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Since No-One Else is Saying This...

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal alerted his readers that long-time New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse had written a very silly piece (of what, I leave to your imagination), and accurately described her opinion of the case as "shallow, disingenuous, and silly".  Veteran Greenhouse readers will not be surprised, as she has been shallow, disingenuous, and silly for her entire journalistic career.  If your wondering how such a Tiger Beat caliber writer managed to score the Supreme Court beat at the NYT, just look at the year she received it again.  For those of us who remember 1978, it was the high tide of Affirmative Action for women at prestigious institutions.  (I would know, as I lost a data processing job at a local hospital because the head of that department was ordered to hire a woman for the post.)  I'll bet she was an Affirmative Action hire.  Once there, of course, she would be fire-proof, as no paper, let alone the Paper of (Liberal) Record, would dare fire a woman from such a prestigious post.
 
Picking a Supreme Court reporter by Affirmative Action eventually proved to have been a bad idea, if the Times still wanted to be considered a serious journalistic enterprise.  Not as bad as our more recent blunder of picking our President that way, but bad enough...
 
 
 
March 31 was the sad seventh anniversary of the forced death of Terri Schiavo, the brain-injured but NOT brain-dead Florida woman whose case became an international story.  The people who tried to save Terri commemorated the anniversary appropriately, and the people who wanted her dead stayed away from the subject, hopefully in shame.  No-one ever comments on what I noticed at the time, which was that for the first time in American history an innocent American citizen was sentenced to death in a CIVIL court (by the bloodless Judge George Greer).
 
Please tell me I'm not the only person who noticed this.
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Notes Scribbled in Haste

Reading the vaporings of the unstable of editorial writers at the New York Times, one can well believe that the editorial board believes that the New Deal saved America in the 1930s.  Their editorial page is a WPA-like project, providing work for the otherwise unemployable.
 
 
 
Every school year we get to read about American schools which are exposing our young people to Islamic indoctrination under the guise of "multi-culturalism".  I'm glad these dhimwits weren't running the schools during World War II.  They would have had their pupils goose-stepping through the halls and at gym class.
 
 
When Rand Paul was campaigning for the Republican senatorial nomination in Kentucky, I predicted that he would lose if nominated.  He has since not only been nominated, but has opened up a considerable lead in the polls against his Democratic opponent.  I would like to say here that if I am proved wrong on this one, I will accept my embarrassment with a big smile on my face.  Go, Rand!
 
 
Is anyone else as tired as I am of Michelle "Boo-Hoo" Obama complaining about her sheltered, priviledged life?  The woman was raised in a comfortable style that fewer than half of Americans can match, she sails through an Ivy League college without attaining any intellectual distinction (the one thesis she wrote that leaked out was a self-pitying embarrassment), she gets a job at a hospital which pays six figures because she's the daughter of a prominent political family, she gets a position created for her at that hospital (with a $200,000 raise) the same day that her husband becomes a United States Senator (the job was eliminated when she left the hospital -- can you say "bribe"?), she wastes millions of taxpayer dollars on her entertainment and vacations while First "Lady", she's narcissistic enough to think that being FL gives her the right to tell us what food we should eat, and now she says that being FL is "hell"?  Poor little rich girl!
 
If you hate the life so much, Michelle, just give it up -- and go away!
 
 
 
The Crab notes with disgust that the teacher's union machine in Washington DC (Den of Corruption) has defeated reform-minded Mayor Adrian Fenty's bid for re-election by beating him with a typical Democratic hack in the Democratic primary.  If the Republicans had any sense, they would select Fenty as their nominee for the usually-unattainable office.  It would be fun watching the septic stream media trying to cover that race.
 
 
 
Did anyone else notice how abruptly the WikiLeaks scandal vanished from the headlines when it was discovered that the leaking soldier, PFC Bradley Manning, is a militant (pun intended) homosexual?  They don't want a debate on this matter, or else some unkind souls and rigorous thinkers might decide that having homosexuals in the military might be a bad idea.  Number me among them.
 
 
 
Given the weekly revelations about terrible ideas in the so-called health care reform bill (I contend that "deform" would be more accurate), maybe the bill should be referred to as the Patient Protection from Affordable Health Care Act.
 
