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Here's some possible fireworks nobody would like to see: an unusual swarm of earthquakes under Yellowstone National Park which one Utah scientist says might be "something precursory" to a volcanic eruption.
Via Fresh Bilge.
UPDATE: A good, professional geological discussion about the possibility of an eruption that does not quite end on "Don't worry, be happy," but it comes close. Also via FB. Includes a very scary video what-if.
Still scouting around for appropriate links for likely end of the year sentiments.
I hope the IDF can end the Gaza deal with minimal casualties of its own. I'm sure our spineless leaders--who nevertheless provide IAF bombs--will force them to quit soon, as they always do.
Mr. Boy claims he wants to stay up until midnight, but he probably won't make it. He had a sleepover last night at a pal's place out in the western hills, events which usually mean little actual sleep. Fortunately he hasn't heard about this yet, so we're safe for another year, anyhow.
I'm hustling to finish a Civil War historical novel in time for Amazon's Feb. 2 fiction contest. That will be it for me and make-believe. My next literary attempt will be some non-fiction Texana.
Mrs. Charm and I will spend a quiet evening and then enjoy her day off tomorrow, although forecast is for chilly. At the least we'll get going on airline reservations for a planned D.C. trip in March.
UPDATE: My novel made the first cut to the top twenty percent. Then it went down in flames on the second cut to five percent. Oh, well. Bragging rights, at least, in the impending hunt for an agent.
Of course, Ms. Kennedy would make a fabulous Democrat U.S. senator, why, even her help says so:
"Senora Kennedy is very busy now with party menus so she tell me to write this when I am finish with floors and make the bed for guest wing. I am now finish so I write this...I have to fold laundry now. Also Tio Teddy is come to the party tonight so I have to lock the liquor cabinets."
Obviously, Princess Caroline would be sooo much better than that awful Republican Gov. Sarah Palin person with those multiple children and an actual job. How gauche. Heh.
UPDATE: Her Highness snubbed. Alas, the royal princess "forgot" to pay her taxes and prefers hiring illegals to citizens, making her a potential political liability. The nod, oddly enough, goes to the NRA.
U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a goggle-eyed Democrat harridan with a fright-wig hairdo, has always been pathetic to everyone except, apparently, the Georgians who keep sending her to Congress. Pity she does not sleep with the fishes today off Gaza. Unfortunately, the Israeli navy did not slice in two and sink but only damaged the boat she was using to aid Hamas, in a publicity stunt for her wellknown anti-Semitism. Funny how, whenever the terrorists are under attack, the anti-Semites, anti-democrats, and anti-Americans come out of the woodwork to fist-punch the air and otherwise support them. If only Hamas would take McKinney and her clones permanently.
UPDATE: Ceasefire is in the daily's headlines, put together last night although Israel had rejected the idea well before midnight. It comports with the frontpage picture yesterday of the handful of Hamas-supporting protestors outside the Texas capitol. Dead Jews aren't news, as Ralph Peters says, only besieged terrorists. Meanwhile the local Jewish Community Assoc. sent out an email of moral support while cautioning that, in times like these, "anti-Jewish attitudes, expressions and activity [bring] an added risk to Jewish communal institutions."
The Dutch Left has issued a new position paper that stands multiculturalism on its head:
"We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society."
The issue, of course, is Islam, the least tolerant "parallel society" of all. The question: is it too late?
Via Instapundit.
As much as I support the Israeli bombing response to Palestinian rocket attacks, I hope the IDF follows Haaretz's logic and avoids a ground invasion. Not for the enemy's sake but for the sake of the young soldiers of the IDF. Certainly, nothing besides full-scale war is likely to stop the rockets permanently. And such war is impossible of success as long as Israel's munitions come from the West which has a Leftist news media and its own interests in keeping the oil ticks happy. Even if we became energy independent, those interests (and the media) would remain. So periodic bombing to make the rocketing expensive, followed by more diplomacy, is probably the best that can be achieved.
