OMG!

"The Truth" by Painter Michael D'Antuono which will be unveiled on President Obama's 100th Day in Office at NYC's Union Square. (PRNewsFoto/NOAH G POP FAM)

Go Ducks!

Fellow southwest Oregon blogger, Bob, recently lost his ducks to a probable dog attack. To replace them, he got twelve Campbell and six Cayuga eggs which he'll have to incubate. I know what Campbell ducks are. I think Bob used to have white Campbells but most Campbells are Khakis:

The Khaki Campbell was developed in England during the early 1900's by Adele Campbell. It was admitted to the American Standard in 1941. Though originally a cross of Indian Runner, Mallard, and Rouen, Campbells exceed all of these and most chicken breeds in egg production, with some strains averaging 300 eggs per year.

Sounds great. We've kept Indian Runners and Mallards and currently have a Runner and a Mallard that have become a couple. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they will breed. However I am not familiar with Cayugas. So I looked them up. What a pretty duck:

Small town politics

The first rule of small town politics is "Don't make enemies." Well that goes for not only for politics but for simply living in a small town. One of my tenants has found that out the hard way. He made an enemy of his last boss. The boss belongs to an old-time county family with connections that run wide and deep. Result: my tenant can no longer find a job as he has been black-balled and now has to leave town.

On May 5th we're having a special election in spite of the fact that our regular elections will be two weeks later on May 19th. It's going to cost $60,000 which is not peanuts in our neck of the woods. (That's what it costs to grade and spread gravel four times a year on the two miles of road that leads to our farm.) The special election is to vote on whether to recall one of our local pols or not. I'm dead against it. It's a complete waste of money, it is splitting the community into factions and the hard feelings may never be healed.

I have had to work with the pol who is the target of the recall on our Local Improvement District for paving the farm road. I originally voted for him because he is not one of the Democratic Party "good ol' boys" who have controlled the county for generations but I've got some problems with him.

He has sided with a bunch of people who want to get rid of the "good ol' boys" network but what they want to replace it with is not much better. Like the "good ol' boys", the newbies also do not have any real respect for democracy. He waffled when I asked (at a public meeting) for actual costs and he brushed aside my request for a list of addresses so that I could get real input from my neighbors about the project. A Local Improvement District is meant to be a grassroots democratic effort not something to be manipulated by politicians. But, despite my problems with this particular pol, I am still not in favor of recalling him. He's a Republican and a fiscal conservative.

The recall effort started because he laid off 22 of 31 county road-workers. Yes, they are unionized. The guy who started the recall effort used to be a member of their union until he took a management job with the roads department but his sympathies still lie with the union and he is very much a member of the Democratic Party "good ol' boys" network. He also happens to be the son of my very closest friends who are an old-time county family.

We are having dinner with them just before the election and I'm not sure how to be tactful about my opposition to the recall. Obviously they are loyal to their son. I may have to just say that I have not yet made up my mind and hope that suffices. My friends are Democrats but they're conservative and pretty much vote Republican most of the time - even more since I've known them and "educated" them on certain issues. I sure am glad for secret ballots.

LGF - Civil War in Right-Wing Blogosphere

I never regularly read or linked to Little Green Footballs but of course I've heard of it. And I've heard of the fights that Charles Johnson (founder of LGF) has had with European "conservatives". Here's more:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie — who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call “St. Pancake,” a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled “anti-Jihadist” blogosphere — from “moonbat” (”an unthinking or insane leftist”) to “anti-idiotarian” (”anyone who grasps the significance of and does his or her best to combat the post-9/11 political alliance between the ‘Old Left’ and militant Islam”).

...

Johnson has blasted Fox News host Glenn Beck, promoting a video from a Beck-inspired party that shows conservatives ranting about evolution and arguing that “this turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP.”

...

When Obama genuflected before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Johnson found archival video of President Bush bowing to take a medal from the King and urged conservatives to turn down their “hyperventilating nonsense.”

This has the blogger’s peers asking themselves the same question, over and over: What the heck happened to Charles Johnson?

“I don’t think I’ve changed,” Johnson said. “I’ve always been pretty independent. This is something I’ve really tried to put out there on my blog. I don’t consider myself right-wing.”

