IG-Gate: Chugging Along

My last full-blown article about IG-Gate for The American Spectator was published June 25. Since then, I've updated the story several times at AmSpecBlog, NTCNews, and the Hot Air Green Room. So last week, when I suggested another article -- "The Little Scandal That Could," published today -- I didn't really think about how much news had occurred in the past three weeks, as for instance in the case of Amtrak IG Fred Wiederhold:

On June 18, Amtrak IG Fred Wiederhold submitted a 94-page report, prepared at his request by an outside law firm, showing that the federally subsidized passenger rail service had, as Grassley said, "systematically violated the letter and spirit of the Inspector General Act." Immediately after the Amtrak board meeting where he presented that report, Wiederhold submitted notice that he would retire.
Those familiar with the congressional investigation say Wiederhold has denied being forced out at Amtrak -- personal considerations were also involved in his decision -- but the report he submitted June 18 details a pattern of obstruction by Amtrak's law department.
This department is the bailiwick of Amtrak vice president and general counsel Eleanor "Eldie" Acheson, who just happens to be a longtime friend (and Wellesley College roommate) of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Acheson's deputy general counsel, Jonathan Meyer, joined Amtrak after spending six years as a top Senate aide to Joe Biden, who has long proclaimed himself as Amtrak's No. 1 advocate in Washington and who personally announced the $1.3 billion in "stimulus" funds for Amtrak.
Led by the well-connected Acheson and Meyer, Amtrak's law department tried to require the IG's office to get prior approval before communicating with Congress and instituted a policy where documents subpoenaed by the IG's office were first reviewed and occasionally redacted by Amtrak management.
None of this squares with the law and Grassley, the congressional patron saint of inspectors general, wrote in a letter to Amtrak chairman Thomas Carper that, in the wake of Wiederhold's retirement, IG staffers were "fearful of retaliation" if they spoke to congressional investigators. The seriousness of these charges prompted Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, to join with the committee's ranking Republican, California Rep. Darrell Issa, in announcing an official investigation, parallel to the probe led by Grassley's team in the Senate. . . .

You can (and certainly should) read the whole thing, but just consider all that has been reported about the Amtrak case in the past three weeks. (USA Today is just now catching up to this scandal train.) Grassley's office published the 94-page report, detailing the pattern of obstruction by Acheson's department, disclosed the "retaliation" fears of IG staffers, the Towns-Issa inquiry was announced -- and that's just the stuff I can actually report about one of the IG cases.

There are various interesting off-the-record tips that I'm still trying to confirm, and there are more developments expected in coming days that I can't report yet. (Rule One: Never burn your sources.) Meanwhile, the Walpin case keeps simmering, with the stonewalling by AmeriCorps officials and other interesting developments.

There is lots of news here. If it weren't for Michelle Malkin, The Washington Examiner's Byron York, The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe -- dig this document dump! -- Youth Today's Nancy Lewis and the Sacramento Bee, I couldn't keep up myself.

The source I call "Deep Cleavage"* didn't return phone calls yesterday. and there are a couple of big tips I need to follow up on, so I'm headed to Capitol Hill again today. Since I'm not one of those $100K-a-year bloggers (I'm starting to think they're a myth, like unicorns and sober Kennedys) please hit the tip jar to help fund this latest shoe-leather trip.

*NOTE: "Deep Cleavage" is a mnemonic device, not a description. It's also the kind of lame pun ("Big tips" = "Deep Cleavage") that appeals to my inner eight-grader. Whether or not this involves a "D" . . . hey, never burn your sources. But these tips are real and they're spectacular.

UPDATE: OK, I'm running behind schedule this morning, but the Spectator story is already linked at Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Red State, Sister Toldjah, Around the Sphere, Urbin Report, And So It Goes In Shreveport, and Memeorandum. Please pay attention to this very intelligent comment from Moe Lane:

So, we’ll see.

For less intelligent people, I recommend a certain tasty beverage known as STFU.

UPDATE 11:20 p.m.: Oh, boy. Chris Dodd? Just a hint from the Hill, but . . . oh, boy.

Memo to Judith Warner

"[Sarah Palin] is the 21st-century face of the backlash against women’s progress. . . . The hatred of women . . . is still alive and well in our society, and when directed at well-educated women, it’s socially acceptable, too."
-- Judith Warner

If Sarah Palin is "the 21st-century face" of anything, at least it's a pretty face, eh?

People who like Sarah Palin don't hate women. But everybody hates whiny bitches like you.

Now, get me a cup of coffee, hon. Cream only.

(Hat-tips: Little Miss Attila and Darleen Click.)

In which I praise Glenn Greenwald

Mark this moment, friends, but Glenn Greenwald's chronicle of how panicky talk of financial "meltdown" led to the TARP bailout that benefitted Goldman Sachs -- well, it's a very valuable aggregation.

This is one of those left-right libertarian populist convergences. The Goldman Sachs bailout infuriates Greenwald because he hates greedy capitalists; it infuriates me because it shows how big government rigs the game, picking winners and losers.

I've got nothing against capitalism, but the buddy-buddy cronyism where Congress, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve decide which companies are "too big to fail," and cuts special deals for politically-connect companies at taxpayer expense -- that's not capitalism, it's Wesley Mouch from Atlas Shrugged.

