Is Chuck Hagel Doing a John Edwards?

You might recall that one reason John “Breck Girl” Edwards ran  for vice president is that he would have lost his Senate seat if he ran for re-election.   A.J. Strata, Strata-Sphere, reports that Nebraska Republicans war preparing to rinse Hagel out of their hair.

But with the challenger within striking distance of the magic 50% mark and Hagel down in the high 30’s you can basically start saying your farewells to Hagel. He is toast.

And badly burnt at that.

Well, kinda.

All this nonsense Sheryl Crow and toilet paper, David’s touched on… with rubber gloves, I trust…

But it occurred to me we’d already written on all of this both last month, and back to 2002… Follow all the links for the full effect.

Critics of vulgar, violent gangster-style rap music make a mistake when they write off the rap stars as stupid, immoral and self-destructive. They may be immoral and self-destructive, but they’re not stupid. As one of my readers observed in a thoughtful e-mail, they’re making a rational economic choice.

Clarence Page,

San Fran Chron–(04-23) 19:24 PDT MENLO PARK — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam was killed today doing what he had done for more than four decades: chasing down a great story.

In many ways, Halberstam was the inspiration for the current noise the Democrats are making over Iraq.

I don’t have a great deal of time to go into this, being bound for work, (I may ahve more later) but I must say at the outset, the level of disgust I have for what this man did during the Vietnam era, (How many lives American, Vietnamese and Cambodian…did this man cost?–Ed)… is only surpassed by the amount of disgust I have for the people today who appear to be falling all over his memory, trying to grab some of it for themselves, today. And that nonsense, I think, has barely begun.

Yeah, Billy, I saw that New Cars disk about a month ago, after I found it being played on of all places, WKPQ, over in Hornell, sometime last October or November, it must have been, during afternoon drive. I tuned in, in the middle of the song, and the mental activity that ensued was fearsome to behold.

Cars Tribute Band? Nah. Too close.

Ric Okasek doing another solo album?  Nah, I’d have heard of it.

Some older cut I’d not heard previously? Doubtful; I own about everything either act ever recorded.

What IS this, then?

I actually pulled over in the nearest parking lot to keep from losing the weak signal.  There were a few differences in sound that I attributed to technology, and the weird beard audio stack WKPQ used at the time, not knowing the current lineup.

A great sound, and sounding amazingly fresh.

I remember wishing it was warmer so I could roll the windows down and kick the big amps in.

Steven Taylor, posting at OTB, links a story today regarding the firing of a VT professor:

An adjunct professor was fired after leading a classroom discussion about the Virginia Tech shootings in which he pointed a marker at some students and said “pow.”

The five-minute demonstration at Emmanuel College on Wednesday, two days after a student killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus, included a discussion of gun control, whether to respond to violence with violence, and the public’s “celebration of victimhood,” said the professor, Nicholas Winset.

During the demonstration, Winset pretended to shoot some students. Then one student pretended to shoot Winset to illustrate his point that the gunman might have been stopped had another student or faculty member been armed.

Says Taylor, in response….

Back to the summary dismissal: such are the circumstances for adjuncts, but still it is odd that he was so summarily dismissed. One wonders if there was some kind of backstory that would explain the situation.

Clearly, discussion wasn’t wanted , despite what they said about it. The interesting part here is that the students were not offended ; the campus administration was. What could have possibly offended the administration so ?

The idea that someone might have defended himself, had they been armed. That is an idea that needs to be kept under the strictest of control.

So much for college Campi being a place for free exchange of ideas as a part of a learning process.

Philadelphia is lost.  It has erupted into a civil war.   The policy has failed.  We must pull out now:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – A bloody, bullet-filled weekend left 11 people dead across the city, where drugs and disrespect have trumped brotherly love and the murder rate is on pace to be the highest in a decade. Philadelphia has seen more than one killing a day this year, totaling 127 as of Monday afternoon. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – whose populations are much larger than Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents – have had fewer homicides this year.

Film at Eleven.

In the Washinton Post, Jonathan Safran Foer asks, “Some People Love Guns. Why Should the Rest of Us Be Targets?”

Knives also cut bread and carve wood and aid surgery, but guns only shoot bullets. That’s what they are designed to do, and that’s what they do. When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that’s so important to shoot at?

Now I don’t tell Foer  how to write his books and columns.  So by what right does Foer  presume to tell me how to protect myself?   The fact that Foer  is a hoplophobe, a person with an unreasonable fear of weapons is no reason for llaw abiding citizens to forfeit their fundamental human freedom and to imperil their and their families lives.

