The Light Cavalry Blog

Knowing me as a long-time Birther, Dave Calder, who is not, generously referred me to this piece in very liberal Mother Jones, The Birther Plan To Block Obama’s Reelection. Apart from the writer’s message that the Birthers have a potentially effective plan ( is that ‘traction’? ), the thing that strikes me is the casual assumption that Obama may be unable to produce a birth certificate. Hold on, whoa! Isn’t that the reason why the White House calls Birthers ‘irrational’, that Hawaii has supposedly produced the functional equivalent of a birth certificate based on sight of the very private original in its records and that it’s crazy talk to ask to see the original?

Has the plot changed or has it been lost?

DAVE adds: I also picked up on the “casual assumption” Mark notes above. I’m still firmly a “non-birther” because I don’t share that assumption, but it is interesting to find that assumption among some liberals. It speaks volumes about the liberal mindset by indicating they would willingly override the Constitution to retain Obama (not to mention they support a President they don’t fully trust). If not, they would be clamoring to resolve the doubt in their mind too. Instead the article reminds me of the Imperial officer’s warning in Star Wars: “We’ve analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger.”

MARK adds: Spot on. Bear in mind that a Birther isn’t someone who denies there’s a birth certificate, it’s someone who wants to see it. Kinda like the government if you want a sensitive job.

As a New Jersey property tax-payer, I say ‘Amen.’ Mesmerizing stuff.

Politico reports the White House comment that ‘Birthers’ aren’t rational. It’s linked by Drudge. I eyeballed the first 300 comments on Politico and didn’t spot 1 that didn’t want to see Obama’s birth certificate. Politico is far from a conservative site.
As another ‘Birther‘, Professor William Jacobson of Cornell Law School, writes at Legal Insurrection:

No one really knows who Obama is, because almost everything we know about Obama prior to his entering public life comes from Obama alone.

UPDATE: Uh oh – friend says Governor says there is no birth certificate in Hawaii.

In his post “Understanding Obama“, Mick drew my attention to an interview with Richard Epstein. The interview was made in March 2009 but is still the best account of What Just Happened that I know and an intellectual delight:

I like Sarah Palin for President. I very much like the idea of a Palin win as a symbol of contempt for the Frankfurters who have re-colonized America. How about a Palin/Coulter ticket to maximise the number of exploding heads?

I also like Mitt Romney for President. If Romneycare is the main strike against him, well you have to allow that he was operating as the only non-socialist branch of the Massachusetts government.

But who is the over-achiever who most appeals to my dry sense of humour? Why this gentleman:

McConnell/Gingrich 2012! Because old white men have feelings too….maybe.

I went to the last day of the London Chess Classic on Wednesday…… 4 English players +

These men are like demi-gods to a patzer like me. Entering the antechamber I almost bumped into Kramnik and then stood close to Anand, the world champion, as he gave an interview having drawn with Kramnik. I was slackjawed as I clicked away.

Carlsen won despite a poor start. Garry Kasparov was there, the strongest player of all time (tho Fischer was sui generis).

But best of all Kasparov signed his book on Fischer for me with a dedication to 2 of my children who play chess. Now I know true happiness:

This interview has Kasparov talking about a stint of training Carlsen. It is of extreme interest to cognoscenti as their styles differ dramatically and Carlsen markedly improved thereafter.

Interview with Kasparov and Carlsen + a sting in the tail:

I’ve lacked the blogging mood lately. One reason is travelling. Another reason is certain shadows in the lives of people I know. Another reason is that Obama and the Democrats are now acknowledged as useless by pretty much the whole world. That battle of ideas is won. Now the main event is the tension between what I dub the bluebloods and the redbloods on the right.

That said, I hereby make the contrarian forecast that Obama will act against Iran, probably by greenlighting and abetting an Israeli airstrike. A weak president, taunted by his own party as deficient in testicles let alone fortitude, will be sorely tempted to overcompensate. Good.

We landed in Kathmandu on the 14th, drove to Nepalganj on the 16th, and have been festering since then waiting for the end-monsoon rains and clouds to disappear here on the Indian border with Nepal and about 250km north at Jumla so that we can fly into that town which has for weeks been cut off by landslips on the only road in. The weather has cleared here and it feels like a real transition from the monsoon. We have 4 tickets on a flight tomorrow thanks to our Sirdar and friend, Da Gombu Sherpa. So Garry, I, Amrit and Pasang will try to jostle our way onto a flight tomorrow together with 250kg or so of food and gear. Gombu himself will fly back to Kathmandu to attend to a medical problem and re-join us at base camp later if possible. Our cook, Rai, will follow us after. We’ll spend a couple of days in Jumla getting set with local supplies and porters then head up the Jagdula Khola gorge towards Kande Hiunchuli, say 4 days trek. Once there Garry and I will spend 2 or 3 days acclimatizing before heading over a 5000m pass and down to our base camp by Changda Khola. Then comes the load carrying and clinbing attempt on unclimbed Kande Hiunchuli South (formerly Sisne, 6600m) which we attempted 26 years ago.

After the climb we’ll head back to Jumla the long way round via Mugu, the Langu gorge, the Karnali river and Rara lake. We don’t expect to see any Europeans after Jumla, if there.

It’s rather normal to have this sort of delay. In hindsight we may have come out a little early, but if we do fly tomorrow we’ll have reached Jumla a week after landing in Nepal which is much faster than in 1984 when we trekked much of the way across Nepal from south to north. It’s a blow that Gombu is leaving, but it’s unavoidable and we’ll see what happens. You definitely need patience and fatalism in this game. Ripeness is all.

I’ll be in Nepal for a few weeks from Tuesday. More info here.

Today Obama will take credit for ending the US combat presence in Iraq, a successful outcome due to Bush forcing thru the surge against domestic opposition on all sides:

Obama denies Bush the credit, which brings us to a punchline from Powerline:

One can debate whether Obama is a terrible President–I think he is–but I don’t think anyone can deny that he is an unmanly jerk.

Yesterday President George W.Bush unexpectedly turned up at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to welcome home US Army troops. “The photos are priceless.”

