Tipper Gore — Available!

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First, Al Gore invented the Internet. Then, he announced his separation via e-mail:

Al and Tipper Gore, whose playful romance enlivened Washington and the campaign trail for a quarter century, have decided to separate after 40 years of marriage, the couple told friends Tuesday.
In an “Email from Al and Tipper Gore,” the couple said: “We are announcing today that after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate.
“This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration. We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family, and we do not intend to comment further.”

So . . . the cougar is on the prowl.

Which one of you healthy young fellows wants to help Tipper get her groove back? I’m thinking Will Folks might be available for this assignment.

Hellfire Missile 1, Shaikh Sa’id al-Masri 0

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ABC’s Jake Tapper reports another U.S. victory:

US officials tell ABC News that al Qaeda’s No. 3 — Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid, known as Shaikh Sa’id al-Masri and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid – has been killed. Al Qaeda released a eulogy of Shaikh Sa’id tonight, officials said. . . .
US officials believed him to have been killed about a week ago in Pakistan. . . .
“Al-Masri was the group’s chief operating officer,” the official said, “with a hand in everything from finances to operational planning.  He was also the organization’s prime conduit to Bin Ladin and Zawahiri.  He was key to al-Qaeda’s command and control.”   . . .
An Egyptian, Shaikh Sa’id was formerly the chief financial officer of al Qaeda. The Sept. 11 Commission said that internally he argued against the 9/11 attacks “because he feared the U.S. response to an attack.”

Kinda prophetic, considering how things turned out for him.

Siccing the FBI on Little Miss Attila?

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No, the Obama administration isn’t after our blog friend.

When she was a young teenager back in the 1970s, Little Miss Attila spent a few years in a church that she now describes as a cult. That has not endeared her to those who remain within the flock of minister R.L. Hymers Jr., nor has it endeared her to the son of aforesaid minister, who has reported her to the FBI, accusing her of using “religious ‘hate speech’ to harass and stalk my father.”

Yeah. That’s the Christian thing to do — report your former congregation members to the feds.

Being a fundamentalist myself, raised a Baptist and old enough to remember the era — I graduated high school in 1977, the year LMA left the Hymers church — I was shocked to learn some of the methods employed by the “Open Door Community Churches.” Here is a letter the church sent to LMA in December 1977:

You have been excommunicated from the church for sexual sins that you refuse to repent of, and for continually missing church, and for denying Christ.
You have violated your enclosed covenant with God. There is only one way you can get right with God. You must come back to this church, repent, and publicly confess your sins. You cannot go to any other church and be absolved, for, even if they accept you, God will not. You must come back here to repent, even it is fifty years from now. Otherwise you can never be forgiven.
You were excommunicated by a unanimous vote of the membership of the entire church.

“Excommunicated”? Protestants more typically “disfellowship” straying members. This eruption of Catholic terminology in a Baptist church, however, is not the weirdest part. LMA was “excommunicated” for “sexual sins” when she was 14 years old — and evidently after her “sins” (e.g., having been date-raped by a boyfriend) were discussed by the entire congregation!

Further note that the Hymer church claims that, unless the teeage LMA returns to the church that has just “excommunicated” her, she cannot be reconciled with God.

Whether this is kind of stuff qualifies Hymer as the leader of a cult, it certainly qualifies him as weird.

It’s important to place this in the context of the 1970s. LMA was “excommunicated” from the Hymers church about a year before Jim Jones and the “Peoples Temple” met their infamous end in the jungles of Guyana. In the ’70s, there were a lot of leftover hippies drifting around, looking for something to replace the whole peace-and-love ’60s trip. Those people didn’t feel at home in regular churches, and lots of them ended up in various cult-like fringe religions. And apparently Hymers’ church incorporated its share of ’70s-era kookiness.

Why did Hymers III have his attorney contact LMA to tell her that she has been reported to the FBI? It’s intimidation, pure and simple. They want her to shut up.

Trying to silence critics — isn’t that what cults do?

It Was Not ‘Violence-Violence’

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by Smitty (via Memeorandum)

Andrew Sullivan treats us to the Full Whoopi in relating the IDF raid on the Gaza flotilla, emphasis mine:

A simple point. The violence by the activists is pretty abhorrent. These are not followers of Gandhi or MLK Jr. But the violence is not fatal to anyone and it is in response to a dawn commando raid by armed soldiers. They are engaging in self-defense. More to the point: they are civilians confronting one of the best militaries in the world. They killed no soldiers; their weapons were improvised; the death toll in the fight is now deemed to be up to 19 – all civilians.

It staggers me to read defenses of what the Israelis have done. They attacked a civilian flotilla in international waters breaking no law. When they met fierce if asymmetric resistance, they opened fire. And we are now being asked to regard the Israelis as the victims.

Look, since 2007 there has been a blockade, blockhead. These have gone on long enough for an Internet to develop a Wikipedia and have its own page. When you know there is a blockade in place, you sort of expect the blockader to have a vested interest in interdicting cargo. Legitimate humanitarian aid should get through, or else reasonable people should join nitwits like yourself in the “That’s Uncool” chorus.
Via Knowledge Is Power comes a clip from idfnadesk indicating Flotilla Ship Mavi Marmara may have been packing more than band-aids and rubbing alcohol:But, hey: don’t let the context of being surrounded by people that literally want your blood upset your narrative, Andrew.

