling approval numbers, this controversy… this question  is going to play rather large indeed on the minds of the American voter.   At the very least, moderate supporters of Obama in light of his other failures and broken promises, (Along with those of his party) are going to be looking seriously at what for all outward appearances has the look and feel of yet another cover-up. Getting elected, or, reelected , is a game of appearances.  IE think we can safely had this particular controversy to the long list of spots on the record of the Democrats which do not appear to be all that squeaky clean. Certainly, this thing doesn’t take on the appearance of being overly transparent .  You may recall we were promised a transparent administration.

And November 2010 looms.

Welcome, everyone (Even you Democrats) to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the Sphere…The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the ” Tax Protest” Edition

Webmater’s notes: This thing went out several hours early due to an error in programming. Sorry.
• GLOBAL WARMING? No… Coldest summer in Chicago in 66 years.  At some point, they’re going to have to admit that global warming is a fraud.
• A MICROCOSM OF BIG GOVERNMENT AND IT’S EFFECTS: New York State, that is.  Martin links, without much comment, Fred Siegel at the City Journal:
  

  “The upstate alliance wasn’t powerful enough to stop Rockefeller’s massive expansion of government and was, in fact, undone by it, as was upstate itself. Burdened by the heavy taxes and by a welter of rigid new state business regulations, upstate bled employers and jobs. If you count New York north of greater Gotham as a separate state, it has ranked between 46th and 50th in the U.S. in job growth over the past 40 years. Buffalo, Elmira, Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica all suffer from 25 percent-plus poverty rates; much of rural upstate has sunk into Appalachian hardship. The young and talented have left the region in droves.”

  Billy notes the same link and says, I think rightly:

  

  Billy Beck

  I’ve been saying it for years: this is a functional depression up here.
  More than ten years ago, I was on the road and my current reading was Solzhenitsyn’s “November 1916”. A guitarist inquired about it, listened to my brief, and recalling that I’d had volumes of Soviet history out with me before, asked, “You love Russia, don’t you?”

  It was a completely innocent question from a man I enjoy and admire, but I was taken aback at his misapprehension, for which cannot fault him. He really had no way to see below the surface to my interest.

  I look around at this beautiful country up here and the people who live and work here, and my heart breaks for them. They remind me of Russians. No matter what this government does to them, they just keep plowing along as best they can with a stoicism that could be lauded as heroism if it were facing some natural disaster instead of this human-engineered disaster. As it is, it’s just tragic.

  Billy and I have discussed this angle before, years ago…and as I think on it now, I remember trying to discussionally tie the feeling he describes here to a musical piece that he’d understand the reference to, as well as the context. I don’t know how effective I was at it, in retrospect, but I’ll relate it to you anyway….The song is from Pink Floyd’s ‘Darkside of the Moon’ Album.  The song says ‘hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’. I think it fits the situation here in NY that Billy so aptly describes.  The reason that quote fits so well is multi-facited. 

  First because our cultures at their root are pretty similar. There is a degree of (I think) culturally driven fatalism in most Americans anymore that defies alteration. It’s a cultural aspect we and the Brits share. The other thing we share with the Brits, importantly, is the degree to which government has taken over the lives of the citizenry. We’re no longer citizens, given the level of government. We have, both here in the states…(in my observation, particularly in the northeast, including New York)  over time, become subjects, not citizens…  the way the Brits are.  They’re in the largest of degrees no longer subject to the crown, but to the government in all really funcional parts, has replaced that crown. The level of government intrusion in our lives is remarkably similar.  So too, are the results… both economic and emotionally, culturally. Compare the business climate of NY state as Billy describes it and compare it to this recent report from London.  Getting the message yet?

• SPEAKING OF GOVERNEMNT INTRUSION:  Boortz does a fair job of explaining one aspect of it.   And yes, the two situations are directly connected, even if you’re not ‘rich’.
• A GRASP OF THE OBVIOUS: Mona Charen has a firm grasp of the obvious. No, that’s no insult, given the number of people who lack that ability.
• CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: I mentioned Michelle’s new book, yesterday… said it’d do well. Guess I was right… it’s number 2 as of this morning.
• OOPS:  Gates revises his tax returns based on a Blog post?  Yes, that Gates. And The Tax Prof has more and more to say about all this.

I got a note from the ISP yesterday that explains much of the issue we saw.

On Sunday, I issued a ticket because PHP performance was in the toilet… again.  You’ll recall, this is the issue I got blamed for about a month ago. Turned out at the time it wasn’t my doing, though they were not sure what the problem WAS, exactly.

So, Sunday, I called another one in.

About 1am Monday, they pulled  the server down to rebuild it. The closing on the ticket read:

System administration team identified performance problem on your web server this was related to the slow hard drive because of web stats calculation on the server.

Aha. Now, we’re getting somewhere.

Also system administrators have strongly recommended you to move your php driven applications to the Linux based account as it has better performance for php and leave ASP, ASP .NET, ColdFusion driven applications on the Windows based accounts.

Well, as I’ve already discussed with you, this is a PHP driven site, and as such I’ve been wanting to move to a linux box for some time. I started on a Windows server because my kid wanted his own site, and was using Front Page at the time. That’s since migrated elsewhere. So there’s really no reason to stick with the Windows server any longer other than the couple of days we’d be unavailable because of the new DNS listings. 

I’ll likely make the move before winter, but when exactly, I don’t know. I’ll keep you posted. For now, we’re OK.

