Call It A Comeback
The Freepers haven’t let me down. One of the more amusing comments claims our cars cost 10 times as much and our air conditioners don’t work as well. The first claim is absurd and the second is empirically false–they actually work better, though that has little to do with CFCs being banned.
Will Cal Thomas or Mona Charen make my prediction come true for the major media? I’m betting so….
I’m sure some out there wonder why I think Sully is worth anything, but a good laugh. I think this post shows why. When he can get himself out of a constant lather, he can have some insightful comments about religion and society.
Unfortunately, such insightfullness is displayed by him less and less.
The Great Illinois Republican Civil War has started. Circle up and fire folks. O’Malley and his clan have decided to committ hari kari in the same fashion as Republicans in California and New Jersey.
As a Democrat, I suppose this should make me happy. It doesn’t. I grew up in Illinois and always admired the moderate Republicanism of Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar. They provided a great check excesses of the left and still respected education funding, infrastructure and individual liberties. Jim Thompson provided the infrastructure that makes Illinois an ideopolis now. Without him, Illinois may well be Missouri with good farmland and a big crumbling city. Instead, Chicago is a world class city (Washington and Daley deserve credit for this as well), education is good in most areas (see posting on Blog St. Louis about rural ed), and Illinois is relatively good on social issues.
No more. Now there will be a huge blow-up in the Republican Party between those moderates who have a motto of “Let’s not get excited,” and the jihad wingnuts who are more worried about homeschooling and abortion than infrastructure. I imagine the wing-nuts will eventually win and we’ll see the Democrats take over the state for years to come. Wingnuts are bad for bidness and Illinois is a bidness state.
That is too bad. Many Democratic leaders in the State of Illinois need to be checked. I like Madigan for what he gets done, but he is all too happy to use state resources to further his political goals (separate from policy goals). Republican cronieism provides a check on that. But it won’t if there aren’t any Republicans left in office.
Errr…scratch that post about Pete Peterson …. via Counterspin Central
Bingo! Brazen lying eventually gets discovered. The ‘energy crisis’ was a sham and now there is actual evidence of it. Why would the government enter into an agreement to keep it secret? Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmm…..
Perhaps this would have been more clear if Governor Blowhard wasn’t mucking up the whole debate, but the Bush and Cheney were lying. How do we know they were lying? Well they are competent businessmen in the energy industry. If they got it wrong, they couldn’t have been mistaken because they were competent, right?
But no, they had to push the Murkowski Solution? What is the Murkowski solution? Feet Stink? Drill ANWR
This is truly outrageous. You can die for our liberties, but Congress is going to restrict your liberty over your body.
I have to wonder where all the whining about the UN comes from. The General Assembly has all sorts of problems, and I don’t want to excuse those. Financially, we should get them to clean the mess up and we’ve taken a lot of steps to do that.
However, when it comes to the Security Council, the UN is largely a tool of US power. Of the five member we almost always have one vote locked up, one for sale (Russia), and one that bellyaches and then is up for sale as an abstention so they don’t veto a plan, and well, then the real problem France. Admittedly, France is useless and only got the seat because of postwar politics. The Security Council is deigned to hold power in those few hands and the US with decent leadership accomplishes a great deal with it.
The Council doesn’t have deal with every small country in the world and it is empowered to act easier than any other body. Even more important, any UN Military action can be vetoed by us, thus giving us a lot of control over multilateral actions when we aren’t involved.
We’ve got it pretty good. A little massaging and we do extremely well with the Security Council except on issues relating to China or Russia. Well, that and when the French get a bug up their ass. It isn’t perfect, but it provides the US an important institutional mechanism to get world support, with very little actual support from the other nations.
The Trib did right. And I think this is the key point:
“I simply don’t think that a newspaper can sanction that kind of behavior,” said Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman. “It’s a conflict of interest when you have a close personal relationship with the subject of an article. It’s the same as if you were to have a financial relationship with the subject of a story or some other close relationship.”
When you need a laugh during the day, go here.
The fruitcakes are amazing…
This is Karl Rove on drugs. Perhaps he’ll send Bush to the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner.
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