Had Liviu Librescu been carrying maybe he and more Virginia Tech students might be alive today

Here is how Foer ties to sell his arguement.

Guns are good because they provide the ultimate self-defense? While I’m sure some people believe that having a gun at their bedside will make them safer, they are wrong. This is not my opinion, and it’s not a political or controversial statement. It is a fact. Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than to kill an intruder, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

I find it revealing that Foer cites a “fact” but does not provide the source.   While Foer will not, I will.  The primary author of this purported fact is Arthur L Kellerman and the abstract is here    Dave Kopel has a basic refutation of Kellerman:

In the book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck analyzed suicide data for every America city with a population more than 100,000, and found no evidence that any form of gun control (including handgun prohibition) had an effect on the total suicide rate. Gun control did sometimes reduce gun suicide, but not overall suicide.

Kellerman’s study is not fact,  It is horsewash.   Among Kellerman’s many problems is that he pretends suicide is a problem  and then blames guns for his supposed problem.   Suicide is not a problem.   It is a choice.   The bulk of Kellerman’s deaths are suicides.

Kellerman also has an obession with dead bodies.   Unless somebody died, Kellerman did not take notice.   So by Kellerman logic, when Venus Ramey detained a thief wth her handgun, nothing happened.   Venus might disagree.

Whether or not I have a gun, has no affect on who or how many are targeting Foer. ?

* You will doubtless live recall you will doubtless recall that both the David and myself made mention of Alec Baldwin and the little blow up the head with his daughter on the phone the other day.

I think the situation pretty well inexcusable, myself, but not surprising given we’re dealing with Baldwin, here.

It took several days, but somebody finally came up with a defense of this moron. it’s so poorly written, that it’s hard to know if you should take it seriously.  Amazing. I wanna be this guy’s car salesman.

Stop trying to be stupid, Jon. You’ve succeeded, already.
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* Speaking of trying to be stupid, it’s amazing, the number of people trying to psychoanalyze the shooter at Virginia Tech. Here’s an example from the Times of London.

Cosh gets into it, too, though I think he makes somewhat more salient points than does the Times, who seem to be into this for the mere purpose of filling paper with ink.

As an example of the former, Cosh wonders why Cho, who was an English major, would go to Norris hall to do his dirty work, when Norris is occupied by engineering and foreign language classes… not English classes… and the speculation, apparently runs along the lines of Cho being an engineering major himself until recently.  Engineering, representing one of his failures.

(Shrug) It’s fascinating, I suppose, to some , to try and get inside somebody’s head after an event like this.  But I don’t think we’ll find anything useful of it.  Frankly, all this psychoanalyzing of a crazy dead person, strikes me as a frightful waste of time…. and in the end, counter-productive, because the blame game that ensues NEVER offers any reasonable, workable solution. This is particularly true, when it is clear that many people tried to get inside his head when he was alive, and couldn’t get it right, when they had the guy right in front of them.

I suppose, too, that there is a certain amount of advantage to analyzing someone who was already dead; there’s no way he can be proved wrong.

In the end, I will hold to the situation I described the other night, where the only real answer to the situation is lots of average Joes and Janes, being armed, and reducing the number of casualties to a minimum by taking the sick bastard out.  Yes, it’s true that some people will end up getting hurt in such a confrontation.  But you’re not going to see 30 people lined up against the wall and summarily executed while they wonder where the hell the police are… the police and government agencies that were supposed to protect them.

And by the way, that brings up a point that I’ve been meaning to address, for days, now.  You’re going to see over the next weeks and months, an awful lot of noise being made by various big government types, such as Chuckles the Clown Schumer trying to lay blame on some inadequate government program or other, and stating that his plan is the only way out of it.  What such arguments fail utterly in, is the understanding that government programs by their nature are inadequate.  That mere laws are inadequate to the situation. That no government program, no amount of gun control, no amount of vigilance , save that of individual vigilance… (As in, individuals being armed and able to respond to threats) …is going to minimize the kind of event that happened at Virginia tech the other day.
One of the biggest arguments you’re going to hear is that Cho was on anti- depressants.  I’m quite familiar with the effects of antidepressants, having seen one death incidental to their consumption already.  Without saying where, for fear of identifying the person in question, I will say that I blogged at length about it, without identifying the drugs as a cause. The post is on this site, too, assuming it got converted correctly from the old Blogspot site.
If governmental controls were adequate to the situation the background check would include such information. The fact is they were not.

Give Chuckles credit for this at least; The mood swings incidental to both the need for such drugs, and the results of such drugs themselves, would seem to be a clear and present danger, particularly with the person armed. Yet the government missed this point.  If we are going to argue about the effectiveness of gun control, shouldn’t we include this as a point of discussion? This was not due to a lack in the way of law, because you cannot write a law to cover every situation without establishing what is popularly known as a police state.