UPDATE: Indeed, Hamas' strategy relies on counting on its client media telling it like it isn't. Uh oh, IDF has called up the reserves.
Late getting this posted. But better late than never. Tonight will be the eighth and last night for our friends, the stone Maccabees. The menorah was a gift from an admirer many years ago--forty, to be exact.
It's ho-hum, media-and-big-politician-business-as-usual when the Palestinians are raining rockets and mortars on southern Israeli towns, week after week. But let the Israelis retaliate and Big Media pulls out the stops, plastering photos of wailing Palestinians all over the air- and Web-waves. Yegads but those people can act. They sure know a camera when they see one. Al-Reuters bemoans the end to "six months of relative calm." Suddenly the Arab street is a'blaze. The Left is all a' flutter. European leaders are aghast. Israel's side, meanwhile, is, uh, conveniently forgotten. Bleh.
MORE: Fortunately, there are alternatives to the usual blather, here and here, via Instapundit. And one more.
Alan Sullivan's Xmas leftovers are singing to him from his refrigerator: Come eat us! Now! I know the sound, sort of. For me it's the trilling of the sweets drowning out the basso of the meat and potatoes. But, alas, I must return to my pre-holiday diet if I am to continue avoiding a dance with the Big D of diabetes.
Ever wonder what it would be like to live in a place like Israel surrounded by all the history that's flowed over that really quite small pocket of always-influential terrain? Treppenwitz knows, and he shows us. My own ground undoubtedly was ridden over by the Commanche and Apache, not to mention countless aboriginal hunters and gatherers. Indeed, when you think of all the people who have preceded all of us over the millennia, we're probably all living on ghostly ground.
What I need is a primer on how to use Skype & one of those teensy Bluetooth earsets with a netbook in place of a cell phone. I keep hearing there's a way. Free calls! I just don't know how to jigger it.
No I don't mean Barry's Hopenchange campaign babble, which he will drop like a hot enchilada when it suits him. I mean the good old American urge to hope. For instance, that the recent economic diddle, however apparently catastrophic, won't necessarily lead to something truly awful in 2009 and beyond.
Like the Depressionistas fear it will. A commenter at the Seablogger also cites a new, despairing Spengler essay that I read but must frankly admit that I really don't understand. So I'll go on being optimistic. And with some good company. As Wretchard says in a similar context, we all have the right to worry, but no one is right to despair. The bears are out in force these days, true enough, but, hey, it just might surprise us all and actually get better.
Time was, back when Mr. Boy was a toddler, I had to stay up late trying to assemble some toy or other. Including, once, a Thomas the Tank riding train. This year all I had to do was set up a new Wii. Then, naturally, I had to test it. So I was up until 3 a.m. playing tennis on it. Until my wrist seized up.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Instapundit remembers hearing it on Armed Forces Radio as a teenager in Germany. I was twenty-four in 1968 when it was broadcast from the moon. I was duty officer that Christmas Eve night at squadron headquarters of the Sixth Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Meade, MD. The duty NCO and I were transfixed.
I remember the annoying stories in the early oughts about this made-up holiday of multicultural nonsense mainly celebrated by white liberals. Fortunately I never had to write one. Little did I know that the phony-balony ethnocentric (read "black racist") looney-toons was even phonier and balonier than I realized. For instance, Kwanzaa's "seven principals." They just happen to match the names of the seven heads of the Symbionese Liberation Army's symbolic cobra. Luckily, Ann Coulter has finally set me straight. Yes, that Ann Coulter.
You've got to journey deep into far South Austin, around Congress Avenue and Slaughter Lane, to find it that low. (It's a few pennies higher up here in the Northwest.) But these are prices even Santa would love. Assuming the reindeer run on unleaded. Doesn't everything?
