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silveradeptIt's another beautiful day in the neighborhood. We begin today with proof that if one is ever inside the zone targeted by an atomic explosion, a bank vault may actually protect you from the initial blast. Meaning that the Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith may not be entirely fiction. Hiding in the refrigerator, however, is still right out.
Edwin Newman, long time correspondent for NBC news, arrives in the Dead Pool at 91 years of age.
Also, since most of your are Internet-savvy, check out the explanation of several myths of copyright. Especially for the mash-up artists in here, it's worth a look.
Out in the world today, The United Nations has indicated that it may be sending a special inspection to Syria to detemine the truth of that country's nuclear ambitions. Iran came to the defense of Syria, accusing the UN of acting as Israeli pawns in taking false allegations seriously.
Senator Cornyn continues to push for the Justice Department to show that the states are actually in compliance with the laws regarding active servicepeople being able to vote in elections in their home states. Setting aside the validity of his challenge, as disenfranchisement should be stomped out everywhere it is, I wonder if this big push isn't concidental with the fact that we have significant numbers of people overseas that could influence elections if their votes get back in time to be counted.
One hiker home, two more to go, with the possibility that the other hikers might be used as chips to trade Iranians rather than to let them out on their own.
So, the Pope's going out on a tour. Remember, this is the Pope that, as a cardinal, worked against the defrocking of a priest that was convicted of abusing children, delaying his dismissal for almost six years after conviction. Now, as Pope, he's apologetic the church fathers didn't take appropriate measures fast enough - in this context, it sound like he's apologizing that the cover-ups didn't come faster and weren't effective enough. In his remarks in Scotland, to the Queen, the Pontiff decided to disavow the Christianity of Adolf Hitler and complain that atheists are forcing their views on the rest of us and diminishing us all as a result.
Domestically, a pertussis epidemic has claimed nine children so far, with the root cause likely being a lack of vaccinations. Nine children have died from a preventable disease. And there is no sound science to indicate that vaccinations are somehow responsible for anything other than keeping children from dying from preventable diseases.
Comedian Rush Limbaugh commits the first error of middle school research in broadcasting untrue material on Wikipedia without making independent confirmation first. This is the stuff the librarians drill into your head as Reseach 001, Rush - how do you expect anyone to take you seriously after a basic blunder like that?
...then agaaain...considering that the most accurate indicator of how an election turns out is how many television campaign ads are run, which makes the Citizens United decision a futher nodding that the people with the money really do get to buy the elections, just not directly or in ways that are currently illegal.
Plus, It's not just Rush committing Research 001 errors, it's voters trusting things without verifying them and the media outlets that ask voters questions designed to make it seem like they're on serious topics when they aren't.
Candidate O'Donnell, in addition to being anti-self love, believes The Gay can be cured. Except that her poster boy for ex-gayness has just come back out as gay.
As a capstone to all the political madness, Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are calling for a march on October 30, on the same site as the Glenn Beck rally, but a march composed entirely of moderates who hate talking heads. Unless, that is, you want to march because you are sure the country needs to stay in a perpetual state of panic. But it's okay! You can choose either march and switch between the two.
Global warming as a phrase is out, likely because of all the negative baggage attached, and now, the more accurate "Global Climate Disruption" is in. Hopefully, this will silence the surface argument of "But we're getting colder. It's not warming!" and get people to start actually looking at whether or not we're suffering increased climate variance and the damage such variance causes.
We require more information on this, but apparently it is no longer a requirement to be a minority and cooperating with police commands to be shot multiple times because you have a legally registered and properly permitted gun on your person. Mostly, I need information to tell me whether having the concealed carry permit allows you to override store policies, one, and two, what exactly happened there, considering that the objective observers, such as the cameras, have mysteriously not had their footage released.
Last out, a former Los Alamos scientist and his wife were charged with attempting to sell nuclear secrets to Venezuela.
