Wow! December 31, 2009
Posted by Cory Franklin in Uncategorized.add a comment
What do you say after that?
End-Of-Year Rant December 31, 2009
Posted by Benjamin Wendell in Politics, reader interaction, Sports.add a comment
I’ve spent much of the last few weeks with a high fever, so this whole stream-of-consciousness thing is dependent on being conscious. I’ve probably burned off even more layers of precious receding brain cells than usual over this siege, so any tendencies toward incoherence should be ascribed to illness, as opposed to congenital stupidity. Ok, buckle up.
Cheney, Editorials Slam Obama’s Plane Terror Response – Gothamist
Yeah, right. Obama is soft on terror. This is the biggest crock of bullshit in the history of bulls. Obama has troops flailing all over Afghanistan shooting at anything that moves, as if that’s going to somehow stop guys from boarding planes in Nigeria. He’s got drones flying in swarms over places we can’t even pronounce, unleashing Hellfire missiles and thousand pound bombs laser-guided by geeks in Nevada bunkers to hit anything with a turban that moves. Gitmo ain’t closed and “extraordinary rendition” isn’t just something you see on Broadway. The Patriot Act remains in full force, the Constitution is wintering at a Columbian coca plantation, and some guy with glasses as thick as coke bottles and a proctologist’s sense of humor is probably recording my every keystroke in some NSA cubicle even as we speak. So douche nozzles like Cheney and VDH won’t be happy until Obama sends some nuclear tipped cruise missiles into Sudan, and even then, they’d probably complain that there was insufficient megatonnage employed.
Rush Limbaugh Hospitalized: Taken To Hospital In Hawaii After Suffering Chest
I’d say that Rush Limbaugh having a heart attack was a physiological impossibility, since it requires having a heart, but that theory has long since been disproven by Dick Cheney, along with evolution. Aside from that, Rush really ought to lay off the Viagra, Oxycontin, Cuban cigars, and fried butter sandwiches, but if he wants to take one for the team, who am I to stop him?
http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/12/napolitanos-comments-were-taken-in-context-
Napolitano is a moron, and this ought to be another argument against trotting out clueless department flacks every time there’s a national crisis. Leave the PR to guys who know what the hell they are doing when the red light shines on the camera. If you’re going to lie, evade, obfuscate, and divert, you ought to be a pro, and there are plenty available. That being said, what the Homeland Security Secretary clearly meant in context was that the system did what it was supposed to do once the attempted bombing had already taken place, not beforehand, when clearly a bunch of incompetent fucks had their collective thumbs up their asses while a guy showed up at the ticket counter, bought a one-way ticket while chanting with a Koran in one hand, and did everything to clue us in but fill out a form listing “suicide bomber” as his employment. That, as the president so aptly noted, was a “systemic failure”, but no more his fault or Napolitano’s than Bush’s or Clinton’s. Eight years after 9/11 and the national left hand still can’t find the national right hand with both hands. There’s no softness on terror. There’s just stupidity on a hundred different levels. Try to find a cure for that if you can.
This is the picture that almost made my year. It purportedly showed JFK lolling on the deck of a yacht surrounded by naked maidens frolicking in the sun, and it supposedly occurred before JFK was elected and while Jackie was pregnant. The parallels with Tiger Woods and the half dozen other sex scandals of 2009 were just too delicious to ignore. Sadly, the pic is a photoshopped hoax, actually lifted from a 1967 Playboy pictorial. Not to worry. The next political sex scandal is just one click of a cell phone camera away.
‘Coltsthink’ Spoils Indy’s Shot at History — NFL FanHouse
Last, but not least…WTF was Bill Polian thinking? The Colts have sucked in the playoffs six times out of seven, and it didn’t matter a bucket of warm spit whether they were rested, tired, injured, hungry, drunk, psyched, or whether or not they’d been laid in the prior two weeks. The Colts have been lucky as often as they’ve been good throughout the winning streak. So if there’s a better than even chance that you’re going to go one and done in the playoffs anyway, why not at least make a grab at history? What’s the worst that could happen? Peyton Manning gets hurt? Not very damned likely. His offensive linemen would sooner sacrifice a testicle than see him get sacked, and every ref in the league blows the whistle if they even see a defensive end walk through Manning’s shadow. Now we’ll never know.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
BW
To All Our Readers (And My Blog-Mate) December 31, 2009
Posted by Benjamin Wendell in Uncategorized.add a comment
I second Cory’s wishes for a happy healthy new year for all of us, and I’ll add another big thank you to him for keeping this site going while I was testing the limits of my own mortality. 2009 sucked every which way. Not that my champagne glass is perpetually half-empty, but I’ve got low expectations for 2010. One thing I’ve learned in the last two weeks: Just when you think things can’t get worse…they do. So be careful what you wish for. I’d like peace on earth and good will toward men, but I’d settle on nothing really big blowing up before Valentine’s Day. Set the bar low enough and you can avoid disappointment.
