THIS MUST BE THAT NEW SOPHISTICATED DIPLOMACY WE WERE PROMISED: Mr President and the PM, the best of acquaintances: Is the historic special relationship between America and Britain under strain?
Archive for 2009
March 3, 2009
DAVID BROOKS: This is not the Barack Obama I thought I knew.
Actually, it’s the same Obama it always was. Brooks, and others, were just so excited at the idea of a black President — or, more specifically, at the idea of themselves, voting for a black President — that they suspended all critical faculties. Now it’s buyer’s remorse. We’ll be seeing more of that.
UPDATE: More buyer’s remorse from former Obama supporter Jim Cramer. “And naturally, in response, Obama’s press secretary attacks Cramer by name. Man, the Nixon Obama White House’s enemies list is growing a lot faster than the economy itself.” Well, to be fair, given the state of the economy these days that’s not very hard . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Allah to David Brooks: “You let him off the hook.”
MORE: David Gergen?
STILL MORE: Video of Cramer, and Gibbs.
MORE STILL: Reader Barry Dauphin writes:
Is losing Gergen anything like losing Cronkite?
And what’s the deal with the press secretary?
Beats me. And reader Scott Northwood writes: “While your linking to Jim Crammer comments on the economy why don’t you link to his YouTube video touting Bearn Stearns before the fall. It’s pretty funny and a good lesson to anyone listening to these loudmouths talking heads.” Yeah, his Bear Stearns call was as bad as his Obama call.
BILL QUICK: “California spends far more than it takes in, despite having some of the highest taxes in the United States. It is hostile to business, and the middle class is fleeing in droves. It runs huge deficits every year, yet the Dem dominated legislature refuses to do anything effective to cut spending. Now one in ten Californians is unemployed. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It’s what Obama and the Democrats have in mind as a ‘solution’ for the rest of the country.” I hope not.
HMM: Obama’s plan to hike taxes meets fierce opposition. Even Charlie Rangel is sounding dubious.
INDEED: “I don’t intend to cease exercising my First Amendment right to speak about matters of legitimate public concern because some lawyer who is mis[re]presenting the content of my post threatens a bogus complaint to my State Bar.” If it were me, I’d be thinking about ways to make that lawyer’s life uncomfortable in return.
THE 100 GREATEST SINGER-SONGWRITER ALBUMS of all time. The absence of Five For Fighting somewhat undercuts the list’s credibility.
POLITICO: How media sucks up to White House.
MORE TEA PARTY PROTESTS scheduled for this weekend.
NO STRANGER TO THE BONG: An open letter to the President.
REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.
PLANNED IMPOVERISHMENT? “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.”
SO IF YOU REDUCE YOUR WORKLOAD IN ORDER TO PAY LESS IN TAXES, does that make you a tax-dodger?
CHARLES JOHNSON posts a review of the Kindle 2.
JIM GERAGHTY: “I’m fascinated by the Obama administration’s mentality that the fact that violent Mexican drug cartels are raising hell just over the border doesn’t justify additional border security or a fence, but it does justify making it harder for American citizens to own a gun.”
THE “TEA PARTY” SPIRIT GOES LOCAL: “Ann Meagher, president of the Greater Southern Dutchess Chamber of Commerce, and others, brought teabags into the hearing and placed them on a table near the podium, in reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The reference was made to illustrate the problem disgruntled citizens had with the setup of the MTA Board of Directors, on which the four members that represent Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland and Orange counties constitute only one-quarter of a vote each.”
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Geithner: Obama to fight international tax dodgers.
No wonder they’d rather talk about Limbaugh.
TIMELY READING: Reader Bruce Webster writes:
I flew to LA and back (from Denver) today on business. On the way back, I stopped in a bookstore at LAX to get my usual travel-home-reading. I stopped by the classics table…and saw a stack of “Atlas Shrugged” (not one or two copies, but a face-up stack). Can’t remember the last time I saw that in an airport bookstore.
Didn’t buy it, though — the print was practically microscopic. Instead, bought the current slightly oversized edition of Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. I hadn’t read it in many years and was pleased (but not really surprised) at how well it holds up; the few technical anachronisms (and there are surprisingly few for a book written in 1966) are more than balanced by how very, very relevant it remains politically in 2009. I was surprised to rediscover how profoundly subversive a work it is, both politically and socially, likely outdoing all the “radical” literature that flower children and revolutionaries were inspired by in the 60s (most of whom considered Heinlein “fascist” — thus showing their profound ignorance of both Heinlein and fascism).
That these two books are in the airport bookstores now is obviously evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
OBAMA: Don’t worry about the day to day “gyrations” in the stock market — buy, buy, buy!
Well, I don’t think that this is a “gyration.” And that he’s urging people to start buying suggests that he doesn’t think so either.
Plus, “As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.” Note the longer-term graphic there. Not a “gyration,” either.
IN SPACE, a search for earthlike worlds:
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft’s mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places — that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.
The job, in short, is to find places where life as we know it is possible.
Good luck.
BLOG CARNIVALS FOR TOUGH TIMES: The Festival of Frugality.
A HEADLINE I DIDN’T THINK I’D SEE: Handgun Control Measure Fails in New Jersey. (Via Newsalert).
THE LOTUS OMNIVORE: a car that can run on almost any fuel.
HAPPY SQUARE ROOT DAY! “Tuesday is Square Root Day, a rare holiday that occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. Numerically, March 3, 2009, can be expressed as 3/3/09, or mathematically as √9 = 3, or 3² = 3 × 3 = 9.”
VW UNVEILS the Polo BlueMotion.