Archive for 2013
May 12, 2013
ROGER SIMON: Benghazi: The Video Vanishes. “But the most extraordinary aspect of the talking points editing process is what was never mentioned, at least as far I have seen — the supposedly infamous Mohammed video. Not a word of that. While emailing each other, these officials from the CIA, State, the Pentagon, and the White House seem to have completely ignored it.”
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FETISHIZE OBJECTS: FBI surrounds house of Saudi student following sightings of him with pressure cooker pot, only to find he was cooking rice. “An FBI agent said: ‘You need to be more careful moving around with such things, Sir’.”
STACY MCCAIN: A Short Lesson in Liberal Media Bias: Has Alex Koppelman Forgotten Fitzmas? “Scandals always highlight the disparity in how differently the media treat Republicans and Democrats. We are grateful to Alex Koppelman for this latest example.”
ANN ALTHOUSE: Michael Tomasky thinks the idea of impeaching Obama is “industrial-strength insane,” which is why the GOP will try to do it. “I love the way it’s his idea that he’s calling insane, and he’s so sure other people are insane. Isn’t that kind of… insane?”
SHOCKER: WOMEN’S SEXUALITY NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT. “One woman, in the art world in New York, told me, ‘I could not say what you said without feeling shamed, as though my eroticism made me a willing participant in a patriarchal system.’ ” Few things in nature are politically correct. Political correctness is the most outre fantasy of all.
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JAY COST: Define And Conquer.
In a May 3 Q&A with the New York Times’s John Harwood, former Obama strategist David Axelrod put a demographic spin on the president’s analysis. When Harwood asked why gun background checks failed in the Senate, Axelrod responded, “The Republican Party today is, at its core, a mostly Southern, white, old, evangelical party.”
This is, at its core, false. A majority of Romney voters were from outside the Old Confederacy, under 65 years old, and not evangelical. But truth is not the point, nor is the purpose of Obama’s “permission structure” analysis merely to explain why his legislative program has stalled. Instead, it is to define the president’s conservative opposition as out of the mainstream of American society. Obama’s opponents, so the logic goes, are so out to lunch that their opinions should not be taken seriously.
Read the whole thing.
YOU KNOW, THIS SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF FALLEN ANGELS, DOESN’T IT? Huge ice sheets pushed ashore at Minnesota lake, creep up to people’s doorsteps.
Related: Video: When Ice Floes Attack In May.
YEP: The Moral Disaster of Benghazi, Obamacare, IRS. “A supposedly free people make an extraordinary concession to the government when they file tax returns: In an inversion of the normal American rights, we are forced to testify against ourselves. This is morally acceptable if and only if the government sticks to the highest standards of fairness. When the government breaks that agreement, the people are justifiably outraged. Yet, speaking of outrage, where is Obama? If he’s said anything, I haven’t heard it.”
UNSUSTAINABLE: When having a baby is “social suicide.”
POST-BENGHAZI IRONY: I ran across this from Hillary’s Senate career: Hillary Clinton: No regret on Iraq vote.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she is not sorry she voted for a resolution authorizing President Bush to take military action in Iraq despite the recent problems there but she does regret “the way the president used the authority.”
“How could they have been so poorly prepared for the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein?” the New York Democrat asked Tuesday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
How, indeed?
UPDATE: Hillary should have been reading InstaPundit a decade ago. But hell, she should be reading it now.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Jobs Crisis Is Bigger Than You Think. “We are seeing the greatest wave of economic transition since the mechanization of agriculture reduced the percentage of the labor force engaged in farming from more than half the American labor force in 1890 to less than two percent today.”
GEORGE WILL ON THE IRS’ TEA PARTY ATTACKS: “How Stupid Do They Think We Are?”
Related: IRS Scrutiny Was Deeper Than Thought. “Government investigators have found that the Internal Revenue Service scrutinized conservative groups for raising political concerns over government spending, debt and taxes or even for advocating making America a better place to live, according to new details likely to inflame a widening IRS controversy. The latest details about the IRS handling of applications for tax-exempt status by tea party, patriot and other conservative groups in recent years were provided to congressional investigators by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The findings were reviewed Sunday by The Wall Street Journal.”
Also: Washington Post: IRS targeted groups that criticized the government, IG report says. “The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their name for heightened scrutiny.”
Plus: “The focus will now become whether or not IRS commissioner Doug Shulman knew about the questions when he testified that no Tea Party groups were being targeted for unfair scrutiny in front of Congress in 2012. The report doesn’t shay whether or not Shulman was informed about the Tea Party questioning, but it does show the IRS’s chief counsel was. It’s standard procedure for the counsel and commissioner to discuss this sort of thing before a Congressional hearing.”
WOULDN’T NICOBAN BE BETTER? California woman who slapped deputy so she could quit smoking in jail gets her wish: 63 days.
MISSING CLIMBER KILLED BY VENOM. “One of the rock climbers who helped retrieve the body of one of his peers called the sight ‘tragic and horrifying,’ and it’s easy to see why: Tucson’s Steven Johnson was found dangling from a cliff, where he had been stung to death by bees, reports the Arizona Daily Star. Johnson apparently rappelled off the cliff looking for a place to climb, but he had the misfortune of ending up in mid-air a few feet from a beehive on the rock.”
ZOOM: X-51A Screams to Hypersonic Success. Michael Belfiore reports.
But here’s what Gary Hudson emailed to me when I first mentioned this flight:
Hypersonics are the propulsion systems of the future…and always will be.
I say: quit trying to bore holes in the atmosphere – with the massive thermal and drag issues attendant – and simply go to orbital velocity like any self-respecting rocket engineer knows. Rocket-powered antipodal boost-glide is faster and the technology far easier to master.
I’ll take whatever lets me make a weekend trip to Sydney, but there’s also a scramjet application for hypersonic cruise missiles.
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INFECTION: The World Health Organization says it appears likely that the novel coronavirus (NCoV) can be passed between people in close contact. “This comes after the French health ministry confirmed a second man had contracted the virus in a possible case of human-to-human transmission. Two more people in Saudi Arabia are also reported to have died from the virus, according to health officials.”
THREE WORDS FOR COLLEGE GRADS: Learn some programming.
LESSONS FROM a long-lasting marriage.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Strangest Interactions Between Wild Animals and Humans This Week.