Infinite Monkeys
"...a sparkly blog..." - James Lileks"Read them only with extreme caution."- Hugh Hewitt
Infinite MonkeysNot the old pastor's fault this time. Instead we've got the new pastor charging that Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire tears were sparked by her defeat by -- and I'm paraphrasing the pastor here -- an uppity black man.
I've said before that Obama will probably lose to John McCain in November, and this just confirms it for me. You can't spend your entire adult lifetime associating with a group of people, then ditching them when the spotlight gets uncomfortable. It just looks craven -- particularly when it is craven. If the Scott McClellan brouhaha this week has taught us anything it's that Americans don't like you when you're wrong, but they really hate you when you're disloyal.
One of the more striking lessons from the Democratic primary this year is the revelation of just how shockingly "racist" and "sexist" Democratic voters turned out to be. Who let so many slack-jawed troglodytes into the Party of Progress?
But apart from the obvious conclusion that Americans are simply too hidebound and reactionary to elect a woman or a black man, what does the 2008 election tell us about the state of the world? Mark Steyn mediates on Hillary Clinton's spectacular rise and splendorous fall and explains what it all means:
Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress -- that women's rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet airplane: once invented they can't be uninvented.But that's a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this week -- the York University Federation of Students wants a campuswide ban on any pro-life student clubs. Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only "within a pro-choice realm," as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it.
Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.
On such internal contradictions is the future being built.
Slate on Friday published a fairly scathing report on the Alex Barton story. I detest stupid, mulish, cruel people. Especially "educators" who should know better. Read the document. Realize that some of what Alex describes is likely untrue. I don't believe that Wendy Portillo was physically abusive. I just think that she was badly informed, and taught ignorantly. She then let her ignorance -- so confusing, so comforting -- be subsumed by malice.
And for that, I'm sorry to say, she must be destroyed.
I spent Thursday night and well into Friday morning in a hospital labor-'n'-delivery room, vainly trying to help my wife breathe heroically through some brutal contractions (Lamaze is bullcrap, brothers and sisters). So I had some time to do something I never do: Watch network news. I watched CBS News live at 4:00 Friday morning. It's as shallow and stupid as I remembered. But I did learn that Harvey Korman died, which was a singular bummer. Actually, it was a triple bummer, since I saw basically the same story package three times. (Here's a package of photos of Korman's career at the CBS News website.)
Korman is being remembered as a second fiddle of the first order. But as anyone who watched the old Carol Burnett Show knows, Korman was great because he made the difficult look easy, often absurdly so. The partnership of Harvey Korman and Tim Conway was arguably as great as Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis or Lemmon and Matthau. No joke.
Joel posted a video of one of Korman's iconic scenes from Blazing Saddles. Mel Brooks offered an entirely fitting remembrance: "A world without Harvey Korman -- it's a more serious world... It was very dangerous for me to work with him because if our eyes met we'd crash to the floor in comic ecstasy. It was comedy heaven to make Harvey Korman laugh."
Isabella Celeste arrived at 6:42 a.m., as healthy and a lovely as can be. I haven't slept more than three hours in the past 36, so I'm running on little more than sheer joy and willpower. (I might also take this opportunity to note that Isabella's dad is still looking for work...) Mother and child, however, are doing very, very well.
Photo after the jump...
Colorado's ACLU on Wednesday sued Denver in an attempt to force the city to disclose what equipment the police force is buying for the Democratic National Convention in August, the Rocky Mountain News reports. (The PDF of the complaint is here.)
Specifically, the ACLU wants to know how much Denver cops are spending on "less than lethal" weapons -- stun guns, pepper gas, sonic disruptors, and the like. City officials have been reluctant to say much about how they're spending between $18 and $25 million on equipment. Such disclosure, the city flacks say, "could potentially disclose tactical security information of the Denver Police Department which would be contrary to the public interest."
Oh, baloney.
First, the public has a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent. And the Democratic National Convention is a big deal for Denver. Even under the most peaceful circumstances, the convention is going to be a huge disruption for a lot of people, even as the throngs of delegates, political operatives and press pump tens of millions of dollars into the city's coffers.
Second, how better to discourage the hordes of anarchists, freaks, jokesters, pranksters, vandals, thugs and screwheads than to make clear what will happen when they step out of line in the Mile High City? Talk about deterrence! And the message to city residents and visiting delegates alike would be that no sideshow will distract the nation's eyes from the central business of the convention (which should prove entertaining enough without street fighting).
I've written elsewhere why I think riots at the Denver Convention are unlikely. A preview of what riot control means in the early 21st century could stop trouble before it even hits town. Denver officials should do the right thing and disclose already.
I covered the White House in 2004 and half of 2005 for The Washington Times. So I know Scott McClellan, or at least knew him, on a professional level. He called me by name at many a briefing in the West Wing, a "gaggle" in the press room or on Air Force One, and we've chatted on the sidelines watching Bush at his campaign events in 2004.
I liked him. He was a pretty regular guy. I was happy to hear that his wife was pregnant, that they were buying a house in Arlington (where I lived). It was, frankly, a reminder that these people who are on call -- literally -- 24/7 try mightily to fit a regular life into their very demanding jobs. I still don't know how they do it.
That all said, it was as obvious to me -- working for a "friendly" newspaper in Washington -- as it was to everyone in the White House Press Corps, that Scott was in way over his head as press secretary to the president of the United States. You could never get a straight answer out of the guy on the most basic stuff. Even non-threatening questions, not intended to "trap" him or the White House in an inconsistency, but to simply give the American people some clear talk on the issues, was a fool's errand. Many were the days where I'd leave the press room frustrated that Scott wouldn't directly address the gist of my questions, but would just slip into the company line -- no matter how non-responsive it was.
In short, he was the most incompetent McClellan to hit Washington, D.C., since the Civil War. And at a time of war, Scott's deer-in-the-headlights routine on national television every day did much to harm the war effort. But by his telling in his zooming-up-Amazon memoir, he was simply mouthing war "propaganda." Not doing the important work of explaining to the country the need to fight terrorists overseas. No. Mouthing propaganda.
That McClellan doesn't know the difference only proves his incompetence. Was Washington mouthing "war propaganda" when he was trying to convince his harried troops, a skeptical public and a wavering Continental Congress that a war that looked lost and foolish for almost the entire duration could be won?
Was Lincoln mouthing "war propaganda" when he was trying to continue a war that was mismanaged on the ground worse than the Iraq War by, I dunno, a factor of 1,000? No. They were explaining the need to do a hard, bloody, imperfect, tragic but necessary thing. Scott, obviously, was not up to the job. Or, as it now seems, felt it beneath him.
And that is contemptible. Worse, it is a betrayal -- and not just to his boss, but to his country's war effort, where morale and public perception is vital. It is no secret that the Bush administration's most glaring weakness has been its inability to communicate why we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Scott McClellan, by far, was the most incompetent. And now he has the gall to pass the blame to others. It's like the guy who went 0-12 at bat in the World Series blaming the loss on a guy who drove in 12 runs, but struck out once with a couple of guys on base. Pathetic.