In 2003 Bush made a surprise appearance at a Thanksgiving Dinner in Baghdad, where he helped serve dinner to the troops:

This extract from a message home by a US Army captain describes the scene:

Bremer then said that we should probably get someone more senior to read the
speech. Then, from behind the camouflage netting, the President of the
United States came around. The mess hall actually erupted with hollering.
Troops bounded to their feet with shocked smiles and just began cheering
with all their hearts. The building actually shook. It was just unreal. I
was absolutely stunned. Not only for the obvious, but also because I was
only two tables away from the podium. There he stood, less than thirty feet
away from me! The cheering went on and on and on.

Soldiers were hollering, cheering, and a lot of them were crying. There was
not a dry eye at my table. When he stepped up to the cheering, I could
clearly see tears running down! his cheeks. It was the most surreal moment
I’ve had in years. Not since my wedding and Aaron being born. Here was this
man, our President, came all the way around the world, spending 17 hours on
an airplane and landing in the most dangerous airport in the world, where a
plane was shot out of the sky not six days before.

Just to spend two hours with his troops. Only to get on a plane and spend
another 17 hours flying back. It was a great moment, and I will never forget
it. He delivered his speech, which we all loved, when he looked right at me
and held his eyes on me. Then he stepped down and was just mobbed by the
soldiers.

So what we got here?

A judge nullifies a referendum.
A fed nullifies the law-making of a state.
An interested judge doesn’t declare his interest.
A homosexual nullifies the assumptions of human society to date.

Government should have no role in marriage, but revolutions have started for less than this.

Answer this multiple choice question:

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was most likely caused by -

A. BP who drilled and completed a nightmare well with unsafe techniques?

B. BP and Transocean who owned and operated the rig?

C. BP and Transocean and Cameron who made the blow-out preventer which failed?

D. The US government?

A report from the Center for Public Integrity suggests that the ultimate responsibility for the BP oil leak disaster lays with the Obama administration, mainly because of a botched response to the initial fire from the Coast Guard.
“The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.
“Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.
“An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list.”
Oil platform fires are generally fought using foam, which is a more effective fire suppressant. While the Coast Guard does not itself fight these kinds of fires, it is charged with coordinating fire-fighting activities at off-shore facilities like oil platforms.
The use of salt water rather than foam evidently led to the collapse of the oil platform. This is very important, because the oil leak did not occur until this happened.
“While investigators have zeroed in on a series of missteps and ignored safety warnings aboard the rig that preceded the fiery explosion April 20, the question of what caused the platform to collapse into the Gulf two days later remains unanswered and could prove vital to ongoing legal proceedings and congressional investigations.
“That is because the riser pipe from which the majority of BP’s oil spewed did not start leaking until after the rig sank. Experts and some lawsuits have openly tied the sinking of the drilling vessel to the severity of the leak. “
While the Obama administration has received much criticism for its botched response to the BP oil leak disaster, it has, until now, evaded responsibility for having caused it to start with. This is not just a result of Coast Guard incompetence for which President Obama is ultimately responsible for as commander in chief, but, as an article in the Washington Examiner suggests, the direct result of Obama budget cuts that rendered the Coast Guard incapable of making a proper response:
“The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama’s spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual — advising against firefighting aboard a rig — just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a ‘hollow force.’”

The Obama family is on vacation in Acadia, an island of Maine which is also a US National Park. Yesterday they ascended Mount Cadillac, 1530 feet, the high point of the island.

I visited Acadia in January 2001. In 4 days on the icy, rocky trails I saw 4 other hikers.
Here’s a ditty I left in the visitors’ book of the b and b to record the names of all the Acadian hills I hiked:

Acadia, Mansell, Bernard, Beech,
Sauveur, Penobscot, Valley Peak,
Pemetic, Sargent, Dorr, North Bubble,
Gorham, Champlain, Connor Nubble:
I banged my head on icy tracks
All for the sake of Cadillac.
Imagine my concussive shock-
We could have driven to the top.
Goddamn!

‘Goddamn!’ could as well read ‘D’oh!’ except that it echoes this parody by Ezra Pound:

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,
Goddamm.
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,
DAMM.

I twice bet long on BP recently and was twice stopped out. I’m back long the BP ADR at $29 and $31 and $33, always with downside protection. This weekend BP are working to switch the oil spill containment system to one designed to capture the entire flow. Success should boost the stock of course, but failure won’t be such a big deal to the downside providing the back-up plan to re-install an improved version of the present cap can be implemented if the best option can’t.

The news flow on possible sales of BP assets is picking up. This Sunday morning there’s a report that Exxon have Obaman go-ahead to look at BP assets and there’s speculation of a takeover bid.

LONDON (Dow Jones)–Oil major BP PLC Sunday declined to comment on a report in a U.K. newspaper that Exxon was mulling a takeover bid for the company.

A spokesman for BP also declined to comment on a U.K. press report that BP was in talks with the U.S.’s Apache Corp. to sell up to $12 billion in assets including a big stake in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil field.

“We have no comment to make on market rumors and speculation,” a BP spokesman told Dow Jones Newswires.

The U.K.’s Sunday Times said that Exxon had sought clearance from Washington DC to examine a takeover bid for BP.

The newspaper cited oil industry sources as saying the Obama administration had told Exxon and one other U.S. oil company, thought to be Chevron, that it would not stand in the way of a deal that could value BP at up to GBP100 billion.

The sources said there was no certainty that Exxon would make a move, but said talks with Washington indicated a renewed interest as BP came closer to plugging its oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

“There have been talks at a high level, and Exxon has expressed a serious interest. It is too early to talk about a bid yet, but they are clearing the way,” a senior oil industry source told the Sunday Times.

There is some logic to an Exxon takeover:

1. Americanizing the assets might play well across a lot of the US political spectrum, tho of course Exxon is a bête noire to the moonbats, especially this administration.

2. Exxon is a disciplined outfit and would provide more credible operational assurances than BP can.

3. A US bidder might be able to do a deal with Obama to cap the practically unlimited damages that might be levied upon a finding of criminal negligence. Such a damages’ cap is essential for a takeover bid. Obama could argue that granting a cap is the way forward to get drilling re-started in the Gulf. The masochistic moratorium on deepwater drilling is a legal and electoral embarrassment that Obama could do without if he has any sense. (I know, I know).

