For reasons I can not explain, intermittent internet access at the casa tonight.
Star Trek = awesome
Angels and Demons = meh
Four Christmases- As far as the genre goes, good. I mean, it has the guys from Swingers, right.
Hopefully the intertrons will be fixed by tomorrow. I’ve set up qa CBS Sunday Morning thread to go auto if not.
We are affirmative on couch burns and off to bed.
Doing the movie thing tonight- have Angels and Demons and Star Trek, made some pad thai for dinner that was probably the best I have ever made, and am just loving Star Trek. I don’t know how the purists reacted to the remake, but it is a lot of fun.
I love these long weekends when the only time I have to leave the house and possibly run into people is when I walk the dog.
But I have CNN on in the background and I am still seeing breathless commentary about the party crashers at the White House.
People are aware that the only thing that happened in the breach is that they were not officially invited, right? You all are aware out there that they went through intense screening on-site, went through metal detectors and everything else, and there was no chance they had a weapon on them. You are aware that if one of them had, as Peter King suggested, “grabbed a knife off a table” and lunged for POTUS, they would have been tackled by any one of the thousands of security personnel there. You are aware that they were through far more security screening than it takes to get on an airplane, and tons more than any of the hundreds of thousands of people who shook hands with Obama the last year on rope lines?
In short, you are aware that the only thing that was missing was their name on an official invite list, and it is looking like they were helped out by an Indian dignitary.
Stop acting like Osama bin Laden crashed the damned dinner with a MOAB under his trenchcoat. If this gets the Secret Service more money and resources, great, but no one was in danger and this is really just silly.
Obviously, I don’t buy the idea that when giants like Bill Buckley roamed the earth, conservatism was teh awesome, but Kathleen Parker digs up a quote from Russell Kirk that is very interesting in light of today’s purity tests and party purges:
In fact, the 10-point checklist proffered by Bopp and others is the antithesis of conservatism. As Kirk wrote in his own “Ten Conservative Principles,” conservatism “possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata . . . conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”
Each of Bopp’s bullets is so overly broad and general that no thoughtful person could endorse it in good conscience. Some are so simplistic as to be meaningless. As just one example: “We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges.” What does that mean? Do we support all troop surges no matter what other considerations might be taken into account? Do we take nothing else into account? Does disagreement mean one doesn’t support victory?
Whatever the intent of the authors, the message is clear: Thinking people need not apply.
What’s interesting to me is that today, even self-styled intellectual conservatives claim that David Hume and Edmund Burke offer specific policy proposals. I guess the truth is that anything can be dumbed down to a list of bullet points if you try hard enough.
In fairness, it’s not just Republicans hanging up a sign that says “thinking people need not apply.” When Obama is compared to Spock for insisting on the use of reason in decision-making and told to just make a fast decision, even it’s wrong, on Iraq Afghanistan, the media has that sign up too.
It’s hard not to see this as a sickness that may eventually destroy our society.
This (via Robert Harding) ought to have New York State Dems quaking in their boots:
Emil Henry, Jr., a former assistant Treasury secretary under George W. Bush and executive at Lehman Brothers, has been in discussions with state Republican officials about the possibility of running for governor next year, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
Ed Cox, the state Republican chairman, has courted Henry intensively in recent weeks, hoping to recruit a wealthy and well-connected candidate…
[.....]
....when Henry left the Treasury department in 2007 after two years on the job, Paulson issued a statement thanking him for “reducing the regulatory burden on our nation’s financial institutions, and spearheading our efforts for preparation in the event of a financial crisis.”
I’m probably less of a banksta hater than most, but this strikes me as beyond stupid. Not just because he would have no chance of winning, but because he’d almost certainly get teabagged. A party split is the last thing NYS Republican can afford right now. If they’re smart, they’ll put some Doug Hoffman-type loon at the top of the state Republican ticket in 2010 to fire up the base and help with down-ticket races.
No access to my home computer today, so two photos by me. Regular photo blogging will start again on Monday.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.
If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.
Could be a long, long day tomorrow for Steeler nation:
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who sustained his fourth concussion in four years last Sunday, will miss this week’s game against the Baltimore Ravens, FoxSports.com has reported.That leaves the Steelers with Dennis Dixon as their starting quarterback.
