The Right Wing Professor's Blog

This is all over the blogosphere, and hardly anywhere in the mainstream media...yet. Just google 'Hadley CRU hacked' and you'll find what you want, although most of the most prominent skeptic servers seem to be overloaded right now.
Briefly: a server at the Hadley CRU at the University in East Anglia was hacked, and thousands of files posted in a data archive on the internet. The files contain authentic-looking emails from some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, some of which are devastating, since they discuss data fudging and outright fraud, illegal transfers of funds to Russia to pay for data collection, and overtly admit that climate models don't agree with the last 10 years of temperature data.
The BBC now confirms the hacking. This ain't no fraud.

These involved actual violence. The Lincoln Police thought that issuing the description was important enough, they included it as part of their Crimestoppers report.

The LJS begs to differ.

Lincoln police are looking for two men who robbed a Union College student early Friday. A 21-year-old student walking near the college on 48th Street from Prescott to Lowell avenues was approached by two men who asked him the time, said Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood. The student said he didn't know, and the men asked if he had a cell phone, Flood said. The student said he did not have a phone, and, he told police, one of the men punched him in the face. The men then grabbed his wallet from a pocket and took his driver's license, debit card and student ID, but left his cash, Flood said. They ran south from the scene. The student lost his glasses during the incident and suffered a swollen upper lip.

Near Union College? Probably a couple of those dangerous Seventh Day Adventists!

Obama grovels yet again before a hereditary monarch.

Would some grown up at the State Department please let the unqualified imbecile know that excessive deference is not expected between heads of state, even by inbred aristocrats like Akihito and Abdullah, and least of all from the leader of the world's only superpower. A polite nod is quite adequate. This sort of thing sends a very strange signal. But then, he's a very strange man.

God help us when he visits China. He'll probably knock head.

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The invaluable Judith Martin covered this very topic a couple of months back. Quoting:

But symbolic subservience to a foreign ruler is worse. When Miss Manners sees American citizens delighting in bowing or curtseying to royalty, she tries to remind herself that they are just being silly, not treasonous. When an American official does it, we can only hope it was because he was noticing that his own shoelace was undone -- and not that he recognizes the divine right of kings in general, or the authority over us of that king in particular.

In this, as in so many things, he could take a lesson from Dick Cheney.

That's how an American greets a foreign head of state.

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Hot Air Pundit has a nice collection of photos of other heads of state greeting the Japanese Emperor. Far from bowing, the King of Morocco looks like he didn't bother to shave!

The UNL Board of Regents is currently considering a motion which would effectively end embryonic stem cell research at the University of Nebraska. This is a very bad idea. One of the most important outstanding issues in biology and medicine is to understand how an undifferentiated ball of cells turns, in a matter of weeks, into the complex human organism.This knowledge will not just open windows to improving human health, but will help us understand who we are.

There is no scientific basis for the motion; it's an expression of a sectarian religious belief. The idea that an embryonic stem cell is somehow 'human', in the sense that the skin cells we slough off every day are not, is a result of the not merely unscientific, but anti-scientific, idea of ensoulment. When an embryo divides to make identical twins, rather than develop into a single organism, does God deliver an extra soul? When two embryos fuse to give a chimera, as they very occasionally do, does the person that results have two souls? If we manage at some point to get an induced pluripotent stem cell (look it up!) to divide and differentiate into a baby --and that's not a scientifically impossible idea -- where will the new soul come from? Should we save all our adult stem cells, in case this becomes a future possibility?

Just the possibility we might pass the restriction is already hurting research here.

The Lincoln Journal Star appears to have reinstated its policy of suppressing the description of crime suspects if the suspects happen to belong to certain groups. Compare and contrast: Lincoln Journal Star

Police are looking for a group of people who forced their way into an apartment Wednesday night, assaulted a woman and fired a gun. Four suspects forced their way into an apartment on the 1100 block of E Street around 10:50 p.m., said Capt. Joe Wright. There were three people inside the apartment, Wright said. One of the suspects struck a 38-year-old woman on the head with a handgun. She was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The suspect then shot the gun inside the apartment three times, but no one was hit, Wright said. All the suspects left without taking anything.

KOLN-KGIN

Police are investigating a shooting in Lincoln where the victim's say someone broke into their apartment. Officer Katie Flood said police responded to a shooting call at 1111 E Street at 11:00pm Wednesday night. Flood said 3 men inside had invited 2 women over to visit for a while, but they left at 10:50pm. Flood said 30 seconds later one of the women knocked on the door, but when the victims opened the door the women were there with two black men. One of the men had a .357 Magnum revolver and forced his way into the apartment. Flood said the victims tried to hide, but the man with the gun hit one of them in the head and shot at him 3 times, missing with each shot. Flood said the group fled and no one else was injured. Officers know the identity of one of the women but are still searching for all 4 suspects. The man with the gun was described as a black male in his 30s, 5'9"-6'0" 250 pounds, wearing all black clothes.

Why would you buy a local newspaper if that paper suppresses information it thinks you shouldn't know?

A thoughtful and sobering piece, from a Canadian writer.

Morale had been descending in Afghanistan, from what I could make out, among an under-manned allied force in serious need of reinforcement; casualties rising on uncovered flanks.And then they hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and quick, unemotional decision-making process. After all, he announced his (vacuous) "comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" to great fanfare last March. All he has to do now is give it substance. The Bush administration was, for all its misjudgments in other areas, good at making clear, clean, practical decisions with troops in harm's way. Bush himself commanded overwhelming support in the military vote for his re-election in 2004. John McCain, who could also be taken as having some idea about military issues, largely kept that vote. If Obama thinks he can now win the trust of soldiers, by blathering to them about the solemnity of his own august personal angst, he is as much of a fool as he looks to them already.

And the finale...

I can, in fact, find nothing, in his record so far, resembling a presidential decision, or specific presidential direction; only purple prose, almost never to the point. It is surely evident by now, this is a president who cannot make decisions. It grieves me that the soldiers must pay for that.

...is published in the Daily Nebraskan today.

Particularly amusing is the incoherent rage it seems to have provoked in a couple of our students. It's a shame they seem to have adopted Keith Olbermann as a model for how one should conduct oneself publicly.

The CDC estimated yesterday that the horse has already left the barn for one fifth of the nation's children, who had already contracted H1N1 in the first two weeks of October, some fatally. Meanwhile New York suspended its mandate that health care workers get vaccinated, because there simply isn't a sufficient quantity of vaccine available. At this point, with the rapid progress of the epidemic, it's likely much of the vaccine will be wasted, simply because most people will have gotten the disease before they ever have access to the vaccine. The Federal government has had around 9 months to gear up for this, and flu vaccine production is not rocket science. They simply dropped the ball. Yet Obama, with this conspicuous failure unfolding before our very eyes, wants to put the entire national health care system in the hands of federal bureaucrats. And it was revealed yesterday that while America's kids are losing millions of school hours and occasionally dying from H1N1, the gummint is donating 10% of our desperately short vaccine supplies to other countries.

Meanwhile, it's three months and counting since General McChrystal asked for additional troops for Afghanistan, and no decision has been made. Are we seeing a pattern here?

In fact it appears the the White House has been neglecting Afghanistan to focus on its real war of necessity, the war on Fox News. Taking a leaf from his pal Hugo Chavez's book, Obama yesterday tried to ban Fox News correspondents from the press pool covering the pay czar's announcement of government control of salaries. Fortunately, the rest of the press pool, Obama lackeys though they mostly are, rebelled. After all, once Fox goes, the next likely target would be ABC. Jake Tapper has a target on his back.

A new and perhaps unmatched standard in yellow journalism was set yesterday by Nancy Hicks, writing in the newsletter of the Nebraska Democratic Party Lincoln Journal Star. Originally titled Johanns' Objection sank Nebraska's chances for highway money, but retitled this morning to replace 'sank' with 'hurts', the story is apparently based on a press release from the Nebraska Democratic Party, and, as you might expect, is almost entirely false. Hicks claims:

Sen. Mike Johanns singlehandedly stopped $300 million in federal highway funds from moving forward during a U.S. Senate debate in late September. Nebraska would have received $64.8 million for highway and street construction and maintenance from those funds, including more than $4.5 million for Lincoln streets and $11.2 million for Omaha.

Needless to say, this is a total fabrication. What happened is that the Federal Highway Administration on September 30 was scheduled to rescind $8.7bn in surface transportation funds. This happened because the Surface Transportation Act of 2005 employed a gimmick to stay within budget rules; usually Congress plays chicken but diverts the funds from somewhere else in time. In July, GOP Senator Kit Bond tried to divert some of the stimulus money, already budgeted for infrastructure, to this fund. The Democrat leadership buried the proposal. Instead, on September 30 they tried to do a stopgap measure with $300 million in TARP funds, to cover contracts that had already been issued in anticipation of the transfer. TARP monies (you may remember) were supposed to be used to purchase toxic assets from banks, but have devolved into an all purpose slush fund. David Vitter, who is on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, wanted to put a hold on this to force a vote on the stimulus fund transfer, but couldn't be present, so he asked Johanns to do it. The fund diversion needed unanimous consent under Senate rules, so this effectively killed the measure. But it was dead anyway; it wasn't in the House bill, and the House couldn't have passed it if it were, since it violates House pay-as-you-go rules, and the House had already gone home for the day. The funds would have been rescinded on October 1, regardless. It's all explained in gory detail here.

That's not the worst of it, though. Of course Nebraska wasn't scheduled to get $64.8 million of the $300 million: is Ms. Hicks so dumb she thinks Nebraska gets 1/5 of all federal transportation dollars? In fact, Nebraska was slated to get only $64.8 million of the entire $8.7 billion recission. And we apparently were to get little or none of the $300 million stopgap funds; neither Lincoln nor Omaha, major recipients of the money, had issued any contracts, since they were not counting their chickens.

I expect this sort of thing from the Nebraska Democrats, who, if they couldn't lie, would never issue a press release. But for a journalist to repeat it, screwing up the numbers completely, is unconscionable. This is, of course, not the first notice I've had to take of Ms. Hicks' political propaganda masquerading as reporting.

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The real key is that TARP funds will expire on December 31, 2009, meaning unspent TARP money will ultimately reduce the national debt and not have to be paid off by the taxpayers. The Democrats regard that prospect with horror.

So yesterday it was confirmed what some of us have known for some months; that the comically misnamed 'Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska' have invited Billy Ayers, occasional terrorist, academic scam artist, Obama ghostwriter and fundraiser, and all around moonbat, to deliver an address on 'academic freedom' at their annual meeting

Ayers' commitment to academic freedom is legendary. The terrorist organization he founded, Weather Underground, in their founding document called for the use of force to close down schools and colleges, until such time as they admitted 'all black and brown people' without admissions requirements, had no flunk outs, full scholarships for everyone, and a whole lot more groovy stuff, including the usual calls to 'off the pigs'. Since the universities obdurately refused to do all that, the Weathermen turned to bombing them. Harvard's Center for International Affairs was the first to experience Billy's novel brand of academic freedom. The bombing was carried out by his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, ostensibly to protest the Vietnam War, although it's been suggested Bernardine was also mad because she thought the center didn't have enough women faculty.

Another blow for academic freedom was struck the next year, when they bombed the office of William Bundy at the MIT Research Center. Bundy was a professor of history, but had previously worked for the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, and so needed to be liberated.