It sounds strange coming from a blogger who played an underrated role in forcing CBS News to back down from its 2004 story on President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and whose first reaction to Obama’s election in November — after a quick post congratulating him — was to note that the Muslim Brotherhood, “the world’s largest jihadist organization,” was pleased.

...

Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

...

Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for a Counterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom (now the International Civil Liberties Alliance), an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.

“It was the best conference I ever went to,” remembered Geller [Atlas Shrugged]. But the summit included members of Vlaams Belang, a controversial Belgian political party that criticizes Islam and Shariah law, and had been attacked within the Netherlands for its connections to extremism and racism. Johnson went to work exposing this, and the attendees reeled from the negative attention.

“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU, even those who have no anti-Semitic tendencies.”

I didn't follow the blow-up closely but what I did read made me sympathetic to Johnson. Most European "conservatives" are not classical Lockean liberals like American conservatives. Scratch some European "conservatives" deep enough and you will find reactionary anti-semites if not worse. John had a very difficult job distancing himself from them and may have made many mistakes in doing so. He over-reacted but I still sympathize because he is trying to maintain his independence of thought.

"Those Tea Parties are so petit bourgeois"

Mark Steyn:

My old editor, Charles Moore, has a piece in the London Telegraph on the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street. Very pertinent, as Britain regresses to the basket-case Seventies. But this passage, I think, has relevance to the American elite's view of the current Tea Parties. Charles quotes the leftie writer Hanif Kureishi's condescending dismissal - "Thatcher, like the Queen, is basically vulgar" - and adds:

Without having Hanif Kureishi's exalted, exquisite, Nancy-Mitford-style sensitivity for class distinctions, I do see that the combination of Mrs Thatcher's beliefs and her social origins (and perhaps also her sex) is toxic for people like him.

People like Mrs Thatcher – state-educated, lower-middle-class, provincial, female – were not supposed to question the 1945 state-socialist settlement. To its architects, such people were of no account. They were neither poor enough to attract romantic sympathy, nor grand enough to be entitled to power. They were expected to know their place.

There's a lot of that in that CNN reporter's coverage of the Tea Parties: You'll be getting your $400 Obama "tax credit". So what's your beef? Why don't you know your place?

These people also are "neither poor enough to attract romantic sympathy, nor grand enough to be entitled to power". Which is why the media feel free to sneer.

Thatcher became PM six months after I left the UK for the last time and moved to the USA permanently. I was thrilled about Thatcher and was shocked when I realized that my British friends hated her. Needless to day I stopped keeping in touch with them.

Good fences make good neighbors

The Mexican swine flu outbreak makes me see another reason for tighter control of our southern border. The Mexican swine flu has already spread to California and Texas. Next it will be Arizona and New Mexico; then Nevada and Oregon. It will affect the Chicano community first and then spread through Mexican restaurants and domestic, hospital and hotel workers.

The Mexican swine flu has already killed over 60 Mexicans and is untreatable unlike the TB and bedbugs which illegals have recently snuck across the border.

South Africa's "messiah"

South Africa held its elections on Wednesday. Today the African National Congress (ANC) claimed victory:

The African National Congress, South Africa's dominant ruling party, has claimed victory in general elections, with preliminary results showing the party was just short of holding onto its two-thirds majority in Parliament.

With 90 per cent of the ballots from Wednesday's election counted, the ANC was leading with 66.3 per cent, putting the party extremely close to the two-thirds majority that leader Jacob Zuma said he wants. That majority would enable him to make constitutional changes and enact major budgetary changes without being challenged.

Parliamentarians elect South Africa's president by a simple majority, putting Zuma, 67, in line for the post when the new assembly votes in May.

I found this piece on Zuma interesting:

As Jacob Zuma readies himself for the challenge of governing South Africa, Alec Russell recalls his encounters with the ANC leader: a politician who plays the part of the revivalist preacher and speaks the language of reconciliation but remains an unsettling enigma.

