by Smitty
As mooched from Tabitha Hale via email, and with some formatting from yours truly:
This aggregation had not occurred until I saw Tabitha’s email, so apologies to our regular linkers whom time and bandwidth have caused to be omitted.
On the Road to Spartanville … Oh, Wait, No, Better Make That Spartanburg
DUBLIN, Va.
We pulled into a McDonald’s here about 9:40 a.m. so that I could hop on the WiFi and get some work done quickly before gassing up the econo-rental (a black Ford Probe, $86 for the weekend) and heading back out on the road to Spartanburg, S.C., for tonight’s Republican presidential debate at Wofford College (8 p.m. ET, CBS).
Mrs. Other McCain let me bring our 12-year-old son Jefferson along for the trip, because every eighth-grader should be helping their dads cover presidential campaigns instead of lounging around all weekend playing “Call of Duty.” Jefferson’s career plan is to be elected president of the United States in 2044, but I’m afraid he’ll be haunted by the gaffe in this video:
Spartanville? That blunder may have looked rehearsed, but it was actually spontaneous, as was his clever recovery. And of course, no child of mine could ever forget The Five Most Important Words in the English Language: Hit the freaking tip jar!
Addendum: While we were driving down the road this morning, we heard “Freebird” on the radio and Jefferson declared that when he becomes president, he’ll make “Freebird” the national anthem. I shared this on Twitter — via cellphone, while driving 75 mph abd steering with my knee — and Jon Henke responded:
You WILL stand for 9:06 & you WILL hold your hand over your heart for 9:06. Or you’re an unpatriotic America hater!
And frankly, if you don’t hold up a lighter every time you hear the national anthem, we’ll question your patriotism.
Hell, yeah.
Palate Cleanser: Nigel Farage Lets Loose The Barrage
by Smitty
Nigel Farage is slightly less refined that Daniel Hannan, but that’s no complaint: sometimes you feel like a mallet, sometimes a scalpel.
Farage goes all Donald Trump and starts telling the Eurocrats that they should be fired. We have legions of civil servants in need of the same words here.
via HillBuzz, who do not seem to grasp that Farage is in fact an elected official, not a media personality like Beck.
One Can Nearly Admire The Unmitigated Sack On Display
by Smitty
#OccupyResoluteDesk:
Congress. . .“must not shirk its responsibilities,” according to a White House readout of the conversation.
Seriously. If the intent all along was to punish the Administration’s political foes in particular, and America in general, then the Administration’s actions make sense:
- Play the brinksmanship game in the Spring of 2011,
- load the poison pill into the Super Committee, and then
- make the GOP eat more brinksmanship and the poison pill when the Super Committee, necessarily, fails.
Brilliant! If I wasn’t so thoroughly disgusted at the Machiavellian evil that is this Administration, I would be tempted to admire the perverse talent involved. As with the collapse of the Euro, there doesn’t seem to be much to do in the case of the Super Committee except sound the collision alarm and grab onto something solid.
Over at HotAir, Allahpundit wonders aloud:
Is The One seriously threatening to block a bill that would lift those cuts in the event of a Super Committee deadlock, knowing full well that the GOP will use Panetta’s soundbite to destroy him for it next year? Remember: This guy does not take political risks, and he certainly doesn’t take them in the name of cutting spending. Could be that the fear of another downgrade is weighing on him if the triggers are rescinded, which will pose a threat to his reelection if the market reacts badly, but what are the odds that investors will flee the safety of Treasuries under any circumstance given the chaos in Europe?
Oh, the bond rating agencies, then? Re-election?
Well, it sure is swell that #OccupyResoluteDesk would respect something, since the will of the people as expressed in the result of the 2008 election seems to have all the appeal of old chewing gum.
America has produced an exceptional piece of work in this one. I think BHO and I agree here, though our meanings may vary.
via Memeorandum
Denver Post Quotes @DaTechGuyBlog About @OccupyDenver at #BlogCon11
More than a dozen protesters who say they are part of Occupy Denver disrupted a conservative blogger conference in downtown Denver this afternoon and one man was led away in handcuffs, witnesses say.