As the police manhunt intensified, the Weathermen's bombings petered out; but Billy renewed his commitment to free thought at the academy, by including Karl Armstrong in the dedication list for his manifesto Prairie Fire. Armstrong was a 'political prisoner', according to Billy. The rest of America thought he was doing time for the murder of physicist Robert Fassnacht, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, who had the misfortune to be working late when Armstrong and some friends decided to bomb a mathematics research building.

Billy managed to get off scot-free when the government mysteriously dropped all charges against him, citing prosecutorial misconduct. He went back to college, and eventually became a professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle. RWP has occasionally unkindly speculated that it might be possible to train a monkey to be a professor of education, except that it's hard to find a monkey crazy enough. Billy's field of interest is 'teaching for social justice', which apparently is based on the idea that we shouldn't be teaching all that square math and reading stuff, man; we should instead be teaching the kids to collectivize the means of production, man. Dig it! His thought has advanced significantly since the 1960's. These days he only occasionally ends a sentence in the word 'man'.

Oddly enough, so many narrow minded people are opposed to inviting Billy to speak about academic freedom and how it can be enhanced using high explosives, that the President of AFCON, Dwayne Ball, felt it necessary to justify it in their latest newsletter. The Weathermen were formed to protest the Vietnam war, says Dwayne, which is actually not true -- they were formed to bring about a violent Marxist revolution in the United States. And no one was ever killed in their bombing campaign, he says, which also just a little bit of a fib: the correct body count is three certains, one probable and a few more possibles. Those were bad times in that there Vietnam era, says Dwayne, which is why there's that picture of Billy trampling on an American flag, except the picture was taken in 2001, a date by which even the stoners had found out the war was over. The photo was taken to celebrate the publication of Billy's selective memories of his life as a terrorist. Just after that picture was taken, in the 9/11/2001 edition of the New York Times -- oops! -- he said he didn't regret the bombs, and actually wished he'd planted a few more. So many universities to liberate, so little time!

Rumor has it next year AFCON's featured guest will be Roman Polanski, who will be talking about 'safe kids'. Charlie Manson, the alternate, is likely to be unavailable.

This could be a major scandal; serious indications of 'cherry-picking' (selecting only data that agree with one's theory) in the reconstruction of climate data for the last 1000 years.

Something personal and unimportant: as someone who has passionately defended climate scientists on conservative fora over the last few years, and vocally argued the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming, I feel betrayed by the shoddiness we're seeing in the data handling and the science. I still believe AGW is happening, but my level of confidence is far less than it was five years ago.

...but in late March. The school district confirms what RWP surmised some days ago.

...in SW Lancaster Co.. We had a light frost on the grass this morning. September 29 is about 2 weeks early by my reckoning. My God, what are we doing to the Earth?

I helped the New York Times yesterday with a piece on Najibullah Zazi's plot to make TATP. Mostly I analyzed the materials he had purchased, and how he was planning to cook the explosive. They were kind enough to cite me as a source. I'll write a more detailed analysis of what's contained in the Zazi indictment on my science blog later.

...from my colleague Tom Zorn in Finance. Well worth a read.

Fox now has the lyrics of the Obama adoration hymn that Burlington Township elementary school kids sang in honor of teh 0. It appears they adapted the words of the children's hymn 'Jesus loves the little children', substituting Obama for Jesus.

Black and yellow, red and white
They're all precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world

He said red, yellow, black or white All are equal in his sight Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama

Surely this is creepy, even to a leftist? Any of you liberals care to comment? And do you now understand why so many people didn't want the President broadcasting a speech into elementary schools?

We are rapidly become a banana republic, with the usual third-world cult of personality around the Son of the King of Kings.

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By the way, since Moammar Qaddafi calls teh 0 'my son', can we start referring to him as 'mini-Mo'? Or would that be racist?

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Filial love: the mini-Mo administration wants to give $400,000 to two Libyan charities, one run by big Mo's daughter, the other by his son. I mean Moammar's actual biological son, not Barack, who, as far as we know yet, is not chromosomally related.

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Incidentally Charisse Carney-Nunes, who originally posted the video, says it was made in June, not Black History Month (February), as the school claims. Look at what the kids are wearing: teeshirts, sneakers, light sweaters, hoodies. Winter clothes? Don't think so.

Greg Laden, the most lunatic of the motley mixture of flakes, fruits and nuts collected on scienceblogs.com (my own theory is the site was created to embarrass those of us who are actual, y'know, scientists) today described Qaddafi's interminable UN rant as 'not a bad speech'.

One wonders what Laden (nominally a biologist) especially liked. The claim that H1N1 was created as a biological warfare agent? The claim Israel killed JFK?

Any liberal could have abandoned missile defense (and most wanted to). Any liberal could have left allies like the Czech Republic and Poland in the lurch. But it takes a special leader to abandon Poland, to appease Russia, on the 70th anniversary of Poland's invasion by the Soviet Union.

David Frum has a good summary of the looming disaster that is teh 0's foreign policy.

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Remember how teh 0 was going to restore our standing and respect in the world? Not so much, it seems. Polish PM Donald Tusk refused even to take a phone call from Hilary Clinton. Makes me proud of my middle name.

...in fact, he could have interjected 'You lie' at many different points in the speech, and still been right.

Scott Harrington, professor of health-care management and insurance and risk management at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how teh 0's horror stories of health insurance recission were grossly exaggerated.

To highlight abusive practices, Mr. Obama referred to an Illinois man who "lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about." The president continued: "They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it." Although the president has used this example previously, his conclusion is contradicted by the transcript of a June 16 hearing on industry practices before the Subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The deceased's sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother's coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General's Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week "window of opportunity" from "one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine," that the procedure "was extremely successful," and that "it extended his life nearly three and a half years."

The Obligation to Participate in Medical Research: on my other blog, a discussion of a recent paper by Ezekiel Emanuel (unfairly but amusingly called the Death Czar), in which Emanuel argues that we are all obligated to submit ourselves for medical research experiments. Step up to the needle, now folks!

And two columns I wrote for the Daily Nebraskan, one telling students why they should be libertarians (for other reasons besides legal marijuana), and the other arguing for a private system of health insurance.

It emerged yesterday that lunatic Van Jones, the President's 'Green Jobs Czar', is a troofer. He signed the 911Truth.org petition, that suggested the US knew in advance of 9-11 (and all sorts of other rich troofy nuttiness). He claimed yesterday evening that he didn't carefully review the language before signing it. But now, this morning, it turns out he was on the organizing committee of 'War Times', a post-9/11 tabloid that in its 'prospectus' claimed the gummint was 'secretly rounding up thousands of Arab Americans and other people of Middle Eastern background' and claimed Bush had a plan for 'permanent war'. This was appended to a announcement of a troofer march in San Francisco.

Friday evening is a traditional time for burying embarrassments. I wonder will the Van make it until sundown.

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Now it appears the Van is a fan of cop-killer Mumia. Is there any moonbat cause of the last two decades this freak has not signed on to?

And Jeffrey Lord, in a great article, discusses how the Secret Service would not have allowed Van Jones to even enter the White House, let alone work for the President, without an override from teh 0, his wife, or Rahm the man.
Hat-tip: Gator Country of DarwinCentral.

I received an email from the local Tea-Party organizers yesterday, warning us, inter alia, not to try to counter-demonstrate against the moveon.org pro-health care rally last night, because we had reliable information they were intending to 'intimidate' counter demonstrators. "Intimidate, schmintimidate, they can't scare me" I said to myself. However, my sweetie had to be driven to the drug-store to pick up a three month supply of medication for the impossibly unaffordable sum of $27, so I couldn't go. Now I find out what they meant; a 65 year old man counter-demonstrating against a similar rally in Thousand Oaks, CA, had his pinkie finger bitten off by one of the leftist ghouls.

moveon.org demonstrators at last night's rally in Lincoln

So this is what Obama means by bringing health care into the digital age? Who knew Night of the Living Dead would be a vital self-defense manual for anti-health-care-reform-protestors? I mean, I've heard Obamoids unkindly compared with zombies, but who knew the similarities extended to dietary habits? And does ObamaCare even cover being bitten by pinkie-eating pinkos?

Purple people eaters?

Or, as someone much cleverer than RWP quipped, "Yes, we cannibal!"

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An even cleverer colleague pointed out that while they can't produce a birth certificate, some of them do have their own death certificates. (No, I ain't a birther. It's what live people call a joke. Dunno the zombie word)

Communist 'Green jobs czar' Van Jones' pet activist organization, called the Color of Change, tried to organize a boycott of the Glenn Beck Show, on account of Glenn uttering some unfortunate truths about teh 0. And in the beginning, it looked like the boycott was working. They managed to convince companies like Walmart and General Mills not to advertise on the Beck show. However, an unforeseen thing happened on the way to stifling yet another conservative voice. Beck's fans fought back, and to escape the duelling activists, Walmart and General Mills have now stopped advertising both on the Beck show and on MSNBC counterparts.

Guess which show can better weather a loss of advertisers? Glenn Beck, who draws 3 million viewers a night, or Keith Olbermann, who draws fewer than a million, most of them too stoned to remember what they were watching? Van Jones may well succeed in driving one of MSNBC's liberal rant shows off the air.

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New today: Van Jones calls Republicans assholes. We're supposed to be bipartisan with an administration that employs creatures like this? Normally I'd say "who cares?" He's a barely literate rabble rouser. And not at all atypical: for example, we have similar obscenities today from a blogger on scienceblogs.com whose entire political vocabulary seems to consist of obscenities and threats of violence. That's the left for you; if it weren't for teh stoopid, there would be nothing there at all. But what exactly are Van Jones' qualifications to be 'Green Jobs Czar'? Moronic comments about polar bears?

Here is the bottom line on the Chappaquiddick case.

The events in the early morning of July 19, 1969 are bookended by two reliable timepoints. One is the sighting of Kennedy's car, containing one male and 1 or 2 female occupants, on Cemetery Lane on Chappaquiddick Island, 12:45 a.m., by Deputy Sheriff Huck Look. And it was Kennedy's car; the chances of another late model dark colored Olds with the license plate H7...7 being on the island at the same time are minuscule, especially since the operators of the only ferry to the island never saw another such car. When Look approached, the car sped off along Dyke Road, a sand track: clear evidence something was wrong. Kennedy knew Dyke Road; he had driven it twice earlier that day.

The second time point is Kennedy, in dry clothes, asking the owner of the Inn where we was staying, in Edgartown, across the channel, for the time, at 2:24 a.m..

In the interim, he had at the minimum, to travel the length of Dyke Road (0.8 miles; maybe 5 minutes, given the state of the road), crash the car with Mary Jo Kopechne inside into Poucha Pond (5 minutes, perhaps; perhaps much longer), walk the 1.6 miles back to the Lawrence Cottage (30 minutes at a very brisk pace, especially given much of the journey was on sand), roust out and provide some sort of explanations or instructions to Markham and Gargan, his confederates (maybe 10 minutes), drive the three miles to the Chappaquiddick ferry dock (maybe 5 minutes), find and unmoor a boat and take it across the channel, then moor it (perhaps 20 minutes) and then get up to his hotel room (maybe 5 minutes). That adds up to 80 minutes. He could have done all of it, at breakneck speed, by maybe 2:05 a.m.. And this coincides with a report of a boat carrying three men tying up in Edgartown harbor at exactly that time.