On a blustery southern winter’s night last year, Jacob Zuma hosted a small dinner in the Rand Club for a dozen sceptical guests. Founded by Cecil Rhodes, the dark-panelled club in the centre of Johannesburg was in the old days the preserve of the white English-speaking business establishment. In the early years of majority rule, senior officials of the African National Congress were wary of admitting to membership, fearing headlines insinuating they had become the new ‘Randlords’, the old nickname for Rhodes and his peers. But 15 years into the new era the new guard are feeling rather surer of themselves. None other than the Rhodes Room, a private dining-room dominated by a life-size portrait of the old colonialist in shooting clothes, was selected as the venue for the coming man to set out his stall.

He had arrived early and was chatting to one of his bodyguards at the top of the club’s sweeping wooden staircase. Outside, the city centre was at a standstill as a gun battle raged between rival police units — striking city policemen were trading shots with national police officers brought in to restore order. As we waited for the late arrivals delayed by the drama, he regaled us with a series of anecdotes from his extraordinary life. South Africa’s next president has, as he likes to say, ‘lived a lot’.

The 67-year-old former herd-boy, turned political prisoner, turned exiled spy chief, turned scandal-wracked populist who is the most powerful man in sub-Saharan Africa following this week’s South African elections, has the build of a prize-fighter. This is a tough man, schooled in township scraps in the 1960s and then in the treacherous world of exile politics when he made his share of ruthless decisions. But in small groups he is more of a pastor than a pugilist. He did not seek to dominate, still less impose his views. Rather he sought to disarm, and he listened. It was the very same mellow routine that has served him so well throughout his improbable ascent to the top.

...

For his fellow Zulus, South Africa’s largest tribe, there is also the prospect at long last of seats at the high table of government — and some openly anticipate business contracts — after years in which the Xhosas, the tribe of Mbeki, Mandela and Oliver Tambo, have dominated the party. Yet Msholozi (Zuma’s clan name) does not just appeal to Zulus. ‘Lethu Mshini Wami’ (‘Bring me my machine-gun’), the old anti-apartheid hymn he sings lustily at rallies, sparks a rapturous response across the country. He is the ‘Messiah’, I was told by one ecstatic fan some 500 miles from the Zulu heartland.

...

Despite the best efforts of the ANC spin-doctors, he has in the last year reinforced the impression that he has few fixed opinions and is happy to say what suits his audience. He talked of supporting a referendum on reintroducing the death penalty and then, amid a furore, backtracked. He made pro-business pledges and then under pressure from the unions did a U-turn. More worrying for the health of South Africa’s democracy, he has stood by as his supporters have issued broadsides at the courts. His dislike of them is unsurprising, given how he has spent much of the last three years fighting off corruption allegations in pre-trial court appearances, and also in light of evidence of some politicisation of the prosecution. But that does not excuse his recent remark that the country needs to ‘look at’ the authority of the top court. That is troubling.

Over dinner, however, he painted an alluring picture of a Zuma presidency. He would reinstate the reconciliatory ethos of Mr Mandela’s era, which Mr Mbeki had cast aside.

...

Recalling an encounter with Robert Mugabe when they were in exile in Mozambique in the 1970s, he made a few arch remarks about Zimbabwe’s leader. He ridiculed Mbeki’s reluctance to accept the standard science on Aids. ‘We had a good policy until the president discovered the science,’ he said.

He also talked movingly about the blight of crime, which drives thousands of professionals into exile every year. One night, he recalled, he had been escorting a woman friend back home through downtown Johannesburg, when he sensed they were being followed. Then two more figures materialised ahead of them. ‘I thought now is a time to fight,’ he said. ‘Then suddenly there were four or five blades at my stomach and my back. And I thought, no. Now is the time to talk.’ Hurray, South Africans will say at such stories — he understands us. (Mr Mbeki bridled once when asked if crime was out of control and suggested that was a racist perception.)

But the question everyone wants an answer to is: what lies behind that bluff exterior? Ever since his financial adviser was convicted of corruption and fraud in 2005 for, among other things, procuring a bribe for him from an arms company, Mr Zuma has been assailed by scandal. While he denies any guilt, he has twice been charged on multiple counts of corruption. (A judge dismissed the first case on a technicality. Then last month the prosecution controversially withdrew the second set of charges, which included money-laundering, racketeering, corruption and fraud, citing irregularities.) There was also the embarrassment of his 2006 trial for the rape of an HIV-positive family friend. (He was acquitted but in his testimony he displayed a terrible lack of judgment. He said that after having sex he had had a shower to ward off infection, an appalling statement for a senior politician to make in a country with the world’s highest number of people with Aids. He also argued that in Zulu culture when a woman wears a short skirt in a particular way it is an invitation to have sex.)

