Quid Nimis

Michelle & BarryI thought the doggie bit on Laura Ingraham was mildly amusing this a.m., but it didn't stir me to actually weigh in on what breed the Obama's should get.  When I gave it a moment's thought, I wanted to vote for "Chinese Crested" because it's an ugly, stupid, effete dog and seems an appropriate Liberal mascot.  However, I doubted that it was even in the running.

I was wrong.  And and and... For the 2nd time EVER I visited the Daily Kos, just for fun and to see who was buying the brown trou's now that Barry thinks FISA is okee dokey.   That part was dull, but I noticed that there was a snippet in the navigation area about getting Laura Ingraham- I wondered what that was all about.  Under the title, "Help Us Stop Laura Ingrahm" some hysterical dope is mustering the troops to go to the AKC website and vote for the Soft-coated Wheaton Terrier because all of LI's fans, you know, the Repug's, are voting "Poodle."

by kingdomemariner

Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 02:26:03 PM PDT

The American Kennel Club is hosting a poll on what dog the Obama family should get. In typical right-wing radio host fashion, Ingraham has urged her viewers and listeners to vote for the poodle. How about we wipe that stupid smirk off her face?

No doubt she would use this as another chance to paint him as another effete liberal, out of touch with normal Americans who own, you know, big MANLY dogs. It's time to stick it to her and her listeners and vote. If we all vote for the Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier (in second place), it will be just one less thing for her to laugh about on the radio.

Vote for the Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier!

Oh, hey, stick it to me, baby.  I will be like soooo upset if the poodle loses. 

Best in Show: Vote for Me!But seriously, don't we worry about someone who takes this stuff this seriously?  And don't we want to let the FBI know that some nutter goes off the deep end every time LI draws a breath?

OK, go vote.  Vote for whichever pocket-sized hypo-allergenic dog you think the Obama's will have the most trouble house training (think of a canine Robert Byrd) and exercise your right as a free person to be silly. 

I already voted.  For the poodle.  That's how you can tell I'm conservative: the Chinese Crested is the Pat Buchanan 3rd Party, and I'm a Two Party kinda gal.  Though I am disgusted with both at the mo'. 

Just one thing to get off my chest:

Are we all sick of the articles that say John McCain has a great opportunity to do "x"?  They have titles like "John McCain's Golden Opportunity" or "John McCain's Chance to Make Peace with Conservatives" or some such.  Today there is an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, "John McCain's JFK Opportunity."  I almost want to read it to find out what JFKesque thing John McCain can do that will make him more appealing.  Maybe some international brinksmanship with Hugo or Mahmoud?

When we google "John McCain opportunity" though, we get hundreds of hits on snippets that say "John McCain's missed opportunity" because that's what's happening.  So far, Senator McCain is missing far more than he's hitting, and his abysmal response to the pipsqueak Wesley Clarke puts his biggest weakness en haute reliéf: he really can't bring himself to slam a liberal.  I'm betting only Fox carried the rejoinders from Bud Day and other POW's who spoke out against General Clarke.  From McCain himself we get kind of a mealy-mouth, sotto voce "Gee, I wish he wouldn't say those things." 

In reality, we keep seeing ways in which John McCain could distinguish himself from his opponent but we brace ourselves for disappointment.   JMc has spent a career being the Democrats favorite Republican, and the Maverick Media Darling.  From the looks of him, he's still in shock after realizing that even the most wonderful Republican is just 3/5's of a Democrat when it comes down to politics.  Sorry, John: Your best chance for the White House came and went with Kerry's Veep offer. 

This is a great, short article that sums up the state of the Global warmist mentality. 

So, temps are going down, it's been hotter historically BEFORE industrialization, the Antarctic has more ice than ever before,  and ocean-going robots  show that the oceans have been cooling slightly for the last five years.  If that isn't enough,

...In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.