Could he have done it all in wet clothes? Maybe. One witness (LaRosa), who encountered Kennedy on his return to the cottage, went out of his way to emphasize he couldn't see what Kennedy was wearing. Wet clothes would have impeded his walk, somewhat. And he would have had to change into dry clothes at the hotel, before coming down to ask the time, but he had the ~ 10 minutes he needed to do that. Asking the time is of course a time-honored way of establishing an alibi.

Could he have escaped from the Olds, a big man, impeded by the steering wheel, wearing a back brace, upside down and certainly submerged head and chest in seawater, through the mostly open, driver's-side window? I don't buy it, but it might be within the bounds of possibility.

Could he have dived seven times to try to save her, and then lain exhausted for an indefinite time at the roadside to recover from his exhaustion, as he claimed? No. There isn't time.

Could he have returned, as he claimed, to the site with Markham and Gargan, to try to rescue her? No, there isn't time.

Could he, as he claimed, have swum Edgartown channel back to his hotel? No. First, there isn't time. Second, it's doubtful anyway. At that time of night, the tide would have been running at its strongest into Katama Bay. Anyone diving off the Chappaquiddick dock would have been swept way downstream, and had to walk back to Edgartown. The diver who recovered Kopechne's body tried it at the same stage of the tide later that afternoon, along with two strong swimmers, and concluded he could only have done it by starting far upstream of the dock, or ending far downstream of Edgartown.

Conclusion. Kennedy lied about his story from start to finish. He might have been in the car with Kopechne when it went off the bridge, but merely assuming that makes it a little harder to fit the timeline. And no one ever saw him wet, except his confederates. It is more likely he never got wet at all. The most probable scenario is that he guided the car, idling in low gear, off the bridge, steering through the open drivers' side window, and then hoped to get Gargan to be the fall guy for the 'accident', with him with at least a partial alibi in Edgartown. Gargan wouldn't play ball.

By the way, Farrar, the diver, estimated that Kopechne survived up to two hours in an air pocket at the floor of the inverted Olds. He said her hands were positioned in such a way as if she was trying to keep herself erect. That makes Kennedy's actions, in failing to secure easily accessible help after he put her in this position, at the very least manslaughter. If he'd wanted her rescued, she could have been rescued.

Of course, if he wasn't in the car, which I think is better supported by the data, it was premeditated murder.

There's an obscene joke that can be adapted to this case...the modified punchline is:

You spend 40 years in the Senate, you write hundreds of pieces of legislation, you champion health care and civil rights and education; you become world-famous. And yet, because you commit one little murder, what do they call you?

I use the 'm' word advisedly. It's the only word that fits the facts of what happened at Chappaquiddick around 1:00 a.m. on July 19, 1969. There is absolutely no doubt that Kennedy lied through his teeth, and then used all his considerable influence to frustrate a proper investigation of Mary Jo Kopechne's death.

I will not be watching TV tonight, because my stomach just isn't strong enough to take the crap.

I find it hard to dislike people I've actually met, unless they've done something openly hostile. I met Kyle Michaelis about 18 months ago, when I helped host Ward Connerly's visit to Lincoln. At the time, Senator Christensen's LR232CA -- which would have banned race and gender preferences in Nebraska -- was still alive. Michaelis buttonholed me after the speech, and asked why sexual preference wasn't part of LR232CA. I told him he'd have to ask Senator Christensen about that. He then asked why it wasn't part of (what became) prop. 424. I answered that I thought it was left out for political reasons -- Connerly is actually libertarian, and championed domestic partner benefits when he was a California Regent -- but that in fact, I wouldn't have any problem with it being included in the amendment. After all, Nebraska to my knowledge does not discriminate against or give preference to either gays or straights in education, employment or contracting, and so it would be entirely moot. In fact, I pointed out, since LR232CA was before the Judiciary Committee at the time, it might be an interesting tactical move for the Democrats on that committee to amend it to add sexual preference; that could easily be a poison-pill amendment, given the general obtuseness of the Unicam. This seemed to utterly puzzle him; I think it completely went against his world-view that there might be someone who opposed affirmative action but didn't have anything in particular against homosexuals, and would even support adding sexual orientation to an anti-discrimination provision. So he just kept repeating himself, with a puzzled look on his face. My appraisal at the time was that here we had a classic example of a thirtysomething going on fourteen, and I hoped he grew up before it got to be time to collect social security.

So a few days ago, Michaelis posted an anti-Johanns diatribe on newnebraska.net. Yeah, yeah, I know, it would be a full time job to correct every piece of BS on newnebraska.net, but since this time I happened to have read something that directly contradicted what he wrote (a piece on factcheck.org that rebutted a claim by Obama that the House bill would not result in the gummint paying for abortion), and also pretty much blew out of the water what Michaelis had written about the Hyde Amendment and Johanns. And, of course, anyone with a nanogram of political sense would know immediately that if the House Democrats write a health care bill, it's going to make sure gummint health care pays for elective abortions, and will likely impose that rule on private insurers also, if they receive gummint subsidies. I sent this to Michaelis, in the naive belief he might like to correct what was a pretty gross libel against Johanns. Apparently not; in fact, I see Julie Schmit-Albin has pointed out the same article to Michaelis, and he's essentially blown her off

Oh well; still in search of an honest man on the other side of the aisle.

As a result of their repatriation of a convicted terrorist bomber, Scotland has officially been stricken from RWP's "Dumps I might get around to visiting once I'm done with all the good places" list. Burkina Faso now tops the list.

In case you've been beguiled by the tourist rendition of the skirl of the lonely bagpipes in the keep of a Scottish castle in the misty dawn, let me tell you about the real Scotland. It sucks. It has the highest crime rate in Western Europe. It has one of the lowest life expectancies in Europe. The cities are dirty and crowded and endemically economically depressed. The weather is dark in the winter, and cloudy and dank all year long. The various accents are mostly unintelligible to civilized speakers of English. The food is just dreadful. And the national temperament is moody, aggressive and mindlessly nationalistic, with a chip on both shoulders. Scots are like Canadians on steroids, mentally maimed by resentment of a more successful southern neighbor. The national sport is soccer hooliganism; the national soccer and rugby teams both suck and have sucked as long as anyone can remember, so there's little else to do but get drunk and beat someone up.

Full disclosure; RWP has Scottish connections. The Harbison name traces back (as far back as we can trace it) to Renfrewshire, which was a nice lowland rural county when my great-great-great-...grandfather lived there, but is now Glasgow, the ugliest large city in Europe. My uncle and namesake was Catholic parish priest for Lockerbie and Gretna Green -- yes, that Lockerbie -- and I visited there when I was a small child. I remember the rolling hillsides of the border country, and my first taste of pheasant. I was in Berwick-on-Tweed four years ago, but just to catch a train back to London at the end of my hiking trip up the Northumbrian coast. It was, like most Scottish cities, dour and dark, and it was raining.

A boycott of Scotland should be superfluous; there are actually few good reasons to go there, and they make very little you might want to buy. But if by some odd circumstance you consider either, remember the St. Andrew's crosses they were waving in Libya in triumphant celebration of the return of a man who killed almost 200 American college kids.

(10) More than 25% of Lincolnites show up to vote in a city election, resulting in an all-Republican city council.

(9) Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler discovers the Director of Youth Services he hired 6 months ago is actually Matt Samp using a new alias.

(8) In a poll of progressive bloggers, Kyle Michaelis is voted 'most hated right wing commenter', ahead of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

(7) Lee Terry changes his name to LeBron Terry shortly before the 2010 election, and wins re-election, carrying 90% of the vote in North Omaha.

(6) The Lincoln Journal Star finally goes broke, meaning the Lancaster County Democrats have to start publishing their own newsletter.

(5) BT Osborn, Lisa Hannah and Jane Kleeb get into a three-way death match at the Democrat convention. When the dust clears, the city of Hastings is devastated, and 12 innocent bystanders are dead.

(4) The entire Nebraska membership of SEIU is killed in a freak motorcycle accident.

(3) Ben Nelson's hair elopes with a raccoon.

(2) Ben Nelson is pressured into voting for Cap'n'Tax and ObamaCare, and is massively defeated in the 2012 election

and the number 1 Nebraska Democrat nightmare is....

(1) Ben Nelson votes against both Cap'n'Tax and ObamaCare, and is re-elected in a landslide.

Thank you! I'll be here all week!

Here's another brutal double rape and murder which the national media also seem to have ignored. It's not a hate crime, either. Interestingly, some of the perps in this crime also had previous convictions for robbery.

The trial of Letalvis Cobbins begins today. He had one of the previous convictions for robbery.

Some more specifics, and interesting general observations, from John Leo. He independently (and well before I did) mirrors what I've been writing about the Journal Star

This is a story about a recent racist outrage. Chances are, you've never heard of it.

Last fall, three weeks before the election, a group of four white marines broke into a house in Riverside County, CA. The house was owned by an African-American sergeant in the Marine Corps, and his wife, who was white. The four intruders forced their way in by pointing a shotgun at the Marine sergeant, after a short skirmish tied and gagged the couple, raped the wife, forcing the man to watch, tortured them both for several hours, and then shot them both, execution style. They spray-painted the interior of the house with racist epithets, such as "Nigger Lover". Then they set fire to it. Some small items -- jewelry, a camera and some wedding gifts -- were stolen.

Despite the clear racial element of the outrage, and the hatred evident in the actions of the perpetrators, the prosecutors in California denied and continue to deny this was a hate crime; they maintain the motive was robbery. This, of course makes no sense. If you want to rob a house, you wait until the house is empty. If it's occupied, you go elsewhere; you don't stay and torture and rape the inhabitants. You don't usually choose a house you know to be owned by a Marine sergeant -- non-coms in the Marines are not usually wealthy, and they don't have a reputation of being easy marks. Only someone in serious denial could not see this was a crime motivated by racial hatred. But, in fact, prosecutors suppressed information about the racial epithets for over six months after the crime.

At this stage, I bet you don't believe me. Could a crime like this really happen in America in 2009? And if it did, three weeks before a racially charged election, would it have been pretty much ignored by the national media? Remember the dragging death of James Byrd, and how we never heard the end of it in 2000? This incident was even more horrible. If it had happened the way I describe it, the national media would have been all over it.Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would still be making speeches about it.

Let me now make it all clear. I lied, but only about one thing. I switched the races in the story. The four perpetrators were named Lance Cpl. Emrys John, Lance Cpl. Kesuan Sykes, Pvt. Kevin Darnell Cox and Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller; they were all African-American. The two victims were Sgt. Jan Pawel and Ms. Quiana Jenkins Pietrzak. He was a Polish immigrant who came to the US when he was 10; she was an African-American child-care worker in Brooklyn.

Now it all makes sense, doesn't it?

Some sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jan_Pawel_and_Quiana_Jenkins_Pietrzak

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/11/05/2008-11-05_brooklyn_marine_sergeant__wife_tortured_-2.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/04/03/2009-04-03_grim_twist_in_tortureslay_of_marine_sgt_.html

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Oh, by the way, where is America's first post-racial President in all this? Remember how he was so quick to intrude when an African-African professor was arrested for berating a white police officer? This was the White House's response to a letter from Sgt. Pietrzak's mother.