Long before we had a Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy periodically experienced "panics" where markets collapsed and banks failed. The business cycle of boom and bust is no mystery, and last year's meltdown was just a repetition of a familiar historical pattern. Why, then, the hysteria that led to the recent mania for bailouts and "stimulus"?

So when the government engages in extraordinary interventions, and a few months later politically-connected Goldman Sachs announces record profits, I'm just as pissed off as Glenn Greenwald or any other lefty. It's the government intervention in the market, and not capitalist "greed," that is the object of my ire.

Je suis un bloggeur capitaliste! I'm in it for the money, and the bankers at Goldman Sachs are in it for the money, too. But my economic hardship -- hey, I know all about risky investments -- doesn't get me so much as a teeny little earmark from Chuck Schumer.

American taxpayers have been the victims of a scam. Unemployment is heading toward 10% while Goldman Sachs executives reap huge bonuses, I'm with Cody Willard: Prosecute the thieving jackals. And while we're at it, how about we prosecute Schumer and Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and maybe a couple of Cabinet-level officials, just for the spite of it.

Ben Bernanke! Hank Paulson! Neel Kashkari! Tim Geithner! Let's put 'em all in orange jumpsuits and perp-walk them straight to Leavenworth.

Sending Goldman Sach executives, a half-dozen members of Congress and a few senior administration officials to federal prison won't necessarily do anything to revive the economy, but won't we all feel a helluva lot better knowing the idiots who got us into this mess are being pimped out in Cellblock C for a carton of Newports?

That's not the kind of free-market transaction they teach in MBA programs, but maybe it should be.

The Annals of the Telprompter XXIX

by Smitty (h/t Drudge)

1. Samson had his hair. King David, his sling. And Barack Obama, his teleprompter.
2. And it came to pass, on the 13th day of July of that very odd year for all in the land, 2009, that the teleprompter, gravid with the weighty words of The One,
3. Did gravity-check itself while he was indeed mid-sentence, giving birth to a tinkling mess of tiny teleprompters, too young and innocent in His sight to remember The Words that had just been scrolling across their shiny little parts.
4. “Oh, goodness,” a startled President Obama said. “Sorry about that, guys.”
5. He then proceeded on with his remarks, “To pull our economy back from the brink, including the largest and most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation's history…”
6. For the rest of the speech the president relied on the one remaining teleprompter, to his right, and notes on his podium to finish his speech.
7. Shards of glass remained near the president’s feet for the duration of his speech.
8. And the chief sycophant Gibbs did hastily prepare remarks to the effect that this was a joyous event, that the little teleprompters would be nurtured into a new clutch of glorious teleprompters,
9. and that this event was in no way a sign of Divine disfavor, not the antithesis of a Dove descending, and it was at most an act of overt ill will plotted by Rush Limbaugh, or Karl Rove, or even pro-Cheney elements remaining embedded at the CIA.
10. Janet Napolitano immediately suspected a deranged Iraq war veteran running amok with a hex wrench of having perpetrated an act of overt insurrection.
11. Rahm Emmanuel, while unwilling to dignify the situation with the label 'crisis', was also unwilling to let the fragments go to waste, figuring to score a few sheckles each for keychains and accessories, even as much as a pair of earrings.
12. But the people of the land knew the symbolic importance of the teleprompter, how that its anguished self-sacrifice was a plea for rebirth, as a nation cried out for release from the worst outburst of Ugly Bar Charts and Heinous Line Graphs since Ross Perot ran for POTUS in 1992.

Pat Buchanan's Very Excellent Idea

Via Hot Air:

The problem with Pat's approach is that it's far more humane than this punk deserves. As I've said before, the big mystery to me is why Levi Johnston's horribly mutilated corpse hasn't been fed to a pack of wolves.

Complete Moral Authority! (BUMPED)

I'm watching Sen. Amy Klobuchar singing paeans to the authentic experience of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. One notes that liberals never seemed particularly impressed with the authenticity of the World War II experience of, inter alia, Strom Thurmond or Joe McCarthy.

Authentic experience only matters when it leads someone to endorse the regnant liberal consensus.

UPDATE 6:50: Never has a blogger been named with less irony than Instaputz, which gives me "Quote of the Day" status, links a 2002 Atrios post quoting League of the South founder Michael Hill and then misattributes Hill's quote to me, all of which is cited as proof that I am "an unrepentant white supremacist."

As to the matter of whether defending Trent Lott makes Michell Hill a "white supremacist" (unrepentant or otherwise) I'm content to let Hill speak for himself. The related question of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism is something else entirely. Instputz apparently believes that his own confusion justifies dragging me into a seven-year-old controversy in which I was not a participant, so that he can accuse me of being "unrepentant" of an ideology I never espoused.

What infuriates me is that idiots who can't even get their facts straight, who play mix-and-match quotes in the process of assembling their "Ransom Note" smears, nevertheless consider themselves so much my moral superior as to authoritatively condemn me based on their own ignorant misconceptions, and then act astonished that others don't do the same.