That said, the politics of a US bid for BP would play badly in the UK, albeit that Americans own as much of the company as Britons and albeit that the company may shortly have an American CEO. Some other time, sure, but not now when BP is performing heroically in some ways against a backdrop of thuggery and incompetence from Obama, Justice, Energy and Congress. Now…no way, says this Briton. The US Feds are at least as culpable as BP from start to finish in all of this, but BP’s taken the heat, the shame and the threats. A US takeover in those circumstances would be infuriating and would damage US/UK relations for a long time. Of course to Obama that’s not a bug but a feature.

No, were I Exxon I’d look for a deal to take over BP’s US upstream assets. There are 2 parts to that deal; price – it won’t be cheap, but it won’t be expensive given the strategic potential of the acreage (after all the US won’t always be a banana republic) and the spoken or unspoken leverage of federal threats to shut down BP’s US business (today the US is a banana republic). The second part to a deal is an arrangement with the US encompassing say $10-$20 billion to Obaman preferred entities like solar power companies and wind farms with political connections plus a workable policy on deepwater drilling.

Now if I were Shell, I’d talk to the Feds about bidding on BP assets, or bidding on BP, as soon as a full containment system is in place. Shell should be acceptable in the US, isn’t quite as demonized as Exxon and would be much more acceptable in the UK and Europe. The biggest problem may be that there’s nobody in Obamaworld with business savvy to talk to. He should draft his ally, Warren Buffet, to represent the US interest – the whole US interest.

Anyway, this weekend may boost BP stock ($34). Hope so. My sell target is $45, but I might be tempted in again if it dips from there. A feeding frenzy could develop.

Update 1: An ex-colleague who now works in BP read this then wrote to me:

It’s been painful to see the biased reporting; I have been at Unified Command in louisiana for most of the time and see all the great things we are doing to response and the huge effort we are making to be transparent. Really lost faith in the popular press.

Update 2: The stock was boosted and closed 8% up today, Monday.

Abortion ‘triples breast cancer risk’: Fourth study finds terminations linked to disease.

[In the UK] There has been an 80 per cent increase in the rate of breast cancer since 1971, when in the wake of the Abortion Act, the number of abortions rose from 18,000 to nearly 200,000 a year.

It’s notable how often cultural marxism leads to health catastrophes. Abortion is a health catastrophe for the unborn baby, but also, quite possibly, for the mother who killed her baby. Homosexual libertinism is a health catastrophe for AIDS victims. Soft drugs are a health catastrophe for those rendered schizophrenic. Rampant vaccination through semi-coercion is a health catastrophe for attenuated immune systems. The sedation of disruptive boys through semi-coercion in a feminised and riskophobic public school system in America is a health catastrophe. God knows I’d have been Ritalined from an early age were I at school now.

As Margaret Thatcher said, the facts of life are conservative.

AC Chickadee comments:

I’ve never heard that abortions can cause breast cancer. I wonder if it has something to do with hormones? I believe Ritalin is oftentimes prescribed just to make it easier for teachers to handle unruly students, who are really just normal. Parents can refuse to do it, but they probably go along with it just to make it easier for them too. Sad.

Mark comments:

I recently spoke to a parent from New Hampshire whose school is threatening to bar his son unless he’s medicated. His dad believes the boy, with whom I’ve vacationed, is normally disruptive in a setting which stigmatizes that and messes with the boy’s mind, rather than discipline it. Principals are litigation averse social workers, who use non-fiction versions of ‘soma’.

Whether or not our children are barred in NJ for not being ‘adequately’ vaccinated is essentially at the whim of a bureaucrat who decides whether I’ve used the correct form of lie in claiming a religious exemption.

Brave New World is here in America. How ironic, since Shakespeare used the phrase in The Tempest with a different Americas in mind. ‘Oh brave new world that has such people in’t’ – coercive socialists who govern our children with drugs and pc brainwashing.

Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s today’s outrage:

The striking thing to me is the smug confidence with which the statist professionals commit these atrocities. They’ve captured the levers of social control while honest citizens are busy making money and raising families.

The $20 billion dollar shakedown of BP has set an unholy precedent which will reverberate thru US business interests overseas. Next time Exxon has a Russian style environmental audit at Sakhalin, what’s to stop a Gazprom-friendly politician ordering up a few bill. in escrow money by citing the Obama example ?

BP screwed up unforgivably by the looks of it, albeit with the full, explicit knowledge of the relevant federal agencies, but it was meeting all its financial duties and has resources and cash flow to meet future liabilities. That refers to legal and moral liabilities, not economic losses from the imbecilic, US mandated 6 month drilling shutdown based on an expert report falsified by the Dept of Energy and disowned by the experts who wrote it.

This FT article asks a good question – how is the BP’s escrow commitment to Obama legal without shareholder approval?

“I don’t get how [legally] BP can cancel an already declared dividend, and offer up $20 billion, without a shareholder vote. Nor why they’d do either of those things. If Obama insisted on a political headline, I’d have much rather it’d been Hayward’s scalp,” one trader said.

The article makes a nice point about one of Tony Hayward’s possible successors, Robert Dudley:

Mr Dudley, an affable Mississippian, meanwhile, has been in the fray in Houston, managing the clean-up and is seen as having handled the public scrutiny better than his chief executive.

He was also at Mr Hayward and Mr Svanberg’s side during Wednesday’s meeting with Mr Obama.

Mr Dudley’s recent post as chief executive of TNK-BP, BP’s Russian partnership, gives him experience running a company in a host country with an unpredictably hostile government.

Obama and Hayward, the 2 CEO’s responsible for the Gulf screw-up, are both snakebit. For them every silver lining has a cloud.

A comment in the DT:

As for Hayward’s supposed PR disaster, we need to accept the cultural differences between Britain and the US. We believe you should stay calm and behave as if everything is under control in a crisis. They like to show how committed they are and involved emotionally in the problem.

There’s some truth in that. Today Hayward is sailing with his son on his first few hours off since April 20th and the media feign outrage. Hey-ho. Anyway, writing as a punter long BP, it’s obvious that Hayward has to go. The guy looks punch-drunk with snake bites – a mixed metaphor to be proud of, I think.

Now, Obama….

Mick intones:

Two nations separated by a common language? I’m sure some of that was in play, but truth be told, calm in the face of the storm is also considered a virtue here in the U.S.

