What’s in Your Fab Five?

What in your fabulous five weapons, Catherine Donaldson-Evans and Paul Wagenseil, Fox News:

The five deadliest conventional weapons in the world are all part of the U.S. Armed Forces’ arsenal.

The linked rating do not necessarily represent the views of this blogger.    Your preferences may vary.

Gee, I wonder why she didn’t rush into Israel with medical aid when Hamas was launching their 10,000 rockets. Weird.

Tammy Bruce, On Cynthia McKinney,

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… Bit’sBlog’s Nightlty Ramble.

Nearly the last one of the year. A slower day than some, so tonight’s ramble through the headlines will be a shorter one than some.

• Speaking of the new year; Are you making new year’s resolutions?  This time of year is often a time for reassessing one’s life and it’s direction. Frankly, I’ve not bothered, this year. As I remarked yesterday, this is a year the conditions of which nobody  predicted. And even under more stable and more predictable conditions, I’ve never been able to keep resolutions I’ve made.  I had goals set me for years, most of which involved my obtaining a better position at a job I had. I did well, but the division I was working for was closed. They’re tearing down the buidling I was working in, next month.  Yes, I suppose that perhaps this is a wekaness on my part, but having gone through this 50 some-odd times, now, I’ve given myself to the reality of the situation… the chances are fairly good that I’m going to, for some reason or another, not achieve the goals I set at the end of this year, by the next. That said, I did manage it one year; I got Donna to marry me by New Years day, 1990, getting under the wire by a month.  Best thing I ever did.  So, yes, there is a plus side to setting such goals.
• A second place over at OTB’s Caption Contest. Sometimes the tried and true stuff is still the best.
• We’ve commented several times, now, and in several Rambles that the Dutch appear to be retreating from their supposed “open-mindedness.”  The International Herald Tribune examines this in some detail, today, in an article entitled: From the left, a call to end the current Dutch notion of tolerance. A part, here:
  

  Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”It came at the same time Nicolas Sarkozy was making a case in France for greater opportunities for minorities that also contained an admission that the French notion of equality “doesn’t work anymore.”

  But there was a difference. If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was exceptional.

  There’s an old saying about Kids…. if you hear a toilet flushing and the words “Uh-oh” from a child’s voice, it’s already too late. It seems clear what’s going on here is the dim and belated recognition by the left that they’re being over-run, and that the policies of multi-culturalism aren’t working out quite as billed. I’ve warned of this before in these spaces and not only in the case of the Dutch, but America, as well. The myth of multi-culturalism is based on the notion that everyoe will willingly become a part of the culture and they of ours… our cultures will integrate. That, however, leaves two questions; Will they in fact do so, and with what are we integrating? I asked a while ago why the social left wasn’t recognizing this point… and now it appears at least in the case of the Dutch, that they have started to. I wonder, though, if, as with the recognition of the small child that there might be a problem with flushing whatever-it-was… that it’s already too late… that what we had, culturally, is gone forever, because the consequences of our chocies weren’t understood. Certainly, what we’re seeing from the Dutch is tatamount to a child going ‘Uh-oh…”

• Steyn notes the above story and points out that we in the west are far too quick to bend over….:
  

  Whatever the belated awakening among certain European politicians, the default mode in western institutions will remain pre-emptive capitulation…

  Indeed, and in a comparison of the two, those bent on the Islamic takeover of our culture, and of the left of the west, bent on handing it to them, the latter will be by far the harder to overcome.