Technology, people! Scientists believe they have found a gene that produces the condition of nearsightedness, and feel confident they can develop treatments for it. The end of glasses for most of the nearsighted? Awesome. Althoguh, that does remove a fashion option, unless one simply wants to wear lenses with no vision correction...and there will always be sunglasses. But for the glasses-girl fanatics, watch out!
CERN's particle accelerators are being taken offline for a year due to budget cuts for the organization. Well, if the LHC is supposed to destroy the world, then we keep managing to avert the timeline where it actually happens.
Studying Westerners' brains and generalizing from them may be the most backwards way of figuring out how the human mind works, as Westerners and Americans are WEIRD when it comes to their brains.
In looking for creativity, it appears that being able to let in more information (ooh, shiny!) is good, but it has to be paired with the ability to separate wheat from chaff. Those who don't exclude inputs can see more, but then they have to be able to pick out the good bits. It's information searching strategy - wandering is reasonably good, but don't get sucked in by TVTropes unless you're trying to trace a particular path, and when you're done, pick out the stuff you need and get rid of the rest. Hoepfully, your search results and pages that you look at have incorporated several accessibility tips into their designs. (I wonder how much the current LJ and DW layout I have fails miserably at that regard.) If you want more, the government has published a PDF of their usability guidelines, based on research practices.
Baby naming takes on an entirely new dimension when it comes to whether or not you want your kid to be easily findable on-line. Unique names make it harder to live down anything bad that happens that gets published on-line, whether its true or not. I wonder if this means more John Smiths or more Zaphod Beeblebroxes?
As a follow-on to a previous Letter of Note, the magazine-mentioned Dalek Blueprints. There are other sites out there that have their own "Build your own Dalek", and they claim to make a more accurate one than the plans linked here.
Last out for today, several other X-Prizes have been awarded, one to Very Light Car No. 98 for breaking the 100MPG equivalent barrier in a four-seater sedan, another to an all-electric two-seater side-by-side car with a 170 mile range and a top speed of 80mph called Wave II, and a tandem two-seater bike that gets 187.6 MPGe called E-Tracer 7002. Concepts, most of them, but they're advancing the science so that we can soon have one of those as a regular vehicle on the roads with us.
In opinions, a prime example of sticking your foot in your mouth, with what looks to be an appeal to civic-mindedness that hits a stumbling block by insisting that assimilation is the only way for minorities to be good citizens of their nation and then falls down a very long pit by saying the Park 51 project shouldn's have been built where it was, because it was going to cause offense to some amount of the majoirty group. The splat you hear is the impact of the comment section pointing out the folly of assimilation-is-the-only way, the historical examples of how the country has treated the people who have tried to assimilate, the way that the native people were only a throwaway line, the necessity of uppity women and other minorities that don't know "their place" [I had originally considered rattling off a list of all the ethnic, racial, gender, and other slurs I could think of to associate with "Don't know their place" as a way of evoking the civil rights struggles of the past and presnt, but decided ultimately that the message might be lost in the choice of verbage.] in making the country better, the progress that has been made by not forcing everyone to assimilate into the dominant culture mold, and the problems of treating Muslims as a group, equating their fringe with their mainstream.
And as for the idea that there is some barrier zone outside of which it is safe to put Muslim houses of worship, as Mr. Olbermann mentioned, after someone finally pointed it out in print, the site that would become Ground Zero had at least one, possibly two, places for Muslims to worship already there, with no complaints, in addition to the worship sites that were only a few blocks away, with no complaints. To say that a minority shouldn't exercise their Constitutional rights in favor of greater harmony with the dominant culture is just as easily an attempt to silence them as it is a request to exercise judgment on the social impacts of a planned event or building.
For a while I was confused as to the context, but then the first commment made it all clear - CNS talks about an interview given by a Muslim soldier to al-Jazeera about how the United States military is rife with anti-Muslim sentiments, which seems out of character for them - they usually are going for birthers, deathers, Secret Muslims, and support-the-troops at all costs sorts of pieces. Once I saw the first comment, thoguh, it made sense - they're not putting this up because they want to make a statement about the anti-Muslim military, they're putting it up because they're inviting their user base to make commentary about how much Islam is The Bloodthirsty Religion, the military is Fighting Those Fanatics, and a Muslim in the service should just suck it up and not complain about the totally justified Muslim hate going on.
For someone going for a much more naked attempt at creating fear of Muslims because they're trying to take over the country and turn it into an Islamic theocracy, try instead this piece that makes nefarious intents out of a memoramdum saying, "Uh, guys? If we work together, we can probably do a lot more to influence people.". You have to already believe the Muslims as conquerors department to follow along, but if you do, it's a very nice pieve. Maybe we can start complaining about the Muslim conspiracy to rule the world? I'm sure that the Illuminati and the Jewish Bankers' Cabal could use a break.
And then, winning a Worst People In The World dishonor, The Portland Press Herald has apologized to its readers for portraying peaceful Muslims celebrating a holiday without providing the requisite column or article about Islam the Bloodthirsty Religion in the name of "balance". Rather than rnat onward about how sorry that is for all parties involved, I'll let someone else elquently point out all the various failures involved in that apology. Just because someone complains about it doesn't make it wrong. (Yes, we know, our biases are showing. We Are Not Unbiased. Learn it well.) One possible benefit - by doing something particularly stupid, hopefully the Press Herald has sparked a debate that will reaise the level of understanding and intelligence in the community around. We can hope, anyway.
On other matters, Mr. Mauro provides his help to build the case that destroying Iran would help American interests in the Middle East, especially Afghanistan, with a stinger on the end of "Stay the course and keep fighting".
Mr. Dowd spends his column talking about how much of a failure the EU is on producing unified policy, that it promotes the wrong things and costs too much, with his point - that the United States should not emulate this example - coming in the last paragraph. Well, the U.S. had it slightly easier in that they're not a confederation of nation-states, but Mr. Dowd seems to have been cherry-picking, I guess, choosing examples that would appeal to a United States person's love to see criminals in spartan conditions and to pay government workers as little as they can.
Ms. Malkin accuses the Obama administration of thuggery in how they choose to combat opponents of the health care bill, by demanding that already profitable businesses justify their rate hikes, that misinformation about the program be stopped in favor of facts, and otherwise trying to get companies to open up about why they do the things they do, so that the people in the United States have a much clearer idea of who's trying to help them and who's trying to screw them over. Naturally, things like these are signs that liberals and progressives want the country to be ruled by bureaucrats and not by laws. More than they already are, that is, and so this latest intrusion has to be fought lest the domino theory become reality.
Speaking of thugs, Mr. Elder says that America doesn't have human rights problems, and even if we did, we certainly shouldn't allow nations like China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia to judge us on them. Because a lack of equal rights for everyone to marry or serve in the military is apparently not a human rights issue, but liberal policy disputes, and SB 1070 is just a bill, instead of an invitation to racial profiling. And They're So Much Worse Over There, so we should just be proud of ourselves and lord it over them, instead of trying to fix our (nonexistent) problems.
Upgrading the thugs to tyrants is Mr. Williams, who claims the increasing fervor against liberals is because the country has woken up to their statist, controlling, government-in-charge agenda and now have the tools, like conservative talk radio, to marshal themselves into a movement and define themselves, rather than feeling isolated and shamed by the mainstream media defining them. I think that Mr. Williams is missing context.
Mr. Taylor turns the focus to economics in decrying the Census as an effective stimulus for the economy. Haaah? A legally mandated temporary set of jobs was supposed to turn us around? That would have been selling more than snake oil, that would have been the Emperor's new clothes. I don't believe anyone was selling that - in fact, they were always careful to separate out Census jobs as not really counting for anything. To then extend that out to meaning that the whole economic policy of the administration is flawed is well past the breaking point of a stretch.
For something slightly more sane, although still twisting things to suit their view, The WSJ is tracking the numbers on how many Senators would favor extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone, name-dropping conservaDems to build the illusion of bipartisanship and thinking that it will be an interesting bloodbath to watch some Democratic Senators in tight races have to make a stand on whether they want to "raise taxes in a recession" and follow "the ideological demands of the President and unions". It's a perverse thing in politics when letting tax cuts expire is equated to actually passing tax increases into law. On the Republican side, Ms. Strassel thinks they should call a Democratic bluff and introduce a bill to extend all the tax cuts so they can have a proper debate that the Republicans will win, mostly because they'll be able to message as above about how the Obama Administration wants to raise taxes on you, working-class person, even though that's not true at all. And actually, to help us illustrate the point, here's a visiting professor of the Inigo Montoya School of Grammar, Mr. Sowell, who says that phrases like "health care" and "the rich" versus "the poor" are misleading, and ends up campaigning for the idea that the government should make medical care more affordable to everyone and that if you really want to tax the rich, you should raise the capital-gains tax and other taxes on non-income wealth a lot instead of thinking about income taxes. I doubt that's what he wanted to do, but the reasoning he provides does lead to both of those conclusions as logical. (He also wants you to believe that the rich and the poor trade places frequently by saying people in the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent shift to each other regularly. Perhaps the bottom part of that 20 percent has some changeover, but not the top.)
Unrelated, I don't think I've seen this much union-bashing in politics for as long as my political awareness has been (so it's not all that long, honestly). Have I been missing the signs or is it because there's a Democrat in the house?
Mr. Fund pens a short column accusing Demcorats, including Speaker Pelosi, of ethics violation in soliciting campaign contributions, and provides as his evidence...one Democrat with a possibly sleazy call, and no quotes of the actual juicy bits of his accusation from the transcript that he apparently has. So, what, we're just supposed to take your word for it? It sounds like something like this should have plenty of generated proof. Provide it.
At the end of our section tonight, Ms. Noonan on why the Tea Party is here, now, and why it's so popular with people - they see the establishment parties as struggling between ultra-liberalism and regular liberalism, without anyone really pulling in the conservative direction on things like spending and budgets. Since they're worried it will soon be too late, now they're fielding candidates that they expect to try and pull toward the "true" conservative marker. The echo on this is Mr. Henninger, who says elected Republicans have to establish credibility on spending if they want a chance in hell of being elected to more than just, say, House control in 2012. The emphasis is a pretty reasonable peek inside the head of someone who believes that the elites and the establishment are doing all of this to enrich themselves and screw you, regardless of which party you support. Which makes sense. Ms. Noonan and Mr. Henninger both gloss over the fact that they're pulling in the conservative direction on all sorts of other issues, too, ones where the conservative position isn't nearly as popular in the mainstream. Where you get columns penned about the great rally against the Park 51 community center that the mainstream media ignored because it didn't fit their narrative, sayinga ccusations of bigotry are merely out-of-touch elites smearing them, while namedropping lots of people that would engender that accusation swiftly, like John Bolton, The Liar Andrew Breitbart, and Geert Wilders. (Plus, an accusation that the Obama Administration isn't defending American values, like, oh, the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom of expression.) They'd rather focus on how much the Democrats don't have a unified message and seem to have no control over the narrative and hope you don't notice all the other things busily being swept under the rug rather than address the issue of where the people stand versus where the rich and the powerful stand.
As the counterpoint to that idea, our guest professor from IMSOG returns with his insistence that liberals are not liberal and conservatives are always situationally-dependent, so we shouldn't use those words to describe anyone. Adding descriptive words is always a good idea, as it allows for a much clearer picture of what you're trying to describe and stops you from using one word to mean another so that you can score political points.
