Conor Dwyer Helps Phelps Gain 19th Medal

Conor Dwyer was a classmate of my daughter Niki at Faith Hope Charity School in Winnetka back in the early '90s. I remember chatting with Conor's winsome mom Jeannie who had been a swimming champion at Florida State before getting married and still looking very young and sportive.

Niki and I sat and watched the very late re-run of the swim put on the tube almost a dozen hours after the fact by the sleaze-bags at NBC. Niki's fondest memory of Faith Hope was of Jimmy Murphy, whose uncle O'Donnell had played Robin to Batman in one of the early versions of the epic. Jimmy was smitten by Niki and promised her a ride in the Batmobile.

At least Conor will be able to show off a gold medal that he truly earned, even though Phelps and Conor's training partner at UF Ryan Lochte did help a bit...!

John Deuss: Bete Noir Brought to Heel

Amoco was among the companies that had to take this fraud into account when starting up its Caspian Pipeline in the mid-90s. He's been convicted of "carousel fraud" & banking without a license. The book The Oil and The Glory by Steve LaVine goes into detail about this con man's audacious style with Kazakhstan.

Europe Squelches New Entrepreneurs by Red Tape

The Economist has an article describing Europe's stagnation, in other words the United States in twenty years if Obama is elected.

Data show that continental Europe has a problem with creating new businesses destined for growth. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which compiles comparable data across countries, in 2010 “early-stage” entrepreneurs made up just 2.3% of Italy’s adult population, 4.2% of Germany’s, and 5.8% of France’s. European countries are below—in many cases well below—America’s 7.6%, let alone China’s 14% and Brazil’s 17%.

Few in number, European entrepreneurs are also gloomy about their prospects. A study by Ernst & Young, an accounting firm, showed last year that German, Italian and French entrepreneurs were far less confident about their country as a place for start-ups than those in America, Canada or Brazil. Very few French entrepreneurs said their country provided the best environment; 60% of Brazilians, 42% of Japanese and 70% of Canadians thought there was no place as good as home. Asked which cities have the best chance of producing the next Microsoft or Google, Ernst & Young’s businesspeople plumped for Shanghai, San Francisco and Mumbai (though, to be fair, London got a look in too).

The article goes on to describe the European economy as terminally on a downhill run since the two Great World Wars in the early part of the century destroyed their morale vis-a-vis industry. Of course, the same didn't happen to Japan, less prone to Gramscian backwardness in succumbing to the prevailing Weltanshaung of decadent low morale. And evidence of Europe's sclerotic business environment abounds:

Many aspiring entrepreneurs simply leave. There are about 50,000 Germans in Silicon Valley, and an estimated 500 start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area with French founders. One of the things they find there is a freedom to fail. If your firm goes under in France, says Dan Serfaty, the French founder of Viadeo, a fast-growing business-networking website, you don’t get a second chance.

"If at first you don't succeed....." in Europe, you might as well get out of Dodge & head for San Francisco!

Holland MIch Hot Dog Stand Shut Down

Reason has a piece registering righteous indignation over what Shakespeare in Hamlet's soliloquy called "the insolence of office."

This summer, 13-year-old Nathan Duszynski wanted to make some money to help out his disabled parents—his mom has epilepsy and his dad has multiple sclerosis. So he decided to open a hot dog stand. He saved $1,200, mostly money made by mowing lawns and shoveling snow. He checked with the city to make sure he didn't need any licenses or permits, even going to city hall in person with his mom. And then he bought a cart. (Yep, that's hot dog's from Nathan's, for those who are keeping score at home.)

He arrived to set up shop on his first day and 10 minutes later, a zoning official arrived to shut him down. The problem: The cart, which is in the parking lot of a sporting goods store, is on the edge of official downtown commercial district of Holland, Michigan. The city bans food carts in that area in order to minimize competition for the eight tax-paying restaurants a couple of blocks away.

If Nathan had been Dutch instead of Jewish, he might have got more sympathy. Apropos of nothing, I dated a black girl from Holland way back in the last century when I was studying at Ann Arbor. Anyway, Nathan's sorta thrown in the towel & the sponge.

The city says it is willing to work with Nathan, but keeping food carts out of the small, walkable downtown area is pretty much the same thing as banning food carts altogether. Nathan and his family obviously know that: The hot dog cart is now for sale.

Here's nice YouTube piece on the whole situation. Nathan looks like he'd make a fine libertarian...!

How MSNBC & NBC & Letterman Snookered Red Into Blue

Mark Helperin explains how suddenly the Red of Red China & the Blue of True Blue Conservatism morphed into their opposites almost overnight.

The nation appears more and more able to eat whatever words are shoved down its throat. It is told, and does not protest, that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is indeed a religion of peace, but it is also, quite demonstratively and throughout the world in proof after proof day after day, a religion of war.

As the president travels about, yelling at America and dividing the population into good people and bad people (the bad ones being, purely by coincidence, those who don't vote for him), he has adopted an extraordinary war cry that might make both Huey Long and Spiro Agnew smile in their graves: Millionaires and billionaires. Income or net worth, he doesn't say, the idea being to grab a billionaire, turn him upside down, and shake money out of him. But in the president's logic, this includes, for example, a couple earning $125,000 apiece. The trick is that you can indeed get a lot of money out of such people if you call them billionaires and turn enough of them upside down.

Perhaps the most brazen language diktat has been the mischievous switch of political colors. Stalin would hardly believe it, but blue now supposedly signifies the left and red the right. According to Wikipedia and the Washington Post, so it must be true, the change came in 2000 courtesy of MSNBC and NBC's "Today" show. It next migrated to David Letterman at CBS, and then went bacterial. The spirit of the change is reminiscent of the cable TV directory that read, "The World's Best Ho . . ." when space was clearly available for "tels." One can imagine the high-pitched giggling at this naughtiness. Saddling your political rivals with a symbol to which they have been historically opposed is an even better and naughtier joke. Either it was that or numbing cluelessness.

