There’s lots of stuff like this out there, but I thought this was a particularly good run of it…apart from the occasional continuity glitch and awkward pause. Well done.

From one of my former co-workers, where she posted it over at the Hello Kitty of Bloggin’.

If you don’t want your dog to do something, your dog shouldn’t want to do it. Here in Folsom, them’s fightin’ words…I could get writer’s cramp jotting down all the crap I see people letting their dogs do. Makes you wonder who’s walking who out there.

This is good to see, I might learn to get along with a canine like this.

Update: Re-hosted on YouTube. Thanks to blogger friend Phil for pointing out I wasn’t finished with reading the instructions yet.

Daily Mail:

This is the astonishing moment a book was apparently hurled at the head of President Barack Obama during a campaign rally in Philadelphia.

The flying missile narrowly missed hitting the President yesterday.

It is not clear what the book was, where it came from in the crowd, or why it was thrown at Mr Obama – who did not appear to notice the danger.

But it is expected that there will be fallout from the security breach as the Secret Service investigates how close the President came to danger.

The rally was clearly an eventful one – other images showed a naked man being led away in handcuffs by police.

It is not clear if the man was involved in the book-throwing incident – or why he was not wearing any clothes.

The bizarre incident recalled the moment in 2008 when an angry Iraqi journalist hurled a shoe at then-U.S. President George Bush during a press conference in Baghdad.

The surprisingly nimble Mr Bush ducked the shoe – and the moment became immortalised with online parodies and internet video games.

But the incident was also marked with controversy as U.S. media questioned why the Secret Service – whose members are supposed to be willing to take a bullet for the President – were not close enough to Mr Bush to deflect the attack.

Pffft. They weren’t close enough to deflect the attack because there’s only one position that’s that close. Not wanting to be crass or vulgar about it, but I didn’t bring this up — that position was reserved for Laura Bush.

All the Secret Service can do is screen the crowd. Screening is an exercise in approximation.

Life’s got risks. From the photo, I am detecting a curve to the covers of the book, which strongly implies it is a paperback. What was the potential damage here? A cardboard paper-cut to the back of the neck? A soft bruise in the corner of the temple where the stem of the binding struck first? Martin Luther King and JFK extend their sympathies…

Girlfriend and I spent an exciting day at Rollins Reservoir, and she made a point of picking up the Sunday paper on the way home. With the car back in the garage and the shoes kicked off and the cold suds uncapped & flowing, she brought my attention to the fact that on the Sacramento Bee’s “Voters Guide” insert, Jerry Brown’s photograph makes him look like a responsible distinguished looking elder-statesman, or trusted Walter-Cronkite dude who I can rely on to bring me the evening news…and Meg Whitman looks like a mentally retarded woman who’s just been roused from a three-year-coma.

I turned to the online version so I could find an electronic copy of the image to embed. No can do…what I found there (to left) is far worse. Brown looks like a trusted envoy to be dispatched to a Middle East hotspot to defuse tensions with his wise, worldly understanding of human nature. Meg Whitman looks like a face you’d carve into a Jack O’Lantern, stick somewhere, and haul out to take a picture of it again somewhere in the second week of November when it starts reeking like sin and is bathed with little tiny maggot-flies, with all that squash-tissue sporting a generous putrid sag…

Okay, got it. The print newspaper industry wants us to vote for democrats. And I know why.

What I don’t get is, why any Californian who reads up on the issues would want to vote for Jerry Brown? I understand why a loyalist democrat would want to. I understand why a union thug would want to.

Brown was already put in this office. He sucked. It was Carter magnitudes of suckage…sucked any way he could possibly suck. Sucked like a leaf blower in reverse.

I don’t put a lot of stock in the “self made billionaire going to run this state or nation like a business and pull us out of our hole.” Haven’t fallen for that again since I got snookered into voting for Perot in ’92. I don’t see a lot that is genuinely positive about Whitman.

But she’d be better than Brown. It isn’t even a gamble. Brown is tried, tested and true — that is the problem with him.

I honestly don’t see the upside.

Time out: 6:30 a.m.
Time in: 4:10 p.m.
Distance: 51.20 mi
Route: Granite Bay, Loomis, Newcastle, Auburn, Granite Bay again.
Sunburn: Pretty mild. It’s late enough to leave the sunscreen at home, right? Fluids mostly held out, but I raided the fridge (again) when I stumbled through the door.
Injuries: None
Casualties: None; provided the Android is in my backpack pocket where I left it, which I think it is.
Butt: Pretty sore
Fear of not making it home again: On a scale of 0 to 10, about a 6 with occasional spikes up to 7. Perfect.

You can do something now, and have these little panic attacks where you think maybe you pushed the ticker past its limit…or, you can pamper yourself silly now, and have the same panic attacks at 70 or 80 when they’re much more likely to actually mean something. I’d prefer to have the panic now.

And I got schooled on topography a few times. Can’t get a reading on that from a map. I’d say some of those surprises were mostly responsible for making this an adventure, put the “error” in trial-and-error. The Newcastle area is not level by any means. Well, I made it.

Update: Just realized: While yesterday’s little trip out didn’t set a daily record as far as distance, or total time, or sunburn or money spent — it did push out my Northern (bicycling) frontier a tiny bit. Maybe that’s the way I need to be tracking this:

Yes, this system shows some signs of being productive. I can see the value of figuring out where & how to push this quadrangle/pentangle outward next time. Pilot Hill, maybe?

I am given to understand it is a popular day for weddings. Make sure no one gets the anniversary date wrong, by making it easy to remember…ten ten ten.

Professor Mondo says it is Binary Day.

To me, it is Tours Day…

Ninth-century chroniclers, who interpreted the outcome of the battle as divine judgment in his favour, gave Charles [Martel] the nickname Martellus (“The Hammer”), possibly recalling Judas Maccabeus of the Maccabean revolt. Details of the battle, including its exact location and the exact number of combatants, cannot be determined from accounts that have survived. Notably, the Frankish troops won the battle without cavalry.

Later Christian chroniclers and pre-20th century historians praised Charles Martel as the champion of Christianity, characterizing the battle as the decisive turning point in the struggle against Islam, a struggle which preserved Christianity as the religion of Europe; according to modern military historian Victor Davis Hanson, “most of the 18th and 19th century historians, like Gibbon, saw Poitiers (Tours), as a landmark battle that marked the high tide of the Muslim advance into Europe.” Leopold von Ranke felt that “Poitiers was the turning point of one of the most important epochs in the history of the world.”

From the latter days of the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammed, who had shucked his mortal coil exactly a century earlier, the Muslim invasion proceeded throughout Europe. This is where the religion deviated most significantly from the “Religion of Peace” bumper sticker slogan; it was being spread by force, at swordpoint, convert-or-die stuff. Around all the Mediterranean it swirled, clockwise, threatening to engulf all the known world. Tours was where the irresistible force met the immovable object.

If we were to have a festival beginning with dark dirges on September 11, erupting with a festive celebration on Tours Day, it would be exactly thirty days long. Hmmm…sort of an extended Good-Friday/Easter thing. Interesting idea.