Dixon, the third-string option before Charlie Batch broke his left wrist when he came in against Kansas City, has appeared in one game in his two NFL seasons, completing one pass.
Ugh.
I’ve read this article twice, and I simply do not understand the relationship between debtor nations and the real estate speculators at Dubai. Anyone want to fill me in?
I’m hard-pressed to disagree with a whole lot of this Kathleen Parker piece.
I’m actually kind of shocked Fred Hiatt let it through.
Let the eagle soar (obligatory link):
SHARLET: [The] new (Ugandana) legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.
And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study and the export of a lot of American largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end.
[....]
SHARLET: [The] legislator that introduces the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of the Family. He appears to be a core member of the Family. He works, he organizes their Uganda National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which the Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda…
Looking at the the Family’s 990s [IRS records], where they’re moving their money to – into this African leadership academy called Cornerstone, which runs two programs: Youth Corps, which [it] has described in the past as an international “invisible family binding together world leaders” and also, an alumni organization designed to place Cornerstone grads – graduates of this sort of very elite educational program and politics and NGO’s through something called the African Youth Leadership Forum, which is run by – according to Ugandan media – which is run by David Bahat…
I don’t want to tar all teabaggers with this brush, but I think it’s fair to say that Malkin and her ilk are partly responsible for this kind of behavior (via Steve Benen):
A group called the Chicago Tea Party Patriots publicly heckled a grieving family and suggested that the couple fabricated their tragic story.
At a town hall held by Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) on Nov. 14,, Dan and Midge Hough spoke about how they believed the death of their daughter-in-law and her unborn child were caused, in part, by a lack of health insurance. Twenty-four-year old Jennifer was uninsured. According to her in-laws, she was not receiving regular prenatal care and was not properly treated when she got sick. She ended up in an emergency room with double pneumonia that developed into septic shock, had a heart attack, a brain bleed and a stroke. The baby died and Jennifer died a few weeks later.
Midge Hough was heckled by anti-reform crowd members. “You can laugh at me, that’s okay,” she said, crying. “But I lost two people, and I know you think that’s funny, that’s okay.”
Update. It is a little surprising that the wingers weren’t more sympathetic, given that one of the people who died was unborn. I thought the lives of the unborn counted for something with these people.
Some days I’ve about had it with this country. The absurd over-reaction to the WH dinner crashers was way too much the last few days, but I just saw a ten minute piece on CNN that treated this like it was an enormous deal, and I can’t take much more of this kind of idiocy.
In a sane society, the reaction to this sort of thing would be for people to say to themselves “Wow, the cheeky bastards” and move on with life while the Secret Service quietly performed an internal investigation. But we are not a sane society, and instead have national leaders like this gaping jackhole:
Some lawmakers are calling for a Congressional investigation. Although the couple did go through a magnometer, “They could have had anthrax on them,” said Peter King, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. “They could have grabbed a knife from the dining room table.”
Or they could have had a suitcase nuke made out to look like a great ass in a red dress. Or they could have been carrying vials of cyanide and poured it into the drink of every ranking government official. Or they could have kidnapped the Obama kids and held the President ransom to release everyone at Gitmo.
But they didn’t now, did they? They sneaked in, got away with some free eats and a few drinks, and went on their merry way. So grow up. Grabbed a knife from the dinner table- that is too stupid for even an Austin Powers movie. Christ.
And it bears repeating- that is ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee leading the pantswetting brigade. The next time you have to take your shoes off at the airport or throw out your 6 ounce container of hand creme, you can thank jackasses like him.
Unserious person and DFH James Fallow is being all sorts of unvillagelike and calling you out, Chuck Todd:
Seriously, when does an official part of the chattering class—one of the weekend talkers, someone from the leading newspapers—look back on these past two weeks in journalism’s effort to represent reality and ask how the dominant narrative could have been so wrong, and wrong in a way that was easily noticeable at the time? Just curious. The guiding motto for the inquiry should be the deathless subhead on Tish Durkin’s article: “Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese people managed a clearer view of Obama’s visit than the US media did.”
Any comments from the bobbleheads? Chuck Todd? Mr. Gregory? Georgie? Anyone?
By request.
BTW- I think I want to mull some cider tomorrow. Any tips or suggestions or advice?