BW
BW
To All Our Readers December 31, 2009
Posted by Cory Franklin in Uncategorized.add a comment
HFNY
From Allan Sherman:
I know a man, his name is Lang
He has a neon sign
And Mr Lang is very old
So they call it Old Lang’s Sign.
VDH Wishes You A Happy New Year December 31, 2009
Posted by Cory Franklin in Uncategorized.add a comment
Government Motors December 31, 2009
Posted by Cory Franklin in Uncategorized.add a comment
From the WaPo:
The federal government said Wednesday it will take a majority ownership stake in the troubled auto lender GMAC, providing another $3.8 billion in aid to the company, which has been unable to raise from private investors the money it needs to staunch its losses.
The new aid package for GMAC, coming as most large banks are repaying the government, underscores both the problems afflicting the company and its importance to the Obama administration’s efforts to revive the auto industry.
GMAC, which already has taken $12.5 billion in direct federal aid along with other forms of government support, is the largest lender to General Motors and Chrysler dealerships and to their auto-buying customers.
The Treasury Department said it will increase its stake in GMAC to 56 percent from 35 percent. It also will hold about $14 billion in what amount to loans that GMAC may eventually be required to repay. The government plans to appoint four of the company’s nine directors.
GMAC becomes the sixth company taken over by the federal government in the last two years, joining mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, automakers General Motors and Chrysler, and the insurance company American International Group. The government also owns a large stake in Citigroup.
You know I hate to use the S word but could someone explain to me how and why this is isn’t socialism?
VDH On The Bombing (And The Response) December 30, 2009
Posted by Cory Franklin in Uncategorized.add a comment
From NRO:
I think we will see some radical changes from the Obama administration very rapidly. When a Nigerian national, with a history of radical Islamic sympathies, previously reported to U.S. authorities by his father as a threat to America, buys a one-way ticket with cash, has no check-in luggage, previously was denied a British visa, boards a plane easily, and is prevented only by a courageous tourist from murdering over 300 innocents — and when all that is characterized as the system working like “clockwork” — well, something is terribly wrong. We should see such a threat not as a man-made disaster, but an act of war, in which an enemy has planted a series of human IEDs with the intention of killing hundreds of innocents and destroying a trillion-dollar airline industry vital to the commerce and very health of the West.
And a larger problem with our reaction is the context. This latest threat comes amid a climate of “overseas contingency operations” and “man-made disasters,” the closing of Guantanamo with no plans to deal with the over 100 Yemeni suspected terrorists currently detained there, and the public trial in New York of the confessed architect of 9/11. If millions of America find all this quite dangerous — in no small part due to the impression it creates for our enemies — then just perhaps radical Islamists sense American regret and remorse over our past eight years of muscular efforts that prevented another attack, and thus a new chance to find a route to another 9/11.
Predictions?
I think KSM’s trial will be Guantanamoized — that is, relegated to occasional boilerplate anti-Bush partisan rhetoric with little real follow-up — since in the present climate a circus trial would be political suicide.
Secretary Napolitano will be praised to the skies and transferred; the problem is not her nonchalant comments after the averted attack, but a long series of statements that suggests she does not look at terror empirically, but rather through a political prism intended to please the new general climate in Washington.
I think the president will have to cool the Al Arabiya interview motifs, the Cairo meae culpae, the bowing to Saudi royals, the anti-Bush caricatures of prior anti-terrorism policies, and instead begin to speak of the threat from radical homicidal Muslims in terms of a military challenge rather than an interesting civil-liberties debate.
So I think we will see an end to “Bush did it,” since that trope is already turning ironic in the sense that Bush spoke out against the Ahmadinejad regime and was clearly on the side of its dissidents, his caricatured protocols not only kept us safe but in part were quietly adopted by the Obama administration, and the war in Iraq has pretty much quieted down. Demonizing Bush as the architect of an unnecessary counterterrorism response in the present climate is nothing short of a political boomerang.
Payback Is A Bitch December 30, 2009
Posted by Cory Franklin in Uncategorized.add a comment
I’m betting right now that Adm. Dennis Blair is the fall-guy for the Obama Administration in this bomb screw-up.
He’s the Director of National Intelligence.
Also the author of this idiocy last spring.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has indicated that detainees released in the U.S. would likely receive government assistance to help them return to society — one they’ve never been a part of. “If we are to release them in the United States, we need some sort of assistance for them to start a new life,” Blair said last month. “You can’t just put them on the street.”
“Morons, I’ve got morons on my team” – as a famous movie quote goes.