Great doings taking place out there…

Recently GMAC Mortgage, whose parent Ally Financial is majority-owned by the U.S. government, suspended foreclosures in [states that require judgment foreclosures] after acknowledging that in some cases notaries may not have been present and the signers may have relied upon others to review [foreclosure] documents instead of doing it themselves. Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase then halted their own foreclosures in those 23 states to ensure they are following the letter of the law, and yesterday BofA announced its moratorium is now nationwide.

We’re not aware of a single case so far of a substantive error. Out of tens of thousands of potentially affected borrowers, we’re still waiting for the first victim claiming that he was current on his mortgage when the bank seized the home. Even if such victims exist, the proper policy is to make them whole, not to let 100,000 other people keep homes for which they haven’t paid.

I was hoping within about a year, we — she and I — would be sitting on the other side of this equation: put something down, get approved for our new house, sign on the bottom line and move in. I have to wonder, what are our chances of making that happen now? Under what conditions will a bank agree to go into the deal, knowing they won’t have any real claim to the property? What’s my down? What’s my mortgage? What’s my term? I guess I can forget about it ever happening with BofA for the foreseeable future.

We’re being protected so well from anything bad happening to us, that if it keeps on like this we won’t be able to do anything.

Had to rely on office chit-chat in order to find out about this. But at least I have enough blogger moxee to figure out there had to be a YouTube of it…

And I thought if my hearing ever went, it would be pistol practice. A bag of chips is gonna do that to me? Apparently so. Somewhere else, there’s a video of which I have only learned second-hand…one of these crackerbags being opened on the deck of an aircraft carrier, with the jets taking off. Crinkle-crinkle…(jets in mid-thrust)…hear that? Yup, I can still hear it.

Ah, a small price to pay I suppose…to SAVE…the PLAN-NET…ooh…aah.

Time to embed George one more time. Best monologue ever.

It’s George Carlin. “Not Safe For Work” should be understood without being stated outright, but I’ll state it anyway.

Actually, just a little over three weeks to go. How time flies. So what’re we voting on anyway?

How’s it gonna go?

PJTV’s Tea Party TV today unveiled the results of their weekly Tea Party poll, which revealed that nearly one in four Democrats (24%) believe the GOP could win control of the U.S. Senate. According to the new poll of likely voters, 52 percent of respondents overall believe the Republican Party could gain control of the U.S. Senate while 60 percent believe they could win the U.S. House.

“A majority of likely voters – including some Democrats – believe the GOP could gain control of the legislative branch this November – a scenario many could not fathom two years ago,” said Vik Rubenfeld, PJTV’s Polling Director. “Over half of likely voters believe the GOP could gain control of the U.S. Senate, meaning races in traditionally Democratic states like California, Connecticut, New York, and Washington would need to swing to the right on Election Day.”

++blink++

Wow…I remember the beginning of 2009 like it was yesterday. All that hope crackling in the air like electricity before a thunderstorm! What happened?

A thunderstorm, I guess.

But this isn’t really the democrats’ fault…nothing against their policies. It’s just the bad mood that goes along with a crappy economy that is all George W. Bush’s fault, right? That crappy economy that turned all crappy three quarters of the way through his eight years in office…when the democrats took over Congress…and continues to this very day, now that Bush has been out of office for two years. And the democrats still have control of Congress.

The voters aren’t really blaming them, right? It’s just an anti-incumbent mood!

Not so fast…

If 2010 is an “anti-incumbent” election, how can it be that 80 percent of the incumbents will be re-elected?
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
10/08/10 9:33 AM EDT

That is the question posed over at RedState.com by Ned Ryun in an important post that reminds us all that, stirring as they may be, the Republican primary victories by insurgent Tea Party conservatives like Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and many others are still just that – primary victories.

The key passage in Ryun’s “The Opening Salvo” is this:

“What those of us who believe in free enterprise and limited government are confronting; an out-of-control bureaucracy, out-of-touch leaders, and fiscal irresponsibility, did not materialize overnight, and will not be changed overnight. It will take time to shift the massive ship of the American state and get it back on course.

“I would say that until we see a losing percentage of 50% or more for incumbents at all levels of government we cannot truly say that there is an anti-incumbent wave and that the American people are winning the war against the ruling class.”

But Republicans and conservatives should not get cocky!

You know, I’ve never understood that. Let’s just say the tea leaves aren’t being truthful with us here. Let’s say democrats maintain control of Congress so we can keep on with our sucky-ass economy. Let’s even say they pick up some seats. And you, fool, went & got cocky you stupid boob.

What damage did you do? Did you stay home? No? You went out and voted? Okay then, no harm no foul…the democrats won and they deserved to, America hasn’t woken up yet after all. The votes weren’t there.

So I say, get as cocky as you want. Get out and vote on Election Day…that’s Tuesday, November 2 for Republicans and Wednesday, November 3rd for democrats. Don’t go betting a hundred dollars on the outcome with your asshole liberal democrat neighbor if you’re only feeling twenty dollars worth of confidence in it — that would be cocksure as well. Pride going before a fall.

Other than those two things….where does this restraint benefit anyone? We went through our heartbeat of stupid right on schedule, we tried out some feel-good left-wing liberal policies and got burned. Again. Now we’re going to pull the country’s head out of its ass because we can’t afford not to…again. Natural order of things. Keep the drama low. Not that complicated.

Hat tip for the above video and links to the wonderful Instapundit.

KC is seeing all sorts of colors in the environmental movement…because they’re there to be seen. No hardcore tighty-rightie she, she has come to the reasoned conclusion that this is bollocks. Just a bunch of attention whores trying to get attention.

My conclusion is equally unflattering to the movement, but a little bit more…left-brain…which is not to say scientificikul or anything.

But it does ask some questions nobody has ever been able to answer to my satisfcation. Maybe I’m just messing around where I don’t have any business messing around.

DJIA, in the moment in which I am typing this, is 10967.65. If you do not believe me you can look it up. If you’re reading this, you have an Internet connection. If for some reason you don’t have an Internet connection you can ask the guy sitting next to you on the train or the subway.

More people are worried about global warming than about the DJIA, so this next one should be easy…

I want to know the Earth’s mean temperature. Right now. Actually, not now…I want a reading that was accurate sometime in the last thirty days. Heck, the last six months. And I don’t want it in hundredths of a degree. A full degree will be perfectly adequate. This is only reasonable, right? This is the statistic that drives the panic. If it fluctuates by 0.05, there’s a blizzard of peer-reviewed papers flung around by the White Coat crowd saying we’re all gonna die.

But you can’t get that number for me. And if you do, it doesn’t mean anything.

I know, I know…how dare I say such a thing. I didn’t even go to college. These are our best & brightest slinging around the global warming hooey, who am I to argue with them?

It just doesn’t take very much, that’s how. I can count to three. I can comprehend three dimensions. Earth is a three-dimensional object, and anyone who says otherwise is just wrong. It exists in three dimensions, and its surface is two dimensions. “Mean Earth Temperature” is a statistic taken from the two dimensions. And, actually, most of the scare-articles I’ve read about this, when they go into the details about why they’re stirring up a scare, you find out they’re usually measuring the average temperature among land masses.