...

While Mr Mbeki’s pseudo-intellectualism led South Africa down several blind alleys, there is now a countervailing anti-intellect-ual drive in the party. This could prove equally if not more destructive to South Africa’s institutions than the creeping interventions of the Mbeki years, when the ANC’s policy of ‘deploying cadres’ undermined the independence of several state institutions.

The more hysterical whites seize on Mr Zuma’s polygamy to suggest he will be a caricature African leader. That is wrong. There is, conversely, even a chance he could be a Ronald Reagan figure, and allow the country a breathing space while it recovers from the wrenching questions of the Mbeki years. And yet a more credible scenario is of a vacuum as he struggles to assert his authority and as the ANC further corrodes.

The ANC already started splitting last year:

Oct 8th, 2008 - It is inevitable that South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) will split, former Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota has told the BBC.

"Today we are serving divorce papers," he said, announcing a conference in the next few weeks where a decision may be taken to split from the ANC.

Mr Lekota is a close ally of former South African President Thabo Mbeki who was forced to step down last month.

The governing party is divided between supporters of Mr Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, who won a bitter party contest to become ANC leader last year.

...

"If the leadership of the ANC continues in their arrogance... we will proceed with the next step," he said.

He did not refer to Mr Zuma by name but condemned tribalism and ANC leaders who "stand on public platforms singing songs that advocate violence".

Some of Mr Zuma's supporters celebrate his Zulu origins, while his trademark song is the apartheid-era anthem "Bring Me My Machine Gun".

In Wednesday's elections, the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, seems to be beating the ANC in the Western Cape for the first time:

The Democratic Alliance is likely to unseat the ANC from the Western Cape province for the first time. The Western Cape is South Africa's richest province and is at the heart of the country's wine, fruit and tourism industries.

During the campaign, the party's new leader, Helen Zille, who won praises as the mayor of Cape Town, courted mixed-race voters, who account for more than half the population in the province but only a small minority nationwide.

It appears unlikely the ANC will catch up to Zille's party, which holds just over 50 per cent of the vote provincially. The ANC trailed with less than one-third of the vote, ahead of smaller opposition parties.

I wrote about Zille last year when she received "The world's best mayor" award. Below - Zille with Cape Colored (mixed race) supporters.

















Below - South Africa's new "messiah" Zuma dancing in traditional Zulu tribal finery.























BTW Zuma has six wives and there is now speculation about which one will be the First Lady:

JACOB Zuma is assured of becoming South African president. Now for the speculation over which of his wives will be first lady.

Mr Zuma, 67, is bemused by the conjecture, which involves guessing how many wives he might have, and whether he will name his glamorous daughter as first lady.

"I love my wives and I'm proud of my children," has been his response to the issue.

Reports indicate he has up to six wives - the latest a Durban socialite Mr Zuma is said to have married in January - and between 13 and 22 children.

But his reputation as a womaniser has sparked suggestions he has more wives and offspring than he acknowledges.

A Zulu tribal traditionalist who spent his early life as an illiterate herder of cattle and goats in Zululand, Mr Zuma benefits from a 1998 change to the law in South Africa that recognises customary tribal marriage practices, including polygamy. He is loathed by many feminists, particularly after the evidence he gave when he was acquitted of a charge of raping a woman who visited his Johannesburg home.

But Mr Zuma has said his approach to marriage is better than that of hypocritical politicians around the world who secretly keep mistresses. Officially, he is said to have had four wives.

...

Nompumelelo Ntuli, 34, who married Mr Zuma last year and lives in his tribal home in Zululand, is the favourite to become first lady.

She was in the crowd at the polling station when Africa's new "Big Man" voted at a primary school near his tribal home - standing shyly at one side and saying only "Jesus is Lord" to those who sought to speak to her.

