Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-12-26

• On Palin: If the left, and the so called “moderates” are so desperate to keep her out she’s worth a very serious look indeed#TCOT #
• someone send me a DM please? Testing a script #
• BITSBLOG!!!!!!  The Palin Dance; Amazing, the Variations: #Palin #TCOT http://bit.ly/NV6cF #
• Right. So your statement can be found in lesser amounts on any stable floor, then.  The Left's desperation about Palin is palpable.  #
• BitsBlog makes the NEW York Times this monring. Not sure if that's good or not. #bitsblog #TCOT #
• Oops forgot link #bitsblog #tcot http://bit.ly/GFE2b #
• Washing my SUV for tonight #
• New #BitsBlog post #TCOT We've got Plattitudes, but where's the freeedom? http://bitsblog.theconservativereader.com/?p=22285 #
• New #BitsBlog post #TCOT Steve McNair dead; Was Titans QB http://bitsblog.theconservativereader.com/?p=22289 #
• Watching fireworks at Henrietta ny #
• New #BitsBlog post #TCOT How Independent Are We? http://bitsblog.theconservativereader.com/?p=22305 #

From the New York Post.   The parents of Mayara Rodrigues Tavares, pictured in the red dress above, are just a wee bit upset about how their daughter is being depicted.    Her mother, Lucia Rodrigues:

“Why are they looking at her like that?

Because Miss Tavares has a shapely ass and she put it on public display.  You put an ass like that on display to pair of male eyeballs and you will get a reaction.  It is called libido.

Her father, Eduardo Tavares:

“This is the wrong image of my daughter.””

So who allowed Miss Tavares to travel to Rome without a chaperone, or at least a diligent one?   Somebody was responsible for how Miss Tavares was dressed.   If was not Miss Tavares, then who was it?

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate seems among the first to pile onto Ricci, doing some local newspaper investigation.

According to local newspapers, Ricci filed his first lawsuit against the city of New Haven in 1995, at the ripe old age of 20, for failing to hire him as a firefighter. That January, the Hartford Chronicle reported that Ricci sued, saying “he was not hired because he is dyslexic.” The complaint in that suit, filed in federal court, alleged that the city’s failure to hire Ricci because of his dyslexia violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Frank Ricci was one of 795 candidates interviewed for 40 jobs. According to his complaint, the reason he was not hired was that he disclosed his dyslexia in an interview. That case was settled in 1997 with a confidential settlement in which Ricci withdrew his lawsuit in exchange for a job with the fire department and $11,143 in attorney’s fees.

The Slate piece goes on to list a number of various lawsuits that Ricci was involved in over the years concludes, self -righteously:

Ultimately, there are two ways to frame Frank Ricci’s penchant for filing employment discrimination complaints: Perhaps he was repeatedly victimized by a cruel cadre of employers, first for his dyslexia, then again for his role as a whistle-blower, and then a third time for just being white. If that is so, we should all be deeply grateful for the robust civil rights laws that protect Americans from unfair discrimination in the workplace. I look forward to hearing Republican Sen. John Cornyn’s version of that speech next week.

The other way to look at Frank Ricci is as a serial plaintiff—one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command. That’s not the typical GOP heartthrob, but I look forward to hearing Sen. Cornyn’s version of that speech next week as well.

Heh.

Well, it may not be the typical GOP heartthrob, but on the other hand it’s not at all to similar to what the civil rights groups have been doing for decades, now. I’ve made the point here several times that maybe it’s time we on the right started considering employment of some of those tactics.

As to Lithwick’s article;

Ultimately there are two ways to frame digging up this stuff and publishing it just now… either they are out to defend their uber liberal Supreme Court nominee, Sonya Sotomayor who comes up for confirmation this week. They apparently intend to support Sotomayor  by discrediting Ricci in a national forum. Amusingly,  they do so  to in turn cast doubt on the ruling of the court they’re trying to confirm Sotomayor to.

The other way to look at this is the left thinks that the tactics used by civil rights groups in courts of law over the last several decades are only valid when the plaintiff isn’t a white male.

Or, both. Frankly, I’m not sure which is more troubling.

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

This is the Car Wax edition

• Whoa… Check it out! I usually don’t mention caption contests until they’ve been won by someone on the BitsBlog team, here. But check the shots Dodd (and now Joyner) are running for the current OTB caption contest.  By the way, James… Dill on vaca, is he?
• Ya knew it was gonna happen: Sonya Sotomayor will face one of the winners in her overturned Ricci case in her confirmation hearings next week.  Let’s see if the press, Fox aside, actually covers this one.
• The Ugly Frenchman: What we keep hearing about American tourists, turns out to be more applicable to the French.
• Yet another Gore in the news:  Someone finally won the running of the bulls in Spain.
• Long Live The Queen:  Will someone please such that mangy mongrel mutt up?
• The Gloved one and taxes in LA:  This one should be fairly obvious. While LA complains that the million some odd dollars of bills  imposed by the sheer volume of mourners at his circus funeral service, I would think the larger impact would be him no longer being around and making money to pay what must have been huge taxes to the city and the state over a period of decades.  I suppose that story won’t be coveed because it casts a positive light on the impact of the uber-rich on society. By the way, he’s not even buried yet and we’re now hearing about foul play charges from Jackson’s erstwhile father. Welcome back, my freinds, to the show that never ends….
• It’s not a tumor: Andy McCarthy at The Corner yet again raises the point that what’s going on in Honduras is not a coup, it’s the rule of law. Which casts a whole different light on PrezBO’s actions, here.
  

  

  McCarthy

  Bottom line: Hugo Chavez wants Zelaya in, the law of Honduras says Zelaya must be out; Obama sided with Chavez.

  Yep. The implications here are obvious. Dan Miller looks at What’s Next for the place at Pajamas Media.

• Cap and Tax won’t solve “Global Warming”: Not that it needed solving anyway, but Neal Boortz examines the situation.
• No kidding, Mickey:  Kaus notes:
  

  If he were a GOP, TPM would be all over it, no?

  

  Kaus

  Sen. Inouye acts on behalf of a constituent, who turns out to be in large part himself (a troubled bank in which his ownership share makes up “the bulk of his personal wealth“). … Yet Josh Marshall stays silent.

  No kidding… It’s the kind of thing I’ve seen all along in Marshall and why he gets quote here so seldom. Tell me again, how my comments are ‘one sided’, again. And tell me again about the Rabbitts, will ya? Sheesh.

•  Always on the leading edge of technology:  Reynolds wonders: “IS THERE A PEE-POWERED GADGET in your future?” If so, brewing beer will have a whole new impact on society.

A single picture can be worth more than a NGO  produced 2:47 video.  First the video:

Hat tip video:  News Junkie

Now for the picture:

Hat tip photo:   Darleen Click, Protein Wisdom.

Suffice to say, the chicklette is part of the J8 conference.  Some how I suspect solving global poverty is not part of her agenda.     Want to help solve poverty in Africa., abolish the J8, and use the money for relief.

Addendum:

Apparently the chicklette has been ID’ed and has a bio (PDF):

Mayara Tavares, is 16 and lives in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She inherited from her grandmother and father a passion to take part in community action and social movements and has been an activist in her community fighting for children and adolescent rights. She has recently acted as a community researcher interviewing other adolescents in the community about their lives and how it feels for them to be growing up in

the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. Through this work she became part of a National Platform for the improvement of poor communities situated in large urban centers, an initiative carried out by UNICEF in Brazil. She also

became a member of the Youth Forum in her municipality and hopes that she can continue to engage her peers in this work.

Hat tip:  Ace (Not safe for work).     The bio also includes a Twelve O’Clock picture.    While Tavares is a minor, she is still a politician and I am skeptical of everything in her official bio beyond basic biographic infornation,  such as name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

Ya know, there are times when you just have to let it out, and laugh in their faces.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter called his fellow Democrat, Rep. Joe Sestak, a “flagrant hypocrite” and accused his rival of registering as a Democrat “just in time to run for Congress.”

