DO THE SWISS KNOW SOMETHING THE REST OF US DON’T? “Swiss military exercises in September, called STABILO DUE, were based on EU instability getting out of hand. The Swiss have stayed out of the EU – one more thing the very prosperous Swiss are gloating about these days – and they certainly don’t want EU problems spilling over into their peaceful little country. That the Swiss military is adding four new military police battalions to the army, to be spread around the country, indicates that the threat they have in mind is more disorder and chaos than actual invasion.” Winter is coming.
Archive for 2012
October 7, 2012
MY QUESTION: Is there a parasite that makes people want to dominate other people and appropriate their wealth?
Certainly the body politic is subject to a kind of parasitism that distorts its goals and undermines its health. It’s called “the political class.”
Related: WaPo: Congress members back legislation that could benefit themselves, relatives.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Chavez wins re-election, AP reports. Love the upside photo of Chavez currently atop the Drudge Report.
UPDATE: “Nothing says democratic legitimacy like Fidel Castro’s niece saying she has the results in advance.”
MORE: Photo of armored cars in the streets of Venezuela tonight.
HAS AXELROD LOST HIS MIND? Excusing Obama’s debate performance, he said, “I think he went thinking that this was going to be a discussion about the country’s future and he was confronted with this kind of Gantry-esque performance on the other side.” Not only is it weird/elitist to think normal listeners get the reference to Elmer Gantry, but if you look it up, you’ll find descriptions of Elmer Gantry don’t sound like Mitt Romney at all:
Gantry has no redeeming features but is seen by the gullible public as a man who speaks the truth about God. Of course he could just as easily have been a lawyer or a politician and the heart of Lewis’s satire is how easily people believe what they want to believe.
That gets me thinking about Obama!
FRED BARNES: Obama’s Boys on the Bus: The media pull out all the stops to reelect the president. “Any other president who flew to Las Vegas for a fundraiser hours after the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Libya would have been ‘crucified.'”
Ya think?
MY READERS PROMOTE THEIR WRITING: Every week, or when I remember, I give my readers a chance to promote their writing. Most of these I’ve never read, but go ahead, download a sample and give them a chance.
VENEZUELA: Fausta Wertz and Charlie Martin are blogging the election results.
VIRTUAL APOCALYPSE NOW: Entire Cities In World of Warcraft Dead, Hack Suspected.
This sounds like something from a Neal Stephenson novel.
SCIENCE: Updated election forecasting model still points to Romney win, University of Colorado study says. “According to their updated analysis, Romney is projected to receive 330 of the total 538 Electoral College votes. President Barack Obama is expected to receive 208 votes — down five votes from their initial prediction — and short of the 270 needed to win. The new forecast by political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver is based on more recent economic data than their original Aug. 22 prediction. The model itself did not change.”
NO RED SHIRTS. DEFINITELY DO NOT PACK ANY RED SHIRTS: Asking the important questions: Packing for an Interstellar Space Voyage: What to Bring?
MASTERPIECE OF DESIGN: The Airline Baggage Tag.
SHELL-SHOCKED: “Ah, the true mark of a campaign in a disarray,” Betsy Newmark writes. “Now it’s the Obama campaign that has aides giving anonymous quotes to the media that makes their campaign look bad.”
Recall in 2008, when the John McCain camp went into October in meltdown mode.
UPDATE: Jim Geraghty, in the New York Daily News, explains “Why he’s falling apart — The foundations of Obama’s campaign are not nearly as strong as they once seemed.”
(Bumped to top.)
WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT: The Varianzas polling agency says Hugo Chavez lost the election in Venezuela today. And Chavez says he’ll respect the result once the ballots are counted. But don’t pop any champagne corks just yet. The ballots haven’t been counted. We don’t know for sure if they’ll even be counted at all.
UPDATE: Chavez reportedly “won.” I don’t want to come across as excessively skeptical with the quotation marks, but the man does want to be the next Fidel Castro.
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES.
(H/T to James Taranto for the headline, which originated here.)
ROMNEY RUMOR: GOP Wants to Ban Tampons.
It’s far worse than that — I hear Republicans want to ban dihydrogen monoxide as well.
THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN OLD MEDIA: Clapped-out sclerotic old magazine with one foot in death’s door increasingly believes in salvation in the afterlife, if this latest Newsweek cover is any indication.
Boy, between the above cover, the mausoleum-like Newseum, and the Washington Post investing in a hospice care facility, the MSM sure is obsessed with death these days, aren’t they? Contrast this with the 1960s, when a Time magazine cover gleefully killed off God, at the apex of that youth-obsessed decade.
REASON TV: Really Good Reasons To Skip College.
RATS RACCOONS ON THE WEST SIDE, BED BUGS UPTOWN: Frustrated Residents: Raccoons Slowly Taking Over New York City.
RARE VIDEO FOUND FROM BEN BERNANKE’S CHILDHOOD.
And on a more serious note, your scary-ass charts of the day from Ed Morrissey. As Ed notes, the deficit chart you saw earlier today via Glenn, but don’t miss Heritage’s chart on federal spending per household. About which, Ed writes:
So, we don’t really have a revenue problem here, or at least not primarily a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. Most of that is almost certainly in Medicare and other health-care spending, and it’s certainly going to be the biggest problem in the next few decades. Sequestration isn’t going to solve that. We need to find a way to revamp our safety-net programs to truly reduce spending in order to rebalance the relationship between federal spending and household income. We simply can’t get enough income to support that rate of growth — most of which has been funded by exploding deficits and national debt, the service of which will cost households in future generations even more in federal-spending growth.
Or to borrow a line from Mark Steyn’s recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, “We need to find $16 trillion dollars in America to get back to being broke.”
DOG, THE BOUNTY-HUNTER: “How embarrassing. The police chief of the small eastern New Mexico town of Vaughn resigned this past Wednesday, leaving the town with just one certified member on its police force – a drug-sniffing dog named Nikka.”
Mayor Bosco could not be reached for comment.