Information about the man who was arrested for trespassing was unavailable but witnesses at the Blogcon 2011 conference say he shoved a police officer who was trying to clear the group of out of the lobby at the Crowne Plaza hotel.
Attendees of Blogcon say they knew Occupy Denver was going to try to disrupt their conference because the group had advertised their intentions on Twitter. . . .
The disruption began around 2 p.m. during a data visualization seminar in one of the ballrooms. A few of the protesters tried to charge the ballroom doors to get inside. . . .
But people attending the conference had already started to notice unusual activity by a number of people in the hotel’s lobby and they began to film them, said Peter Michael Dominic Ingemi, a talk show host.
“They started bantering back and forth,” he said. “We all had video. They were filming us and we were filming them.”
Occupy Denver protesters yelled out “We are the 99 percent” and Blogcon attendees yelled back “We want the dog!”
Pete is, of course, Da Tech Guy, who tells the story of the Occupy invasion and includes this video:
The Denver Post story also quotes Tabitha Hale, who hates me.
UPDATE: Conservative Hideout has more video, and we’re linked by The Lonely Conservative, who let me and Da Tech Guy crash at her house in October 2010 when we were covering Ann Marie Buerkle’s campaign.
UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! When I talked to Pete earlier, he was puzzled as to why he wasn’t getting much traffic on his blog. Explanation: He had gotten in a hurry and misspelled Denver in the title. When he corrected the spelling, he changed the URL, so my link to him wasn’t throwing traffic. That’s been fixed, but he probably won’t notice my traffic now that he’s got the Instalanche, too.
Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints uses the word “soviet” to describe Occupy Denver and, if you know anything useful about Soviet history, you realize that his usage is accurate. Of course, nobody in the “Occupy” movement knows anything about the history they’re doomed to repeat — as farce, to quote their philosophical godfather.
#OccupyFail at #BlogCon11: What Fun!
For the second consecutive year, Tabitha Hale didn’t think I was important enough to be invited to participate on a panel at BlogCon.
Or maybe Tabitha just hates my guts.
Either way, she subsequently offered me a “scholarship” to attend BlogCon, a consolation prize I was too proud to accept.
Pity is no substitute for respect, and if nothing I have accomplished in the past three years is worth respecting, I’d rather not be there in person for a repeat of the humiliation Tabitha inflicted by leaving me off the BlogCon agenda last year.
Like I said, maybe she just hates my guts and I could deal with that, if she would admit that it’s her personal contempt for me that explained the repeated exclusions. Instead, she permits my peers (and readers) to believe that the exclusion represents the inadequacy of my professional accomplishments. People say I shouldn’t take it that way, but I can see no other explanation.
Either (a) my blog sucks or (b) my blog’s good and Tabitha hates me.
Anyway, the Occupy Denver crowd descended on the hotel where all the really important and popular bloggers are hanging out:
There’s about 20 of them. They’re fairly young and dirty and speak in a strange jargon like the Oasis Tribe in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Now they’re doing that “mike check” thing, and are chanting.
When the hell are the cops going to get here?
Also, when will the attendees at BlogCon realize that by confronting the Occupy scum, they’re imperiling their own health?
Good thing I’m not popular or important, or else I might be at BlogCon, contracting an incurable contagious disease.
UPDATE: Da Tech Guy risked his health by getting close enough to interview one of the Occupiers:
UPDATE II: Denver’s KUSA-TV reports:
DENVER – Denver Police responded to the Crowne Plaza Hotel Friday afternoon where several Occupy Denver protesters reportedly caused a disturbance.
According to reports, a group of conservative bloggers are at the hotel, which may have incited the chanting.
Did you catch that? The presence of “a group of conservative bloggers” at a hotel incited the disturbance — as if the Occupy Denver riffraff were just minding their own business until those nasty bloggers provoked them.