A thousand cc’s of water, weigh a kilogram. That’s a lot compared to dirt & sand.

That kilogram of water gives off a Calorie, capital-C — a “kilo-calorie” — when it is cooled by one degree Celcius. It absorbs that much again when it is warmed by one degree Celcius. That’s called “heat density,” and that’s quite a bit of it. Again, a whole lot compared to dirt & sand.

But even if you take that into account, you’re still not arriving at an objectively-measured, reproducible summary of anything called “Earth Mean Temperature” until you measure it across three dimensions, not just two. Which means you have to go to the Earth’s core. That’ll ratchet your bottom-line value by something in the magnitude of thousands of degrees.

The planet is in possession of two distinctly different environments, one on the surface and one under it. The one that is superheated to magnitudes altogether inconceivable within the other, is much larger, much denser, much more fluid. They come into contact with each other at unmeasured, random points on the spectrum of time. As rare a happenstance as it may be for the more fluid, pressurized and superheated matter from down below to come in contact with our tepid environment up here…within the workings of this big round rock, it is a relatively mundane event and not always subject to measuring or monitoring. In my book, that means for all practical purposes such a breach is random.

You don’t need letters after you name to figure out what that means. Or how logically devastating this is to the notion that, if the temperature of the more tepid environment varies by so much as a tenth of a degree, it portends something.

It is the natural hazard that an argument must expect to encounter, when it is based on two-dimensional measurements of a three-dimensional thing. This hazard is insurmountable. The only way you can get around it is to take the Earth, throw it in a huge blender, crank it up to puree, and stick a thermometer in the resulting mush. That would be an accurate measurement of “mean temperature,” provided entropy has been reached.

Obviously, we aren’t doing that. We look at land masses, take readings and average them out. Just think on how much that ignores. It’s staggering.

Global warming, man-made climate change, climate deconstruction, global climate alteration, anthropogenic whatever. You don’t need to doubt the models, to doubt it. Doubt the statistic. Doubt its integrity. This thing we’re supposed to associate with the very word “science,” is based on the notion that a much larger thing can be measured by the average of a randomly-selected, much smaller sample…and under ordinary conditions the resulting number should remain absolutely, positively static with no measurable variance whatsoever.

Where else do we believe in such a thing?

It’s bullshit, there’s just no other way to put it. If it says the world is in jeopardy, and in the next hundred years the world really does end, it’s a case of a stopped clock being right at a certain time of the day.

The promise from two years ago: Obama’s gonna lead us.

Delivery of the promise: When the going gets tough, the anointed get going.

Fulfilling his promise to be our most transparent president, Barack Obama is taking an extended trip overseas…with the departure date rather transparently moved up to be as close to election night as possible.

So as much as Obama might like to make himself available to domestic reporters and answer questions about the expected drubbing of Democrats and what the election returns mean about the mood of America toward his failed policies, the president feels it is more urgent that he arrive in India in time to help celebrate the Hindu holiday Diwali.

And while Obama would surely like to have the opportunity to let American voters know that he’s heard their voices, this overseas trip will be among the longest in his presidency – with additional stops in Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea.

I see. We’re going to make a spectacle out of our plummeting appreciation for the “Yes We Can” vision of 2008’s hottest fashion trend…and the lesson to learn from it will be that we’re just not smart enough for His Holy Leadership, and He is actually the President of the World. Or something.

That’s a good thing. Unless there’s some bizarre “Polyester Pants Are Hot Again” moment in two years, Barack Obama will be an ex-President at the tender age of 51 if my math is right…the actuarial tables would then indicate He will be wandering around Jimmy Carter style, looking for something to do & say for forty years or thereabouts.

I’d rather have the seals falling off His podiums out there than in here. Can you imagine a former President Obama saying “Let me be clear, make no mistake, I just think it would be irresponsible for me to comment on the policy decisions of my successor; I just think when ex-Presidents keep their mouths shut, it’s good for everybody.” Can you imagine Him saying that for four decades?

To the mountains of Tibet and jungles of Laos with You, Replacement Jesus. They need Your guidance and Your wisdom. You’re doing the right thing. We’re just not good enough for You.

Update: Probably a good idea to post a warning with regard to what should be obvious…lefty whackjobs expressing their darkest thoughts about conservatives. So lots of naughty words inappropriate for a mixed audience herein.

Twitter shenanigans. Thugs being paid money to make vulgar threats, trash talk about raping conservatives’ children, malware embedded behind Twitter avatars & background images, and a video bust that captures it all.

They’re also making up stories about Tea Party activists being racists…but that’s a little like busting a serial killer for jaywalking. Now you know what sort of people come up with that stuff. I’m a little unsure of the motive though. How do you get this enthused and energized about higher taxes and baby-butchering?

It truly is a collision between two different worlds.

Hat tip to The Other McCain.

Oh, okay, I feel so much better now.

Hat tip to Boortz.

I was watching the couple named in the title a few years ago on the teevee, discussing their marriage and how they make it work. The smitten groom of the pair, James Carville, lefty, managed to land some snide comments that let us say did not bring clarity to this question, at least from where I stand. Okay, so they have a union based on mutual understanding and respect…and Mary Matalin can count on having her intelligence, character and personal integrity insulted by her knight in shining armor every night when she goes home. Oh yeah. What bliss.

But this is the exception to the rule, as Neo Neocon has noticed:

I’ve personally known a number of marriages of the mixed political variety. Almost all of them have conformed to this Democrat-woman Republican-man pattern. Almost all of them seem to be working out pretty well.

She’s discussing an article in the New York Times …

After 13 years of marriage, Anne Edgar and David Sussman survive by avoiding most political conversation. “But a Republican is a lonely man in New York,” said Mr. Sussman, a billing analyst for a nursing home in Connecticut. “I do watch Bill O’Reilly. And I’ve had some moments with Anne’s friends.”

The reaction to her husband in their social circle sometimes engenders sympathy in Ms. Edgar, whose firm handles publicity for museums. “My friends might act dogmatic or superior or try to pick a fight,” she said. “And it’s frustrating because he does know a lot. I know I’m right, but he is more articulate. And he’s kind, so how can he have these political beliefs — he doesn’t think that global warming is man-made — or appreciate people that I think are dangerous?”

Ms. Edgar suspects that Mr. Sussman may relish the contrarian role. “My husband is a Jew who rooted for the Romans in ‘Spartacus’ — that explains a lot,” she said. “I wonder if he’d enjoy being part of the mainstream if we lived in Iowa. Where we live, he has to dissemble or keep quiet. I do worry, though, about the safety of my husband in Brooklyn Heights if the truth gets out.”

When politics makes strange bedfellows, the extended families and in-laws may treat the newcomer as an alien life form. “But my family was actually more disappointed that I wasn’t marrying a Red Sox fan,” said Jennifer Taddeo, a lawyer in Franklin, Mass. “I had a history of dating Republicans. I found them interesting but misguided. I do value that political back-and-forth. It would be much more difficult for me to be with somebody who was apathetic.”