A tribal woman, Ms Ntuli is said to have organised a recent Christian prayer meeting and community development foundation, suggesting she has political inclinations that could be useful as first lady.

The Zulus are the most conservative (and Christian) of all the tribes and for decades there was a literal killing war between the "progressives" of the ANC and the "conservatives" of the traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party. It's a shame that South Africa's first Zulu president is so unrepresentative of his tribe.

The joys of nationalized healthcare

The British National Health Service:

When I arrive, I am greeted by an empty reception desk but there is a push button ‘satisfaction’ survey machine whereby I can register the fact that I am being kept waiting.

My presence is eventually acknowledged and I am given a heap of forms mostly concentrating on my ethnic group, country of origin and other matters of social categorisation. I am then seated in an airport departure lounge-style waiting area with joined-together seats, facing a television screen showing episodes of Will & Grace. The patients sit in rows not laughing. Clearly there are limits to the ability of even Paramount Comedy to put smiles on faces.

After not too long, I am taken into a small room where a doctor in her early twenties examines me and tells me she has no idea. I will need more tests, for which there will be a several-hour wait. I press her for any hint of reassurance she may be able to give me which will get me through these worrying next few hours. She shakes her head and intimates that when she says she has no idea, she means she really has no idea.

And so I am dispatched, quietly hysterical with fear, to the section of the radio-graphy unit set aside for women’s things. No sooner am I through the door with my supermarket cheese counter-style ticket — number 73 — than I see this is not going to be easy. All the other women have brought their husbands with them. Possibly they imagined they would be told to wait outside. But it seems the NHS has no hang-ups when it comes to us all just hanging out of hospital gowns together, Sixties summer of love-style. I watch with my mouth open as I witness the routine I am to be subjected to. As each woman’s number is called they are taken to a cubicle with a flimsy curtain almost drawn across, but not quite, and told to take off their clothes and put on a gown. I can see, and so assume the men can, most of what is going on behind the curtain. The half-dressed women then come back out and awkwardly sit down, perhaps next to their husband, perhaps next to another man.

The ward is run by two terrifying women called ‘lead superintendent radiographers’ who sit in offices with the doors permanently wedged open.

As Churchill said:

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Another Obama appointee with dirty laundry?

Taki, the uber-snob, on Obama's car tsar:

His name is Steve Rattner, and he looks like a rodent, except that he wears glasses. He is a shifty-looking little balding man, who is to Wall Street aristocracy what Paris Hilton is to discretion. He is Obama’s chief adviser in dealing with Detroit, the car tsar, in fact.

It was at a dinner and I was seated at the same table as the Rat and Mrs Rat, a woman who calls herself Maureen White, socialite. It was the first and last time I set eyes on them. Madame Rat was quite unpleasant, making it obvious that my wife and I were below her standards. The Rat was just as hostile, but kept his opinions to himself. The Rattners made their names by getting on every Big Bagel committee imaginable. It is the quickest way up café society, and they took full advantage of it. The Rat comes from a modest background but learned early on to hook up with movers and shakers, as people who buy influence are known in this town. His top catch was Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, the paper Rattner went to work for but eventually left for the greener pastures of banking. He remained tight with Sulzberger, a man who inherited a great fortune and is about to turn it into a very small one, and this friendship led to people like Michael Bloomberg, Mort Zuckerman, Richard Holbrooke, the Clintons and others too fishy to name in this here column.

The reason I’m writing about this social climber is because of his involvement in a scandal of gigantic proportions, yet as recently as last Friday a White House spokesman said President Obama had full confidence in the Rat. I find this very strange. I know a man is innocent until proved guilty, but I also know about Caesar’s wife. A new administration that is printing trillions of dollars and taxing everyone to the limit cannot afford types like Steve Rattner cutting corners. After leaving journalism, the Rat joined Lazard Freres and became Felix (the Fixer) Rohatyn’s minion. He angled for the top spot after Felix’s departure, but the big boss, Michel David-Weill, told him it was no go. Rattner quit and began a fund of his own, Quadrangle, around the year 2000. It invested in media properties, including semi-porn magazines. Some of these investments proved to be duds, and the Quadrangle Group had to call upon other investors, drawing on Rattner’s social and political connections. One of the investors was Cerberus, a giant private equity firm which had bought Chrysler some time back. When the porn business faltered, Rattner played hard ball with Cerberus, which had loaned Quadrangle 120 million big ones.