Last for tonight, what happens when you have a brother living in a video game world with the Princess...and the video game world intrudes, just for long enough to make you question it all over again?
Edwin Newman, long time correspondent for NBC news, arrives in the Dead Pool at 91 years of age.
Also, since most of your are Internet-savvy, check out the explanation of several myths of copyright. Especially for the mash-up artists in here, it's worth a look.
Out in the world today, The United Nations has indicated that it may be sending a special inspection to Syria to detemine the truth of that country's nuclear ambitions. Iran came to the defense of Syria, accusing the UN of acting as Israeli pawns in taking false allegations seriously.
Senator Cornyn continues to push for the Justice Department to show that the states are actually in compliance with the laws regarding active servicepeople being able to vote in elections in their home states. Setting aside the validity of his challenge, as disenfranchisement should be stomped out everywhere it is, I wonder if this big push isn't concidental with the fact that we have significant numbers of people overseas that could influence elections if their votes get back in time to be counted.
One hiker home, two more to go, with the possibility that the other hikers might be used as chips to trade Iranians rather than to let them out on their own.
So, the Pope's going out on a tour. Remember, this is the Pope that, as a cardinal, worked against the defrocking of a priest that was convicted of abusing children, delaying his dismissal for almost six years after conviction. Now, as Pope, he's apologetic the church fathers didn't take appropriate measures fast enough - in this context, it sound like he's apologizing that the cover-ups didn't come faster and weren't effective enough. In his remarks in Scotland, to the Queen, the Pontiff decided to disavow the Christianity of Adolf Hitler and complain that atheists are forcing their views on the rest of us and diminishing us all as a result.
Domestically, a pertussis epidemic has claimed nine children so far, with the root cause likely being a lack of vaccinations. Nine children have died from a preventable disease. And there is no sound science to indicate that vaccinations are somehow responsible for anything other than keeping children from dying from preventable diseases.
Comedian Rush Limbaugh commits the first error of middle school research in broadcasting untrue material on Wikipedia without making independent confirmation first. This is the stuff the librarians drill into your head as Reseach 001, Rush - how do you expect anyone to take you seriously after a basic blunder like that?
...then agaaain...considering that the most accurate indicator of how an election turns out is how many television campaign ads are run, which makes the Citizens United decision a futher nodding that the people with the money really do get to buy the elections, just not directly or in ways that are currently illegal.
Plus, It's not just Rush committing Research 001 errors, it's voters trusting things without verifying them and the media outlets that ask voters questions designed to make it seem like they're on serious topics when they aren't.
Candidate O'Donnell, in addition to being anti-self love, believes The Gay can be cured. Except that her poster boy for ex-gayness has just come back out as gay.
As a capstone to all the political madness, Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are calling for a march on October 30, on the same site as the Glenn Beck rally, but a march composed entirely of moderates who hate talking heads. Unless, that is, you want to march because you are sure the country needs to stay in a perpetual state of panic. But it's okay! You can choose either march and switch between the two.
Global warming as a phrase is out, likely because of all the negative baggage attached, and now, the more accurate "Global Climate Disruption" is in. Hopefully, this will silence the surface argument of "But we're getting colder. It's not warming!" and get people to start actually looking at whether or not we're suffering increased climate variance and the damage such variance causes.
We require more information on this, but apparently it is no longer a requirement to be a minority and cooperating with police commands to be shot multiple times because you have a legally registered and properly permitted gun on your person. Mostly, I need information to tell me whether having the concealed carry permit allows you to override store policies, one, and two, what exactly happened there, considering that the objective observers, such as the cameras, have mysteriously not had their footage released.
Last out, a former Los Alamos scientist and his wife were charged with attempting to sell nuclear secrets to Venezuela.
Technology, people! Scientists believe they have found a gene that produces the condition of nearsightedness, and feel confident they can develop treatments for it. The end of glasses for most of the nearsighted? Awesome. Althoguh, that does remove a fashion option, unless one simply wants to wear lenses with no vision correction...and there will always be sunglasses. But for the glasses-girl fanatics, watch out!
CERN's particle accelerators are being taken offline for a year due to budget cuts for the organization. Well, if the LHC is supposed to destroy the world, then we keep managing to avert the timeline where it actually happens.
Studying Westerners' brains and generalizing from them may be the most backwards way of figuring out how the human mind works, as Westerners and Americans are WEIRD when it comes to their brains.
In looking for creativity, it appears that being able to let in more information (ooh, shiny!) is good, but it has to be paired with the ability to separate wheat from chaff. Those who don't exclude inputs can see more, but then they have to be able to pick out the good bits. It's information searching strategy - wandering is reasonably good, but don't get sucked in by TVTropes unless you're trying to trace a particular path, and when you're done, pick out the stuff you need and get rid of the rest. Hoepfully, your search results and pages that you look at have incorporated several accessibility tips into their designs. (I wonder how much the current LJ and DW layout I have fails miserably at that regard.) If you want more, the government has published a PDF of their usability guidelines, based on research practices.
Baby naming takes on an entirely new dimension when it comes to whether or not you want your kid to be easily findable on-line. Unique names make it harder to live down anything bad that happens that gets published on-line, whether its true or not. I wonder if this means more John Smiths or more Zaphod Beeblebroxes?
As a follow-on to a previous Letter of Note, the magazine-mentioned Dalek Blueprints. There are other sites out there that have their own "Build your own Dalek", and they claim to make a more accurate one than the plans linked here.
Last out for today, several other X-Prizes have been awarded, one to Very Light Car No. 98 for breaking the 100MPG equivalent barrier in a four-seater sedan, another to an all-electric two-seater side-by-side car with a 170 mile range and a top speed of 80mph called Wave II, and a tandem two-seater bike that gets 187.6 MPGe called E-Tracer 7002. Concepts, most of them, but they're advancing the science so that we can soon have one of those as a regular vehicle on the roads with us.
In opinions, a prime example of sticking your foot in your mouth, with what looks to be an appeal to civic-mindedness that hits a stumbling block by insisting that assimilation is the only way for minorities to be good citizens of their nation and then falls down a very long pit by saying the Park 51 project shouldn's have been built where it was, because it was going to cause offense to some amount of the majoirty group. The splat you hear is the impact of the comment section pointing out the folly of assimilation-is-the-only way, the historical examples of how the country has treated the people who have tried to assimilate, the way that the native people were only a throwaway line, the necessity of uppity women and other minorities that don't know "their place" [I had originally considered rattling off a list of all the ethnic, racial, gender, and other slurs I could think of to associate with "Don't know their place" as a way of evoking the civil rights struggles of the past and presnt, but decided ultimately that the message might be lost in the choice of verbage.] in making the country better, the progress that has been made by not forcing everyone to assimilate into the dominant culture mold, and the problems of treating Muslims as a group, equating their fringe with their mainstream.
And as for the idea that there is some barrier zone outside of which it is safe to put Muslim houses of worship, as Mr. Olbermann mentioned, after someone finally pointed it out in print, the site that would become Ground Zero had at least one, possibly two, places for Muslims to worship already there, with no complaints, in addition to the worship sites that were only a few blocks away, with no complaints. To say that a minority shouldn't exercise their Constitutional rights in favor of greater harmony with the dominant culture is just as easily an attempt to silence them as it is a request to exercise judgment on the social impacts of a planned event or building.
For a while I was confused as to the context, but then the first commment made it all clear - CNS talks about an interview given by a Muslim soldier to al-Jazeera about how the United States military is rife with anti-Muslim sentiments, which seems out of character for them - they usually are going for birthers, deathers, Secret Muslims, and support-the-troops at all costs sorts of pieces. Once I saw the first comment, thoguh, it made sense - they're not putting this up because they want to make a statement about the anti-Muslim military, they're putting it up because they're inviting their user base to make commentary about how much Islam is The Bloodthirsty Religion, the military is Fighting Those Fanatics, and a Muslim in the service should just suck it up and not complain about the totally justified Muslim hate going on.