Her husband, Russell Taddeo, a business consultant for Staples, upholds his family’s conservative values. “And his father makes him look like a crazy liberal,” Ms. Taddeo said. “But Russ has some of his father’s nature, so he likes to say things to shock, then sit back and watch the carnage. I tell him that living in Massachusetts is a dream come true — there are so many people he can inflame. I just take everything he says with several huge grains of salt, preferably on the edge of a margarita.”

Try as I might, I cannot think of a single marriage or coupling I personally know that runs in the Matalin-Carville direction. NN has picked up on this as well:

Note that, in the marriages described in the article, it’s the woman who’s the liberal and the man who’s the conservative. This ties in with statistics showing that, ever since a transition time somewhere during the 70s or early 80s, women consistently have been more likely to vote Democrat and men Republican.

Note also how polite and tactful the conservative men in the Times article are toward their liberal spouses, and the unwarranted condescension of most of the liberal wives towards their own conservative husbands.

I think, if your name isn’t James Carville, the liberal-man conservative-woman dynamic just isn’t going to work. Try having a “friendly debate” with a liberal about an idea some time without either side being allowed to mention surpluses or deficits in the other person’s qualities. A decade ago, or more, this might have been possible. Now it’s like herding cats. The liberal has to keep going there; arguing about the idea itself just isn’t feasible because there is no idea for the liberal to argue. “I’m sure Obama will get it all fixed any day now, just wait and see,” and that exhausts everything they have to say about it; to go any further would involve speaking on behalf of His Holiness. And the underlings do not speak for Our First Holy President — it doesn’t work that way — He speaks for them.

That’s a generalization, but as a generalization it works. Liberal arguments do not have much to do with what’s going to be done, they concentrate on all the glittery things that make some spangled leader all wonderful and hopey.

That means, when they’re defending the celebrity from a criticism, they need to go to the personal attributes of the critic. It won’t take long.

And women have thin skins. Or let’s tighten that one up for accuracy: Our society has a thin skin about women. How many times have you seen a commercial where the wife is using Brand X and her husband swoops in with the Good Stuff to show her how it’s done? That doesn’t work on Madison Avenue, because it won’t play in Peoria. Women are not to be insulted. Just isn’t done. If a man figures out the right answer quicker than the woman, that’s an insult.

So you can’t insult women, and liberals can’t discuss their issues without insulting people. I think, yes, liberal men do court conservative women, but it just doesn’t last. We’re seen a survival-of-the-fittest scenario play out.

Also, there is the gun issue. If a couple starts to make a life together and it starts to look like a good idea to acquire a handgun, this has a different dynamic for women. So if it’s her position that it’s better to have it & not need it than vice-versa, and his position is the tried & true liberal groupthink of “don’t have it don’t look at it don’t think about it guns are bad bad bad,” then when the rubber meets the road the conversations are going to have to take on a rather unpleasant turn. They will only become as serious as the need for the gun; which, if it exists at all, is as serious as it gets.

No matter what the dynamic is, once a lady has figured out she can’t make a practical, lasting life with her beau — whatever the reason — it’s all over. Conservative or liberal, they got us beat here. Women think about the future, we think about their breasts, legs, other body parts, and how to enjoy them more often.

Also, liberal men cannot stand rejection. That’s how they get that way.

Shirley S. Wang, “In the Lab,” Wall Street Journal:

Some people meet, fall in love and get married right away. Others can spend hours in the sock aisle at the department store, weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of wool argyles instead of cotton striped.

Seeing the world as black and white, in which choices seem clear, or shades of gray can affect people’s path in life, from jobs and relationships to which political candidate they vote for, researchers say. People who often have conflicting feelings about situations—the shades-of-gray thinkers—have more of what psychologists call ambivalence, while those who tend toward unequivocal views have less ambivalence.

High ambivalence may be useful in some situations, and low ambivalence in others, researchers say. And although people don’t fall neatly into one camp or the other, in general, individuals who tend toward ambivalence do so fairly consistently across different areas of their lives.

For decades psychologists largely ignored ambivalence because they didn’t think it was meaningful. The way researchers studied attitudes—by asking participants where they fell on a scale ranging from positive to negative—also made it difficult to tease apart who held conflicting opinions from those who were neutral, according to Mark Zanna, a University of Waterloo professor who studies ambivalence. (Similarly, psychologists long believed it wasn’t necessary to examine men and women separately when studying the way people think.)

I’m thinking, overall, it’s a “thumbs-up” — although that odious phrase “researchers say” is sprinkled throughout a little bit too thickly for my liking.

But I generally approve of what the researchers are saying: This ability to see things in shades of gray, is more of a predilection. People who can do it, are hard pressed when called upon to do the opposite, like a right-handed person suddenly challenged with writing left-handed. The practice isn’t there, the skills are lackluster at best, and the confidence is missing.

There are some specialized tasks in which you would want the person working it to be a shade-of-gray-er. Usually when “researchers say” things about this in other studies, they come to the conclusion that all tasks are like this…even running things. Which is a huge mistake. No, you don’t want leaders to think in shades of gray. Obviously, if that’s the way it’s going to be, their subordinates will not act on anything with any confidence because the boss is going to change his mind. So the entire organization becomes a by-the-numbers bureaucracy. People responsible for getting things done, make it a point to do things without any real passion, and to preserve plausible deniability at all times. The next casualty after accountability, is reason. No, what I did doesn’t make any sense, but them’s the rules. At the time I did it, that’s the way we were doing it. My ass is covered.

I’ve seen a few Gordian knots cut through. When it happened, someone made a decision…and there was clarity at last. They made the decision by seeing something in black-and-white. That’s how the world goes ’round, really. “Here…we’re going to do THIS…and, right-or-wrong, this is the decision we have made, we’re married to it, our fortunes will rise or fall on it.” It’s the simple concept of commitment, and generally, it very seldom does any damage worse than the alternative, which is indecision.

“Fair Game” is the title of a movie coming out this year that, somehow, tells the story of Valerie Plame’s “blown cover” without a Richard Armitage. I probably won’t be seeing it, and I’ll not write about it here.

It’s also the name of a thoroughly mediocre flick that came out fifteen years ago, marking the beginning and end of Cindy Crawford’s acting career.

And a much more enjoyable, though by no means more believable, Australian exploitation-genre project from a decade before that. Starring John Denver’s ex-wife, it played for our amusement last night, mostly so we could make sure the VHS player was still working. Animal-loving, ecologically sound, vegetarian woman plays Wiley-Coyote-Road-Runner with three big-game-hunting, flesh-eating, truck-driving men. Meep meep.

It is the title of a Neal Boortz posting from yesterday. This is the “fair game” I want to discuss. Boortz is picking on a child, holding her innocent comments up to public ridicule. If, that is, you define “child” as a college senior who has taken it upon herself to put an article, with her name at the top of it, in her school newspaper. The article describes why she doesn’t want to shop at Wal Mart, and she doesn’t think anybody else should either. It proves in no uncertain terms that the young lady knows nothing of capitalism. In fact, I’ll go further than that: If you know nothing about capitalism, I mean a scientifically measurable, truly vacuous nothing, you’ll be able to figure capitalism out quicker than she will. Her knowledge is negative, and for reasons I’ll not attempt to inspect or to explain, she saw fit to advertise this to the world.