Then, out of the blue, Rattner was named Obama’s front man to deal with the auto mess. How can Chrysler get a fair deal — not that it should after the lousy cars it’s made these past 75 years — from a man that owes it a fortune? Rattner, of course, left Quadrangle once he got the Washington job, not that it means much. He still has his equity in the group and knows which side his bread is buttered on.

Now for the big one: in a 123-count indictment issued last month, two people were accused of selling access to investment firms in the New York state — get this — $122 billion pension fund. In other words, two men working for the comptroller are said to have taken kickbacks in the millions for giving access to the pension fund. Among the firms given access was — yes, you guessed it — Quadrangle Capital. Quadrangle won $100 million worth of business from the pension fund.

I usually take Taki with a heaping tablespoon of salt but he does move in top circles in Manhattan and often has inside info.

"From my cold, dead hands"

I could kick myself. The NRA, Tom Gresham on Gun Talk and our local Richard gun guru, Richard DeChambeau from "Oregon Outdoors" radio talk show all warned last year already that there would soon be a shortage of ammo but I spaced out and, yesterday when we went to buy more ammo, found that only shotgun cartridges are readily available.

Of course the Democrats want to make it even harder to buy ammo since they know that gun control is not popular. Today my buddy Chas did a post, Where has all the ammo gone?

I'll bet there are some Democrats who want exploit the situation, by making ammo and ammo materials hard to obtain. If they can't take people's guns away, they will try to stop and/or control the ammo, with creepy things like "Encoded Ammunition" (Bullet and Cartridge Case Serialization).

...

People would be required to forfeit all personally-owned non-encoded ammunition.

...

People would be required to separately register every box of "encoded ammunition."

...

The cost of ammunition would soar, for police and private citizens alike. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturing Institute estimates it would take three weeks to produce ammunition currently produced in a single day.

...

A tax of five cents a round would be imposed on private citizens.

...

No Bullets, No Shooting!.

In the last year, so-called “encoded” or “serialized” ammunition bills have been introduced in 13 states—Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Washington. Their goal: Destroy our Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

All of these bills would prohibit the manufacture and sale of ammunition, unless the bullets and cartridge cases are marked with a code and registered to the owners in a computerized database. Most would also require gun owners to forfeit any non-coded ammunition they possess.

I've never been to a demonstration in my life - not even the Tea Parties - but, if the Democrats pass the "encoded ammo" laws, I will be out there with my hand-made sign: "From my cold, dead hands."

"The Tea Parties were so amateur"

Jay Nordlinger:

I’ve seen many, many pictures of the tea parties around the country. But my favorite was sent to me by a friend this morning. A woman is holding a sign that says, “If Obama Screws Up Health Care, Where Will the Canadians Go?” Perfect, in so many ways.

There was also the young woman who held up a sign saying, “Help Me, Mr. Obama — They Want Me to Work and Stuff!”

And I would like to echo a point that Jonah has made: One of the most touching things about these tea parties is the homemadeness of them — the unorganizedness of them. These are just Americans, saying what they have to say: freely and rambunctiously. The signs are all homemade, and all different. Some are clever, and some are dumb. But they’re all individual.

These tea parties are so, so different from the robotized rallies we see from the Left all the time — with their seas of identical, professionally produced signs. It’s no wonder that Anderson Cooper and the like hate them so: hate the tea parties. They go sharply against the modern grain, thank goodness. They are not . . . well, controlled, and official, and approved.

You ever seen a SEIU demonstration? The term Orwellian is too loosely used, but...

Some of the signs were cringe-inducing but, as Jay points out, they represented the individual's opinions unlike the Leftist collectivist "toe the party line" mass-produced signs.

Happy 445th birthday to Shakespeare

There is no official record of his birth but Will was baptized on the 26th. So it is assumed that he was born on the 23rd. He died on his 52nd birthday. Shakespeare fans have a treat at NRO's symposium on Will. And here's my favorite sonnet, number 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Daily chuckle

What do the thugs in these mugshots all have in common?