It's especially pathetic and disgraceful when you consider that McClellan has been a Bush insider since 1990 -- which encompasses most of his adult life. He owes his whole career -- the perks, the nice salaries, the public spotlight -- to George W. Bush. As you see from the photo above, Bush went to the trouble to arrange a Rose Garden send off in April 2006 -- the kind of event that becomes a source of family pride that spans generations. Bush must be thinking: Thanks for nothing, jerk. And maybe the president would like to take back these words from that send-off:
One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the Press Secretary. And I can assure you I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, job well done.
But Bush, really, has only himself to blame. He has long valued loyalty over competence. If you're on the team, and you earn his trust, you can do no wrong. That myopic mindset of Bush's was behind his infamous "Heck of a job, Brownie" line after Katrina. And that mindset kept a mediocrity in place as press secretary longer than just about any other in modern history.
As a coda to this opera, I heard on the radio today a quote from a McClellan confidant -- though I haven't bothered to scan the net for corroboration -- that Scott is blaming the rough, accusatory language on his book editors. He apparently claims that the editor, looking for more juice, inserted the kind of language that has Washington in such a twitter.
Typical. To the end, McClellan is passing the buck. I used to be a lonely defender of Scott. No more. What a weasel.
For a humorous take on McClellan's give-away of the White House secret handshakes, check out Jon's Top 10 list of "Surprising Revelations in Scott McClellan's 'Tell-All' Book."
CBS This Morning interviewed Melissa Barton, mom of Alex, yesterday. The video is here. The Treasure Coast Palm has a follow up story on the international attention the kindergartner's case has received.
Clearly, young Alex Barton has problems. It isn't difficult to imagine that his problems very quickly became a problem for his teacher and his classmates. But however Alex might have disrupted his Port St. Lucie, Fla., kindergarten class, his behavior cannot possibly justify the stupid, cruel and vile behavior of his teacher, Wendy Portillo. Kindergarten shouldn't be an episode of "Survivor."
The comments on the CBS story -- running in excess of 750 as I post this -- are illuminating. Perhaps it's not surprising that there is a small but vocal cadre of support for the teacher and against the Bartons. The argument is straightforward, and not without merit: Special needs kids and especially children with learning disabilities should be in separate classrooms, where they can get the attention they need and not be a distraction to other students. It's tough to disagree. But, often, it's a question of limited resources.
The other day, I mentioned the child in my son's kindergarten class with Asperger's. That boy's parents spend thousands of dollars a month on one-on-one aid. Obviously, not everyone can afford that kind of help. What's more, public schools are bound by state and federal law to do everything they can for learning disabled children, including "mainstreaming" those kids in regular classrooms.
But I think a pretty good case can be made that mainstreaming, however well-intended, may not always be the best choice for special-ed kids, especially in public school settings. Alex Barton is undoubtedly a fine young man to whom a terrible injustice has been done. I hope Wendy Portillo is exiled from the classroom forever. Alex deserves better. So do his classmates. They have a right to learn (relatively) free from disruption and he needs special care -- care, clearly, the public schools cannot and may never be able to provide.
Our friends over at Exurban League remind us that today is the 10th anniversary of the tragic death of the comic genius, Phil Hartman. (My wife says that her birthdays have been a little sadder these 10 years thanks to sharing the date.)
Anyway, some classic Phil Hartman clips, starting with the great one Jon at ExUrb selected.
We begin with Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor
Here's Phil on NewsRadio on quitting smoking.
Phil, as NewsRadio's Bill McNeil, conducts "hypothetical interviews."
Phil, as Bill McNeil, proves he can get a radio job anywhere.
And, Chris Farley -- as Matt the Motivational Speaker -- sings goodbye to Phil over video from NewsRadio (apparently, NBC and Fox has removed ALL videos of Hartman doing his bits for SNL and The Simpsons. So no "Troy McLure," no "Sinatra Group," and no "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.")
Rest in Peace, Mr. Funny Man.
This is the way the world ends. No, not with a bang or a whimper, but with the rise of bionic monkeys.
According to Reuters, "Using only its brainpower, a monkey can direct a robotic arm to pluck a marshmallow from a skewer and stuff it into its mouth, researchers said on Wednesday."
Scientists claim their research could reap tremendous medical benefits for humans. "The technology behind this feat may lead to brain-powered prosthetic limbs for people with spinal cord injuries or disabling diseases that make such simple tasks impossible."
Do those eggheads at the University of Pittsburgh really think the monkeys will allow that to happen?
"The monkeys appear to enjoy the task. 'They sure like eating their marshmallows.' Sometimes the team will use pieces of apple, orange or zucchini. 'Just about anything we can that doesn't make too big of a mess,'" a hopelessly naive scientist told the gullible Reuters reporter.
Oh, there will be a mess, alright. A big, bloody mess.
"The researchers must overcome several engineering challenges, including developing more durable electrodes that do not lose their signal over time."
That, and figuring out how to quell a robot-monkey insurrection.
(Hat tip: Banjo man. Pirate-cyborg monkey image lifted from Urkobold.)
No matter who is president come 2009, the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay are numbered. McCain wants to close it. (You can see a video where he says he'll do it on his "first day" as president here.) Hillary wants to close it. So does Obama. Even President Bush has given up on defending what has become the most distorted (lied-about, really) war-time prison in history.
Of course, none of our future presidents talk much about the peril of putting those terrorists in a holding pen on American soil. But opening up ordinary American courts to terrorists -- and giving them all the rights that thieves and tax cheat enjoy -- comes with many terrible complications that will surely hamper this country's ability to defend itself.
But perhaps its time to hear from the terrorists themselves. Because judging from this article in the esteemed magazine Foreign Policy, the terrorists never had it so good at Club Gitmo. At the hotel proper, the terrorists get halal meals, in keeping with their religion. In Hotel Gitmo, U.S. Troops handle the Holy Koran with gloves, lest they soil it with their infidel skin. And they are allowed to pray five times a day, and are aimed toward Mecca so they can stay right with Allah.
That's quite a bit better treatment than Islamists get from other governments -- including those who have made a sport of attacking America's alleged "gulag" in Cuba. Foreign Policy made a list of "the worst places to be a terrorist." Among them:
France: The French actually have some of the world’s toughest and arguably most effective antiterrorism laws. In France, terrorist investigations are overseen by a special unit of magistrates with unprecedented powers to monitor suspects, enlist the help of other branches of law enforcement, and detain suspects for days without charges. Additionally, prosecutors have a mandate to pursue terrorists abroad if the suspect or victim is French. France is also not shy about deporting Muslim clerics it views as threatening.
Hmmm. The connection between "tough" anti-terror laws and their effectiveness seems clear. Good on the frogs! We continue ...
Jordan: Jordan’s intelligence service, the General Intelligence Department, has exploited close ties with Sunni tribes in Iraq’s Anbar province to provide its U.S. and Israeli counterparts with valuable intelligence about the structure and financing on terrorist organizations.
Gee. I hope the Jordanians get warrants for that surveillance. Time for the United Nations to look into that, I guess ...
Egypt: After a wave of terrorist attacks and political victories for the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1990s, Hosni Mubarak’s government opted for a strategy of ruthless repression in combating the threat from terrorism and political Islam.
"Ruthless repression" of terrorists. Nice work, Egypt. Keep it up.
Singapore: After 9/11, the island country strengthened its crackdown on terrorist funding, and it recently passed legislation giving the Army wide-ranging powers to pursue terrorists domestically.
