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Archive for 2007
September 4, 2007
September 3, 2007
WHEN CONTROVERSY FOLLOWS CASH: “Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman, has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens. The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their ‘bundlers’ while they press to raise record amounts.” I think the scrutiny mostly involves making sure the checks clear.
YEAH, I KNOW IT’S CLIMATICALLY MEANINGLESS, but it’s still funny: Ice Blocks Global Warming Trip.
The phrase “easy to imagine†has all the virtues of theft over honest toil. It is “easy to imagine†that the Kaiser won the Great War and that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet). Likewise, it is easy to imagine Jacob Hacker’s now-largely-discredited thesis of income volatility and our current cyclical financial worries defining domestic politics in a generation, but why would we bother to imagine it? Let’s imagine instead the centrality of the coming “robot gap†in American politics.
I, for one, welcome our new robot employees. Er, and employers. But that’s not actually Will’s point.
STILL MORE on Sony spyware.
CHINESE MILITARY hacked the Pentagon? “The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American Âofficials. The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.”
MORE ON PETE SEEGER, from Maimon Schwarzschild.
“MCCARTHYISM” by gay liberal bloggers? Well, maybe.
But not Arianna Huffington, who asks: “In the Age of Terror, Isn’t Busting Toe-Tappers an Insane Use of Our Law Enforcement Resources?” Put me down for a yes vote on that one.
ROCK STAR FOREPLAY.
A FUEL-CELL ELECTRIC HYUNDAI.
TAKING AMERICANS HOSTAGE shouldn’t be a resume-enhancer.
SHADES OF MINORITY REPORT: “A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way. Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met. Hexham children’s services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.”
Plus, this: “A recording of social workers threatening to take a newborn into care has been removed from the YouTube website after Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire started legal action, claiming the Data Protection Act was breached. Vanessa Brookes, 34, taped social workers telling her and her husband that they would seek to place the baby, due next month, in care, while admitting there was ‘no immediate risk to the child.'”
The traditional English response to things like this involved tar and feathers. The British may want to bring those traditions back.
UPDATE: Drawing a connection.
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, BUT JESUS, IS THIS LATE:
I said that Mr. Seeger had supported Stalin’s tyranny for so many years yet had never written a song about the Gulag. Yet some acknowledgment of his former support would have been appropriate, especially considering the songs he has sung about the Nazi death camps, which he often introduces by saying, “We must never forget.” . . .
I almost fell off the chair when I read Mr. Seeger’s words: “I think you’re right – I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” . . . More importantly, Mr. Seeger attached the words and music for a song he had written, “thinking what Woody [Guthrie] might have written had he been around” to see the death of his old Communist dream. Called “The Big Joe Blues,” it’s a yodeling Jimmie Rodgers-type song, he said. It not only makes the point that Joe Stalin was far more dangerous a threat than Joe McCarthy – a man Mr. Seeger and the old left view as the quintessential American demagogue – but emphasizes the horrors that Stalin brought.
Coulda shoulda woulda. But it’s something, I guess, and more than a lot of Seeger’s comrades have ever done.
ALLAH HAS video of Bush in Iraq.
UPDATE: Fred Kagan is excited.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jules Crittenden comments: “Kagan pays only brief attention to the domestic impact of Bush’s trip, which at this point is its most critical.”
LIKE MOOSE BITES, Segway falls can be pretty nasty.
SURVEY: BRITS THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS AN EXCUSE TO RAISE TAXES. Well, everything is an excuse to raise taxes. “A survey carried out by YouGov for the TPA found that only a fifth of people thought politicians were genuinely trying to change behaviours using the tax system. In contrast, 63% believed they were using the issue as an excuse to pull in more cash.” (Via Noel Sheppard).
A LOOK AT ROMANIAN OIL POLITICS from the TransAtlantic Politics blog.
THE FAMILY THAT WINES TOGETHER, shines together. “Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004 found that adolescents whose parents permitted them to attend unchaperoned parties where drinking occurred had twice the average binge-drinking rate. But the study also had another, more arresting conclusion: Children whose parents introduced drinking to the children at home were one-third as likely to binge.”
JOHN EDWARDS KNOWS WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU. “So, the mental health check is mandatory too? Why does he not even realize how bad that sounds?”
UPDATE: They’ve already got the forms ready!
IN THE MAIL: Brian Slattery’s Spaceman Blues: A Love Song.
ILYA SOMIN: “As bad as things are with eminent domain in this country, it’s much worse in China.” To be fair, however, it sounds as if they’re expelling people from their property in order to actually build useful things, rather than simply to hand the property over to private developers — though given the level of corruption in China I wouldn’t call that impossible.