…

On Thursday, Specter’s campaign sought to bring into question Sestak’s roots to the Democratic Party.

Right, Arlen… and your jumping ship from the GOP wasn’t a move of both desperation to stay in power, and a move of opportunity?  Like your roots have always been Democrat? And you know the tragic part is there are still some people who will take this clown seriously? I’m no fan of Sestak’s politics, or of the man, but this serves as an example of power and the abuse of it of the first order.

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

This is “The Xing Edition”

Kind of a short one today… doing heavy lifting at work these last few days.

• Obama’s tax promises unrealistic? There it is, in black and white, from the AP, of all places. Do you suppose they’ll eventually admit that most if not all the promises he made were unrealistic?  And then of course, there’s the outright fabrications.
• The Honeymoon is over:   Obama’s not only losing the independants, he’s losing  everyone else as well. You can stop thinking about that second term, now, Barry.
• I spoke earlier today about racism:  Here’s racism you don’t often hear about.  Do you suppose they’d approve of Sotomayor’s reverse racism? You know they would.
• Bing? Well, not really.  Most of my search engine hits are still coming from Google.
• Palin: I hear the Iowa GOP Wants Palin to their dinner.  Maybe I can convince Art Smith to say a few words, here.
• Seven Rules for a 2012 Victory provided by Jenifer Rubin I continue to be a fan of this lady.
• Multi-purposing the dead in Chicago:  We know all the hop dead people vote in Chicago, but apparently, they’re serving other purposes as well.
• We all know Pelosi was lying about the breifings she had. Now, apparently there’s a number of Democrats willing to give her some cover.  

Enough of the Wacko Jacko mania,  Mrs. Pelosi puts an end to the nonsesee of a House resolution, honoring the departed Michael Jackson, from Susan Davis, Wall Street Journal:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear today that she disagrees with Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee on whether the House should vote on a resolution honoring the life and humanitarian works of pop icon Michael Jackson who died last week at the age of 50.

“Michael Jackson was a great, great performer,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference. “I don’t think it is necessary for us to have a resolution

BZ, Mrs P.

I’m more than a little annoyed at what I find in the LA Times Op-Ed section this morning.

The two cases were the latest skirmishes in the broader conservative war to reframe the way Americans view the issue of race. As many conservatives see it, we’re living in a chastened, post-racial America in which discrimination has been largely dismantled, Jim Crow is dead and gaps are being narrowed. With a growing black and Latino middle class — not to mention a “beiging” of America thanks to intermarriage — it’s time to end our obsession with righting the wrongs of the past. More specifically, we should do away with morally troublesome policies such as affirmative action, minority set-asides and “pre-clearance” that aid minority groups at the expense of the majority, and revert, instead, to the sounder principle of colorblind justice for all.

Are they right? This page agrees that race-conscious policies such as affirmative action should be temporary — existing only until they are no longer necessary because society’s inequities have been addressed. But it is naive to think we have arrived at that moment. Despite the enormously significant changes since the civil rights movement, the simple fact is that the great American race problem has not been resolved. To be sure, it’s different today than it was when 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten, shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River for whistling at a white woman in 1955, or when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered by the Klan in 1964 for trying to register black voters in Mississippi. That doesn’t mean it’s gone.

Although more blacks go to college today, and although they have more opportunity to compete for middle-class jobs, the black poverty rate in 2007 was still triple that of whites, and the black male unemployment rate today is still almost double the white male rate. Obama’s election notwithstanding, the only African American currently in the U.S. Senate is the controversial (and non-elected) Roland Burris of Illinois.

The news is not all Wacko Jacko, all the time, from Karen Araize, NBC Philadelphia:

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

I heard this lady, she was like, ‘Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ She’s like, ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child,'” said camper Dymire Baylor

FoxPhilly report the same story but with different twists:

Officials at a daycare accuse a club in Montgomery County of discriminating against the minority kids in their program.

They’re inner city children spending the summer in the basement of a Philadelphia elementary school.

But every Monday afternoon, they were supposed to get a welcome break at the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, where they’d get to swim for an hour and a half.