The sequel to Singularity Sky and the last Charles Stross modern SF book it looks like I'll be lucky enough to read until his publishers get around to releasing another one. What makes his books so much better than the run-of-the-mill space opera is the integral plot use of computing and, especially, the Internet and email which are shown to have spread not only across the solar system but out into the stars. Once again the Eschaton is involved and, well, you really should read this one for yourself...
Mrs. Charm, good liberal that she is, faithfully listens to NPR every morning. I stopped years ago. And their recent attempt to rehabilitate belt-and-suspender-man Dan Rather to cover up his anti-Bush election fraud of 2004 is a good reminder why. It still amazes me that we have to pay tax money for NPR's crap-as-news-and-analysis. How much nicer it would be if they were forced to be wholly self-supporting. You know, like Air America on which soon-to-be U.S. Sen. Al Franken couldn't make a living? Heh.
As it happens, I knew Rather's source before his crazy fraud. I had dealt with the guy on a pre-Bush piece he wanted on the Texas National Guard. My editors decided it was bosh, and I had to admit that it was pretty flaky. So it never ran. The guy later tried to get even by libeling me on a Web site that I won't link to. A few years later I heard from other ink-stained wretches that he was playing Dan Rather for a chump. About the same time, Charles Johnson at LGF wonderfully exposed DR's fraud, in the simplest way possible: showing that the source's material was forged. All it has left DR with, four years later, is to keep trying to muddy the waters. Good luck with that. Even with NPR providing him a free, obfuscating tongue-bath.
Via LGF.
MORE: Beldar also had a small but prominent role of his own in exposing the fraud.
Merry Christmas, y'all.
Finally, I awaken to sunshine and a moderate warm morning. Temps are climbing into the seventies. Now that's the real Central Texas Christmas I remember. Others may crave cold. But not me.
The story of courageous newspaper journalists and their editor bringing down a nefarious president? As we have been told, and told, and told for a generation. Or that of a disgruntled deputy FBI director who used the journalists and their editor to bring down a president the director believed was too close to reigning reining in his theretofore nefarious agency? Stratfor reports, you decide.
MORE: Cynical manipulation of the press and the public, told by an old master journalist.
Via No Left Turns.
Maybe there's not as much difference as some conservatives think. As for the liberals? Who cares.
Got to be the world's largest Chanukkah menorah--atop the Azrieli (Shalom) Center in Tel Aviv.
MORE: Lighting the fourth candle on Christmas Eve, Mr. B. said "Remember the Alamo!" Mrs. Charm told him not to be disrespectful, but I had to agree. It was sort of like the Alamo. Except the Maccabees won. For a while, anyway.
Yes, it sounds masochistic. But it's actually from a funny little number called Boogie Woogie Chanukkah.
Via Simply Jews.
Stephen King-esque clown Al Franken, possible the most obnoxious Bush-hater of the past eight years (excepting only crockumentary filmmaker Michael Moore) seems to be headed for the U.S. Senate. Bleh.
The first time I saw Jeven Snead in person was when Mr. Boy's cub scout troop was invited to a Longhorns football practice back in 2006. Snead looked taller than Colt McCoy, to whom JS seemed doomed to play backup forever, and I got the feeling that, in line with the rumors of the time, he wouldn't be satisfied with that for long. So I was not surprised when he jumped ship for Ole Miss. Nor, given his high school performance in Stephenville, that he's done well there.
Oh, goody. Barry's new science advisor recently authored a piece in which he dubbed climate skeptics "dangerous." He also has a background of not only being wrong, but being intemperate. Swell.
Well, I made it past another solstice, without feeling the need for an Anglo-Saxon costume drama. Just a quiet day, despite the frigid aftermath of another overnight Blue Norther. Finishing Iron Sunrise, another good Charles Stross SF novel, and thinking of the seasonal carols of my youth, Adeste Fideles and Hark The Herald Angels Sing. Then I did the annual reading of his Maccabees book to Mr. Boy before we lit the first Hanukkah candle. For the next few days we will be singing Santa and Reindeer songs for his and Mrs. Charm's secular celebration of Christmas.
