October 30, 2012

Question for Pat Robertson

If Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy is well received, it could get him reelected. Did God send the storm for that purpose?

Addendum 20121105. This post mocked the superstitious Right when it should have been mocking the superstitious Left. One Savannah Guthrie (Whozzat? The host of the Today Show) pretty much said in all seriousness what I wrote in sarcasm.

Which are dumber, the people who suggest the hurricane was divinely ordained to get Obama reelected, or the people who unquestioningly characterize it as due to anthropogenic global warming?

October 29, 2012

Closure of US Financial Markets

Ostensibly because of Hurricane Sandy, US stock exchanges will be closed today.

IMHO the powers that be are concerned about vulnerability to flash crashes more than vulnerability to weather per se, but I'll be surprised if they admit it.

October 25, 2012

Another Discrepancy Like Y2K's?

According to various polls, Obama is narrowly behind in the popular vote but narrowly ahead in the Electoral College.

So far the National Popular Vote Compact has been ratified only by blue states. Look for a lot of back-pedaling if, heaven forbid, the current results hold up. (Of course the Left won't call it back-pedaling.)

October 20, 2012

She Always Struck Me As a Stuck-Up Member of a High School Student Council

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has no idea what Obama's Kill List is, and could care less. (HT: Ed Driscall@Instapundit and Reason)

I'm not accustomed to being on the same wavelength as Glenn Greenwald, but he nails it:
One expects corrupt partisan loyalty from people like Wasserman Schultz, eager to excuse anything and everything a Democratic president does. That's a total abdication of her duty as a member of Congress, but that's par for the course. But one does not expect this level of ignorance, the ability to stay entirely unaware of one of the most extremist powers a president has claimed in US history, trumpeted on the front-page of the New York Times and virtually everywhere else.
This person is being touted as the successor to Pelosi as the leader of House Democrats.

It would be funny if it weren't horrifying. You can smell the rot.

Dippy Wasserman Schultz.

October 19, 2012

Is It Better To Be Lucky Than Correct?

The preceding post decried Romney's gaffe about Libya. Despite the disfavor of Real Conservatives™, here and here, when I called it a gaffe, my opinion is consistent with Krauthammer's. (Even Megan McArdle gets it.)

No question that the moderator inappropriately injected herself into Romney's gaffe, but suppose she had ignored it. Instead of focusing on her blunder & the underlying media bias and on the US failures in media, the Right would now be playing defense after the Left nitpicked out "acts of terror" from the transcript. (Wrt my previous post, in this situation it's better to be desperate on offense than desperate on defense, but I admit that my attitude has changed somewhat since that post.)

October 17, 2012

Who Sounds Desperate?

Given the frantic hairsplitting (but see this) about the distinction between acts of terror and acts of terrorism, the answer is that the Republicans do.

Romney was correct on the substance but threw it (the debate? the election?) away with an ill-chosen (ill-researched?) phrase.

Someone seeking to oust an incumbent President can afford very few unforced errors.

October 13, 2012

Promises by Real Conservatives™

1. No new taxes. Read my lips.

2. The Permanent Republican Majority.

(Why is Karl Rove not persona non grata like Richard Darman was?)

3. SCOTUS will throw out Obamacare.

4. Claire McCaskill is a goner in Missouri. The seat is a surefire GOP pickup.

5. Paul Ryan will destroy, crush, obliterate Slow Joe Biden in their debate.

October 11, 2012

Why Don't MA Voters See Through Elizabeth Warren?

So marvels LI commenter Jeffrey. I respond that Warren's deceit...
...might be easy to rebut out in flyover country. The prosperous, superbly credentialed, highly intelligent, deeply caring people who are so numerous in MA accept Warren’s narrative at face value and defend it ferociously.

Because they’re running the same scam Warren is. Wrecking the country for their own benefit while pretending to be stewards. (Some of them believe their own BS.)

PETA Kills Animals

I acknowledge this revelation belatedly.

It makes me wonder what the Legions of Militant Compassion would do to human beings if they had their way. Heck, look at what happens where they do have their way.

