Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
Over at The Mudville Gazette, Grayhawk gives a pictorial fisking to Daily Kos‘ protest march do’s and don’ts. The t-shirt one is particularly funny.
Pay attention, as well, to the sparse nature of the “crowd”. This “100,000 marched on Washington” is going to become another discredited, but immortal, left-wing meme (I just heard it again on Meet the Press). Honest accounts from the ground are putting the number at well less than 10,000.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Jeff Goldstein tears apart a highly biased AP story on the anti-war protests here. But the most telling item is this comment from his reader, Randolph Resor:
This is not only a biased article, it’s also a “fisking”. This was posted on the Washington Post’s Web site at 11 AM today (Saturday), although it’s datelined tomorrow (Sunday). The author has no idea how big the rally is, because she wrote the article before the event began.
Little Green Footballs is under attack by Chinese hack-bots.
You know these must be part of a Chinese government operation, because they’d never let LGF get to the common folk.
I’m currently tuned to the middle of Run Silent, Run Deep, on TCM. As always, I’ve preselected C-SPAN’s Washington Journal – at 4am. I’m about to program the interval between. It’s unlikely I will see any of this. But, if I do, I don’t want to awaken to crap. 🙂
Update: Midnight – Austin City Limits – Los Lobos and RatDog – Yeah Baby! Of course, I’ll likely be asleep. 🙂
I need a TiVo.
Tuesday’s season premier of Nip/Tuck was pretty hot. But I think they still have a ways to go to surpass Battlestar Galactica.
This from WSJ online:
8:47 p.m.: How long would it take, with unlimited funds, to build levees around New Orleans to withstand a Category 5 hurricane? Three to five years, according to Col. Richard P. Wagenaar, district engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, when asked the question by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. “We just can’t go out and built a concrete wall around the city of New Orleans,” he said, noting that environmental, economic and cultural compromises would need to be made.
A must-read post from Alexander The Average, framed around this quote from von Clausewitz:
Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war…
Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions…
This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather…
Read the whole thing
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Build team member, Kari Byron, has to be about the most drop-dead-georgous woman in reality-TV. 🙂
Oh: Sorry, Paige; you’re hot, but not THIS hot. 🙂
This from Jonah Goldberg at NRO:
There’s a lot of wishful thinking out there that the Republicans are doomed. The voters don’t trust them, they’re spending money like Teresa Heinz at a French mall. Bush this, Bush that, Bush the other thing. But I think the truth is more depressing. I think the Republicans will run things for a generation. Sure, there might be some upsets, some shake-ups, a Democratic president here or there. But ultimately I think we’re still in the beginning phase of a Republican era. As countless commentators have noted before, Bill Clinton was liberalism’s Eisenhower. Ike confirmed the New Deal’s bipartisan status, Clinton confirmed the Reagan Revolution’s bipartisan status.
If you listened to the Democrats fight John Roberts this month, it’s impossible not to conclude the Democrats are a runt party and will remain one for a while. The gravitational pull of their base makes it all but impossible for them to attain escape velocity from Planet Permanent Minority. Senator Feinstein actually said she won’t vote for Roberts in no small part because she’s not sure what kind of father and husband he is. Does this woman know or care what an unbelievable SOB Oliver Wendell Holmes was? Joe Biden who by personal acclamation is the smartest man in his party, ultimately resorted to debating Roberts by flashing his teeth at the nominee like a semaphore signal. If you study the video of his meandering soliloquies you’ll discover that while he was ostensibly opining on the inadequacy of the “umpire” metaphor, he was in fact delivering a coded dental message “I CANNOT STOP TALKING. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WILL SOMEONE STOP ME?”
While I lack Goldberg’s surety – to me it rings of a Fukuyamaesce “End of History” proclamation, I must say that, until the Jackasses reign-in their most prominent spokespeople – the Cindy Sheehans, Al Sharptons, and Howard Deans – who seem to regularly jump the shark, or unless some third party, like the Libertarians, learn the mechanics of politics, we are condemned to one-party rule.
This from WSJ online:
12:25 p.m.: Flood waters are pouring into New Orleans’s Ninth Ward neighborhood. “We have three significant breaches in the levee and the water is rising rapidly,” says Maj. Barry Guidry of the Georgia National Guard. Rains from Rita sent water gushing through breaches in a patched levee in this low-lying neighborhood. Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 30 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee. On the street that runs parallel to the canal, the water ran waist-deep and was rising fast. Guidry said water was rising about 3 inches a minute. Officials believe the neighborhood has been completely cleared of residents.
This should drive home my point that we simply shouldn’t put good money after bad, rebuilding eastern New Orleans. If we do, we would do well to import some engineering expertise from our friends in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Currently, it looks as though this won’t happen, due to our political leader’s zeal to “just do something.”
This from Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit:
SPINNING THE PROTESTS: I recommend that readers google the names of people mentioned in the press accounts of this weekend’s antiwar protests. I looked up Brian Becker, who’s mentioned in this Washington Post story by Petula Dvorak. To be fair, Dvorak at least mentions the ANSWER connection, but a quick Google search of Becker’s name finds that he’s been praising the “Iraqi resistance” and denigrating U.S. troops since the beginning. It would appear that he’s not so much “antiwar” as just on the other side.
Normally, I transfer the permalinks in my quotes. But this post has a wealth of them. Rather, I very much encourage you to read the whole thing, and follow the links.
Captain Ed blogs on the ties between the organizations planning anti-Iraq protests this weekend, far-left, and even communist organizations:
None of this comes as a shock to those who have followed this anti-war movement. The funding for the so-called grass-roots groups show remarkable complexity and opacity, but as John J. Tierney points out, most of them do receive at least some of their funding through the Tides Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Institute, the latter of which also indirectly funded John McCain’s Reform Institute as well. ANSWER has a long history of supporting repressive and brutal regimes such as Kim’s and Saddam’s, and have positioned themselves as neo-Stalinists as a result.
No, it is no surprise. ANSWER was the principal organizing force behind the circus-like pre-war protests.
Just now, I hope they don’t let Terry Ryder (Bo’s wife) get weak. To date, she has been a tower of emotional strength and rationality – a great role-model for any military spouse.
Oh, and here’s a little kowtow to “Mrs. B” from last week’s episode: “raise your hand to me again, and be prepared to die.” Yeah! You go girl!
Today at Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds is skeptical about NASA’s plans to go to the Moon:
The problem is that this NASA approach looks like more of the same. Oh, it’s better than some earlier efforts: The program emphasizes astronauts learning to “live off the land” via lunar resources, an approach that seemed quite radical back when Bob Zubrin was first championing it. But the technology looks old — and not “proven reliable,” as Space Shuttle components have been less than ideal — and I don’t see any way this program will deliver what we need most: High flight rates and low costs.
I wonder, then, if the money wouldn’t be better spent on things that have a higher likelihood of delivering those, like space elevators. As I mentioned in an earlier column, space elevator technology promises drastically reduced costs to orbit (from which, as Robert Heinlein famously observed, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system in terms of energy) and it looks as if we could build a working space elevator — or several — within the $100 billion pricetag and over the same time frame.
I most hardily agree; our emphasis at this juncture should be on finding inexpensive and reliable ways to put people and materials into orbit. But I wouldn’t limit ourselves to space elevators. Other technologies, such as Fly Into Orbit and Rail Guns as 1st stage boosters are also quite promising. This sort of multi-pronged approach is best undertaken by the private sector.
Joan Collins and Madonna have this in common. Collins did it in 1986, and Madonna ten years later. And no, it has nothing to do with Warren Beatty. 😉
Update: Congratz to reader Jay Tea (see comments).
This from Info Shop News
The situation in Algiers got a bit more surreal this week when the U.S. military asked the anarchists for help in providing basic services to local residents. A medical military clinic commander asked the folks running the Common Ground Clinic if they could lend a few medics and doctors to the military until the military sets up a “permanent” health clinic on Newton Avenue on Monday.
Some BIG NEWS from NashvilleCityPaper.com:
Next Tuesday The City Paper is going to start running the best of Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson’s classic comic strip about a 6-year-old boy and his real-only-to-him tiger. When it originally ran from 1985-1996, it was an incredibly popular strip, and there are still more than a dozen collections still in print.
[…]
The strips are being re-released in honor of the publication of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, similar to The Complete Far Side from 2003 — a lush, three volume hardback set of all 3,160 Calvin & Hobbes strips. Watterson has written the introduction to the book and has produced six new art panels for the front and back book covers. It’s going to be released on Oct. 4 by Andrews McMeel.
Certainly, a MUST READ, come October. In the meantime, if anyone knows of a paper carrying the C&H strips online, please let me know.
Update: UComics.com has the strips from 9/7/94 thru 9/20/94. Are these the same as have appeared in the papers?
On today’s Best of the Web Today, James Taranto quotes this from Talking Points Memo:
TPM is looking for a new web intern who’ll be responsible for various aspects of on-going site design, site maintenance, assistance administering the TPM community site, TPMCafe, and work on our various projects like . . . our new tracking of which members of Congress are supporting President Bush’s Gulf Coast Wage Cut [suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act]. . . .
This is an unpaid internship.
And he comments:
When your money is at stake, Marshall is willing to let unions dictate wages. When it comes to his own money, he not only refuses to pay prevailing wages, he won’t even pay the minimum wage–or indeed any wage at all! Just who is trying to bamboozle whom here?
By order of Congress, the FBI has placed high priority on fighting adult pronographers:
Either the FBI has too much money, or the government’s priorities are screwed up, or both. If there’s another terror attack in America, how will Gonzalez and Mueller justify this? Maybe by blaming Congress: “Congress began funding the obscenity initiative in fiscal 2005 and specified that the FBI must devote 10 agents to adult pornography.”
This story is actually a few weeks old. It just comes to the fore now, as growing numbers of Americans support reduced funding for the real war, in Iraq, to make more money available for Katrina recovery:
Christopher Orr reviews The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at TNR (free registration req’d):
After its first third, the movie loses faith not only in its predecessor’s tone, but in its storyline as well. The leisurely jaunt to one alien planet is replaced by a hectic commute to no fewer than three–one of them the setting for a nonsensical subplot featuring John Malkovich as a religious evangelist, which is inserted abruptly and then all but forgotten. A love triangle between Arthur, Zaphod, and Trillian is laboriously constructed. And the Vogons, who were not heard from in the book after the airlock incident, are reimagined as ongoing antagonists who chase the heroes across the galaxy for a series of tiresome gun battles. As a result of these and other interventions, the movie has a choppy, episodic feel and will, I suspect, prove almost incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with Adams’s oeuvre.
[…]
Talent-wise, the cast is a tremendous upgrade from the B-list actors who performed in the 1983 BBC miniseries. (Simon Jones, who played Arthur then, has a cameo as the holographic Magrathean face in the new movie.) Yet that miniseries, though somewhat hard to find, is nonetheless rather more satisfying than its big-budget successor. Sure, the alien costumes look as though they were constructed from the innards of a 1970s sofa, the laser beams appear to have been drawn on the film stock with a highlighter, and the sets are worthy of a community theatre production (or, worse, an episode of “Dr. Who”). But this shabby, secondhand feel actually suits the story rather well. When Arthur first arrives on the Vogon ship, he asks, “Is this really the interior of a flying saucer? … It’s a bit squalid, isn’t it?” It’s an apt description of Adams’s entire universe, which is simultaneously incredible and mundane, awe-inspiring and ridiculous.
The makers of the new film obviously got this. There’s a deliberate cheesiness to the special effects, and an improvisational feel to many of the scenes. But $50 million is still $50 million, and it will find a way to get on screen. Why have just a few Vogons in the early part of the movie, when you could have dozens reappear throughout it? Why not have an entire Vogon planet? And maybe another planet, too, where John Malkovich can crawl around on dozens of crablike mechanical legs? When your special effects credits run into the hundreds, you have to find something for all those people to do. And, of course, to make space for the new material you’ll need to cut a lot of that boring old talk talk talk.
In Hollywood, budget is often destiny. There’s no doubt that a movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide was destined to be made–with its large and loyal following, how could it not be?–but thanks to the economics of the industry it was probably destined to be made badly. And it was.
These things are, of course, quite unpredictable. Hurricane Rita may make landfall in Mississiooi – or perhaps Mexico. But just now, the smart money is on Houston., or perhaps a little south. But the question arrises, with its capabilities already tapped by New Orleans Katrina refugees, can Houston handle another hurricane?