Miss North Dakota is Under Arrest in Iran

My buddy Chas has a great profile of Roxana Saberi, the American journalist imprisoned in Iran, Miss North Dakota is Under Arrest in Iran:

The former Beauty Queen became a journalist, and had been living in Iran for the past 6 years. Her father is from Iran, and she holds duel citizenship in America and Iran. Her mother is of Japanese ansestory.

Roxana Saberi was born in the U.S.
and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota.

Welfare vs charity

Two Dogs posted this yesterday:

For poor people to stay poor they have to continue to do exactly what people that are poor do, which is NOTHING. There are plenty of folks that lose their jobs, have very little money for a short period of time, and then get another job. They suffer setbacks. But, the folks that are perpetually poor do not follow that model.

If you want poor folks to enjoy the success that UNpoor folks enjoy in this country, QUIT GIVING THEM FREE STUFF. Just stop doing it.

If you look back across the years, you shall notice that instead of reducing the number of poor folks in this country, government subsidies have INCREASED them to the point of entire families never having hit a lick at a snake. I have seen this exact thing with three complete generations of a family living in a Section 8 housing complex for their entire lives with no one in the family ever having a job.

Patrick commented, "Why did you climb Everest?" Because it was there. "Why are you on welfare?" That answer is definitely obvious.

I remember back in my youth, my parents would tell me to stay away from the bums, they were not good people. Now, there are entire government and private agencies set up to EXALT the bums. Folks, that is screwed up.

We have gotten to the point of actually allowing others to make us feel guilty for NOT wanting to help people that obviously DO NOT want to do anything for themselves.

Welfare is my biggest peeve. Living in the welfare state of the UK, I saw what Big Brother does to humans. It reduces them to dependent children. No - it actually reduces them to dependent cretins. This is what I said to TD:

Today one of my trailer park tenants asked me to fill out a form so that he could get his rent money from AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children.) I was glad to do it. He was recently injured on his job and he's a single dad (as I was once) with two kids 1 and 3. Ex-wife's a druggie.

Sometimes the safety net works but it's not worth the price of the destruction of our culture. Private charity is more efficient because it deals with individuals rather than statistics and identifies those who are worthy of helping. We are inclined to help those who help themselves. The government simply sees statistics. We see character.

I would have helped my tenant anyway. Right now, out of my 40 tenants, 4 are struggling and I'm working with them to slowly pay off what they owe me. I'm taking a chance but, if they do right by me, they will really have helped themselves. If they shaft me, they'll be finished for life. I will never help them again.

Helping people out through private charity because you trust them is the only solution. Government hand-outs will never work.

Tree-huggers kill trees

From Brendan Borrell's "Our obsession with climate change is killing off animals left and right":

The magazines, newspapers, and Web sites that pay my salary have little to say about habitat loss these days. Now, being green is all about greenhouse gases: Neighborhood moms are more apt to fret over food miles than felled forests; organic cattle farmers are more interested in offsetting the methane coming from cow burps than pondering squished tadpoles in hoof prints. Even scientists have grown bored with question of habitat loss, tweaking their grant proposals to emphasize the climate angle no matter how tenuous the connection.

...

Even if we consider the impact of environmental degradation on humanity, deforestation has a more significant and immediate impact on local weather, water availability, water quality, and soil erosion than does global climate change from greenhouse gases.

The roots of trees and native brush hold loose, nutrient-rich topsoils together, slowing erosion and absorbing precipitation. You can see the impact of habitat loss on local climate by poking a stick into the parched soils of the Brazilian cerrado or wandering along the boundary of the expanding Sahel Desert in Africa. Then there's Cherrapunjee, India, once considered the wettest place on Earth—and now facing climbing temperatures and water shortages as the once lush landscape has been denuded.

Only recently have conservationists begun to grasp what a debacle it was to enact climate change legislation in Europe without first putting in place global deforestation treaties. EU policies promoting a market for biofuels triggered the destruction of Indonesian rain forests in favor of palm plantations.

Oh, the irony!

TARP, the Criminal Enterprise?

Larry Kudlow:

Is the whole TARP plan a criminal enterprise? Sounds farfetched, I suppose. But after reading about Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky’s report, it may well be that TARP is just one big criminal problem.