OK, so we can't take a life as just punishment if the criminal hasn't taken a life.  That's the logic.  Let's skip all the other stuff about the Constitution and how backwards we are compared to Europe, and particularly how backwards Louisiana is compared to just about everywhere.  Let's also skip the part about how a huge guy got his jollies with his ex-girlfriend's eight year-old goddaughter and was so caught up in the spirituality of the union that he didn't notice that he had perforated her vagina.  No press reports about whether he noticed her screams.  When he came back to earth, however, he noticed the blood and called a carpet cleaning company.  Instead of saying, "I decided to process a deer in the living room," he actually told the cleaners that his ex-girlfriend's goddaughter had "become a young lady," thereby alerting even the carpet cleaners that (a) something really weird was going on, and (b) this guy must be retarded, which, by the way, was the fallback defense in case the "but-he-didn't-actually-kill-her" argument didn't work.

Aside:  Victim's rights groups have put forth the argument that a death penalty for a crime like this takes away any incentive to keep the victim alive.  My answer to that is, if this fellow had the capacity to think, "Gee, (having sex with) this hot little vixen is worth any punishment short of lethal injection," we probably would have a much lower crime rate and no murders. End aside.

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, but it seems like the whole "evolving standards" thing is just a shift of emphasis.  The shift is away from protecting the rights and the welfare of those who are young and innocent, and towards those who are adults who want to have sex with whatever.

I read something that a fellow named Lakoff said about "progressivism."  Some of you may remember that he was the guy who said that Liberals, oh excuse me, "progressives," needed to learn how to "frame" their ideas better so that more people would buy into their enlightened view of the world.  Anyway, he said that progressivism has a remarkable history of the continual expansion of rights over the last so many years- I forget the exact number of decades.  The implication, of course, is that we need to continue to keep expanding those "rights" so that we can continually "progress."  Now, any fool can see that the Constitution actually guarantees and defines a few very important rights.  So "progressives" have gone from extending, or rather, taking credit for extending, basic rights to groups like blacks and women, to making up new "rights" to extend to everyone, and I might say, extending them especially to those who, by any standard of decency other than the evolved one, don't deserve them.  Taliban butchers, child rapists, mass murderers, and criminal illegal aliens, e.g.

On the happy side, lots of D.C. residents can pack heat legally to defend themselves from the people who pack heat illegally.  I hope they do. 

Getting preferential rates from Countrywide.

A.F. Tschiffely with Gato (l) and Mancha (r)

I've been traveling a little bit in the past week and, in the minutes before I was due to leave on trip #2, I went to the big bookshelf that houses all of the "light" reading, some of which I inherited from my mother's library.  One book caught my eye- I remembered it from when I was little, as I remembered ignoring my mother's suggestion that I read it.  Tschiffely's Ride is the memoir of one Aimé Félix Tschiffely, as Swiss-born school teacher-turned-adventurer who rode on horseback from Buenos Aires to Washington, D.C.  in 1925.

 
South American RouteThat's right.  1925.  10,000 miles.  That was when there were only two paved roads connecting B.A. to neighboring towns, and the paving was cobblestone.  No plastics, no Gortex, and no down parkas. 
Route through Central & North America No effing polyester, for heaven's sake.  No vaccines, no antibiotics, no anti-malarial pills.  No phones to speak of, although occasionally he makes use of a telegraph.  No water purifiers, no freeze-dried rations, and not one in a thousand literate persons between B.A. and the American border.  But: there were two revolutions in progress, two rainy seasons, several mountain ranges over 10,000 feet, a completely impenetrable swamp (the only portion of the route he didn't ride was the swamp region between Colombia and Panamá) and two horses that could go for days without water, trek for twenty hours through desert, swim rapids carrying three men while pulling 5 who clung to their tails, traverse rope and board swing bridges that spanned 1000 foot mountain crevasses...  Did I mention that there was no GPS, and by the way, no maps for most of the area he rode through?

 It's an adventure story that will make you feel like a complete wimp, a worthless speck on the face of the earth. 