Hayward’s demeanor was perfect for BP, because shareholders, employees and executives all know that he shares their fate and concerns. The appearance of sang froid is, in my view, always an asset within this context, but what Hayward did not understand is that Gulf coast residents, and the nation at large, were not at all certain that Hayward and BP shared their specific fate or concerns. The American south has always had a streak of xenophobia running through it, and BP being perceived as a ‘foreign’ corporation with a ‘foreign’ chief wasn’t helping.

That seemed obvious to me, but apparently escaped Hayward and his team, who would have benefited from hiring some PR consultants as soon as the situated developed. Before he could create a perception of control, he needed to create for the Gulf Coast what he took for granted at BP–a shared fate (BP has long been part of the Gulf coast community…). I would have set up camp and invited the governors of the various gulf states to join him for some helicopter tours and in-depth discussions, setting up some sort of coordinated response between the company and the states.

Hayward made a lot of mistakes, but he has an excuse–ignorance. What’s Obama’s excuse?

It is literally incomprehensible that Obama didn’t jump on this like a hungry owl on a mouse caught out in the open. He had Clinton as an advisor (who handled the Florida hurricanes with aplomb), the negative example of Katrina, and a life-time of political experience to tell him that he needed to get on this thing within hours of it happening.

Obama still has some die-hard supporters in the media who’ll keep on making excuses for his profound incompetence, but they are dwindling rapidly.

Mark agrees: I agree.

Actually I don’t excuse Hayward. PR in a crisis is an indispensable attribute of his job. The best PR is calm, directed action, frankly explained with no quips. It’s not mysterious.

The only xenophobia I’ve noticed is in Washington. In the UK the contrast with Piper Alpha is widely noted. In 1988 a US operated platform exploded in the North Sea killing 168 men. An enquiry judged the operator, Occidental, to be culpable. There were no boots on throats, yankeephobia or political posturing about this accident, just a determination to fix what was wrong. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Daniel Hannan has written a mea culpa: “I admit it: I was wrong to have supported Barack Obama“.

My comment:

Sorry that this sounds snooty, but your post is better analysed by a psychologist than a bloggologist. To touch on one claim – “Obama was dealt a rotten economic hand.” No, he was a major promoter and beneficiary of Fannie and Freddie, the CRA and mega-Government which are the principal causes of what went wrong. Obama is the poop, not the scoop. That was obvious all along, so that someone of your excellence (I mean it) could only have been self-duped. That is what you need to acknowledge – that you wanted Obama to be the One for psychological motivations which met at the intersection of many other self-dupes’ motivations.

Barack Obama has made himself the ultimate horse’s ass over BP and the Gulf oil disaster. For a guy who probably can’t change a tyre, he’s done so much damage by insulting and criminalizing the engineers who are doing their damnedest to control events a mile under the surface that things could only get worse if he made himself ceo of BP. Since his latest bluster has contributed to a another spike down in BP’s price to a long-term low, I’ve now gone long the BP ADR at $34.90 (with downside protection).

Incroyable! This is my instant reaction to the breaking news that the White House enlisted Bill Clinton to offer Rep Sestak a job to stay out of the Senate primary against Arlen Specter, whose vote was desperately needed to pass Obamacare.

The White House:
Efforts were made in June and July of 2009 to determine whether Congressman Sestak would be interested in service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board, which would avoid a divisive Senate primary….The White House Chief of Staff enlisted the support of former President Clinton who agreed to raise with Congressman Sestak options of service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board.

18 U.S.C. § 600 : US Code – Section 600: Promise of employment or other benefit for political activity:

Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment,
position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit,
provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of
Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such
benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any
political activity or for the support of or opposition to any
candidate or any political party in connection with any general or
special election to any political office, or in connection with any
primary election or political convention or caucus held to select
candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this
title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

My comment:

1. It doesn’t matter whether the position was compensated or not. If it did matter, then the statute would prohibit “compensated position” not “position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit”. Clearly the Chief of Staff and the former President thought they were offering something of benefit to Sestak, else why bother?

2. This is far more cut and dried than Watergate, Plamegate or cigargate. The statute is clear.

3. This puts Obama and Clinton in the frame. I guess the defence will be “It depends on the meaning of ‘or’”.

4. They are all probably lying anyway. Sestak said he was offered a high-ranking federal job.

5. REVENGE!!!!

I was shooting balconies in Shad Thames yesterday morning, squatting low down among the fag ends, when a voice said  ”Do you want to take our photo?”  It was 3 young french guys who work at Pont de la Tour Restaurant. So I took this shot:

Then I realised they were all hiding their cigarettes, which was why they’d been loitering outside, so I told them to show the cigarettes, which made them look frenchier esp the middle one:

Professor Gingrich struts his stuff in a tutorial setting. I’m pleased that he recognizes Chris Christie as the most important governor in the United States for what he’s attempting in New Jersey. What’s so attractive about Gingrich is that he integrates the nitty gritty of politics with the ideas of politics and does so with the utmost fluency; a beautiful mind.

Walking to play football near Old Street, London, I passed through Bunhill Fields, a small cemetery for 17th and 18th century Non-Conformists and Dissenters. I heard a little girl ask her father “Why do they bury people?”, and he said “Well they have to put them somewhere.”

I suppose it’s a sign of age that I find cemeteries friendly and welcoming as I slip into something like the Hindu 3rd stage of life when “one gradually withdraws from the world, freely shares wisdom with others, and prepares for the complete renunciation of the final stage.”

I prefer cemeteries which allow nature to feed off the graves, moss-eaten English country churchyards, rather than the tidy type I find in America. I also like cemeteries which offer sublime views to their guests as sometimes in France. I myself hope to end up ground to dust in a high glacier somewhere or as fishfood by a coral reef.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

At Bunhill Fields lies John Bunyan, author of the allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come.

The images Bunyan uses in Pilgrim’s Progress are but reflections of images from his own world; the strait gate is a version of the wicket gate at Elstow church, the Slough of Despond is a reflection of Squitch Fen, a wet and mossy area near his cottage in Harrowden, the Delectable Mountains are an image of the Chiltern Hills surrounding Bedfordshire. Even his characters, like the Evangelist as influenced by John Gifford, are reflections of real people. This pilgrimage was not only real for Bunyan as he lived it, but his portrait evoked this reality for his readers. Rudyard Kipling once referred to Bunyan as “the father of the novel, salvation’s first Defoe.”

Another long-term resident is Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, sometimes considered the first novel in English; also of Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year.

In Defoe’s early life he experienced first-hand some of the most unusual occurrences in English history: in 1665, 70,000 were killed by the Great Plague of London. On top of all these catastrophes, the Great Fire of London (1666) hit Defoe’s neighborhood hard, leaving only his and two other homes standing in the area. In 1667, when Defoe was probably about seven years old, a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway via the River Thames and attacked Chatham. All of this happened before Defoe was around seven years old, and by the time he was about thirteen years old, Defoe’s mother had died.

Defoe’s later life was also eventful:

And most modest in monument, but most splendid in works is William Blake, arguably both the greatest English lyric poet and the greatest English artist. Wordsworth said:

There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.

It is reported that on the day of his death

Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually…he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.” Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always. Blake died.

Since we’re on the subject of graves, let me add some images from my archive:

Chris Christie confronts the New Jersey press:

Today Obama nominates the morally repulsive Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. She is his “moderate” choice. This post is simply to record extracts from Powerline’s terrific blog entry “A Note On Elena Kagan” :

As Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan had to deal with the issue of compliance with the Solomon Amendment. Under the Solomon Amendment, universities receiving federal funding are required to allow the armed services to recruit on campus like other employers. It is a law that shouldn’t be necessary.

Harvard Law School was one of many prominent law schools that chose to violate the Solomon Amendment, citing the military’s don’t ask/don’t tell policy. The don’t ask/don’t tell policy is not just a whim of the armed forces. It is also the law of the land, but don’t tell law school deans about it. They have to worry about matters closer to home, like their own schools’ so-called nondiscrimination policies against hosting recruiters for employers that don’t toe the line on homosexual rights.

When the Department of Defense sent Harvard a notice that it intended to enforce the Solomon Amendment, Kagan announced that she would adhere to what I call the Yale Doctrine, in honor of the statement made by then-Yale Law Dean Anthony Kronman at the time:

We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this–at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.

Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the “money talks” impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. Thus the Yale Doctrine: We take your money for the good of the world.

And:

Kagan’s side decisively lost the FAIR case in the Supreme Court [9-0]. I wrote while the case was pending in the Supreme Court that some lawsuits deserve a fate worse than failure. While decent military recruiters suffered the rudeness of their purported betters at Yale Law School and elsewhere in silence, the armed services of the United States were (and are) actively defending the freedom of those schools from peril. The rank ingratitude of those who should know better is a disgrace that deserves to be widely recognized as such.

Kagan doesn’t have the guts to stand by her position that the military shouldn’t be allowed to recruit because of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, which of course was Clinton’s compromise and is Obama’s tho he mewls and pukes about it. And she doesn’t have the guts to admit the highly relevant fact that she’s homosexual.

To paraphrase Powerline: Some nominees deserve a fate worse than failure and so do some Presidents. Has any President ever nominated such a gang of intellectual cowards, tax evaders, hacks, placemen, student revolutionaries and enemies of The West? Nope. The Manchurian President indeed.

Some things I’ve learnt about the failed NYC bombing

1. There’s a VIN on a car’s engine as well as the dashboard. I knew that, but the bomber didn’t. The next bomber will.

2. A young, male, recently naturalised, Pakistani who has just spent 5 months in Pakistan, isn’t on a watch list.

3. Altho he’d been ID’d and was being sought, he was able to board a plane to Dubai at the main airport, JFK, of the very city he’d tried to bomb.

4. Army planes intercepted his cell phone number

He was hauled off a plane in the nick of time as it was about to fly to the Middle East. CBS 2 obtained air traffic control recording intended to stop the pilots from taking off. The controller alerts pilots to “immediately” return to the gate.

In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Update – this page is now removed. Maybe the Administration reads this blog.

5. Mayor Bloomberg’s initial suggestion was that the terrorist might be someone disaffected by Obamacare. The rest of the liberal nomenklatura were probably rooting for the same wish-fulfillment.

6. Mayor Bloomberg warns against threats against Muslims in the face of threats from nobody.

7. President Obama says he will not rest to defend America against terrorism. Barack Obama’s political career was launched at the home of his friend Bill Ayers, the notorious unrepentent terrorist co-founder of the Weathermen. The Weathermen are not affiliated with the tea-party movement. What’s the phrase? Oh, yes, Obama was “palling around with terrorists”. You might even call them a “death panel”. Now this guy is President of America, defending my children.

8. More comedy here:

Senior administration officials say that Faisal Shahzad was put on the no fly list on Monday at 12:30 pm ET.

So how was he able to board the Emirates Airlines flight to Dubai?

“It takes a few hours for the airlines system to catch up,” a senior administration official tells ABC news.

Another senior administration official adds that Emirates refreshes their system to update with US intelligence information periodically – but not frequently.

Hold on, pardner. Even were it true that the proper function of the bureaucracy is to deflect responsibility for catching terrorists to airlines, there’s no way to get on an international flight at JFK without showing your passport and boarding pass to the Department of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile:

this self-congratulatory Administration will “keep it’s foot on the throat of BP“. It’s like dealing with whiny children when the house is on fire. It may be noteworthy that the Obamans are demonizing BP = British Petroleum, but low-profile or silent about Transocean, the rig operator, and Cameron, which made the blow-out preventer which critically failed. Still it could have been worse. BP might have been jewish-ish like Goldman Sachs.

The Dept of “The Buck Stops Here” – Not is busy right now what with blaming Emirates Airline for the NYC terrorist’s near escape. Where does a hyperpower find adult supervision when its electorate makes infantile choices?

There’s a General Election here tomorrow. For me the best outcome would be for UKIP, the UK Independence Party, to do well enough to get the faux-conservative, Cameron, sacked from the Conservative Party leadership. In fact Cameron will likely be Prime Minister 2 days from now, a true triumph of Cultural Marxism, when supposed conservatives take liberal ideology as a given. But I still voted Conservative, dammit:

Been catching up with the Goldman’s Case. I find Henry Blodget pretty persuasive.

