A few more post-Osama postmortem tidbits:
Little did I know that this untested young Commander-in-Chief would muster the courage to read his weekly Gallup numbers and, in one daring unilateral extra-judicial targeted hit job, toss aside every single idiotic foreign policy principle of his election campaign. Perhaps most satisfyingly, it was a mission made possible thanks to information extracted by methods he previously banned as “illegal torture.”
An interview that Brad Watson of WFAA-TV in Dallas conducted with Obama has been getting a lot of attention. A lot of it has centered on Obama’s visible testiness at the questions, but I’d like to point out his baffling ignorance of Texas history:
The overall thrust of the interview is why Obama isn’t more popular in Texas. “Too big a spender, too liberal, too incompetent, too prickly, and too out-of-touch” all cover it rather nicely, but you can add “appallingly ignorant of basic historical facts” to that list…
Some people have asked me if I’ll be reviewing the Atlas Shrugged movie, since one of my gigs is reviewing science fiction movies, and Ayn Rand’s original novel certainly qualifies as science fiction. (I’m also familiar enough with the novel to craft this parody of it.) But I thought it would be nearly impossible to do justice to the source material in movie form; a TV miniseries would probably be more appropriate to fit that sprawling, didactic story.
So I’m glad the inimitable P.J. O’Rourke has saved me the trouble. He’s seems to have done a good job of dissecting the movie’s flaws (and advanced word has been very negative just on the story-telling and movie pacing fronts) without rejecting the underlying message.
That’s the money quote from Mickey Kaus, a Democrat who voted for Obama (and may very well vote for him again), in an article about why Obama seems so bad a politics.
Now that Kaus has uttered an obvious truth, that Obama owes much of his success to white guilt (and, to his credit, to being the first serious black candidate for President who (unlike Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) wasn’t a complete scumbag), do you think the MSM, whose hero worship was such a large factor in getting Obama elected, might cease accusing anyone who opposes him of racism?
More than two years after Obama’s election, we’re still waiting for an honest “national conversation about race.”
Former Walter Mondale Vice Presidential pick Geraldine Ferraro has died at age 75. If Mondale had not made this liberal New York congresswoman his running mate, her obituary would barely be a blip nationally. If the Ferraro pick was meant to attract lavish media praise and attention it succeeded; if it was meant to help him win electoral votes, it failed, as I doubt she was instrumental in winning Minnesota.
But the main reason I bring up Ferraro’s death is to exhume an obvious instance of biased political reporting. In 1992, when Ferraro was running in a four-way Democratic primary race against left-wing favorite Elizabeth Holtzman, Al Sharpton and Robert Abrams for the Senate seat held by Republican Al D’Amato, The Village Voice published a piece called “Gerry and the Mob,” documenting the extensive ties between Ferraro’s husband John Zaccaro and organized crime, just a few weeks before the primary. In the course of doing so, The Village Voice revealed that they had all the information back when Mondale picked Ferraro as the Vice President, but had spiked the story because of the “historic” nature of her candidacy. Ferraro ended up losing a race she had been leading to Abrams, which made her so bitter she refused to campaign for Abrams, who ended up losing to D’Amato by 80,000 votes.
So when it comes to the liberal media reporting news, reality is whatever benefits liberals. Keep this in mind every time you read a MSM piece on Obama, and wonder just what they know and refuse to reveal until Obama is safely out of office.
An interesting development, to say the least.
I still think Monbiot is more loon than not, and Anthropogenic Global Warming more scam than threat (I think it possible that the earth has warmed slightly, but regard the case for this possible warming trend being man-made as far from proven). But at least some hardcore greens are beginning to realize that if you really want to reduce carbon emissions without wrecking the world economy, nuclear is the way to go.
On a related note, for my latest Japan update (including news on the Fukushima Daiichi reactors) go here.
I haven’t been posting much here, as I’ve been putting up a lot of news and videos on the Sendai earthquake on my personal blog.
But I did think this bit caught in my spam filter over there was worth sharing: the text says “Please Donate To Japan’s Quake and Tsunami Victim’s,” but the link goes to “foxnews-boycott.com”.
You stay classy, liberals…
After voicing my concerns, Mickey Kaus finally shows up at his new gig with The Daily Caller. No word on the nearly four week gap between his last Newsweek piece and this one. The two explanations that come most readily to mind are:
This being the web, naturally I’m going to assume B…
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds was forced to get a new campus ID, so he showed his readers the 20-year “before and after pics.” Actually, he looks older but pretty much the same, almost as if he has a painting of himself hidden away in his attic that ages instead of him.
However, my sources at the University of Tennessee have uncovered the shocking fact that the “after” picture up on his blog is in fact a shameless lie. Thanks to their efforts, I can now reveal the horrifying truth.
Here’s the before picture:
And here’s the real portrait of what you look like after teaching law school for 20 years:
Not a lot of news coming out. The longer it takes things to happen, the more likely Mubarak is to hold onto power. Yesterday brought scattered reports that the army may be wavering in support of Mubarak. Today? Not so much. There are sporadic reports of gunfire, and lots of reports that citizens groups are banding together to prevent looting.
The old links down the page stopped updating at the end of the day. The new links are:
As for what an actual popular Egyptian government might look like, Michael Totten reminds us that the answer might be pretty ugly:
In Egypt, 82 percent want stoning for those who commit adultery; 77 percent would like to see whippings and hands cut off for robbery; and 84 percent favor the death penalty for any Muslim who changes his religion.
Asked if they supported “modernizers” or “Islamists” only 27 percent said modernizers while 59 percent said Islamists.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, there are reports of unrest in Yemen. Conversely, yesterday’s reports that Syria had also taken down nationwide Internet access appear to have been false.