Neal summarizes the situation:

I know that college students are the future and all that, but face facts. These are people who, by and large, have lived in a protected environment where all of their needs are met by someone else for pretty much their entire lives. For the most part they have never had to worry about meeting basic survival needs in a way most working Americans have.
:
If you’re dumb as a bag of hammers, and you promise not to vote … I’ll leave you alone. If, on the other hand, you insist on taking your abysmal lack of common sense into the voting booth – resulting in dangerous atrocities such as Barack Obama — I will consider you to be a threat … and you can await the sting of my rapier-like wit. I hope it hurts like hell.

I disagree with Boortz slightly about this. His triggering-mechanism, if you will, is the act of voting. Promise not to vote and he’ll leave you alone. These college kids are voting and that makes them fair game. Well, what really got this situation underway was not the act of voting, it was the act of publishing.

Which is quite alright with me. Take a look at what was published:

Now, I don’t knock those who shop at Wal-Mart. Its goods are affordable, and they’re all in one place. The lower your income, the more attractive those prices are.

But it’s time for American consumers — you, me and a whole bunch of other people — to take strong, direct steps against huge, unfeeling corporations with such major impact on what we buy, where it’s produced and how much we pay.

You. Me. A whole bunch of other people. Now we come to the meat of it; this is the real crisis that is facing today’s college kids. Grab a banner, raise your voice, recruit some ruffians, lead the charge, come up with some slogans, shout ’em from the hilltops — and if anybody criticizes you, whine like a little bitch.

That is the crisis. Too many people want it both ways; they have a message they want to get out there, so they do the “brave” thing and stick it in some kind of forum with their name linked to it. Or they would like to…but they want what they cannot have. What they really want, is all of the benefit of a public communications channel, plus all the benefit of a private one. Anyone who isn’t sympathetic to the mini-revolution they’re trying to stir up, they want all those people to butt out. They really, really want those other people to butt out. They feel their rights are being violated if their messages are intercepted, let alone reproduced in another forum — exactly the claim they’d be able to make, if they were communicating on a private channel.

It’s a case of enjoying benefits without grappling with the responsibilities attached. That is what makes Crystal Villareal fair game.

And that is what I want to discuss here. The modern revolutionary who wants to foment “change”, by broadcasting his or her voice far and wide, over the hilltops and through the valleys. But in such a way that it is heard only by those who approve of it. Anyone who would not, should be butting out and letting things be…as if the effort to instigate the change, will not be affecting that person. But the whole point of it is that it should be affecting as many people as possible — that is the definition of success.

So what these modern revolutionaries really want, and they don’t even seem to directly comprehend it themselves, is a sort of closed network whose tendrils extend to the boundaries of the known universe. They want to coordinate a revolution that will turn the world upside-down, but covertly, safe from the scrutinizing eyes and ears of those who might not be pleased with the effort.

Let’s call it what it is. They want to coordinate an ambush.

I saw one of my Facebook friends become embroiled in a debate about Social Security with a hardcore lefty type who was playing the “What You Gonna Do” card. You know how this goes…you have to have a solution, otherwise you have nothing to say and no right to complain. She asked some kind of direct question, and I commented in three short paragraphs, answering her question directly. She made a joke out of it and started ridiculing the other guy. I thought this was a little strange, seeing as how she was given exactly the information she said she wanted and now she was derailing the conversation on purpose.

All you readers who keep piling on me for my lack of respect for Facebook, what I call “The Hello-Kitty of Blogging,” pay attention to what comes next. I made a point of saying nothing further, but checking back on the conversation to see what happened. After twenty-four hours, I think, something looked wrong. I hit the “see all comments” button and what to my wondering eyes should appear…she had said something between this and this, and there was no trace of it. And then I recalled another thing she said over there, and there was no trace of that. There was just an archive of me & this other guy, talking to ourselves, like one side of a phone conversation.

“Do I read this right?”, I entered. “Did [name] just pull all of her comments out of this thread, like picking up her marbles & putting ’em in a bag, and head home?” I received confirmation in the affirmative.

See, there it is again. That selfish, unrealistic desire to get a message out there where it can be seen by as many pairs-of-eyes as possible…but not too many. I want to foment a revolution. I want to be a leader. I want to be edgy and bold. But don’t you go picking on me. Stop reading my stuff! Eavesdropper!

And then there is Ed Darrell’s page…yup, it’s about the Mosque in Manhattan. That’s really the same situation, when you think about it. Which most people don’t do, because it is constantly portrayed in the media as an issue involving the “right to worship.” Liberals want it portrayed that way, and we accommodate them constantly for reasons we cannot explain. But it isn’t about the right to worship. It’s about a towering leviathan, constructed for the express purpose of putting a message out. Far and wide. Sea to shining sea. But, again, if you aren’t sympathetic to the message, the proponents of the mosque want you to just shut up and go away. Keep your opinion to yourself. After all, they just want some space in which to privately worship!

The three gotta-build-it people have been requested — politely — repeatedly — to stop misrepresenting those opposed to the Mosque, as engaged in religious bigotry or some attempt to banish Muslims from the country. Very nicely; PLEASE stop. They refuse to. They say, if you don’t want to be a burglar don’t steal stuff, and if you don’t want to be called a bigot then don’t do bigoted things.

But it has nothing to do with religious oppression. One side wants to get a message out, publicly enough that it will have a lasting effect on the lives of total strangers…but they want the message to be treated like a private conversation, with all the privileges and respect that would entail. The other side is saying, this would have an effect on me and I have something to say about it. They are exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. And, according to all the information that has come to see the light of day, coping responsibly with the burdens that arrive with that. They are the ones being oppressed, when you get down to it.

Yesterday, a very silly column appeared with Richard Cohen’s name on it. He was promptly torn to shreds by Michael C. Moynihan, writing in Reason, who laid out a sound, logical argument that Cohen’s column sucked in every way it possibly could. Cohen was comparing the Tea Party movement to the National Guard troops that fired on the Kent State students in 1970, because…well, I don’t know if I can state the connection properly. I’m still not sure I understand it fully, or if Cohen does. It’s quite a stretch.

The final smackdown of Moynihan’s piece was,

…Cohen doesn’t catch the irony: The dissent of Kent State protesters, he thinks, was met with deadly force because of rhetoric that “otherized them,” that turned them into a domestic enemy. Pretty much exactly what Richard Cohen is doing to the dissidents of the Tea Party movement. But he disagrees with those people, so…

Now if you do your research, even just the very lazy research that involves just looking it up in Wikipedia, you see the bullets were not discharged in Ohio because of rhetoric. That becomes a very unlikely and unworkable proposition, very quickly. No, the protesters initiated the violence. This is not subject to dispute, and shouldn’t be. It was a Viva La Revolucion dust-up for which that particular era is well known.

I know this comes off as insensitive and churlish, but let’s face it: The students threw rocks, repeatedly, at young men with loaded weapons who, it turns out, were under-disciplined and under-trained. The under-trained young men with guns quickly exhausted all their options, and the protesters took advantage of this to foment as much anarchy as they could. Stick it to the man! Way to go!

