Copyright © 2009 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2009 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings.
Email: |
I beg to differ. The former commander of the USS Cole thinks Obama is considering the wrong factors when setting policy:
I think he's got it backwards, seeing as how we're founded on certain ideals, and one of the premises of the Declaration of Independence is this:
I'll grant that the Declaration of Independence is not the Constitution, but are human rights not among the unalienable Rights endowed by the Creator? Is Commander Lippold suggesting that the ideas in the Declaration are "so September 10"? Given how our country struggled in its infancy, and the dangers it faced, I think it's a little self-absorbed to say that what we face is more serious than what our founders faced. Those premised need to inform policy. They have to; they're our ideas.
Is the party affiliation of corrupt Democrats being hidden? When the media fail to "adequately" emphasize the party affiliation of a Democrat who's been charged, it's sometimes taken by bloggers on the Right as an example of MSM liberal bias; that is, some kind of willfully-imposed silence. The arecent arrest of the mayor or Hartford was cited this week as a case in point. The local newspaper didn't mention his affiliation in the first article at all, and in a later article not until the 13th paragraph. I don't think the pattern is very clear from these two observations, seeing as how the primary audience for the Hartford Courant is not national, but local, and the local audience could be expected to know their mayor's affiliation. But others took it further, and noted that "Democrat" wasn't mentioned often enough in the news.google listings on the item: if you add "Democrat" to a search with the three terms hartford mayor arrested, you only get about 60% as many hits when you don't add "Democrat." Is this proof that it's not mentioned often enough? Well, even if you assume that the coicidence of terms is an identification of the mayor as Democrat, the answer is "no." Using news.google hits, just as high a percentage had "democrat" in the results following the arrest as in the week beforehand. So it's not like the arrest led to a conspiracy of silence on his affiliation. Secondly, what constitutes "enough"? As I said earlier, local consituents could be expected to know the affiliation and not need to be informed. Third, is the assumed silence worse for charged Democrats than it is for charged Republicans? Gulfport mayor Brent Warr (R) was arrested on fraud charges this week. A check I did on news.google two days ago showed over 300 hits including these terms (no quotes: gulfport mayor warr) but only one when "republican" was added to the mix. (And among the many failing to identify him as a Republican was the New York Times, a favorite target of the Right.) Today it's increased to 66 out of 345, but still much lower than the 60% seen for the Hartford mayor. There may actually be a bias against identifying the party of corrupt politicians, but I think Powerline hasn't done enough to identify a pattern and point fingers yet.
By your signal reforms ye shall be judged. Even though no Republicans in the House voted for Obama's stimulus package, Kevin Drum sees a worse indicator of obstructionism in the vote on delaying the switch to digital TV signals: although all Senate Republicans voted for a compromise, not so in the House. In the last Congress there was a point where the GOP was so set on voting no that they accidentally did it on their own bill!
The train I ride on... Howlin' Wolf... Occasioned by a little something I viewed tonight, a DVD rental called "American Folk Blues Festival, 1963-1966." Well worth your hour.
It's hell to be a Republican. Remember Rush Limbaugh, after the Democrats lost Congress in 2006?
Well, Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell sang a similar tune this morning on NBC's Today Show:
Maybe if they tried a little honesty, they wouldn't be in such a fix? Well, as we prepare for the tricentenary of Johnson's birth, maybe the GOP would do well to remember something he wrote 250 years ago, in Idler No. 10:
Then again, maybe they'd rather sweep the Doctor under the carpet, seeing as how one of his most famous quotes noted the use which scoundrels put patriotism to.
A long road is getting longer. No, we're not talking about road improvements thanks to the stimulus package, but the process in determining Minnesota's Senator. The Coleman campaign's attorneys are trying to make sure that the seat goes to Coleman, and not Franken. And their current evidence is photocopies of rejected absentee ballots; copies which the Coleman campaign admits bear its markings; and due to the fact that the evidence is photocopies and not originals, difficult to determine the provenance of the markings:
It was sad enough when the Gabler edition of Ulysses relied on photocopies to make judgments about a great piece of literature; this is sadly stupid, expecting judges to rule on photocopies.
Sounds like a litmus test to me. Over at NRO's Sandbox, Andrew McCarthy oversimplifies the decisions of Senators which really might have been complex:
Without further evidence, it's probably a stretch to say it was "just fine" with those who voted to confirm Geithner; as in, they didn't care a whit. However, life is full of mixed bags - - you can support a politician on the basis of the whole rather than a single factor. Some people do, some people don't. And they may eliminate autos from their consideration set on the basis of mileage, or allow poor mileage cars because they have (to them) compensating virtues. I think it would be rare to hear someone say their car's crappy mileage was "just fine" with them, without citing other virtues. McCarthy, however, seems to live in a do-or-die world. All hingeing on some singular specific thing, like whether or not he screwed up on his taxes. I don't mean, for a moment, to say it's inconsequential; but it takes a pretty myopic view to focus on that one thing. Kind of like child care: how many qualified nominees have gone down the tubes because they hired an illegal for child care? (And how many in the stoning party bothered to do anything about the difficulties of finding adequate child care after their subject had been successfully stoned?)
Are actors an empty vessel? I think I saw this argument recently, but can't remember where. At first I thought it might have been at a conservative blog from the Wild Rice State, but a cursory review suggests I was wrong. Maybe it's a straw man not worth bothering with, but if you're in the mood...
Burns. Yes, it's today. Here's your guide.
Case study in oversight. Of course, "oversight" has two completely different meanings. Sadly, we have different histories for protestors and people who, like, want to kill us.
Hillary Clinton is to Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, as Condoleezza Rice is to...
OK, we're back. Sorry there was no "Thursday" picture; my host decided to do a system-wide password reset, and the process wasn't clear regarding how to change. But I can now log in, I can now use FTP, and as you can see, there's a new picture for your enjoyment. A belated complaint about the Obama White House web site: I, and so many other bloggers, dutifully linked to pages on the White House web site as it was set up under the Bush Administration. Apparently they've gone off to the memory hole, which is disappointing, as it was nice to be able to easily access important speeches like the 2002 Cincinnati speech and the 2003 SOTU. I don't know that any statements have been issued about if/where they'll be archived, but I really regret their loss.
|
|
