AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on TVs.
Archive for 2016
January 12, 2016
MOONSHOT — DRINK!
Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade. Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.
“All you need to know about the SotU speech: Barack Obama intends to put Joe Biden in charge of curing cancer.”
Earlier: “‘Moonshot’ Medicine Will Let Us Down,” says…The New York Times?
A doubly-interesting source, considering that Thomas Friedman was the origin of Obama’s other favorite outer space State of the Union cliche, “The Sputnik Moment.”
UPDATE: Steve Green concludes his SOTU drunkblogging with a quick one (appropriately enough):
This was Obama’s Al Bundy speech, the lowly shoes salesman desperately trying to get everyone to remember that time he scored four touchdowns in the one game.
Er, that is President Obama wanted us to forget most of the last seven years he’s actually been President, and instead remember that time Candidate Obama gave those big speeches everybody loved.
I’d say even by that modest measure, tonight’s speech was worth of an Al Bundy nap.
But like Al Bundy, Obama will be perpetually on cable TV starting next year, when he’s finally free to be what he’s always dreamed of being, a host on MSNBC.
Exit Quote: “I’m really touched by a soliloquy on cynicism by a guy who doesn’t acknowledge 10 US sailors in Iranian custody.”
THE JOYS OF WORKING FOR PLAYBOY. “If there is a better opening line for a journalist on the road than ‘Hi, I work for Playboy magazine,’ I have yet to encounter it.”
GENTLEMEN, GIRD YOUR LIVERS: Steve Green is Drunkblogging the Final Obama State of the Union Address.
YES, HE’S THE REAL VICTIM HERE: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell Frets Iran Seizing Sailors Has Created ‘Frantic’ Scene for Obama’s SOTU.
Why do these bad things keep happening to him — him — of all people?
WELL PLAYED: Speaker Paul Ryan invites nuns to Rep. Keith Ellison’s ‘Bring Your Own Muslim’ night. “Ryan instead chose as his guests the Little Sisters of the Poor, the nuns who have been alternatively winning and losing their fight against the Obamacare mandate that they provide, against their religious beliefs, birth control (including abortifacients) as part of their health plan.”
ANDREW McCARTHY on Obama’s Insane Iran Policy.
Khamenei’s consistent message? Death to America. Obama’s consistent message to Khamenei? “Hey, we can work it out.”
CUBA: North Korea With Palm Trees. “Like North Korea, Cuba maintains a distribution system in which citizens pay a low cost for inadequate rations of staple foods. (At one state shop, the provisions, listed on the blackboard, were grains, washing soap, bathing soap, toothpaste, sugar, salt, coffee, evaporated milk, eggs, and oil.) As in North Korea, archaic laws prevent the private sale of commodities that have been deemed strategic to the nation. Fishing is limited in both countries on the grounds that the bounty of the seas is the exclusive property of the state.”
Hang your rulers, and live a better life.
AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Have Shed 1,206 Full-Time Faculty (13.3%) Since 2010.
EXCLUSIVE: BOMBSHELL: EXPOSED: Donald Trump Played Soccer in High School.
“Most patriotic Americans stop playing soccer at around age nine, because it’s lame and rewards weakness. It’s also very popular in Mexico.” It really is a low-energy game. The scoring opportunities aren’t very yuge, either.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Free Play Creates Emotionally Stable Children in an Unstable World.
I WAS HOPING FOR AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy. “The B61 Model 12, the bomb flight-tested last year in Nevada, is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of an atomic revitalization estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.”
The way things are going, I fear we’ll be wanting the large, the obvious, and the indiscriminate.
JAMES TARANTO: Brooks Borks Cruz:
Yesterday we had a mischievous thought: What if Donald Trump, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, were to announce (or merely suggest) that if elected, he would nominate Ted Cruz to the next vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court? Such a move would give some Cruz supporters a reason to switch while reassuring other conservatives nervous about the soundness of a President Trump’s judicial nominees.
Trump could even use the occasion to reinforce his current Cruz-directed mischief. After all, nobody can claim that Cruz’s Canadian birth would pose an obstacle to a Supreme Court appointment. Several early justices were born in England and vicinity; Justice Felix Frankfurter was a naturalized immigrant from Vienna; and Justice David Brewer was born as far away as Turkey.
Is David Brooks thinking along similar lines? We ask because his New York Times column today looks an awful lot like a pre-emptive borking.
Read the whole thing.
LYNDON B. OBAMA: “When it comes to offering progress reports on his war against ISIS, Barack Obama is beginning to sound like a previous wartime Democratic president. It is not a flattering comparison,” Richard Benedetto recently noted at Real Clear Politics:
Over the past few weeks, Obama has issued several upbeat statements crafted to assure an uneasy American people that the fight against terror is going well, only to have the facts come back and bite him.
He is starting to develop a “credibility gap,” faced by Lyndon Baines Johnson during the Vietnam War. LBJ and his commanders kept telling the nation that the war was going well when it really was not.
“We are pleased with the results we are getting,” Johnson said in an impassioned November 1967 press conference. “We are inflicting greater losses than we are taking.”
Johnson added that it was “an encouraging sign” that decreasing numbers of Vietnamese were living under Communist control. “Overall, we’re making progress,” he added. “We’re satisfied with that progress.”
Sound familiar?
Very much so, especially today, when the capture of two Navy ships by Iran sounds eerily reminiscent of the Pueblo incident, which took place this month in 1968, when the North Koreans temporarily captured the USS Pueblo, “a Navy intelligence vessel…engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast when it [was] intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but the North Koreans turned their guns on the lightly armed vessel and demanded its surrender.”
No word yet if the US sailors detained in Iran will be flashing “the Hawaiian good luck sign” at their captors, but it would certainly have double meaning this time around.
Related: Report: Obama Ordered the CIA Not to Support Green Movement in Iran in 2009.
And this is the thanks we get today from the mullahs — why it’s as if they mean it when they say they’re really America’s enemies or something.
REVIEW: The Lexus LC500 Coupe.
NEW YORK TIMES USEFUL IDIOT DAVID BROOKS: TED CRUZ ISN’T JESUS-Y ENOUGH AT WORK:
Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.
Of course, if his speeches — or even those of his mentors — really were filled with “pagan brutalism,” Brooks would be a true admirer of Cruz and/or his pants.
Related: Four Problems With Media Confusion Over Ted Cruz’s Quoting Of Scripture.
HEADLINES FROM 1942: Young woman visiting Paris receives number tattooed on arm: “Why I left the Paris Climate Summit with an activist tattoo.”
I never imagined I would get a tattoo during the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris. Yet here it is, newly healed and permanently inked on the inside of my right wrist.
The tattoo is three numbers and a symbol: “355<” in 25-point font, styled as if from a typewriter. It’s my commitment to the people of the climate movement, to listening to and sharing their stories of climate justice.
When I was born in October 1991, the concentration of carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activity — in our atmosphere was 355 parts per million. In the early 20th century, we topped 300 ppm for the first time in 800,000 years, beginning the destabilization of our climate and society through rising planetary temperatures.
I never knew these exact numbers before, but now that they’re printed on my wrist, I will never forget.
Huh — in the past, a lot of people with numbers tattooed on their arms uttered those last two words.
STEPHEN GREEN WILL BE Drunkblogging The State Of The Union. If I were Obama, I’d be drinking just as hard.
PENTAGON: Two Navy boats in Iranian custody but Iran tells US that crew will be returned ‘promptly.’
Huh — why would they impound our boats when we’ve become such buddies with them under Obama?
UPDATE: “US officials tell NBC that Iranian forces have seized 10 American sailors,” CNBC reports.
MORE: Glenn Reynolds tweets, “Obama’s Carterization is complete” — and on the day of his final SOTU, to boot.
THAT ’70s SHOW:
Shot:
A feeling of constant and imminent menace pervaded the country, and especially its big cities. The 1974 movie, Death Wish, captures the mood of dread. Charles Bronson plays a New York architect, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal,” whose wife is murdered and whose daughter is raped by three thugs who force their way into the family’s apartment. The police do not catch the killers. They do not much try. They fill out forms, make some routine inquiries—and then forget about it. As a precinct captain explains, the city is suffering thirty murders a week. How could anyone investigate them all? A friend gives Bronson a gun, and he begins to prowl the streets and subways at night. Never has Manhattan looked more terrifying. The wind is chill; the streets are empty; the few law-abiding pedestrians pull their collars up around their ears, and hear and see nothing. At first by accident, then deliberately, Bronson tempts muggers to attack him. It seldom takes him long. The criminals are lurking everywhere. They approach their victims in total arrogance, without even a glance over their shoulder for the police. They know the police aren’t coming. And in fact, the only police action we see in the movie is a furious manhunt to capture Bronson, the vigilante killer.
—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.
Chaser: EU Gun Control: After Terrorism And Sex Assaults, European Union Cracks Down On Firearms Ownership.
Hangover: “Alain Ghozland, 73, a French Jewish politician from outside of Paris, was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday, with his body showing multiple lacerations that appeared to be stab wounds, according to reports.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Electron tomography reveals precise positions of individual atoms in aperiodic material.
ROGER SIMON: How Jeb Can (Still) Save His Reputation and Help America at the Same Time — If Jeb quits, he’s in a position to say the same to Hillary.
Sadly, I think Jeb would rather burn his campaign contributors’ money in a giant bonfire (QED) than admit that this isn’t his year.
IS TED CRUZ A “NATURAL BORN” U.S. CITIZEN?: According to Widener law school’s Mary Brigid McManamon, who has an oped in the Washington Post today, the answer is “no.” Her reasoning is a bit shaky:
On this subject, the common law is clear and unambiguous. The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on it, declared natural-born citizens are “such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” while aliens are “such as are born out of it.” The key to this division is the assumption of allegiance to one’s country of birth. The Americans who drafted the Constitution adopted this principle for the United States. James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” stated, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. [And] place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.” . . .
Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the power to naturalize an alien. . . . But Article II of the Constitution expressly adopts the legal status of the natural-born citizen and requires that a president possess that status. . . . Congress si