• Speaking of that… If it’s anti-Western, Bozo moonbat Cynthia McKinney can be counted on to back it. As in this case.  Too bad they didn’t sink her. Think of the lives that could have been saved.
• I remakred yesterday about the small mountain of corruption within the Democrat party. It’s starting to look like they were waiting until after the danger of losing the election has passed, as I said yesterday, to take action. CNN is now following the situation with Charlie Rangel. Any further denials about how the Dinosaur media is working for the left should die a quick and painful death, when someone notes that prior to the election, the rpess couldn’t be bothered to pursue the issue of Rangel’s corruption as it should have been.  And then, there’s William Jefferson, and Chris Dodd, (And Chris Dodd) and Barney Frank, whose corruption the dinosaur press is pretty much ignoring. Are you getting the picture, yet?
• So, the Democrats in Congress are thinking about hearings on Madoff? Why does this strike me as an opportunity for Democrats to execute damage control?  The image of a freshly painted white fence leaps to mind.
• Me at OTB’s comments section  this morning, responding to Steve Plunk, who says in part:
  

  Can we now expect OPEC to behave like the Federal Reserve? Inject a little oil to boost the economy, reduce production to cool it off. I understand the number one priority is price support but they just learned how high prices can dampen economic growth. Will they learn to play it both ways?

  I’ll tell you this; that’s the best illustration I can think of for the futility of a bunch of old men sitting around a table in Washington DC trying to dictate economic policy. The fact of the matter is, that energy is the basis for all the rest of it. Without it, anything anyone, particularly government, does, is utterly meaningless.

  We opened ourselves up for the economic collapse we just experienced, by not using what energy is available. By refusing to drill here at home. By refusing to increase refining capacity here at home. By refusing to dig what coal we have here at home. By sacrificing our energy usage to the great myth of global warming.

  By no means am I suggesting that energy independence is possible or even desirable. What I’m saying is that everybody else, (particularly countries that don’t like us very much) has levers with which to manipulate our economy. If they hadn’t figured that part out before this most recent collapse, they sure as hell have now. Our only option is to create a few levers ourselves. Given who is in control in Congress, and the White House, do you suppose there’s a snowball’s chance of it?

  I can tell you now, that I don’t. Mostly, because they’re so enamoured with restricting our energy use, that they lose sight of the damage it’s causing. As for OPEC and it’s intentions, Steve Verdon notes there, in the original post, that…

  OPEC is determined to get the price back up to a more acceptable level. So when the economy does recover it is likely that we could see oil prices move upwards rather sharply. Especially if during the economic downturn and period of lower prices oil companies cut back and lay off employes and cut back on new investments, especially in refining.

  Frankly, I’m unconvinced that’s going to happen. Certainly their cash reserves in the Arab oil world would preclude that as a nesessity. Their taking that action may be a question mark, but I don’t see it as a sure bet.A lot of what we see going on in OPEC just now is politics which have to do with the price of extraction. Some places are content at current prices because they’re making money. Others, not so much. Which is the more troublesome of the world stage? The ones with higher extraction costs, for the most part.  the higher the price of oil goes, the better Iran for example, is able to fund it’s nuclear ambitions. Even other Islamic nations aren’t too happy about that, and they’re making money at the lower price anyway, so they’ll be less vocal in their push for higher prices than they might be otherwise.

•   Billy;
  

  Tell me what I should write about that. That’s been on my mind for days now, almost like a debt that I don’t know how to pay. I don’t know how much more clearly one could see what that man is writing about, and I feel like I could write all the time for the rest of my life and never help anyone see it. Certainly not to any degree that could alter the alterable that must be altered. None of this is ordained. It is merely happening, but what is happening is a necessary matter of cause and effect, and that is a matter of human purview.

  Well, you could start, Billy, by reminding both your correspondant and yourself, that there’s a major difference between voting here and voting in the country he left. In some ways, he happening here is far sadder. That’s because while their vote was a sham from the start over there, and at the point of a gun. Meanwhile, over here, too many people gave their vote away to people who promised them the moon… and gave it willingly. Far as I can see, the former is the abuse by government, submitted to unwillingly, and of the voter. The latter is willing and non-thinking abuse OF government BY the voter. That’s a major difference and shouldn’t be overlooked. I say again…as I have for years, now… Our system only works with careful consideration of who is elected. Can you honestly tell me that kind of consideration has been given on the whole, since 1980? I would add that’s an opportunity they don’t have elsewhere, this opportunity that has been squandered in this country  all these years. Clearly the problems you both decry (and rightly) are founded not in that the system is corrupt, but in the fact that such consideration and care wasn’t given. We’ve had discussions before about why that’s so. Education, for one thing. these things could have been overcome and might be yet. But as it is, the culmination of all of that is the most recent election.

• Lots of blog awards going out just now, being we’re on the end of the year. And BitsBlog is still not on any of them, (Sigh…)  though I note a lot of our friends are. I see Hawkins running his own list, too, though I’ll have more to say on that point tommrow.

Well, the question I asked a while ago, about who would want to be named to the Senate by Blago while he’s under criminal investigation, would seem to have been answered…

The answer is: ,former Illinois Atty General Roland Burris.

So now, Harry Reid has an interesting quandry, doubtless designed so by Blago… he can either refuse to seat the appointment, or he can seat the guy. either way, people with proverbial flamethrowers are going to have large objections.

Oh, and you guys want irony? Catch this act:

From 1964 to 1973, he worked at Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company (now Bank of America), serving as tax accountant, tax consultant, commercial banking officer, and vice-president. He headed a commercial group that covered government guaranteed loans and minority business banking.

I’ll just leave that hanging, for the time being.

Addendum:  (David L)

Rod Blagojevich may be cornered and doomed, but he just  out smarted Dirty Harry Reid.   Blagojevich played the race card on Dirty Harry.

Congressman Bobby Rush dared white Democratic senators to block a black man from joining their ranks.

He urged people “not to hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer” and, after saying repeaedly that Burris would be the only African-American in the Senate, said that he believed no senator would want “to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the US Senate”.

Rush is a former Black Panther who trounced Barack Obama in the 2000 Democratic primary when the then state senator challenged him for his House of Representatives seat

Dirty Harry should not make threat he can’t keep.    Playing the race card was so obvious, that anybody,  smarter than Dirty Harry, should have seen it.

Jules Crittenden, today, in a great and extended article:

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak wants “war to the bitter end.” Hamas is on the run, its terrorist infrastructure and personnel being blown to bits as we speak. All good, but at the end of the day, all that gets you is a pile of rubble and a bunch of dead terrorists, international condemnation, and you start all over again.

So, what next?

There’s been a fair amount handwringing about how this all goes nowhere, it’s a zero-sum game just leaves Palestinians more angry, prospects for peace in a shambles, shocked international community alienated, and then the cycle starts again.

What if the exact opposite is true, and the destruction of Hamas is the best thing that ever happened to the Palestinians? Their game of murderous harrassing fire, after all, was the real go-nowhere game that kept the people of Gaza isolated, under the Israeli boot, suffering, wishing for another border fence holiday to cross into Egypt and buy stuff, because in a Gaza run by terrorists, that’s as good as it gets.

Heh.

 I meantioned this in last night’s Ramble, and have been screaming about this for a long time, now. I said yesterday and will repeat, today, that the only way that situation is going to come to peace is if the war gets fought to a conclusion. As I keep saying, peace is a product of havng won the war waged against you. That does not mean negotiation. That means not laying down arms until the job’s done. I say let Israel level Gaza. Peace will come when Israel has the parking stripes painted on the place.

If the last 40 years have proven anything, it’s that peace is not aquired in this situation through negotiation. And I’m not the only one seeing who is responsible. I linked this yesterday without much comment, but today, I think I’ll quote part of it:

Who is responsible for the violence in Gaza asks the media?

The answer, coming from a Palestinian girl injured in the latest attacks?

Hamas.

Look, the crazies on the left can complain all they want to, about Israel, and label them the problem, but it doesn’t change the fact that Hamas has only one goal… the elimination of Israel. There is no negotiation, no compromise possible with that goal. No compromise can be had so long as that is the stated goal of the Palastinian government, and / or large groups within the Arab world. So, our options are limited to a total of one: Peace will only come to the region, when we eliminate totally, the groups and governments so dedicated. It’s time we get our minds around that, or we’re going to be dealing with this cul-de-sac for forty more years, and beyond, at the cost of far more lives…. since during that time, someone’s going to get nukes over there. Now’s the time to end this nonsense, and help Israel win the war.