(The interesting part about this is, that “police” is taken from the French word meaning literally “power of the people”. So do we give arms only to uniformed officers of the goverment, or do we give them to the people? Giving them only to representatives of the government, leads to such situations as Virginia Tech, Littleton Colorado, and a few other such situations.  But you’re never going to hear Chuckles Schumer say that, since he is a representative… not of the people…. but of the government.

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* Speaking of articles the we’ve written previously, and speaking to what happens when firearms are in the hands of lawful individuals, David put up a fine post regarding Venus Ramsey, who is these days 82 years old.  Apparently, the 82 year old woman, responded to a crime against her, by shooting out the tires of the intruders getaway car.  I mention this, because about a dozen times today, I’ve come across snide comments from the gun grabbing liberals, who claimed that the gun is a substitute penis. I wonder if Venus Ramsey would see it so. Somehow, I tend to doubt it.

* Trivial Timekeeping: At three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be: 02:03:04 05/06/07. That won’t happen again for another 100 years.

* I see that the next challenger for the Buffalo Sabres is the NY Rangers. Of course I’ll still be cheering for the Sabres, but I have to confess a little annoyance that we can’t seem to get out of NY. Once we get past the Rangers, it wouldn’t shock me at all to find us up against New Jersey. In which event, I will be torn between cheering for my Sabres, and wishing Brian Gionta well, since he’s also from Rochester.

* Today was kind of a makeup day for a day we took off last November. Mrs Bit and I took a mental health day last November, and made plans for a nice restaurant in Buffalo, a little shopping, and a walk through the park somewhere.  Of course, that turned out to be the first snow day of the year, where the kids stayed home.

We ended up doing a lot of window shopping, and having a nice lunch together. A lovely day weather-wise, too..  nearly 80.

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* He was just awarded “Snark of the Day” a while ago, so I guess I can’t do that for a while… but this from Surber to Sheryl Crow would be a contender:

Hey, here’s an idea on saving oil and trees: Quit making CDs, which are made of plastic and cardboard (as well as some rare metals). Oh and quit touring the nation by bus, car, plane or train as they all use energy and are all made from metal and plastic.

Stay in your room with the lights out, and save our planet.

I won’t go into the rudeness of confronting people at dinner parties. This is not a two-ply post.

This stuff is golden, Folks.

The Moscow Times is reporting, just now:

Former President Boris Yeltsin died of heart failure in a Kremlin hospital on Monday. He was 76.

The Kremlin’s top doctor, Sergei Mironov, said Yeltsin died at 3:45 p.m. at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow.

“He died as a result of progressive cardiovascular and multiple organ failures,” Mironov told reporters.

Now, I’ve been called harsh on the occasion of the deaths of some, but I don’t hold a candle to the amount of Vitriol coming from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:

Boris Yeltsin was always good for a laugh, which is probably why on the occasion of his death people outside of Russia are not calling him words like scum and monster, but instead recalling him fondly, with a smile, as one would a retarded nephew who could always be counted on to pull his pants down at Thanksgiving dinner.

…

Like most people who lived in Russia during the 1990s — and Russia was my home throughout Yeltsin’s entire reign as Russian president — I have a wide variety of fond memories of the Motherland’s drunken, bloblike train wreck of a revolutionary leader. My favorite came in 1995, at a press conference in Moscow, when a couple of American reporters perfectly captured the essence of Yeltsin by heckling him as he stumbled into the room. As he burst through the side entrance with that taillight-red face of his, hands wobbling in front of him in tactile search of the podium, the two hacks in the back called out: “Nor-r-r-r-r-r-m!” Such a perfect moment, I almost died laughing. Boris Nikolayevich, of course, was too wasted to hear the commotion at the back of the room.

Boris Yeltsin probably had more obituaries ready in the world’s editorial cans than any chronically-ill famous person in history. He has been dying for at least twenty consecutive years now — although he only started dying physically about ten years ago, he has been dying in a moral sense since at least the mid-Eighties. Of course, spiritually speaking, he’s been dead practically since birth.

And that ain’t the half of it. Of course, he’s the the guy puking on “The Smirking Chimp”... (I won’t call it writing)… where the order of the day is a blinding hatred toward anything to the right of Fidel Castro. His main complaint as regards Hillary Clinton, for example, seems to be that she’s not socialist enough.