Nice work, that keeps the world safer, from the land of lashes for petty theft.
Russia: Russia has carried out a ruthless campaign of military suppression in Chechnya, and when it hasn’t been attacking militants, it has joined with them by elevating former rebel Ramzan Kadyrov to the presidency of the now largely peaceful region.
From a "ruthless campaign" to a "largely peaceful region." Sounds like extreme measures that make life hard for those who slaughter children in a school house in Beslan, but effective in protecting innocents.
You might notice a nation conspicuously absent from Foreign Policy's list -- the kind of list that the "international community" would condemn.
That nation would be the United States.
Gitmo is a "gulag"? Hardly. More like this:
(HT: Cliff May at The Corner)
The dream is over.
Well, we'll always have Helter Skelter...
Update: The teacher, Wendy Portillo, is on desk duty. You know why? She has a great union. Where's the student union?
I know a kid in my son's kindergarten class with Asperger's. He is, like most people afflicted with the high-functioning form of autism, troubled but brilliant. Even more brilliant than my bright boy. This kid challenges the teacher on a daily basis and even has his own full-time aide. Last week, he tried to punch my very pregnant wife, who runs the school, in the stomach. As I say, troubled. But I cannot imagine for an instant his teacher or my wife even contemplating a stunt like this:
Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.
By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.
...(An official) said the boy had been sent to the principal's office because of disciplinary issues. When he returned, Portillo made him go to the front of the room as a form of punishment, she said.
Barton said her son is in the process of being diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome... Alex began the testing process in February at the suggestion of Morningside Principal Marcia Cully.
Children diagnosed with Asperger's often exhibit social isolation and eccentric behavior.
Click through to the story, by all means. That Alex Barton is a handsome lad. Alex's mom pulled her son out of school, which was the least she could do. She also got the cops involved, which was probably an overreaction. The D.A., rightly, declined to press charges as there were no charges to press.
But that is not to say there shouldn't be some accountability here. "Barton said after the vote, Portillo asked Alex how he felt. 'He said, "I feel sad,"' Barton said." I hope she sues, and sues good and hard. If it were my son, I would want nothing less than to see that teacher dragged through a field of broken glass. Twice.
Bob Barr is the Libertarian Party's nominee for president. Read hundreds -- nay thousands! -- of words on the candidate and the Byzantine politics of certain (principled) defeat here, here and here. Enjoy.
Update: And the Republicans think they have problems? David Weigel reports on the way out of Denver:
Defeated candidate and Massachusetts party chair George Phillies pulled me aside to express how worried he was about the Barr/Root ticket. "This is a train wreck," he said. "My delegation is majority pagan. Nominating this man is the equivalent of nominating an Imperial Wizard of the KKK to lead a party of African Americans." Phillies raised the possibility of a Massachusetts LP convention that would nominate a new candidate at the top of the ticket, like author L. Neil Smith. And as I left, I heard a rumor that Arizona might do the same thing.
A schism within the Libertarian Party ranks could be the difference between .4 and .5 percent of the popular vote. Golly, I hope Barr and his running mate -- some guy named Root -- can work it out.
Some Memorial Day reading:
Honor them.
Caution: Spoiler alerts ahead!
Good lord, the new Indiana Jones movie is boring.
There's lot of individual elements to like in the new movie. Cate Blanchette is hawt in the Boris-and-Natasha getup. Some of the set pieces -- chase scenes, the nuclear bomb -- are quite well done. But the movie mostly creaks along like a 65-year-old man who is willing to go through the motions but secretly desires a nap.
No offense intended.
I sat back last night, trying to figure out where Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas lost their touch.
With Lucas it's easy: First he started thinking about characters as potential sales on the toy shelves of America's stores. (Ewoks.) And then the rise of CGI allowed him to focus his creative energies on making cool-looking things instead of telling great stories using reasonably talented actors. But he has kept making hundreds of millions of dollars in the meantime -- based mostly of fond memories of his output from 1977 to 1980 -- so there's no real reason for him to correct course.
Spielberg is more complicated, because he's been successful along a broader array of genres. But I'd argue that he lost his storytelling instinct about the same time he stopped trusting his audience to fill in the blanks.
Think about Spielberg's earliest successes. In "Duel," Dennis Weaver is haunted by an unseen truck driver. In "Jaws," the shark is more hinted at than seen throughout the movie. In "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," we don't see aliens until the very end -- and then only from afar, really. Even "E.T." left us wanting a little more -- what was E.T.'s culture like? His world? His technology? If you were a movie-watching adolescent in the early 1980s, these were burning questions -- never to be answered. And in two of the first three "Indy" movies, the most important character -- the one without whom there is no action -- is never seen: God.
Spielberg used to be pretty good at letting moviegoers use their imaginations in conjunction with his. And then it all went wrong.
Me: I blame "Schindler's List."
This, of course, was the movie where Spielberg crossed over from being very-talented-and-less-evil Jerry Bruckheimer -- that is, a great entertainer -- into being something more: An Artist With Something To Say. And once Spielberg had something to say, he couldn't leave it to his audience to fill in the blanks anymore: He had to tell them exactly what to think about what they were watching. He had to answer the unanswered questions.
The most false note of "Schindler's List" near the end. The war is over, the Jews under Oskar Schindler's care have been saved. But Schindler -- formerly a womanizing raconteur -- must be bundled off to safety. As he takes his leave, Schindler breaks down: "I could've got more out ... I didn't do enough." Whereupon a number of the surviving Jews rush to comfort him.
Barf. Maybe something like this happened to the real Oskar Schindler. In the context of the movie, though, it feels like Spielberg is hitting us over the head: "See? He's really a good guy now! He didn't just do good things! His soul's been transformed! Be touched, dammit!" And that's before we get to the modern-day epilogue showing Schindler being honored by real survivors and their descendants. You know: Just in case you didn't get it.
Of course it was Spielberg's most-praised movie. And the game was up after that.
"Saving Private Ryan" was a good war movie that became -- for me -- unbearable to watch by virtue of its modern-day epilogue. The aging Ryan pleads with his wife: "Tell me I'm a good man." And they do. Any ambiguity about the nobility of Tom Hanks' death in World War II is thus erased. "See? He really was a good guy! His soul was transformed! Be touched, dammit!"
Again: Barf.
"Artificial Intelligence" is potentially a good and poignant movie if it ends with Haley Joel Osment on the bottom of ocean, staring up at the amusement-park statue for all eternity. Instead, we get a million-year flash-forward in which aliens arrive on earth and grant Osment his fondest wish. "See? He didn't strive for nothing? There was kind of a happy ending after all!"
And so on and so forth until this week, when we get "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." There are problems with the pacing, and also with the special effects: The early "Indy" movies were created to celebrate the Saturday serials of the 1930s, and if the effects of the 1980s were more advanced than the 1930s, they were still related -- models and matte paintings used to create entire worlds.
Now everything is created inside a computer. And there's nothing wrong with that, exactly, except that one gets the sense that Spielberg -- like Lucas -- has stopped applying his storytelling creativity to technical challenges because there are no technical challenges anymore. And perhaps because that muscle now goes unused, so do others in the storytelling arsenal.
Final spoiler alert. Go no further if you don't want to know what happens at the end.
