The stock market’s down more than 2% this morning, while foreign bourses are at six month lows. Time to start worrying?
Archive for 2010
May 20, 2010
IN THE MAIL: From Stuart Buck (yes, the blogger), Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, now out from Yale University Press.
Here’s today’s photo of the day, taken in Breezewood, Pennsylvania last December.
I don’t recommend getting stranded in Breezewood.
One day sale on radar and laser detector.
IS ORGANIC FOOD BETTER? Wild birds say “no.”
DID RAND PAUL CRITICIZE THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 only on federalism grounds? Allahpundit thinks so. I explain why he’s wrong here.
Of U.S. cities with populations over 500,000, can you guess which had the lowest murder rate last year, and consistently ranks among the three safest big cities in America? The answer might surprise you.
STARTING TOMORROW IN MIAMI: The Cuba Nostalgia Fair.
More on Draw Mohammed Day: Brendan O’Neill explains why he won’t be participating. And my boss, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, explains why our magazine will.
If you don’t know Walter’s Unified Field Theory of Everything, you don’t know there really is at least one guy on the Left who tries to give the Tea Partiers a fair shake.
THE PRESIDENT NEEDS MORE BIRDS!
Barack Obama’s media advisers were quite distressed when the President travelled down to the Louisiana coastline last week to make his first on-the-spot statement about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Their distress was caused by what they didn’t discover, rather than what they did. Despite their frantic requests, no photogenic dying oil-covered birds could be found to form a backdrop for the Presidential tirade as he weighed into BP.
And, as Tim Blair adds, Ted Turner, once seen railing against, as Turner put it, “Jesus freaks,” believes that he has suddenly heard from God himself, via the oil spill.
MARK STEYN ON EVERYBODY DRAWS MOHAMMED DAY: “I’m bored with death threats. And, as far as I’m concerned, if that’s your opening conversational gambit, then any obligation on my part to ‘cultural sensitivity’ and ‘mutual respect’ is over. The only way to stop this madness destroying our liberties is (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it) to spread the risk. Everybody Draws Mohammed Day does just that.”
Of course, as Michael Totten, my fellow Insta-guestblogger just noted here, Pakistan is rapidly becoming One Nation Under a Firewall to limit its citizens’ exposure to the samizdat images.
Update: The irrepressible blogger known only as Zombie wastes no time swinging into action.
KENNEDY’S CAMELOT MYTH IS IRRESISTIBLE, Noemie Emery writes at the Washington Examiner:
A few weeks ago, our colleague Gene Healy asked for an end to the Camelot movies, a noble idea that is not going to happen. The story and themes are simply too powerful, the characters too eternal and too enigmatic, the appeal too universal to fade.
It’s also worth flashing back to the origins of the Camelot brand-name, and how it has influenced history’s view of Kennedy’s all-too-brief administration. That’s a topic that James Piereson explores as part of his magnum-opus 2006 article “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up” in Commentary, which later served as the central thesis of his book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, the following year.
KEITH OLBERMANN’S DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK: “Sure enough,” while Richard Blumenthal “was headline news everywhere else, his name never even came up on The Hour of Spin.”
MULTICULTURALISM REACHES ITS DEAD END: “Americans may be confused about a lot of things — but they’re clear on one thing. Damn it, if you make the journey to America there’s one thing you’d better be prepared to accept … the notion of E pluribus unum: out of many, one.”
BECAUSE THEY WORKED SO WELL UNDER NIXON: 17 Senate Republicans vote for price controls.
INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MASKING TAPE: How to easily simulate driving shots for video, without ever putting your car into drive.
May 19, 2010
MORE VEHICULAR HUMOR from Madison, Wisconsin:
Will Saletan delivers a pretty righteous dismantling of Richard Blumenthal’s attempts to explain away his exaggeration of his military record. Saletan takes Blumenthal’s excuses one by one, then points to instances where Blumenthal has laughed off similar excuses from the defendants he has prosecuted in his time as Connecticut’s attorney general. Blumenthal “would you like you to give him a break,” Saletan writes, “But Blumenthal has never given anyone a break. He has made a career out of holding others to the strictest standards of truth—and mercilessly prosecuting them when they fall short.”
In that vein, a reader emailed to ask if Blumenthal might be in violation of the 2006 Stolen Valor Act. As far as I can tell, that law applies only to falsely claiming or wearing military medals one didn’t earn. So probably not. Then again, as Saletan’s article makes clear, Blumenthal himself was a pretty crafty prosecutor. Perhaps he should hope there aren’t any aspiring Richard Blumenthals in the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s Office looking to make a name for themselves by strectching the law to bring down a high-profile politician.
I should add here that I don’t think Blumenthal should be prosecuted. And I have some issues with the Stolen Valor Act in general. We’re too eager criminalize actions that are better addressed outside the criminal justice system–in this case with shame and scorn. But I’ll confess: I’d find some poetic justice in seeing Blumenthal sweat a bit over the possibility of getting Blumenthaled.
IT’S NOT OVER IN THAILAND: Some of the Red Shirt leaders may have surrendered in Bangkok, but violence is spreading. Michael Yon is posting updates on his Facebook page and is getting picked up by Thai media, while Joshua Kurlantzick publishes a piece in Foreign Policy explaining what led to all this.