(IMO suicide is a fundamental human right and the State has no business meddling with it except maybe to the extent of requiring a waiting period. Nevertheless, IMO, involuntary euthanasia should be prosecuted as murder. I recognize that there are borderline situations, e.g. expensive high-risk treatments and limited resources. Right-wing religious kooks dishonestly conflate assisted suicide and euthanasia, pointing to one as a pretext for banning the other.)

October 9, 2012

A Senate Radical Caucus?

Sanders, Baldwin, Warren.

Still four weeks to go, but the Left is making cautiously triumphalist sounds about Warren. Intrade has Baldwin as a 3:2 favorite.

Brown gave the cold shoulder to Tea Partiers who had worked their hearts out for him in 2010. Although Warren is a disaster looking for the worst possible place to happen, Brown is stupid and deserves to lose.

I don't know much about WI, but gather that the Tea Party "patriots" divided their votes in the primary so a GOP squish won.

October 8, 2012

"Giving Back"

That phrase is a pet peeve. I've been intending to post about it, but wound up commenting:
1. After I accepted this phrase for years, some time ago it triggered a double take. It’s been an irritant ever since.

2. When I did volunteer work, I did not perceive it as repayment of an obligation; in fact, I would have been less likely to do it had it been so presented.

Afaic philanthropy is commendable, but its least commendable forms are philanthropy performed out of social pressure or for self-promotion. Even philanthropy performed for tax advantages strikes me as preferable to the foregoing.

October 7, 2012

Who Would Be Stupid Enough

...to believe that Chavez would lose the Venezuelan "election"?

Probably the same enlightened folk who think that liberal protests will force Putin out of office before his term is up. Yes, those protestors are the Russian liberals who let the thugs take over the country during the Yeltsin administration.

And the same enlightened folk believed that pluralistic democracies would sprout from the Arab Spring

October 6, 2012

Cutting Their Losses, And More

Submitted as a comment to Kristine Rusch:
As a reader, I am exasperated by publishers who cut a series off unresolved, even in mid-crisis, as soon as sales wobble. This goes at least as far back as the Dumarest of Terra series and the Dray Prescot series.

Their attitude toward their readership is as short-sighted as their attitude about authors’ sales. Of course, I’m not saying they should keep publishing a series which no longer makes money; my point is that they should provide a wrap-up to the readers who made the series successful.

With hardly any exceptions, I no longer buy a series of novels until it is complete.

My attitude as a viewer is similar.

October 5, 2012

Ideological Imbalance in Academia

I'm not proposing the following proposal as a definitive policy, but as a starting point for discussion:

No institution of higher learning that receives government funding more than TBD may require politically partisan coursework as a requirement for graduation. If such coursework is required, said funding will be cancelled.

I could propose that no credits toward graduation be granted for partisan coursework, but I am just brimming with tolerance, accommodation, and sweet reason. ;-)

Iran

I'm reading about a currency crisis, potential hyperinflation, and mass demonstrations. Is the regime in danger?

There seems to be a sort of Brezhnev Doctrine wrt Islamism: nowhere can it be rolled back. A replacement of the Iranian regime by a pluralistic one would be important.

Is there a potential effect on the US election?

October 2, 2012

Althouse and The Obamaphone Video

My two cents are here. Nice takedown in this thread, including links to the infamous crying episode. Money quote:
That coming from an educated person, a law professor, and one who is supposed to be in the moderate middle. I went to bed truly disturbed last night after I read that post. The first time a blog entry has ever done that to me. There is no hope for the future for our country if we have to fight that level of stupidity and inanity in someone with those sorts of qualifications.
Finds the words I've been looking for.

The attitude is everywhere. I attracted a noticeable disapproving minority when I wrote that, no, it is not a good idea to turn our Attorney General over to Mexico for trial.

What Big Content Really Wants

No transformational innovation allowed. They mean it:
...according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don't upset the apple cart of copyright, before they're allowed to exist.
The review would be conducted by the same people who write the laws which Congress passes: special-interest lobbyists.

I found the above link through Instapundit. In a related post, he links to this piece discussing the latest from the Against Intellectual Monopoly authors.