The climax of the newest movie comes with a closeup of an alien -- a cartoonish little CGI device that, with a scowl on its cartoon face, wreaks a very personal vengeance on Blanchette's character. It's expected. It's like something out of a "Men in Black" movie. And it spells out everything, exactly. There are no blanks left to be filled in, no remaining mystery, no unseen hands. Perhaps this wouldn't matter as much if the scene came at the end of an entertaining movie, but I was -- by this time -- bored.
And trust me: That CGI sequence is just going to look silly in 20 years.
A couple of years ago, I wrote the following:
We’ve reached the end of popular culture.Now, I don’t mean that we’re not going to have a popular culture anymore. It just means that, right now, there’s nothing new that pop culture can do — because it’s all been done.
The advent of realistic computer special effects means there’s no scenario that can’t be convincingly depicted on screen: monsters fighting each other, spaceships careening through the void. In pop music, most of the variations on rock and hip-hop seem to have been explored decades ago. Not coincidentally, that’s about the time the term “old school” became words of praise.
And let’s face it, the subject matters of all that pop culture — love and adventure, usually — are pretty much what they were when the Greeks started writing their plays a few thousand years ago.
So, like Michael Jordan in his prime, our producers of culture have to find tricks to keep things fresh, make them interesting. Steven Soderbergh makes a movie using 1940s techniques. The White Stripes let themselves have two instruments only, guitar and drums, and see what they can make of it. Justin Timberlake tries to make a Prince album.
Along the way, the audience is asked to appreciate not just the product that was put in front of it — but also how it was made.
You remember those old Ray Harryhausen movies, like “Clash of the Titans” and “Jason and the Argonauts,” where unrealistic stop-motion creatures battled each other and humans? My prediction: Sometime in the next five years, somebody will make a blockbuster-style movie using those long-dead techniques — and be hailed as a genius for doing so.
Everybody knows that Stonehenge is where a man is a man and the children dance to the pipes of Pan. But who built the damn thing? Nigel Tufnel has a theory...
(Hat tip: Film Drunk.)
Yes, this list from Blender is old -- from 2003 to be exact. So there are probably some adjustments to be made to it. After all, American Idol was barely two years old back then, so Clay Aiken's sure-fire qualification for the list was still in question.
Yet I am not ashamed to say that many bands I like made the list. I know I can't be alone. Here's an often funny rundown of some of the bands Blender thinks are among the worst OF ALL TIME!!! And my humble defenses.
49 TOAD THE WET SPROCKETVery poor name. Even poorer band
“We were together longer than we ever thought we’d be,” said Toad the Wet Sprocket singer Glenn Phillips when the band gave up in 1998. Longer than the rest of us had hoped, too. But the California four-piece defied the odds for 12 years, even piercing the Top 40 with their R.E.M. readymades.
My defense: So it' pop. So its derivative. So what. That's what pop is.
46 THE SPIN DOCTORSBeards. Extended “jams.” Oh dear, oh dear
For a brief time (between 1992 and 1996), it seemed that any workaday bar band, if it was willing to gamely trek around the country for at least three years, had a chance at superstardom (cf. Hootie and the Blowfish, Blues Traveler). Blame the Spin Doctors, hairy New Yorkers who — thanks to the supremely annoying “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes” — momentarily opened a route between dive bars and the Billboard charts.
My defense: This is a band that I was really into before the ubiquitous "Two Princes" violated every sense of public decency (not because it's a terrible song, but because it was played to the point of torture). I still think they're good, and hearing them takes me back to my college days. Screw Blender.
40 BLIND MELONA video made them; heroin undid them
Led by Axl Rose’s mewling, drug-plagued pal Shannon Hoon, Blind Melon’s lightweight rock would have been forgotten completely were it not for the boundless charm of “Bee Girl” Heather DeLoach, whose hoofing in the video for “No Rain” made the tune the band’s lone hit.
My defense: Hard to argue that Blind Melon would have probably been nobodies -- and Hoon still living -- if not for the "Bee Girl." Yet the song was cool. So was the only other decent cut on the record, "Stones of Home." Among the worst bands ever? Hardly.
37 THE DOORSHe was the Lizard King. No, really…
While in college, many young men still choose to immerse themselves in such ill-advised subjects as Nietzsche, black magic and Native American folklore. Most get over it; Jim Morrison, unfortunately, inflicted his terminally adolescent views on the wider world. The consequences included overblown screeds of nonsense such as “The End” and “The Crystal Ship,” plus, effectively, the invention of goth. Then he got fat and died.
My defense: Won't offer one. Just love the last line in that review. Glad to see that someone doesn't buy into the Doors hype. Unless you were (or are) really into drugs, I don't see how you can dig 40-minute organ solos.
34 LIVEThese U2 sound-alikes never did find what they were looking for
Blessed with the same spiritual longing as U2 — but, sadly, none of the musical cunning — this Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, quartet made a brief but insignificant splash in the early ’90s as purveyors of grandiose, vaguely uplifting alt-rock. Although their hold on the mainstream had evaporated by the end of the decade, their blend of loud guitars and portentous lyrics helped pave the way for crypto-Christian rockers Creed. Nice one, Live.
My defense: I wouldn't have thought to have blamed Live for Creed, but that is a sin. I did, and still do, like their "Throwing Copper" album. "White Discussion" is a good jam. But I'm sensing a pattern here: If you made it big as a rock band and were not named Nirvana or Soundgarden ... you suck. Ok, then.
32 THE HOOTERSThe great folk-rock scare
Philadelphians Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian assembled a quintet that specialized in a vile blend of folk-rock and New Wave, in the process proving that the mandolin is more irritating than the synthesizer.
My defense: I post this only so my went-to-high-school-in Philly wife will read it -- and get mad. C'mon, though. "And She Danced" is a goofy, 80s pleasure. Isn't it? Isn't music supposed to be fun? (Though the Hooters were a real buzz-kill with the morbid "All You Zombies."
28 CRASH TEST DUMMIESThey said Brad Roberts’s voice was so deep it could be heard only by whales. Not true, sadly
If you want to be recognized as serious recording artists with a whimsical, folksy bent, it’s probably best not to notch your only hit with a daft novelty song based around the world’s silliest lead vocal and title it “Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm.” The remainder of God Shuffled His Feet, this Canadian band’s second album, was much worse. They released I Don’t Care That You Don’t Mind in 2001. No one cared.
My defense: I still like that humming song. It's a novelty, yes. But why do all novelty songs have to be played by Weird Al on the accordion? And are Crash Test Dummies really worse than No. 36: 98 Degrees? God, no.
22 PRIMUS“Care for some prog-rock with cartoon-character vocals on the side?” “No, thanks!”
Perhaps the most tune-free act ever to chart an album in the Top 10 (Pork Soda hit number 7 in 1993), Oakland, California’s Primus were led by Les Claypool, a bass virtuoso and startlingly nasal vocalist. Musicians and the terminally nerdy gaped in wide wonder at the trio’s prodigious instrumental “chops”; everyone else was repulsed by the band’s combination of the worst aspects of Frank Zappa and Rush.
My defense: I guess Primus gets no points for trying to have fun. They get the last laugh, though, for doing the theme song for "South Park." And everyone knows that one. It's like the anti-theme song.
20 HOWARD JONESHe came from England. Thanks, England
In the mid-’80s, it was difficult to avoid synth-wielding Brits. The sprig-haired, perma-grinning Howard Jones was the most irritating, seemingly convinced that he had something very important to tell the world — his 1984 debut was grandly titled Human’s Lib — but unclear exactly what it was.
My defense: Another one to get Mrs. Zaius to throw poo at the computer. "Things Can Only Get Better" has a great horn riff that I'm shocked isn't sampled to death.
16 OINGO BOINGOArtless art-rock
Oingo Boingo singer Danny Elfman went on to become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand soundtrack composers. But during his first go-round, he and his movie-director brother led this ostentatiously orchestrated L.A. New Wave group that began its pretentious career, not surprisingly, as a performance-art troupe.
My defense: Wrong. Simply, wrong. Danny Elfman is a musical genius. Listen to the stuff he wrote 25 years ago for that band -- a New Wave pop band. The arrangements are simply stunning. And he also pulled off the tough trick of writing catchy melodies over the beautiful mess. Hell, he wrote "The Simpsons" theme song shortly after Oingo Boingo's hey-day. Listen hard to that one, and try to figure out how you'd play it. It's hard, and still brilliant after all these years. This listing is an abomination. Boooooooo!!!
And, really, I can't argue with much else. Have at it, team!
In the Brave New World when robots are our servants and super-smart monkeys pilot shuttles to colonies orbiting the Earth, a much less exciting and glamorous innovation awaits: Turning our urine into drinking water. I don't recall seeing such a device in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It seems even this innovation eluded Kubrick's creative mind.
Astronauts living on the International Space Station soon will take recycling to new extremes: They'll get some of their drinking water from the toilet.NASA has spent decades perfecting a system to transform urine into water that can be used in space for drinking, food preparation and washing. Agency officials say the water from the system will be cleaner than U.S. tap water.
Maybe cleaner than the tap water in Los Angeles or New Jersey. But I'll take a bet that drinking water in Lawrence, Kansas, is cleaner. Taxpayers will be happy to learn that NASA scientists have spent $250 million developing a system to turn pee into Evian. They might have saved a few bucks by hanging out at college bars to collect test samples. Oh, well.
But here is one of the least shocking elements to this story:
Russia developed a similar system in the 1980s but it never flew in space because of concerns over crew squeamishness, says former station astronaut Leroy Chiao, now a space consultant. He says station crews expect hardships and aren't likely to object.
Invent a machine to turn pee into vodka? The Russkies will be selling it by the case.
The BBC reports that the Web is transforming into a poor, nasty, brutish and short Hobbesian wasteland. Or something.
From the story:
The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.
Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.
Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.
Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.
This isn't a surprise, really. When I'm working, I'm one of these users -- on task, for the most part, hunting down the documents I need. Now addicted to high-speed Internet, I get impatient with slow loads. But when I'm not working, I linger. StumbleUpon, the blogger's best friend, can be an enormous time-waster, for example -- in the best possible sense, I mean.
In the context of this story, what I really want to know is this: How did Infinite Monkeys manage to become the top Google stop for the term "old lady beatdown"? And why do we get three or four visits a day just from searches for that term? What are you people looking for? Really? Really?
If it were the Summer of Rum -- and it isn't -- then I would link without reservation to Eric Felten's article in the Wall Street Journal on Ernest Hemingway's love for rum drinks, especially the daiquiri. Whoops. Looks like I linked to it anyway. The daiquiri is one of those great drinks that's been ruined by time, cheap booze and what I would call the Slurpefication of cocktails.
Any other year, I would make a stronger case for the classic Hemingway daiquiri. I'll leave it instead to Felten, who always entertains and educates. We learn, for example, that "Hemingway allowed no sugar in his Daiquiris. His Doble-drinking hero in the posthumously published 'Islands in the Stream' declares that what makes him love to drink is 'drinking these double frozens without sugar.' Part of the reason Hemingway abjured sweet drinks was that it was harder to put them away in quantity: 'If you drank that many with sugar it would make you sick.'"
Did Papa know best? As it's the Summer of Gin, I really can't say. What gin drink beats a daiquiri? I would recommend an Aviation: 2 oz. gin, 1/2 oz. maraschino liqueur, 1/4 oz. lemon juice, cherry garnish. (Recipes can and do vary, however.) A great, refreshing (non-rum) cocktail for a hot afternoon.
Following is cross-posted from Cup O' Joel, where it already received my best geeky celebrity comment ev-ah.
I don't believe for a second that Hillary Clinton, by invoking RFK's assassination, was somehow offering public hopes that a similar fate would somehow befall Barack Obama. I trust she meant what she said: That RFK was merely a marker that presidential nominating contests have a history of going into June.
It's still not a great comparison to make. Presidential contests used to revolve around slavery too, but it would be silly to be running on an anti-slavery plank in 2008.
What do I mean? This: In 1968, there were primary elections -- but they weren't really meaningful, because everybody knew that all the real action would take place in the proverbial "smoke-filled back rooms." Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination in 1968 without entering a single primary -- and that was his strategy.
So it was different historical moment -- today we expect caucuses and primaries to decide these things, which is why conventions aren't fun to watch anymore -- and thus silly for Clinton to dredge up.
For what it's worth, I'm about half-through with Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland," and though it does have its goofy moments, it's valuable as a corrective to all the RFK hagiography that's gone on since his death -- and which we'll certainly be treated to next month. Even in his final months, RFK was no saint -- he was as dithering and calculating a politician as you could hope to find. Better than what we got? Probably. But a saint? Hardly.
No surprise, really, that the Democrats weren't entirely serious in 2006 about abruptly ending the U.S. presence in Iraq. There are promises and then there are fantasies. Now the Hill alerts us to a video in which Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., gives away the game:
In a video , posted to YouTube on Thursday, Kanjorski reflects on the Democrats’ approach to the war in 2006 and said they pushed the rhetoric “as far as we can to the end of the fleet — didn’t say it, but we implied it — that if we won the congressional elections, we could stop the war.“Now, anybody who’s a good student of government would know it wasn't true,” he said. “But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress — we sort of stretched the facts.”
Republicans, for some reason, want Kanjorski to apologize, but I can't quite understand why. Wouldn't the better response be along the lines of "We told you so?" Or would that be unseemly?
Predictably, Kanjorski is backpedaling. “In an August 2007 town meeting, I shared the frustration of my constituents that the war in Iraq continued," he said. "I expressed my belief that some Democrats in 2006 overestimated the ability of a single house of Congress to end the war, particularly in the face of an intransigent President and Senate Republicans who are committed to continuing the war."
Excuses, excuses.
The reviews of Hollywood's can't-MoveOn thriller "Recount" are trickling in. NRO's Byron York got a look at the movie, which I note in this updated post. York's take is funny, but he also spoke with Republican attorney Ben Ginsberg, who consulted the producers and is a key character in the film. They apparently didn't listen to much of what he told them.
"My take is that we won the recount, and they won the movie," Ginsberg told [York]. "I think they actually did a very good job of capturing the tension and the pace of what we were going through, but it's clearly from the Democrats' perspective. This is a fairy tale that didn't come true for them.""I think there were some key things that were left out," Ginsberg continued. "For example, there's no mention at all of the first U.S. Supreme Court case, which overturned the first Florida Supreme Court case, and then the Florida Supreme Court completely ignored the U.S. Supreme Court….They also made of big deal of 'We don't know who won,' but they didn't mention the media recount, which concluded that if you followed what the Gore camp wanted or what the Florida Supreme Court ordered, then Bush won….And the notion that they were a bunch of boy scouts and we were the cutthroats is just nonsense. They didn't want to count all the votes, they only wanted to count Gore votes."
Ho hum. Big surprise. I'm also tickled by Entertainment Weekly's review of the movie. They give it an A-minus. The director who brought you the Austin Powers trilogy has crafted a "cunning drama" with a "clever script" and "tenterhooked" score (whatever that means) that creates a "perfect mimicry of these public events."
Except when they are not so perfect.
Despite its ''equal time'' approach, Recount is an underdog story, and thus a Democrat story. While George W. Bush, like Gore, is only vaguely glimpsed, the remaining Republican players here are coolly calculating — Tom Wilkinson's James Baker III, the Bush team quarterback — or they teeter on the edge of madness, like Laura Dern's Katherine Harris. ... Fair? Debatable, but like Recount, it's a gorgeous bit of political theater.
And Hollywood can't make satisfying political theater unless they distort events to portray Republicans as power-mad mustache-twirling schemers and Democrats as haloed champions of truth and light. I'd guess a fair treatment would have only lowered the movie's letter-grade review.
The only thing left that I need to know about this movie is who played this unforgettable character?
The Texas polygamy case has always been, well, icky. I don't advocate that lifestyle, as I made clear in my defense of traditional marriage a while back. Perhaps I'd feel differently if any of the ladies above were as cute as Kelly McGillis in Witness ....
Where was I? Oh, yes. I was getting to how I was as disturbed with what be going on in that religious sect's compound as I was with the Texas government's reaction to it. Namely, the state's move to take 440-some kids into its possession on what seem to have been flimsy grounds. It struck me as extreme. Turns out, it struck a Texas appeals court as extreme, too.
SAN ANGELO, Texas - In a ruling that could torpedo the case against the West Texas polygamist sect, a state appeals court Thursday said authorities had no right to seize more than 440 children in a raid on the splinter group's compound last month.The Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the state failed to show the youngsters were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action.
Now, maybe those children are being abused, as the state alleges. But the ability of the government to remove nearly 500 children from their parents -- who no doubt, love them -- in a single stroke via an anonymous tip without any apparent serious review of the case seems somehow wrong. And I'm glad the court said so, but not everyone agrees.
That said, I hope the case doesn't die and that a real investigation into the welfare of the minors in that compound is conducted. And if abuse is exposed, remove the children and prosecute the adults. But its not a bad thing that a court declared that the power to break up families and spirit humans away should not be as strongly and swiftly imposed by any government.
Just so you know. It's on his Web site.
Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex MarriageObama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.
Even Hillary doesn't advocate repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, which her husband signed.
Note in that story how many Democrats run from Obama position on this issue. Interesting.
Dennis Prager's radio show is always worth listening to. It's especially good when he spends time debating a liberal. He spent a whole hour Thursday debating Arianna Huffington with the pretense letting her flack her latest book bashing everyone who disagrees with her in the most disingenuous ways possible.
It's worth listening to the whole podcast. Points for her venturing beyond Air America (if it's still on the air). But during the interview, Arianna claimed that she has a "zero tolerance" policy about comparing political opponents to Nazis. Well, either her blog servants are falling down on the job, or she's a liar. (Yeah. I know. It's hard to find good help these days.) It took me 15 seconds of searching the Huffington Post to find this headline on a post by someone called Larisa Alexandrova:
All the President's Nazis (Real and Imagined): An Open Letter to Bush
That blog post was put up on her site seven days before her Prager interview. If I felt like taking more than 15 seconds to prove this dishonest, pampered pseudo-intellectual wrong, I'm sure I'd find more examples. OK I'll do it.
Listen to the podcast. Dennis was waaaay to kind to the George Soros glamorous but still ugly step sister.
It's one thing to be generous and respectful to the ailing Teddy Kennedy, as this site has been. One should not be quick to speak ill of the dead, or even the dying. Yet it is time to draw the line and deny a man who has lived a richer life than most his dying wish: Keeping his U.S. Senate seat in the Kennedy family.
Ted Kennedy has made clear to confidants that when his time is up, he wants his Senate seat to stay in the family - with his wife, Vicki.Multiple sources in Massachusetts with close ties to the liberal lion say his wife of 16 years has long been his choice to continue carrying the family flame in the Senate. Kennedy won the seat in 1962; his brother John held it from 1953 to 1960.
"There's no question that he'd like Vicki to continue in his seat," said one Massachusetts Democrat with ties to the Camelot clan who spoke to Kennedy recently, before his health crisis.
"She's smart, and smart politically."
Maybe she is. But can't we finally end the dynastic Kennedy rule over most of New England and the nation? It's bad enough that the Kennedys seem to think it is their birthright to serve high elective office. Now we have our media-dubbed "political royalty" wanting to pass their offices down to married, rather than blood, kin. Are we to believe that the state of Massachusetts is lacking a single better-qualified Democratic candidate than Teddy's wife?
Enough. Kennedy's seat has been held by him and his brother for all but two of 55 years. That two-year interregnum was filled by a "place holder" who stepped down as soon as Teddy was old enough, legally, to serve in the Senate. That's right, Ted has been a U.S. Senator since nearly the very moment he was eligible.
The world's most successful democracy is not well-served by indulging the carrying of any "family flames" in our government. That is among the defining features of banana republics. Teddy would do a final service to his country by not publicly presuming that his U.S. Senate seat belongs to the Kennedy clan.
Oops. Turns out, President Bush vetoed a slightly different bill from the one Congress passed. But don't go pointing fingers at the president. Congress somehow forgot to send Bush about 34 pages of the bill.
According to the Associated Press:
In order to avoid those potential problems (i.e., constitutional questions over what the legislative branch passed vs. what the executive vetoed) House Democrats hoped to pass the entire bill, again, on Thursday under expedited rules usually reserved for unopposed legislation. The Senate was expected to follow suit. The correct version would then be sent to Bush under a new bill number for another expected veto... Lawmakers also will have to pass an extension of current farm law, which expires Friday.
Congress should see the blunder as a kind of gift. Second chances don't come around too often. Especially second chances for blinkered Congressional Republicans who now may have second thoughts about their votes from the first time around. Republicans could kill this beast after all.
If they had any nerve, or any sense, that is.
When Congress isn't giving away hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to agriculture interests, they're grilling oil executives about their salaries and quarterly earnings. It's strange. Powerline has a thorough run-down of today's farcical hearings on oil prices and oil company profits. Read the excerpts and despair. No, it's better to laugh to keep from crying.
There are a few salient issues here that go well beyond simplistic talk of high gas prices and "obscene" oil company profits. Understanding profit margins, for starters. Oh, and don't forget that pesky law of supply and demand. It's a concept that reporters and senators alike have trouble getting their minds around. According to USA Today's story, "Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the executives there's 'a disconnect' between normal supply and demand and the skyrocketing price of oil that the industry has yet to explain."
It isn't up to the oil industry to explain it. Leahy could have looked left and right for an explanation. Poor public policy, a weak dollar, and, yes, high demand around the globe is driving the price of oil skyward.
One solution, but not the only one, is entirely in the hands of guys like the gentleman from Vermont. We need to do more exploration in Alaska, off the coast of California, in the Gulf of Mexico. We need to be extracting from shale in the northern plains. We need to be pumping natural gas. Hell, we should be drilling through live caribou, if necessary.
Naturally, Investor's Business Daily has a perfectly sensible, spot-on take about Wednesday's laughable inquisition:
"Do market forces alone explain the skyrocketing price of oil and gas?" (Sen. Herb) Kohl wondered. We'll take that one: No, senator, market forces alone don't explain it; congressional incompetence does.Of the "solutions" Congress has pushed — including limits on CO2 output, windfall profit taxes, restrictions on drilling on public lands and, most recently and absurdly, suing OPEC — all lead to less oil and higher prices.
We agree our economy could do more to save energy. And with oil prices over $130 a barrel, it will. (Indeed, U.S. oil use this year is down 2.2% from 2006.) That said, the main solution should be to drill for more oil and gas on our own territory. Billions of barrels and trillions of cubic feet await.
Leahy and his Democratic colleagues wanted to make an example of greedy oilmen. Instead, they looked like idiots. They're part of the problem. And yet they're winning. And we're paying.
A new HBO movie, "Recount," premieres Sunday -- right in the heart of Memorial Day weekend. That's a fitting time to air the movie, since Democrats will apparently mourn the loss in the "stolen" election in Florida the way others mourn the loss of war dead.
Never forget! (sob, sniff, wimper) Always mark the day of Karl Rove's coup!
Boo hoo, losers.
Anyway, it's an all-star cast, with most of the actors made up to be spitting images of the people they portray. Laura Dern has enough eye makeup on to, well, look a lot like Katherine Harris. Ed Begley Jr. looks just like Democratic power lawyer David Boies. And the chamelon-like Tom Wilkinson even nails James Baker's oft-photographed stern facial expression.
Only Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary look like, well, themselves.
I'm not going to watch the movie. And wouldn't even if I had HBO. It's time, as some smarty pants liberals said back in the '90s, to move on.
Director Jay Roach promises to deliver an even-handed look at the Florida debacle. I don't believe him. The movie's web site lets you vote on the question: "Who really won the 2000 Presidential Election?" And it snidely asks you to "Cast Your Ballot. We promise to count it this time."
Ha ha. I'm guessing the producers of this movie aren't going to note that Gore didn't want to count every ballot, but only those in heavy Dem areas. And that the Gore team put out a memo on how to throw out mostly Republican military ballots arriving from overseas (The Dems backed down under intense public pressure).
Nah! The baddies, I'm guessing, will all be on the "red" side. Typical Hollywood.
But a fun activity is taking the challenge put forth by the Sun-Sentinel newspaper and trying to cast your vote with a replica of the 2000 butterfly ballot. You know, the "confusing" ballot that (ahem!) Democrats designed?
I tried it and was congratulated for voting for correctly. Thanks guys. I also managed to tie my own shoes this morning. Can I get an atta-boy for that, too?
UPDATE: Byron York got a look at an advance screening of Recount. And -- SURPRISE! -- my instincts were corrrect:
Once upon a time there was an election. A very good man won the election, but it was really, really close, and a very bad man claimed that he had won the election. And a group of brave, strong people tried to recount the votes to prove that the very good man had won the election, but they were so high-minded and good that they just wouldn't fight dirty, while a group of cruel, mean people would do anything to stop the counting so that the very bad man could win. When the counting got under way, the very bad man's lead got smaller and smaller, and the very good man was about to win until a group of very, very, very bad people in Washington DC stopped it all, and the very bad man won. The end.
Heh.
Update: Well that didn't take long. "The House has overridden President Bush's veto of a $290 billion farm bill and senators soon may follow suit. It was only hours before the House's 316-108 vote Wednesday that Bush had vetoed the five-year measure." Disgraceful.
...
President Bush did the right -- and really obvious -- thing today by vetoing the $307 billion monstrosity that is the "Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008." Alas, Congress appears set to override Bush's veto. "This is really a farm bill for everyone," said Sen. Tom Harken, D-Iowa. Yes. There is plenty of pork to go around.
Actually, the term "pork" doesn't do the legislation justice. The bill is a sickening giveaway to agri-business at the expense of middle-class taxpayers at a time when grocery bills are creeping ever higher. But is it really any wonder, coming from a Congress that has no grasp whatsoever of the law of supply and demand? As the Wall Street Journal's editors observed on May 14, just after the House overwhelmingly passed HR 2419 with a bipartisan vote of 318 to 106:
Nearly every crop -- corn, wheat, sugar -- has won increases in subsidy payments even as farm commodity prices explode... Of the 17 most subsidized commodities, only rice and cotton will get a slight reduction in payments, while the bill extends the farm welfare net to lentils, chick peas, fruits and vegetables, and even organic foods. There are new programs for Kentucky horse breeders and Pacific Coast salmon fishermen, and your tax dollars will help finance the dairy industry's "Got Milk?" campaign. Oh, and you still don't even have to farm to cash in. Hundreds of millions of dollars will go to landowners based on their "historical planting average" even if they haven't planted a seed in years.And once again the big sugar plantation owners in Florida walk away with the sweetest deal: Big Sugar bagged an increase in price supports and a guarantee of 85% of the domestic sugar market at these guaranteed prices. So taxpayers are on the hook for buying surplus domestically produced sugar at 23 cents a pound and selling it for ethanol for closer to three cents a pound.
Say what you want about John McCain, but he got this one right and for all the right reasons. Meanwhile, Republicans are struggling to understand why they're losing. Here's a $300 billion clue why McCain's GOP colleagues will continue to lose, and lose big: You can't blame the Democrats for out-of-control spending when you're joining them at the trough.
Yeah. Seriously.
Bangkok - The United Nations will send nearly a quarter of a million condoms into cyclone-hit Myanmar to help needy survivors with no access to contraceptives, a UN official says.So far, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said it had sent 72 800 condoms to survivors struggling to maintain their family planning after the storm hit in early May.
A total of 218 400 condoms would be delivered, UNFPA aid advisor Chaiyos Kunanusont said.
"We don't want regular use of contraception disrupted. An emergency usually damages the health system, so people don't have access to condoms and contraceptives," said Chaiyos.
The U.N. is so dysfunctional, they can't get food and doctors into Burma to help the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of suffering people. But their priority in "medical care" is Operation Condom Drop. Wouldn't want the Burmese to produce more suffering children, now would we?
And Bush's FEMA is held up as the international poster child of screwed up disaster response. Sheesh.
(HT: K-Lo at The Corner)
No. That is not me going overboard in my description of the House of Representatives’ most radical, rude and liberal member. If you Google “Pete Stark” and “disgrace” you get nearly 10,000 hits. So I’m hardly alone in applying that label.
Indeed, Fortney “Pete” Stark’s record of being a contemptible ass in his official capacity as a member of Congress is long and distinguished.
And here is the latest classless stunt from the representative from a suburb of San Fran-Sicko.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An anti-war Democratic congressman is demanding to know why there were uniformed Defense Department personnel watching House proceedings from a public gallery Thursday, who they were and what they were doing."If they were here on official duty, this was an abhorrent misallocation of our military resources at a time of war," Northern California Rep. Pete Stark asserted Friday in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
"At a time when our nation is at war, our troops are overextended, and the administration is literally asking for emergency military spending, what good to the 'war on terror' is having U.S. generals and other top-ranked officers — who were likely accompanied by staff and escorted by their chauffeurs — spending hours sitting in the gallery of the House of Representatives?" Stark asked.
Stark’s insulting letter is soaked in so much ignorance and sanctimony that it is, literally, breathtaking. Who is Stark, in the words of the AP headline, to “question” the “presence” of military officers in the public gallery of the House of Representatives? Who is Stark -- who has done nothing to protect America from the terrorist threat -- to say that these military men had better be observing on their "own time" the Congress they risk their lives to protect? How dare he all but spit “Get lost baby killers!” while demanding answers to his asinine, bad-faith questions:
Please provide for me the name, rank, branch, and duties of each of these officers, as well as the number of additional staff and drivers that were used to facilitate their attendance yesterday. I would like this information by Monday, May 19.
Stark, whom Barack Obama put in his endorsement quiver this month, didn’t have to wait until May 19. The Pentagon wrote and delivered their response to Stark within hours. As it turned out, the 20-some men in military uniforms that made Stark so angry, were students at the Army War College. And Stark’s response to the truth -- something he could have learned himself simply and honorably by sending a House page up to ask -- was in tune with his typical condescension.
"I appreciate the swift response," Stark said in his follow-up statement, without retracting or apologizing for his earlier complaints. "However, if these officers were hoping for a lesson in how Congress ought to work, then perhaps the Iraq supplemental wasn't the best debate for them to witness."
No, that’s the exact debate for them to witness. Because undermining the military, its mission and our national security are the hallmarks of this Democratic Congress. They continually play games with bills to support the troops on the front lines. They refuse to give the federal government the tools to prevent another 9/11. They can’t even be bothered to demand that Stark raise his maturity level above that of a 3rd grader -- let alone issue a resolution of censure against him or merely ask him to apologize. But we’re supposed to believe that anti-war clowns like Stark and his enablers in the Democratic Congress “support the troops.”
I’m amazed that military exceeds its retention goals when our troops know they are risking their lives to protect the hides and freedom of scumbags like Stark.
Go to Hell, you jerk.
(HT: McQ at Q&O and Brian Faughnan at The Weekly Standard)
Doctors announced today that Sen. Ted Kennedy's seizure on Saturday was caused by a malignant tumor on his brain. The prognosis is typically for a patient to survive such a condition for between one and five years.
I interviewed Ted Kennedy on several occasions outside the Senate chamber when I covered Congress for The Washington Times. I was always struck by how much shorter he was than I imagined. And he walked as briskly as he could with a noticible stoop -- half hunched over. That couldn't have been comfortable.
Kennedy wasn't the rudest senator I ever stopped to ask questions of (that's Ted Stevens, R-AK, hands down). Nor was he the most kind (it's a tie between Sam Brownback, R-KS, and Mark Pryor, D-Ark.). But he was congenial enough and gave you quotes you could use. And there was also a sense that you were speaking to a living political legend -- which is undeniable, no matter how much I disagreed with his views and political tactics.
My prayers go out to him and his family today. It is a terrible thing to watch your body break down.
...and John McCain ain't him.
Georgia Republican Party chairwoman Sue Everhart said Saturday that the Arizona senator and the GOP's presumptive nominee "has a lot in common with Jesus Christ."
"John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross," Everhart said as she began the second day of the state GOP convention. "He never denounced God, either."
Perhaps taking a lead from their presumptive bossy nominee, the Democratic National Committee has decreed that attendees at the convention are not to consume fried foods. Nor are they to drink bottled water.
That's not all. Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi descended from Mount Freakshow with more commandments:
Plates must be reusable, like china, recyclable or compostable. The food should be local, organic or both.
Mmmmm. Can't you just taste the boiled free-range chicken with a side of organic okra and arugula served conveniently on your outstretched hand?
But wait, there's more. Democrats, in a bow to diversity, have mandated what colors the food must be at 22 sanctioned party events.
And caterers must provide foods in "at least three of the following five colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white," garnishes not included, according to a Request for Proposals, or RFP, distributed last week.The shrimp-and-mango ensemble? All it's got is white, brown and orange, so it may not have the nutritional balance that generally comes from a multihued menu.
"Blue could be a challenge," joked Ed Janos, owner of Cook's Fresh Market in Denver. "All I can think of are blueberries."
Well think harder, fella. Or hope that food coloring isn't also outlawed so you can add it to that boiled chicken. I'm no professional caterer, but my list of blue foods runs from those blue tortilla chips, Bleu Cheese and, um, that's about it. Purple potatoes might cut it, unless they've been genetically modified. Sooooo, probably not.
And about that "locally grown" mandate. It's also problematic.
"I think it's a great idea for our community and our environment. The question is, how practical is it?" asks Nick Agro, the owner of Whirled Peas Catering in Commerce City. "We all want to source locally, but we're in Colorado. The growing season is short. It's dry here. And I question the feasibility of that."
Boiled free-range chicken it is, then. Democrats sure know how to party!
Kevin at Exurban League has lots of fun with this subject, too:
There goes the Latino Vote (no chimichangas, flautas or churros), and the Black Vote and Asian Vote as well.
Heh.
(HT: Mark Hemmingway at The Corner.)
We’re slowly learning what Obama means by getting the “world community” to like us. And Michelle Obama’s bizarre statement from February that “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual” is also coming into clearer focus.
Our lives as usual — if they include driving the vehicle of our choice and setting the thermostat to our desired comfort level — will have to change in the America our new Great Leader.
“We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said. “That's not leadership. That's not going to happen.”
So, leadership, to Obama, is bossing Americans around to satisfy European bureaucrats. Leadership, to Obama, is ignoring the fact that the SUV-driving, AC-cranking United States has a better record on reducing carbon emissions than the Kyoto fetishists of Europe.
This would be a great issue for John McCain to exploit in the campaign. Pity that he, too, has drunk the Green Kool-Aid and can’t call out Obama on this nonsense.
An eminent climate scholar, who is in his spare time serves as the useless Prince of Wales, warned the world today that it has 18 months to stop climate change disaster. And by save the world, Charles means tax us all to oblivion and spend it on government programs.
In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual programme was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences."We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall," he said.
"We are asking for something pretty dreadful unless we really understand the issues now and [the] urgency of them." The Prince said the rainforests, which provide the "air conditioning system for the entire planet", releasing water vapour and absorbing carbon, were being lost to poor farmers desperate to make a living.
Fifteen billion pounds a year might not seem like a lot to you, prince. But it's more than a few quid pocket change to the rest of us.
Oh, and poor farmers are clearing the rainforest like never before to make crops for ethanol -- the real environmental disaster the green weenies have, so far, managed to bring about through their mindless activism.
Mark it down. The end of the world arrives on Nov. 18, 2009 — just in time to give thanks over a turkey and kiss our planet goodbye. Or not.
If you're an NBA fan, and have followed the Tim Donaghy gambling referee scandal, you'll get a chuckle out of Exurban League's quick take (with funny art) on the latest developments.