From the Department of Not Exactly News: Chris Matthews Is Very Confused

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You can’t make up stuff as funny as this:

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“I feel ashamed about this. I feel ashamed as an American, the way we’re doing this. . . . We’re not handling it as Americans should handle a matter like this. And I don’t feel right about it.”

There’s a lot of commentary concentrating on the fact that Matthews criticizes Obama, but as Ed Morrissey says, the whole 12-minute clip is worth watching.

Like many liberals trying to make sense of the Egyptian crisis, Matthews has been whipsawed between his support for democracy and his support for Democrats. It’s enormously upsetting to Matthews because he so very much wants to credit Obama with doing the right thing, even when (a) it’s not really clear what “the right thing” is, and (b) Obama is quite obviously doing everything wrong.

Putting aside the frightening thought of Islamists turning Egypt into Iran-on-the-Nile, conservatives have a much easier time making sense of this crisis: We expect Democrats to bungle foreign policy. We never believed Obama had any kind of miraculous abilities, and we especially jeered at Obama’s naive notion that the secret to foreign policy was to celebrate every week as “Be Nice to Foreigners Week.” Continue reading From the Department of Not Exactly News: Chris Matthews Is Very Confused →

Virginia Muslim Institute?

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Somebody mentioned this in the comments the other day when I was up to my neck in Egypt blogging, but I just saw it again at 1389 Blog:

VMI is celebrating the Muslim invasion
and occupation of Spain in 711 AD.

And then I read this:

The March 23-25 celebration entitled “711-2011: East Meets West” and organized by VMI’s Center for Leadership and Ethics, is scheduled to feature standard Muslim apologists Reza Aslan and Akbar Ahmed. VMI Superintendent Gen. J.H. Binford Peay has even filmed an invitation to the celebration.

So the poison of “multiculturalism” does its deadly work everywhere, even in the hallowed halls of Lexington, Va.

They need to change the name from VMI to WTF.

‘The End of Blogging’? No, It Just Proves That Nothing Succeeds Like Success

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Elizabeth Spiers is taking over as editor-in-chief of the New York Observer — a minor blip of media news that is rather more significant than it would appear at first glance.

Earlier this week, the Observer ran a long article entitled, “The End of Blogging,” a grabby title that misinterprets the changes that are actually happening in the online world. Of course the irony is that the paper’s new editor is — you guessed, didn’t you? — a blogger:

Spiers is the founder of Dead Horse Media, which created highly successful blog properties such as Dealbreaker, Above the Law and Fashionista. She has also served as founding editor of Gawker.com and editor in chief of mediabistro.com.

She’s got some print-journalism background, too, but Spiers’ stock-in-trade is turning blogs into “properties.” As Joe Coscarelli of the Village Voice points out, “Spiers has been given the task of making the Observer ‘a website with a newspaper, rather than a newspaper with a website.'”

The much-analyzed Observer “End of Blogging” article — which got ripped apart by Chris Rovzar, among others — utterly misunderstood (or perhaps, cluelessly misrepresented) the phenomenon of online communication. It doesn’t matter, for example, whether or not you call your site a “blog” or whether you call the elements “posts” or “articles.”

A thing is what it is, regardless of what you call it. Continue reading ‘The End of Blogging’? No, It Just Proves That Nothing Succeeds Like Success →

‘How Many Girls Have to Die?’

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Liberals obviously want this story to go away, but the abortion industry has got too much innocent blood on their hands, and Americans are tired of being taxed to pay for this shameful criminality. Dr. Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life:

“It is time to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their seedy business practices,” said Dr. Yoest. “For too long, they’ve lived off the American taxpayer with little or no oversight. In the last week alone, we’ve seen proof in Philadelphia that women’s lives were at risk while officials turned a blind eye to what goes on at an abortion clinic. Then we saw video of a Planned Parenthood clinic manager in New Jersey talking about how to manipulate the law to cover up the abuse of underage girls captive in the sex trade. Today we see video from Virginia of possible misconduct in a Richmond Planned Parenthood clinic.
“How many girls have to suffer and die before we investigate the abortion industry? At some point, substandard care for women becomes criminal.” . . .

Read the whole thing.

Fun With Lizards

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There’s all kinds of news I need to be blogging about today, but offline duties intervened and — as much as I know it bores most of you — I just had to call attention to the latest in Johnsonoid craziness.

Charles Johnson went on a rant about “stalkers and dimwitted creeps” — a rant thoroughly and hilariously mocked — and in the process, CJ linked back to a 2009 thread that included links to a couple of former LGF fan sites. But those two ex-sycophants have since been banned from LGF, as Diary of Daedalus had noted in November. So . . .

Someone at Diary of Daedalus pointed out that Charles had, by linking to this 2009 thread, accidently called attention to “praise” from ex-LGFers who now despise their former idol. Well, CJ claims never to read the “stalker” site Diary of Daedalus, but overnight he killed the links and — here’s the payoff, for connoisseurs of irony — Chen Zhen at Diary of Daedalus created a flashing GIF showing the deletion.

ROTFLMAO.