Built in the late Sixteenth Century by Japanese merchants in the southern central Vietnamese port town of Hoi An (a stop on the old Silk Road), the bridge is said to have supernatural powers, perhaps owing to the monkey and dog gods that guard its either ends. Clicking through a passel of photos, taken by Snoopy the Goon on a recent family tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia, I recognized the bridge immediately. Although I think it was a different pastel color when I knew it as an Army advisor in 1969-70. Posted with STG's kind permission.
His political idol may be JFK, but his poet is no Robert Frost. Instead, Barry--our alleged new racial healer--has chosen a lightweight, preachy racial whiner to deliver an inauguration poem. Camelot, this ain't.
Via The Seablogger.
If I had more email to do, a smart phone would be more enticing. That seems to be the main thing people do with them, besides voice calls, camera snaps, note-taking, and minimal surfing within the confines of a very small screen. The netbook is more appealing to me since it's mainly about web wandering which is what I'd mainly use it for, besides some note taking. Probably could post with it, as well. I'm going to wait until after Christmas to decide, when I expect the pre-holiday sale prices to be even lower.
Joey Hairplugs on the economy: We've got to have Socialism to save Capitalism. Er, or something.
Naturally, nine of them are Detroit-made losers. You know, the companies our tax monies are about to bailout? Although one of the skunks, the Dodge Nitro, might make a passable artillery shell.
Via Instapundit.
Among them: the certainty that Hopenchange is no more than the latest political babble. That business-as-usual, which is to say, corruption by career pols, is the order of the incoming Chicagoland presidential administration.
More of the 9/11 generation, headed for commissions next June and ultimate deployment.
I have read almost all of Charles Stross's SF, so even though this series is more fantasy than SF, I decided to give it a try. I sort of cherry picked the first book I could find, the fourth one, actually, The Merchant's War, which is about alternate universes. Three of them. The sword-and-sorcery dialogue was off-putting but the segments without it were compelling enough that I kept thinking about the plots I had read (not all of them, actually) long after I finished.
So I bought the first three installments, The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, and The Clan Corporate, and inhaled them in a week. The heroine is a bit annoying. Not an airhead, but a liberal ditherer who is accident-prone to say the least. But there are other main characters I find more satisfying. After the first three, I reread the fourth one, including the "by-your-leaves" and the "my lady" stuff, and finally understood it all. There's even what looks like a new, interlocking plot to come that's actually going to be SF. Alas, the fifth book in the series isn't due out until April. I've preordered it. Waiting is going to be hard. Come on, Charles, hurry up and finish it, okay? (Looks like he has and he's working on the sixth one, which will be the end. Oh, dear.)
I've been considering this for a while now and I've finally decided to give Mr. Boy's mom an anonymouse name of her own, instead of just referring to her as his mom, etc., which sounds sort of like I'm a stepdad, which is not the case. I will even give her a separate category of her own, so I can do posts on her doings, now and then. I did steal the name from the same nice blog where I filched the map of the "soler system," but there it's Mr. Charm, so, their being of different genders, I doubt we'll get them mixed up. In this blogosphere, we all learn from each other. More or less.
It takes no courage at all to throw something at an American president, as VDH says. Real courage would be throwing a shoe at Saddam or any other Arab/Persian dictator. But that, of course, would get you a noose--if the security police let you live long enough to make it to the scaffold.
UPDATE: Looks like he only got a beating. Tough cookies, Muntazer. Ah, but now he has a new excuse. The old assault-on-the-Koran libel. Bosh.
Finally, it's warming up again at the rancho after a seemingly endless period of thrity-degree days and nights. But meteorologist Bob Rose says we're due for more blasts of arctic cold this weekend and next week. How long, as AGW's critics like to say, does the climate have to cool before the warmists recognize that Al Gore's warnings are lies? Not to mention the hitherto unremarked but probable climatic effects of the solar wind's surprise assault.
It's well below freezing out in the hills, with the twenty-three at Menard the lowest. Just thirty-one degrees at the rancho but we're inside the urban heat island. Bit of freezing rain, but not enough to jog the gauges of the Lower Colorado River Authority, much less crack the regional drought.
It's official, size ten flying shoes to the contrary notwithstanding:
"The police are generally helpless, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Mexicans have fled the border region, often to the United States (if they had dual-citizenship, which many do). Those without money must hunker down and wait for someone to win this war."
We could put the gangsters out of business and stop it all, if Barry had the nerve to end the failed drug war.
As Barry prepares to raise the price of electricity, gasoline, heating oil and diesel fuel (via taxing carbon emissions to reverse "global warming"), scientific skeptics are gathering allies:
“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” -- Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group."
Read. It. All.
Via Soob.
Bureaucratic intransigence is the order of the day at NASA, where Mike Griffin, the presumably soon-to-be ex-administrator, is fighting to preserve his little return-to-Apollo vision from Barry's transition team. As usual, going back to the moon seems to be about the last thing to all concerned. I'm betting the Chinese will have a base there before we do.
Apt title. More lies from the Dictator's Club, via Eye on the UN.
The Blagojevich scandal does not surprise me. What do people expect from the "Crook" County swamp? It's been amusing to watch Barry's Big Media buddies scurry to exonerate him without asking any questions. Even the prosecutor got into the act, explicitly waving off any prospective bloodhounds from Barry's track. Fat chance. The evidence trail from Blago to Barry O. is clear enough for those who care to follow it and ask the right questions. Not that anyone will.
UPDATE: Well, maybe someone will. As usual, it's the cover-up, not the crime, that gets you.
When the kid's teacher complains about his excess talking and not paying attention, to him in front of you, you expect he'll be chastened and spend the rest of the day being extra good. Wrong. Not only does he not obey when you ask him to do something like hang up his coat or stop putting his grubby paw in the cereral box, but he lies to you about finishing his homework. When he tells you to shut up, you get a sudden appreciation for child abuse. Instead, you dock use of his Nintendo DS game for part of the upcoming weekend. Then, after his mother gets home, you go grocery shopping to cool off. Grocery shopping. Geez.
A family friend, recently removed from Maryland to Houston, leaves a phone message not to bother to return the call just to share in her amazement: "It's snowing in Houston!" Fortunately, it's merely freezing in Austin.
Not just giving the oil ticks a good case of really well-deserved gas, but giving the rest of us really cheap gas. Going to be a good year ahead for a driving vacation or three.
Via Sonia-Belle
Leaves, leaves, everywhere. They blanket the rancho's front lawn and the back forty. They swirl in the pool. I stare at them and wonder how much longer I can get away with ignoring them before the grass dies and the skimmers clog up. I much prefer them as poetry.
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.
Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.
Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
W.H. Auden 1936
I know I'll have to rake them sooner or later. I decide to make it later. Of course.
Speaking of old Texas state parks built by the CCC, one of our favorites is Palo Duro Canyon, southeast of Amarillo. It's well-hidden on the flat Llano Estacado in the Panhandle until you drive right up on it. Also known as the Grand Canyon of Texas. The lighthouse, above, stands sentinel.
Army buddy Chuck Adams already is intoning the faded glories of his alma mater's football team in predicting a fight with Texas at the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 5. He's setting up the straw men:
"...speaking of winning national titles, the Buckeyes were there in 2002...and 1970...1968...1961 [my freshman year]...1957...and 1942. Not too shabby, methinks..."
Too bad the Buckeyes can't bring any of those teams to Glendale, Chuck. They'll have to make do with this season's No. 10 version.
I'm not so sure that Barry's idea to throw money at the nation's sagging infrastructure amounts to no more than one guy digging a hole and another guy filling it in, as some conservatives are suggesting. I see no reason to be that cynical yet.
