Month: March 2009

Governor Kaine signs law permitting “Choose Life” license plates.

Via Riehl World View:

DNC chair infuriates abortion backers

Tim Kaine, the Virginia governor and President Barack Obama’s hand-picked choice as the head of the Democratic National Committee, infuriated abortion-rights groups Monday by signing legislation that gives abortion foes a long-sought victory.

Kaine brushed off intense lobbying by abortion rights supporters in Richmond to sign a bill that allows Virginia motorists to advertise their anti-abortion views by sporting “Choose Life” specialty license plates.

Infuriated. How… brittle of them.

Crossposted to RedState.

Strange New Respect for Keith Olbermann.

Who knew that a cow college grad could be so biting?

Well… OK, most of the country knows that cow college grads (sayeth the state school grad) can be so biting. But if it’s true that Keith Olbermann called the President “Cal Worthington Obama” in response to the President’s gentler touch towards Wall Street in comparison to the auto industry* (via Hot Air Headlines), well. I will have to raise my opinion of Olbermann’s potential wit. Or at least the wit of his writers.

Anyway, Greg Pollowitz also included this video of Cal Worthington’s greatest hits:

I personally managed to stay on my chair and not howling with laughter up to about the bear.

Moe Lane

*Mind you, Greg Pollowitz reported that Olbermann’s more worried about the poor UAW than those awful auto executives.

Crossposted to RedState.

Looking for someone to read (Peter Hamilton)

(Today’s author: Peter Hamilton)

I’m currently going through The Temporal Void (second book in his Void Trilogy), so I thought that I should mention his works generally.  Peter Hamilton’s one of the more interesting science fiction authors out there: while his work is definitely part of the ‘hard space opera’ tradition, he’s also ready to play with some quite heretical tropes – at least, heretical for hard SF.

Case in point: his Night’s Dawn Trilogy explores the reaction of an interstellar civilization to empirical proof of the existence of an afterlife, particularly when its inhabitants start escaping from it en masse.  His Mindstar trilogy (based in a globally-warmed, post-Communist, future Great Britain) is likewise ostensibly one genre (cyberpunk), but one that has been modified heavily in order to make it plausible that anybody would actually live in it voluntarily.  And the trilogy that I’m reading now is a sequel to the two-book series Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, which rather sneakily inserts elves into a classic alien war scenario without anyone quite noticing until it was over and done with.

They’re big, fat books, and quite fun. Check them all out.

WSJ calls SEIU on EFCA lie.

It’s the usual trick of taking the first half of a sentence and presenting it as a complete statement. In this case, this turns “The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act but in practice makes it a dead letter” into “The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act;” Rep George Miller (D, CA-07) and SEIU are now using the truncated quote to pretend that the Wall Street Journal is on their side of the secret ballot question.

You can tell how amused the WSJ is on this by their editorial title (“George Miller Loves Us – Too bad he and Big Labor can’t read”): you can probably also use it to tell how desperate Miller/SEIU are, too. After all, as it stands they don’t even have Sen. Feinstein (D, CA) firmly on-board… which is interesting, no?

Crossposted to RedState.

I believe that the technical term for this would be “ghetto.”

Or, if you’re a Jerry Pournelle fan – and why aren’t you? – a “Welfare Island.” Via AoSHQ:

Brazil builds walls around Rio de Janeiro slums

RIO DE JANEIRO, March 28 (Reuters) – The government of Rio de Janeiro is building concrete walls to prevent sprawling slums from spreading farther into the picturesque hills of this world-famous tourist destination, an official said on Saturday.

This should end well.

Moe Lane

PS: Not that the President of Brazil’s planning to listen to a white guy with blue eyes. Didn’t you hear? I’m one of the people responsible for the current economic crisis.

Um… sorry about that?

Crossposted to RedState.

We call these types of trolls ‘mobys’ at RedState.

You Want To Fight Back?  Go To Wikipedia.  Really.

Andrew Breitbart (H/T RS McCain) has an article up about the unfortunately common habit of elements of the Online Left to, well, lie:

Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing “Internet trolls” to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that’s called “vandalism.” But in a political movement that embraces “graffiti” as avant-garde art , that’s business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people’s property in pursuit of electoral victory.

Hugh Hewitt’s popular site shut off its comments section because of the success of these obnoxious invaders. Breitbart.com polices nonpartisan newswire stories for such obviously coordinated attacks. Other right-leaning sites such as Instapundit and National Review Online refuse to allow comments, knowing better than to flirt with the online activist left.

Speaking as a site moderator for a popular conservative website, this is not actually hyperbole.  I’m not entirely in agreement with how effective the tactic is – the average practitioner is hampered by both a fundamental lack of empathy for his (it’s usually his) targets, and an overestimation of his IQ by an average of about 20 points* – and I’m not sure that it’s quite that formally organized.  A perusal of, say, the average YouTube comments section** indicates that there’s no shortage of people willing to sound like any flavor of lunatic that you’d care for; so it may simply be that the general idea resonates in a certain type of puerile mind.  But it does happen; in fact, somebody reading this post right now is doing so with the smug awareness that he’s managed to get away with it without the vaunted (rolling eyes) Moe Lane catching him at it. Continue reading We call these types of trolls ‘mobys’ at RedState.

Al ‘Bear’s Gore-Spiller’ spurns Earth Hour.

No word yet whether he sacrificed a penguin to the Dread Demon Ozone Hole again this year.

Via Hot Air, I see that notorious, bloodthirsty polar bear-murderer Al Gore is up to his usual environmental violations – take that any way you like – in the pursuit of his destructive lifestyle:

Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research —the same organization that also found Gore’s home consumes 20 times more electricity than the average household — told Yeas & Nays that Gore’s Belle Meade-section mansion did not go dark during the global campaign’s designated hour between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Johnson did admit that although it wasn’t as bright as can be, Gore did have on “a dozen or so” floodlights on his trees, a light shining on his address number, and a noticeable “bluish glow” from his powered-on televisions and computers coming from inside his house.

That bluish glow was probably actually Cerenkov radiation: Gore’s just the sort of Gaia-denying hypocrite to have a secret nuclear reactor in his basement. After all, a man who’d have a kill rating of four millibears a year from his personal lifestyle alone can’t be trusted at all. Besides, as the photo to the side shows, he’s not even willing to turn off the light that shows his street address. As if any one in the area could miss it, what with the unholy glow of his profligate energy potlach obscuring the clean, night-time Tennessee sky. Continue reading Al ‘Bear’s Gore-Spiller’ spurns Earth Hour.