The attempt at some proportionality argument ignores the reports that the IDF went in without assault rifles.  Had the IDF slaughtered half the Mavi Marmara crew outright, you may actually have an argument.  But the evidence seems to indicate they did not.  The a priori judgment that Israel is always wrong utterly pollutes your mind, Sullivan.  They ceased to be civilians when they engaged the IDF in close combat.

Furthermore, the problem was limited to one boat in the flotilla.  Do you think that, maybe, just maybe, the Mavi Marmara carried more than M-and-M’s?

One nearly approaches a sort of academic curiosity, wondering what it would take to bring an Andrew Sullivan sort of character into reality. Just before becoming a full thought, the whole venture drowns in a puddle of contempt.  I actually have more respect for the personal courage of Whoopi Goldberg than that of Andrew Sullivan; she’s a tough lady.

Update: Insta-lanche!

Update II: As far as I can tell, the two Andrew Sullivan comments are authentic.

Matthew Yglesias Attempts — And Rather Sadly Fails — to Understand Economics

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It’s kind of touching, really. Like watching an infant attempting to walk and falling down:

We right now have the capacity to produce more—much more—than has ever been produced before in the history of the planet. There are dozens of supply-side policies that could be improved in every country on earth, but that’s not a new fact about the world. What’s new is the lack of demand, the willingness of the key leaders in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Washington, Berlin, and now it seems London as well to tolerate stagnation and disinflation in the face of some of the most exciting fundamental new opportunities for human economic betterment ever.

A mild rebuke from Tyler Cowan:

Reading the Keynesian bloggers, one gets the feeling that it is only an inexplicable weakness, cowardice, stupidity, whatever, that stops policies to drive a more robust recovery. The Keynesians have no good theory of why their advice isn’t being followed, except perhaps that the Democrats are struck with some kind of “Republican stupidity” virus.

What Yglesias can’t seem to get through his head is that we are suffering from a capital shortage. There is no magic formula to restore the asset-value lost in the housing-bubble meltdown. Nor can any monetary or fiscal intervention magically restore the asset-value lost in the stock market slide. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, still nearly 4,000 points (28%) below its October 2007 peak, has spent the past month trying without success to regain a plateau near 12,000. That 28% decline is real and, combined with the decline of home values, has had a severe impact on the net worth of many Baby Boomers nearing retirement.

Investors are resisting the conclusion that we may be entering the second phase of a double-dip recession, but the conclusion may soon prove irresistible. Most people didn’t notice this Friday, but the FDIC shut down five more banks Friday, bringing the 2010 bank failure total to 78. Five months into the year, we are on pace to substantially eclipse the 140 bank failures of 2009. The FDIC’s list of “troubled” banks is now at 775 — nearly 10% of all U.S. banks.

The official unemployment rate is still 9.9% and shows no prospect of significant decline before next year. The European debt crisis still isn’t over and the newest worry for investors is municipal default — Harrisburg, Pa., Detroit and Jefferson County (Birmingham), Ala., being the leading edge of that problem.

Yglesias wants government to stimulate demand, and he wants it stimulated now, and the warning signs be damned. Most Americans have reduced their debt, paying down their credit cards, but Yglesias thinks the government should increase its debt by engaging in yet more deficit spending.

When the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And when the only economics you’ve got is Keynes, every problem looks like a shortage of aggregate demand.

UPDATE: Shockingly, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones (!) feels that cutting taxes might be an effective stimulus. But the type of cut he suggests — a payroll tax holiday — would be Keynesian in its purpose, aiming to stimulate consumer demand.

Demand is not the problem, and it was not by stimulating demand that the “supply-side revolution” of the 1980s succeeded. What the reduction of top marginal rates (and deregulation) accomplished was to encourage capital formation, and to make the U.S. a more attractive place for capital investment. It was the liberation of capital that created the long boom.

Extending the Bush tax cuts and eliminating the estate tax and the capital-gains surtax — that would be supply-side.

Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see a liberal argue that tax cuts are a good thing. There may yet be hope.

Gags Sarah Palin Shouldn’t Even Try

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by Smitty (h/t Little Miss Attila)


One can’t imagine Sarah doing dry, absurd humor. The Sarah Palin equivalent of the Dead Parrot sketch probably involves her walking into a repair joint and very calmly dealing with a deadbeat service twerp. The twerp asserts that, as a classy lady, she knows little about cars. She’s complaining about the car repair service, and he’s trying to call her a dumb broad in not so few words.

Only she’s sort of a Marisa Tomei figure, and the sketch builds as she’s slowly demonstrating to the twerp that:

  • She really does know what she’s talking about, and
  • He’s a leaky bucket of fail.

Writing that up is left as an exercise to a someone that’s a big Palin fan and a bigger wrench than I. Here is the original Python sketch, with the Blue State Parrot on serene display: