The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE – 11.30.10

Posted on | November 30, 2010 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE – 11.30.10

TOP NEWS

U.S. Fears Iran Has Nork IRBMs, Russians Call BS

King Abdullah greets President Obama

Wikileaks document dump reveals disagreement over Iranian missile program

Assange To Be Indicted Under Espionage Act?
WW1-era law doesn’t apply just to U.S. citizens





U.S., Japan Reject PRC Calls For Resumption of Six-Power Talks
Foreign Minister Maehara: “It’s unacceptable for us to hold six-party talks only because North Korea has gone amok.”



POLITICS

President Proposes Freeze On Federal Pay

Now is the moment the deficits begin to recede...

Boehner calls for hiring freeze as well

W Has His Facebook Moment
Currently liked by over 619K members, former President appears on Facebook Live


Congressional Dems Prepare Gut Check For GOP On Tax Rates

Senate Can’t Agree On Scrapping Onerous Obamacare 1099 Mandate



THE ECONOMY, STUPID

Wikileaks to Target Major American Bank Next

Germany Watches With Alarm As Euro Falls Despite Irish Bailout

CBO slashes TARP Cost To $25 Billion

Gartner: Tablets, Economy Taking Bite Out Of PC Sales

Black Friday Puts Microsoft XBox Kinect Over 2.5 Million Mark



SPORTS

Big Three Click, Heat End Skid With Win Over Wizards

LeBron James

James, Spoelstra Deny Rift

#3 TCU To Leave Mountain West For Big East Next Year

Rockies Lock Down Tulowitzki With Decade-Long Extension


Johnson, Finnegan Fined For Fighting But Not Suspended

49ers Dominate Cards On Monday Night Football



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS

Franco, Hathaway To Host Academy Awards

James Franco and Anne Hathaway, your 2011 Oscar hosts

Road to Oscar hosting apparently now leads through SNL

Kardashians Pull Plug On MasterCard Deal

Drug Investigation On “Deadliest Catch” Boat



Could Pro-Pot Group Save Willie Nelson From Doing Serious Time For Latest Weed Bust?

What Actual Burlesque Stars Think of “Burlesque”



FOREIGNERS

In Haiti, Calm Follows Chaotic Elections

Deaths Of Iranian Nuke Scientists Provokes Tehran Claims Of Hit Squads

“Human Rights”, “Humanitarian” Organizations Whine About Gaza Blockade

Japan Hit By Richter 6.9 Earthquake Off Bonin Islands



BLOGS & STUFF

Gateway Pundit: Palin Slams Administration Handling Of Wikileaks

Protein Wisdom: Democrat Alternative To Obama Wage Freeze? Increase Pay!

NRO: Hauser’s Law – This Reality Isn’t Negotiable

Commentary: When Will Liberals Acknowledge What The Arab World Already Knows?

NRO: Not Even The WaPo Buys The DeLay Conviction

Pirate’s Cove: The Post Doesn’t Get This American Exceptionalism Thing


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

Student Takes Hostages in Wisconsin; UPDATE: 15-Year-Old Gunman Commits Suicide; Hostages Freed Unharmed

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 2 Comments

Marinette High School, about 50 miles north of Green Bay:

A student armed with a handgun burst into a high school classroom in eastern Wisconsin on Monday, taking nearly two dozen students and a teacher hostage at the end of the school day, authorities said. Five hostages were released by mid-evening. . . .
Police Chief Jeff Skorik said officials had been able to communicate by phone with the teacher inside and no injuries had been reported or shots fired.

Don’t know anything about the hostage-taker or his motives. Will be interested to see how it turns out. Please feel free to update in the comments with link to any additional information.

UPDATE: Associated Press:

Trapped in their classroom with a student gunman, a group of terrified Wisconsin high schoolers worked desperately to keep their captor calm by chatting and laughing with him about hunting and fishing.
The 15-year-old gunman eventually shot himself as police stormed the room at Marinette High School hours later Monday evening, but his 23 hostages emerged unharmed. Student hostage Zach Campbell said the gunman seemed depressed, but he didn’t think he meant them his classmates any harm.

UPDATE II: Linked earlier by Wombat in the comments:

Officers who were outside the Marinette High School classroom said they heard three gunshots shortly after 8 p.m. and busted through the door, said Police Chief Jeff Skorik. The 15-year-old male gunman then shot himself.

Category: Crime, Education, Wisconsin

FMJRA 2.1, or, Two Days Late & A Dollar Short

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 1 Comment

Oy, what an inept Unpaid Blog Intern I am. Not only did I spend a long weekend away from the Internets, on my return Sunday, I attempted to whip the FMJRA together only to end up staring at the emacs control panel much like the Apes gazed upon the Slab, only without any flash of enlightenment. Fortunately, Smitty is still in an undisclosed location with access to the Intertubes, and patiently coached me through the assembly process. This time I took notes, so next weekend the training wheels come off. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the FMJRA in all its Rule 2 glory!

TSA Boss Explains Groping Grandma Necessary Because U.S. Doesn’t ‘Profile’

Porn Star Date Says Charlie Sheen ‘Started Yelling Racial Slurs’ in NYC Rampage

Maxine and Barney, Sitting in a Tree . . .

FBI Report: Remember That Predicted Wave of Tea Party Hate Crimes?

Shrieking Outrage in 3, 2, 1 . . .

Charlie Sheen Countersues Porn Star for ‘Shakedown,’ Calls Her ‘Scam Artist’

LIVE AT FIVE – 11.23.10

Oritz Concedes TX-27 to Farenthold; GOP Reaches Historic 241 Seats in House

Holy Crap! North Korean Opens Artillery Bombardment on South Korean Island

WaPo Makes an Excellent Decision: Jennifer Rubin Hired as Blogger

NY-25: Maffei Concedes, Buerkle Wins

DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen: 2010 ‘Could Have Been Worse’ for Democrats

If You Ever Feel Discouraged . . .

Can You Say ‘Mandate’?

Sarah Palin Schools Gawker

Nine Key States for 2012

‘Year of the Pro-Life Woman’

LIVE AT FIVE – 11.25.10

Hallie Miller: What’s Not to Like?

Thanksgiving Day Traffic Suckage Alert: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders Edition

Are You Thankful for Sex?

Thankful for the Man in the Fedora

VIDEO: Happy Thanksgiving!

Muslim Men Led U.K. Girl-Rape Gang

Outrageous: MSNBC Broadcast Causes Left-Wing Woman to Make Fake School-Shooting Threat Blamed on Tea Party

Who Speaks for America?

Report: ‘Issues of Culture, Ethnicity and Identity’ Raised in U.K. Rape-Gang Case

World Shocked by the Alarming Urgency of Jennifer Aniston Mexico Bikini Pictures

Religion of Peace Update

Did Someone Say ‘Desperation’?

It’s ‘Make My Wife Happy’ Day!

Kate Middleton Upskirt Photo?

Blame Feminism?

‘Far More Grim’

‘The Weekly Sarah Palin Segment . . .’

Not Just ‘Yes,’ But ‘Hell, Yes!’

Obligatory WikiLeaks Apocalypse Post

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: FMJRA Award

Guess Who’s Having a Party?

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 2 Comments

Ann Marie Buerkle, that’s who. You will recall that, when Pete Da Tech Guy and I visited NY-25 in mid-October, a new poll showed the Republican challenger trailing Democratic incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei by 13 points. I ended my Oct. 18 American Spectator column with a quote from Buerkle’s speech to her supporters in the village of Clyde, N.Y., telling them what would happen after they won on Election Day:

 “I promise you, we will have one great party.”

Well, because Maffei didn’t concede until last week, that party got postponed. And I just now got an e-mail invitation to Ann Marie Buerkle’s victory celebration, which will be Dec. 8 in Syracuse.

Should I RSVP? Will you hit the tip jar so I can attend?

Category: Ann Marie Buerkle, Election, New York

Shorter Obama: ‘In This False Dilemma, America Must Make a Manichean Choice Between My Indisputably Wise Policies and My Tendentious Straw-Man Caricature of Republican Policies’

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 12 Comments

Of course, that description fits just about anything Obama says, not just today’s speech justifying a two-year freeze on federal civilian employee pay. It goes to show how, even when arguing in favor of a good policy, the president’s rhetoric is predictably crammed with invalid logic, counterfactual assertions, and — always — the effort to shift blame to his favorite scapegoats. Even the press release announcing today’s speech began with scapegoating:

Because of the irresponsibility of the past decade, the President inherited a $1.3 trillion projected deficit upon taking office . . .

Translation: Blame Bush!

I’ll update in a few minutes with the transcript, video, reaction and commentary from other bloggers.

UPDATE: A loophole big enough to drive a government truck through:

Will we actually see this cost savings?  Probably not.  Gabriel Malor received an official explanation given to federal employees today, which assured them that the freeze “will not impact step increases or bonuses for federal workers.”  It applies to cost-of-living increases, mainly.  If an agency wants to give a worker an increase, they just need to increase their pay grade or boost their bonuses to make it happen.

UPDATE II: Rep. Darrell Issa:

To put this in perspective, the Obama Administration says this two-year pay freeze will save $2 billion, however, just last week, OMB released a report revealing that the federal government’s improper payments for FY-2010 totaled $125 billion, $15 billion higher than the previous year. It is unthinkable that we have come to accept having a bureaucracy that has institutionalized waste, fraud and abuse to the point where $125 billion in improper payments were made last year.

(Via National Review‘s Robert Costa.)

UPDATE III: C-SPAN video is online and, with the assistance of the official White House transcript, let me show you what I mean about Obama’s use of scapegoats, strawmen and false dilemmas:

Going forward, we’re going to have to make some additional very tough decisions that this town has put off for a very long time. 

Implied: “Unnamed others have put off ‘tough decisions,’ which I possess the courage and wisdom to make.”

And that’s what this upcoming week is really about.  My hope is that, starting today, we can begin a bipartisan conversation about our future, because we face challenges that will require the cooperation of Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

Translation: “If my policies are opposed by others, it is because they are partisans, who don’t care about ‘our future’ and are unwilling to ‘face challenges’ or engage in the requisite ‘cooperation.'”

Everybody is going to have to cooperate.  We can’t afford to fall back onto the same old ideologies or the same stale sound bites. 

Translation: “Any arguments made by my opponents are mere ‘sound bites,’ reflecting their obstinate adherence to ‘old’ — which is to say, discredited and obsolete — ‘ideologies.'”

We’re going to have to budge on some deeply held positions and compromise for the good of the country. 

Translation: “Of course, I am not going to ‘budge’ an inch. I’m merely setting up the argument that if my opponents don’t rubber-stamp my own policies — which is what I mean by ‘compromise’ — it is because they are indifferent to ‘the good of the country.'”

We’re going to have to set aside the politics of the moment to make progress for the long term.

Translation: “Everyone who opposes me is doing so for short-term political gain, because they are opposed to progress.”

 And as I’ve often said, we’re going to have to think not just about the next election, but about the next generation, because if there’s anything the American people said this month . . .  

Translation: “Whatever voters said in the mid-term election, it cannot be considered a rejection of my own policies. Unless, of course, the American people are a bunch of backward ignoramuses who have fallen prey to the ‘same old sound bites’ offered by my partisan opponents, who are enemies of progress. And, in case you haven’t noticed, ‘I’ve often said’ this.”

. . . it’s that they want their leaders to have one single focus:  making sure their work is rewarded so that the American Dream remains within their reach.

Translation: “Excuse me while I focus on unloading this massive cargo of glittering generalities. My opponents are against rewarding work, and are at least tacitly supportive of putting the American Dream out of reach of the American people.” 

It would be unwise to assume they prefer one way of thinking over another.  That wasn’t the lesson that I took when I entered into office, and it’s not the lesson today.

Translation: “As long as I’m the president, no event may be interpreted as reflecting badly upon me. Anyone who says that Americans prefer policies other than my own is unwise. And in conclusion: Blow me.”

UPDATE IV: Instapundit links to a Conn Carroll policy piece at the Heritage Foundation, while it falls to Brian Butler of Talking Points Media to point out that Republicans advocated the federal pay freeze months ago, for which the GOP was denounced Democrats.

So, while the Scapgoater-in-Chief applauds his own visionary leadership for adopting one tiny part of the Republican policy agenda (you know, that obsolete ideology of partisan sound-bites) now Obama expects us to believe him when he proclaims that the rest of the GOP agenda is nothing more than an expression irrational hatred of progress.

UPDATE V: Ed Lasky at American Thinker: “Barack Obama because he has created 141,000 new federal jobs since he took office (meanwhile the rest of the nation has lost millions of jobs) and has been busy raising [federal] salaries with all the alacrity of Santa Claus on Christmas Day.”

UPDATE VI: Interesting headline at Firedoglake:

Obama Flunks Economics with
Pointless Federal Wage Freeze

Of course, Firedoglake being Firedoglake, they’re attacking Obama on his left flank, claiming that government “austerity” is counterproductive from a neo-Keynesian perspective. (“Aggregate demand! Aggregate demand!”) What makes the headline interesting to me, however, is that while Obama been flunking economics from Day One, it wasn’t until he took this one teeny-tiny token baby-step in the right direction that liberals started whining.

If Obama keeps taking baby-steps this way, it’s possible that the unemployment rate might actually decrease between now and November 2012, which is both good news and bad news.

The bad news is, if unemployment goes down, it will make Obama more likely to be re-elected. The good news is, that would drive the Left even more batshit crazy than they already are. The lefty bloggers will be howling “betrayal” and “sellout,” even while the economy improves and Obama’s approval rating goes up.

So we’d still have Obama as president after 2012, but we’d also have the delightful entertainment of watching these demented moonbat bloggers trying to explain why it was a very bad thing for him to pursue the very policies that did the most to secure his re-election.

And yeah: Millions more Americans would have jobs.

UPDATE VII: Linked by the Lonely Conservative. Thanks!

Category: Barack Obama, Economics

The Idiotic Eloquence of Tom Friedman

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 16 Comments

Matt Welch engages in a world-historic dismantling of Thomas Friedman’s latest column, with its “trademark sloganeering” and “what-Americans-want ventriloquism.”

In the former category, Welch catches Friedman shilling for his too-clever formulation, “nation-building in America” (alternatively, “nation-building at home”) which has been deployed in 14 Friedman columns over the past two-and-a-half years. In the latter category, the way Friedman abuses the first-person plural — “we,” “us” and “our” — reminds me of the old joke about the Lone Ranger, the punchline of which is Tonto’s reply, “What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

The combination of these two Friedmanesque tics results in entire paragraphs of laughable idiocy, to wit:

[P]eople intuitively understand that what we need most now is nation-building in America. They understand it by just looking around at our crumbling infrastructure, our sputtering job-creation engines and the latest international education test results that show our peers out-educating us, which means they will eventually out-compete us. Many people understand that we are slipping as a country and what they saw in Barack Obama, or what they projected onto him, was that he had both the vision and capability to pull America together behind a plan for nation-building at home.

Friedman conjures up a money-is-no-object consensus in favor of his own pet idea, which he attempts to sell with a fictional endorsement by Barack Obama, and which he asserts (or implies or merely assumes) was irrevocably ratified by the 2008 election.

But what about those 58 million Americans who voted against Obama? Why must Friedman conscript them into this amorphous consensus of “we”? What about Americans whose kids are performing well in school and thus are not part of the “us” being “out-educated”? What about states where the infrastructure is not crumbling?