 
 
Funny, isn't it, how we are supposed to hold the youthful dabblings of Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell with witchcraft against her, but we are never to mention the Muslim schools that BO attended, or the sincerity of his conversion to Christianity?  Actually, as an old-fashioned Catholic Christian, I contend that their were no NO Christians in Jeremiah Wright's indoor circus.  To call that Christianity is to rob the word of its meaning.  Wright was (and is) working for the other side.
 
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A Few Passing Comments

Before the flood waters began to subside in Pakistan, our nincompoop Secretary of State, Hillarious Clinton, was on the scene, telling the Pakistanis (and everyone else) that the floods had been caused by ... you guessed it ... global warming.  After all, we never had floods before the internal combustion engine, did we?  I was moved to this reflection when I came home yesterday and found my wife watching a musical about Noah and the ... 
 
Hey, wait a minute...
 
According to the leftist power-mongers, global warming has caused floods, droughts, melting glaciers, severe storms, etc.  Meanwhile, the average temperature here on Earth hasn't budged in 12 years.  Here we have the apotheosis of leftist science.  Global warming causes everything except global warming.
 
 
 
When famed "trouble tourist" P. J. O'Rourke visited Russia during the Gorbachev era, we spoke to a Russian citizen about Gorby's having won the Nobel Peace Prize.  With perfect Slavic sour humor, the man replied that he had noticed that the prize hadn't been for economics.  That same Russian, and many more like him, must have seen the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to leftist columnist and New York Times scribbler Paul Krugman with grim satisfaction.  Had Krugman been at the helm of the Russian economy during those years, the Soviet Union's economy would still have collapsed in flaming ruins, so just having a Nobel Prize winner in charge of your economy is not necessarily a help.  You have to have a sane one.
 
 
 
I read a recent item in which the Washington Post's ombudsman was praised for admitting that the paper had mis-reported (with standard leftist media bias) some story or another (I've forgotten which).  Publications like the Post and the Treason Times (once known as the New York Times) get far too much credit for employing so-called ombudsman.  This shallow dodge enables them to willfully mis-report with banner headlines, issue a small mea culpa on page 10a, and declare the matter settled.  The confession means and is worth nothing if the the biased reporting continues as before.  To borrow from the late Ambrose Bierce, "Jesus did not tell the sinful woman to go and sin more."
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The Treason Times Slanders Tea Partiers While Pretending To Correct a Slander of the Tea Partiers (?)

From the invaluable Media Research Center:
 
The NY Times Runs a (Half) Correction on Matt Bai's Phony Tea Party Racism Charge
By: Clay Waters
July 27, 2010 17:08 ET


On Sunday, the New York Times issued a surprise half-correction to the unverified claim, made in Matt Bai's July 18 story, that racial epithets were hurled at Democratic congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis during protests at the U.S. Capitol on March 20 against Obama-care. Bai wrote:

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

The portion in bold above has now been omitted from the online version of Bai's story. Here's the correction, in Sunday's edition:

The Political Times column last Sunday, about a generational divide over racial attitudes, erroneously linked one example of a racially charged statement to the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements, there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members.

The Times' “correction” repeated the original vague and unsubstantiated charge of “scattered reports...of racially charged rhetoric,” by claiming “Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements,” just not the one in question. The Times should get specific and stop making vague allegations.

Scott Johnson at the Power Line blog demonstrated that the Times' new version of events has little to recommend it by:

After finding Tea Party protesters guilty of "a number of such charged statements," the Times holds that there is no evidence that Tea Party protesters made the statements on this occasion. In other words, the Times raises no question about the statements having been made at all. Yet this has been the point in contention all along, and there is no evidence supporting Rep. Lewis's contention about the "statements."
(For the original go here.)
My genial young friend Dominic is beginning to learn about media bias, so here's a quick pointer for you, my friend.  When media outlets like the Treason Times refer to those they dislike as having been connected with "a number" of some unseemly activity, they are willfully misleading, but they are not technically lying.  There have been a number of times when Tea Partiers have been credibly connected to racist statements.
 
After all, zero is a number.
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Anniversary One-Liners and Short Items

One of the most enjoyable things about having your own blog is the chance to immortalize your own wisecracks, like this one:
 
My wife:  Bill Clinton's in the hospital with a heart problem of some sort.
 