Since the far left is quite experienced with generation of this level of vitriol, perhaps we have an explanation for why so much of it gets applied to Yeltsin. It’s a habit more than anything else. And, therefore, is not to be taken seriously.
His main complaint about Yeltsin, appears to be that Yeltsin gave socialism a bad name.  Which is, of course, inaccurate; it had a bad name long before either he or Yeltsin showed up.  Though I must say, both of them seem to be doing a fair job of maintaining that bad name.

Don’t misunderstand me, here.  That Yeltsin was a pig, is beyond question.

However I if you as being equally beyond question that Taibbi is too much of an idiot to understand that the kind of government he promotes as a matter of routine leads to precisely that kind of individual having nearly unlimited power. if he ever manages to put that together the spinning resulting from his cognitive dissonance will be a natural power source that will solve our energy issues… assuming we can harness it.

you see, the difference between myself and Taibbi, is that when I say a person is a socialist, saying they are a pig is an exercise in repetition, whereas Taibbi apparently thinks that a socialist who is a pig is a rarity.

Perhaps he’s just never read “Animal Farm”.

Iraqi soldiers interogate suspect, who then then gives up the location of a bomb factory. Of course the Times is still upset about it:

After the prisoner was returned to the Iraqis, Captain Fowler was asked whether the Americans realized that the information was given only after the Iraqis had beaten Mr. Jassam. “They are not supposed to do that,” he said. “What I don’t see, I don’t know, and I can’t stop. The detainees are deathly afraid of being sent to the Iraqi justice system, because this is the kind of thing they do. But this is their culture.”

More, See-Dubya, Hot Air.

Now see how Senator McCain and Spector can sponsor a bill to outlaw torture by the Iraqi Army.

An ignorant pundit named named O’Donnell is assine on national television.   Is it Rosie or is it Larry?  Allahpundit, Hot Air, has the answer, along with video.

You know somebody is really making an ass of himself when Pat Buchanan is the voice of reason.

(H/T photos:  Rosie, Heckler Spray; Larry, Newsbusters.)

I’ve made no secret that I’m a fan of air shows, and the Blue Angles particularly. It’s with sadness, tonight, that I pass along news of the death of one of the Angles:

PENSACOLA, Fla. —FOX/AP- Investigators looked through wreckage Sunday to determine what caused a Navy Blue Angel jet to crash during a maneuver, while the military identified the fallen pilot as a 32-year-old who was performing in one of his first air shows with the team.

Lt. Cmdr. Kevin J. Davis of Pittsfield, Mass. was in his second year with the Blue Angels, the team known for its high-speed, aerobatic demonstrations, Lt. Cmdr. Garrett Kasper said.

(Sigh)

They don’t know why, yet, apparently.

After swearing up and down that he wasn’t going to run for the 2008, Democatic Party nomination for president of united states, it seems Al Gore lied to us.  The Telegraph says:

Friends of Al Gore have secretly started assembling a campaign team in preparation for the former American vice-president to make a fresh bid for the White House.

Mr Gore, President Bill Clinton’s deputy, has said he wants to concentrate on publicising the need to combat climate change, a case made in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which won him an Oscar this year.

So, tell me, are you starting to see why global warming was so important just now?

It has nothing to do with any danger to the earth, and it never did.

What it has to do with is getting name recognition for a possible presidential run for Al Gore. By making lots of noises about the sham called “global warming” Gore hasn’t needed to swallow up all of the resources that the other people running for the democratic nomination have needed to spend.  That situation will continue, with the planned a book coming out about midsummer.  All he’s needed was a bogus platform, and a fawning press.. The latter of which, is a guaranteed commodity for any Democratic frontrunner, in any event.
Captain Ed notes the same article, and says:

A Gore entry will probably prove fatal to the ambitions of Barack Obama and John Edwards. Both have run on Gore’s turf so far, and neither will outshine him with party donors desperate to find a credible alternative to Hillary Clinton. Gore has a great deal more substance than both candidates put together and will almost immediately be the chief challenger on Hillary’s left, once he formally enters the race.

Possibly. But perhaps the time has come to ask a impertinent question: if he lied to the American people, so as to get a head start on the presidential race he swore he wasn’t going to run, what else is Al Gore going to lie about? 

Both the campaigns of Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama were groveling, much like Don Imus did, for Al Sharpton’s support:

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are competing for the endorsement of Mr. Sharpton, who said he would make his choice among the Democratic field in a few weeks. (John Edwards of North Carolina and other candidates have spoken at the annual convention.)

So a question for both Mrs. Clinton and Obama, what role, if any, would Al Sharpton play in your administration?   When a canidate nestles up to a hate monger and bigot, like Sharpton, the voters should be curious as to the role the bigot will play in the canidate’s administration.