Around the Moronosphere 7/30/09

The last couple days have sucked it has been hot enough here that I literally can't sit at my desktop computer to do these roundups or the heat from it has me sweating so bad that i start leaving sweat puddles on the desk. In addition unless I want to get in the middle of a blogwar between RS McCain, Casandra at Villainous Company, Donald Douglas at American Power and Dan Riehl there just hasn't been much to glean from the other blogs. Maybe today will be different.

Three Beers Later - A rule 5 bikini contest - gotta love the description of the guys blog "An Experiment in Adjusting an Alcohol-based Reality Filter. The more beer you drink, the more the world seems to make sense. I'm not sure if this is the beer's fault, or the world's. Experiments proceed. For pigeonholing purposes, I consider myself a South Park Conservative: I believe in Loose Women and Tight Borders but I'm getting anime porn and legally mandated lounges for day laborers...further adjustment to the model may be needed.

Uneasy Silence - Uh Oh! Windows 7 Activation Cracked!-

When will companies learn that DRM and product activations don’t work? When people are determined to do something they WILL do it! Case and point, not more then two months until Windows 7 launches, it has been cracked with an OEM activation code.

Ace of Spades - To Coin a Phrase, It's Time for the Birthers to Move On (.org) -

Birtherism is Bad. It's bad for you; it's bad for me. More importantly and for obvious reasons it's bad for the Republican Party. And most importantly it's bad for America. It is fundamentally anti-democratic. It is inherently anti-constitutional. Let me explain:

The Birthers want the courts to void an election and overthrow a President. That is not something that the Constitution gives courts the authority to do. In fact, the Founders kept the courts away from elections and away from sitting presidents. Ultimately, the Constitution gives Congress the power to unseat Presidents. Not the courts. Hence, when I say that Birtherism is inherently anti-constitutional, I mean they are asking for something so heinously contrary to American tradition that it makes my blood boil.

Bravo!

Betsy - The Justice Department's interpretations of rights that jihadist inmates have in prison -

Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot who died on Flight 77, the one that was flown into the Pentagon, has a chilling column today. Obama's Justice Department has given in to a hunger strike by Richard Reid, the shoe bomber who tried to blow up a plane over the Atlantic, to grant him more rights in prison to meet with other Muslims in prayer. Burlingame reminds us that Reid is in a supermax prison along with a Who's Who of Al Qaeda members who regard themselves as obligated to continue their jihad against America.

STEPHEN MARCHE IN ESQUIRE: via Instapundit -

So far, the first African-American presidency has been one of the worst ever for African-Americans. The economic crisis has predominantly hit non-white working class men; the collapse of the auto industry is threatening to destroy the basis of the Midwestern black middle class. Key matters for African-Americans languish — the overincarceration of young black men that makes a mockery of American justice being the number one example. Government aid? That goes to bankers in Connecticut. If the President were white, there would be riots.”

Little Green Footballs - Another attempt at satisfying Birther's fanatic claims - Unfortunately I think that this one just gives them ammo. In the 1962 Certificate of Live Birth that he shows it lists the Hospital or where the birth occured. The 2007 copy that Obama provided does not. Birthers are going to be on that like stink on shit

Demure Thoughts - The most interesting man in the world - Amazingly it isn't me

The Economist takes on the Obama cult (better late than never?)

In current (July 25th) issue of the Economist Lexington opines that because of the unreasonable expectations of his followers, as well as his failure to inject some reality into their rhetoric, that Obama may end up with a failed presidency and be the most unpopular president of the modern era.

Mr Obama has inspired more passionate devotion than any modern American politician. People scream and faint at his rallies. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming him “The One” and noting that “Jesus was a community organiser”. An editor at Newsweek described him as “above the country, above the world; he’s sort of God.” He sets foreign hearts fluttering, too. A Pew poll published this week finds that 93% of Germans expect him to do the right thing in world affairs. Only 14% thought that about Mr Bush.

Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it. As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world”, to “transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth”. As president, he keeps adding details to this ambitious wish-list. He vows to create millions of jobs, to cure cancer and to seek a world without nuclear weapons. On July 20th he promised something big (a complete overhaul of the health-care system), something improbable (to make America’s college-graduation rate the highest in the world by 2020) and something no politician could plausibly accomplish (to make maths and science “cool again”).

...

Mr Obama is clearly not the socialist of Republican demonology, but he is trying to extend federal control over two huge chunks of the economy—energy and health care—so fast that lawmakers do not have time to read the bills before voting on them. Perhaps he is hurrying to get the job done before his polls weaken any further. In six months, his approval rating has fallen from 63% to 56% while his disapproval rating has nearly doubled, from 20% to 39%. Independent voters are having second thoughts. And his policies are less popular than he is. Support for his health-care reforms has slipped from 57% to 49% since April.

All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr Obama to prove him wrong.

Oh sweet sweet karma. I can almost taste the ironic deliciousness. Unfortunately in order for it all to come true things probably have to get even shittier than they are now, and that is not something I am willing to wish on the country. Still it's nice to dream.

It be hot outside

96 degrees in Seattle. It feels good until I have to come sit next to the computer which is pumping out another 3,000,000,000 degrees of hot air.

Newsweek - The recession is over! The Economist, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affars - Not so fast bucko!

The Great Recession, which rolled over our financial lives like one of P.J. Keating's giant pavers, is most likely over. Home sales, while still far below the levels of a year ago, have risen for three straight months—a first since 2004. The stock market has rallied 44 percent since March, thanks to renewed optimism and improving earnings from big companies like Goldman Sachs and Apple. In June, seven of the 10 indicators in the Conference Board Leading Economic Index pointed upward, including manufacturing hours worked and unemployment claims. Macroeconomic Advisers, the St. Louis–based consulting firm, says the economy is expanding at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the current quarter. Economic activity "will increase slightly over the remainder of 2009," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress.

source

All that may be true, but we exist in a globalized economy and it appears that the global economy is still verging on collapse - The Economist reports that global shipping is down some horrendous percentage:

Estimates by the World Trade Organization suggest that trade volumes will shrink by around a tenth this year. But recent figures from big economies give reasons to hope that the worst of the slump may now be past. Even in May, the value of trade was nearly a third lower than a year earlier. But the recent awful figures mask the fact that exports and imports have held more or less steady since January.

Foreign Affairs reports that the Asian economies are unlikely to recover soon, driven as they are by exports:

For decades, Asian economies used exports to the West as a means of growth. Now, if they hope to weather the global recession, they will have to enact deep structural changes such as higher wages and increased domestic consumption.

and Foreign Policy magazine predicts a coming bursting of the Chinese economic bubble:

China's fortunes over the past decade are reminiscent of Lucent Technologies in the 1990s. Lucent sold computer equipment to dot-coms. At first, its growth was natural, the result of selling goods to traditional, cash-generating companies. After opportunities with cash-generating customers dried out, it moved to start-ups -- and its growth became slightly artificial. These dot-coms were able to buy Lucent's equipment only by raising money through private equity and equity markets, since their business models didn't factor in the necessity of cash-flow generation.

Funds to buy Lucent's equipment quickly dried up, and its growth should have decelerated or declined. Instead, Lucent offered its own financing to dot-coms by borrowing and lending money on the cheap to finance the purchase of its own equipment. This worked well enough, until it came time to pay back the loans.

The United States, of course, isn't a dot-com. But a great portion of its growth came from borrowing Chinese money to buy Chinese goods, which means that Chinese growth was dependent on that very same borrowing.

Now the United States and the rest of the world is retrenching, corporations are slashing their spending, and consumers are closing their pocket books. This means that the consumption of Chinese goods is on the decline.

...

Much of China's growth over the past decade has come from lending to the United States. The country suffers from real overcapacity. And now growth comes from borrowing -- and hundreds of billion-dollar decisions made on the fly don't inspire a lot of confidence. For example, a nearly completed, 13-story building in Shanghai collapsed in June due to the poor quality of its construction.

This growth will result in a huge pile of bad debt -- as forced lending is bad lending. The list of negative consequences is very long, but the bottom line is simple: There is no miracle in the Chinese miracle growth, and China will pay a price. The only question is when and how much.

So we may have weathered the gust front but the rest of the storm is still to come.

Even Newsweek recognizes this, admitting that the recession may be over but the recovery is going to be long and painful:

To a large degree, the U.S. economy must now cope with an era of lower expectations. Road building isn't a recipe for full employment, green technology won't displace fossil fuels in this decade, the benefits of universal broadband may be overblown, and the dysfunctional health-care system won't shift overnight from a headwind to a tailwind. The recession may be over, but there's likely to be plenty of tough slogging ahead.

Does that mean the smart economy is a waste? Absolutely not. Declaring the stimulus a failure five months after its passage is a little like calling the results of a marathon at the second-mile marker. Virtually all these investments are necessary. They will make the economy and specific industries smarter. They are intelligent economic and political strategies. But they're not sufficient. Large as it is, the stimulus can't fill the hole we've created or bring a series of large industries into the 21st century. Each imperative requires investments far in advance of what even the most free-spending liberal could imagine. Transforming the nation's energy--production-and-transmission system "will take an investment of trillions of dollars over decades," says Dan Arvizu, director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. "The private sector has to make this happen."

Historically, the economy has kicked into higher gear when a development comes along that can touch every part of the economy, not just particular sectors: the steam engine, electricity, the computer chip, globalization, the Internet, cheap money. By definition, it's almost impossible to know what the next disruptive, discontinuous great leap forward is going to be. On several occasions, Lawrence Summers has remarked that when he was involved in the big economic summit Bill Clinton held after winning the 1992 election, he didn't recall hearing many mentions of the words "the Internet."

Around the Moronosphere 7/27/09

Betsy - What's is actually in the (health care) bills -

Fortune Magazine has gone through the Kennedy bill in the Senate and the Democrat-backed bill in the House to explain more clearly what the details mean. The picture is not pretty.

In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

Flopping Aces - Sunday Funnies line-up




Doug Ross @ Journal (via Cold Fury) - Two Books and who they are being read by

Liberty and Tyranny read by Sarah Palin -

A book that describes the rationale for the very founding of the United States; and the philosophers who inspired the Framers; the economic, legal and moral principles underpinning the Constitution.

The Post American World read by Barack Obama

Honestly I don't think you can make too much of this but still it's funny

D=S - Peer Reviewed Climate Study Rocks Climate Debate -

Three Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.

link to the article abstract

Demure Thoughts - Jen has questions on job fair attire

Mojito Grilled Fish Tacos and Chipolte Lime Slaw

Made these for the first time today and they were damn good

Mojito Grilled Fish Tacos - makes 8 tacos

2 TBS lime juice
2 TBS minced mint leaves
1 TBS canola oil
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 fresh jalapeno chile seeded and minced
1 pound firm white fish (halibut, cod or snapper. I used halibut) cut into 8 finger shaped pieces

Combined marinade ingredients mix well, add fish and refrigerate for 30 minutes. turn once.

Grill fish on high heat until firm opaque and lightly browned. approx 7 minutes turning once.

Chipolte Lime Slaw

1/2 cup mayonaise
2 TBS chopped mint
2 TBS lime juice
2 TBS Chipolte Tabasco
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups shredded cabbage

Combine ingredients and mix well.

Serve fish on corn tortilla with chipolte lime slaw.

Around the Moronosphere 7/25/09

Uneasy Silence - Some nice desktop backgrounds from the upcoming Mac OS 10.6 release dont eat up all his bandwidth downloading the pictures please

Flopping Aces - Democratic Party Imploding

House healthcare negotiations dissolved in acrimony on Friday, with Blue Dog Democrats saying they were “lied” to by their Democratic leaders.

Just wait until the far left Democratic Party/Congressional leaders try to push through yet another fake stimulus, another fake bank bailout, and then somehow expect to hold Congress next year as tax rates for small business owners and investors approach 70%.

Personally I never underestimate the extent of potential voter stupidity or the ability of the Dems to weasel their way around something like this. In actuality by the time this is all over somehow the Blue Dogs will all be counter-revolutionary fascists and Henry Waxman will be the glorious protector of our rights as anointed by the NY times

I just realized Joe Biden actually told the truth about something

Recently Joe Biden told an AARP audience that in order for the US to avoid going bankrupt we needed to spend a trillion dollars on health care reform.

(CNSNews.com) – Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.

Everyone pretty roundly ridiculed him for the remark but this evening I realized he is teeling the truth.

Here's the realization I came to - Health care reform isn't really about health care at all, it's about reducing the entitlement burden from an aging US population. By rationing care to older people they will die off sooner reducing the long term costs to Social Security and Medicare.

It's a short term investment for a long term payoff.

Sneaky 'lil batards huh?

A history of American growth from The Economist

Interesting visual of the American economy since WWII

Another Member of the Chopped Liver Brigade

R.S. McCain was also not invited to speak at the upcoming RightOnline conference in Pittsburgh. Of course it hurt him more because

• He actually knew about the conference wheras I oly found out about it 4 minutes ago by reading his blog post


• He actually has readers.

Still I am hurt - deeply, deeply hurt - by this snub. Seriously how is the dextrosphere too know of the potentials of a Pandora Peaks presidency if I am not there to tell them.

Around the Moronosphere 7/24/09

Betsy - Sinking of it's own weight - ...Obamacare is sinking in Congress. It turns out that it isn't possible to deliver more service at less cost. Who knew?

Doubleplusundead - The best analysis of PDS I've read so far...

Hot Air - Obama loses majority support -

Rasmussen’s presidential tracking polls detecting slippage in support for Barack Obama first, and now they report that his approval ratings have fallen below 50% for the first time. Driving the indicator, as it has all along, is the departure of independents from the president’s banner.

Fox News this morning had a poll showing President Obama's approval at 53% with most of the disapproval coming from his handling of the economy. Weirdly however 61% of people believe that our current economic situation is Bush's fault. Maybe he will be able to play the it's Bush's fault game for the next 3.5 years.

Instapundit has a vampire book coming. I am so sick of Vampires when are we going to get some cyberpunk or stories again.