John Cardinal Newman was among those philosopher/philologists [along with Nietszche] who affirmed that the first sign of the decadence of a nation turning into absolute decomposition is the decline of language and grammar. Nowadays every single idiot on the left says "between you and I" and "I was laying down" to the extent that most young people don't know the correct grammar.... Object of a preposition and the correct past tense are now meaningless.

This is Gramsci at work. As the old socialist presidential candidate used to say, "The USA will awaken one day to find itself a socialist country without the name ever being used in political discourse."

Jon Stewart Rips Brian Ross For Aurora Shooting Tea Party Gaffe (VIDEO)

Jon Stewart rips Brian Ross [as I did previously on my blog] for not apologizing. "Correcting" a mistake is one thing. Not apologizing when the "mistake" is an accusation of being a mass murderer is unconscionable. Yes, the time to debate gun control is right after the mourning period ends, about two-three days. But those calling for gun control clearly have lost the national dialogue over the last twenty years, when support for gun control of a strict sort has diminished from almost 70% to around 40%. That's a pretty steep nose dive and NOT due to the so-called nefarious NRA. It's due to the lousy arguments of the pro-control advocates in a society where ILLEGAL guns number over a million and are often in the hands of people inclined to break the laws of the land.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Stop Wondering Why There Were Young Children At The Aurora Theater

Yes, your point about the onset of schizophrenia in the very-late teens or early twenties was made on The Today Show this morning by a clinical psychiatrist. Holmes apparent bizarre behavior in court might be due to his coming down from the opiates he ingested before the massacre or merely lack of sleep. However, schizophrenia presents in many ways as I discovered working in a French hospital in my past.
About Gun Control
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

CNBC Shows Colors by Advancing OWS BS....

Here is a CNBC article on how the top 1% are losing a lot more money than the rest of us, proportionately. Here is James Taranto's little tidbit on how the article was corrected from its silly and way-off-base first draft:

"CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the top one percent earners' share of the country's total income as 26.7 in 2007 and 22.3 in 2009. In fact, the One Percent made 16.7 of the national income in 2007 and 11.5 in 2009."--CNBC.com, July 20

Caught CNBC & its parent network in a little OWS boosting hyperbole.

A Beast [Diller] Takes Over the Daily Beast

Barry Diller has taken over the Harman 50% of the Newsweek Corp. In 2007, Newsweek veered sharply left with some whack-job Editors like a guy named Meacham et al. Here's what happened:

Sidney Harman acquired Newsweek from the Washington Post Co in August 2010 for $1 plus the assumption of the magazine's more than $50 million in liabilities. The then-91 year-old Harman, who made his fortune as the founder of audio equipment giant Harman International Industries, viewed owning Newsweek, which had gone from earning $30 million in 2007 to losing the same amount just two years later, as more of a philanthropic effort than an actual business endeavor.

Of course, the print business was heading downward, but Newsweek had the worst lineup of duds in living memory. Newsweek went the farthest left the fastest and it's prayers were answered.

POLITICO reports on TWO ABC lies about Holmes...including that he was member of CO Tea Party!!!

Holmes' mother is denying ABC's lie

that it had identified the correct James Holmes because his mother "told ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, saying, 'You have the right person.'"

Just to show the reader the sloppiness of the left-wing libtard networks and their haste to seek out bad news about suspected GOP supporters who use violent methods to advance their agenda, ala Chairman Mao and slayers of half-a-100million Soviet citizens, the memorable Yusuf Vissarionivich Djugashvili, slime balls at ABC had phoned the mother and then asked her if she were the mother of James Holmes. According to the family attorney:

"This statement is to clarify a statement made by ABC media. I was awakened by a call from a reporter by ABC on July 20 about 5:45 in the morning. I did not know anything about a shooting in Aurora at that time," Holmes said in a statement this afternoon, read to the national press by attorney Lisa Damiani. "He asked if I was Arlene Holmes and if my son was James Holmes who lives in Aurora, Colorado. I answered yes, you have the right person. I was referring to myself."
"I asked him to tell me why he was calling and he told me about a shooting in Aurora," she continues. "He asked for a comment. I told him I could not comment because I did not know if the person he was talking about was my son, and I would need to find out."

ABC First-Class Retard Dianovich Sawyer, who famously remarked on-air that Occupy Wall Street had organizations active in "over 1000 countries," making the average literate individual giggle. [Note: There are very few literate people among the libtard left.] It appears only 187 of those "over 1000 countries" have membership in the United Nations, refuge of exotic postage stamp mini-states.

Which leads to the next ABC muck-up. Did moron-in-chief investigator Brian Ross ever try getting his phone crew to pull up the Occupy Wall Street hippie/love-drug/radicals online?

Methinks the thought never crossed Brian's left-tilted mind.

Solutrean & Other Europeans "First Americans" along with traditional "Indians?"

Ten Years Ago the BBC had an intriguing article demonstrating almost beyond a reasonable doubt that Solutreans and other Europeans were among the first immigrants to North America:

If the Solutreans had the Clovis point it would have made a formidable harpoon weapon to ensure a food supply. Would modern Eskimo ever consider a five thousand kilometre journey across the Atlantic?

The answer it seems is yes - they have undertaken similar journeys many times.. Most encouraging was the realisation that Inuit people today rely on traditional boat building techniques. 'Unbreakable' plastic breaks in the unceasing cold temperatures whereas boats of wood, sealskin and whale oil are resilient and easily maintained. The same materials would have been available to Solutrean boat builders. Even if the Stone Age Europeans could make those boats, would it survive an Atlantic crossing?

Stanford believes the boats' flimsiness is deceptive. With the Atlantic full of ice floes it would be quite possible for paddlers in open boats to travel along the edges, always having a safe place to haul out upon if the weather turned in.

All this evidence was still essentially circumstantial, making the Solutrean adventure possible not proven. Douglas Wallace's DNA history bore fruit once more. In the DNA profile of the Ichigua Native American tribe he identified a lineage that was clearly European in origin, too old to be due to genetic mixing since Columbus' discovery of the New World. Instead it dated to Solutrean times. Wallace's genetic timelines show the Ice Age prompted a number of migrations from Europe to America. It looks highly likely that the Solutreans were one.

Why then, if this BBC series and the science was almost insurmountable back in 2002, does no one in the USA even know that this flip-flop of history occurred? More evidence of "weird science," propounded by a mandarinate of PC peer-reviewed patriarchs of group-think? How would evidence of a prior set of European emigrations to North America from 20000-10000 BC by a series of successful voyages break the leftist mantra of nasty colonialist English, French, Spanish, Portuguese invaders who invaded a pristine noble-savage paradise of peaceful "natives," free of all pollution from Old Europe.

Leaving aside the semantic differences between English colonists and Spanish colonialism, the larger point is that history dictated by left-wing academic petty dictators is never subject to evidence, as anyone familiar with the scientific method knows that all evidence must be sifted and accounted for, lest we get beguiled into Richard Feynman's famous Cargo Cult Science scenario where good intentions trump hard facts. Or established consensus trumps new findings throwing said consensus into doubt. An example of the second:

The traditional view of American prehistory was that Clovis people travelled by land from Asia.
This version was so accepted that few archaeologists even bothered to look for artefacts from periods before 10,000BC. But when Jim Adavasio continued to dig below the Clovis layer at his dig near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he found blades and blade cores dating back to 16,000BC. His findings were dismissed as erroneous; too astonishing to be credible. The Clovis consensus had too many reputations behind it to evaporate easily. Some archaeologists who backed Adavasio's conclusions with other similar data were accused of making radiocarbon dating errors or even of planting finds.

Ten years later, Dennis Stanford is finally getting his own opinions out into the marketplace of ideas. And Jim Adavasio has promised to publish a book, which I haven't been able to find.

Citing The Solutrean Hypothesis, wikipedia gives a sort of convincing beatdown of the Stanford thesis. However, both sides of the debate seem to use the sort of high-school-debate arguments that are only indicative and not decisive. Bearing in mind the inherent conservatism of archeologists unless something hits them hard on the head [like Gobekli Tepe] and the PC arguments against a European immigration scenario prior to the Vikings, an open mind is still better than a closed one.

UPDATE Newest Evidence that several Europe and Asian based traditions were behind the Amerindian invasion of North America.

Media Ignores Comparison with Norway's Mass Killings

This link shows Anders Behring Breivik's diabolical plan to divert police and fire rescue from the main site of his mass killings. Evidently the social outcast Holmes in Aurora concocted a similar scheme after his world began to disintegrate. Holmes began amassing his arsenal in May after he decided to drop out of his PhD studies in neuroscience. Breivik lived alone in the hilly Norwegian countryside. But Holmes' plan to play very loud music to attract police, leaving the door slightly ajar with a fishline tripwire attached to an IED behind his door, was designed to cause a huge explosion, killing or maiming any Aurora police response. This was timed roughly a half-hour before his rampage in a crowded midnight showing of Dark Knight Rises.

Breivik's plan worked because his explosion in front of government ministries was successful, unlike Holmes' failed attempt. Also, Breivik's second follow-up massacre on Utoeye Island was far away from downtown Oslo where the first murderous explosions took place. Police took almost an hour to respond to the slaughter of 77 Labor Party activist teens, whereas the response to the Aurora 911 calls were under 2 minutes! Also, Holmes did inform the police that his apartment was booby-trapped.

Parenthetically, long ago I was on a cross-country trip in my old BMW & stopped in Aurora to visit friends, including a high school classmate who was mayor at that time. We split up after seeing the movie The Exorcist in a local theater and I and another buddy walked back to my old BMW. It had snowed heavily a few days ago and right next to my car door I found a small rubber doll's head almost identical to the demon statue found by the Jesuit priest in the opening scene of the movie we had just seen. The movie was scary enough. The omen or synchronicity of finding the devil doll convinced me that it was a sign that evil truly exists in the world. Last year, Breivik proved this original sin is still here.

Forty years later in another Aurora theater, on July 20th, Holmes proved it still does.

Obama's Lapses in Male bravery

Today Obama actually seemed to give a short talk without teleprompters!

Amazing as that may be, the coward still ranted on and on about a girl named Abby saving her friend while remaining mum about the three guys killed protecting their girl-friends.

Looks like the First-Girly-Man is still unable to throw a baseball like a man.....

Peggy Noonan Rebukes Lauren, Romney, Obama

The WSJ has Noonan in high dudgeon about the silly made-in-China Olympic uniforms which parenthetically look like stiff Martians rather than all-American [remember that moniker?]. While asking the same question I've asked myself about Romney---if he knew he was gonna make a run for POTUS, why in the five-year runup didn't Mitt keep his taxes inspection-ready, Noonan says that the Romneys wrong-footed the issue, but it's hardly the big-picture catastrophe that the Dems are painting it out to be. [BTW: WSJ Noonan article must be googled to be read in full.]

Then she lands a round-house punch on the First Eff-Up for general mismanagement of the economy, which is the issue that's gonna make him unemployed next January 21st. And for his verbal gaffes of a much higher order than Joe Biden's foot-in-mouth flimflammeries:

The president stepped in it this week with his own failure to communicate.

Mr. Obama, at a campaign appearance at a fire house in Roanoke, Va.: "Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own." If you own a store or factory "somebody invested in roads and bridges," somebody built the infrastructure that allows for commerce. Fair enough. We all built it, with public moneys for public benefit. But it makes as much sense to tell the wealthy businessman, "Feel guilty because the taxes of the poor built that highway," as it does to tell a mother on public assistance, "Feel guilty because your hardworking neighbors built that road."

How about nobody feel guilty?

The president seemed to me to be confusing a poor argument—he implied we owe our wealth and growth as a nation to government programs—with a good one, that nobody achieves success alone. This is true: Nobody proceeds unhelped through life, everyone who's achieved something got some encouragement from a neighbor or a teacher or a coach.

But Mr. Obama makes this point mischievously. He aims his argument at his political opponents—Republicans, Romney supporters. Yet many of them—most, probably—are involved one way or another with churches, synagogues, civic groups and professional organizations whose sole purpose is to provide assistance and encouragement to those who are ignored and disadvantaged. Conservatism doesn't mean "do it alone." God made us as social animals and asks us to help each other.

Mr. Obama was trying to conflate a nice thought—we must help each other—with a partisan and ideological one, that government has and needs more of a role in creating personal success. He did not do it well because his approach was, as it often is, accusatory and vaguely manipulative. Which makes people lean away from him, not toward him.

It is odd he does not notice this, because communicating is his obsession. He made this clear again in his interview last week with Charlie Rose. "The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right," he said. "But, you know, the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism."

I am certain the president has no idea how patronizing he sounds. His job is to tell us a story? And then get our blankie and put us to sleep?

When he says "a story" he means "the narrative," but he can't use that term because every hack in politics and every journalist they spin uses it and believes in it.

We've written of this before but it needs repeating. The American people will not listen to a narrative, they will not sit still for a story. They do not listen passively as seemingly eloquent people in Washington spin tales of their own derring-do.

The American people tell you the narrative. They look at the facts produced by your leadership, make a judgment and sum it up. The summation is spoken—the story told—at a million barbecues in a million back yards.

The narrative on the president right now is: He's not a bad guy, but it hasn't worked.

Some people will vote for him anyway, some won't. But all, actually, know it hasn't worked. That's the narrative.

To get that wrong—that the American summation comes from the bottom up and not the top down—is a big mistake. It means you don't know you've got to change some facts, as opposed to some words.

Deep doodoo is Obama's home territory nowadays, as the media begins to comprehend that the Golden Boy might be Fool's Gold that just ain't ready for prime time, despite the rave reviews they've been giving him over the last three& years.

Kim Strassel points out in another article today on what a nasty piece-of-work this First Nixon is turning out to be. Persecuting an Idaho rancher for contributing to Romney shows that Obama's Chicago Mafia & his Justice Department are working overtime to mau-mau the GOP contributors. The rants against the Koch brothers are another piece of the commissars' game plan. Would that the media point out the silly Buffett's feet of clay and the malevolent Soros' attacks coupled with his active bent toward state socialism on the European model.

The Mainstream Legacy Media still have a long way to be as fair-and-balanced as FoxNEWS & the Wall Street Journal seem to be.

US Poised to Dominate London Olympiad?

WSJ has an article which may be presumptuous, but I hope it's on the money. 40 Golds for the US versus 38 for the Chi-coms. 29 for the Russkies and 22 for the Brits. Hope these predictions hold up.

Tipping Point for Assad Dictatorship in Egypt?

The Happy Ending that every sane human being wishes for Syria may be near. But as The Economist notes, a happy ending might augur a period of chaos:

....a year or so after their revolutions, both Egypt and Libya remain unstable; and Syria, which borders Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, is an exceptionally complex and pivotal part of the Middle East. Those who wish Syrians well now need to focus not just on how to bring about Mr Assad’s swift fall from power, but also on how to spare the post-Assad Syria from murder and chaos and how to prevent violence from spreading across a combustible region.

Given that the size of the blast that killed the Defense Minister & Assef Shawkat, Bashar's brother-in-law and the "Enforcer" in the top ranks of the Alawite Elite indicates an inside job that must have required more than one or two people to pull off, suspicions are running amok and the cowardly stick-insect Dictator has fled to the Alawite heartland near Latakia. And now that the coward has fled, there may be hell to pay in the capital---including the WMD that Saddam sent to Syria before Operation Cobra II under the ruse of aid to flooded areas of Syria after unseasonal rains in 2002.

For the past few months, diplomacy has focused on a plan, overseen by Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, to negotiate an effective ceasefire under a team of monitors and to set up an interim unity government. But over the past few weeks the Annan plan, along with many thousands of Syrians, has died. The rebels, who can now smell victory, will not agree to a ceasefire. The monitors’ activities have been suspended because of the fighting. The country is ravaged by civil war, so there is no prospect of putting together a unity government. After this week’s bomb the danger is that a desperate Mr Assad will resort to ever more extreme tactics—flattening whole districts in Damascus with heavy artillery, say, or seeking to provoke a regional war, or even murdering his own people with chemical weapons.

"His own people" doesn't mean much to a member of an Alawite minority consisting of 12% of the Syrian population of around 22 million, a population three times that of when I first visited Syria in 1972. The 74% Sunni are regarded by the Alawite & the 10% Christian minorities as a possible persecutor were they to come to power. The Sunni Al Qaeda are also suspected to have infiltrated the Opposition Forces. The Israelis are nervous about this possibility, but are also going to be relieved if the Alawite allies of Hezbollah and Iran are pried from power in Syria. Indeed, the number of possible configurations of new alignments across the board, including a different relationship with the newly-elected Shi'ite majority in Iraq just for starters, are mind-boggling if the Sunnis come to run the government in Syria. Relations with Sunni Turkey will improve, and with Sunni Jordan. Egypt may start persecuting its Copts even more if the Sunnis in Syria begin to persecute Christians.

At the moment, the only support Assad has in the foreign czar-wannabe Putin & his Chi-com UNSC partner:

The threat of international justice—especially warnings about his pariah status if he uses chemical weapons—might just have some force. But only Russia has much influence over him. The desire to protect an old ally, fear of its own restive Muslims and hostility to Western calls for regime change have led Russia to shelter Mr Assad’s regime from diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions. As it seems ever-likelier that Mr Assad will go, so the chances that Russia will abandon him in return for a role in a post-Assad Syria grow.

To be sure, there are still pockets of support in the Western press, as this fawning puff-piece fluffing Bashar's feathers demonstrates, although one notes that the blather was written in the early morning of the day of the blast killing the upper elite military/intelligence figures & had to be hastily redacted three hours later. Reuters is notorious for such happy horseshit. Who knows how much provender that author Hamilton had thrown over the transom by Syria or its Iranian allies to write such gibberish? In the meantime, the commonsensical Economist notes about the best way to get the bloodthirsty tyrant out of the country:

...in the absence of a decisive diplomatic shift in the right direction, Western governments should try to give the military effort against Mr Assad a further push. The swiftest way of doing that would be to give aid—such as money and communications gear—to the main rebel force, the Free Syrian Army. It is already getting arms and cash from Qatar and Saudi Arabia with Turkish co-operation, but it needs more help; for, despite its recent setbacks, Mr Assad’s regime is heavily armed with the best Russian kit. The FSA is no band of angels. Some of its weapons will doubtless fall into the wrong hands, possibly including groups of jihadists. Flooding Syria with arms will make the country harder to govern once Mr Assad has gone. But backing the FSA is probably the quickest way to prise Mr Assad from power.

The article ends by noting all that might go wrong after Assad is ripped from power, but in the meantime, no successor can possibly be quite as bloodthirsty as the demon with five intelligence agencies and a notorious series of torture chambers. My many visits [more than half-dozen] to Syria as an FSO & afterwards have filled me with much information. In only one department have I found the Syrians the best in the Middle East---their wonderful food, which is only surpassed by the Turks.

Mitt Romney Adviser Says Sluggish Economy Is 'Riptide Taking Obama Out To Sea'

Mitt is cruising into dock while Obama is flailing at the waves carrying him seaward on a life preserver The Obama pollsters and Chicago Mafiosi running his campaign have analyzed and over-examined every iota of this campaign, but they can't see the trees for the veins on the leaves of the trees, let alone have a view of the forest of prevarications that Obama must unsay & misdeeds he must undo to exit his own hyperbolic echo chamber.

The Romney campaign aide is correct. All the backing and filling & hemming and hawing in the world won't get Obama out of the cul-de-sac he's backed himself into. He's gotta make a run for the roses, but his ride is a spavined nag that nobody's betting on.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Pudge Murray gives chest-pounding Brookings rant

Fat Patty Murray is totally dedicated to howling at the moon, although "chest-pounding" may not be appropriate to the flatlands under her chin. Read the WSJ Op-Ed & note the photo to see why Patty should be sent to the rendering plant this November.

PC Heightens Racist Dems War on GOP

James Taranto has a vivisection on Matt Taibbi, the racist Rolling Stone writer. Best line of all: "It isn't that Taibbi has a vicious streak, Matt Taibbi is a vicious streak..."

Family of Friend Buried Alive in B.C. Landslide

Lynn Migdal's two daughters Diana & Rachel appear to have died along with their father in a landslide in British Columbia.

I knew both Rachel & Diana & they were beautiful intelligent young women. I offer Lynn my sincere condolences along with Marilyn & Nicola.

Obama's Lapses in Storytelling???

Whinging whining second-rater Obama has actually stated that his "biggest mistake" was not telling his story better. Even Obama lapdog Jimmy Fallon didn't buy that last night and after repeating the First Loser's pathetic excuse, said "yeah, and fixing the economy would've been nice too..."

Jimmy Fallon Sucks DNC Dick Like a Pro....

Tonight I missed Washington Week in Review on PBS to waste time on Fallon groping Sean & Yoko Ono singing a song about fraccing, or as the ignoramuses at the Fallon show misspell it, "fraking." As Steve Moore says in his WSJ piece, this is part of the Sierra Club's conspiracy to shut down coal, oil & natural gas as fuels to generate electricity. Soon the tree-hugging whacks will have us paying double or triple for lighting and other electricity in our homes. And America sleeps as the Sierra termites like Fallon & the Lennon/Ono crowd BS them while they are awake....

Since natural gas from reserves under farmland & other settled areas can be released in an economically profitable manner, the gang of freaks like Di Caprio & Ruffalo & other misbegotten lumps of hormonally maladjusted twits are naturally against it. The USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal & has enough natural gas & crude oil for decades to come----which means the jug-eared monkey in the Oval Office has to outsource "green" energy swamp gas projects to Brazil & Finland, among other places.

Fraccing [google "The Shale Gas Secret"] is a complex process. Indeed, induced hydraulic fracturing is only recently economic and has now threatened the tree-huggers with another way to get low-cost energy to the market without the insanity of Germany's ENERGIEWENDE which will have the whole country dependent on wind & solar energy----both depending on highly variable meteorological phenomena----running its economy after Merkel's risky bet shuts down the last nuclear plant about fifteen years from now.

No one in Germany yet knows what will provide a steady dependable flow of energy---nor do the lunatics in the jug-eared monkey's WH have the problem figured out. Maybe Pelosi is the best bet---only we'd have to pass her energy bill to find out what's inside it!!!

Noonan Hits a Home Run

Peggy Noonan can be annoyingly clever by half. By that I mean, just at the edge of twee. Zooey Deschanel who can write & coin winners like "It's morning in America!" which buried Walter Mondale under the mediocre manure he deserved in 1984. But here's Peggy at her near best in today's WSJ:

The next president will have to wrangle with Congress, and when lawmakers balk, he'll have to go over their heads and tell the American people the plan, the reasons it will work, and why it's fair and good. He'll have to get them to tell their congressmen, by phone calls and mail and by collaring them in the neighborhood and at the town hall, to back the president. When this happens to enough of them—well, as Reagan used to say, when they feel the heat, they see the light. The members go to the speaker, and suddenly the speaker is knocking back a drink with the president, and in the end a deal gets made. Things get pushed inch by inch toward progress, and suddenly there's a sense things can work again. That encourages an air of unity and of national purpose, which itself gives a boost to public morale.

Anyway, the next president will have to do that sort of thing, and it will take deep political gifts. We have not seen that genius in Mr. Obama. Whether you will vote for him or not, you know you haven't seen it. He seems to view politics as his weary duty, something he had to do on his way to greatness.

When he goes over the heads of Congress to the people, it's like he threw a dead fish over the transom—it lands with a "Thwap!" and makes a mess, and people run away. As for Mr. Romney it is a commonplace in punditry to implore him to speak clearly of where he'll go and how and why we should follow.

Both candidates seem largely impenetrable—it's hard to know them, figure them. With Mr. Romney, you have a sense of what he's been, what jobs he's held, and his general approach. But do you have a solid sense of who he'd be and what he'd do as president? Probably not. Even he may not know. As for Mr. Obama, the more facts you know, the more you don't understand him, the more you can't quite grok him.