Me:  Probably a Viagra overdose.
 
 
 
I read that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has a career American Conservative Union rating of 98.4%.  I hope that's good enough to get my friend Tony the Libertarian to vote for him, but sometimes I wonder.  I think sometimes that T the L would probably refuse to vote for himself for office, on the grounds that he once spent his money liberally.
 
 
 
I have to keep better notes.  I have a note I jotted down at work that says "Obama and Holocaust Deniers".  I have no idea what I meant.  If anyone has a theory, please let me know.
 
 
 
Can your hearing have a Freudian slip?  I heard a radio host refer to something that would happen at the "next full session of Congress", but I thought I heard him say "the next fool session of Congress."  If I was off, it wasn't by much.
 
 
 
Unlike some right-wingers, I never expected anything to come of the Obama birth certificate brouhaha.  It's never going to get BO out, and it isn't worth the attention it has received.  One facet of the "Birther" controversy, however, ought to be considered more than it has been.  I find it very revealing of the character of the man who holds our chief executive office that he would rather spend more than one million dollars in legal fees than simply comply with the request that he show his birth certificate.  How dare we?  We are just peasants!  We cannot question our ruler, our superior, our king!  Of course, you and I know that he is not king, but I'm not so sure that BO knows the difference.  In this, I believe, lies the explanation for so many of the events of the BO Error so far.  He is offended when he is questioned, and he believes that the only obligation he has as our President is to rule us.
 
 
 
John Derbyshire of NationalReview.com doesn't go wrong often, but he was wrong about the importance of Honduras and their (now happily former) President and wanna-be dictator, Zelaya.  (I've forgotten his first name.)  Derbyshire made a running joke of it on his Friday Audio blog, Radio Derb.  It wasn't funny or insignificant, though.  Anyone who loves liberty and pride loved the way that the Hondurans, showing the same spirit that animate the citizens of Kansas Territory during the Lecompton Constitution controversy in the late 1850s, held their ground against all too much of world opinion and defended their constitution and the freedom of their citizens by ousting the would-be tyrant Zelaya, and appointing an interim president to hold office until they could elect a new, constitution-respecting President in a fair election.
 
The second, and for an American lover of liberty much more alarming significance of the Honduras contretemps was the reaction of our own government.  Here was one of the first, if not the first opportunity for the new administration and its foreign policy dream team (a nightmare is, after all, one kind of dream) to support freedom and democracy elsewhere in the world, and they chose to support the would-be dictator instead.  To me, and to many others, this choice had an unsettling effect on our opinion of the new President.  Maybe he really is a Marxist who distrusts and opposes letting people rule themselves.
 
This, too, explains a lot of what we've seen in the last year or so.
 
 
 
Too many conservatives are folding in the face of the renewed threat to allow gays to serve openly in the military.  Hello, sailor, goodbye unit cohesion.  Besides, they're forgetting the deadly pattern of militant infiltration by leftists.  Once you let them into a profession or milieu which they were banned from before, can the demand for quotas and promotions be far behind.  Soon they'll have the whole military wearing lavender velvet.  (Boy, am I insensitive, or what?)
 
 
 
 
 I've concluded that the reason that the New York Times has no comic section (despite the fact that they have a publisher, Pinch Suzlberger, whose mental development never passed the comic-book level) is that the intelligence and effect of the Times's reporting and editorializing renders the idea of "funny pages" redundant.
 
 
 
 
 I read a headline in James Taranto's Best of the Web Today that related that a lottery winner had been killed in an accident.  This was a bit chilling for a New Yorker like me.  His Accidency the Governor of New York, David Patterson, has been casting about for ways to close the huge budget deficit bearing down on the New York government, brought on by years of swelling budgets and a sudden dip in tax receipts due to the recession and recent tax hikes which have sent many of the richest NewYorkers fleeing to more taxpayer-friendly climes.  I was tempted to suggest to him that a good way to raise funds would be to change the rules of the lottery so that every winner had to take the 26 payments in 25 years option (25 years plus a day, if I understand it correctly).  Then all he would have to do is making the right to payments non-transferable, and then kill all of the winners.  Millions saved for the treasury!
 
Then it occurred to me that he might not realize that I was joking...
 
 
 
 
 
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