Even if there was material non-disclosure outside industry norms tantamount to guilt in a civil case, the whole thing seems trivial unless part of a much vaster scam. Client (Paulson) asks GS to create a product to short the housing market, client proposes elements for the product, more than half those elements not selected by industry expert (Abacus) to compose the product, Abacus itself goes a billion long the product alongside other deep-pocket sophisticates including GS itself which loses $90m on it, then after the trade goes bad Abacus et al complain to the SEC that Goldman committed fraud by not naming Paulson as a short seller. Bollocks on stilts.

From what I’ve seen so far this is a purely political case which is wilfully financially illiterate. Matt Taibbi, a left-wing journalist on Rolling Stone, famously wrote:

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money

but even he thinks this is about politics.

You know, this strikes me as a dumb move even by Obama’s standards. The whole liberal project has flourished from the support of Wall Street Jews, many from Goldman Sachs, and Hollywood Jews. I know it’s always tempting for demagogues to throw the Jew down the well (Borat reference, but the clip is boring) and Obama’s doing his damnedest to throw Israel down the well and I know that the true religion of many American Jews is liberalism, but even they, even the liberal Jews in Hollywood, Wall Street, New Jersey and New York, must start to get what really animates Obama (and Obama’s supporters and mentors like Wright and Farrakhan and Sharpton). Obama is trying to play America as tho America were an ignorant crowd of victim culture voters in Chicago. I’m not sure who Obama’s friends will be once he’s alienated the Jews, the Press, Middle America, Democrats in Congress, the Supreme Court. Blacks don’t count since they vote monolithically for Obama already. Hispanics? I don’t think so. They’re not monolithic in politics and most have conservative family values.

Goldman can win this one and the rest of capitalism, Jewish, Hispanic, black or blue, should line up with them. Also significant will be Obama’s increasing isolation. Hey, New York, how do you like who you voted for? He wants to screw your biggest industry, he wants to screw your tax base, he wants to try KSM in Downtown Manhattan for a couple of years. Happy?

Cramer too:

Romneycare and Obamacare are the same thing and that thing is socialism. “The individual mandate”, ie compulsory health insurance, is an unconstitutional outrage.

Now when you’re a conservative governor of a lib-leaning state it’s pretty tough to stay ideologically pure, but that’s not the standard here. There are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed.

Romneycare does have mitigation. There’s a profound difference between a state law and a federal law and Romneycare is a somewhat coherent, bi-partisan expression of the will of the voters of Massachusetts rather than the stinking crap sandwich with which Obama is choking an unwilling America, but there’s no getting round the point that Romney implemented a technocratic solution to a problem that is primarily and rightly ideological. Moreover judged by technocratic criteria of medical provision and economy, Romneycare run by Deval Patrick and the Democrats is an utter flop:

The system is riddled with waste, and quality of care is uneven. Government health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid threaten future generations with an enormous burden of debt and taxes. Given these pressures, the temptation for a quick fix is understandable.

But, as Massachusetts has shown us, mandating insurance, restricting individual choice, expanding subsidies, and increasing government control isn’t going to solve those problems. A mandate imposes a substantial cost in terms of individual choice but is almost certainly unenforceable and will not achieve its goal of universal coverage. Subsidies may increase coverage, but will almost always cost more than projected and will impose substantial costs on taxpayers. Increased regulations will drive up costs and limit consumer choice.

The answer to controlling health care costs and increasing access to care lies with giving consumers more control over their health care spending while increasing competition in the health care marketplace – not in mandates, subsidies, and regulation. That is the lesson we should be drawing from the failure of RomneyCare.

Adamscare by the way is: No government involvement in healthcare other than as a safety net for children and those who put themselves at risk for the public good. The most obvious outcome will be healthier, happier, richer citizens, but the most satisfying outcome will be that liberals will no longer get to feel good about themselves by giving away my money.

So where does this leave Romney? Is he viable? Yes he is. He’s a strong executive when America is sick from communityorganizerocracy, the swing voter doesn’t care so much about ideology and every candidate has major difficulties in their record. Those fade if the candidate looks electorally attractive at the national level.

For someone whose boyhood was punctuated by the latest marvel of space travel from Sputnik on, this is pretty poignant. The signatories’ names have almost mythical weight:

“America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz (at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future) until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves. The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

“It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature. While the President’s plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. If it does, we should institute a program which will give us the very best chance of achieving that goal.

Neil Armstrong

Commander, Apollo 11

James Lovell

Commander, Apollo 13

Eugene Cernan

Commander, Apollo 17

Here’s how it looks from China:

Krugman accused China of “engaging in massive capital export – artificially creating a huge deficit in China’s capital account”. China is running a current account surplus with the US, which by definition means that China is exporting capital to the US. In my view, the most important reason why China should not run a current account surplus consistently against the US is simply because China is one of the poorest countries in the world, and should not engaging in financing the consumption binge of the richest country in the world.
China is running “twin surpluses” – current and capital account surpluses. It means that while importing capital in the form of FDI and foreign debts with high costs, it exports capital in the form of piling up greenbacks and US treasuries with low yields or no yields at all. By doing so, China has been engaging in a massive wealth transfer to the US. How could Krugman argue that China is “making everyone else poorer”?
The losses incurred in financial transactions between China and the US could be trivial compared with the capital losses China may suffer in the future. China has parked its savings in the US treasures while US fiscal debt ratio has been surging. Following the upcoming structural changes such as aging, China will run down its foreign exchange reserves sooner or later. A very big question for China is: When it needs to redeem its treasuries, can America honor its debt obligations?
History may show that China is the biggest victim of the post-Bretton Woods international monetary system, a system of the dollar standard. Under this system, everything hinges on the integrity of the American government and the Fed, or the speed of their printing press. The American government and the Fed have let down those who have trust in them.
For its own sake, China should stop further piling up greenbacks massively.

Yu Yongding, president of the China Society for World Economics.

I was asked this by a super-intelligent young lady whom I accuse of being brainwashed into her illiberal liberalism:

Btw, I’d be genuinely interested to read your manifesto if you’re willing to engage in debate without using ad hominem arguments or suggesting I’m brainwashed.