I agree that it probably won't do much for recovery from the recession. But there undoubtedly is work to be done--see Minnesota's bridge disaster of 2007. Some of what the old CCC did survives today in such as state park facilities in Texas. There are going to be lots of ways to ridicule Barry's presidency, but I don't think this is going to be one of them.
Via Instapundit.
UPDATE: Well, it turns out I'm a bit naive. Seems to be more about parks and sports centers than pot-holed roads and falling-apart bridges. It really wouldn't be like pols to fix the obvious stuff since at best the only thing they could point to would be a little sign with their name on it. Feh!
This is an obvious photoshop, but it's a useful image when talking about what a dubious idea proliferation of these things will be. For one thing, they can be dangerous to people as well as to migrating birds. For another, the hundreds of gallons of oil they use for lubrication can spill and contaminate the environment, or even start a forest fire. Even their Dem champions don't want them marring the view in their neighborhood. But the worst thing about them, in addition to their noise, is that they are so darned inefficient. They will never replace oil and gas, not to mention coal.
Longhorns defensive end Brian Orakpo has won the Nagurski tophy as the best defensive player in college football. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy or better athlete. The fifth-year senior and son of Nigerian immigrants graduated Saturday.
So Texas, which should have played for the Big Twelve title, doesn't get to play for the BCS title, despite having a better loss than Florida and a better win than Oklahoma, which Texas also beat by ten points. Just one point shy of the eleven that Florida put up on Alabama.
Instead, Texas gets a bowl (the Fiesta) to play 10th-ranked Ohio State. Huh? It would be more logical for Texas to play 4th-ranked Alabama--as in the top two play each other, then the next two and the next two and so on. But that's not the way corporate college football wants it: no split title, thank you.
Meanwhile, Texas Tech, which rode the No. 1 ranking for weeks, is unfairly excluded from a BCS bowl altogether. And, once again--and I'm happy to see the daily's Kirk Bohls join me in decrying this--a power team (Oklahoma) is shamelessly rewarded for humiliating an outclassed opponent (Missouri) by running up the score, 62-21. Wherever this game of college football is headed, it doesn't look good.
Just when you thought government couldn't get more ridiculous. So far, the proposed EPA rule only affects cows and hogs, not people. Gotta save the environment, you know. Can't make PETA mad, either. Wouldn't be progressive, no no. Get ready for the price of meat to soar. Hope you like tofu.
I'd bet the recently discovered magnetic portals linking us to the sun every eight minutes have a much bigger effect on our climate than AGW or cow farts. But they wouldn't give the Left a "crisis" to combat.
Via The Fat Guy.
That was the banner flown around last night's Big Twelve title game before Oklahoma crushed Missouri 62-21. Not only true, but it's also a claim that the other loser of the three-way tie, Texas Tech, cannot make. Nevertheless, for the honor of the Big Twelve, I hope Bradford & Co. beat the Gators. (Sorry, Diller and nephew.) Fiesta Bowl here we come. Hope it's against Ohio State.
Nice sentiment. Makes a great bumper sticker. I used to have one. But the reality? Not so much.
SF author Bruce Sterling: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach."
SF author Charles Stross: "Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars."
Nevertheless, Stross, at least, foresees a Moon base in twenty years and ten years later, one on Mars. I would add that both will probably be Chinese. American pols are too gutless and greedy.
November ended very dry, putting Austin in the exceptional drought category, i.e. the worst possible. We're surrounded by an extreme drought area (the red on the map) with no end in sight. Our driest year since 1956. Odd combination: no rain and an early winter of chilly days andfrigid nights. Yech.
Boy, you can almost hear the Islamic and South American oil ticks sweat. Gotta find a new source of payment for their bomb vests and naval exercises with the Soviets, er, Russians. Not to mention the Russians, themselves. Heh.