Neither has a flair for politics, and neither seems to love it. Both come from minority parts of the American experience, and both often seem to be translating as they speak, from their own natural inner language to their vision of how "normal Americans" think.

What does all this suggest? That voters this year will tend to be practical in their choice and modest in their expectations. Which isn't all bad. But joy would be more fun.

All her prose thusfar verges on insightful, especially the sense that both candidates are from far outliers of the massive middle of America, both the archetypal Middle West and the middle income clock-punching majority of the electorate.

The exotic self-proclaimed "mutt" Obama hails from a morganatic [look it up!] marriage of a bigamous Kenyan with an 18-year old Kansas-native from a former slave-holding family. Since her father's Kenyan tribe used to sell to Arab slavers, this made BarackO, formerly Barry until he got too full of himself, descended on both sides from owners/dealers of African slaves.

The equally exiguous Mitt Romney is a Mormon whose family spent a generation in a Mexican commune and himself spent a year in France [shades of the perfect hairdo John Kerry!] going door-to-door preaching Mormonism. I was a student in Ann Arbor when Mitt's father George effectively exited himself from presidential contention back in the late '60s by declaring himself "brainwashed" on Vietnam.... Given Mitt's grim determination mixed with expressions of euphoria when he is applauded, Romney fils is showing that he's not going to let any of his cards show.

Both candidates are so boringgggg..... that BHO has already decided to push his less odious wife Michelle out front of him to keep the malodorous fumes from reaching the electorate directly. And Mitt is so white-bread Holsum brand that he simply hasn't been able to get any orchestration at all past the wall of silence the MSM has kept him behind, except the occasional bleat that BHO is lying, cheating, stealing the election without an intervening campaign.

Peggy was both "twee" and correct when she titled her Op-Ed "Ennui, the People." There doesn't seem to be a campaign, since the ABCCBSNBCCNN firewall of silence has effectively meant that only those watching Fox News or reading the WSJ or other "ironic points of light" know Mitt is anything other than a very rich man and that BHO means well, but those meanies in the GOP Congress won't let him work on behalf of the 99% of the lazy suckers just waiting for more handouts[ed. note].

But the denouement might save Mitt's campaign, if he has the wits to pick a Veep candidate worthy of the name.

We must end with some burly, optimistic thoughts or we'll hurl ourselves over a transom and go "Thwap!" 1. There's still time—more than 100 days—for each candidate to go deeper, get franker, and light some kind of flame. 2. The acceptance speeches are huge opportunities to do that. 3. The debates, if they do not sink into formalized torpor or anchor-led superficialities, could be not only decisive but revealing of greater depths. 4. Mr. Romney's vice presidential choice will matter.

About which a note. Speaking the other day to a gathering of businesspeople from across the country, I mentioned the subdued nature of the election and my thoughts as to its reasons. I was surprised to get no push-back afterward, even from political enthusiasts, only agreement.

But the news: When conversation turned to the vice presidential nominee, I said we all know the names of those being considered, spoke of a few, and then said Condoleezza Rice might be a brilliant choice.

Here spontaneous applause burst forth.

Consider: A public figure of obvious and nameable accomplishment whose attainments can't be taken away from her. Washington experience—she wouldn't be learning on the job. Never run for office but no political novice. An academic, but not ethereal or abstract. A woman in a year when Republicans aren't supposed to choose a woman because of what is now called the 2008 experience—so the choice would have a certain boldness. A black woman in a campaign that always threatens to take on a painful racial overlay. A foreign-policy professional acquainted with everyone who's reigned or been rising the past 20 years.

I should add here the look on the faces of the people who were applauding. They looked surprised by their own passion. Actually they looked relieved, like a campaign was going on and big things might happen and maybe it could get kind of . . . exciting.

I myself think Marco Rubio will have a great positive effect as well. But the slime-throwing MSM would accuse Marco of child-molesting assault-and-battery within days of being named.

However, Condi Rice would suppress the loathsome maggots spewing "racism" on every channel every time a person accuses Obama of malfeasance, which is the all-purpose noun describing this amateur's performance up to now. And then we might be able to get ObamaCare repealed, and keep the death panels from our door!!!

There's No Brain Death Like Academicide...!

George Lakoff is a UCal Prof on political sloganage during elections. Here's James Taranto giving the "intelligentsia" a well-deserved beat-down.

"Don't repeat conservative language or ideas, even when arguing against them."

That bit of advice, No. 1 on a list titled "The 10 Most Important Things Democrats Should Know," comes from the promotional material for "The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic" by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling. (You may remember them from our June 12 column.) In a PJMedia.com essay, the anonymous blogger whose pen name is Zombie draws out the implications:

Many politicians, pundits and talking heads have taken Lakoff's recommendation to heart. This is why conservatives and liberals can't seem to have the simplest conversation: liberals intentionally refuse to address or even acknowledge what conservatives say. Since (as Lakoff notes) conservatives invariably frame their own statements within their own conservative "moral frames," every time a conservative speaks, his liberal opponent will seemingly ignore what was said and instead come back with a reply literally [sic] out of left field.
Thus, he is the progenitor of and primary advocate for the main reason why liberalism fails to win the public debate: Because it never directly confronts, disproves or negates conservative notions--it simply ignores them. . . .
By intentionally refusing to challenge, disprove, understand or even acknowledge the existence of the other side's argument, you allow that argument to grow in strength and win converts.

This is an important insight, not only into the way the left debates and otherwise communicates, but into the way the left thinks--or fails to think. The book's subtitle, after all, promises an instruction in "Thinking and Talking Democratic." Lakoff and Wehling command their readers not only to act as if opposing arguments are without merit, but to close their minds to those arguments. What comes across to conservatives as a maddening arrogance is actually willed ignorance.