What’s going on over at LGF these days? Nobody would know if it weren’t for the gallant ex-Lizards who toil diligently to keep us informed on the latest laughable developments in Lizardlandia. But just imagine how embarrassing it is to Charles Johnson that he is so irrelevant at a time when interest in the Egyptian situation is delivering big traffic to Michael Totten and Weasel Zippers and other conservative bloggers.

Criticism of U.S. intelligence on the Middle East gets analyzed by Ed Morrissey and Jim Hoft for the benefit of thousands of readers, but who bothers anymore to see what Charles Johnson has to say? Who even cares?

Back in the day, when a big story like this would break, LGF threads would be swarming with hundreds of keen-eyed conservative commenters linking the latest important news. Ah, but then Charles Johnson gave into his resentment of Pamela Geller‘s success, and began banishing every commenter who didn’t go along with his anti-Geller jihad and now . . .

OK, sorry to bother the readers with this mention of LGF. We’ll get back to blogging about interesting stuff, I promise. Just as soon as I can quit laughing.

Smitty and Tammy, Sittin’ in a Tree . . .

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You probably know the rest of that playground poem from memory, but Smitty’s a married man and his wife’s not named Tammy. However, Smitty did get a shout-out from Tammy Bruce when she had as a guest on her radio show our good blog-buddy Big Fur Hat from IOwnTheWorld.com:

If you lack the patience to listen to the whole thing, you can cheat by skipping forward to a bit past the 7-minute mark, where you’ll hear this:

Tammy Bruce: I’ve gone to the lounge at IOwnTheWorld.com, and you’ve got pictures there, you’ve got people’s favorite photos, you’ve got some videos, you’ve got . . .
Big Fur Hat: I got a haiku — I got a haiku from Smitty . . .
TB: Oh, I read that!
BFH: I got a haiku from Smitty the other day . . .
TB: I read that! I didn’t know what a haiku was, and now I do, and I thought it was a very good haiku.

And they go on from there, in mutual praise of Smitty’s “Haiku Sonnet for Sarah Palin,” which is unlikely to be included in the next edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, but did get reposted at IOwnTheWorld.

Meanwhile, I’m jealous both of Smitty for having been praised by Tammy, and of Big Fur Hat for having been a guest on her show. But now that we know she’s into poetry . . .

There once was a conservative sapphic,
Whom I would throw some blogosphere traffic,
If I were on her show.
There’s a joke there, I know,
But the punchline might be pornographic.

No, wait, I can do better than that:

There once was a blogger named Smitty,
Who gained fame by composing a ditty.
But alas, the poor fool
Got deployed to Kabul
And complains that the bandwidth’s a pity.

How Screwed Are We?

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For more than a year, I’ve been warning against the idea that we are in an economic “recovery.” It’s not just the disturbing persistence of an unemployment rate above 9 percent.

That’s the symptom, not the disease.

What the U.S. economy is suffering from, and what no amount of neo-Keynesian “stimulus” can remedy, is a capital shortage. And in fact, the successive government interventions since 2008 aimed at fixing the economy have mainly worsened the fundamentals.

Consider, for example, the attempts to cushion the collapse of the housing bubble by trying to halt foreclosures or offer “assistance” to deadbeats who can’t make the payments on houses worth less than the mortgage value. What’s the net economic effect?

At Calculated Risk, Tom Lawler, a real estate economist and former risk policy veep at Fannie Mae, tries to figure out how many people have actually lost their homes to foreclosure, short sales or deed-in-lieu desertions. The answer: Not enough. Lawler . . . says the number of foreclosures that have been completed so far is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of loans that have gone bad. . . .
[T]here could be roughly three times as many homes on the market as there are now. Lawler points to 1,445,000 completed foreclosures and short sales at the end of 2010, compared with 4,296,01 mortgages that are past due by 90 days or more.

To adapt an old Marxian expression, we have a “reserve army” of unforeclosed deadbeats, who are on one hand a steady drain on the vitality of the financial sector but, on the other hand, a looming threat to the real-estate sector. Either the deadbeats are permitted to fall further and further behind on their mortgages (not good for the banks) or else the banks foreclose and all those homes are dumped onto an already glutted real-estate market.

It’s a lose-lose situation for the overall economy.

How will policy-makers respond? Badly, I predict. The most likely response is more inflationary pumping by the Fed, more deficit-funded bailouts for the deadbeat homeowners and/or the lenders, and perhaps also some more cumbersome regulation.

Also, consider the fact that 11 percent of U.S. homes are now sitting empty. If one out of nine existing homes lacks occupants — they can’t even find a renter, much less a buyer — what does that tell you about the market for new homes, and the home-construction industry that depends on that market?

The word you’re looking for is “screwed.”


Rednecks: A Global Phenomenon

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It’s like the punchline of a Jeff Foxworthy joke:

BEIJING, Feb. 3 (Xinhua) — Two people were killed and 223 have been injured in the Chinese capital amid traditional New Year fireworks frenzy that lasted from Wednesday evening to Thursday noon. . . .
On Thursday, Beijing dispatched more than 20,000 street cleaners after a night of fireworks. A total of 2,380 tons of exploded fireworks have been swept up by workers.

That there’s funny, I don’t care who you are.