Classic Alinsky manuever: The enemy has all of the responsibility for maintaining order, and our side has none. Exploit this to the fullest. Do whatever you have to do, to win, and we’ll figure out what that means later.

Two of the four dead, it seems, had nothing to do with the protest and were just heading from one class to another. There’s a tragedy. Perhaps, and probably, the other two were protesting peacefully and had nothing to do with throwing the rocks. But this is the trouble with getting your message out as part of a group.

The protest was the wisdom-equivalent of leaping into the bear’s cage at the zoo to give the animal a big hug. You aren’t supposed to point that out because our media has used that magic word in connection with it, “tragedy.” But it’s true.

In Cohen’s world, it is an indictment against The System. Because the protesters sought to create problems for the Guardsmen, outside the scope of what the Guardsmen’s training prepared them to handle. The protesters succeeded at what they were trying to do. They wanted anarchy and they got it. They won, the Guardsmen lost; the latter labored under the mission of maintaining order. Now we’re supposed to have a decades-long debate about what bad people they are, and supposedly this goes up to Nixon and, it’s not difficult to imagine, every Republican who has succeeded him in that office.

So this has been going on awhile. Young people just coming of age, who think fewer guns and more free sex are all it takes to make the world perfect — with some new glut of government programs, and don’t for a minute think about scaling back the obsolete government programs the new ones are there to replace. A message of resistance and a protest to go with it. Modern-era broadsheets: Tall buildings, “worship centers,” articles in student newspapers, Facebook taunting, pictures of crucifixes dunked in urine, and Jesus Christ receiving oral sex from men. Anything to show how courageous and edgy we are. Because we have a right to dissent against the oppressive system!

But if you aren’t going to support us in this, ignore us and mind your own business. We have a right to our privacy.

The lesson we’re learning here is one we have been learning for a long time: Today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s dictator. The heady thought we get to digest, as we scan all these situations to see what they have in common, is: Revoluionaries act quite dictatorial while they’re still in the early stages of their revolutions.

The privilege they demand, and can expect thanks to history but not reason, is the same privilege sought by tyrants. That is, the privilege of tinkering with the intricate and intimate lives of strangers, with an opaque veil of secrecy drawn upon the tinkering, so the strangers never know what’s about to hit them.

Our young people are being raised to expect this, and to demand it. Why should they not? What force do they have in their lives, to provide them with a different expectation? From where else, besides the strangers who don’t see all things the way they do, will they get their mid-course correction? How else will they learn that free people don’t like to be manipulated in this way, and that all of Creation is not just a big finger-puppet show for their amusement?

These are serious questions. We have an epidemic of people not learning this.

So HELL yes, they’re fair game.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Hehe.

From Fox News:

An art exhibit that critics say features Jesus receiving oral sex from a man is under fire in Loveland, Colorado. The artwork is part of an exhibit in the city’s public museum.

“It is visual profanity,” said art gallery owner Linda King, in an interview with the Loveland Reporter-Herald. “It disgraces the God of all creation.”

The controversial artwork is part of 10-artist exhibit called, “The Legend of Bud Shark and His Indelible Ink.” The lithograph showing the son of God engaged in a sex act is called, “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals,” and was created by Stanford University professor Enrique Chagoya.

Yawn.

Lame.

Pedestrian.

What a dullard.

This has been done so many times before that it is a cliche. In the artworld, such work belongs next to the Velvet Elvis and the dogs playing poker.

If this “artist” had any courage, he’d show Mohammed instead of Jesus. That’s cutting edge. That’s breaking new ground. That’s dangerous. That’s truly being willing to sacrifice for the sake of art.

I triple-dog dare the professor.

Otherwise: Bluck, bluck, bluck.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

It’s so easy to go dissing the guy who won’t retaliate against anyone after he’s been dissed.

See? Now you respect me, because I’m a threat. That’s the way it works.

— Syndrome.

Real Clear Politics. Go. Click play.

I find it hilarious He is talking about “science, technology, engineering and math” just as the symbol fails Him. “We cannot sustain,” and +++plop+++.

Every single time I see one of these serendipitous suggestions that make it just a tiny bit more likely there is a God…it seems entwined with that is a much stronger suggestion that He has a sense of humor. The President of Empty Packaging delivers yet another smug monologue about the hard sciences and how certain other things cannot be sustained without them. And His Divine Podium falls apart on Him.

A podium is a device which is used to buttress the appearance of authority figures while they deliver tedious, often empty speeches.

Engineering is a discipline that is involved in — among many other things — affixing decals to podiums so that they don’t fall off.

Update: Blogger friend Rick found the embeddable clip that my searching couldn’t quite pin down.

Sarah Palin’s disastrous handling of that “seeing Russia” question — that looks like Jack Nicholson’s “You Can’t Handle The Truth” performance, by comparison to Blumenthal’s mess.

Hat tip to Ace, whose comment #48 by phelps, adroitly sums things up:

Miss South Carolina is now officially off the hot-seat.

To be fair to Blum, though: What loyal leftist could provide a halfway-decent answer to this question?

They get elected to solve this particular problem, probably more than any other. The voters who’ve been snookered by this, I think, would be rather shocked to learn how little thought the lefty politicians have really been giving it.

Speaking of my list of things that give you away as a clueless idiot (see previous), there is the matter of doing geologically insignificant little things to save the planet. That’d be the well-worn-out Item #3 on said list. Kate reports at Small Dead Animals:

Britain is the home of a surprising number of environmental-activist groups. If you follow the links to the “partners” of British climate-doom website One Hundred Months (“We have 100 months to save our climate“) you’ll start to grasp the extent of it. One organization, Plane Stupid, (“Bringing the aviation industry back down to earth!“) demands a ban on domestic flights and aviation advertising; another protests against renewable (bio) fuels, while another suggests we can get “free energy from air.”

If you spend enough time tooling around these sites it becomes apparent that in many, if not most cases, the activists’ concern for the environment pales in comparison to their level of self-righteousness and self-obsession. This recycling, eco-village-building whiz (gallery here), who describes herself – in the third person – as someone whose “life is organized on a logical basis,” and who “tends to control life, organising systems and people,” is fairly typical of those for whom environmental activism is essentially a tool used to draw attention to their too-too special selves.

When you look at the middle-or-upper class “activists” on display here and here, you have to wonder: if they honestly and truly believed that their actions were being undertaken in the interest of saving the planet – the baby animals, and the third-world poor – from a looming climate apocalypse, would they be acting so amused, and having so much giggly fun? If they were instead protesting, say, an ongoing genocide, would there be so much celebratory, “look-at-me” merrymaking?

I’ve not come across any scientific papers written on this…and I doubt that I’m going to, now that institutionalized science has prostituted itself, and become little more than a label for a bunch of hyped up political agendas. But there are quite a few people walking around, as free as you or I, who seem to be burdened with a phobia about the idea that the times in which we live are…well…not really all that special. In other words, our people may have thousands of years of survival stretched out after the moment the dirt hits our coffin lids, just as they had thousands of years before our umbilical cords were cut. In the chronicling of human existence, 2010 may not be the end, it may not be anywhere near it, it may be as unremarkable as, say, 1521. Or 387. Or 65,982 BC.