I’d be particularly interested to hear how your system deals with natural monopolies (air traffic, transport, broadband, post, police, courts, army)
and things that affect the vulnerable (health care for poor children/parents, education) and whether you legislate for and enforce laws around things like farming of animals, insider trading.

So I dashed off this fragment:

Air traffic – not a natural monopoly.
transport – ditto.
broadband – ditto
post- ditto

If you’re thinking of the ‘pipeline’ for broadband, water, power, etc as a natural monopoly then one way to handle it is as it’s done now – combination of public regulator and private franchisee monopolist, but it’s a technical rather than political question.

Air traffic control may be a natural monopoly and should be state regulated tho privately run perhaps.

Courts should be in the public sector, but have become corrupted by social engineers in the Anglosphere, cf atrocities like Roe v Wade, atrocious for it’s substance, yes, but intellectually atrocious as having no basis in law other than an invented right to privacy which is then tendentiously extended to the right of a mother to kill her baby as tho any of the Framers would have contemplated anything of the sort.

Police should be in the public sector probably, tho not necessarily. Again control by social engineers has been disastrous.

Army ditto.

The question is not whether a private corporation runs something, but who appropriately regulates that corporation – the free market or the state. The principle is that all activities should be free from state interference other than enforceability of voluntary contracts.

The exceptions should be few and have compelling ideological or practical justification such as ‘the state should have the monopoly of force’ or ‘children must be protected.’

The reason for that is ideological – freedom is an absolute good – and practical – the government is sometimes useless, but more often worse than useless at effecting good results. It has neither the skills nor the correct motivation. Your suggestion that the answer to that is better government has been so comprehensively disproved in practice and theory, in history and in the present, all over the world and probably on Jupiter, that it takes cognitive dissonance to persist with it.

Children are the reason for society to exist and should be protected consistent with minimal displacement of the family by the state.

Other animals should be protected by law. Factory farming and vivisection should be crimes. How to get from here to there is discussable, but that’s what ‘there’ looks like.

Insider trading is fine providing everyone knows it might happen and there are no voluntary contracts – eg contracts of employment – to bar it. Risks are far more manageable when they are in the open.

I’d add that anybody should be sackable for any reason and there should be no state healthcare other than fallback provision for children and those injured in the front line of military service.

Yes the government should ensure that water is clean and power stations don’t blow up.

This will sound ruthless to you, but the outcomes are much better spiritually, politically and practically except IN ONE RESPECT: it doesn’t allow liberals to feel good about themselves at others’ expense. But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

At Powerline Paul argues:

In my opinion, President Obama’s tilt towards the Palestinians is rooted in ideology, a considerably softer version of the ideology espoused by Jeremiah Wright . The facts that matter to this president do not pertain to the PA’s intentions. Rather, I suspect the key facts are these: compared to Israelis, Palestinians are downtrodden and non-Western. They are what leftist academics call “the other.” And promoting the interests of “the other” is a big deal for Obama — indeed, this imperative seems like the closest thing he has to a religion.

If I’m right, then Netanyahu will never be able to placate Obama. And he should not try.

He’s wrong only in the phrase “considerably softer version of the ideology espoused by Jeremiah Wright” which would better read “muted version”, but Paul’s being polite or evading the cruel truth that America is now governed by the intellectual spawn of 1960′s hippie revolutionaries. In truth Israel has a special role in this religion. Israel is “the other” and the founding high points of modern terrorism against the West are attacks on Israel – Jewish, modern, victorious, free Israel. Among the plane hijackings, the Munich massacre, the murder of children which figure in Obamans’ pyschogeography as revolutionary acts of the downtrodden, I wonder if Obama has even heard of Operation Entebbe:

Operation Entebbe was a counter-terrorism hostage-rescue mission carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on July 4, 1976.[1] A week earlier, on June 27, an Air France plane with 300 passengers was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and flown to Entebbe, near Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Shortly after landing, all non-Jewish passengers were released.
The IDF acted on intelligence provided by Israeli secret agency Mossad. In the wake of the hijacking by members of the militant organizations Revolutionary Cells and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with the hijackers’ threats to kill the hostages if their prisoner release demands were not met, the rescue operation was planned. These plans included preparation of armed resistance from Ugandan military troops.
Led by [a] 30-year-old commander ….. the operation took place under cover of darkness, as Israeli transport planes carried 100 elite commandos over 2,500 miles to Uganda for the rescue operation. The operation, which took a week of planning, lasted 90 minutes and 103 hostages were rescued. Five Israeli commandos were wounded and the only death was of [the] commander… All the hijackers, three hostages and 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed, and 11 Russian-built MiG fighters of Uganda’s air force were destroyed. A fourth hostage was murdered by Ugandan army officers at a nearby hospital.

The dead Israeli commander was Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu whom Obama, Community Organizer in Chief, hosted with open contempt last week. Things change.

Hey Mark,

Just wanted to know your opinion on the fact that UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE IS ABOUT TO BE SIGNED INTO LAW!!!!

- Your nephew, Wormwood

P.S. – Looks like Obama is getting stuff done while the conservatives have been too busy having tea parties.

Nephew,

I emphasize the Party of Death/Party of Life contrast here, but that’s because of Stupak’s role.

Health care will become a government dept. I’m agin it in principle because it’s the very big nose of a humongous camel snuffling into my tent and I’m agin it because I’ve known about a National Health Service all my life. It’s ghastly, costly, murderous and infectious. And smells bad.

In terms of modern history it may be a good thing, as was Obama becoming President a good thing. It crystallizes the issues around big government so that America is confronted with socialism in its face and has to make a choice. Right now the polls and the energy are all on the side of the self-reliant version of your country. Obamacare just heightens the disgust of real America. But who knows, maybe you’ll become like Belgium yet, tho I doubt it.

It’s still strange to me how intelligent young men like you get taken in. I suppose your world view was formed by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and Tina Fey. Eric Cartman is a better role model.

I differ from most conservatives on government health care. My policy is that there shouldn’t be any government health care except for children and front-line military. The rest is one’s own responsibility + one’s family + voluntary charity as opposed to the involuntary charity of you, Ebenezer Whippersnapper Wormwood, saying: “Weird Uncle Mark, you may be a senior devil but I know how to spend your money better than you, so I’ll tax you and give your money to what I say are worthy causes, AIDS in Africa, say, or healthcare for illegal immigrants, AND AND AND on top of that I get to feel good about myself.”

Well apart from me wanting to kill you for being sanctimonious at my expense, it turns out that most people get worse health your way. Human Motivation 101. But that doesn’t matter because you get to feel virtuous.

Finally you want to regulate my life far more than I want to regulate yours. That places a heavy burden of proof on you.

Your Weird Uncle Mark

It’s a few hours before the House votes on Obamacare. All the mood music is that Democrats will muster the 216 votes, probably by inducing defections from Stupak’s small group of anti-abortionists. If by a miracle this disgusting bill fails, let it be remembered what Obama is and why his Presidency failed in its signature legislation: Obama is The Abortion President, the man who wriggled, squirmed and lied to deny ‘healthcare’ to babies who survive abortion.

Re that earthquake in Hawaii:

• It’s true, Hawaii and Haiti both have 2 i’s.
• Obama may have been born in Hawaii, so it seems peculiar that he’d confuse it with a different one of the 57 states, but, look, he hasn’t been back there for nearly 3 months.
• He claims that the great Hawaii Earthquake of 2010 will be covered for federal aid because of the Louisiana Purchase in his Healthcare Bill, but it won’t because that provision is explicitly limited to Louisiana, which makes sense because it was an La. senator’s vote being purchased, not the vote of Senator Papa Doc Duvalier from Hawaii.
• So this isn’t just a lie, it’s a multi-layered, nuanced, Harvard Law School, Potemkin Village, alternate reality, supercallifragilsticexpialidocious, Krakatoa of a lie….an Obaman lie.
• All together now, to the tune of The Star Spangle Banner: “WHAT IF BUSH HAD SAID THIS?”

Obama is useless, as in soup-to-nuts useless and then some. The “and then some” means wrecking America’s alliances and emboldening America’s enemies. Has he no friendships with foreign leaders? Britain? Fuhgeddaboudit, that romance is swimming with the fishes. France? Sarkozy looks down his distinguished nose at Obama’s “virtual” foreign policy to Iran and says so at the UN. “Zut alors! ‘oo eez ze surrender monkey?” (while refusing troops for Afghanistan). Where are the African leaders fêting Obama? Indonesia? Nope. India? China? Nope, nope. Venezuela? Iran? N. Korea? Brazil? Russia? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

People are starting to notice and this piece attracted this comment:

Obama’s problem is that most other world leaders are not empty suits but people of some accomplishments. As these leaders have met and assessed him as of no consequence, in effect agreeing with Bill Clinton that Obama is little more than a coffee boy elected via celebrity syndrome, they have little interest in him and he realizes that he is not of their caliber either. Consequently, once past the pleasantries and the weather, neither has much to say to the other.

And for masochists a comedy classic:

The BBC:

Ok, chaps, you didn’t get us last time around, here’s what you need to work on.

Barack Obama wants the 9/11 ringleader, KSM, tried in a civil court in New York. Now he’s been forced to re-consider the venue, but treating foreign terrorists like constitutionally protected US citizens remains dogma for our Harvard Law School philosopher kings.

So where’s an appropriate venue?

Eureka!

A General Election looms, so naturally the press is full of demeaning stories about politicians (all true). There’s a labyrinthine meme about Gordon Brown as bully. ‘Bullying’ is the new black in un-pc vices, often in the eye of the beholder, and so a deliciously malleable accusation for modern witchfinders. Since the witchfinders are usually Nu-Labour apparatchiks, it’s apt that Brown is on the receiving end of strongly sourced charges that he hits his flunkies and pushes secretaries around. His answer is to go all weepy in a cringeworthy, humanising interview with Piers Morgan. It is sad, but what kind of scumbag uses such personal grief to win votes ? But this reconstruction from Taiwan almost makes me want to vote for him. If he socks Obama between now and May, then I will.

…George Will:

It’s striking to me how the pundits I like best, George Will (Oxford, Princeton) and Charles Krauthammer (Oxford, Harvard), reject Sarah Palin as not smart enough, inexperienced, policy light, whereas another very smart pundit, Mark Steyn, is pretty pro-Palin, like me, while reserving some judgement, like me.

How come?

Well it’s obvious what George and Charles have in common. They’re both dry, cerebral, irreligious, disabused, fluent, efficient in word and thought and I like that. Steyn and Adams are both Marks, they both have curly hair, they’re both playful with words and both educated at English public (ie private) schools. Neither Mark went to university; Steyn was a disc-jockey at 18, Adams took a Classics Exhibition to Cambridge at 16, then changed his mind and hitch hiked off to an improbable future. I postulate that George and Charles simply can’t get past their academic bias in judging Palin, whereas the Marks have a broader band experience of the whole world, especially of self-made achievers, and can sense excellence in Palin for which Oxford/Harvard types have narrow band receptors. That excellence is courage, “the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others” as pointed out by by another English public schoolboy who didn’t go to university.

Comment on Will’s terrific CPAC speech:

And here’s some Steyn:

Governor Palin is not merely…”all-American”, but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I’m not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin’ Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who’s done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of “community organizer” and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.
….
Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol..
….
Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a “hinterland” – a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn’t just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won’t need the usual stage-managed “hunting” trip to reassure gun owners: she’s lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we’re often told it’s easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child?
…
I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

When the history of these times is written, primary sources will get the attention they warrant. Many conservatives view Obama’s background as irrelevant now that the election is over. I don’t, since it should impact the 2010 elections and the willingness of Republicans to do business with him. Moreover his actual and attempted appointments imply that his beliefs haven’t changed:

1 minute version

15 minute version

Long version (I’ll listen in the car), seems interesting:

Manchuria is a historical name given to a vast geographic region in northeast Asia.

Investor’s Business Daily:

…..nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Investment Act has been spent on wind power.…..nearly 80% has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines…..at least China is a real place, as opposed to the phantom ZIP codes and congressional districts in which the administration has claimed to have created jobs….The irony is we leave vast reserves of job-creating domestic oil, coal and natural gas locked up as we sacrifice our economy to the Gaia, the goddess of climate change, something China has wisely refused to do.

Powerline:

If the Obama administration were actually trying to damage our economy, it is not clear that it could do a better job.