My Devoted Subjects:

As you may have heard — it was on all three major networks 24/7 for about a month — it has pleased your Exalted Ruler to endow the Obama Dynasty with a canine companion, named Bo. Like all Our Chattels and Appurtenances, Bo receives the best of everything: gourmet kibble, Olympic-trained dog walkers, and of course, the best in veterinary care.

Yesterday, however, as my Secret Service vassals were leaving to take Bo to the Presidential Vet, We were struck by a Presidential thought. “Is this fair?”, We asked ourselves. “Why should Bo get to live a life of continuous, basket-to-grave veterinary care, while thousands, nay millions, of cats and dogs, parakeets and guinea pigs and goldfish and Burmese pythons, do without any health care at all? America spends billions of dollars on veterinary care every year; yet most of our pets receive nothing! The local DC street cats, for example, never see a vet. Why should a few pampered pooches receive the best pet health care in the world, while the average cat has a longevity of 2 years and a kitten mortality rate of 70%? We, as a nation, need to Do Something.”

We therefore hereby graciously deign to proclaim a National Veterinary Reform Initiative. All cats, dogs, and other domestic animals, even tame rats, will heretoforth receive cradle-to-grave pet care protection. Owners will be required to buy Pet Health Insurance; if they can’t afford it, the gummint will step in and pay for it. Expenses for ownerless pets will be paid for by a pet tax, which will probably be no more than $1,000 a year for the average middle class household (but much much more for the rich). Vast cost savings will be effected by computerizing all pet records and by withholding shots from old and addled pets. We will also establish a Pet Czar, who will decide which pets deserve more care than other pets. Valuable and attractive pets, such as Portuguese Water Dogs, will receive the best of care. Goldfish, well, a little fungicide in the aquarium water is perhaps better than most of them deserve. Defective pets and all Chihuahuas* will of course be euthanized, as will loud pets and pets with tendencies to Bite the Hand That Feeds (hear that, conservatives?).

Single payer care has already been implemented on humans in many countries of the world, with impressive results. The average 70 year old Frenchman consumes less in health care resources than the average Shih-Tzu in New York! And because of their fantastic Mediterranean diet and French sang-froid, to say nothing of the sanitizing effect of Gauloise smoke,( and, for some lucky Frogs, regular horizontal workouts with Carla Bruni, by the sword of Idris, that woman’s hot... I wish Michelle would lose a few pounds, especially around her...)wait, where were We? Oh yes, many Frenchmen make it to 71, while putting almost no burden on the State! In fact, the average Frenchman outlives even the healthiest American dogs and cats, and his rabies rate is no higher! Do our pets deserve any less than superannuated Frogs? Well, then!

(I won’t be signing Bo up for this program, by the way. He’ll continue getting his own First Rate, World Class Vet Care. But don’t worry. Yours will be every bit as good, just different, and much cheaper)

So I want each and every one of you to go sign up with your local grass-roots Obama Cats and Dogs for America Chapter, and get out there to lobby for my Veterinary Reform program. Don’t listen to the howls and the hisses of the other side! Let’s look after all America’s pets, not just a privileged few! Do it for the puppies and the kitties!

By the Grace of Allah, I am

Barack Hussein Obama II, Caliph President of the United States

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*Memo to self: need to make sure Rahm clears this with a Latino focus group.

...that allows the Secret Service to 'temporarily confiscate' the cellphones of US citizens so they can't take pictures of the First Lady munching on a burger?

MICHELLE Obama, like her husband, enjoys a good burger, but not as well done. The first lady brought daughters Malia and Sasha to former "Top Chef" contestant Spike Mendelsohn's Good Stuff Eatery in DC for cheeseburgers, onion rings, fries, and milkshakes. "They got the burgers medium," says a spy. (President Obama was mildly ridiculed after ordering a burger medium-well in January.) "Three starving Secret Service guys were literally standing over the grill as Spike made the burgers, but didn't eat," our source adds. Fellow patrons had their cellphones temporarily confiscated to prevent pictures from being taken.

The Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority, following complaints, removed the following advertisement from buses.

Don't believe in God? You are not alone.

OK, say you believe in God. Put the ol' faith thing on hold, and reason a second. The above is a completely truthful statement. 5% (approximately) of Americans are atheists. You could believe in God and utter the above without doing the slightest violence to your beliefs. (You might consider it a deplorable state of affairs, but that's different).

Needless to say, Iowa voted for teh 0, and it's anything but a conservative state. The Governor, Chet Culver, is a Democrat. And he said the ads offended him. Evidently, being reminded of the mere existence of atheists offends him. Rabid bigot, or cretin? Well, he's a Dem,, so it doesn't have to be 'either-or' .

The real irony is that in nowadays in Iowa, a man can marry another man, as long as he subscribes to a book that tells him he should be put to death for it.

You shouldn't sell out the people you appointed yourself to 'represent' (yeah right) and then ask RWP to join you.
Useless organization anyway. The discounts duplicate AAA's (and unlike AARP, AAA really does represent the interests of its members). Their magazine features equal amounts of liberal agitprop, and cheesy pictures of superannuated ex-Hollywood stars hoping they'll look sexy once the editor blurs their facial wrinkles, and photoshops out the Depends bulge around their rears.

It appears that, as grassroots protests against the collectivization of American health care mount, thugs from the SEIU and other leftist goons are resorting to violence.

Nice folk you're working for there, Jane Kleeb.

Michelle Malkin and others are upset the NEA's chunk of the Stimulus Bill is being used to fund the same kind of trash the NEA always funds...shows titled 'Perverts Put Out', nude reviews, and....

“Thundercrack” of which a reviewer raves: “Witness if you dare, the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla. "

RWP, of course, doesn't object to people watching sick, twisted perversion; he just thinks you should download it free off the internet*, like the rest of us, and not rely on the government to buy it for you.

But the NEA has crossed the line this time.

$25,000 to the International Accordion Festival in San Antonio Texas.

Now that's grounds for impeachment!

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*needless to say, you should not use a University of Nebraska computer to do this.

In view of my ethnicity and my known fondness for the substance, I've been asked to comment on the beer summit, and particularly about the choice of brews.

The President is easy. He chose some sort of Belgian-Brazilian manufactured flavored water whose name I will not allow to sully my blog. The subject is beer. He's not planning to drink beer.

Gates' choice is not quite as pathetic, but it's close. I really wanted to like Red Stripe; it's from the Carib., and it's mentioned in Ian Fleming novels. But I couldn't. It's skunk-urine, one of the least appetizing Pilsners I've ever had. It's almost as bad as Molson for skunkiness.

They brew some decent light beers in the Islands. I've liked a couple of the local Bahamian beers. They go down nicely on a hot humid day. But all I can say about Red Stripe is that it's a good beer to have if you don't drink beer, but want to make some sort of lame point about racial solidarity trumping patriotism.

The only half-way respectable brew was chosen by Crowley, who's having Blue Moon. A lot of people are down on Blue Moon because it's made by Coors. I like the Coors family's politics, if not their products. Blue Moon is a bit of a girly beer, but at least it's beer, and it's quite tasty on a hot sunny day when you're thirsty. And when you need to watch what you say, which you would in this company, it ain't going to get you drunk.

And it's a Belgian white ale. Geddit?

All in all, though, I'm not sure what this little photo-op proves more; that we all need to lighten up about race, or that we need to drink better beer.

Latest word on the House 'deal' done with the 'blue-dog' Democrats indicates that it will involve an expansion of Medicaid by about $700 bn over 10 years (or $70 bn a year). 7% of that will be picked up by the states. Nebraska currently represents about 0.5% of total federal Medicaid expenditure; multiply 0.5% by 7% by $70 bn, and you get $24 million a year, which is the approximate direct hit to the state budget annually.

Currently the State of Nebraska's three biggest expenses are aid to school districts ($933 million a year), the University ($497 million a year) and Medicaid (~$670 million a year). The University is continually squeezed by the other two categories; a nearly 4% increase in the state medicaid budget will almost certainly come out of the University's portion, and will represent close to a 5% reduction. That would be catastrophic.

Judging by its crime reports of the last week or so, the Lincoln Journal Star seems to have changed its policy and is now publishing descriptions of suspects, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Of course, this blog had nothing to do with the change.

A truly postracial exploration of 'L'affaire Gates' (including some charmingly recycled Harvard jokes)
"That's Professor Asshole to you, you fascist townie!"

Fraud from the 'Union of Concerned Scientists', today on my Worst of Science Blog.

Soros-funded 'scienceblogger' Ed Brayton is indignant an African-American might not like the NAACP. He calls him an 'Uncle Tom'.

Needless to say, Brayton is no more African-American than he is a scientist. But he sure wants African-Americans to know their place.

Teh 0 is trying to mend fences.

So at the end of the conversation there was a discussion about — my conversation with Sergeant Crowley, there was discussion about he and I and Professor Gates having a beer here in the White House. We don’t know if that’s scheduled yet — (laughter) — but we may put that together.

Consuela! Please bring us two Colt-45s and a Guinness!

It's probably a surprise to many of the readers of this blog, but I have occasionally been accused of racial insensitivity.

Yes indeed. As I rant and rave about why we should have strict equality before the law, it has been suggested to me, more than once, that I don't understand what it is to be black in America. If I did, they say, I'd understand why we need preferences to create a level playing field in the face of the constant daily oppression that black men experience.

And, by golly, they're right. I have had an epiphany. I want to experience oppression first hand, so I can Truly Understand. I want to walk a mile in Henry Louis Gates' shoes.

I want to live as a black man in a city whose mayor is black, in a state whose governor is black, in a country whose president is black, and complain about institutional racism and the Man.

I want a free house in the nicest part of Cambridge MA, a nineteeenth century house with a leafy garden on a quiet street, a short walk from Harvard Square, right next to the Fogg Art museum. To understand oppression, you need to understand the ghetto.

I want a high six figure salary for a job whose principal qualification is to have the right skin color, where the only real requirement is to turn up, unprepared, to teach a class that consists of laying the guilt, thickly, on a bunch of impressionable rich white kids.

I want lots of free time so I can fly to China at someone else's expense, to shoot TV specials that nobody will watch but that everybody has to pay for.

I want to be able to come home, and when a Cambridge city policeman stops by to check if my house has been burgled while I'm away, sass him unmercifully as a racist white cop, and cuss out his mother.

When he's finally had enough and arrests me, I want to be able to call up a Harvard Law Professor to defend me, and have the Harvard Administration send a vice-provost down to city hall to 'monitor' the situation.

When, instead of arraigning me like they would anyone else, they release me, I want to threaten to sue them for millions. Of course, the millions aren't for me, but for my bruthas in oppression.

I want the President to personally intervene on my behalf, to berate the cop whom I abused. Stupid cop. Doesn't matter how racially sensitive you seem, deep down, you're a racist, like all white people. It's right there in the color of your skin.

I need to know oppression first hand. I need to walk a mile in Henry Louis Gates' fine Italian leather loafers.

No, make that ten miles.

After tonight's press-conference, I think it's safe to proclaim we have America's first African American lame duck President.

Yep, the rambling answers, the disconnect from reality -- all the signs were there. Six months into his presidency, Obama is becoming completely irrelevant, eclipsing previous worthy efforts by the purely caucasian Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan. Once again, the record set by old white men is simply wiped out once we let a little diversity into the pool!

Mis hermanos, si se puede!