Such an attitude is the product of leftist intellectuals, not political professionals--and, as Zombie notes, the latter are foolish to follow it:

Lakoff, of course, is the genius who devised for Nancy Pelosi the slogan for the 2006 election based closely on Newt Gingrich's 1994 victorious shibboleth. Instead of C "for America," the genius Lakoff came up with: "Contract on America!" It took a while for the clueless guinea Pelosi & the Marxist Jew-boy Lakoff to realize, after panicked advice from advisors, that their Demonrat slogan was a Mafia hit imprecation. Zombie continues his wise words:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, is an exemplary Lakoffite, relentlessly hammering home her own framing of each issue, and utterly ignoring the Republican frame, except on rare occasion to mock it. How effective is this? A quick survey of conservative sites shows that she is regarded as the Queen of Buffoons, a figure meriting gleeful derision and eliciting relief that the Democrats have selected the worst possible spokesperson. She certainly hasn't changed a single conservative mind, I can assure you. But has she converted "undecided" voters to the liberal cause?
I posit that the answer is "No," and I'll explain why. . . . Lakoff has an authoritative "scientist" persona in addition to his partisan "activist" persona, but in order to lend gravitas to his arguments he must conflate the two and pretend to be an impartial scientist while in reality enunciating transparently partisan talking points. Yet people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz don't have that option, so that when she speaks, every single listener already knows that she is a partisan spewing partisan spin. She doesn't have an "authority hat" to put on which might give her statements the veneer of impartial truth.
This is one difference between an intellectual and a politician: When an intellectual haughtily dismisses opposing arguments, he does so in part by resting on his authority as an intellectual. This authority may give him a false sense of his own intellectual strength and that of his arguments.

Recall how lefty law professors thought mockery a sufficient response to the idea that Congress's Commerce Clause authority has limits. Lefty journalists and politicians joined in the mockery, made confident by the authoritative pronouncements of the scholars. The U.S. Supreme Court has now adopted a legal principle that elite law professors refused even to comprehend.The other difference between an intellectual and a politician is that the latter's profession entails regular reality checks. If the Democrats do badly this fall, Barack Obama and the unwieldily named Wasserman Schultz will be understood to have failed. He will lose his job, and she will likely lose her prominence. Lakoff presumably has tenure, which shields him from reality. Barring a severe financial crisis in the higher education industry, he's set for life.......

If you're interested in the rest of the article, Taranto & Zombie show how Salon denizen Katie Roiphe gets into trouble when she actually tries to respond as a human being and not the amusingly shrill shrieker Debbie WS. Wasserman Schultz does not have a human bone in her body....

Global 500: Gazprom, Russian Energy Company, Tops List Of World's Most Profitable Companies

Anyone surprised about the ascendancy of Gazprom to the top of the world's capitalist companies should read "Petrostate," by Marshall Shuman, who was Counselor to Cyrus Vance while I was in the State Dept, poring over his studies on the USSR wearing a green eyeshade like a CPA. This was back in the days when Zbigniew Brzezinski was predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union and Marshall was counseling caution.

Marshall's book on the Russin oil and gas industry is anything but cautious. He outlines a long-term chess game whereby Putin & Co. will use Russia to subject Western Europe via the ironically named "Friendship" pipeline until they're addicted to cheap gas and groggy until the prices suddenly rise. Ask the former Ukrainian Prime Minister as she rots in jail through the machinations of the Machiavelli of our age, Vlad the Empoisoner Putin, using the Russian-speaking Donets Basin minority to try to suborn Ukraine through its current Prime Minister. Putin has a plan to bring back the Ukraine to the Russian Motherland, and it involves poison as well as love potions. The PM before her who was freely-elected after the "Orange Revolution" had dinner with one of Putin's special envoys and almost died of polonium poisoning after the meal. He survived, but his health was undermined and his Ukrainian political enemies allowed the country to eventually fall under Russian influence. Soon, if events continue to march in this direction, the Ukraine will be another Belarus, completely under Putin's thumb.

Putin is Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili reincarnated, with the penchant for poison Stalin's Ossetian father may have given him genetically through his Persian & Jewish genes [Dzhugashvili means "son of a Jew." The Persian Qajar Shahs had ruled Georgia before the Czar conquered it fifty years before Stalin was born and the Qajar divan's use of exotic potions & fatal admixtures was legendary.] Montefiori's book on Stalin dwells on the elderly Stalin's rewriting of Georgian history---to be published in Soviet schools, of course---with a special emphasis on ethnic backgrounds. This had been the original way Stalin had impressed Lenin back in the day. Stalin's real genius was with poisons and he read up on Qajar lore profusely.

Putin is using his former KGB comrades in the new FSR as his cat's paws. He uses poison like Polonium when nothing else will advance this chess player's long-range plans.

The oafish Germans are the channel whereby Putin, who speaks German fluently and Merkel, who learned Russian during her youth in the ludicrously-named German Democratic Republic [GDR] plan to use gas to replace nuke power in Germany's new ENERGIEWENDE, touted around the world for its wind farms and solar panels and phase-out of nuclear plants after the tsunami disaster.

Did Markus Wolf recruit Angela Merkel as the ultimate mole? Willy Brandt came close, but she might have achieved perfection in achieving the template to tax us all for breathing & exhaling evil carbon dioxide.

Putin and Merkel may be in cahoots. Their allies in the USA are the green tree-huggers of the Democrat Party, that's for sure. Pelosi and her cohorts in crime are ready to undermine our Constitution via energy policy---ANWR & the "moratorium" in offshore drilling are simply the First Act. "Fracking" is a sideshow for clowns like Ruffalo & other Hollyweird losers for the time being, but if Oblunder is re-elected, look for the takeover of American energy just like Putin took over Russian energy.

If only BarackO had the stones to resist Putin and his nasty allies like Bashar Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei. I don't want him in the Oval Office in 2013 fucking up the US Constitution while Botox Nancy and Dingy Harry misrule Congress.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Roswell UFO Was Not Of This Earth And There Were ET Cadavers: Ex-CIA Agent Says

When I was an FSO in the Political Section of the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia in the mid-70s, my CIA counterpart told me one of his friends in Langley had informed him that the "cadavers" had been flown to the Wright-Patterson AFB shortly after the event as well as the remains of the spacecraft, which was being studied for possible retro-fitting.

