Monday Political Artillery

Last week, everyone was so busy micro analyzing Gov. Palin in the debate that just about no one paid attention to fact-check Big Joe:

• Biden lied when he said that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran. Barack Obama did say specifically, and Joe Biden attacked him for it.
• Biden lied when he indicated that John McCain and Barack Obama voted the same way against funding the troops in the field. John McCain opposed a bill that included a timeline, that the President of the United States had already said he would veto regardless of it’s passage.
• Biden falsely said McCain will raise taxes on people's health insurance coverage -- they get a tax credit to offset any tax hike. Independent fact checkers have confirmed this attack is false.
• Joe Biden lied when he said that John McCain was “dead wrong on Iraq”, because Joe Biden shared the same vote to authorize the war and differed on the surge strategy where they John McCain has been proven right.

That's only some of it. As I watched parts of the debate, I noticed that Biden also incorrectly cited which Constitutional Article defines the powers of the Executive Branch and he also claimed that Hezbollah had been run out of Lebanon.

In another item, David Bernstein does a good job of identifying why the Bill Ayers question is valid in considering Barack Obama:

Obama is an extremely ambitious man. He's been interested in a national political career for many years. It's not that surprising that he wouldn't find Ayers and Wright objectionable company--in the very liberal, Hyde Park/Ivy League circles that he's traveled in since attending Columbia, people with such views are more mainstream than, say, the average conservative evangelical Christian. That itself makes Obama far more liberal than the image his campaign attempts to portray.

In short, Obama's ties to Ayers and Wright suggest to me NOT that Obama agrees with their views, but that he is the product of a particular intellectual culture that finds the likes of Wright and Ayers to be no more objectionable, and likely less so, than the likes of Tom Coburn, or, perhaps, a Rush Limbaugh. Not only that, but he has been in his particular intellectual bubble so long that he was unable to recognize just how offensive the views of a Wright are to mainstream America, or how his ties to Ayers would play with the public, especially post-9/11.

And finally, what should you do if your own self-loathing prevents you from living a happy life? Simple; blame Sarah!

I have crossed every line I believed should never be crossed in public discourse — I have criticized not only her policies and her record, but her hair, her personal style, her accent, her abilities as a mother, etc. I’ve also begun to suffer personally and professionally. I bore my friends with my constant tirades against her, and am constantly distracted from my work by my need to continually update myself on the latest criticism, and indeed, ridicule, of her. In my hatred for her, I have begun to hate myself. I don’t want this woman ruining my life before she even gets a chance to ruin our country. How do I stop? Is there a self-help group for this?

My advice would involve copious amounts of 'growing up.'

Mom Must Have Quite a Social Calendar

Help me; I'm too stupid for this world:

MILWAUKEE - Oprah Winfrey's mother says she shouldn't have to pay a nearly $156,000 debt to a high-end fashion store because store officials shouldn't have extended credit to her.

Holy cow. What could possible happen in Milwaukee that would require $155,000 of lavish garb?

Valentina Inc. alleges that Vernita Lee of Milwaukee racked up $155,547 in purchases and interest as of July 1. The company sued, saying Lee fell behind in minimum monthly payments of $2,000. Lee filed a counterclaim Friday contending that Valentina took advantage of her "lack of knowledge, ability, and-or capacity" when creating her credit account.

What, did mom's allowance run out or something?

Court papers say Lee resolved a 2002 case with the company over a $175,000 bill. The resolution prohibited Valentina from extending further credit to her.

Let me rephrase that - what could possible happen in Milwaukee that would require $330,000 of lavish garb?

Oprah should either let her mom use her credit card, or it's time to put mom in the guest bedroom for the foreseeable future. Either way, Oprah can easily find $156,000 in some purse laying around her compound somewhere and set it all right with the store, at least until mom leaves the house again.

Time to Invest!

He Had Me by Paragraph One

Shout it from the highest mountain, Tom:

Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis. Among the Congressional "leaders" invited to the White House to devise a bailout "solution" are the very people who have for years created the risks that have now come home to roost.

Five years ago, Barney Frank vouched for the "soundness" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said "I do not see" any "possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury." Moreover, he said that the federal government has "probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing." Earlier this year, Senator Christopher Dodd praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for "riding to the rescue" when other financial institutions were cutting back on mortgage loans. He too said that they "need to do more" to help subprime borrowers get better loans.