Little Green Footballs - A look at the Obama Birth Certificate controversy

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Born Identity
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

The Belmont Club - The Strong Horse -

Michael Totten tried to put his finger on the pulse of Iraq. Michael wanted to understand what Iraqis said when Americans were not in the room, the better to figure out what would happen when the US left and sought out an Army source, an Iraqi whose candidness was next best thing.

...

MJT: It looks like the Iraqi government is going to throw us out, though.

Sayid: Believe me, Maliki is a dictator in Iraq. If the American government doesn’t watch him, he will become a dictator in no time. In four or five years, he will look like Saddam Hussein. Keep on him. He wants to rule. He wants to have the power. Everyone who works in his office are his relatives. He will bring all his tribe.

MJT: That’s how it is everywhere.

Sayid: No, no. In the States?

MJT: I mean, in this region. It’s like that everywhere in this region.

Sayid: In this area? Yeah. It is. Except Israel and Lebanon. They have democracy. But the rest of them? Syria? Damn. [Laughs.] Iran, too.

So are we going to be back in Iraq in 2015? Bears watching

Julie Banderas ( @juliebanderas ) hosting strategy room

on foxnews.com at 10am est tomorrow. She sent out a twitter plea for viewers. Apparently she is trying to prove something to her bosses. She is one of the better hosts as well as being smoking hot so help her out. My personal opinion - Fox could replace Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity or Sheperd Smith with her and come out way ahead in the deal.

Around the Moronosphere 7/22/09

Doubleplusundead - Idiot congressman tries to defend vote on Cap and Trade. I know how eddiebear feels. Listening to Dave Reichert on the radio the other day I threw up in my mouth a little (joke, but I didn't buy his reasons)

Flopping Aces- Ground Shifting Fast in Health Care Battle -

The last 24 hours have brought a slew of positive changes to the effort to stop Obama’s plan to socialize America’s health care and force Americans to become more dependent on the Federal Government.

Instapundit - Facing Blue Dog Rebellion, House Energy and Commerce Committee Cancels Markup for 2nd Day in a Row.

Not a good sign for the Democrats trying to report the bill out from committee onto the floor for a vote. Seven conservative blue dog Democrats on the committee have said they can't vote for the bill in its current form.

Slashdot - Med Students Get Training in Second Life Hospitals -

The real innovation in SL clinical simulations is that they bring people together in a clinical space — you are standing next to an avatar who is a real patient, and the doctor avatar to your right is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the nurse to your left is at the University of Pennsylvania hospital,' says John Lester, the Education and Healthcare Market Developer at Linden Labs. The most significant benefit of SL training may be the cost. Real-life training facilities require thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars to build and maintain, while SL simulation rooms can be created for minimal costs, and accessed from anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. SL can also expose students to situations that a standard academic program can't duplicate: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions,' says Colleen Lin. 'When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it.'"

This is what technology is supposed to do. Make things better, safer and more efficient. A lot of times it seems to work the opposite way.

The Art of Manliness - The Ultimate Push-up Guide

Alabama in Between - Fascinating Focus Group Result - Apparently people don't want to experiment with health care.

The Other McCain - The Mother of All IG-Gate Updates - What it boils down to is Obama didn't like what an IG was reporting so he fired him in direct violation of a law that he himself voted for. It may not be an isolated incident.

Do we need Globalization and the WTO?

I ask based on this article in the NY Times - Obama's Ad-Hoc Strategy To Reverse Manufacturing's Fall.

The United States ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing — 13.9 percent, the World Bank reports, down 4 percentage points in a decade. The 19-month-old recession has contributed noticeably to this decline. Industrial production has fallen 17.3 percent, the sharpest drop during a recession since the 1930s.

...

Manufacturing has long been viewed as an essential pillar of a powerful economy. It generates millions of well-paid jobs for those with only a high school education, a huge segment of the population. No other sector contributes more to the nation’s overall productivity, economists say. And as manufacturing weakens, the country becomes ever more dependent on imports of merchandise, computers, machinery and the like — running up a trade deficit that in time could undermine the dollar and the nation’s capacity to sustain so many imports.

Those are the statements that started me thinking this morning. In general I am a free trader. Trade benefits me as a consumer and the countries we trade with by allowing them to increase their standard of living and develop stable social institutions, but does it really benefit America? The offshoring of manufacturing leads to a loss of well paid jobs as well as an increase in trade deficits. Both of which are not particularly good for the economy.

The free trader in me says that neither of these would be a problem if American companies learned to compete more effectively. In that case companies would have no reason to shift production offshore. The same applies to tax policy. If it wasn't punitive then companies wouldn't feel a need to leave.

