Just in case you weren’t breathlessly watching coverage of being unable to see a suspect hiding under a tarp in a boat that wasn’t on fire you couldn’t see in a trailer behind a house you couldn’t see, the second Boston bombing suspect has been apprehended alive.
A few random interesting bits about the Boston Bombing suspects/events/coverage:
ObamaOrganizing For America is using anti-gun ads to target Sen. Ted Cruz.
That’s some mighty fine political ad targeting you’ve got going on there, Lou.
The same Ted Cruz that pantsed David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff because Dew wasn’t conservative enough?
The same Ted Cruz who was endorsed by Gun Owners of America? (You know, the gun rights group that’s like the NRA, but not so squishy and eager to compromise.)
The same Ted Cruz who beat his opponent in the general election by 16 points?
The same Ted Cruz whose been walking point on Second Amendment Rights in the current congress?
The same Ted Cruz who isn’t up for reelection to the Senate until 2018?
Yeah, that’s a use of liberal money that I’m sure is going to be super-effective.
I hope OFA dumps all their money into ads against Cruz, since it will garner them squat and weaken their ability to place ads elsewhere.
(Hat tip: Rick Perry vs. The World)
More on the late Margaret Thatcher:
“I am not a consensus politician. I’m a conviction politician.”
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Britain was a disaster: The lights frequently went out, trash was piled up in the streets, and the IMF was called in to bail the treasury out — in response to which the civil service decided that their role was to “manage” Britain’s decline and fall….’Diversity’ types are amusingly silent about her — and for good reason, as her example is utterly lethal to the culture of victimhood on which they rely. The global Left, likewise, has strong motives to disparage her: She realized that decline was a choice….She was right and they were wrong. While they blathered, she helped to defeat Communism, restored democracy to the Falklands, and saved Britain from the reds at home. She was, without doubt, our finest post-war premier and she made an incalculable contribution to the life of my country of birth.
Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight.
Thatcher on Socialism
Announcing the invasion of the Falklands
Her statement on European integration (“No! No! No!”).
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
Thatcher on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line:
On the danger of the Euro:
Been a while since the last Friday LinkSwarm, so here it is!
Government spending on bailouts, subsidies, grants, salaries and entitlements commands a much larger share of these economies than it did just a few years ago. European austerity has been focused on the private sector — namely, taxpayers with high incomes.
That is the second thing the PIIGGS have in common. The highest income tax rate was recently increased in every one of the troubled PIIGGS except Italy (where it was already too high at 43%). The top tax rate was hiked from 40 to 46.5% in Portugal, from 41 to 48% in Ireland, from 40 to 45% in Greece, from 40 to 50% in Great Britain, and from 48 to 52% in Spain.
You know what’s counterproductive? Trying to make satire disappear on the Internet because you’re offended by it.
Here’s a chart of my blog hits over the last two days:
Over 12,700 hits just today, and rising. In addition to the 7,000 hits yesterday.
By pitching a hissy fit and insisting my Locus April Fools piece be taken down, the failfandom brigade only ensured that it would be seen by 20 times as many people as would have seen it otherwise.
Emphasis on the “fail.”
In an effort to prove that they’re not dour, humorless, thin-skinned avatars of political correctness with authoritarian tendencies, Wiscon’s Feminist failfandom brigade had my contribution to Locus Online’s April Fools Day festivities taken down. (Note that, under the transparent pseudonym of L. Ron Creepweans, I’ve participated in every Locus online April Fools Day since 2002.)
Locus forced Locus Online editor Mark Kelly to pull the piece only a few hours after it went up.
Thanks to the magic of Internet caches, you can still read it in its entirety:
And the text:
Today the SF3 ruling committee for the Madison, Wisconsin-based feminist SF convention WisCon announced that starting this year, all attendees would be required to wear burqas.
“We were trying to think of what we could do to make Wiscon more inclusive,” said con chair Belle Gunness. “Suddenly, we realized that devout Muslims could easily be offended by the amount of sinful and wanton flesh on display at Wiscon. Therefore, starting with this year’s Wiscon, we’ve made burqas mandatory for all attendees. Allah Akbar!”
Both male and female members will be required to don the traditional black, face-covering, head-to-toe Islamic garb for all convention events. Gunness indicated that the convention would have substantial quantities of Burqas for rental to congoers, from Small to 5XL sizes. As an added benefit, she said that the new regulations would help eliminate “rampant lookism.”
Gunness said that guests would be required to wear the garb as well, “in the spirit of egalitarianism.”
Wiscon also announced that next year’s guest lineup would consist of J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Joss Whedon and Suzanne Collins. “At least as far as you know.”
For those tuning in for the first time, this was a direct jab (in humorous form) at WisCon’s previous decision to yank their Guest-of-Honor invitation to Elizabeth Moon for daring to voice (in the mildest possible form) politically incorrect thoughts about certain aspects of modern Islam.
How radical Islam became so sacred to radical feminists is a topic for another time, and I have hamburgers to cook. But it’s sad to think how a tiny, unimportant, radical fringe of disgruntled feminists (so aptly dubbed “Failfandom” by Steven Francis Murphy) have not only come to believe that their right not to be offended trumps the free speech of others, but that other people in the SF community have come to cave into their petulant demands. (Whatever happened to “The solution to free speech is more free speech?” It seems that fewer and fewer people on the left side of the political aisle believe that any more.)
But if there objective was to get this piece to disappear down the memory hole, I think they shall find that they are sadly mistaken…
Senator Rand Paul has launched an old-fashioned filibuster against Obama’s CIA nominee John Brennan to protest the Obama Administration’s refusal to rule out drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
Under questioning by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Eric Holder admitted that he thought Obama could indeed launch a drone strike against American citizens on American soil.
Funny how far you can stretch unlimited power when the Constitution is a living document.
Hell, even some liberals are appalled.
Here’s the first hour of Rand Paul’s filibuster:
And here’s Cruz getting in on the filibuster action:
This is potentially even a bigger story than it’s being made out to be (and it’s already plenty big). There’s lots of support for Rand and Cruz coming from some unusual quarters. I don’t have time to go into all the ramifications now, but this could be the issue on which finally the vast majority of Americans look at the unchecked growth of federal power under Obama and finally yells “Enough!”
Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, the latest volume in his acclaimed Lyndon Baines Johnson biography, came out May of last year, but Garry Wills just got around to reviewing it in The New York Review of Books.
The sad thing is that for the first few thousand words, it’s a really interesting review. Caro’s book is about how Johnson’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s mutual hatred for each other drove much of the Johnson’s Presidency. By this point, anyone beyond Democratic hagiographers know that both LBJ and RFK were nasty pieces of work, and it’s no surprise that both of them loathed each other. Caro is a good historian, I’m sure the book is quite fascinating, and the review conveys its central points well.
Then, alas, the Garry Wills kicks in.
For those who can’t lay their hands on The Field Guide to Liberal Fossils, Wills is a historian who started out as a protege of William F. Buckley but then started moving steadily to the left and has kept moving ever since. He came down with a full-blown case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, and penned one of the nastiest hit pieces on Romney after he lost. He has such a bad case of it he can’t resist getting in digs at Bush43 while reviewing a book that takes place 30+ years before he entered office.
“He [LBJ] also tried to work the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, requesting an office in the White House with a bulked-up staff for military and security issues. He was trying, we now see, to have the parallel presidency that Dick Cheney secured for himself under a compliant George Bush.”
This is the sort of wacky “Cheney is the puppetmaster” conspiracism that had the nutroots convinced that “Fitzmas” was going to result the wholesale indictment of the Bush Administration for treason before The Great Fizzle. A professional historian believing in it is akin to treating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a real document rather than a Czarist fake.
Honorable mention goes to the line “Americans hated communism so much that they thought every Russian was a threat.” Yeah, funny what an ideology killing 100 million people and having some 5,000 nuclear warheads pointed at you by an evil empire will do to dampen your enthusiasm.
At some indefinite point in the future, I hope to read all of Caro’s volumes on LBJ. But I see no need to read anything by Garry Wills ever again.
See if you can fill in the blank for the following headline:
“Homebuilder Confidence in U.S. BLANK Fell in February”
Having trouble? Try again with the first sentence
“Confidence among U.S. homebuilders BLANK dropped in February from a more than six-year high, a sign the real-estate market will take time to accelerate.”
If you’ve been reading Instapundit for any length of time, you know exactly what the word replaced with BLANK is. And that word is “unexpectedly.”
Gee, how could anyone possibly have seen that continued high unemployment and an economy that is shrinking might negatively impact the housing market? (And of course, when the economy shrank, the shrinkage happened “unexpectedly.”)
Obama and friends keep trying and trying neo-Keynesian pump-priming and keep getting the same results: economic stagnation. While trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of madness, that doesn’t matter to them, since it allows them to continue the payoffs to cronies and interest groups that keep the Big Government Class in power (and rolling in taxpayer dough). Germany and Estonia performed no or minimal “stimulus” deficit spending and their economies are growing again. Obama and congressional Democrats have taken the opposite tack: Keep pouring money down the big government rathole and hope that results this year won’t be identical to the last four. My prediction: higher deficits, continued high unemployment and continued economic stagnation.
And each and every negative economic indicator the media will report as arriving “unexpectedly.”
Expect it.