In other words, Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default. The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously. But the magic words "affordable housing" and the ugly word "redlining" led to politicians directing where loans and investments should go, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and various other coercions and threats.

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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not deserve to be bailed out, but neither do workers, families and businesses deserve to be put through the economic wringer by a collapse of credit markets, such as occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Neither do the voters deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were free market institutions they could not have gotten away with their risky financial practices because no one would have bought their securities without the implicit assumption that the politicians would bail them out.

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts. Phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make much more sense than letting politicians play politics with them again, with the risk and expense being again loaded onto the taxpayers.

Earmarks to Nowhere

Please Don't Kane Kimi Raikkonen

I'm watching the Grand Prix of Singapore live on SpeedTV, F1's first ever nighttime race. Very cool under the lights and SpeedTV is actually banging it down in HD.

After leaving the pits, Renault's Fernando Alonso pulled off a helmet visor tear-off and let it sail over his shoulder, just as you'd see at any race of open-cockpit cars.

Noticing this, Bob Varsha pointed out that each racing team has recieved a special dispensation for the race weekend insulating them from Sinapore's uber-strict littering laws.

(C)ity authorities will waive their escalating fines for littering (£192-384 for the first offence; £768 and a corrective work order for a second offence) when it comes to the F1 drivers' tear-off visors - at least five of which tend to be used in a race.

More here:

Laws got tougher in 1987, with higher minimum fines, and again in 1992, with the work-order program, which has offenders pick up trash for no pay or else face a $5,000 fine. "Work is to be done under the full glare of publicity as otherwise the deterrent effect would be lost," says Maggie Chia, a customer- service worker with the country's National Environment Agency.

UPDATE: Raikkonen just stuffed into the water barrier coming out of turn 10 which ends Scuderia Ferrari's 46-race streak of finishing with at least one car in the points.

Chasing Flies with a Hammer

Let's hope that they're able to swing those hammers:

A US navy destroyer has made visual contact with a Ukrainian ship which was seized by Somali pirates last week and is now moored off the town of Hobyo. There is no indication that the USS Howard is about to approach the MV Faina, which is carrying 33 T-72 battle tanks destined for Kenya's government. A Russian navy vessel is also heading towards the region.

The pirates have reportedly demanded a ransom of $35m (£19m) to release the Ukrainian vessel and its crew. Authorities in Somalia's semi-autonomous region of Puntland say they are powerless to confront the pirates, who regularly hold ships for ransom at the port of Eyl.

But wait there's more:

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill "within days" of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died. This was also confirmed by Hassan Allore Osman, minister of minerals and oil in Puntland, an autonomous region of Somalia.

Osman's delegation spoke to the ship's captain and its engineer by cellphone, demanding to know more about the cargo. Initially it was claimed the cargo contained "crude oil"; later it was said to be "minerals". And Mwangura has added: "Our sources say it contains chemicals, dangerous chemicals."

Why this isn't covered by the legacy media reveals how lame they've become.

Demonstrable Supidity

First, from the Holy Messiah:

Watch the Obama ad (in link) blasting McCain for owning three foreign vehicles: a Lexus, a VW and a Honda (identified in the Detroit Free Press as a "2001 Honda sedan"). If it's a 2001 Honda Civic, it was built in East Liberty, Ohio, with higher domestic content (75%) than the Ford Escort (60%).

And second, from the back-up QB:

CBS News was with (Biden) last Thursday during one of the rockiest weeks in history for the U.S. economy, something that wasn't lost on the six-term senator. "Part of what being a leader does is to instill confidence is to demonstrate what he or she knows what they are talking about and to communicating to people ... this is how we can fix this," Biden said. "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

Franklin Roosevelt? 1929? Television? Wow.

Biden went on to tell the story of a time in 1950 when he watched a DVD of Seattle Mariners Highlights . . .

UPDATE: In the WaPo, some moron from the UAW harpoons McCain for having three of them "foreign cars" in his fleet:

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, in a conference call organized by the Democratic party, blasted McCain on Sunday for not being truthful with voters. "When he's in the midwest, he tells voters he supports the industry," Gettelfinger told reporters. "That's really a nice campaign line. But it turns out that John McCain wasn't being straight with the people of Detroit."