Listen to this: Barofsky’s investigators reported Monday that they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax-law violations, insider-trading, and mortgage-modification fraud related to TARP. Yup, those are criminal probes. Barofsky is the special IG overseeing the bailout program. And for some reason the mainstream media refuses to report this on the front pages where it belongs.

Barofsky’s report spans 247 pages. And it says that the very character of the bailout program makes it “inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse, including significant issues related to conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants and vulnerabilities to money laundering.”

By the way, one of Barofsky’s recommendations is for Treasury to abandon its whole plan of buying toxic assets from banks and investors. The IG’s report also notes that what started last October as a single-purpose $750 billion effort to buy toxic securities has morphed into twelve separate programs that cover up to $3 trillion in direct spending, loans, and loan guarantees. In other words, TARP is nearly equal in size to the entire federal budget.

Now, Geithner & Co. has said very little about this. Even in yesterday’s TARP oversight hearing, very little was said about the Barofsky critique. That’s too bad, because this is a crucial area of investigation. TARP is badly in need of reform — or maybe better yet, badly in need of termination.

Think about this: TARP, which is now linked to substantial criminal activity, has ballooned to the size of a second federal budget and represents the biggest government-directed intrusion into the economy in history — vastly bigger than the New Deal. And not only is there TARP for banks, insurance companies, and non-bank financial institutions, but also for GM, Chrysler, and various auto suppliers, and perhaps soon enough for credit cards, newspapers, and other sectors of the economy.

This is why I believe the era of democratic free-market capitalism is coming to an end. It is being replaced by state-directed corporatism on a grand scale. This is central planning that goes way beyond the American tradition.

Now we will wait and see if the investigative process for TARP turns into a judicial process, and whether this criminal enterprise puts the long arm of the law onto specific, individual criminals.

There's perfectly good traditional word for "state-directed corporatism." It's Fascism. And Fascism, like its nasty cousins Nazism and Soviet Socialism, has always attracted (and rewarded) psychopaths and criminals who quickly rise to the top of the ant-heap.

PS I was going to title this "Daily duh!" because any sane person saw this coming last year when Bush first introduced TARP.

PPS Barofsky is a Bush appointee.

Belief in God by country

This graph is from here. HT Derb.

Quote of the day

Maggie Gallagher:

The old Reagan coalition is dead. Not because we failed, but because we won: because we won on communism and because we cut taxes. (Social conservatives got the least out of this coalition, but that is partly our fault — more on that another time). Whether a new coalition along similar lines can be sustained — economic conservatives, hawks, and social conservatives — is an open question. What alternative coalitions might work for economic conservatives is extremely unclear.

Many in the Republican intellectual networks are flirting with political suicide. They are imagining that because gay marriage (and to a lesser extent these days, abortion) generates hatred and contempt in elite networks, the solution to the current real difficulties is to . . . jettison the core of the GOP's voter base.

This makes no sense at all, but the people who are responding in this way tend to think of themselves as very, very smart. Perhaps the lead lemming thought so, too.

Respectfully: Putting together an attractive agenda for economic conservatism and support for a strong defense in the current environment is an urgent task. . . it is also not the job of social conservatives.

I just thought it interesting that Gallagher says it's not the job of social conservatives to put together "an attractive agenda for economic conservatism and support for a strong defense." The Reagan coalition of economic conservatives, hawks, and social conservatives is all we've got right now and it's up to all of us to make the GOP attractive.

Belated happy birthday to Doris Day

Doris Mary Anne von Kappelhoff was born April 3, 1922. 87 years old!

Doris set out to be a dancer but she had a car accident when she was 15 and started singing while in hospital. People took notice and got her on some local radio shows. She landed a job with local bandleader Barney Rapp when she was 16. Rapp changed her name to Day. After working with Rapp, she worked with a number of other bandleaders including Jimmy James, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown. It was while working with Brown that Day scored her first hit recording, "Sentimental Journey."



"It's Magic"



"Secret Love"



"When I Fall in Love"



"Autumn Leaves"



"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"



"I'll See You In My Dreams"



"Love Me Leave Me"