We may be living in the belly-button of human existence.

That just fills some people with dread. That would mean the reasons to remember these people after they have passed on, amounts to the balance of the reasons to remember what they did while they were (are) here. They’ve emotionally invested so much in the obvious apocalyptic contrary thought, that they can’t handle this. They don’t want to be remembered for what they did. They want to be remembered as: “He was here when it all went down.” Saw the end credits, as it were. Sang Amen.

That’s silly, of course. Who’d do the remembering?

But the dread is definitely there. Viewing the situation logically, the idea that there’s nothing special about the times in which we live other than the obvious technological advancements — is actually quite likely. Man has been vocally predicting his own extinction…well, pretty much non-stop for hundreds of years. One debacle after another involving the world ending in 2000, and 1996, and 1987, and 1900, and 1700, and 1600, and 1000, and…and…and.

It’s accelerating, lately, because we’re bored. We have more time to worry. We have fewer real problems than the average guy living in 1699.

There is a recognized problem with something called “Survivors Guilt.” This might be related to that. It seems to be grounded in a fear of recognizing, or an inability to recognize, that fate has granted you a full lifetime of opportunity to do what you want to do — and denied it to others just as deserving.

It is, when you think about it, a big heavy thought that entails some real responsibility once you think through all the ramifications of it. Nowhere is it written that we can all handle it.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Beginning any statement about your political views with “Hey hey, ho ho.”

–Item #38 on my list of telltale signs that you might be a clueless idiot.

Couldn’t help thinking back to that when I read the following:

On Saturday, September 18th, Andrew Breitbart faced a situation similar to that endured by EMS for over three years during the SEIU’s corporate campaign to force unionization on its employees (See Andrew Breitbart Forces President Obama’s Protesters to Fold Up Shop).

He and Glenn Beck faced an unruly crowd chanting “Hey, Ho, Breitbart and Beck Must Go,” a scene that my employees and I faced constantly during the ordeal. The chant then was “Dave Bego and EMS must go!” From an originality perspective, the SEIU has not progressed much in the five years since the campaign against EMS!

Of course, if you continue to read the article at the link behind the link, you discover these are day laborers hired for cash, not really union members. That’s right, in addition to being a parade of idjits, it’s a scam.

Unionization has been peddled to us, as I understand it, as a codification of our constitutional right to assemble peaceably and petition our government for grievances. In practice, assemblies such as this don’t always remain peaceful, and we’ve found unions define their reason for existence around the process of petitioning someone other than the government…unless the government’s shop happens to be the one being unionized. It would be more accurate to say to say assemble in some way and petition somebody for redress of grievances, which starts to deviate from the text of the First Amendment.

The phrase “SEIU’s corporate campaign to force unionization on its employees” interests me, since I’m still arriving at this with the codification-of-First-Amendment mindset. Why does the First Amendment, or some codification of it, need to be forced on people? Why do you need a corporate campaign to proliferate such a, er, um, …freedom? In fact, going back to the beginning of the organized labor movement, how come we need a whole new set of laws to buttress, or codify, or reinforce or augment or amplify or modulate one of our constitutional amendments in the first place?

Warning, audio is not safe for work or appropriate for a mixed audience. Potty-mouth language, ya know.

Hat tip to Buck.

Linked without comment.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Blogger friend Phil made a comment, and pointed to his own stuff in doing so. The subject is why our current President, and by extension all or most liberals, don’t want us watching Fox News. The critique against Fox is supposed to be that it is far less enlightening or accurate compared to other networks; but little-to-nothing is said by these critics about the factual tidbits Fox brings that its competition simply leaves out.

Phil notices something about how the leftist mind comes to call true things false and false things true. It isn’t their motivation to do this…at least, that is not their primary motivation. Rather — well, I’ll let him tell it.

All during the [ObamaCare] “debate”, their side was talking about what was literally in the bill’s wording (when you could get them to talk about details in the bill at all rather than The Grand Idea or how evil/stupid their opponents were) … and our side was talking about what the effect of the bill would be.

We said “it’ll mean this will happen” and they said “Fear monger! That’s not IN THE BILL!” and hence it was, to their eyes, “proven false”. But now even proponents are openly admitting that that [the medical rationing, or “Death Panels”] is exactly what we’re talking about. Government officials being in charge of what care you get based on whether it’s “worth it”. To whom? By whose standards?

This is bigger than the death panels. I see it in quite a few issues.

“If you make it more expensive to employ people, fewer people will be employed.” “LIAR! There is nothing in our legislation that raises the minimum wage, requiring businesses to lay off employees!” It’s all about intentions. Cause-and-effect be damned. Take away people’s guns, and they won’t be able to defend themselves. But our intention is to make people safer! So violent crime isn’t going to go up, it’s going to go down! Because that is what we intend to have happen!

The trouble is, to the loyal leftist history always began yesterday morning. So our nation’s long and busy history of government programs that were intended to cause one specific thing, and ended up causing something more-or-less the precise opposite, is conveniently overlooked.

Intentions. “It Isn’t In The Bill.” That is all that matters. If you factor something else in…like, real-world rules of if-you-do-this, such-and-such-happens…well, you’re evil, stupid, crazy and bitterly clinging to your Bible and your guns. Fooey on you.

Update: On the subject of how this makes false things true…I’m looking over this list of broken Obama promises (hat tip to Linkiest) and it probably isn’t what you’d ordinarily expect. Not a whole lot of dry reading about repeal this bill, pass that bill…this is wild, out-there type stuff. Remember when you were seven and you wanted to become President so you could make it illegal for your little brother to beat you at Monopoly, or by Executive Order you could make it possible to hide broccoli in a glass of milk? This is a little like that.

“That is why there will never be true security unless we focus our efforts on targeting every source of fear in the Americas. That’s what I’ll do as president of the United States.”

I’m curious. How many sources of fear are there in the Americas? Did He promise to get them properly targeted, or just to focus our efforts on targeting them?

I think the defense is going to be, He has intended for the sources of fear to go away and that is plenty good enough. Some variation of that. Because outside of that, this promise is rather tough to defend.

Just a typical problem you walk right into, when you live in a world in which intentions are everything & nothing else matters.

I’ve said a lot of things like this myself…although the context is different.

Any jackass can kick a barn door down, but it takes a carpenter to build it back.

No…there hasn’t been some amazing flip-flop between 1953 and now. Rayburn is talking about “building” the one product democrats really care about building…left-wing legislation. He’s issuing ominous foreshadowings of the next two years as he’s compelled to hand over the Speaker’s gavel. Republicans are jackasses who are going to kick the barn door down.

I imagine, if you’ve never really built anything, it’s easy to think you’re in the process of building something when what you’re building is nothing more than a piece of machinery that destroys.

But out here in the real world, of real people who aren’t politicians, who build real things that do real things and help other real people…Rayburn’s words ring true. The process of destruction is infinitely simpler than creation. It is one hell of a lot sexier, too. Everyone wants to destroy, nobody wants to admit they’re destroying, but destruction is quick, easy, fun to do and fun to watch. It’s the Morgan Freeberg Theory of the Charismatic Wrecking Ball.