And if small Palastinian girls can see that, what can’t our own left?

James Taranto, Best of the Web,  goes the quote route:

“I’m really coming into this as somebody who isn’t, you know, part of the system, who obviously, you know, stands for the values of, you know, the Democratic Party. I know how important it is to, you know, to be my own person. And, you know, and that would be obviously true with my relationship with the mayor.”–Caroline Kennedy

Whereas Cuffy Meigs, Perfunction,  perfers the video route:

Hat tip:   Stop the ACLU.

You know Caroline, I don’t know.    Howver what I do know is that you, Mrs. Schlossberg are as qualified to be senator as BO is to be president, to wit not at all.

Word on the wire is that Freddie Hubbard has passed on. The LA Times blog has it this way:

Freddie Hubbard died today at Sherman Oaks Hospital as a result of a heart attack suffered in late November. His name might not blow up the same marquee lights as that of the late Eartha Kitt, whom we lost on Christmas Day, but anyone who cultivates even a passing interest in jazz certainly knows Hubbard’s swift, mercury-smooth trumpet sound, whether they realize it or not.

Indeed. They’ve got audio, over there, too. Check it out.

In my view, Hubbard should be required listening for anyone wanting to understand Jazz.

I am given to understnad that one sexual predator in particular and leftards in general  are upset that one  Chip Saltsman included the Paul Shanklin classic “Barack the Magic Negro”  in his Christmas greetings, Peter Yarrow, Puffington Post:

The sending of a Christmas greeting by Chip Saltsman to the members of the Republican National Committee that includes a recording of the so-called parody, “Barack the Magic Negro” is not only offensive, it is shocking and saddening in the extreme. It flies in the face of America’s deeply held hope for a new era in which common ground and mutual respect characterize the exchanges between our national leaders.

 To which I have to say, tough,  get over it.    If you find the phrase “Barack the Magic Negro” offensive, take it up with the phrase’s author, one, David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Times:

But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination – the “Magic Negro.”

The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. “He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,” reads the description on Wikipedia

I find it amusing, and revealing, that Yarrow only purports to be offended by Saltsman sending of the parody, but not by Ehrenstein’s coining of the phrase.,   Surely if Yarrow is not a stoned out brain dead libtard hypocrite,  be must find both Saltsman and Ehrenstein actions offensive.  

More, Michelle:

Oh, give me a super-sized break.

Leftie ’60s leftover/songwriter Peter Yarrow at the Huffington Post fumes over the “Barack the Magic Negro” parody that has RNC candidate Chip Saltsman in hot water.

All of sudden — after eight years of “F**k Bush” bumper stickers and “Kill Bush” assassination chic and Bush-or-Chimp parodies — the left is concerned about insulting the office of the Presidency?

Speaking only for myself, I intend to give BO all the respect he deserves.

Welcome one and all to the most intense nightly read on the ‘sphere, BitsBlog’s Nightly Ramble.

I ended up having to go into work today and tomorrow, and so we will see a Nightly Ramble for both those days. We’ll see about the rest of the week when that gets here.

• Victor Davis Hanson notes:
  

  As 2008 comes to a close, almost nothing has turned out as was expected at the beginning of the year – whether we consider oil prices, the war in Iraq, political corruption or the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

  Indeed. In short, all the supposedly zones that we elected Obama, have faded into the mists.  Hanson gets into some serious detail on all these points, and it’s worth the read.  The take away from the read is that perhaps we didn’t know all that we thought we did about the management of such matters by the Bush administration.  On that basis, one can also aver that maybe we didn’t know quite so much about Obama, either.  Congratulations, morons, you just dropped a huge  question mark in our future.

• To that point, did anybody notice that Kosovo has named a street after President Bush?  I think it possible given their judgment is so much more generous for the president then that of the electorate that we might be missing something that they see far more clearly.
• Speaking of Hanson, he has a great bit up in The Corner.
  

  I’m very puzzled by the nexus between the current downturn and concern about global warming. Given that we were told we had to immediately cut back on carbon emissions (even before sustainable alternative energies are in place), largely by curbing our lavish energy-dependent lifestyles, why then all the concern about stimuli and global depression? Surely, the world right now is sort of what the radical Gorists wanted to see, since the current cutback in gasoline usage, and general economic slowdown are radically restricting the burning of fossil fuels in a manner that even the most optimistic green utopian could hardly have envisioned just few years ago?

  Well, exactly. There’s no way in the world that the bkind of draconian nonsense that Gore and his tribe of misfits wanted… and still want… to impose on us, wouldn’t have resulted in exactly the economic downturn we are now seeing.  Is there any recovery then from our current downturn, if we allow Gore and company to have their way on energy?

• The story that David mentioned the other night about somebody in the Santa suit opening fire and then burn the place to the ground killing… I guess the total was seven people it the time? Apparently the count is up to nine, now. Ten if you include the guy himself, according to what the reports I’m hearing. What would drive someone t that point? I hear, he got pretty well trounced in a divorce.  She even took his dog, I hear…… I’m not going to defend the guys actions, by any stretch.  But if we’re to truly understand the question of what drove into that point, we have to consider what was going on in his life.  It strikes me as not implausible that those events could trigger that kind of response.
• Look, Glenn, Anybody who elects a Democrat figuring that it will result in spending cuts on the whole,  probably deserves a rubber room at the Washington Laughing Academy.  Or, possibly a place in the editorial board of the New York Times.
• Heads up to the guys at Cox and Forkum: We need you back.
• Venlet has a string of Sub-Prime posts you’ll want to read.
• Want to stimulate the economy? Eliminate all taxes for 6 months. No, really, think about it. It’ll end up being less expensive than letting the government decide where to put our money. And of course given that there’s a Democrat in the White House just now and that they are totally in control of Congress means that our chances of that actually happening are approximately that of the snowball in a campfire. Alas, so too, our chances of economic recovery anytime soon, thereby.
• So Oprah fell for another fake? And yet still endorses the thing? Gee, big shock. After all, look who she endorsed for President. Think her credibility is a problem after that?  Not nearly as much as it will after Obama gets in office, I think.  Speaking of credibility, there’s no small amount of irony here, given the story was uncovered by The New Republic… they of their own interesting blend of falsehoods.
• Nothing like Israel defending itself from constant rocket attacks to drive the already mentally unhinged such as Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein...  even further over the edge. Tell you what guys, why don’t we arrange for spending some time, the both of you, under where those rockets are falling, and see if your attitude doesn’t change a little.  I suggest you’d probably come back to reality damned fast, and realize that the fastest way to end a war is to win it.  Until that happens, I suppose we’ll have to put up with your moronic  outbursts, defending Hamas.  Bruce notes this at Q&O:
  

  Israel could sit like a bump on a log and never do anything and still suffer attacks because that is the Hamas mission in life. It is committed to Israel’s destruction. Klein and the NYT just can’t seem to get their head around that simple fact.

  Think now; Isn’t that pretty much the same deal we got from them with  AlQuieda?  They’re not about our detsruction, they’s simply reacting to or being on their turf, and other such nonsense arguments?  I’m to the point now where I say that the only way that situation is going to come to peace is if the war gets fought to a conclusion. As I keep saying, peace is a product of havng won the war waged against you. That means not laying down arms until the job’s done. I say let Israel level Gaza. Peace will come when Israel has the parking stripes painted on the place. They’ve had the justification for 20 years at least to do exactly that.

• Before we leave the topic of Gaza altogether, check this from A Blog for All.  I suppose Klein and Greenwald know more than the people under the rockets, huh? Well, it’s clear they think they do.
• Sister Toldjah does her usual good job at exposing double standards. I for one was glad when she got the job over at Right Wing News. Smart guy, Hawkins.
• OK, the Bills may have tanked at 7 and 9 when they should have been far better off. Underacheievers, certainly.   The Cowboys are certainly under achievers, given the blowout yesterday, and perhaps there’s some justification for the Cowboy fans to be howling for the head of Wade Phillips, as I did with Buffalo a few years ago.  But the Lions? My freinds, there’s a case study of under-achievement for the ages; The first team in history to go 0 and 16. Rather like the city itself, of late. But here’s the thing; Does anyone really figure that any of these teams are going to do anything in terms of coaching but take someone else’s failed cast-offs? Explain to me how the leauge is helped by shuffling the coaching deck chairs. None of these teams is going to do anything but marginal improvements, if they dont’ reach outside the already tried and failed. Maybe the easiest thing for them to do is scream and bitch that they need a bailout.
• Quintuplets on the first try, huh?  Why do I get the impression that this is going to be her last try?
• Doctors and finally decided to start piping up about some of the pure hucksterism coming out of the Hollywood left, as regards their theories about health. At what point can we start questioning their theories about other kinds of science, for example the environment? Yes, the aforementioned Oprah among them.

By way of  Glenn Reynolds I note an interesting article in the DC Examiner, today:

It appears that among the many celebrity victims of Wall Street fraudster Bernie Madoff is former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer resigned earlier this year following revelations that he was using laundered funds to pay for his multiple socks-on inter-state sexual encounters with high-priced prostitutes in New York and Washington. Spitzer acknowledged recently that his family’s real estate firm had lost an unspecified amount of money as a result of investments with a Madoff subsidiary. The revelation came during a press bash thrown by Slate.com, the online news and commentary site that threw the disgraced Spitzer a lifeline back into the public policy arena via a regular column.

Since he seems determined to regain a place in the national spotlight, it is worth recalling that there were far more serious ethical issues surrounding Spitzer long before America learned of his rendezvous with Ashley Alexander Dupre at Washington, D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel. While he was New York Attorney General, Spitzer was responsible  for policing New York’s estimated 60,000 charities and nonprofits, including his family’s $26 million Spitzer Charitable Trust. Most of those assets were invested in hedge and equity funds whose executives made numerous campaign contributions to Spitzer, according to Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center. Spitzer did not recuse himself from investment decisions by the board of his family trust even though a state ethics panel had ruled that top state officials should not serve as directors or board members of regulated agencies.

And let us not forget the $42,555 Spitzer received in campaign contributions from lawyers with the now-disgraced Milberg Weiss law firm in his successful 2002 re-election as Attorney General. As first reported by The Examiner in 2007, among those donations were $10,000 from Mel Weiss and $10,000 from former managing partner David Bershad. Weiss is now serving a federal prison term – along with another former senior Milberg Wess partner, William Lerach – after confessing to participating in kickbacks totaling $11.7 million to plaintiffs in more than 150 securities class-action lawsuits brought by the firm in a conspiracy that began in 1981.

In looking at the rather longish list of misdeeds.. and those being merely the ones we know of, it seems to me that what he got out of the reports of sexual misdeeds was far less punishment than he might have gotten out of a conviction on any of the counts listed above. All of that says nothing of the added embarrassment for Democrats such charges alone against Spitzer would have brought, much less the convictions for those charges.

It’s not much of a stretch to ask if his withdrawal from office under the cloud of a sex scandal wasn’t arranged by either himself or some other Democrat or Democrats to avoid these larger issues for himself and the party.  If they were looking for some way of avoiding these larger issues, they couldn’t have found a better way.

Consider, too, that Spitzer’s addiction was one of the worst kept secrets in politics. Why move exactly when they did, against him?

That question takes on added weight when one considers the timing other events running concurrently to the revelation of the scandal; Right on the cusp of a presidential election, during which any hint of scandal would have made for serious problems, particularly in getting a Democrat into the White House. After all, Spitzer was supposedly one of their shining lights. Douse the fire, get him out of the way.

That would seem to be confirmed by the lack of action against Rangel, William Jefferson, etc etc etc until AFTER the election; it fits the pattern of a close scandal management rather well; Almost Clintonesque in it’s slickness.