FWIW, in referencing Klobuchar's paeans to Sotomayor, I chose the examples of Thurmond and McCarthy -- prominent figures in the liberal demonology -- specifically to highlight how liberals use "heroic" narratives to justify their own allies, as if a heroic biography proves political virtue. At age 38, Thurmond volunteered with the 82nd Airborne and participated in the Normandy invasion, yet none of the liberals who enthusiastically praised the Vietnam service of John Kerry ever counted Thurmond's service as evidence of virtue. Perhaps if Strom had thrown away his medals . . .

By what weird manner of Rorshach association this reference caused Instaputz to invoke Michael Hill and Trent Lott, I can only speculate. But given the universe of wild-assed things I've actually said -- hey, I'm a four-time Malkin Award nominee! -- this misguided attempt to indict me for something I never said shows the bizarre lengths to which liberals will go in their permanent campaign to convince themselves of their own moral superiority.

UPDATE: Linked by that unrepentant green supremacist, Instapundit. Y'know, I feel kind of guilty not jumping on board the green-for-Iranian-democracy blog bandwagon. But my failure to color coordinate my blog doesn't mean I hate either Iranians or democracy. It shouldn't be necessary to say that, but silence sometimes leads to bizarre interpretations, so I figure I'll get ahead of any rumors accusing me of fearmongering the Persian Menace.

Also, while I'm at it, I'm OK with women wearing trousers, but am willing to extend multicultural tolerance to Sudanese who feel otherwise. However, this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of flogging.

When did it get so complicated to be a bien-pensant?

OK, Conor, that was funny

As satire, "my" advice on methods of advanced blogwhoring is devastatingly accurate. However, you forgot the part about telling the bartender to put everything on Matt Welch's tab.

'The Rule 5 Community'?

In celebrating our Sunday babe-blogging ritual, Classical Liberal coins that phrase.

"Community" has a certain flavor of identity politics, suggestive of protest marches and the mau-mau routine, mindless chants led by some demagogic huckster with a bullhorn who insists on being addressed as The Reverend: "No Justice, No Peace!"

Are the Rev. Smitty and I "community organizers"? Do we need some slogans or chants? Our own Judge Sotomayor, to represent the "diversity" of the babe-blogging community?

Or, like the "issues" raised by the demagogic hucksters, is this all merely a shameless pretext to post a photo of Jeff Goldblum's 21-year-old girlfriend, Tania Raymonde?

NTTAWWT.

UPDATE: A card-carrying member of the Rule 5 community, Donald Douglas notes that the "Classy Mommy" blog gets its own New York Times feature based on "60,000 unique visitors every month."

Considering my monthly SiteMeter total hasn't gone below 115,000 since January, I ought to feel outraged. But what about Ace of Spades, whose monthly SiteMeter number is usually about 2 million? Where's the New York Times feature about the hobo-hating Ewok and his merry band of morons?

Nevertheless, despite my resentment at this injustice, I'll offer some useful advice to the Classy Mommy bloggers: Change the name to "Classy Mommy Nude."

You don't actually have to provide nudity. It's just what they call "search engine maximization." Traffic is traffic. Hits is hits. Which is why I'm thinking of changing my blog name to "Lindsay Lohan Topless." Also, dibs on "Selena Gomez Jailbait."

How to Blog?

I'd love to be asked that question, but instead they asked Felix Salmon of Reuters:

Blogs are a conversation. Remember that. They’re not a sermon, they’re not a news article, they’re much closer to a discussion in the pub, or sometimes a graduate seminar. They can be funny, or serious, or angry; they can be two words or 20,000 words long; they can be pretty much whatever you want them to be, including heavily reported. But they’re distinguished by having voice, which is one necessary part of a conversation.

Hmmm. I'm tempted to react to that, but then there's this:

Of course, having a good blog can get you hired, too: there are two sides to that coin, and right now the market in good bloggers is pretty hot, and the number of bloggers making six-figure incomes has never been higher.

Donald Douglas goes apeshit on that one:

I can't imagine anyone making $100,000 a year blogging . . . I want some names! Let's hear 'em: Who's making 100k?

What intrigues me more than the $100K number is Salmon's bland assertion that "having a good blog can get you hired" and that "the market in good bloggers is pretty hot," which I'm tempted to translate as: "Your blog sucks, otherwise somebody would be hiring you to do it."

Salmon, however, wrote his notes on blogging for the South Asian Journalists Association, and they are probably not perfectly applicable to the conservative blogosphere. I know conservatives who are getting paid to do political blogging of one form or another. But they aren't being paid for "voice." They're doing fee-for-service work, delivering an online product rather than personality.

'New Ideas' and Old Mistakes
Adding a personal perspective without becoming entirely personal, conservatives face a demand-side problem in the current blog market. The people who might have the wherewithal to provide $100K incomes for bloggers don't seem particularly interested in regular conservatism -- that is, conservatism of the sort that the average Republican voter wants.

Instead, the money people want "new ideas" from kids like The New Establismentarians or perhaps even, as Professor Douglas notes, Scott Payne's "Twenty-First Century Conservatism," which looks very much like a formula for re-making the GOP in the image of Susan Collins -- a conservatism that NARAL, AFSCME and the Sierra Club could love.

We see here a disconnect, a manifestation of the same problem that the Culture 11 disaster exemplified. Steve Forbes (and other investors whose identity we do not know) correctly believed that conservatism needed "something new," but they didn't have the slightest clue what that something should be. So they hired David Kuo and got Conor Friedersdorf and "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage."

