SOLARGATE UPDATE: Worse and worse: New e-mails show White House rushed OMB to approve Solyndra loan. “Why was it so desperately important that Joe Biden announce the Solyndra loan at the groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s new plant that federal analysts had to be rushed through their review of a $500 million deal?”
Archive for 2011
September 13, 2011
THE PRISONER ON Flight 1884. I’ll just note that I was never impressed with Pawlenty, and made that clear early on.
THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO’S BOUGHT through the Amazon links on this page, or the searchbox in the right sidebar. By doing so you’ve put a little money in my family’s pocket at no cost to yourself. It’s much appreciated!
ELIZABETH WARREN to run against Scott Brown. If there’s any place where a frumpy Ivy League professor with questionable research can beat a charismatic incumbent, it’s Massachusetts.
WEINER-SEAT UPDATE: Prof. Jacobson is blogging the NY-09 results. “This race should be a piece of cake for Democrats in a district which has several times more registered Democrats than Republicans (it’s the former seat held by Geraldine Ferraro and Chuck Schumer), except for three things (1) the lingering stain of Anthony ‘Breitbart hacked my Twitter’ Weiner, and (2) a relatively weak Democratic candidate. The third factor (3) is the Jewish vote and the way in which Ed Koch and others have put Obama’s Israel policy on trial.”
The Dems have been scared. I expect votes for David Weprin from Peter Minuit and Willem Verhulst.
HAVEN’T THEY TRIED THIS BEFORE? Obama Campaign Launches Snitchline. Producing the inevitable response: “If you see anything, report it fast and furiously!”
UPDATE: Reader Clifford Drout emails: “Geez, why don’t they just come out and say it: ‘MiniTru needs YOU!’”
LOW EXPECTATIONS: “It’s Wisconsin. Kudos for not rioting.”
JOHN HINDERAKER ON THE ISSA ATTACKS: Connecting The Dots: How The Left Works. “The Times story blew up like an exploding cigar. You might think that would cause the Left to abandon it in shame, but you would be wrong. Today The Hill reported that a left-wing group has asserted ethics violations against Issa, based on the Times story. That was the plan all along, of course.”
ANDREW BREITBART: “I come from a ‘Live Free or Die’ Mentality.”
THE JAPANESE EARTHQUAKE, six months later.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Median Male Worker Makes Less Now Than 43 Years Ago.
MORE DEMOCRATIC HATE SPEECH: I guess the “new civility” crap hasn’t taken hold, judging by the very first comment to this piece at The Hill. I’m posting a screenshot in case it gets removed.
The good folks at The Hill aren’t responsible for this comment, of course, but it does suggest that there’s a real “climate of hate” among folks on the left. And if it’s not fair to blame The Hill for the insane hatred displayed by some of its commenters, then it’s not fair to blame bloggers for their commenters either, though we see some people — even some Big Media folks who should know better — try to pull that one from time to time.
UPDATE: Speaking of climates of hate, the Wisconsin Crackup continues: In Madison: 150 protesters storm hotel to disrupt press conference given by the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. They told me if I voted for John McCain, blackshirts would be attacking advocates for racial equality. And they were right!
I was going to write a long piece on what it was like to work at Ground Zero in the days immediately after the attacks. Perhaps someday I’ll write that piece, but every time I started it this weekend, it felt false. What I wanted to write about was emptiness and silence. And what do you write about those things? Better writers than I have struggled with the impossibility of directly expressing an absence. The towers were there, hovering over every move you made downtown, and then they were not, but when they collapsed they left no impression behind them. There was just the sky, looking like the sky.
The shock, for New Yorkers was not just that they were gone, but how quickly we acclimated to the fact that they were gone. It wasn’t like losing a tooth–there was no visual cue that something was missing. Your brain might remember that something was supposed to be there, but your eyes quickly forgot.
At ground level, there was the tangible reminder–that multistory shard jutting out of the smoking rubble that became one of the iconic images of 9/11. But somehow, that didn’t make the absence any more real. I worked down at Ground Zero for a year, from shortly after the attack, to just after the first annual memorial. I stood right next to that monumental fragment when the ground was still smoking and firefighters were spraying it with hoses to keep the smoke and ash at bay. I smelled the odor that pervaded Ground Zero for weeks, maybe months–burning office fittings and damp embers. And yet in my deepest mind I didn’t connect any of it with the buildings where I had worked on and off throughout the 1990s–even though I stood looking at it from the very familiar streets where I’d eaten lunch so many times. It didn’t look like a building, or even the ruins of a building. It looked like a scene from a movie about the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Read the whole thing.
PROF. JACOBSON: Wisconsin Unions Start Feeding On Themselves.
If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted public sector unions, there is no better example than the Wisconsins Education Association Council (WEAC).
Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff. With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified.
Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees.
Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union? Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions?
And smaller fleas to bite ’em.
ANNIVERSARY: Sept. 13, 1899: New Yorker Becomes First U.S. Pedestrian Killed by Car. It was an electric car.
VIRGINIA EARTHQUAKE UPDATE: Geoscientists Get to Work as Quake Memories Fade. “For one thing, these scientists say, the earthquake offers a chance to learn more about the seismology of the East Coast.”
AT AMAZON, deals in cameras, photo, and video.
ABOUT TIME: U.S. DOT Honors Service of Merchant Mariners on 9/11. “The heroism of merchant mariners who evacuated hundreds of thousands of people from Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is featured in a new video released today by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration. ‘Rescue at Water’s Edge,’ includes interviews with vessel operators, emergency responders and passengers.”
I wrote a column on this back in 2002.
Here’s the video. It’s nice to see the faces and hear the voices of the people who performed this amazing feat.
SORRY, HILLARY, THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Raising a child doesn’t take a village, research shows.
“In the African villages that I study in Mali, children fare as well in nuclear families as they do in extended families,” said U-M researcher Beverly Strassmann, professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “There’s a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers.”
Naive.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): The nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010, its highest level since 1993.
Some related thoughts from Chuck Simmins.
Plus this: Chart: Obama Hates Poor People.
CAN MORNING IN AMERICA dawn anew?
MICHAEL YON: Afghan Faces.