Post Script: Out of curiosity, I looked up A.F. Tschiffely, just to see his biographical particulars.  It turns out, he died at the age of 59 from complications after minor surgery at a hospital in London. 

Barack Obama's statement about Tim Russert's passing:

“We all I think have heard the news about Tim Russert. I’ve known Tim Russert since I first spoke at the convention in 2004. He’s somebody who over time I came to consider  not only a journalist but a friend.  There wasn’t a better interviewer in TV, not a more thoughtful analyst of our politics and he was also one of the finest men I knew. Somebody who cared about America, cared about the issues, cared about family.  I am grief-stricken with the loss and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family. And I hope  that even though Tim is irreplaceable that the standard that he set in his professional life and his family life are standards that we all carry with us in our own lives.”

Let's work through this odd statement, shall we?

I’ve known Tim Russert since I first spoke at the convention in 2004.

Almost four years.  OK.

He’s somebody who, over time, I came to consider  not only a journalist but a friend.

Over time, everyone considered Tim Russert a journalist but for most people the amount of time was a millisecond because Tim Russert was a journalist, and rather a famous one at that.

There wasn’t a better interviewer in TV, not a more thoughtful analyst of our politics and he was also one of the finest men I knew. 

We're dancing on the edge of over-the-top for someone whose only known Mr. Russert, and only professionally, and only intermittantly, for less than four years.   And any way, is Tim Russert the man Barack Obama knew?  We'll never know.

I am grief-stricken with the loss and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family. 

We've thrown ourselves off the edge and done a reverse double somersault tuck straight into the deep end of the maudlin pool.

And I hope  that even though Tim is irreplaceable that the standard that he set in his professional life and his family life are standards that we all carry with us in our own lives.

This is just inane.  If the press actually read what Barry says, he'd lose the "eloquent" adjective right  quick.

This is John McCain's statement:

“I would like to just make a brief statement concerning the shocking news about the untimely death of a great journalist and a great American, Tim Russert.

Tim Russert was at the top of his profession. He was a man of honesty and integrity. He was hard but he was always fair. We miss him. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and we know that Tim Russert leaves a legacy of integrity of the highest level of journalism and we will miss him and we will miss him a lot.

Again, he was hard, he was fair, he was at the top of his profession. He loved his country, he loved the Buffalo Bills and most of all he loved his family.”

Huh.  Not  a word about being big pals with Tim.  Nothing obsequious.  No rending of garments or sitting in ashes.  Just a dignified tribute to the man himself and an expression of sympathy.  I guess John McCain didn't really know Tim Russert, though.  Yeah, that must be it.

By Ross Terrill, for The Weekly Standard 

(...) 

A former student of mine from China, now a businessman in Shenzhen in the south, had recently opened a branch office of his successful IT import business in Mianyang, a city hit by the quake. By a miracle, none of his 24 Mianyang employees was killed, though the office was wrecked.

"We flew them all to Shenzhen," the businessman told me. "My workers in Shenzhen raised $21,000 for quake victims. For the company, I added $15,000." Some of his staff wanted to channel the money through the Chinese Red Cross, which is virtually a finger on the hand of the party-state. My former student said no. "We want to stand on our own feet. I don't want to just depend on the government. If the folk from Mianyang need more, we'll go back and raise it."

The Sichuan earthquake not only energized him, but led to a step that, after our two decades of friendship, came as a surprise. Never before one to talk about religion, he told me he organized a private Christian service, over dinner, with eight relatives and staff members at a restaurant in Shenzhen. "We sang hymns, took turns reading from the Scriptures, and prayed for the lost people. No beer or wine on this occasion. We felt better afterwards."

"It's been 30 years of chasing after money in China," he said, striking another new note. "And people haven't paid enough attention to spiritual life. Now we Chinese have money; we must also have care and trust in each other. Because China has improved, there's a real private realm where action may be taken--we took it."