Mercifully, the investors had the good sense to pull the plug before Culture 11 could give us "The Conservative Case for Cap-and-Trade," "The Conservative Case for Keynesianism," "The Conservative Case for Infanticide" . . .

Steve Forbes has been a free-marketeer his entire life, and yet where was the free-market voice at Culture 11? Where was there anything remotely like the cheerful Reaganesque sensibility -- "Hope, Growth and Opportunity," to borrow Forbes' 1996 presidential campaign slogan?

Why is it that whenever someone like Steve Forbes gets the urge to give somebody a wad of money to generate "new conservative ideas," the money never ends up in the hands of actual conservatives? It's like watching a cable channel whose programming consists entirely of reruns of the David Brooks biopic: The Republicans Who Really Matter.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Immediately after the election, I warned against exactly the problems that are now affecting the conservative movement. Defeat inevitably induces doubt, and when the GOP gets its ass kicked, the experience characteristically induces in some Republicans a desire to emulate the liberal victors -- ergo, "new ideas."

In "You Did Not Lose," I argued against the tendency to see election results as an ideological referendum, a rejection not only of conservatism as an idea, but of conservatives as people. In "Don't Overthink It," I argued against the tendency to make an electoral debacle an occasion for the sort of intellectual navel-gazing which predictably leads some to conclude that Republicans could win if only they were more like Democrats.

The reason I warned against these tendencies was because I'd seen them displayed after the Bob Dole debacle in 1996, when both David Brooks in The Weekly Standard and Christopher Caldwell in The Atlantic Monthly launched vicious attacks on the red-state conservative grassroots.

My warnings evidently went unnoticed by anyone important, for once again we see the same gormless quest for "new ideas" we saw 12 years ago, a quest that produced George W. Bush and "compassionate conservatism" and -- eventually -- brought us full circle, right back to Square One. Except that this Square One is not 1997 (when at least the GOP still held its congressional majority) but more like 1965, 1977 or 1993, when the liberal Colossus bestrode the world triumphant, scornful of any restraint.

What the Official Conservative Movement really needs now, as in the wake of those previous electoral catastrophes, is not "new ideas," but rather courage and confidence in some very old ideas -- cf., "How to Think About Liberalism (If You Must)."

However, because my blog sucks, nobody's offering to pay me $100K to promote those ideas, so please hit the tip jar.

The United States of Goldman Sachs

"They exist, and others don't, and taxpayers made it possible."
-- anonymous "industry consultant," quoted by the New York Times, reporting that Goldman Sachs is expected to post record profits Tuesday, nine months after getting $12.9 billion in last fall's bailout

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
-- Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Department of Excellent Questions

by Smitty

Pudge has some simple, yet interesting, questions for Sonia.

But I'd also ask what she thought of President Obama's judicial philosophy, as expressed in Audacity of Hope. In that book, then-Senator Obama criticized "strict constructionism" and its adherents. He wrote:

Some, like Justice Scalia, conclude that the Founding Fathers will tell us all that we need to know, and that if we strictly obey the rules they've laid out -- for example, that the only rights protected in the Constitution are those that are written in plain English as understood by those who wrote them -- then democracy is respected, and fairness is achieved.

After debunking this assertion, Pudge continues:

Obama notes correctly that Breyer is, in essence, a consequentialist ("take the practical outcomes of a decision into account", even if they violate the letter and intent of the law), but it gets worse than merely agreeing with Breyer (which is bad enough). He then writes:

The historical record supports such a theory. After all, if there was one impulse that was shared by all the Founders, it was rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. But it's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to guard against. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or ism ... any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

Coming back to Pudge and Sonia, emphasis mine:

But to bring it back to Sotomayor and her hearings, I'd ask her if she agrees that some notion of a historical rejection of absolute truth or authority of any kind -- explicitly including that of the Constitution itself -- justifies a Justice ignoring what the Constitution actually says in favor of pushing for certain higher "purposes" or preferred "consequences."

'Ignoring' might be a heavy word choice here. Clearly, in altering the fundamentally libertarian course of the Constitution towards a Progressive, utopian course, you can't just turn the ship on a dime. Or course you are not so crass as to 'ignore' the Constitution.

• You have to shame the Constitution as a tool of white, European male oppression. Apologize early, apologize often. The less historically founded, the better.
  
• You have to obscure the timelessness of moral hazards. These had been substantially checked by the three-branch/three-level design of the Constitution. Focus on the shininess of new technology. New people require new thinking. The very age and stability of the Constitution are a bug, not a feature. The fact that it has not already been scuttled, far from indicating a substantially reasonable approach (modulo slavery) instead mean that Progress has more work to do. Trust instead the Latina who is wise.
  
• You have to support leaders who are ready to blow Article Five right off.
• You have to be patient. The cranks who adhere to the Constitution will die slowly enough. It took Moses two generations to prepare the Israelites to enter the promised land. It may take as many as ten to prepare Americans for re-entry into a symbolic Egypt.
• You have to own the media. Get them to lie for you, early, often, systematically. Provide a scapegoat (e.g. a Sarah Palin) figure for them on whom to pour the bile with which they'd love to decorate you.
• You have to have tools like Affirmative Action that claim to promote fairness while, over time, increasingly achieving opposite results. There is sweetness in perversion.
  