While the one, a/k/a Barack Obama may claim to have both a undergraduate degree from Columbia and a law degree from Havard, Clarice Feldman, the Sharp Tack, makes the case that Obama is an under educated man, from the American Thinker:

I do not believe that someone with such a  consistently weak understanding of economics, history the guiding legal document of our nation and its language  merited admission to Columbia University or Harvard law school. Nor can I imagine how anyone could have merited graduation from these institutions (let alone edited the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious legal publication of its kind) with these deficiencies.

Feel free to make to make the case that Obama has a better than room temperature IQ.   In fact, the one’s only long suit appears to be arrogance.

Sarrah Palin to the media:

“In honor of the American soldier, quit making things up.”

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the web: The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “Bottle of Wine” Edition

• RELEASE THE TAPES:  Moe Lane thinks they ought to release the police tapes made during the incident between Crowley and Gates. I tend to agree. I’d be interested in the 911 tapes of the original call, too. I note Tom McGuire making the same noises. Says Tom:
  

  …if the Cambridge Police Dept had besmirched my behavior and deportment by telling people I was “tumultuous” and acting strangely, I would demand the release of the dispatcher tapes to blow away their lies. Ending the cop cover-up would be my idea of a teachable moment – yeah, I would give those guys something to move on, all right (after they were out of earshot), but clearly I am a lesser man.

  Yeah, well….. That Gates didn’t DO that seems a solid indication that he doesn’t think his argument would withstand such a release. McGUuire goes further, suggesting that if the tapes made Gates look good, they’d already have been released.  He’s got a point, there, kids.

• AND ABOUT THAT:  Sorry, Radley… I’m not buying it. The cop didn’t abuse his power by way of racism or otherwise. The one who was heaping abuse here was Gates. Boortz points up today that any ‘duologue on race’ involving Gates (And I would add, Obama) would tend to exclude….
  

  …what percentage of home break-ins in and around Boston and Cambridge are committed by blacks. There is no way you might be able to suggest that the police were acting on experience given the fact that blacks are more likely to be involved in criminal activity in the Boston area than whites or other minorities. And you damned sure wouldn’t be able to bring the idea that much of the problems experienced by the black community are due to culturalism rather than racism.Don’t even begin to suggest that it might be black culture, rather than poverty and discrimination, which lead to high incidences of black crime. And for God’s sake, don’t mention the anti-education, anti-learning mentality that suffocates so many young black boys and girls. You know —- the culture in which a young black teenager is accused of trying to “act white” if he or she so much as raises a hand to ask a question in class.

  Boortz is correct, of course. He brings an argument I’ve been waging on this site for years,and on the web in total for nearly two decades, now. It’s that kind of dishonesty he points up, that has always been at the center of this thing. And you’ll never, never never get Gates, or Obama to admit that salient point.

• PALIN:  Speaking of Boortz, he’s got some vid up on Palin’s farewell address. I can’t help but wonder if Palin isn’t playing the leftist press for the fools they are. After all, what could she have done to get more press … and more favorable polling reax…than what’s been done by her and her team already?
• MICHELLE’S NEW BOOK:  Yeah, I think this one’s gonna sell. Matter of fact, I’ll be ordering a copy tonight. No, I’m not getting a thing for the mention. Call it a thank you for all the linky goodness over the years.
•  SAY WHAT?!!?!  According to a WaPo poll, Conservatives outnumber Liberals in AMerica by a 2 to 1 margin. Makes one wonder mhow we ended up with this government. I suspect what’s behind that is a conservative rejection of liberal Republicans. Like, John McCain, for one.

We’ve had some further issues with the PHP server, the nature of which they’re apparently still investigating. I note with interest the performance has improved rather nicely, so I assume they fixed whatever the problem was…. though I confess  some interest in exactly what the problem was.

Let you know.

From the Associated Press:

BOSTON – Police responding to a call about “two black males” breaking into a home near Harvard University ended up arresting the man who lives there — Henry Louis Gates Jr., the nation’s pre-eminent black scholar.

Gates had forced his way through the front door because it was jammed, his lawyer said. Colleagues call the arrest last Thursday afternoon a clear case of racial profiling.

Adolf Hitler was purposed to have dismissed Albert Eintien’s Jewish Theory of Relativity, as if atoms recognized ethnic bounds.   Like atoms do not recognize ethnicity, neither does scholorship.   If a person is indeed a scholar there no need to preface ths distincton.  It is not like truth is the least biet dependant on race.

So when the Associated Press describeS Henry Louis Gates Jr as a black scholar, you have wonder about Gates scholarship.   Further this supposed scholar completely mangles the concept of  racial profiling, which is the idea that police stop a person based on his race.

Gatess and his driver were seen tryng to break into his front door.   Gates neighbor called the police to report a ssupect burgalry.    That is what good neighbors do.   Gates should count himelf lucky.   When the police officer  arrived the officer asked Gates for identification.   That what good  police officers do.   So rather than congradulating his good neighbor and the good police work, Gates tried to make this into somekind of racial incident.   That is what race mongers do.

William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection:

But none of those analogies fit. The police did not profile anyone. They received a call of someone trying to force open the door to a home. They asked the person attempting to force the door open who he was. Had Gates answered, that would have been the end of it.

I got stopped te other day.   Gave the officer my driver license and the entire affair went down much like  Jacobson said it would have for  Gates, had he but cooperated.

Addendum:  (Update and Bump)

Steve Gilbert, Sweetness & Light, comes up with thi2 gem.  In 1994, Professor Gates told Brian Lamb, C-SPAN:

I’m the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard and a professor of English.

Gates claimed to be both the chair of Afro-American Studies and a professor of English.  Yet when asked by Lamb why he used the word “Nigger” so often in his book  “Colored People”,  Professor Gates, the self-avowed chair of Afro-American Studies and professor of Eng lish, got the orgins to the n-word wrong.