For someone going for a much more naked attempt at creating fear of Muslims because they're trying to take over the country and turn it into an Islamic theocracy, try instead this piece that makes nefarious intents out of a memoramdum saying, "Uh, guys? If we work together, we can probably do a lot more to influence people.". You have to already believe the Muslims as conquerors department to follow along, but if you do, it's a very nice pieve. Maybe we can start complaining about the Muslim conspiracy to rule the world? I'm sure that the Illuminati and the Jewish Bankers' Cabal could use a break.
And then, winning a Worst People In The World dishonor, The Portland Press Herald has apologized to its readers for portraying peaceful Muslims celebrating a holiday without providing the requisite column or article about Islam the Bloodthirsty Religion in the name of "balance". Rather than rnat onward about how sorry that is for all parties involved, I'll let someone else elquently point out all the various failures involved in that apology. Just because someone complains about it doesn't make it wrong. (Yes, we know, our biases are showing. We Are Not Unbiased. Learn it well.) One possible benefit - by doing something particularly stupid, hopefully the Press Herald has sparked a debate that will reaise the level of understanding and intelligence in the community around. We can hope, anyway.
On other matters, Mr. Mauro provides his help to build the case that destroying Iran would help American interests in the Middle East, especially Afghanistan, with a stinger on the end of "Stay the course and keep fighting".
Mr. Dowd spends his column talking about how much of a failure the EU is on producing unified policy, that it promotes the wrong things and costs too much, with his point - that the United States should not emulate this example - coming in the last paragraph. Well, the U.S. had it slightly easier in that they're not a confederation of nation-states, but Mr. Dowd seems to have been cherry-picking, I guess, choosing examples that would appeal to a United States person's love to see criminals in spartan conditions and to pay government workers as little as they can.
Ms. Malkin accuses the Obama administration of thuggery in how they choose to combat opponents of the health care bill, by demanding that already profitable businesses justify their rate hikes, that misinformation about the program be stopped in favor of facts, and otherwise trying to get companies to open up about why they do the things they do, so that the people in the United States have a much clearer idea of who's trying to help them and who's trying to screw them over. Naturally, things like these are signs that liberals and progressives want the country to be ruled by bureaucrats and not by laws. More than they already are, that is, and so this latest intrusion has to be fought lest the domino theory become reality.
Speaking of thugs, Mr. Elder says that America doesn't have human rights problems, and even if we did, we certainly shouldn't allow nations like China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia to judge us on them. Because a lack of equal rights for everyone to marry or serve in the military is apparently not a human rights issue, but liberal policy disputes, and SB 1070 is just a bill, instead of an invitation to racial profiling. And They're So Much Worse Over There, so we should just be proud of ourselves and lord it over them, instead of trying to fix our (nonexistent) problems.
Upgrading the thugs to tyrants is Mr. Williams, who claims the increasing fervor against liberals is because the country has woken up to their statist, controlling, government-in-charge agenda and now have the tools, like conservative talk radio, to marshal themselves into a movement and define themselves, rather than feeling isolated and shamed by the mainstream media defining them. I think that Mr. Williams is missing context.
Mr. Taylor turns the focus to economics in decrying the Census as an effective stimulus for the economy. Haaah? A legally mandated temporary set of jobs was supposed to turn us around? That would have been selling more than snake oil, that would have been the Emperor's new clothes. I don't believe anyone was selling that - in fact, they were always careful to separate out Census jobs as not really counting for anything. To then extend that out to meaning that the whole economic policy of the administration is flawed is well past the breaking point of a stretch.