What Gettlefinger is too stupid to compute is that, as a spokestool for Obama, he's going after McCain for owning at least six American cars, when his pro-labor messiah, Obama, owns one American car. NOW who's "doing more for the American autoworker," you mouth-breathinhg idiot?

Weep for Once Great Britain

Brussels Journal:

At the same time as sharia law has gained official recognition as a part of the British legal system and Muslims proudly talk about conquering the Western world, a British woman has been arrested because of a supposedly "racist" doll she kept in her window. In al-Britannia a Muslim man can claim state benefits for children with multiple wives and brag about subduing the country and reducing its traditional inhabitants to second-rate citizens or worse, but you cannot have a "racially insensitive" doll in your own home, at least not if you're white.

In Control for 90 Minutes

Everton 0-2 Liverpool

A nice result at Goodison Park. Livepool played with a welcome flair and Everton thugged it up as usual. Still awaiting Mirnegoff's desperate spin on this result.

Performance Art Update

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

That Toddlin' Town

Chicago - what a machine:

A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.

The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.

Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.

Remeber All the Presidnet's Men: "Follow the money."

Examining Today's Labor Market

The question, I guess is whether the women will work for what they've been paying the cows:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk. If Ben and Jerry's replaced the cow's milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers-and cows-would reap the benefits.

It's hard to tell where PETA, NOW and the Militant Breast Feeders will clash on this one, but since their all predictably in the bag for Obama for another six weeks, we probably won't hear a thing.

We Want Free Heathcare

Just like they have in Canada:

The head of the medical clinic that sent a Winnipeg man to the Health Sciences Centre emergency room, where he was found dead 34 hours after he arrived, says her clinic is not to blame.

Socialism means never having to say you're sorry.

"I hope that his death wasn't a death resulting from poor care. And if it is, I hope it will help us to do better," (Dr. Diana Bennett) said.

I wonder if the dead guy hopes his death will help them do better. Ah yes, it's always the system that fails, never the individual.

In 2000, Robert Collicott died of a blood infection before he got to see a doctor; he had been sitting in the HSC waiting area for 4½ hours. In 2001, Herman Rogalsky, 58, died in a waiting room at the Health Sciences Centre while waiting for an ultrasound. In 2003, Dorothy Madden, 74, died of a heart attack in the waiting room of St. Boniface Hospital's emergency ward, after a six-hour wait. In 2004, after a 20-year-old a woman shared her story about miscarrying after a four-hour wait at the Health Sciences Centre emergency room, nearly a dozen other women reported similar stories.

That's it; I totally want the government to get into health resource rationing.

Health Minister Theresa Oswald noted that the addition of reassessment nurses to emergency wards did not address the problem of people who don't present themselves to the triage desk in an emergency room, as appears to have happened
in Sinclair's case.

Blame the patient - that's the blanket defense of the bureaucracy.

Manitoba Health has asked emergency rooms to make changes to prevent anyone else from falling through the cracks in a similar way, she said. "We did that yesterday … to ensure that every person is spoken to in the waiting room, just to say, you know, 'Hello, have you seen the triage nurse? Have you spoken to someone and registered?'" she said Wednesday morning.

Wow, good thinking; nice to get around to that.

It's All About the Focal Length

I thought riding to work on a motorcyce was exciting. I was wrong.

Tangible Aura Now Out of Business

When I watch this, it makes me forget for a bit, that I'm no Yankees fan.

Hero Dog is Heroic

The darkness is the coward's only friend.

This is my neighbor's fence and what used to be her garbage bin. Early Sunday morning, about 2:00 am, some carbon-based shit-fer-brains came by and played the felony arson card. The scum got away this time (lucky for them), but the damage was mitigated by a brave watchdog who sprung into barking action and alerted the rest of the pack to the 12+ foot flames:

Not even two years old but still very happy with himself.

On a much lesser heroic note, I got to live up to my legacy and play Saint Paul Fireman with my garden hose and fancy car-washing nozzle. My amateur rig reached just far enough across the alley to keep the fire limited to what you see above. It's not like I was facing the MGM Grand, or the Willard Hotel, but it was still an exciting night here on the edge of the tundra.