There is no more dreadfully boring thing to watch, than something getting built…except, maybe, for that same thing being designed. Yuck. Measure, draw, erase, measure again. Razing packs a whole lot more entertainment punch compared to raising.

Therefore, for the addled mind, it is more worthy. Since the purpose of life…after all…is to have fun and be entertained.

Oh my…how politically incorrect this is.

Andrew Cline, writing in The American Spectator…

There’s a reason President Obama tries so hard to convince Americans not to watch Fox News. He keeps shamelessly lying about easily verifiable facts. Evidently he figures that left-leaning media outlets won’t call him on it, so if he can only convince people not to watch FOX, he’ll be OK. Unfortunately for the president, the American people simply have to look around them to see that he isn’t being honest with them.

Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, the President repeated his biggest health care reform whopper: You can keep your current health insurance. Here is what he said:

“There’s nothing in the bill that says you have to change the health insurance you’ve got right now. If you were already getting health insurance on your job, then that doesn’t change.”

Yet hours before he uttered that line, the Boston Globe reported that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care was canceling its Medicare Advantage coverage specifically because of new regulations imposed by Obama’s health care law.

A little while ago I echoed a mini-manifesto peeled off by a left-winger who wanted to bully and cudgel and sway people away from watching Fox News.

Fox News, four or five months back, captured an abrupt about-face with regard to Our First Holy President’s appreciation of technology. Remember when He was going to make the White House more sophisticated, because He knew how to work a Blackberry and an iPod and what not? It went straight from that, to bragging about not knowing how to work these things, to appear more folksy.

If you got your news form something other than Fox, you’d never have known. Ah yes, I know what the rejoining argument is supposed to be…you don’t have any business knowing because it doesn’t matter.

Funny, it mattered quite a bit when people were voting in droves for His Majesty. So sophisticated! There’s Just Something About Him!

Still the Obama apologists are out there saying…don’t watch it. Or we’ll call you stupid. Or evil or rotten or bigoted, or, or, or…

But it’s funny. If I watch the mainstream media, minus Fox, it seems all the questions I’m seeing put to His Gloriousness are one of:

1. What are you worried about as negotiations with the evil Republicans begin, on [insert subject here]
2. What do you have to say to people who [insert situation here]
3. Human interest pablum (daughter wants to know when he’ll plug the hole, picking out the White House dog, etc.)
4. What’s it like to be so awesome?

Haven’t heard much by way of hard questions. I mean hard — like, for example, “If you voted in favor of TARP as a Senator, isn’t it hypocritical to complain about the previous administration handing you a big deficit?”

I really don’t watch that much of Fox News myself. None at all, really. Just not a teevee guy. But it just strikes me as bad form to be complaining about hard-hitting journalism as if we’re suffering from some kind of glut of the stuff…when, if anything, what we really have is an acute shortage. Our Top Dude is out there still telling us we can keep our health care plan if we want, while it is being demonstrated this is not the case.

It isn’t a case of — the boss says something poorly-thought-out, and it’s proven to be in error a whole year later. It’s a case of: Boss says something, it’s proven wrong, and He keeps on saying it. Then…He does it a whole bunch more times. It’s at the point where it brings discredit upon the entire nation when He is allowed to keep getting away with it.

I’d like to know. And no, infiltrators don’t count…

From Human Events, which explains,

A liberal protester at the “One Nation Working Together” march physically assaulted a HUMAN EVENTS reporter who was videotaping Rep. Charlie Rangel (D.-N.Y) at the event at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The reporter, Emily Miller, was first hit from behind while she was taping Rangel as the Harlem congressman glad-handed supporters in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Miss Miller is heard on the video saying, “Please don’t hit me.” The protester proceeds to yell at the reporter, “Well get out of the way! What do you think this is? A–hole.” The activist was attempting to meet Rangel herself. Miss Miller continued videotaping the event, when suddenly the same unhinged protester lunged at her, hit her on the arm, and yelled, “Don’t take my picture.”

I see from this item at Cassy’s place, that we have finally reached the Rubicon of lazy, impractical thinking: “Facts” are being used to suppress other facts. People who acknowledge reality are being castigated for avoiding reality, and people who shun and poison reality are being extolled for the merit of somehow fortifying it.

In logic, the Law of Identity states that an object is the same as itself: A ≡ A. Any reflexive relation upholds the law of identity. When discussing equality, the fact that “A is A” is a tautology.

“That everything is necessarily the same with itself and different from another” is the self-evident first principle of linguistics, for it governs the designation or ‘identification’ of individual concepts within any symbolic language, so as to avoid ambiguity in the communicating of concepts between the users of that language. Such a principle is necessary because a ‘symbolic designator’ has no inherent meaning of its own, but derives its meaning from a cognizant agent who correlates the given designator with a conventionally prescribed concept that has been previously learned and stored in their memory.

— Wikipedia entry for Law of Identity (sentence-case & bold mine).

This is the essential building block of all statements that purport to comment on real things. It is the common unified ancestor. Without the capability of recognizing a thing as what it really is, no truth can be recognized, and if truth cannot be recognized then falsehood can’t be recognized either. Nor can you graduate to more complex thoughts about cause-and-effect; you cannot make a statement that A causes B, if you cannot first come to some understanding that A is A.

But you can’t recognize things as what they really are, that’s hateful!

I was waiting for the trash pictures to pop up before commenting on the “One Nation” rally, which is the left-wing answer to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” assembly from two months ago.

I couldn’t be more bored by all the shouting back-and-forth about crowd counts. What is the point of this…that there are more people sympathetic to growing government than people sympathetic to shrinking it down? Who gives a fig, if we can’t afford any more growing? It would signal to us that 2008 is a time for leftists to come into power, but 2010 really-really-is the same thing even moreso?

No, I’ve been holding out for garbage photos. And they have arrived:

More at Marooned in Marin.

Near as I can figure, the message of the “One Nation” rally is that we are all one, we’re in this boat together…so let’s make those other people not count, and really stick it to ’em.

Let’s show our numbers, and our resolve to get out to the Reflecting Pool to demonstrate our steely resolve, and how determined we are…to fight any expectation that anybody should ever do anything exceptional outside of here.

The poor dears don’t know if they want to be ordinary or extraordinary. They don’t know if they’re promoting the excellent or the mediocre. They don’t know if they’re about unity or division. They’re completely confused on all these counts.

No wonder they can’t pick up their trash.

Update: Lest someone somewhere think I’m being unkind…a little perspective, please. I didn’t even raise a welt. What Byron York noticed is gonna leave a mark.

Organizers of Saturday’s “One Nation Working Together” rally at the Lincoln Memorial are proud of their diversity. Before the event, they predicted it would be the “most diverse march in history.” It turned out they were right. Looking around the rally, there were Teamsters Local 311, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, Communications Workers of America Local 2336, American Federation of Teachers Local 1, United Auto Workers Amalgamated Local 171, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and representatives of many, many other unions. That’s a lot of diversity.

Doug Ross has more pictures…these are pictures you are not going to see in the legacy media. Like…this…

Update: Mark links to a video with much more of the same, and we start to see what all the arguing is really about…