Tom McKenna at Seeking Justice cites this article:
The city of New Orleans followed virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan in the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans officials also failed to implement most federal guidelines, which stated that the Superdome was not a safe shelter for thousands of residents.
The official “City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan” states that the mayor can call for a mandatory citywide evacuation, but the Louisiana governor alone is given the power to carry out the evacuation, which Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has yet to do. She “begged” people to leave before the storm and is still asking the few thousand holdouts to evacuate the flooded city.
Red Cross officials say the organization was well positioned to provide food, water and hygiene products to the thousands stranded in New Orleans. But the state refused to let them deliver the aid.
And this article:
The husband-and-wife owners of a nursing home were charged with homicide because they did not evacuate 34 elderly patients who died after Hurricane Katrina struck, the first major criminal case related to the storm’s still-rising death toll.
And, citing Louisiana Negligent Homicide LA R.S. 14:32:
A. Negligent homicide is the killing of a human being by criminal negligence.
B. The violation of a statute or ordinance shall be considered only as presumptive evidence of such negligence.
C. Whoever commits the crime of negligent homicide shall be imprisoned with or without hard labor for not more than five years, fined not more than five thousand dollars, or both. However, if the victim was killed as a result of receiving a battery and was under the age of ten years, the offender shall be imprisoned at hard labor, without benefit of probation or suspension of sentence, for not less than two nor more than five years.
He wonders, “why are the mayor of New Orleans and perhaps the governor of Louisiana not charged with violating this statute in those cases where deaths occurred due to a failure to evacuate or because of poor conditions at the Superdome?”
Popular rumor has it that this actress underwent breast enlargement to play in this 1983 biopic.
Update: Congratz to reader Bill (see comments).
This from InstaPundit:
SO THE EARLIER PORK POST — in which various bloggers posted and emailed about pork in their states — looked kind of promising, and N.Z. Bear and I got together to figure out a way to take it up a notch
How are we going to mobilize the blogosphere in support of cuts in wasteful spending to support Katrina relief? Here’s the plan.
Identify some wasteful spending in your state or (even better) Congressional District. Put up a blog post on it. Go to N.Z. Bear’s new PorkBusters page and list the pork, and add a link to your post.
Then call your Senators and Representative and ask them if they’re willing to support having that program cut or — failing that — what else they’re willing to cut in order to fund Katrina relief. (Be polite, identify yourself as a local blogger and let them know you’re going to post the response on your blog). Post the results. Then go back to NZ Bear’s page and post a link to your followup blog post.
The result should be a pretty good resource of dubious spending, and Congressional comments thereon, for review by blogs, members of the media, etc. And maybe even members of Congress looking for wasteful spending . . . .
Feel free to copy the cool logo by Stacy Tabb (or this [smaller] version) and use it on your own posts.
Technorati tag: porkbusters.
Update – also from InstaPundit
As of the moment, over $13 billion in pork projects have been listed by bloggers over at the PorkBusters page. (Take that, Tom Delay!)
But remember — follow-through is everything here. Don’t just list your project: Call your Senators and Representative and ask them what to do about it, then post their responses on your blog, and link ’em at the PorkBusters page.
When you do that, send me a link to your post with the subject line “Pork Response” and I’ll link it.
From the NRA’s website:
If you have personally had a gun confiscated in Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina hit, please call (888) 414-6333. Be prepared to leave only your name and immediate contact information so we can get back to you. Once again, we are seeking contact information from actual victims of gun confiscation in Louisiana only.
For additional information, please visit www.NRAILA.org, or e-mail us at ila-contact@nrahq.org.
It comes to mind that many of the people victimized by New Orleans authorities, after being victimized by Katrina, are unlikely to see the NRA web posting, or this one. So, if you know of anyone, please help them get their information to the NRA.
When this Hollywood megastar learned that a Los Angeles television station planned to show this movie, his first big-screen appearance, he took out an ad in the LATimes, urging viewers (counterproductively) not to watch it
Update: Congratz to reader Taj (see comments).
![this [smaller] version](http://instapundit.com/images/porkbusterssm.jpg){kind=link}