What enhances the credibility of the entire Roswell episode is that the only three atomic bombs in the US arsenal at the time were stored at Roswell AFB and the wing of B-47s [I believe] were the only aircraft outfitted to load and deploy the bombs had Stalin actually begun an invasion of the free part of Western Europe as the pre-NATO Americans believed him to be holding under consideration. [The USA was the only nation possessing nukes until the Russians in 1950 with the help of American spies.]

Wouldn't it make some sort of cosmic sense that a nuclear explosion would have alerted our more evolved life-companions to observe our delivery systems? There had been a violent summer thunderstorm a couple of nights before the wreckage of the spacecraft was discovered at an exceedingly remote site by a sheepherder, I believe. There were certainly a spate of UFO sightings in 1947 for the first time in great profusion and such a mishap was more or less within the bounds of possibility.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Rahm Emanuel: Godfather & Babysitter's Client

My GOP daughter

Rahmbo is presiding over a Chicagoland which has become a shooting gallery. Right when homocide rates are declining across the nation, Chicago and Detroit, two prototypical Dumborat cities, are keeping the average up, with an assist by Washington, DC, a plantation where the Dumborats are the Simon Legree's keeping the slaves numb and dumb with drugs & a non-functioning school system.

Doesn't the midget mayor sound just like the failed fingerpointer-in-chief in this para:

After weeks of media reports about Chicago homicides — which so far are up nearly 38 percent from last year — Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy defiantly said during a news conference that the gang strategies in place before McCarthy arrived were the ones that failed, not the new ones.
More beat officers are now on the streets and staying in specific areas, replacing the large, specialized units that would temporarily drop into crime-ridden areas. Emanuel and McCarthy said they have no plans to change that strategy, and the mayor announced Monday that he's devoting another $4 million to tear down vacant buildings where gang members live and store guns and drugs.

Oh yeah, the failed police policies before that are succeeded by policies so successful that the murder rate is UP 38% must be because of the predecessor's failed policies....

Who does this lame little dweeb think he's fooling?

Just like the American people see through the whining Buck-Stops-There BarackO, so the Chicagoans trapped in a one-party system are as unable to escape their fate as Russian dissidents were under "Uncle Joe Stalin," first cousin in a political sense to the Traitor-to-His-Class who tried to pack the SCOTUS back in 1937. Rahmbo is a dwarf version of his former slave-master BarackO...!!!

P.S. The reference to Babysitter's client refers to the fact that little Rahm and his Entourage brother Ari were babysat by the same Irish nanny who babysat my daughter Niki.

Niki is a lot better-looking and is a registered Republican.

The Wall Street Scandal of All Scandals

Reich is a joke. His first paragraph is an example for bad writing that is only matched by his genius for worse thinking...!!!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

John Roberts---Chief Weenie of the SCOTUS

James Taranto keeps knocking the ball out of the park. Here's his take on Jan Crawford's revelation and then a Prof Campos followup about CJ Roberts changing his mind after he wrote the first two-thirds of the DISSENT!

....CBS's Jan Crawford, citing "two sources with specific knowledge" of the Supreme Court's deliberations in NFIB v. Sebelius, the ObamaCare case, had reported that Chief Justice John Roberts initially voted to hold the individual mandate unconstitutional, then changed his mind. But Crawford's sources denied speculation that the dissent was originally drafted by Roberts as a majority opinion.

Now a competing story has emerged. Lefty law prof Paul Campos writes at Salon.com that "a source within the court with direct knowledge of the drafting process" tells him that, to quote the unnamed source, "most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts' chambers in April and May." (The Campos story does not dispute that Roberts switched his vote, and indeed makes sense only if he did.)

National Review's John Fund adds:

I've learned from my own sources that after voting to invalidate the mandate, the chief did express some skepticism about joining the four conservatives in throwing out the whole law. At the justices' conference, there was discussion about accepting the Obama administration's argument, which was that, if the individual mandate was removed, the provisions governing community rating and guaranteed issue of insurance would have to go too but that the rest of the law might stand. The chief justice was equivocal, though, in his views on that point.

Fund's account is consistent with either Crawford's or Campos's. Unlike them, he does not say if his sources were court insiders. What's most striking about these accounts, though, is not the particular details but that we are reading them at all. Politics and law aside, it suggests the Roberts Court has a managerial debacle on its hands.

Whoever the sources are, it appears that both the four conservative [and eventually dissenting] justices and the four liberal [and eventual affirming justices] are pissed off at Roberts, which means besides a political and managerial debacle, Roberts has an internal feud going on which centers on himself. The affirming liberals feign anger that Roberts declared the mandate supported by the Commerce Clause as unconstitutional. And the conservatives are angry that Roberts allowed the stupid law to stand because4 it could be interpreted as a tax if insurance was not bought. [Obama & his chorus of liars deny it is a tax EVEN THOUGH Obama's Solicitor General argued exactly this before the SCOTUS....!!!! [Of course, for Obama to lie is like for the sun to rise in the morning....just part of nature itself]. But here is Taranto explaining it all:

A chief justice can lead the court only through the power of persuasion. That is to say, ironically, that the leader of the government's nonpolitical branch has to rely entirely on political skill in order to be effective. Earl Warren, who actually was a politician (three-term California governor), famously employed such skill in 1954, when he gradually persuaded all eight associate justices to join his opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, in the belief that unanimity would be helpful in overcoming popular resistance to the ruling.

Almost everyone surmises that Roberts's motives for upholding ObamaCare were political. Putting aside the merits of the respective cases, his political performance--that is, his performance as the court's leader--contrasts dismally with Warren's in 1954.

Crawford reports that Roberts "engaged in his own lobbying effort--trying to persuade at least Justice [Anthony] Kennedy to join his decision so the Court would appear more united in the case." Not only did that effort fail, but Roberts ended up with the exact opposite of a unanimous decision. He was on his own, with the four dissenters refusing even to acknowledge his opinion, and the four justices who agreed with him on the outcome joining a bitter concurrence in which they upbraided his reasoning on the case's central constitutional question.

Talk about jumping the shark and ending up everyone's dinner, Roberts may have seriously handicapped himself as far as future leadership of the SCOTUS is concerned.