So, it's all good. The demolition of all that was good about America can be accomplished.
Sonia is a sufficiently skilled sophist to appreciate the humor in Pudge's question. She may not like him exposing the project in quite so succinct a question. But subverting his mind might make a fine side project for her, along the way to wrecking the Constitution itself. But slowly, with much ornate phraseology.

Rule 5 Sunday

by Smitty

Welcome to Rule 5 Sunday, a pleasant roundup of loveliness from all over the tubey-clouds.

• Now, when when you hear the words "fiction" and "science", your first association might by "Al Gore". Back in the day, though, we did have the likes of Erin Gray. Good times.
• The Daley Gator has some YouTube content with Bar Refaeli that is probably NSFW, to judge by the cheeky still. I can honestly say I havne't followed the link, in the name of preserving my remaining three shreds of my credibility. Two.
• The Classical Liberal classically blended flags with a liberal dose of bikini. The Parthian shot alludes to the CSA Battle Flag. Now, what could that choice possibly mean? Bikini? Coded message? I question the timing! Then he posts an Ali Larter review on Saturday. I fear he is taking over the Stacy-McCain-o-sphere.
• The Patriot Room, always willing to Go Where Lesser Men Fear To Tread, has something of PETA "expose", if you will. For the rest of us, proxy courage will have to do. As a diplomatic gesture towards PETA, we'll throw in a link to a pair of primate ballerinas. This is actually an excuse to wonder out loud if this pair symbolizes US foreign policy, at a high enough level of abstraction. Discuss.
  
• Dustbury: we don't need no stinkin' GPS. And then he confesses to a Melanie Chartoff crush.
• Fishersville Mike thinks Sarah Palin recalls Shania Twain.
• Donald Douglas investigates the political science aspects of women on full-auto. He also introduces Anna Faris, in all her lovliness.
  
• Morgan Freeberg apparently had to "move something" recently.
• Bob's Bar and Grill, which we had feared a victim of the cratered economy, is open for business and admonishes us all to "appreciate the balance and aesthetics (assthetics) of the photograph."
• Esquire has a roundup of 54 jokes from beautiful women. Favorite joke: #42. Favorite lady: why?
• Joyce DeWitt looks slightly the worse for wear after the Troglo-treatment. But he throws in some of Joan Jett-sans-guitar pics of her as compensation. His Trogularity made up for all this with a patriotic roundup. He also posted a picture of Miss Wisconsin, including her name. Plus a Weisz and Shue meditation.
• Three Beers Later has an investigation into Comparative Scandalography as well as an Iranian protestor. Finally, a Brandi Chastain clip, and a wry comment.
• Kottke has a clip about Anna Wintour making the September issue of Vogue "An apt demonstration that an editor/curator's main job is saying no to almost everything." Porch Manqué recommendation: make this woman the Speaker of the House. Yesterday. No, make that last January.
• Lisa Hannigan, courtesy of Chicago Boyz is exactly what we're talking about. Contrast her authenticity with the complete lack thereof in Anna Wintour:

• Jeffords manages to raise a question powerful enough to over-ride our standing "No Britney Rule".
• Chad at KURU's naval architecture studies have him looking for buoyancy in strange places.
• The Paco delivery truck just came by and delivered yet another crucial supply of retro classiness.
• Chris in NJ has some LBI liberation.
• Teach at the Pirate's Cove has a birthday pinup.
• Bob at The Camp of the Saints sends Ava Gardner to, you know, rough Paco up a bit around the edges. This blog hopes to fuel a positively dame-a-licious blog noir war.
• Attention all of you Megan Fox fans out there, Deuce at the Skepticrats has done something, really, really edgy. This blog just links, and takes no responsibility for the side effects. Responsibility is sooo last administration, don't you know.
• Sparing this post from being a total estrogen-fest, Carol presents Hugh O’Brian.

Spam Smitty with cheers, jeers, and links.
Love, peace, and hair grease.
Out.

Doctor Zero vs. Peggy Noonan

A long-form dissection of Noonan's anti-Palinism:

Palin doesn’t "read anything," you see. She's probably not even literate. The moment Noonan is fretting over came when Katie Couric asked Palin which newspapers and magazines she reads regularly, and she couldn’t name one. Given the cratering circulation of print media, Palin is clearly in good company. I suspect the sin that truly damns her in Noonan's eyes is her failure to read Peggy Noonan columns. At least America was spared the horror of a Vice President who doesn't spend much time reading newspapers. Instead, we got a Vice President who should have left his debate with Palin in a straitjacket, and shows no sign of coherent thought at all. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Palin inevitably confronts a problem affecting nearly all busy people in the Information Age: With so much job-related communication to process, there is very little time for non-job-related reading.

People in the news business (e.g., Katie Couric) might consider it proof of erudition that someone regularly reads the New York Times or Newsweek, but many people simply don't have the leisure. It's merely the self-regarding snobbery of the chattering classes that hold that against Palin. The idea that the governor of Alaska needs to read the New York Times every day is silly.
I think Palin suffers in Peggy Noonan's estimation by comparison to Ronald Reagan. When he first emerged as a national political figure with his 1964 "Time for Choosing" speech, Reagan was 53 years old and had spent years traveling the country as a spokesman for General Electric. He was a man of some wealth and, prior to 1966, when he ran for governor of California, also a man of much leisure.