While I was breathing the fumes, Mrs. OctaneBoy was giving the directions to the 911 dispatcher and within minutes, the fellas from Station 14 were on the scene. They were coming from the-mop up of an earlier, similar incident. Later, they'd be off to address another burning garbage can off Howell Avenue.

Economics versus Politics

Economics says that if you want the swimming pool deeper or shallower, you have to add or remove water respectively. Politics "reassures us" that an unchanged volume of water can be made deeper or shallower; whatever you like, my dear voter:

Hurricanes along the Gulf Coast are likely to do two things. First, they are likely to increase demand for gasoline as people flee the storm and look for fuel to power generators. Second, a hurricane that hits a major oil-producing region will almost certainly knock supply offline in the short run. An increase in demand coupled with a reduction in supply means that the price will go up.

Higher prices tell people to economize on gas and other essentials by cutting out nonessential driving. They also have the benefit of attracting supplies from elsewhere: profit-seeking entrepreneurs in regions that are not affected by the hurricane would, in anticipation of higher profits, redirect their supplies from unaffected areas toward places where they are most desperately needed.

The process by which equilibrium is restored is rendered inoperable — indeed, made illegal — by price-gouging laws. This has several surely unintended but negative consequences.

Read it all, unless you are prone to headaches when presented with the truth.

A Window to the Fever Swamp

The consequnces of feeding at the trough of legacy media:

"I had become complacent," she said. "I thought the election was in the bag. Then, all of a sudden, we've got this big fight on our hands."

What? It's not all wrapped up? I thought they had Hope™ for Change™!

"I'm very worried because we've seen this movie before," said Robert Spurrier, a teacher. "The Republican attack machine shifts the election away from issues and
turns it into a battle of personalities."

Is that the same attack machine that's harpooning Governor Palin from Anchorage to Hollywood to Manhattan?

"You want to know the honest truth? I think she's like a bad actor from a B-list sex movie," said Paula Vanbuskirk, an Obama-supporting independent, whose contempt for the Alaska governor and self-styled "hockey mom" was shared by almost everyone questioned by the Financial Times.

This goes directly to Ann Althouse's comment on Cathy Young's coumn; that they won't let be a feminist unless you vote for all that lefty dogma:

But in recent years, feminism has been dominated by Democratic Party devotees who act like they own feminism, as if theirs was the only feminism -- as if they could dictate that all women should vote Democratic.

But wait; there's more.

"I just do not trust the American people," said Eleanor Shavell, 58, a computer programmer who, along with several others, joked she would move to Canada if Mr
Obama loses. "I cannot believe that 80 per cent of this country thinks we're headed in the wrong direction yet 50 per cent are supporting McCain and Palin. I guess it's like at school: there's always got to be a bottom 50 per cent."

There you go, America - Only Obama and his Army of Smug can save the nation from your stupidity and rural ignorance.

The High Price of Street Cred

It's hard out there for a pimp.

How's a brother supposed to get his name all huge out there in this modern era? I mean, when you play that gangta game, cleaning up city parks or teaching kids to rear is not going to make you supabad, know what I'm sayin'?

You gots to be notorious. You gots to make headlines in other ways:

A Minneapolis rapper who goes by the stage name "Explosive" bound the mother of his child with a telephone cord in her Burnsville apartment, told her "he loved the smell of burnt flesh" and then burned a cheek, her back and arms with a red-hot spoon, according to criminal charges.

That's what you have to do; show the world how tough you are. How you won't take no lip from no woman.

Milton T. Brasson, 27, was in the Dakota County jail Friday, charged with second-degree assault, domestic assault by strangulation and false imprisonment. His brother, Aaron D. Brasson, 22, was also jailed, charged with aiding and abetting second-degree assault for allegedly helping to tie up the woman and heating the spoon over the stove, and aiding and abetting a terroristic threat.

Not only is Brasson an unemployed loser, a crappy father and deranged sicko, he's also a sissy of extraordinary magnitude. You need your kid brother to help you beat up a woman, tough guy? Wow; what a pansy.

Chris Johnson, an audio and video producer for Twin Cities-based Shakademic Productions, recently produced a video for Brasson. He said Brasson has been trying to make it as a rapper for about five years.

The only sounds I want to hear from the Brasson sissies are the noises they make locked in a box with a dozen hungry Honey Badgers.