It's good news, of course, for our side. Oil is down about seventy percent since July. I filled up the rancho-mobile yesterday for under twenty bucks. At one dollar seventy-nine a gallon, it was easy.
Since a continuation of the culture war (anti-gay marriage, etc.) has been cited as one reason the Reps lost the election, it would seem to be a perfect time to end the drug war, which has failed to do anything but strain government spending, raise the price to the consumer and destablize producing countries like Mexico, Columbia and Afghanistan.
Plus, if you're going to nationalize health care, anyway, which Barry seems intent on doing, it would be a perfect time to offer "free" drug treatment to all who need it. But pols are such cowards, never doing anything that might cost them re-election. So we stumble along, with cops devoting too much energy to seizing marijuana and cocaine and, increasingly, needing automatic rifles to defend themselves against the foot soldiers of the drug cartels. Can Barry fix it? Yes, he can! If he only has the nerve.
UPDATE: It's not a unique idea, of course, but I knew that. On the other hand, it may be a bit much expecting a progressive to end drug prohibition, considering it began on FDR's watch. Alcohol prohibition, the previous failed effort, was pushed through by "progressives," as well.
President Andrew Jackson broke with tradition and invited the common people to the White House reception after his inauguration in 1829 and they tracked in mud and otherwise left him a big cleaning bill. But history has recorded no sniping remarks from him about it. The snark is left to his Democrat party descendents such as (who else?) Harry Reid. Thanks to the air-conditioning (wind or solar-generated, surely, can't be from oil or coal) in the new Capitol Visitors Center, Reid's delicate olfactory sensibilities will no longer be troubled by commoner body odor. Term limits, please.
Finally getting around to replacing the Nikon Coolpix S10 VR I had that got run over by a truck back in August. I had set it down on the top of the car while getting some bags in and forgot it was there. Halfway down the highway at seventy-plus I saw something black sail into the air behind us and realized immediately that it was the Nikon in its case.
I turned around and went back to it and ran out in the road to retrieve what turned out to be the cushioned case alone. The camera had somehow come out and smacked into the asphalt. I located it and started to dash out for it just as a semi approached. My prayer didn't work. The truck's front wheel ran over it. Not enough left for a souvenir. So far I like this Canon model the best. It's got some of the same features, has a viewfinder for use in bright sunlight, looks like it will fit in the old case, and it is a lot cheaper. In case it winds up getting run over someday.
Via Instapundit.
I kind of like the idea of Hilarity being Obamalot's new SecState. She'll singlehandedly bring the agency down to its fundamental uselessness. Although I have a hard time imagining how her penchant for telling lies and throwing temper tantrums is going to enhance Barry's alleged interest in "soft power."
What with the presumed new, federal "green" push for this and that, Cobb foresees lots of need for such non-environmentally-friendly minerals as chromium, copper and arsenic. Heh.
When I read of the Islamic terrorists attacking an Hasidic Chabad Center in Mumbai, India, I thought of Chabad House at the UT campus where I enjoyed a Passover seder with another likewise-unattached journalist, and a few young bachelor musicians, one very humid spring night more than twenty years ago.
It's not hard to imagine that place being invaded by Muslims with grenades and AKs or for them to find people like Rabbi Holzberg and his wife. I'm sure they were as welcoming as the Chabad Lubavitchers of Austin and, of course, they paid for it with their lives. There's a story now that the attackers cased the Mumbai center in advance, where they must have met the young couple they would later slay. The Austin rebbe, whose name I don't remember, led our all-male seder (the women cooked and served) in so many toasts and regaled us with so many scholarly jokes that the evening still is a warm, alcoholic blur. But I don't recall the food being as bad as Roger Simon remembers the cuisine at his daughter's Chabad Sunday School in Los Angeles. The Austin ones did then and still do the outreach to Jews and non-Jews that Roger, and some of his commenters, speak of here, which makes them vulnerable.