California was a large, rich state, so that the governor had an extensive staff to which he could delegate work, leaving him more leisure than Palin would have as governor of Alaska. And between leaving the governorship in 1975 and becoming president in 1981, Reagan had another period of relative leisure, which he devoted to writing a newspaper column and doing daily radio broadcasts. He was therefore in the news business himself.

So if Noonan compares Palin to the Reagan she knew -- a man in his 70s who had been studying and discussing national political issues for more than two decades -- obviously Palin comes up short, through no real fault of Palin's. The real mystery is exactly why Obama stands so comparatively high in Noonan's esteem, even when it is increasingly clear that Obama's reputation for erudition has been inflated by, among other things, a ghostwritten memoir.

Keynsian economic suicide

Explaining basic economics would be so much easier if one did not have to slog against the tide of misconception created by the idiotics theories of the late John Maynard Keynes and his disciples. The "stimulus" approach that has been pursued by the federal government since last year is based in Keynesian theory: The idea that deficit spending to encourage consumer demand can, through some magic that only Keynesians claim to understand, lead to economic recovery.

This "demand-side" approach fails to acknowledge a host of negative economic impacts of deficit spending. It also fails to acknowledge a basic truth: You can't make capitalism work without capital.

So when I saw Keynesian economist Dean Baker arguing with The Washington Post about the need for a second "stimulus," I felt compelled to try once again to explain this:

The first "stimulus" is, in fact, damaging the prospects for recovery and the debate over a second dose of the same poison is basically about whether we should commit economic suicide faster.

You can read the whole thing. It gave me an excuse to quote something I'd caught while compiling a market report for NTCNews.com, the bluntest possible expression of why the stock market sucks now:

"Nobody's investing because there's no reason to invest," said Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Financial Group.

The Dow has lost more than 600 points in the past month, and there are really no prospects of upward momentum in the near term. Currency-exchange analyst Jamie Saettele applied Elliott Wave theory to the situation:

The interpretation of multiple markets’ price patterns indicate that the deflationary environment experienced in the summer and fall of 2008 has returned. . . .
Stock markets, whether in Europe, Asia, or the United States, all appear headed lower throughout the remainder of 2009. . . .

Saettele has more of that, and a lot of complex charts, but the basic message is: Cash out now.

Sergio Gor, Mack Daddy

Here's a photo from an event I attended Friday at Union Pub on Capitol Hill:

Left to right, David Frum, Hannah Giles, Tom Qualter, Sergio Gor, Lynn Vincent. Yes, I know, it's the second time in three days I've been at the same event as Frum, but that's not the point. The point is the story about Sergio Gor I tell at The American Spectator.

Jimmie Bise Jr.: Inside Cricket Today!

Sundries Shack vs. impenetrable sports reporting:

Now I think I understand the glassy-eyed look I get from non-sports fans when I talk about My Beloved Redskins or the Capitals. I ran across an article in the UK’s Times Online which, I swear to you, is utterly incomprehensible to me. I know it’s recapping a cricket match (game? contest? googly?) and that it turned out badly for England. Beyond that, I’m flummoxed.

Heh. Twenty years ago, when I was sports editor at the Calhoun (Ga.) Times, I imposed a rule on myself: The first paragraph of every game story must include the final score.

This would seem a simple and obvious idea, but by the 1980s, lots of sports writers had picked up the magazine-style method where you begin with an an anecdotal lede -- "Rocky Thompson called his mother before Saturday's game against State Tech . . . " -- then string the reader along to the fifth paragraph before mentioning the final score.

All fine and good for Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated, where you're doing weekly in-depth coverage for stone-cold sports junkies who already know the result of the game played four days before they pick up the magazine. But in a newspaper? No, I'm sorry. The most important fact -- the final score -- needs to be somewhere in the lede.

Is cricket really as mystifying as the Times of London coverage suggests? Or are the reporters just guilty of the same lazy journalistic habits that affect, inter alia, so much financial reporting? As I've learned from editing financial news at Not Tucker Carlson, if you don't already understand bond markets, you're never going to figure it out from an Associated Press story about the bond markets.

Dept. of Lousy Headlines

Ralph Z. Hallow of The Washington Times has an exclusive interview with Gov. Sarah Palin in which she says:

"I will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation," she said over lunch in her downtown office, 40 miles from her now-famous hometown of Wasilla -- population 7,000 -- where she began her political career.
"People are so tired of the partisan stuff -- even my own son is not a Republican," said Mrs. Palin . . .

Read the whole thing, but try not to freak out over the headline:

EXCLUSIVE: Palin to stump for conservative Democrats

Well, hypothetically, perhaps -- assuming there is a contested election featuring a Democratic candidate "who believe[s] in the right things" vs. a Republican who doesn't. More likely, she sounds like she might be signaling her willingness to back some GOP primary challengers -- the Club For Growth types -- against RINO incumbents.