For something slightly more sane, although still twisting things to suit their view, The WSJ is tracking the numbers on how many Senators would favor extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone, name-dropping conservaDems to build the illusion of bipartisanship and thinking that it will be an interesting bloodbath to watch some Democratic Senators in tight races have to make a stand on whether they want to "raise taxes in a recession" and follow "the ideological demands of the President and unions". It's a perverse thing in politics when letting tax cuts expire is equated to actually passing tax increases into law. On the Republican side, Ms. Strassel thinks they should call a Democratic bluff and introduce a bill to extend all the tax cuts so they can have a proper debate that the Republicans will win, mostly because they'll be able to message as above about how the Obama Administration wants to raise taxes on you, working-class person, even though that's not true at all. And actually, to help us illustrate the point, here's a visiting professor of the Inigo Montoya School of Grammar, Mr. Sowell, who says that phrases like "health care" and "the rich" versus "the poor" are misleading, and ends up campaigning for the idea that the government should make medical care more affordable to everyone and that if you really want to tax the rich, you should raise the capital-gains tax and other taxes on non-income wealth a lot instead of thinking about income taxes. I doubt that's what he wanted to do, but the reasoning he provides does lead to both of those conclusions as logical. (He also wants you to believe that the rich and the poor trade places frequently by saying people in the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent shift to each other regularly. Perhaps the bottom part of that 20 percent has some changeover, but not the top.)
Unrelated, I don't think I've seen this much union-bashing in politics for as long as my political awareness has been (so it's not all that long, honestly). Have I been missing the signs or is it because there's a Democrat in the house?
Mr. Fund pens a short column accusing Demcorats, including Speaker Pelosi, of ethics violation in soliciting campaign contributions, and provides as his evidence...one Democrat with a possibly sleazy call, and no quotes of the actual juicy bits of his accusation from the transcript that he apparently has. So, what, we're just supposed to take your word for it? It sounds like something like this should have plenty of generated proof. Provide it.
At the end of our section tonight, Ms. Noonan on why the Tea Party is here, now, and why it's so popular with people - they see the establishment parties as struggling between ultra-liberalism and regular liberalism, without anyone really pulling in the conservative direction on things like spending and budgets. Since they're worried it will soon be too late, now they're fielding candidates that they expect to try and pull toward the "true" conservative marker. The echo on this is Mr. Henninger, who says elected Republicans have to establish credibility on spending if they want a chance in hell of being elected to more than just, say, House control in 2012. The emphasis is a pretty reasonable peek inside the head of someone who believes that the elites and the establishment are doing all of this to enrich themselves and screw you, regardless of which party you support. Which makes sense. Ms. Noonan and Mr. Henninger both gloss over the fact that they're pulling in the conservative direction on all sorts of other issues, too, ones where the conservative position isn't nearly as popular in the mainstream. Where you get columns penned about the great rally against the Park 51 community center that the mainstream media ignored because it didn't fit their narrative, sayinga ccusations of bigotry are merely out-of-touch elites smearing them, while namedropping lots of people that would engender that accusation swiftly, like John Bolton, The Liar Andrew Breitbart, and Geert Wilders. (Plus, an accusation that the Obama Administration isn't defending American values, like, oh, the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom of expression.) They'd rather focus on how much the Democrats don't have a unified message and seem to have no control over the narrative and hope you don't notice all the other things busily being swept under the rug rather than address the issue of where the people stand versus where the rich and the powerful stand.
As the counterpoint to that idea, our guest professor from IMSOG returns with his insistence that liberals are not liberal and conservatives are always situationally-dependent, so we shouldn't use those words to describe anyone. Adding descriptive words is always a good idea, as it allows for a much clearer picture of what you're trying to describe and stops you from using one word to mean another so that you can score political points.
Last for tonight, what happens when you have a brother living in a video game world with the Princess...and the video game world intrudes, just for long enough to make you question it all over again?
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Re: ???
Date: 2010-09-20 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-19 07:15 pm (UTC)