(“Crumbling infrastructure” is mainly a problem in high-tax states without right-to-work laws, where repairs to roads and bridges are extraordinarily expensive because of inefficiencies inherent to unionized workforces. That guy leaning on the shovel in the highway work-zone? Yeah, he’s the union steward’s brother-in-law, featherbedded onto the payroll, but at least he showed up; the taxpayers are also footing the bill for phantom “workers” who played hookie.)

Ranking the very worst New York Times columnists is always tough. They’ve got so many genuinely awful ones (Friedman, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and my pet whipping boy, David Brooks) that it’s hard to say which is worse. For some reason, Krugman escaped mention on Alex Pareene’s “hack list,” which ranked Brooks at #30 and Friedman at #3. I hate Brooks far more — “National Greatness,” my ass! — but what Pareene says about Friedman is worth quoting:

Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. . . .
He’s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men.

It’s his unlimited expense account (Pareene isn’t exaggerating with that “literally“) which gives Friedman carte blanche to go flitting hither and yon in search of anecdotal evidence to support his own favorite public-policy themes.

And they are just that, themes. Friedman doesn’t get his hands dirty with the difficult business of pushing actual legislation through Congress. Far less does he concern himself with the arguably more difficult (and almost certainly more dirty) business of getting an electoral mandate for  his policy themes. If Friedmanism is so gosh-darn popular — if it’s what “we” really want — why isn’t it advocated in the platforms of both major parties? Why didn’t congressional candidates fill the airwaves with campaign ads calling for the enactment of Friedman’s ideas, or excoriating those small-minded obstructionists who stand in the way of our glorious Friedmanite future?

Jonah Goldberg (who got an undeserved #7 spot on Pareene’s list) absolutely loathes Tom Friedman, and once delivered himself of this memorable denunciation:

 [F]or Friedman everything is connected to everything else, so everything is a metaphor for everything. “In the Friedman mind,” writes Ian Parker in a 2008 profile for The New Yorker, “things tend to be like something else. The new is like the old. The foreign is like the American. The scattered has a pattern.” Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud famously observed — but not for Tom the Magic 8 Ball of cliché generation, the maestro of mixed metaphors. A cigar could be the key to understanding why geo­thermal energy is the only way to save the panda. Like the China Syndrome that inexorably leads to the perfect storm that breaks the camel’s back, Tom Friedman encounters no obstacles — factual, logical, or literary — between himself and the points he wants to make.

Exactly so. Friedman is a sophister, whose cleverness as a writer is employed to disguise the shortcomings of his ideas. This is a classic error of intellectualism: Conflating mere eloquence of expression with soundness of thought.

People who admire fine writing (and I do) must always be on guard against this error, keeping in mind that a man may be both (a) an excellent writer, and (b) an advocate for very bad ideas.

The unfortunate fact that an argument may be both superficially persuasive and fundamentally wrong constitutes an eternal temptation to the minds of those people who permit their admiration of literary excellence to overcome their common sense.

Go read David Brooks’ infamous 1997 ode to “national greatness” and you will find no shortage of literary skill. Clear away the superficial eloquence, however, and you recognize that Brooks is arguing on behalf of the same sort of big-government, guns-and-butter, welfare/warfare state agenda that led LBJ into the political/policy debacle of the Great Society, the Dien Bien Phu of 20th-century American liberalism.

Karl Marx was a witty writer with a demonstrated aptitude for clever aphorisms (e.g., “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) and sloganeering: “Workers of the world, unite!” Yet Marx’s eloquence as a writer was exercised on behalf of what proved to be the most deadly idea in all human history.

Marxism was always more beloved by college students than by the working class, simply because the university is a place where words matter (or at least seem to matter) more than deeds. And the same can be said of the profession of journalism, whose top practicioners too often confuse their stock in trade — an excellence of written expression — with an actual superiority of intelligence, knowledge or wisdom.

This is an enduring problem Friedrich Hayek examined in his landmark essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” Hayek’s insight seems to have been ignored by our intelligentsia, whose hubristic self-satisfaction with their own eloquence is the taproot of their folly.

(Hat-tip: Insty.)

Category: New York Times

Mohamud’s Bad Luck Was Not Just Luck

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 2 Comments

Jeremy Lott on the Portland bomber:

Mohamud thus makes three in a string of recent examples of Islamists who have plotted unsuccessfully to blow up Americans on U.S. soil. Last month in another sting, the FBI arrested Farooque Ahmed in Virginia for casing the D.C. Metro system to plot a bomb attack. In May, Faisal Shahzad created but did not managed to detonate a bomb in New York’s Times Square. These incidents are linked, and so is their failure. The linkage is obvious. All men were Muslim immigrants who decided to bring Jihad to America. That it didn’t work out is not merely a matter of luck. . . .

Read the whole thing.

Category: Terrorism

LIVE AT FIVE – 11.29.10

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 2 Comments

TOP NEWS

ROK President Lee Warns Norks Against Further Attacks

President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea

PRC calls for emergency talks to defuse rapidly deteriorating situation

Hackers Crash Wikileaks Servers
One wonders who the hackers might have been working for.

Friends Stunned By Portland Terrorism Arrest
Also, why Portland?

Ireland Agrees To EU, IMF Terms For Bailout
Cash reserves, pension funds to be tapped first; annual deficits must be slashed from 32% to 3%



Wikileaked Documents Links PRC to Google Attack
What did the State Department know, and when did they know it?



POLITICS

Bowles & Simpson Work To Get Consensus Plan From Deficit Panel

Erskine Bowles (L), Alan Simpson (R)

Votes from 14 of 18 commissioners needed to issue formal recommendation

Possible Rift Ahead For Kansas GOP?
The K.C. Star sure hopes so, or so it seems


Washington State Dems Still In Control
But GOP stronger, more unified; could peel off some Dems on budget



THE ECONOMY, STUPID

Oil Rises Past $84 As Irish Bailout Becomes Reality

Strong Yen Leads To Japanese Splurge On Imports, Foreign Deals

BP Sells $7.06 Billion In Argentine Holdings To Cover Spill Cleanup Costs

Homeland Security Seizes, Closes 70 Internet Domains

Can Facebook & Twitter Predict Election Results?

Can Google Stop The Vitaly Borkers Of The World?



SPORTS

Cutler Upstages Vick As Bears Bring Eagles To Ground

Jay Cutler scrambles to evade Eagles' defense

No doubting the Bears now; 8-3, and the only team to beat the Eagles led by Vick

Tigers Take First In BCS, Ducks Fall To #2
TCU #3, Boise State #11

Ravens Hang On For Win Over Bucs

Favre Not Ready Yet For Wheelchair
Runs for first down: “Was it just ten yards? It felt like fifty.”

Byfuglien Leads Thrashers To Fifth Straight Win

Nuggets Run Away From Suns, Manage To Win Without Carmelo



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS

Leslie Nielsen Dies At 84

Leslie Nielsen, 1926-2010, RIP

Another of Canada’s gifts to drama and comedy leaves us

A New Year’s Wedding To Ease Lily’s Baby Grief?

Rihanna On The Cover Of British GQ

Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga Give Up Twitter For Charity

Pregnant Pink Talks about Cravings, Hormonal Rage

Miss New York Crashes Miss USA Float At Macy’s Parade



Pattinson & Stewart Turn Down “Dancing With The Stars”?

Willie Nelson Busted For Pot, Posts Bail



FOREIGNERS

Election Fraud Alleged In Haiti

Ethnicity Colors Ivorian Elections

Violence And Voting “Irregularities” Mar Egyptian Elections

Brazilian Police, Reinforced By Army Troops, Beat Down Gangs

Swiss People’s Party Wins Vote To Deport Foreign Criminals



BLOGS & STUFF

iOwnTheWorld.com: The Absolute Joke Known As Firedoglake

Pejman Yousefzadeh: Situational Alarm Concerning Terrorism

Althouse: “That’s A F****ed-Up Question”

Protein Wisdom: Pecksniffian Progressives And Other Drunks

Matt Welch: Thomas Friedman’s “Nation Building” Obsession


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin