Friday, August 29, 2008

What they're saying...



AP: Palin would be 'fragile' president
MADISON, Wis. - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would make a "pretty fragile" president, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton said Friday as politicians trotted out their talking points on Republican presidential hopeful John McCain's surprise vice presidential pick.


- Then WHY are most conservative bloggers ecstatic? I dont think these people understand exactly how Palin got where she is.

That Includes O'Reilly just now on his show... he thinks she's lightweight. He hasnt watched this clip of her on US Energy Policy, including criticizing Dubya for his plea to Saudi's to increase production:


But then O'Reilly notes this:
Under Breaking News banner on MSNBC: "How many houses does Palin add to the McCain ticket?" Seriously.. video

From OpenLeft

She's appealing and well spoken on TV but she said several times this year it was unlikely she'd be picked as VP... maybe because she knows she's not capable? But she's ambitious and competitive so what the hell why not.

How is she going to campaign full time with a baby? Is that any way to treat your child? Can she handle the VP duties and also raise a baby, a 7 year old, and a 13 year old?

My friends, please welcome the Mayor of Wasilla and her eskimo First Gentleman.

- -- - - -

A Kos Kid says Palin not only wants to outlaw abortion
, she belongs to a SECRET SOCIETY that wants to outlaw CONTRACEPTION!!!
- I expect he doesnt think anyone will actually READ the link he provides.
- - -- - - -
Oh, hell... it's too much to keep up with, just check out this google search and wonder if they can spell it "Miss Ogeny"

On Craigslist
Sarah Palin swimsuit

got a be a pic out there somewhere. Will the religious hardliners vote for a woman that was in a swimsuit competition?

Their counterpart taliban wouldn't.

Whooaaaa! First REAL Palin 'scandal'?



On kos:
Palin's faked "pregnancy"? Covering for teen daughter?

Supposedly David Sirota reported it on the Thom Hartmann show. Trying to find some sort of transcript for that.

UPDATE: I just asked David Sirota, in his own diary, whether there was anything to this. He says he never mentioned this to Thom Hartman. Knew nothing about it! Whoa!

Apparently her teenage daughter was out of school, unseen, for months, because she "had mono".

I'm not quite sure what to think of this. Seeing as how she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest maybe she's actually not a hypocrite.

Normally I'd say this is a totally private issue for them, but seeing as how she's quite willing to butt into the private lives of every other American woman, I think it's fair game.

UPDATE:

Okay, 11 comments in and already some people are crying out to delete this. So I'm adding a poll:

Well, That's somewhat refreshing, coming from kos. But the PREMISE presented is a little troubling.
- - - - -- - - - - -- - - - - - - - -
UPDATE: On Palin's 'Troopergate' investigation as noted in the post below, FloppingAces has the skinny
- Between choices of "Something or Nothing", looks like Nothing.
Bottom line - Palin fired a guy she appointed. Where's the beef? Actually she didnt even fire him; she said he wasnt doing well in that role, wanted to move him to one he was expert in and he declined.
McCain Rolls the Dice with Palin

Gotta admit ... he's still the Maverick.

She has not much more executive experience than anyone else on these tickets. And the pundits are saying that it's a mistake because Biden, in face to face will tear her apart. That remains to be seen; what does McCain know that we don't? I bet she will surprise.

Her baggage is that she's conservative. But that's her strong point too. Ted Stevens and other corrupt GOP Rep are also baggage, but she ran for Gov and won on a 'throw the bums out' platform.

The scandal to uncover.. she's quarreling with the chief law enforcement officer in Alaska about his failure to fire his relative on the AHP. It may be uncovered as a personal vendetta as her sister was involved. Or not.

UPDATE: Time: Dems go after Palin

They'd better watch out... she's no Dan Quayle... or even Geraldine Ferraro. For some reason some Dems say Ferraro was a disaster. I dont recall it that way. I liked her then, I still like her and thought she was the strong suit of that ticket.

Additional points: Palin dismissed her security detail, sold the 'Governor's airplane'. Fought the Oil companies' pipeline plan. Fought the state GOP on several 'old boy' fronts.

But ThinkProgress triangulates on the Brother in Law situation.

So.... if her staff HADNT pushed to fire the guy... it would have also been seen as 'insider corruption', right?

Oh.... you think she will hesitate for one minute to throw Ted Stevens in front of the bus and back over him, herself?

Typical Lefties; grasp at any straw... let's hope they keep doing that.

And.. sigh.. she was FOR taxing 'windfall Oil Co profits'??!! So much for her being in 'Big Oil' pockets. {Sarah.. there's NO SUCH thing as a 'Corporate Tax'!!!!}

Talkleft's Big Tent Democrat is impressed and thinks Obama had better tread lightly

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Penn & Teller: World Peace!



In which the "Bullshit!" artists cut away the drivel and drive a stake in the heart of partisanship.. in their own inimitable way!
Linking to the LGF three part embed from Youtube. Dont worry, there's no editorial comment there. It's here:

Got that, you morons?

No subsidies, no tariffs. No tax breaks to 'even things out'. No long lasting sanctions or embargoes... no matter WHO or WHY or how much money their expats piss into your campaign slush funds.
No Diplomatic Immunity for two bit chiselers from half-horse petty fiefdoms. They embezzle from the UN, they go to jail. They rape and pillage the people they're supposed to keep safe, they get turned over to the victims' families in the middle of the night.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Farting Contests can be fun......



But, sooner or later, someone drops a turd and spoils it.

Thus, I've at least temporarily shut down political commenting on a soccer site forum I mod and invited an eclectic group of people from there to post and comment on here.

I have no idea if they will and I have no idea what they're gonna say. Judging from the first couple guys {howdy Paineist and Indigo} who accepted i probably wont agree with 'em all the time, either. But it'll be fun trading the harangues, anyway.

Maybe I'll at least get the blog-ometer back up to ten a day or so.
An open blog for comments on whatever.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Carnival of Cretins



Well, kids.. today we have a surplus of idiocies to share:

Juan Cole repeats Ahmadinejad's ridiculous claim that the US planned to kidnap or assassinate him on his recent trip to Baghdad.

Even Cole's commenters found that to be just a little too far out.

Pat Buchanan claims the Holocaust was preventable.

If Britain had only not guaranteed Poland's safety, of course. Because then there would have been no larger war. Never mind he had started terrorizing Jews from the outset.

Finally Rep Hinchey retracted what he said here:

Link: sevenload.com



- sorry, I dont buy the retraction. First Maxine Waters threatened it, now Hinchey. When under stress you say what you really mean. I do, dont you?

Monday, June 16, 2008

Ross Perot is Back!



Thanks to 'fulhamag' on the FulhamUSA non-soccer subforums, we get to see this little gem of a PowerPoint presentation on the state of our country's economy and dire warnings on the future, if something is not done about curbing entitlement legislation.

Suicidal Spending

- Perot's foreword is here: Perotcharts{dot}com

Watch the entire thing... and please think about what you are seeing there, before you grab onto a single kernel of truth. Consider it in its entirety; The truth is not always able to slap you in the face.
I fully expect some to use that presentation selectively as fodder for their views on particular administrations, but the presentations do not reflect the true states of the economies, should changes not have been enacted.

Example: The late nineties budget surpluses.

This has been used to show that the Clinton Administration with the Republican fiscal conservative congress produced what we all want. True.. and False. Dont forget that a large part of the economy at that point in time was based on speculative gross product...i.e; the Internet Boom which fueled huge growth in the IT and Commercial Real Estate sectors. In the end much of the 'Product' was vaporware, much of the taxable income based on jobs which were a result of that boom.


The conclusions I draw are simple:

1. We cannot tax ourselves out of deficit. It LOOKS like we could if you accept one or two charts at face value, but the entirety of the piece shows otherwise.

2. The proposals for a National Health plan must be very carefully considered in the light of what we can see as a result of current limited programs.

In a practical sense, attempts to curb mandatory Health and Retirement spending growth suffer the inevitable backlash from the 'entitled', who object to any change which might reduce their expected standards of support.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

A Milestone Reached



On this father's day, my son and I went to my wife's store to pick her up for lunch. Not finding her, I went to the service desk and had her paged. She didn't respond.

A few minutes later the girl at the desk went on break and saw my wife in the employee lounge.

"There was a gentleman looking for you to take you to lunch."

"Oh, what did he look like?"

"He was a fairly tall elderly man..."

The wife just couldn't wait to tell me about that.

Added:
I should also have noted that the same kid ALSO gave me my own Domain name.. thus this blogspot based rant-fest also appears on 'Pettyfoggery{dot}com'.

In the future, I'll probably use the Wordpress module he installed as well, but for now the blogger edition is reflected on the site.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Oil: How long till the Europeans get smart..



Gasoline at $4 a gallon? If only.

As prices across America hit an average $4 a gallon over the weekend, European motorists, truckers and economic planners wrestled with fuel costs around twice as high, blamed not only on the soaring price of oil but also high government taxes levied at the fuel pump.

That has made few people happy. In the latest show of distress, Spanish truckers Monday began a blockade of their country’s border with France, lining up their rigs in a crawling strike to protest the cost of diesel. In France, farmers on their tractors did the same, offering a foretaste of a planned national strike by truckers next Monday.



- from BarcePundit, which adds:

Anyway, those guys should be protesting at the Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, UAE embassies, and not create a mess for everybody, not turning the whole country upside down in the hope thatt he government gives them some subsidies. Why don't they raise their prices, as we all do when our costs raise? Yes, it would hurt the consumer eventually, since the increase would pass along the chain, but it would allow us to either clench our teeth and pony up, or change our habits. Neither of the two possibilities sounds as holding the whole country hostage, does it?
Not very helpful, I'm afraid. Some estimates are that the top thirty percent of the market price per barrel is speculative.

If the Europeans paid attention, they'd recall those taxes were always there and it's not going to help by shifting net tax revenues over to some other economic sector in order to subsidize transportation fuel costs

What they SHOULD be looking at is the failure of the US to address its part in easing the speculation.

Things like this: Fortune: The politics of oil shale

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- You'd think this would be oil shale's moment.

You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale - a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen - into light crude oil.

You'd think all of this, but you'd be wrong.

Last month, the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Committee voted 15-14 to kill a bill that would have ended a one-year moratorium on enacting rules for oil shale development on federal lands (which is where the best oil shale is located). Most maddening of all - at least to someone like myself not steeped in the wacky ways of Washington - the swing vote on the appropriations committee, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., voted with the majority even though she actually opposes the moratorium.

"Sen. Salazar asked me to vote no. I did so at his request," Landrieu told The Rocky Mountain News. A Landrieu staffer contacted by Fortune doesn't dispute this, but notes that Landrieu did propose a compromise which Republicans rejected.
That's good.. blame it on Republicans, without defining WHY they might have rejected it. But that's beside the point... Republicans have shown to not be averse to having their pockets lined with special interest money.
As long as that money doesnt come from ' big oil' which is the 'antichrist'.

For Colorado's Senators, it's easier to figure out WHY they balk.. even if that goes against their state's overall economic interest. Again, follow the money.. not far.. just to Aspen and Boulder.

It's no secret, just under-remarked that Colorado has turned blue politically in the last twenty years and much of that is due to an exodus from California of various blends of the rich liberal leisure class. Oregon doesnt want them anymore and said so at the end of the eighties.

So they move to the next best. In the process, giving credence to a view that Aspen is the center of liberal interests in Colorado and the University of Colorado is their center of 'informed thought'. Which resulted, of course, in such as Ward Churchill.

Ah, but back to oil... The interview does touch on the nut of the issue:
Quote:
Fortune: Has oil shale development always been a partisan issue or is this something new?

Sen. Allard: It is something new. The issue with the Democrats now is they want to cut off any source of carbon. And there are those in the Senate who believe the more expensive you make gasoline, the less driving people do and you force conservation by making driving so expensive people can't afford it.


Well.. the rich will always be able to afford to drive, whatever the price. We arent talking about the guys who live in Aspen.. or in Boulder, either.

We're talking about Joe Sixpack, who works in construction or in factories, or has his own service business. What galls the liberals is that Joe barely made it out of high school and yet has the temerity to own 2.5 cars, a motorcycle, and a boat which he uses to go waterskiing a couple weekends and one week a year.

In any JUST society, Joe would have a delivery truck, used only for business, maybe a motorcycle but a bike would would be better, and all else would ride public transit. His watersports would consist of a picnic on the riverbank and riding the ferry.

While those who invested tens thousands in their academic liberal arts education would have their salaries adjusted appropriately and they would have the toys of leisure. As befitting their learnedness and ability to expound on all things philosophical.

And if we actually started drilling in all the known fields in the US, the bottom would drop out of oil futures, and the powers that be would actually have to raise taxes to keep fuel prices up. Thus be transparent.

For now, they are content to go on pocketing cash from the leisure liberals while paying lip service to green groups.

If only we could figure a way to siphon a percentage of oil revenue from these new fields directly into the politicians bank accounts, the problem would be solved.


hat tip to InstaPundit, twice.

UPDATE:
Well, Look at this... via ProteinWisdom...According to the Guardian the highly educated and informed people at the World Bank have come to the same conclusion I, using only common sense, came to years ago.
Does that make me smart? No... it makes the case for stepping back and thinking about what you are really doing.

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Noam Chomsky





Living proof you don't actually NEED ten thousand monkeys at typewriters. Just one trained as a 'semanticist' will do.
- pettyfog

That's a 'copyright' statement for me, on that. I haven't read that anywhere alse, anyway

What brought it to mind was I just read Charon QC's Blawg Review where he says he found Chomsky's video lecture on the US election system 'fascinating'.

Is that some gentle irony poke at 'quasi-intellectual gibberish'? Dunno.. I've never totally mastered British wit.