There is a scene in Fred Zinnemann’s great film, “High Noon” (1952), in which Will Kane (Gary Cooper) loses his head in a bar room. Desperate for help against the bad guys, he slugs some dink who is standing around jeering at him. Off the floor, the downed dink nonetheless looks up at him from the moral high-ground: “You had no call to do that, Marshal. You wear a badge.”

The moral principle: a unilateral monopoly on the use of force is a terrible thing, and it sets those who presume to claim it fundamentally apart from everyone else. To my mind, it is impossible, but the necessary political implication is that they must always tolerate behavior around them to which most people would take righteous offense but can never be proscribed in criminal statute. They have to be better than ordinary men because of the moral claim that they advance.

I don’t believe that is possible. In any case, police departments nationwide are failing this test atrociously now.

Very little question on that score, Billy. 

To some degree, the problem is one of design.

I question, however, just how much of the problem is each cause… how much is design and how much of it is increasingly impossible expectations placed on the guy with the badge?

I mean, consider your example of High Noon;  He’s already facing impossible odds; and then he ends up with, as you call him, a dink pushing his buttons, and then claiming offense when the badge responds as a man would. You’re correct, there’s few people who could NOT respond to that kind of situation. Keep prodding the lion and eventually he’s going to respond, and the result has a fairly high chance of not being  a happy one. We have no substantial disagreement, here, but I do wonder how much of our current issues with Police are caused not by the design of law enforcement, but by the attitudes of the populace they deal with.  And how much of that police anger is justified?

Consider the bit with Rodney King, and look past the night of that tape being made of the cops whipping the snot out of him.  Look at the record of the guy, both before and after that particular arrest.  It’s cases like that that make me wonder at whiles is we’d not be better served by ignoring excesses in cases like that. Oc course, that, in turn, is a question that wouldn’t need to be brought up at all, were the courts a bit more reliable in dispensing justice.

Keep in mind also, this is a completely different situation and a different set of questions, from, say, the wrong house on a drug bust. To my mind, the question of unilateral force applies more to the latter situation, than it does the former.

Last night, we had a database server outage.

Early this morning, we had not one, but two web server failures. I’m unclear on how much downtime each of these failures caused, frankly.

On both occasions, the IX folks were responsive. But I’m now getting to the point where I’m thinking I’m going to need to implement a better site monitor from my end.

Suggestions on monitor systems are welcome. Something with SMS or email failure messages would be ideal…

BO’s (Barack Obama) plan to reward his union buddies and give the shaft to the American tax payer has a price tag.   David Axelrod has pegged the cost of the Raw Deal,  Sharon Otterman, New York Times:

Regarding the new administration’s stimulus plan, Mr. Axelrod also said that the exact dollar amount Mr. Obama will seek has not yet been determined. “We’ve talked about a package from $675 billion to $775 billion,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

That is three quarters of trilllion dollars that we can not afford and which will not stimulate anything, except the union donors to BO’s campaign.   It change which we can ill afford.

As regards global warming, my view is essentially the same as yours: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science.

Frank Tipler, distinguished mathematical physicist at Tulane University, via William Katz: Urgent Agenda

Hat tip and more: Stop the ACLU.

The LA Times:

Delaney Bramlett, 69, a singer, songwriter and producer who penned classic rock songs such as “Let It Rain” and worked with musicians George Harrison and Eric Clapton, died Saturday at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center in Los Angeles as a result of complications from gallbladder surgery, his wife Susan Lanier-Bramlett said.

Born in Mississippi in 1939, Bramlett came to Los Angeles in the 1960s and played guitar in the house band for the TV pop show “Shindig.”

With his then-wife Bonnie Lynn he formed the short-lived Southern blues-rock band Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. The band toured as the opening act for Blind Faith, the supergroup that featured British guitarist Clapton.

After Bramlett and his first wife divorced in the early ’70s, they parted professionally as well, and he faded from the spotlight.

I always wondered where that bit would ahve taken them had they stayed together. Here they are with Eric Clapton and someone who looks amazingly like Dave Mason. Interesting;Mason often covered Delaney’s stuff.

And yes, before you ask, the Black Crowes covered this one, also.