UPDATE III: The unpopular and unimportant Jeff Goldstein:
The Occupy Denver kiddies got wind of the conference and naturally have to protest it. Because, you know — well, because, uh, KOCH BROTHERS RACISM HATE HATE HATE!
Hundreds of bloggers with video-capable phones, and these morons decide we’re to be the target of their disjointed, intellectually scattershot “protests”?
That’s some strategy, that is.
UPDATE IV: “I am really starting to lose faith in the hippies of my generation.”
UPDATE V: Denver police: Not nearly brutal enough. Why aren’t they beating these hippies unmercifully?
Because hippies are white. And Denver cops are racist.
Refute that!
UPDATE VI: John Hawkins:
About 15 scruffy looking protesters arrived in the lobby with, as far as I can tell, no intention other than disrupting the conference.
They succeeded — but, not in the way they expected because after they started chanting, bloggers poured out of the conference to take pics and videos. Soon, there were 30 bloggers surrounding 15 Occupy people and chanting things like “We love Koch money” and “Breitbart, Breitbart!” There was lots of chanting, lots of yelling, and Steven Crowder got shoved by one of the female Occupiers.
Now a Memeorandum thread.
UPDATE VII: Sister Toldjah posts video:
UPDATE VIII: “Denver HS Teacher Brings Students to Join #OWS Mob As They Storm Conservative Conference (Video).”
Victor D. Hanson Offers Meanness And Mitt
by Smitty
VDH is one of the few academics worthy of the respect formerly afforded the ivory tower. His analysis is pure gloomy realpolitik: only Romney has the chops to take on Barack.
Where I badly want to disagree with Victor is that he seems not to hold out much hope for the American people. While fully in the Anybody But Obama camp, it seems a lighter Fail if the replacement has to be Some Personality. That the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in our founding documents seem insufficient to excite the people on their own plays into the Left’s thesis that people are sheep, and should be herded by experts.
The subtext of Mitt at the CNBC Economics Debate seemed to be acceptance of the pre-2008 state of diminished liberty, with enough Tea Party flourishes to pull in conservatives for the ‘win’, where winning means crashing more slowly. Romney does not seem a terribly visionary statesman who is bent on rolling back the federal overreach of the last century.
Update: I want this to be wrong, but somehow I don’t think it will prove so: “Big Labor’s Scorched-Earth Campaign in Ohio a Preview of Obama’s Reelection Campaign”
Update II: linked at The Camp of the Saints.
Small Arms May Stop Spread Of Tuberculosis At #OccupyObamaVilles
by Smitty
Ladd Ehlinger seems surprised that anarchy, poor sanitation, and the onset of winter can lead to outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis.
I disagree with those who said the Occupy movement was doomed at the first sign of winter. This is because I have never seen it as a grass-roots movement, but one cooked up by Obama’s OFA organization, in collusion with Anonymous and Lulzec members, and funded by all the usual suspects, including Soros. The reasons for the cooking had little to do with today’s politics, but the 2012 election, and scaring the bejesus out of soccer moms inclined to vote Republican.
Now an unlikely enemy has arrived to lay waste to these plans, the super-tuberculosis bug. Lie down with dogs, get fleas; lie down with Occupiers, and get both fleas and a disease that can’t be cured and may well kill you.
Via Althouse, there is also Zuccotti Lung, as this blog raises awareness of recent advances in our respiratory tract sickness choices.
These public health concerns may be mitigated somewhat by what seems to be a rash of shootings at ObamaVilles around the country. I was just wondering out loud on Twitter if the gun violence might not be a backup plan for the collapse of Fast & Furious. The American people must somehow be made to accept that the 2nd Amendment is as moot as the 10th Amendment if we are to reach the next stage of Holy Progress. Is it possible that the shooting victim in Oakland was a poet named Horst Wessel?
Is this all part of some grand scheme masterminded by #OccupyResoluteDesk? If so, then liberty-loving Americans must ponder, harden their resolve, and let their peaceful, patriotic actions answer the mail on this sad, creepy #Occupy movement.