Monthly Archives: September 2011

Rick Perry: Still Not Quite Ready For Prime Time

Featured image A long-time reader writes: Prompted by a request from John, I thought I would offer my impressions of the Fox/Google Republican presidential debate. First, let’s declare a winner in pure debate terms, without regard to standing in the polls and likelihood of electoral success. For me, that winner is Herman Cain. While I can’t vouch for its accuracy, Cain’s explanation of why he likely would not have survived his bout »

Unfortunately, Not A Photoshop

Featured image This morning, Steve posted and commented on this bizarre photo, in which Barack Obama seems to experience a sort of Tourette’s moment, blocking out another world leader in a group photo. It was originally suspected of being a photoshop because of Obama’s bizarre conduct and affect, but it turned out to be genuine: What chief executive was erased from the photo by Obama’s upraised palm? I don’t know, but Michael »

No CLASS

Featured image If you don’t know what the CLASS Act is, you are not alone. CLASS stands for the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act. It was enacted as part of Obamacare, but, given all of the other issues on which attention was focused at that time, little was said about CLASS. It has been described as “an optional, government-backed, long-term care insurance program that would pay a daily or monthly »

Can A Public Person Be Libeled?

Featured image In the United States, I would generally say No. With respect to defamation, under American law, it is essentially open season on public figures, especially politicians. But Joe McGinniss may have provided us with the acid test, in the form of an email he wrote to an anti-Palin activist in Alaska in January of this year. We wrote here about the absurd and even contradictory claims about Sarah Palin that »

The President’s New Spending Plan, By the Numbers

Featured image The Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee has put together a simple summary of the President’s most recent spending plan. Recall the claims that Obama made for his proposal: I’m proposing real, serious cuts in spending… All told, this plan cuts $2 in spending for every dollar in new revenues. Hardly. This is what the Budget Committee finds: $1.4 trillion ……………………………. Actual deficit reduction through 10 years under the »

From Enron to Solyndra

Featured image One of our more constructive critical commenters posed a challenge on my short Solyndra post on Tuesday, namely, did you folks get this worked up about Enron’s collapse? Short answer: Yes we did.  Longer answer: Starting before it collapsed in fact, and for much the same reason—its seduction into the politicized world of crony capitalism.  Enron’s collapse bears some striking similarities to Solyndra, namely, a business model that increasingly depended »

More Math Jokes

Featured image Well since we’re doing math jokes, how about this one Glenn Reynolds spotted on Facebook: “Obama is great at math. He divides the country, subtracts jobs, adds debt and multiplies misery.” That’s when he’s not revealing his massive egotism and insecurity, as in the now infamous photo from yesterday.  I was sure this was photoshopped when I saw it, but it turns out to be genuine. »

Joke of the Day

Featured image One of my brothers posted this joke on another web site. It exemplifies Zeno’s Paradox, among other things: An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one tells the bartender he wants a beer. The second one says he wants half a beer. The third one says he wants a fourth of a beer. The bartender puts two beers on the bar and says, “You guys need »

Fact vs. Opinion: Does the Washington Post Know the Difference?

Featured image Last night I wrote a post called Who Checks the Fact-Checkers? The subject of the post was Glenn Kessler, who writes a regular feature for the Washington Post called The Fact Checker. Specifically, Kessler did a post about a statement on the Middle East by Rick Perry. Kessler derided Perry’s comments as those of a “newbie,” said that Perry was “stuck in a time warp,” and concluded, citing anonymous liberals »

Hypocrisy–That’s Why We Miss Good Ol’ Bill

Featured image So I see the annual Clinton International Chick-Pickup Forum Clinton Global Initiative opened today in New York, and Clinton dispelled much of the nostalgia some conservatives were having for a tax-cutting, budget-balancing, free-trading (all under GOP duress, I understand) Democratic president, who compares very favorably to the one we’ve got now.  We’ve all forgotten what a first class hypocrite he is.  Clinton went off on Republicans on climate change, and »

Ron Paul yuks it up

Featured image Last month in “Cruel thoughts on a weak field,” I wrote of Ron Paul: “Can we trade this guy to the Democrats for a player to be named later? He would make a great consultant to Dennis Kucinich on foreign policy.” Paul appears to be thinking along the same lines. Today the Hill reports that Paul appeared at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Paul said at the »

President Zero

Featured image This new campaign video by Rick Perry is very, very good. It sets, I think, a new technical and aesthetic standard that other campaigns (most of all President Obama’s) will have to try to match: »

Poppering the Bubble

Featured image A reader out there in Power Line land (I forget who right now—was it you RH?) e-mailed after a recent post of mine to recommend Richard Cockett’s book Thinking the Unthinkable, which sounds like another book about nuclear weapons during the Cold War (easy to do, since the great Herman Kahn did in fact have a book by this same title about that subject), but in fact is about the »

Another perfect story

Featured image A long-time reader writes: Last week, Steve Hayward thought he had found “The Perfect Story” in the attorney at the New York State Attorney General’s office who moonlighted as a dominatrix. It’s difficult to improve on perfection, but I think I can. Consider the tale, told by Ron Suskind, of the alleged mistreatment of top female advisers in the Obama administration. It seems that the liberal culture of victimization and »

Oh Canada!

Featured image How can it be that after all these years of making fun of Canada for all of the right reasons (its anti-Americanism, its social democratic welfare state, its ludicrous Steyn-hunting “human rights” commissions, its export of Michael J. Fox and William Shatner, etc.), it can now be held up as a superior model to Obama’s America?  Everyone knows the joke about the world’s most boring headline competition being won by »

Debunking the Palestinian lie

Featured image Our friends at Encounter Books have produced the timely video below, related to Encounter’s new Broadside pamphlet by Sol Stern, A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred. The publisher explains: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has launched an international campaign to achieve recognition by the United Nations for an independent Palestinian state. Abbas and his international supporters claim that only Israel (with the United States) stands in the way of »

Uncommon Knowledge with Milton Friedman

Featured image This week Uncommon Knowledge brings us a blast from the past. A golden oldie. Host Peter Robinson rides in on a motorcycle to kick off the installment. Over at Ricochet, Peter commented when this episode ran last year: He may have been gone for [five] years now, but Milton Friedman, the Hoover Institution website display indicates, remains one of the most popular interview subjects ever to appear on Uncommon Knowledge. »