That holds true as long as everyone is playing by the same set of rules. Some, such as Douglas Bartlett, the protagonist(?) of the NY Times article would argue that is not happening and it places American businesses at a disadvantage:

“Bush and Obama,” Mr. Bartlett said scornfully, “one is as bad as the other in terms of manufacturing policy.”

He acknowledged that the recession was the immediate reason for the demise of his family’s business. But what really did it in, he said in an interview, was the competition from less expensive Chinese circuit boards — less expensive, he argued, because the Chinese undervalue their currency and this administration, like the ones before it, lets them get away with it.

“Our orders went from $8 million at an annual rate to $4 million, which was not enough to make money,” he said.

Mr. Bartlett, who is co-chairman of an organization called the Fair Currency Coalition, said that Chinese competitors charged only $1 for each printed circuit board sold in this country, while he charged $1.40. Like many economists and government officials, he says he believes the Chinese currency is artificially undervalued. As a countermeasure, he said the Obama administration should impose a 40 percent tariff on imported Chinese goods.

Raising tariffs in a recession is a blunder, as Smoot-Hawley showed, but Bartlett raises a valid point. The type of behavior the Chinese are allegedly engaged in is essentially illegal under WTO rules, both as a form of dumping and as an illegal subsidy. If the rules can't be enforced then why do we belong to the organization?

I believe that a strong manufacturing sector is vital to the country and there are a number of things I would do to increase manufacturing in this country, such as economic Free Zones, where business taxes such as the capital gains tax would be waived and tax credits for jobs created among others. At the same time we need to ensure open global markets so that once those jobs are created we have a market for the goods.

In short we need globalization but I am not so sure about the WTO.

Around the Moronosphere 7/21/09 - In which I offer some Alinsky like ideas

The Other McCain - Anger on it's own does little - Smitty writes:

Assuming he stays in character, by the time Barack Obama dies, hopefully more than twice his current age, he'll be paraphrasing Westmoreland: ""The United States in the end abandoned Socialism."

It doesn't take anger. It takes commitment to Federalism, avoidance of shortcuts, and insistence from "We the People" that social programs are not funded using Rock Star Economics: "We'll just tour some more and release another live album to fund the drug habit."

I disagree. While the commitment to Federalism etc. are necessary so to is enough anger to fuel a desire to do something about the situation. What isn't needed is unfocused rage like that I have been seeing in the comments section over at Ace of Spades for a number of weeks. The anger has to be focused and channeled into things like letter writing, doorbelling, even donating to candidates that support the same things you do.

Flopping Aces - Action Alert: Call or Write Congress NOW! - Mike's America provides good follow-up to Smitty's post above:

Years ago, I worked in Senator Alphonse D’Amato’s New York office. My job was to answer some of the mail from constituents. I learned that letters, phone calls and emails DO matter. But letters have the greatest impact. If you care enough to put a stamp on it, it carries more weight than if you email it. But whichever method you choose, your letter will be read and your opinion tallied up along with all the others.

* Contact your congressman by following this link to the House Directory.
* Contact your Senator.

And after you do that, make sure to send your letter or email to the editor of your local newspaper and recommend he or she run it as a letter to the editor. Use the link for your local paper or try this site.

As per Cynthia Yockey and Saul Alinsky you also need to be persistent. Yockey says 30 days of contact is the minimum. I say until you get a response that you like and then set up a tickler file in your calendar so that you follow-up every so often. You also need to reward your congressmen when they vote correctly, just like when your schnauzer rolls over and plays dead, positive feedback in the form of a dog treat or a campaign contribution makes it more likely they will do so again.

Just One Minute - Enhanced Interrogation - The Fog Clears

Yesterday the WaPo finally reported the blindingly obvious (to anyone who read the record) - contra the proposed Sofan timeline, enhanced CIA techniques had been employed almost from the outset. The WaPo confirms that some of the useful intelligence gleaned from Zubaydah followed the CIA involvement.

I read the article and I don't think it says what Tom Maquire thinks it says

Just a Girl in Short Shorts - Becky closes up shop.

Not really much I can say here other than this once again makes a mockery of Google's don't be evil motto

Everybody's Free

OK, if you're not a fan of the Venture Brothers you may not appreciate the humor I like it:

Around the Moronosphere 7/18/09

I went thru my RSS feeds twice and nothing reached out and grabbed me by the balls this morning so I will have to try again later.

Around the Moronoshere 7/17/09

OK I know I have only been doing these again for a couple days and here I am sluffing them off to the afternoon. Well I had a busy morning and that's just the way it is :-P

Ace - Calls on people to keep the anger at reasonable levels. - I have to be honest one of the reasons I don't comment at Ace's much anymore is because the comment section seems to have been taken over by angry idiots.