Given that I'm already campaigning for the defeat of the Waxman-Markey Eight -- the worthless sellouts who voted for the Nancy Pelosi's "cap-and-trade" energy tax -- why should I object to Palin joining the RINO hunt?

Also: Anybody want to buy a T-shirt?

UPDATE: Maybe Sarah Palin is talking about campaigning against the Republican senator who had his hand on David Brooks' thigh?

UPDATE II: The editors at The Washington Times came up with a new headline:

EXCLUSIVE: Palin plans to stay in politics

Much better.

Honduran 'Peace' Talks?

by Smitty (h/t Lucianne)

Daniel Cancel at Bloomberg uses the title "Zelaya Returns to Washington After Honduras Peace Talks Stall".
Just exactly how are these "Peace" talks? Has Mel Zelaya declared "war" on his own country? The Honduran fiasco has been the political equivalent of Jenny Sanford throwing Mark out of the house and changing the locks.
The situation is no more a "war" than it ever was a "coup".

Why has no Republican senatorever grabbed my thigh?

If only I had a New York Times column!



Apparently, it's commonplace for New York Times columnists to be groped by middle-aged Republicans, but David Brooks doesn't kiss and tell:

O’DONNELL: What, what’s happened?
BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.
HARWOOD: What?
BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.
O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?
BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you. But so, a lot of them spend so much time needing people’s love and yet they are shooting upwards their whole life, they’re not that great in normal human relationships. And so, they’re like freaks, they don’t know how to, they’re lonely. They reach out. I’ve spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere. And you find a lot of this happens in mid-life and among very powerful people who are extremely lonely.
O’DONNELL: Can I ask one other question David? Do you think, what about female or women politicians? Are they dignified and are there examples of when they have not? Or does it tend to be the men who less dignified?
BROOKS: Yeah, I think that’s mostly a matter of genetics. I do think that…I do think there’s loneliness.
O’DONNELL: That was just a softball, David, and you really hit it very well.
BROOKS: Yeah, I wish I could think of sort of St. Bernards, sloppy women who are licking their aides, but but no, I can’t think of any.
HARWOOD: I’m not going there.
O’DONNELL: Did you have a couple drinks at lunch, David? I mean, this is clearly.
BROOKS: No, you’ve hit me…I’m trying not to be too dignified and stuffy.
O’DONNELL: Well, David Brooks as always, thank you very much. That was a lot of fun. You may not have gotten best column of the week, but you got best appearance of the week, certainly.

If you're going to throw it out there like that, you should at least give us a hint. Otherwise, we'll all just assume it's Lindsay Graham.

Fortunately, My Jaw Rebounded Admirably

by Smitty

It is time for the weekly Full Metal Jacket Reach Around. In the spirit of Buffet (Jimmy, not Warren) we try to take time off just to try and recall the whole week. Our country's collective slouch towards Hopeychangereich is rarely uplifting and never boring. To work:
For starters, Honduras remains a foreign policy train wreck for the US.

• Carolyn Tackett goes there, likening the legitimacy of Zelaya to Chavez, Castro, Noriega and...Franken
• Fausta, who is among the best English-language blogs on the topic, honored us with a link for the Senator DeMint clip.
• No Oil For Pacifists liked the DeMint clip, and offered some excellent Miguel Estrada opinion.
• Paco has some, AFAICT, exclusive video of Zelaya's attempts at repatriation. At least the earlier ones.

The Economy continues to defy all attempts at anything but gallows humor.

• The Daley Gator picked up on Cloward-Piven, and thankfully missed the imagery that came to some with the use of the phrase "Stimulate the GOP".
• Paco's notion of stimulus was more Metallica than I would have gone, but he did link to this blog's observation of the Democratic Party as a criminal enterprise.
• Fishersville Mike knows the mantra: "It's all Bush's fault. It's all Bush's fault."
• Jeffords amplifies the Zimbabwe analysis. Because we have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of ____. The wages of sin is a Zimbabwian economy, but the gift of Barack is good teleprompter. So we got that goin' for us.
• Cynthia has a well-done photoshop highlighting our POTUS the outdoorsman.

She Whom The Left Can Handle As Well As The Truth:

• The Astute Blogger notes something no one else has about the Palin announcement.
• Rhetorican led off with the DNC reaction.
• Deuce the Skepticrats thinks I'm dreaming and complains about his screwed up blog. Nearly narcissistic enough for POTUS, that one. ;)
• Troglopundit requires self-censorship.
• Paco tried not to speculate, but proved goadable.
• Chance at rightofcourse had astute observations.
• The Blogprof has a roundup of video clips, and covered the Ace-Stacy back-and-forth last week.
• Little Miss Attila took a moment to referee the match.
• As did KURU lounge.
• Nice Deb was early with the clips.
• Radmisto juxtaposed RSM and El Rushbo and gave the nod to RSM. Score.
• The Conservative Political Report had a decent early roundup.
• Thankfully, Jimmie doesn't consider me a Helpy Helperperson about the GOP's woes.
• The Cranky Conservative weighed in on the Ace-RSM exchange.
• The Daley Gator "people are going to be looking at candidates who DO NOT fit the same old political mode." or mold.
• Caffeinated Thoughts had a great roundup.
• Brigette at Moralia quoted my "wait and see" response to Sarah, amidst interesting analysis of her own.
• Fishersville Mike: Nobody Knows. The knowledge that Sarah does know has the Left hearing footsteps, which is at least entertaining.
• The Mean 'Ol Meany linked the Don't Feed the Sharks post amidst a mediation upon how "swell" the 24 July Minimum Wage Increase is going to be. For "totally suck" values of "swell".
• rightofcourse picked up the Most Ludicrous Reaction post.
• I may concede Isabella's point on the Most Vile Reaction.
• Pat in Shreveport gives the most vile to HuffPo via Pundit & Pundette
• Jenn Q. Public concurred with RSM's assessment.
• The Classic Liberal is on board with the No Shark Feeding suggestion.
• Jimmie, on the other hand, advocates both barrels.
• Carolyn Tackett has the last word:

  I also believe that if it is God’s will, Sarah will continue and become stronger. If it is His will, she will be President.

  About the only thing to add is that God remains in charge, even if His Will plays out otherwise. Thankfully.

The Obama Administration appears to be weathering IG Gate. For now.

• Dad29 says "So if you haven't fired them, you just re-arrange their Patron, eh?". How cynical. It's almost like you can't trust the administration, or something.
• Pat in Shreveport follows the IG Gate scandal. Deftly kept out of the mainstream media.
• As always, WWU-AM remains your index of all things IG-Gate.

I'll be happy to be wrong on this one:

• Jimmie accuses me of nasty thoughts about where the non-regard for Senate ratification of treaties
could go.
• Rhetorican gives linky-love too.

Stacy, Interweb Master of Romantic Intrigue, assumes credit for the Suderman-McArdle liason:

• Moe Lane agrees.
• Pundit and Pundette don't hesitate to concur.

On the topic of intimate fitness:

• Fear and Loathing in Georgetown:

  As is often the case when FLG gets a bunch of new visitors, the emails begin to arrive commenting on the odd mix of vaginas, vibrators, and profanity with posts about Aristotle and international affairs. FLG knows people find this weird. He thinks it is their problem.

• The Constitution Club mis-attributes the Tatiana Kozhevnikova post to me. Call me a boring monogamist. I'm content that others are happy, without poring over these details.

Brooks floggin' is good bloggin':

• Great title at Paco: "When Paving the Road to Hell, If You're Out of Good Intentions, You May Substitute Vain Pretensions". If you've only three letters for Brooks' opinions, recommend "Ass".
• Obi's Sister takes a Cookie Monster route.
• The Ordinary Gentlemen included the Brooks post in a roundup. Thanks, E.D.
• Rational Review hat tipped us. Why a purportedly Libertarian Web Journal would quote the gentleman (Brooks) is unclear.
• The Daley Gator revealed that Brooks is the "other white meat", AND gave him the inaugural Moral Retard Award. High praise indeed, if viewed while engaged in a headstand.

Mark Lux needs a Three Dimensional Loser Award:

• Teach over at the Pirate's Cove picks up the response from Mike Lux at PuffHo. He, Mike Gibson, and I had taken Lux to task for making statements like

  Conservatives have always argued that tradition should be revered and change should be feared. They have always argued that too much democracy is a dangerous thing. They have always opposed expanding the idea of equality -- to blacks and women and the poor, to immigrants and migrant workers, now to LGBT individuals. They have always argued these things, and they still do. And progressives from Jefferson and Paine to those of today have always fought for more democracy, more equality of opportunity, more investment in regular people as opposed to giving everything to the elite and letting them run things.

  I find that too laughably trollish for my limited time. I will offer a moment of silence for the brain damage suffered by "all both" of the people who buy and read this man's "work".
• On my personal short list, Morgan Freeberg echoed the disdain for Mark Lux's holiday hijack.

4th of July Roundups:

• The Dailey Gator has an impressive 4th of July roundup.
• As did Human Trend.
• Carol at No Sheeples Here included us.
• Jesse Hathaway rounded us up, too.

Miscellaneous shouts:

• Blogging machine Donald Douglas recalls a fun Will Wilkinson post.
• The Classic Liberal liked the Al Franken post
• Hyscience echoed the "Styrofoam Diadem of a Clown"
• Here's to you, American Catholic.
• Conn Caroll at The Next Right points out two of the 8 Waxman-Markey GOP losers who are on the NRCC Patriot Program list. *wretch*
• Stephen Gordon had a lengthy Tea Party post, well worthy of attention.
• Thanks to Carol for a mention on her Honest Scrap post. And for just being generally wonderful.
• Paco links the 9/12 March on Washington. Look for this to become an Intensely Big Deal. Amusing Lefty paranoia, too.
• I scored a Best of the Blogs quote in a great Patriot Room roundup. Glad somebody understands my second motive for blogging, after therapy, is ego massage.
• Knappster links the How to get a million hits post.
• Nice Deb linked the Mr. Jefferson post.
• I made Troglopundit's random quotes post.
• That Binky fellow at Steynian linked the lawyer Satan post. And that is one mad roundup.
Bob at TCotS notes that Stacy may have gone over to the Dark Side

That concludes another FMJRA roundup. Oversights, cheers, jeers, and Rule 5 Sunday inputs go to Smitty.