Note the camp has now become a daycare center.    The campers have become not black but rather minority.

In reax to NBC, Allison Kilkenny, Puffington Post, managed to soil her nappies:

NBC reports that more than 60 African-American campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club because — according to John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club — “there was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.”

It may surprise some Americans to learn that not only do certain private clubs still refuse to admit African-Americans, women, and gay people, but that this kind of enrollment discrimination is considered perfectly legal.

Yet the same Kilkenny turned to blind eye to the racist and sexist Sonia Sotomayor:

President Obama has selected Sonia Sotomayor as the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court judge. As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote this morning, Sotomayor’s appointment is encouraging news. She’s a smart, capable judge.

Of course, the right is already ripping out their hair in hysterics. Glenn Beck’s Twitter -wondered if Obama, the “messiah,” has healed Sotomayor’s diabetes yet. Michelle Malkin proved that Twitter’s 140 character cap isn’t too strict to include both a vague sexist and racist remark.

Amusing, Kilkenny sees racism in private swmming club disinviting daycare attendees from their swimming pool but sees no problem with potential Supreme Court justice who was a member of an all chick social club.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor has quit her membership in a women’s club, the New York-based Belizean Grove.

“I believe that the Belizean Grove does not practice invidious discrimination and my membership did not violate the Judicial Code of Ethics, but I do not want questions about this to distract anyone from my qualifications and record,” the 54-year-old New York federal appeals judge wrote.

Come on Allison, if discrimination is good enough for the one’s Supreme Court justices it ought to be good enough for his campaign donors.

Addendum: 

This could very well apply to Eric’s post.   Fredrick U. Dicker, New York Post, reports via Brain Terminal, and Instapuntit:

During the long years of Republican control, the all-white GOP “conference” would regularly bemoan its lack of diversity, and make extra efforts to recruit minority Senate candidates and hire minority staff.

During the first five months of this year, with the Senate under the control of its first African-American majority leader, Smith, top Democrats bemoaned the lack of minority Senate staffers.

But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new jobs.

The move produced severe racial tensions, made worse by the fact that, as a high-level Democratic staffer confided, “We’ve been told to only hire minorities.

Unlike the swunnug club,   the New York State Legislature is not a private organization.   It just acts like it is.   Malcolm Smith claimed to offended by race based hiring, so he hired by race.

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

This is the “I’m forever blowing Bubbles” Edition

•  The Sotomayor Tax Dodge: It appears that we’re going to ahve something added to the confirmation hearing on Sonya Sotmayor… apparently the law firm under her name is a tax dodge.  Don’t expect the Republicans to do anything about it. Give credit to  Mitch McConnell though, who is now publicly worrying that she lets race enter her rulings.
• The real reason:  The confusion on the stated goals of healthcare by governmental fiat is yet another example of why I’m cinvinced it’s all BS and the real reason for such efforts is simply growing government. Re-making America as a socialist model.
• So how’s that stimulus working out?  We’re now seeing 14% unemployment figures being bandied about. And yet the Democrats are still insisting it would have been worse if they’re not gone crazy with borrowed money to the tune of trillions of dollars.  Of course they offer no proof for this.  None. One of Reynold’s readers quips:
  

  So, I guess they would agree that the invasion of Iraq was a success because it prevented another terrorist attack in the U.S.? They wouldn’t agree with that? BIG surprise….

  Yeah, we know how that works, don’t we? We also know they’re not going to deal with the real cause of all of this.

• No cigar for the cigar store indian: Ward Churchill isn’t getting his job back after all.
•  When even the Biz pages notice:  Investors Business Daily says Crazy Uncle Hugo’s prints are all over Obama’s kissing Zelaya’s backside. OK, Mixed metephor, I know. Dan Miller has a bit of discussion on that.  So does Richard Fernandez.

Great piece at NRO this morning, from David Kahane:

If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO2’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.

You might also want to think about interviewing New York literary agent Jane Dystel, who a) contacted the totally unknown Obama in the wake of an adulatory New York Times piece in 1990 and b) got him a $125,000 advance for a memoir that c) he couldn’t write, even after a long sojourn in Bali, which d) got the contract canceled, whereupon e) Dystel got him $40,000 from another publisher, following which f) the book finally came out to glowing reviews and g) Obama fired her. Wouldn’t she have an interesting story to tell?

Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed.

Now, of course Kahane is writing in a weird third person. But it works in this case, rather well, and he’s quite right in that  the Republican leadership… and a goodly number on the right outside the GOP…  have been resisting that course. Wrongly, in my view.

None of this is new….  I’ve been making these points for some time now. I’ve been rebuked several times by those who claim I lack “principle”.  To them, I say this;   We their fight to win, or we lose. In much the same way as Radical Islam has declared war on the west, America particularly, so to have the radical left. Because of the path we’ve chosen, refusing to fight on the battlefield that is, we are losing against them.    If we continue down the path we’re on, we lose. It’s that black and white, that cut and dried. Where will our principles be at that point?  You see, as with any war, it’s those who win are those who get to decide which principles are valid and which are not.

Ponder the tactics being used against us;

Kahane

Did Sarah stand for “family values”? Flay her unwed-mother daughter. Did she represent probity in a notoriously corrupt, one-family state? Spread rumors about FBI investigations. Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live. Above all, don’t let her motivate the half of the country that doesn’t want His Serene Highness to bankrupt the nation, align with banana-republic Communist dictators, unilaterally dismantle our missile defenses, and set foot in more mosques than churches since he has become president. We’ve got a suicide cult to run here.

And that’s why Sarah had to go. Whether she understood it or not, she threatened us right down to our most fundamental, meretricious, elitist, sneering, snobbish, insecure, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders bones. She was, after all, a “normal” American, the kind of person (or so I’m told) you meet in flyover country. The kind that worries first about home and hearth and believes in things like motherhood and love of country the way it is, not the way she wants to remake it.

There’s no denying, that those tactics have been working, right along, and in far more than just Palin.  As I said last May:

For eight years, every single time the Republicans made any kind of a move, it was reason enough for the Democrats to hold a press conference. They would scream and gnash their teeth over whatever the news of the day happened to be. In so doing, they managed to cast anything even remotely Republican to be bad or evil. They used these occasions to push their leftist core values, thus pleasing their base and strengthening their electoral position.

We end up with corruption after corruption PROVEN, and not acted upon, by Democrat after Democrat. Yet, look at the lynch mobs of leftist press going after Palin on ethics charges, none of which ever pan out. They started another such probe last week.  It’s not about ethics, people, it’s about image control. Saul Alinksy rule number 4 as Kahane indicates.

For the moment, though, let’s keep with the example of Palin….Think about it; what tactics that were used against Palin would ever be used by the right? What was McCain’s response? “We have nothing to fear from an Obama Presidency” he said. He took the association to the radical church of Reverend Wright,a nd every other serious challenge to Obama off the table.  The man capitulated on every single point that was brought up against Obama. The result is the catastrophe we have today.

It is this disagreement as to how to handle the left and what Kahane describes that is causing the rift between the GOP leadership, and the rank and file. It’s what’s causing the GOP leadership for example to have such a problem with grassroots individuals such as Palin. It’s causing us to lose every battle. And the left is loving every second of it.

I say again: It’s time to take the damned gloves off.

Welcome to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “When Cows Fly” edition

• So, the Gloved One is now the Buried One. Someone, and I don’t know who, on Twitter last night, called him a “Shovel Ready Project” . Yeah, that fits.  Someone else called him “America’s version of Princess Dianna”.  They … whoever they are… should be taken out and shot… quickly. Else, the oughta be given an award for pun of the year.  Unlike  Jacko, who never really knew what kind of princess he wanted to be when he grew up,  Dianna wasn’t hard to look at.  Jackson, meanwhile, looked like a Mary Shelly novel on acid. More,  Dianna’s problems were not self-inflicted, best I could tell at the time, or since.  Nor was her demise nearly as predictable as that of Jackson. Of course, now comes the decade or so of legal fights, which will be much more public than the ones surrounding Dianna’s death. After all, there’s more money involved and more hands out for it, and less shame about legal maneuvers to obtain it. Ah, Hollywood.
• Slow Burning Fuse? Gotta tell you Billy, I find this attitude far more prevalent among cops than apparently is your experience.
• What page are we on, again? As flat out stupid as I find Obama’s foreign policy… (Can anyone explain to me in 30 pounds of BS or less how yesterday was anything but a loss for the US?) … apparently, Joe Biden isn’t a team player.  Either he’s smart enough to see the disaster of the course Obama’s taking, or too stupid to see the consequences of not following the boss’ lead. And I won’t lay odds for either one.
• Why we’re in financial trouble:  Here you go.
• Job Killer: We’re having troubles keeping folks in jobs. Every time the minimum wage has been raised, we lose jobs, particularly among lower income families, and teens. So, come July the 24th, the Democrats are raising the Minimum wage.
• The Stimulus had the opposite effect:  Now comes a report that the Stimulus killed off jobs, too.
• Democrats- King Midas in reverse:   Donald Lambro a couple days ago in the Washington Times points up:
  

  President Obama’s domestic agenda is losing steam in an increasingly contentious Democratic Congress amid growing public doubts about the veracity of raising taxes in a deep recession. 

  

  Lambro

  The economy remains sick. The stimulus plan isn’t working. Investment capital, the lifeblood of a vigorous economy, is still on strike. Over 40 House Democrats voted against his energy tax bill, which barely passed by a seven-vote margin and now faces huge obstacles in the Senate. His health care plan is on shaky ground. His promise not to tax middle-class workers is in shreds, and massive deficits are piling up as fears mount that the economy may face months if not years of anemic growth.

  The White House fashions new, defensive arguments weekly in behalf of Mr. Obama’s stimulus. The latest argument coming out of the president’s economic advisers is that they never actually expected the stimulus bill to trigger growth this early in the year. It’s going to take a lot longer to show results, they say now.

  The gross domestic product, the measurement of all the goods and services the economy produces, shrank at an annual rate of 5.5 percent in the first quarter. It is expected to shrink further in the second quarter but at a slower pace.

  Americans are not spending; they are saving. The savings rate jumped to 6.9 percent in May, a 15-year high, while spending barely budged by 0.3 percent. “As the first half of ’09 ends, investors are growing more anxious about whether the economy can bounce back later this year,” the Associated Press reported last week.

  Holding the economy back is unprecedented borrowing and a raft of higher taxes Mr. Obama intends to impose on the country – from energy taxes that will increase the cost of everything we buy to health care taxes to pay for the president’s grandiose national health insurance plan.

  One cannot help but wonder if we’re not dealing with intent to harm, here. After all, one can only be so wrong so often by sheer force of will. They even admit they know their moves are job killers.

• Why they insist on putting in programs that don’t work: The ability to screw things up ranges farther yet…The soon-to-be-married Megan McArdle notes, today:
  

  Now, everyone on the left was united in favoring auctions over giveaways. Auctions also had a fair amount of support on the right, mostly from people who hate corporate welfare even if they also oppose cap-and-trade. And you can whine all you want about how the Republican party had a god-given moral duty to provide political cover to Democrats from coal states (though frankly the complaining about your party’s 60-seat senate majority is really starting to sound quite idiotic), but the fact is that at the end of the day, you couldn’t do this perfectly obvious thing that has surprisingly broad support among the policy elites of both parties.

  

  McArdle

  Instead, the bill was passed in a form that makes it more expensive, and almost totally ineffective.The fact that you can imagine some perfect bureaucrat administering a beautifully-designed law does not mean that this is actually possible in the American political universe.

  There’s something else that has been bothering me. I have been urged to support Waxman-Markey on the grounds that we musn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and maybe I do. But the mediocre can also be the enemy of the good. Even if you support national healtch care, you certainly wouldn’t build Medicare in its current form. But there is path dependance in institutions: once they exist, they’re precious hard to change. Enacting a crappy climate trading system in order to do something forestalls the possibility of enacting a better design five or ten years from now. Given that this bill is universally expected to accomplish virtually no significant emissions reduction in the foreseeable future, that should worry people. Other than me, I mean.

  See, Megan… the thing you’re missing is, there’s one advantage they’re not telling you about to acting now. In a hurry. Like it was a crisis. It turns the whole thing over to government with a lot less question. As we found with the stimulus, not only are the opportunities for graft astoundingly large, but what should be a commodity becomes a political football to be used at the next election.  And therein lies the center of the whole thing. They’re about growing government power, not fixing the problem.

•  Global warming and other myths: Boortz has a great bit on that today.  He’s spot on.  You know who will get my vote? Someone who will campaign against “cap and trade” and any other global warming nonsense. Do you suppose there’s any chance someone who have the balls to do that? Besides Sarah Palin, of course.
• Speaking of Sarah: Yes, I’ve seen the arguments about how she bailed on legal expenses.  Actually, that firms up my thinking that she’s coming out in 2012.

Wacko Jacko, Michael Jackson; is to buried today    Jammie Wearing Fool notes the media Wacko Jacko overloadf, ”It Was An Orgy of Glorification‘

After the first day or so of the Michael Jackson coverage I felt the same way. Hard to believe they haven’t even held a funeral for him yet. Thankfully, with beautiful weather and time off, I’ve had much better things to do than watch the excessive coverage of the freakshow that tomorrow will overrun Los Angeles.

One small voice of reason, video:

 Hat tip:  Ace

Congressman King’s entirely appropriate comments caused the Puffington Post to soil their nappies:

Over the weekend, King said that the media had gone far over the top in glorifying Jackson, who he deemed a “low-life” pervert who “may have been a good singer” and “did some dancing.”

Now, an ActBlue fundraising site has been set up by “A fan of Michael Jackson” titled “Michael Jackson Fans AGAINST Peter King.”

Puffington is both promoting and linking to a partisan fund raising site.   So much for the pretense of being a  legitiimte news source.

Meanwhile in some alternative universe, Representative  Sheila Jackson Lee overloads her three functioning brain cell, from Eric Zimmermann, Hill:

We recently reported that Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Tex.) had introduced a resolution to honor Michael Jackson. (Oddly enough, the legislation was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.)

The full text of that resolution has been published, and it’s….long.

So much for Jackson Lee’s clam to be sane.

The Sister:

Good grief!

Amen.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, opines:

SO, TECHNICALLY, IT WOULD BE WRONG TO CALL THE PLAN “SOPHOMORIC:” “In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of ‘a nuclear free world.’ He railed against discussions of ‘first- versus second-strike capabilities’ that ‘suit the military-industrial interests’ with their ‘billion-dollar erector sets,’ and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads. The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts.”

He doesn’t seem to have done a lot of sorting since, actually, to judge from the rest of the piece and what’s going on now. But if you want a nuclear-free world, wouldn’t a good start be to stop Iran and North Korea from getting nuclear weapons? Not seeing much action, there

I am having trouble trying to associate the Moron-in-Chief with thoughts.   Intelligent thought is just not the one’s thing.    Having to actually think is just a distraction to Obama.

It well could be that when Obama wrote in ‘Eighty-Three that he desired a nuke free world, he was simply lying   As the Professor notes, a nuke free would by necessity mean that neither North Korea or Iran could have nukes.   Obama is clearly not willing to take any steps which would preclude either North Korea or Iran from acquiring Nukes.    Achieving a nuke free world is not the priority Obama said was back when he claimed to have been in college.  I still haven’t seen any transcripts.

Alternative theories include:

• One, Obama is simply too much of coward to act on his convictions.
• Two, Obama is too stupid to realize that preventing North Korea and Iran from acquiring nukes is a necessary requirement for a nuke free world.
• Three, the one like Rip Van Winkle has spent that last twenty years in a coma.

Joe Biden, the village idiot of Delaware, is looking better and better every passing day.