Betsy - Sweet payback for Nancy Pelosi - It turns out that many House Democrats, particularly the Blue Dogs, don't like having to vote for poorly crafted bills in a big rush and then having to go defend their votes to their constituents. They've heard a boatload from their voters and now they're telling Nancy Pelosi that she has to slow things down and stop cramming huge, expensive bills through the House if she wants their votes. Apparently, their constituents didn't like the cap and trade bill and these Blue Dogs are balking about falling in line for health care.

Flopping Aces - Director of the Congressional Budget Office: Federal Spending is "Unsustainable" - 'duh

OK this was a short one today

Around the Moronosphere 7/16/09

Flopping Aces - Obama, Ayn Rand or Pope Benedict? Who's got it right?

Instapundit - Hey Wait I Thought the Science Was Settled - “Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong? Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Becky - The stupid people win - Google has again taken offense at Becky's anti-Obamaisms and slapped her with a content warning so she is closing up shop and heading elsewhere. Sucks!

Locusts and Honey - Quote of the Day - One of the ideas that occurred to me fairly recently is that there is a number of people in the world whose graves really ought to be shat upon routinely.

The Other McCain - takes a whack at Megan McCain - I have kind of half-heartedly defended Megan McCain in the past. She's young so she is allowed to be a little stupid, but she deserves to be smacked around some at this point.

Traction Control - Chain SAW - it was designed to have the ergonomics of a chain saw, and the firepower of a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon). It’s based on the idea that heads up displays no longer require a gun to be held up to the face for aiming. Theoretically, this type of grip could be applied to many different weapons in the future.

Around the Moronosphere 7/15/09

Ace - Liberal Law Professor: Sotomayor Either Perjuring Herself or Unqualified -

She's denying that there exists something called "theory of jurisprudence," which includes such doctrines as originalism, strict constructionism, and, of course, the ever-flexible and ever-expanding doctrine of the "Living Constitution." As she doesn't want to admit she's an adherent of the latter, she claims there's no such thing as judicial philosophy whatsoever.

...

So, yeah, she's lying. Or else she's so stupid she doesn't even realize she's making a choice about judicial philosophy at all -- like man of the stupid and liberal (BIRM) she is entirely unaware that there is any other philosophy than the one she believes in, to the point where she denies it's a philosophy or choice at all and believes it to be simply the natural and inevitable order of things.*

I'm not really sure that this is all that big a deal. I don't agree with Sotomayor's style of judging, at leats what I have read about it, but at the moment she is tap dancing for the committee. Roberts and Alito did the same thing when Dems were trying to pick them off. If she gets called out on an outright lie then I will change my mind.

Betsy - Get ready for updated economic forecasts -

The new numbers will come as part of a semiannual review that, under ordinary circumstances, is the kind of earnest-but-dull document that causes many Washington eyes to glaze over.

This time, however, the new forecasts — if they are anything like what many outside economists expect — could send a jolt through Capitol Hill, where even the administration’s current debt projections already are prompting deep concerns on political and substantive grounds.

Higher deficit figures also would arrive at a critical moment in the health care debate, as lawmakers are already struggling to find a way to pay for the president’s nearly $1 trillion reform package.

Alternately, if Obama clings to current optimistic forecasts for long-term growth, he risks accusations that he is basing his fiscal plans on fictitious assumptions — precisely the sort of charge he once leveled against the Bush administration.

Little Green Footballs - Obama Axes Pentagon's New Tank

Becky - The Libertarian Case For Judicial Activism

Around the Moronosphere 7/14/09

The Other McCain - Praises Glenn Greenwald

Mark this moment, friends, but Glenn Greenwald's chronicle of how panicky talk of financial "meltdown" led to the TARP bailout that benefitted Goldman Sachs -- well, it's a very valuable aggregation.

Ace - The World According To Reagan: I remember when they used to sell these posters at Spenser's.

Doubleplusundead - False flag operations against the Free Republic

but then there's this, turns out the reporter is a Kossack, and has been actively advocating that Kossacks post racist or offensive comments on Free Republic, so that they can be used to attack FR.

Power Line - Two indicted in plot to recruit Somali youth to participate in Jihad

D = S - Setting the record straight on Europe's Cap and Trade experience

the reality is, we’re lucky Europe’s gone through with a cap and trade program, because it is a perfect example of what not to do.

Strategic Calculus and the Afghan War

The Zeray Gazette - Failed States Index:

It's a fascinating map. The study regards the most stable nations as Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland. Among unstable nations, Israel is the only democracy.

Al-Jazeera - Pakistan's displaced begin return:

Pakistan has begun returning home some of the two million people displaced by a military offensive against the Taliban in North West Frontier Province (NFWP).

...

However, with security in the Swat valley and surrounding areas still uncertain, many families chose not to leave the makeshift camps and other places where they have been staying since the offensive began.

CNN - Reasons to be concerned about Sotomayor

Washington Post - Even India loves everyday low prices

Around the Moronosphere in 60 minutes 7/13/09

I had some time so here we go with the first moronosphere round-up in awhile:

Ace: Premortem on the Sotomayor Hearings:

Doubleplusundead: What would happen if North Korea tried to Attack Hawaii with a missile. Amusing, but given our current leadership I think the more likely outcome would be weeping and showering the Norks with money.

Michelle Malkin: CNN gets fact-checked by an African journalist

Powerline: How Ricci almost disappeared. It was just a fluke that one of the judges read an article about it in the New Haven paper and looked it up after the summary judgment had been filed. It certainly sounds like Sotomayor et. al. knew they were being sleazy and tried to hide it from the rest of the court.

Slashdot: Traditional news media is 2.5 hours faster than blogs in breaking stories.

"The researchers' paper, 'Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,' (PDF) shows that although most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media."

The Art of Manliness: 100 Must See Movies: The Essential Men's Movie Library

The Belmont Club: Falling approval ratings equals need for investigations of Bush administration?

“Call me a cynic, but I am not in the least surprised that a couple of weeks after Barack Obama’s strong approval/disapproval ratings took a turn to the unfavorable and Obamacare is looking less like a lead pipe cinch it is suddenly time to investigate the Bush administration.”

...

Obama’s Grand Bargain is a black box. One day the public may even get to peek at what’s inside and who can say what their reaction will be. The dilemma facing the administration’s political strategists is that once the administration begins to lose political momentum, a hundred niggling points will suddenly start to catch on the previous Teflon-coated surface with all the tenacity of velcro, which they can’t let happen. On the other hand, how can they speed up to conceal the blemishes unless the critics can be silenced or at least misdirected?

The Other McCain: Smitty has a few questions for Judge Sotomayor

But I'd also ask what she thought of President Obama's judicial philosophy, as expressed in Audacity of Hope. In that book, then-Senator Obama criticized "strict constructionism" and its adherents. He wrote:

Some, like Justice Scalia, conclude that the Founding Fathers will tell us all that we need to know, and that if we strictly obey the rules they've laid out -- for example, that the only rights protected in the Constitution are those that are written in plain English as understood by those who wrote them -- then democracy is respected, and fairness is achieved.

Just A Girl in Short Shorts: Beware of Googlers Bearing Gifts

BBC- Power sockets can be used to eavesdrop on what people type on a computer. This is actually a pretty well know phenomenom. It's one reason why Tempest rooms have such strict requirements for power supplies

The Hunt for Red October memory

Andy Levy ( @andylevy )from Red Eye just tweeted about The Hunt For Red October amking fun of the fashions and the huge laptops and cell phones. That made me think - most people probably don't realize what a cultural impact that novel had.

When it was published in 1985 very few military techological thrillers were being written, even fewer that showed the US military in a positive light. The first review I read of the book was in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute and as I recall that was one of the first points made the second was the amazing accuracy. A couple months after reading that review I read another that mentioned that Tom Clancy had been questioned extensively because no one in the government could believe he had written this book without someone slipping him classified data.

He must have convinced the CIA et al because the didn't throw him into one of their numerous secret prisons and the genre exploded. Larry Bond, Harold Coyle, David Poyer all hopped on board and I had reading material for the next 20 years. Clancy continued to write and now has entire sections of bookstores devoted too him. It was pretty damn amazing.

Through it all though Red October has remained my favorite Clancy novel. It had the cleanest story and I thought it was the most engaging.

Anyway just thought I would share.

Meritocracy and the emerging Uberclass

Despite our long separation from England America has never quite gotten over the royalist idea that good breeding makes for good leaders. It's a phenomena that raises it's ugly head from time to time mostly, as R.S. McCain points out, around election time.

If you've actually read Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, you understand how the many merits of the book were obscured by an unfortunate (if necessary) controversy over their discussion of the hereditary component of intelligence.

...

However, the entirety of the controversy over what Murray and Herrnstein said about hereditary and race was a horrible distraction from what was, to me, the most revealing part of their book: How the democratization of educational opportunity and the near-universality of intelligence testing (the SAT and other standardized aptititude tests function, at some basic level, as IQ tests) had resulted in a revolution in American socio-economic class structure.

Specifically a meritocracy has emerged in which attendance at a small set of elite institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, maybe one or two West Coast schools) is considered a prerequisite for high public office. It is the old money / landed gentry arguments of the 18th and 19th centuries moved into the Silicon age.
McCain speculates that it is one of (maybe the main reason) for the press's continuing Savage treatment of Sarah Palin:

If you have read both The Bell Curve and Brooks' Bobos in Paradise, you know how he applied Murray and Herrnstein's ideas -- in a light, breezy, humorous way -- to his study of the lifestyles of the emerging overclass. And every time Sullivan savages Sarah Palin, you are witnessing an expression of Sully's certainty that no one who attended a community college and graduated from a state university can be more fit to govern than a true "meritocrat" like Barack Obama.

Whatever her SAT score, Palin has failed to jump through the proper institutional hoops necessary for validation as a member of the congnitive elite that Sullivan, Brooks & Co. recognize as the only legitimate governing class.

And he does seem to have a point. Although Palin was the only one on either ticket with executive branch experience she was routinely derided as unworthy of office. This despite the fact that her opponents only major accomplishments were too graduate law school and in the case of Barack Obama to have the balls to write a memoir at the age of 30 something about how tough his life was while attending those same elite schools.

Despite that, and despite the fact that every actual project that Obama was involved in - such as the Annenberg Trust's project to improve Chicago schools - Obama was immediately pronounced as more fit to govern. (Admittedly Palin didn't help her case with a series of bad TV interview, but that came later)

McCain believes this doesn't augur well for our representative democracy or federalism:

This view amounts to a repeal of the American founding. If the graduates of elite institutions are exclusively qualified to govern, then most citizens are thereby adjudged incapable of the self-governance which was the ideal of the Founders.

Furthermore, the Sully-Brooks interpretation denies the equality of the states, for Oklahoma produces fewer National Merit Scholars than do Massachusetts and Connecticut, and therefore Sen. Tom Coburn and his constituents are politically inferior to Sen. Chris Dodd or Sen. John Kerry and their constituents.

Finally and most importantly, the Sully-Brooks "meritocracy" theory tends toward the negation of local self-government and the endorsement of unconstitutional centralization of power in Washington, since the national government attracts the "best and brightest" (the meritocrats who are fit to govern) in a way that the governments of Texas or Tennessee cannot.

I agree, although I do have to disagree bit - the founders were not for self-rule by the common man. That is clearly obvious by the original requirements to vote. Male 21 and of the landed class. The general franchise evolved later.

In a way this is the opposite argument that Heinlein made in Starship Troopers. There a meritocracy emerges but it is based on service rather than wealth. Of the two I think I would probably prefer Heinlein's.

Catching up a bit

I have a little free time to today so I decided to play a bit of catch-up.

I haven't been following the news too closely although the Palin announcement blew me away, just like everyone else. I can't understand what she is thinking. If she is planning a run for higher office this seems to scuttle that. If she is hoping to get out from under the media microscope it kills that chance too. If she is planning on trying to build some sort of conservative coalition I think she has just opened it to criticism / ridicule. But then what do I know? A couple of years ago I couldn't conceive of the idea of Barack Obama and Joe Biden being in charge elected President and Vice President either so I could be completely wrong.

In the meantime Ace takes offense to an R.S. McCain piece, and I have to say I agree with him about the heretic hunting. (Although that may be a bit of the pot calling the kettle black given my recent post on the 8 Republicans who voted for the cap and trade bill. In my defense I will just say that there are somethings that I think will be so harmful to the country that you have to draw a line. Most other things are open to some form of compromise.) McCain did post an update clarifying his point so an incipient blog-war may have been averted.

On the other hand Ace is often to ready to jump on the Allahpundit band wagon. It's good that he get's called on it occasionally. Keep him honest :-P

Not much else is happening. I am sick of all the Michael Jackson coverage. My Spanish class is going OK. Work is a real bummer (of course that's why they call it work and not happy happy fun time). I am filling out transfer applications. Looking for a decent school with a good rep and affordable tuition. My two primaries are still UW-Bothell and UW-Tacoma but the way higher ed is getting slahed her in WA State I need back-ups.

Update: The Other McCain follows up.

Surprisingly It Wasn't Tonya Harding - Ex-Figure Skating Champ Busted in Meth Ring

JERSEY CITY, N.J. (AP) - Former figure skating champion Nicole Bobek has been charged with being part of a northern New Jersey drug ring.

source

I have always kind of liked Harding just because she was is white trash but when I saw this headline I figured it was right up her alley. Oh well.

Dave Reichert explains his vote on Cap and Trade

Sorry bud I'm not buying it. You have to go.

http://www.mynorthwest.com/resources/audio_headlines/audio_player.php?a=8341&f=/kiro/2009/07/07012009201156.mp3

Bit of a blogging hiatus

Sorry for the lack of posts.

Currently I am either in class, getting ready for class, or at work from 5:30 AM to 7 PM. That isn't leaving a lot of time for blogging.

There is a blog by email option in blogger that I have tested once or twice before that I may have to try out again. I really want to start up the daily round up again but that is just so time consuming.

Anyway that's my excuse and I am sticking to it.

(Oh and let me tell you I am not super thrilled with the way some of classes are going so far but the complaints will have to wait 8 weeks until I am sure that my grades wont be affected.)