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Thoughts from Joe the Mouth Biden: at least he's still clean. Articulate, eh, not so much.

I'm not sure what the FEC thinks of free webspace for campaign fundraising, but I'm going to find out. Meanwhile, quoting our latest wannabe dragonslayer...

Instead of two more years of rubber-stamp representation, they want someone who isn't afraid to work with the President if it means creating good jobs, supporting service members and their families in our community, and getting our economy back on track.

We already know that's not what it means. The stimulus was a boondoggle for Democrat supporters, 'Heath Care Reform' will cripple state budgets and raise costs, and 'cap and trade' will do nothing for the environment, but will raise energy costs, and create new layers of government bureaucracy.

But we've already seen Tom White in action in the Unicam, as the architect of Nebraska's safe haven law, possibly the single worst piece of legislation drafted in the last quarter century. Will Nebraska voters punish incompetent performance? Let's hpe so.

Mirabile dictu, the LJS today published a description of a suspect in a robbery.

He described his attacker as Hispanic or Native American, 25 to 35 years old, 6-foot, 180 to 200 pounds, with a goatee and a number of tattoos on his forearms and legs.

Yet in the second robbery described in the story, they didn't give the police description (the robbers were two white males).

It makes no sense at all.

On my other blog, I have an article exposing some newly discovered and rather ghoulish writings by White House Science Czar John Holdren.

... is yet another armed robbery. The report from KOLN-KGIN

Lincoln police say they're looking for a suspect after he robbed several people outside their apartment complex Thursday morning. Captain Jim Davidsaver said at 3:42 a.m. 3 residents returning to their apartments at 6039 Meridian were confronted by a black male armed with a handgun. Davidsaver said the man stole a wallet and tried to steal a purse, fired his gun once in the air, then fled in a red Chevy Monte Carlo. 
Police describe the suspect as a black male in his 20's, about 5-6, 140 pounds, wearing a blue hoodie and a green bandanna

The report from the Lincoln Journal Star.

Lincoln police are looking for the man who robbed three people at an apartment parking lot early Thursday.

A man and woman were dropping another woman off at an apartment on the 6000 block of Meridian Drive around 3:40 a.m. when a man with a handgun approached them and demanded their wallet and purses, said Capt. Jim Thoms.

The man gave the robber his wallet, but the women refused to give up their purses, Thoms said. The robber grabbed one of the women’s purses, but she did not let go, and he dragged her five to ten feet before giving up, Thoms said. He ran to a red Monte Carlo and got in the passenger side, and the car left east from the lot.

Note, however, the LJS won't give a description of the man, but will describe his car. Note also this is not merely armed robbery, but assault and battery. This creep has been carrying out robberies like this for months. Could one reason he hasn't been caught be that our local newspaper, for reasons of political correctness, won't publish his description? And if, sooner or later, he fires that gun and kills someone, will Michael Nelson the editor of the LJS, accept some of the blame?

A reddish egret, Cape Canaveral, FL, Friday.

From District 3's former vice chair.

If you're going to have to fight with someone, pick up the nearest chair and smash it across their face. It settles the argument rather quickly, you don't get hurt as much as your opponent, and it is an effective debating tool - you usually have the floor, and everyone's undivided attention, when you're opponent is laying cold-cocked on the floor.

Evidently the Lincoln Journal Star has given up any pretense of being a family newspaper, and has given itself over to publishing the sick fantasies of Mr. Richard D Sullivan, 'identity manager'.

Don't click if you have a weak stomach. I think he'd tell you he's trying to make a point, but I'm damned if I know what it is.

No, it's not your imagination. My blog template set the width annoyingly narrow -- presumably so it would display fully on a 600 by 480 screen, but there aren't many of those left -- so I putzed around with the template editor and widened it.

There are some annoying things about the blog.mac software -- principally, comments management -- but the template editor is a very nice feature.

Hillary Clinton today, on how things have changed...

In some of the meetings that I've had in my travels around the world, foreign governments and foreign leaders have made very aggressive demands on our country. "And on at least one occasion, I've said, 'You know, you didn't make those demands the last eight years.' They said, 'Well, we knew we would never get a response,'"

I'm sure she didn't mean this as a compliment to GWB, but I can't think of more fulsome praise for a president than to say that foreign leaders would not waste their time making 'very aggressive demands' on the US while he was in charge.

Teh 0, upholding teh dignity of teh office.

Sarko's expression is priceless.

Lest we forget, Tom White's most significant act in the unicameral was to propose removing the age limit on Arnie Stuthman's LB157, Nebraska's safe haven law, thus making it possible for parents of out-of-control teens anywhere in the country to come to Nebraska to dump them on us. And, of course, he made Nebraska a national laughingstock in the process. This was an act of pure legislative laziness; White didn't want to sit down and craft a properly-written bill, and so he turned LB157 into this:

No person shall be prosecuted for any crime based solely upon the act of leaving a child in the custody of an employee on duty at a hospital licensed by the State of Nebraska. The hospital shall promptly contact appropriate authorities to take custody of the child.

Nebraska had to convene a special session at considerable expense, purely to undo White's mischief. Now he wants to run for Congress. Why? So he can write horrible laws on a national scale?

The Lincoln Journal Star says the fact that celebs sometimes die on the same day is evidence of a grand cosmic plan. Good grief! This is what happens when you use a Ouija Board to write your columns.

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Though there may have been divine intervention in one recent celebrity double-death...

Farrah Fawcett died and ascended to heaven. She was greeted personally by the Almighty at the gates. "Farrah, baby", said God. "I'm a huge fan, always have been, I loved you in Charlie's Angels. I have a 12 foot poster of you above my desk. Welcome!"

Pleased but a little surprised, Farrah said: "Thank you, God, but I'm not sure I'm worthy"

"Of course you are, honey", said God, who seems to be a little swish. "In fact, just to show my appreciation, I'm going to grant you one wish"

Farrah thought for a minute. "Well, this is heaven, and I'll have everything I want, so maybe I'll do something for the folks I left behind on earth. OK, God, I'd like to do something to make the children on earth just a little bit safer today!"

"Done", said God, and there stood Michael Jackson.

Someone whom I'm too lazy to look up defined a gaffe as an instance where a politician speaks the truth accidentally. This is not what Peter King did.

Yet for the last — I don’t know for how long now — this lowlife, Michael Jackson — his name, his face, his picture — is all over the newspapers, television, radio, ll we hear about is Michael Jackson. Let’s knock out the psychobabble, This guy was a pervert, was a child molester. He was a pedophile. And to be giving this much coverage to him, day in and day out, what’s it say about us, our country?

In a sane world, my response would be DUH! In the insane place that is the US in 2009, I say, Bravo, Mr. King.

On this Fourth of July, I'd just like to offer my best wishes to the people of Honduras, who are taking the truths affirmed in the Declaration of Independence far more seriously than we are. Don't worry about teh 0, our temporary leader, Honduras. We will be rid of him soon, and the people of America stand with you.

Viva Honduras libre!

Our junior senator had a narrow escape today at University of Nebraska Medical Center, when a workshop he was holding was crashed by an unruly mob from the organized crime syndicate known as SEIU. ('SEIU' is derived from a Brazilian underworld term for 'shakedown'). SEIU, headed by a millionaire gangster who goes by the name 'Stern', like MS13, draws a high proportion of its members from the illegal alien community, and derives most of its income by extortion from the hospitality industry.

Fortunately, security personnel were able to round up the hoodlums and throw them off the property before they could disrupt the democratic process.

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Update; a strange woman named Jane from Washington DC, who has evidently been put in place as one of the local SEIU gang bosses, was hallucinating the claim that Johanns had the gangsters thrown out. Her co-captain, however, has contradicted her story. This was all revealed by an ex-gang member called Lisa who has evidently decided to leave the life of organized crime. In fact, intra-gang warfare within SEIU seems to be intensifying; at the moment it's only words, but I'm sure we can shortly expect it to escalate to hair-pulling and even spitting.

I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota. What a lousy way to live.

Lieutenant Ben Vargas, one of the winning plaintiffs in the Ricci vs. New Haven case, referring to his three sons. Vargas's family hails from Puerto Rico, just like Sonia Sotomayor's. Can't we have him on the Supreme Court instead?

The Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska is planning to have unrepentant terrorist and committed foe of education Billy Ayers come to Omaha to speak, ludicrously, about academic freedom.

I have friends on the board of AFCON, and they are good people. Some of them are not even leftists. But I can't begin to describe what a stupid idea this is. Weather Underground, the terrorist group Ayers led, made its views on academic freedom perfectly clear when they (and specifically Bill's wife, Bernadine Dohrn) set off a bomb at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, apparently because Dohrn thought they didn't have enough women on the faculty. In case this left any doubt about how Billy feels about academic freedom, WU also bombed the office of William Bundy, a historian who was a former Kennedy and Johnson advisor, at the MIT Research Center; and Billy dedicated WU's Prairie Fire manifesto, inter alia, to Karl Armstrong, who used a Terry McVeigh style ANFO bomb to murder Robert Fassnacht, a postdoctoral physics researcher at the University of Wisconsin's Sterling Hall, because he didn't like some of the research he thought they were carrying out in the building.

I am constantly amazed and simultaneously disgusted by the contemporary Left's fascination with washed up terrorists like Ayers. It's almost as if they're leading a vicarious life through creatures like Ayers and Dohrn, living out their juvenile anger by glorying in the brutalities of an earlier era. And those who are not of the Left -- well, they should know better. If Ayers or his ilk ever came to power, libertarians would be first against the wall, and the Enlightenment idea of academic freedom would be DOA.

As a member of one of the constituent organizations of AFCON, I have formally proposed a motion that we dissociate ourselves from the coalition.

The news

Nelson seeks greenbelt tax break. Nelson said he could sell part of his property to developers to build homes or start “a small farming and ranching operation” and seek approval for greenbelt status. “I liked the idea of raising some cattle and horses, and harvesting and replanting trees.

Behind the news: a conversation in the Oval Office

Teh 0: Ah yes, come in Senator...Senator Newton?
Teh Benator: It's 'Nelson', your Highness. Senator Ben Nelson. But your excellency can deign to call me Ben.
Teh 0: Yes yes...Well, Senator Nelnet, Our staff has been looking over your application to be Czar of Radioactive Waste in Our new administration, and We're very impressed. You have a proven track record of shutting down nuclear waste repositories, something We're very interested in. And you cost the taxpayers of North Dakota a hundred and fifty million dollars in the process! That's just excellent!
Teh Benator: Nebraska, your majesty, not North Dakota, forgive me for correcting you, I know you're so busy, and all...
Teh 0: Nebraska, North Dakota, well, they all look the same from Airforce One! But there are a couple of problems...first, if you step down as Senator, your governor's a Republican, and will presumably nominate one of his own to fill the seat. That will cost Us Our filibuster-proof majority.
Teh Benator: A Nebraska Republican, your exaltedness. You won't be able to tell the difference.
Teh 0: But there's a bigger problem, Senator. Our staff vetting says you've had an insufficient record of cheating on your taxes. A minor issue with a property tax classification in Sarpy County. A wild turkey ranch...well that's very creative. I had no idea there were such things as wild turkey, outside of a bar, ha ha.
Teh Benator: And I did renege on a promise to pay all the back taxes, your eminence.
Teh 0: Yes, that's fine, but it's not good enough. The thing that distinguishes Us from the little people, Senator Nixon, is that We don't have to follow the same laws they do. The great leaders of history never paid taxes. Does Robert Mugabe pay taxes? Did Jomo Kenyatta pay taxes? Dodging a minor tax bill in Slurpee County, or whatever it's called, just isn't good enough!
Teh Benator: I'll get right to work on it, your imperial holiness. I have a new tax dodge all set up. I'll prove myself to you!
Teh 0: Yes, well, We'll see about that. Send in the NBC White House correspondent. My left shoe is smudged.

Finding stupid in Mother Jones is, of course, like shooting fish in a barrel, but this is especially good, on the subject, of course, of Global Doom, AKA Climate Change.

Despite ongoing efforts to curb emissions levels and slow the planet's warming, the warning signs are clearer than ever. Natural disasters abound. Entire regions may be rendered inhabitable. Mass extinction looms on the horizon.

Oh noes, entire regions 'inhabitable'!

Democrat flak Don Walton of the LJS hit a new low yesterday morning, when he apparently took an entire column idea from Dem. blogger Kyle Michaelis, parroting Kyle's idiotic charge that Lee Terry (R, NE-2) Hates Our Troops, because he voted against a supplemental spending bill that contained a $100 billion pork infusion for the International Monetary Fund. That's $0.1 trillion, in case you want it on an Obama-deficit scale. Even Kyle had to shamefacedly admit the whole stupid accusation was bogus, and that he was only making it because (he says) the GOP did the same thing when they crammed pork into Iraq and Afghan war funding. But Don even left out Kyle's moment of honesty; in his zeal to attack a GOPer whose Congressional District is 50 miles from Lincoln, he omitted Michaelis's caveats.

Seriously, how hard is it to crank out an original column every Monday morning? I came up with 1200 words monthly for the DN last semester, usually about something that had ticked me off in the last 48 hours, and I hold down a real job as well. How low do you have to get to have to go for column ideas to some unemployed 30-something pounding out party agitprop (that hardly anyone reads) from the shelter of his mom's basement?

Better yet, why not eliminate the middleman, and just hire Kyle as a columnist? He's not a bad writer, he needs the job, I bet he works for peanuts, and he wouldn't be any more partisan.

---

Meanwhile, at the New Nebraska Nutcase blog:

I can't believe I'm writing about anything so idiotic as 2nd District Congressman Lee Terry's shouting profanity at a Washington D.C. motorist

I can believe it. Nothing is so dumb a Democrat won't try to make political hay out of it.

---

36 hours later, Don gives Lee Terry's side of the story.

Honduras on Monday threw out a marxist thug trying to seize power. Manuel Zelaya had tried to remove term limits so he could stay on as President, no doubt on his way to a Chavez/Castro style 'President for Life' gig. However, since he's managed to piss off almost everyone in Honduras, they wouldn't let him away with it. Congress refused to certify a referendum to create an assembly to change the Constitution. Zelaya decided to hold one anyway. The Supreme Court said he couldn't. Zelaya fired the head of the military for refusing to carry out his illegal orders. The Supreme Court told him he couldn't do that either. Zelaya's bud Chavez printed up the ballots, the military seized them, and then Zelaya led a mob to 'liberate' the ballots. At this point, Honduras had had enough, and kicked the dictator-wannabe out. His own party sponsored a resolution declaring him mentally unfit to retain power. All this, and more, is described in a Wall Street Journal article.

Needless to say, Obama and Clinton, who never saw a marxist thug they didn't like, are now calling for Hondurans to take back their aspiring tyrant. It's too bad they weren't as forceful with Ahmed-the-nutjob and the theocrats in Tehran. In this, they stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow thugs Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega. Remeber the last time we had a major !@#$-up in Central America, and let Ortega win power in Nicaragua? Well, folks, here comes Jimmy Carter II, with Jimmy Carter I as a drooling, superannuated advisor.

Honduras has dealt with a budding tyrant effectively, have appointed a replacement who has the backing of their Congress and the Supreme Court, and are on track for elections in the fall. Let's leave them alone; it looks like they have things well under control. The last thing we need in Honduras is another Chavez.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, citing 'an administration official', is calling Zelaya's illegal attempt to retain power a 'nonbinding survey'. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

The 1000 page monster piece of legislative sausage making called 'cap-and-trade' is coming up for a vote today. Nobody has a clue about the net impact of the bill; as usual, nobody has read it in full. It contains some bizarre compromises; for example, it protects bioethanol form the EPA, which has excellent evidence corn ethanol production actually causes substantial net increases in greenhouse gases. All we really know is that it creates masses of new federal bureaucracy and control, and will raise taxes and kill jobs and growth. Please contact your congresscritter and tell them, regardless of their stand on anthropogenic global warming -- and I'm not a denialist, by and large -- that they should vote against this ugly excrescence of a bill.

KOLN-KGIN:

Armed Robbery Investigation

Lincoln

Posted: 10:29 AM Jun 25, 2009

Last Updated: 10:29 AM Jun 25, 2009

Reporter: KOLNKGIN

Email Address: desk@kolnkgin.com

Police are looking for a suspect who robbed a man at gunpoint Thursday morning. Officer Katie Flood said a 20 year old was walking to his car in the Kwik Shop parking lot at 2710 W. W street just after midnight when he was approached by a man from behind. Flood said the man threatened the victim with a gun and demanded his wallet. Flood said the man gave him $45.00 in cash and the suspect ran away. The suspect is described as a black male, 6'0" 180 pounds wearing a red hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and a blue bandanna on his face.

Lincoln Journal Star:

Lincoln police probe robbery outside Kwik Shop

By the Lincoln Journal Star

Thursday, Jun 25, 2009 - 09:04:04 am CDT

Lincoln police are investigating a robbery in a convenience store parking lot early Thursday.


A man told police he was walking to his car outside the Kwik Shop at 27th and W streets around 12:15 a.m. when another man approached him and demanded his money, said Capt. Jim Davidsaver.

The robber had a dark handgun, Davidsaver said. The victim gave him his wallet and he left east on foot. Police checked the area but did not find the suspect, Davidsaver said. No one was hurt.

You have to laugh, though. They aren't willing to describe the perp., but they'll describe his handgun as 'dark'!

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has gotten hold of a series of internal EPA emails that indicate that

a significant internal critique of EPA’s position on Endangerment was essentially put under wraps and concealed. The study was barred from being circulated within EPA, it was never disclosed to the public, and it was not placed in the docket of this proceeding. The emails further show that the study was treated in this manner not because of any problem with its quality, but for political reasons.

The 'endangerment' referred to is the EPA's Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act, which proposes

to find that the current and projected concentrations of the mix of six key greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)—in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations. This is referred to as the endangerment finding.

and

to find that the combined emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O, and HFCs from new motor vehicles and motor vehicle engines contribute to the atmospheric concentrations of these key greenhouse gases and hence to the threat of climate change. This is referred to as the cause or contribute finding.

The study in question is by Alan Carlin, Senior Operations Research Analyst at the National Council for Environmental Economics. The first email, dated March 12, from Al McGartland, director of NCEE, forbids Carlin "from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues".

A quote from an earlier article by Carlin makes it clear why Obama wants to shut him up

Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may be well intentioned and even helpful. But as the sole strategy for climate change control it is nevertheless inflexible, expensive, risky, and politically unrealistic...

Remember the fuss about James Hansen at NASA, who was never muzzled in anything like this way? Will anyone in the media notice?

Hat tip: the indispensable Michelle Malkin

From teh 0's press conference today:

At a time of great fiscal challenges, this legislation is paid for by the polluters who currently emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air we breathe.

I can't begin to describe how scientifically illiterate this is. First of all, he's actually referring to carbon dioxide, not carbon. We do emit carbon (e.g. in diesel soot) but that's not a subject of his legislation. Second, if the current atmospheric 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide 'contaminate the water we drink', then carbonated drinks, which have over 2,500 times the concentration of carbon dioxide that water from a tap contains, should certainly be banned instantly.

Do you think he understands any of this? Of course not. He's parroting what Steven Chu tells him, and since he doesn't comprehend what he's parroting, it's coming out as nonsense.

Reowr! Hiss! Scratch! When the Third Congressional District Democrats are finished clawing each others' eyes out and are looking for medical attention, at least they can be thankful Jane Kleeb and her union goons haven't killed our health care system. Yet.

BTW, Roger Hannah's problem is most of his gibes are soaring way over their heads. They're both too clever and too Scottish for the average Nebraska Dem. to comprehend. But nae worries, Roger laddie, ye have fan richt here!

RWP will be joining the Great American Blackout, to protest ABC's turning their news coverage into an infomercial for the ObamaCare 'Health Zero' plan. He will of course be going the extra mile; instead of one day's coverage, he will be boycotting a week's worth of Channel 8 (What's on ABC anyway? Anyone?); and he will also be boycotting Channel 8's premium advertisers. These are mostly a sorry lot he wouldn't do business with anyway, but he does shop at Super Saver, something that is going to end.

Screw with my health care, and this is what happens to you!

The Lincoln Journal Star once again omitting the description of a suspect in a crime, this time an attempted robbery.

Inquiring minds wonder why. (I lie: inquiring minds know why. Inquiring minds wonder if it's a viable newspaper business plan to omit important information from a story because of PC). LJS:

Police are investigating an attempted robbery 4 a.m. Friday on the 4500 block of Tranquility Drive. A man approached a woman leaving an apartment complex and demanded money, said Assistant Chief Jim Peschong. The man told the woman he had a weapon, but she didn’t see one. She didn’t have any money, so the robber left on foot.

KOLN/KGIN

Police are looking for a man who threatened and attempted to rob a woman early Friday morning. Officer Katie Flood said the 37 year old victim was leaving her apartment at 4501 Tranquility at 3:53 Friday morning when a black male approached her from behind. Flood said the man had his hand wrapped in a towel or shirt and told the woman he had a gun and demanded her money.
Flood said she only had a dollar and change on her and offered that to the man, but he didn't believe her and made her empty out her purse. Flood said he didn't find anymore cash and left empty handed. Flood said the man matches the description of the suspect in two Kwik Shop robberies in the area, one where the man wore a beer box on his head. Police say he is a black male in his late 20s, about 5'10"-6'0" weighing 155 pounds. He was last seen wearing a dark shirt and pants and a white bandanna over his nose and mouth, just like the suspect in the Kwik Shop robberies.

This is the LJS's description of the latest Kwik Shop robbery

Police are looking for the man who robbed a Kwik Shop early Wednesday. A man entered the store at 4400 Cornhusker Highway around 1 a.m. and demanded money and cigarettes from the 31-year-old clerk, Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood said.

The suspect implied he had a gun, but he had a bag or shirt covering his right hand and did not show one, Flood said. He fled the store with two packs of cigarettes and $33, according to a police report.

This is the third time that the Kwik Shop has been robbed since Jan. 1, Flood said.

You can see that, indeed, the LJS description of the attempted robber fits the description of the earlier Kwik Shop bandit. It's completely absent.

Our home town newspaper apparently doesn't know the difference between 'collegiate' and 'collegial'.

They don't want to learn, either, judging by their failure to post corrections. It makes one wonder; exactly what are the qualifications for a newspaper editor, these days?

---

(Thanks, Grundle). Well, they fixed it, but they don't want to admit who tipped them off. Tsk tsk. Next time, I'll bill them for editing.

Conservatives are grumbling about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. They should be cheering.

Think of what Obama could have done. He could have appointed a genuinely qualified, persuasive leftist jurist to the court. While this wouldn't have shifted the political balance (Souter was pretty leftist already), it would have replaced an intellectual nonentity with an intellectual force, capable of writing powerful opinions, who might have won over Anthony Kennedy's wobbly fifth vote with alarming frequency. Instead he appointed someone whose defenders damn her with faint praise. The NYTimes carefully said her opinions were marked by 'diligence, depth and unflashy competence.' They might have added she's punctual. Her statements about the superiority of Latina women over white men, and that race and gender differences in abilities might possibly be physiological, mark her as almost a caricature of a modern leftist bigot. And it's widely reported she's widely disliked as a colleague and is very difficult to work with. This is not the judge to form coalitions with the court moderates. This is a woman who will piss off even those on her own side. I doubt Justices Breyer and Stevens will much like being lectured on their white male inferiority.

The GOP should grill her carefully and respectfully, but in great detail, about her interesting views on race and gender, her conduct in the Ricci case, etc.. Let's get her on the record about everything. By all means cast a principled vote against her. But don't filibuster, let her take her seat on the court, and then watch the fun.

By the way, Benjamin Cardozo was the Court's first Hispanic.

Maryland last year tried to close its budget gap by fleecing the rich. They instituted a new top 'millionaires' bracket with a 6.25% rate. The Baltimore Sun said millionaires would "grin and bear it." Uh, no. This year, the WSJ reports, millionaire tax returns are 2/3 what they were in 2008. As the Journal notes, rich people usually have at least one other home, and it's usually somewhere like Florida, which has no income tax. And if you own your own business, are a high executive in someone else's business, or make your money from investments, changing your state of residency is ridiculously easy. It's only wage slaves like RWP that have to spend more than half their year in high-tax states. So, in fact, the richest people will actually be paying less tax this year in Maryland than if they left the rates alone.

Nebraska's top rate is 6.84% (and that rate starts, amazingly, at $27,000 p.a., which is barely middle class). Imagine all the potential state tax revenue we've driven away.

This Memorial Day weekend, I's like to echo the memorable words of our most cerebral president since Jimmy Carter, uttered on Memorial Day, 2008:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

In Chicago politics, not only do the dead vote for you, but they even come out to hear you speak.

Washed up terrorist Billy Ayers, denied entry to Canada yet again.

This was taken at twilight last night on a beach overlooking Pond Bay on the Sea of Abaco, Abaco Island, Bahamas. It's an Antillean Nighthawk, taken with a flash camera. The red eyeshine shows the nighthawk's huge eyes; you can also see his enormous gape, and the white wing markings that says this is a nighthawk and not a Chuck Will's Widow, the only other Caprimulgid likely to be in the Northern Bahamas. Anyhow, they're incredibly fast birds. Four of them came out to hawk for moths at twilight just outside our cabin, and this was the best (and certainly the weirdest) of about 30 attempts to get a picture.

Full trip report later.

A wonderful article by a bankruptcy law professor on how the Obama administration has trampled all over bankruptcy law at Chrysler, to benefit the UAW. One more step on the way toward a Hugo-Chavez style people's republic.

The Obama administration's behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy is a profound challenge to the rule of law. Secured creditors -- entitled to first priority payment under the "absolute priority rule" -- have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.

As an owner of one Chrysler and one GM vehicle, I hereby pledge never to buy another vehicle from either company, until the creditors are given their proper rights under bankruptcy law, and neither the UAW not the gummint holds a cent of equity in the company.

HT/Somniferum @DC

It turns out the Boston trolley driver who injured 46 people by colliding with another car at 25 miles an hour while texting his girlfriend was given the job despite a lousy driving record because he was a female-to-male transsexual. Lots of guys screw up on the job because they're thinking with their little head rather than their big head, but this is the first recorded instance where the little head was plastic...but seriously, folks, if they wanted 'diversity' in the MBTA, they should consider hiring a normal person. The T has for the last half century been an employment agency for the unemployable cousins of Democrat party precinct captains. The only reason there aren't more accidents is, well, the darn things run on rails, and all you can really do to crash them is completely ignore signals for a long time. All adding preferences means is you get a nice mix of races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations among the drooling idiots.

The New York Times finally got around to admitting one of those widely known but rarely acknowledged facts -- that the massive rise in sub-prime lending that caused the current economic meltdown was in large part driven by political pressure to make loans to members of minority groups who were, on average, far poorer credit risks than whites or Asians. Of course, they only admitted it because it was necessary to do so to show that, as usual, minorities are hardest hit by foreclosures.

Like previous studies, the report found that blacks and Hispanics were more than twice as likely to have subprime mortgages as white homeowners, even among borrowers with comparable incomes. Only 10.5 percent of white home buyers took out high-cost loans in 2007, compared to 27.6 percent of Latinos and 33.5 percent of African Americans. These loans, which typically require little or no down payments and are meant for borrowers with low credit scores, made homeownership possible for many black and Hispanic families during the boom years, but also led to high rates of foreclosure.

Sometimes hard facts are so gosh darned, you know, racist.

Evidently deaf, dumb and blind to the irony of it all, the Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation wants UNcle Sam to buy up local pork, to shore up prices. Evidently we just haven't been buying enough dead pig, on account of swine flu, so the NFBF wants to force us to buy it with our tax dollars instead. And why not? Not enough of us bought GM and Chrysler cars, so they made us buy the car company. Not enough of us wanted dubious mortgage backed securities, so we got to own dubiously capitalized banks instead. In Obama's America, if you don't spend you money the way a well-heeled group wants, they'll just take it from you and spend it instead.

Ted Sorensen is, unfortunately, a Nebraska icon.Ted's claim to fame is to have ghostwritten Profiles in Courage for John F. Kennedy. Profiles in Courage is not an especially good book, but it served to endow JFK with the patina of intellectualism, won a Pulitzer for that reason, and probably made the difference in his misbegotten election to the presidency. When what everyone knew was true appeared in print -- that JFK had not in fact written Profiles in Courage -- Sorensen signed his name to a perjurious affidavit --- if not perjurious by precise legal standards, then by all normal standards of truth -- swearing under oath, falsely, that JFK was the author. Then, as if this were not enough, Sorensen bragged in his own autobiography, 'Counselor', that he had in fact written Profiles in Courage, no doubt counting on the fact that the statute of limitations, as well as the public attention span, had long expired.

Well, so what? Sorensen should be justly derided as a creature without the wherewithal to lie for his own benefit, being only fit to lie to promote the career of another -- a veritable intellectual eunuch to the Emperor Kennedy. Unfortunately, just for having the touched the holy jockstrap of JFK, Sorenson has become a demi-god of the local libs. A rcent column , covering Sorensen's characterically stereotyped and dumb-as-rocks views on torture, appeared in the LJS, and a lot of people were mean about ol' Ted -- just showing that the average Nebraska citizen can spot a phony, even if they don't know the full history of his phoniness

Don Walton, self-designated carrier of Ted's rather light-weight jockstrap, has now weighed in, though 'weigh' seems to be the wrong word in this case. He says

some of the comments online and in my phone mail are the latest reminder about how many haters are out there.

I don't see it. Frankly, I see nothing in the comments about Sorensen that isn't well deserved, and nothing about Don at all. One more shot in the war to shut conservatives up?

In a little-noticed study, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University a couple of months ago ranked the relative level of individual freedom in the fifty states, on separate indices of fiscal policy, regulatory policy, economic freedom and personal freedom. Nebraska's performance was disgraceful. We scored in the top half of the states only in regulatory freedom (13th), probably because in Nebraska, your hog confinement facility can stink as much as you want it to. We scored 38th in fiscal policy, 27th in economic freedom, and 34th in personal freedom. Our overall placement was 28th, which should be compared with our neighbors: Colorado (2nd), South Dakota (3rd), Missouri (6th), Kansas (12th), Wyoming (15th) and Iowa (16th).

There's no excuse for this. We are a high-tax, paternalistic state where the gummint at various levels butts into our lives and takes our money so they can fund their intrusiveness. Small wonder the kids can't wait to be out of here.

It's bad enough we have a monoglot president, but must he try to joke in a language in which his vocabulary contains only words like 'enchilada' and 'guacamole'? A telling quote from last year:

My accent's always been good. It's just that I only know 15 words.

That sums up the Obama presidency.

George Bush's accent wasn't so good, but he speaks the language.

We're all in a tizzy again about a hazing incident at Sigma Chi. Yawn. The local rag lists previous incidents, which were drearily familiar to me, except for one at Sigma Alpha Epsilon at 2003, where it says a stripper used a vibrator to penetrate a pledge's anal orifice -- that sounded uncharacteristically heterosexual, although I suppose they didn't specify the sex of the stripper. I could tell you of some other rituals I've heard of, but I won't; I like to keep this blog no worse than R rated.

Everyone, of course including the LJS, has misidentified the problem. They think hazing is something that has to be stopped, either by the schools, or by the alumni of the fraternity, or by the gummint. Get a grip, people! We're discussing consensual sexual activity by men over the age of consent here! Granted, the sort of extreme homosexual BDSM that seems to be the norm for some of our frats may not be everyone's cup of tea, but that's what tolerance is all about. If it's reasonably discreet, and everyone participating has full knowledge and is fully consenting, how can you possibly justify banning it?

The real tragedy seems to me to be the young men who clearly love doing these sorts of things, or having them done to them, and who then have to, once they graduate from college, (presumably because of social pressure) adopt lives of vanilla heterosexual sex. That sort of long-term repression can't be good for them or for the people around them.

No, the problem here is that frats mislabel themselves as organizations promoting 'brotherhood' and similar virtues, rather than hard core gay kink, and may therefore lure in naive heterosexual or vanilla gay guys into their activities. (Seriously naive hets or vanilla gay guys though; c'mon, 'Greek brotherhood'?) This can be solved by 'truth in labeling'. Frats can do what they want, but they need to divulge their initiation rituals to the university; a committee composed of the Dean of Students, perhaps a couple of profs in queer and gender studies, and the sex-ed. coordinator, can write up a quick summary of the frat (e.g. organizational activities: homosexual BDSM, primarily focussing on humiliation and anal penetration), and publish it in the student activities guide. That way the unwary or unwitting get to join organizations perhaps a little more attuned to their tastes (organizational activities: hiring strippers and then drinking so much we can't remember their performance), and maybe the frat brothers themselves can come out of the closet, realize who they really are, and what it is they like. There's nothing to be ashamed of, guys!

Don Walton of the Lincoln Journal Star likes Jeff Zeleny's sycophantic 'surprised-troubled-enchanted-humbled question' to teh 0, at last week's presser. Of course he does. It's the kind of question Don routinely asks local pols. Actually asking a probing question to get some, you know, news? Not my job, says Don. That would be 'caustic and mean-spirited'.

Don also thinks there were 'gotcha questions' at the press conference. When? I sure didn't hear any. Dennis Miller put it better than I could, when he said Miss California was asked more difficult questions at the Miss USA Pageant, than Obama was at last week's press conference.

Don also thinks 'an informed and engaged citizenry' is at risk if local newspapers go out of business. That would be true in Lincoln, if our local newspaper did any investigative journalism, or reported the news in any sort of objective fashion. But actually, the student-run Daily Nebraskan has a better record of investigative journalism in the last few years than the Lincoln Journal Star. Their big story recently was 'breaking' the news that there are fraternities on campus that collect old exam questions and distribute them. Next they'll be telling us that there is drinking going on in the frat. houses, something I've always suspected. (Hey, LJS, if you decide to investigate that, you don't need to give me credit for the idea. Really. )

These little guys breed in the Rockies and Northern Canada, and winter in the southern US, but they do migrate through Nebraska. This is my first Lancaster County sighting, on my front lawn this morning.

...that according to the Department of Homeland Security, I may be a terrorist.
Find out if you're one o' dem nasty right wing extremist terrorists here. And maybe spend some time reading the magazine. Esp. you, lurker1.

It's unclear who first quipped that you shouldn't attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. Some people give credit to Heinlein; some to Napoleon. But let me make an original observation; that where the press is concerned, what is often attributed to malice can usually be explained by sloth. Neal Gabler, not exactly a soulmate in other respects, often makes the same point; that the press's besetting vice is laziness, not bias.

Discussing with a Chemistry colleague, who was also there, about how both I and the organizers could have counted 350 - 400 people at Saturday's Lincoln Capitol Tea-party, whereas the press reported 150, he hit on the solution. He said the press disappeared after the first 15 minutes, before most people had arrived. And it's true; by the time I did my first count, about 1:45 p.m., I didn't see any press critters at all. So they didn't really report on the demonstration -- they reported on the first few minutes of a two-hour demonstration.

The Lincoln Journal Star is going broke, and I won't miss it much. When I occasionally worry about who will cover local events, I remind myself that you could never really rely on the LJS's coverage anyway.

The Lincoln Tea Party was a success. We had (my estimate) about 400 people, about as eclectic a mix as you could ask for. Bikers, Ron Paul supporters, fair tax advocates, guys in suits, students, parents with kids (that would include me), and a big stack of cans of pork and beans. The crowd was friendly, good humored, and patriotic. There were no politicians I could see. The speeches were excellent, considering this was being run by political amateurs. They kept it non-partisan and focussed on government spending. There was a C&W singer there, who, given my complete hatred of country music, was at least tolerable. No white supremacists, no Obama birth certificate types, no obviously visible wackos. Just a lot of American flags and one very visible 'Don't Tread on Me' flag, which, I confess, I'm inordinately fond of, and some quite funny signs. I have some video that, if it looks OK, I'll post later.

Kyle Michaelis didn't show up; nor did any other lefties, that I could see. All they would have gotten was some good-humored ribbing, if they had. The left likes to fantasize about 'grassroots', but this was grassroots; it was as good a cross section of Nebraskans as you could ever hope for.

RWP is helping get the word out that the Lincoln Nebraska tea party, where we will go Santelli and protest the massive bailout of bankers, auto unions, mortgage defaulters, and other flavors of moochers and deadbeats, will be held April 11 on the steps of the Capitol. Not April 15, April 11; Lincoln, is four days ahead of the rest of the country. That way, you get to protest twice!

It's fitting that we go should first; a recent national headline announced that Nebraska is the happiest state in the nation. What this actually means, if you read the details, is that we have fewer foreclosures and less non-mortgage debt than the rest of the country (as well as low unemployment). Under Obamanomics, that means we just pay more to bailout the deadbeats who took on more debt than they could afford. I don't why anyone would be happy about that. I'm angry, and so should you be.

So get out there and let the nation know you're not happy to be the ant in a nation of grasshoppers!

The Nebraska State Historical Society found a sign. The sign says

Whites Only Telephone Booth

Lincoln Telephone and Telegraph

Nobody knows where, if at all, the sign was ever displayed. Contemporary accounts say that the owner of LT&T was not a segregationist. There is no record in the company's archives of segregated telephone booths. One might speculate a hotel or other business put it up, independently, maybe in the 1920's, but that's pure conjecture. The sign might also be a fraud. In short, we don't know if it's authentic; we don't know when if at all it was used. Doesn't matter. It's useful to beat Lincoln residents over the head with, to try to convince them that their city was segregated, which it was not, before 99.9% of its current citizens were born.

Meanwhile, here's another sign, that's up on the web, right now.

http://yns.nebraska.edu/UNLEMBHSSC.shtml

Who is eligible and how do I apply?

Applicants must be enrolled as a current 5th, 6th, or 7th grader in aLincoln or Omaha school. Applicants must be from a group traditionally underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (African American, Native American, or Hispanic) and/or qualify for free or reduced prices school lunches according to federal guidelines. Interested students and parents should complete the application forms and submit completed materials by Friday, May 1, 2009. Space is limited so applicants are encouraged to submit completed materials as early as possible. Complete applications will be reviewed and invitations extended beginning Wednesday, May 8, 2009 on a rolling basis until all positions are filled. UNL EMBHSSC Application materials are available on the Forms Page.

Yes, indeed, Nebraska voters passed a constitutional amendment last fall, outlawing such blatant discrimination. Think the University cares what the constitution says?

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Just to add, in case it isn't already clear, that the sign reported in the article would never have been legal in Nebraska. Racial discrimination in public accommodations in Nebraska was prohibited by statute in 1885, whereas Lincoln Telephone and Telegraph wasn't founded until 1904.

A couple of months back, Rick Santorum gave a speech here at UNL, and various national (if hardly watched) media outlets made a big issue when a rookie student reporter claimed (probably inaccurately) that he referred to the language of the Koran as 'Islamic'.


Well, gosh, Our President, today, replying to a reporter from Austrian TV, said the following:

"There's a lot of — I don't know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing, and, you know, people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics."

Lieber Präsident Null, gibt es keine Sprache, die 'Austrian' genannt wird. In Österreich, spricht man Deutsch.

(Or in Chicagoan: Hey meathead, in Austria, dey speaks German).

Paging Rachel Maddow....

Obama grovels before the French, confessing that arrogant America was dismissive to Europe.

It makes a nice follow up to his obeiscent bowing and scraping before the vile Saudi King Abdullah, autocrat of a medieval and barbarous desert nation that happens to be rich by a freak of geology.

Mark Steyn as usual, put it best.

I think I preferred him when he had his butt in the air and was staring at King Abdullah's shoes. (As George V, rex et imperator 1910-36, said, "Only waiters bow at the waist.")

Needless to say, all this abject obsequiousness has brought us no agreement with our economic policies (Angela Merkel, unlike teh 0, is actually qualified to lead a major nation, and knows economic mumbo-jumbo when she sees it); and only a negligible contribution of troops for the Afghan war.

I thought if we were nice to them, they would do what we wanted?

The Senate on Tuesday adopted by a 67-31 vote an amendment by Mike Johanns to prevent 'cap and trade' rules being imposed via the budget reconciliation process. This sneaky parliamentary maneuver has been discussed by Democrats as a way to avoid a full Senate debate on the massive energy tax, a debate they know they would lose. This may be the single most significant piece of legislative action carried out this year, and it's the work of Nebraska's own rookie Senator.

The London Telegraph reports today that our boy President's gift to the Queen was an iPod. Good grief! Well, at least it's better than the Walmart-bought boxed set of DVDs they gave to Gordon Brown.
Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports the President is being carefully sequestered from the media, probably so he won't publicly make another retard joke.
The national embarrassment continues...meanwhile, CBS this morning was gushing about how the British love the Obamas. Are we living in the same universe as the mainstream media?

Hillary Clinton, praying in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe today, asked 'Who painted it?' (Quién la pintó)

The Virgin, of course, is believed by Mexican Catholics to have appeared miraculously in 1531 on the cloth of San Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin's tilmàtli. Amazingly, this was Hillary's second visit, and she still wasn't aware of the legend. Way to reinforce Mexican sterotypes about American ignorance of their country, Hill! Don't you bother to get a briefing before you visit important places?

My monthly DN column for March is about earmarks; I point out the fallacy of Ben Nelson's claim that earmarks help 'even the playing field' for small states.

Nancy Hicks, the Lincoln Journal Star legislature reporter, has the hots for Ernie Chambers; as I've previously blogged, she covers up for even his most outrageous rants. Yesterday, she reported that Ernie Chambers wants to take possession of the state electric chair once it's been retired from duty. (That's what she reported; what he actually said was probably quite different). So I posted this  comment.

I'd fully support Ernie Chambers getting the electric chair.

It appeared on the site for a couple of hours, but then was taken down. The complete lack of a sense of humor at the LJS, when it comes to one of their icons, is duly noted.

Ernie Chambers, of course, blames the entire global economic crisis thizzle on whitey (his full remarks are here). But now Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who looks pretty damn pale himself, is getting in on the act.

This crisis was fostered and boosted by irrational behaviour of some people that are white, blue-eyed. Before the crisis they looked like they knew everything about economics, and they have demonstrated they know nothing about economics.

This, of course, must never be allowed to happen again. I propose that, in future, banks with majority white ownership be forbidden from making loans to, offering bank accounts to, or otherwise exploiting people of color. It's the only way to prevent those blue eyed devils from sticking it to the People.

That'll show 'em!

A UNO Saudi Arabian student group will be putting on a a carnival to 'showcase' the culture of Saudi Arabia at the Kauffman Center at UNL.

To properly honor Saudi Arabian culture, women will be prohibited from driving within 10 blocks of the center; all religious symbols, books and observances, other than those of Islam, will be banned on campus; and there will be a public flogging hourly at Broyhill Fountain. Women will please respect Saudi culture by covering themselves head to foot during the carnival. Burqas are preferred.

As part of the festival, volunteers are sought to help reenact the glorious burning to death of fourteen girls at the Mecca religious school in 2002, when Saudi religious police interfered with rescue efforts because fleeing students were not wearing the obligatory public attire (long black cloaks and head coverings) for Saudi girls and women. Severely depressed female teenagers preferred.

A link to the ScienceDaily article about our terrorist explosive research. John Simpson of the American Chemical Society did a very nice job on the news release, which I couldn't post here because it was embargoed until yesterday evening. The photo in the article is a still frame from a video we made of a TATP explosion; I'll youtube the full video when I get back into town. We had 472 google hits this morning just by search for the literal text of the ACS news release headline, including newspapers in India, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and the UK.

UNL, my own university, showed negligible interest in getting out their own news release, although I've kept them completely up to date on the ACS coverage. And although I independently emailed the local newspapers alerting them to the press conference and pending release, none of them picked it up. UNL puts out news releases for almost every other piece of research on campus that's at all newsworthy. I find it really odd that I can find the story in two places on the USA Today website, and in the Canadian National Post, but not in the Journal Star or World Herald.

I'm beginning to entertain paranoid questions about whether I'm being blacklisted, in a pathetic local sort of way, for my political activity -- though, frankly, if that is the case, they're only hurting themselves. If we're being linked by USA Today, I could give a flying !@#$ if anyone in Nebraska notices.

Big Science, from the American Chemical Society meeting in Salt Lake City.
Live TV : Ustream

PS: the weather sucks.

Obama's supporters are reluctantly beginning to agree that Obama is not the Second Coming of Jesus: Jesus, after all, could build a cabinet. -- Cobalt Shiva, of Darwin Central.

RWP reads (you don't think I watch that dreck?) that March 9, Olbermann named one State Senator Larcenia J. Bullard (D Miami, FL) the 'worst person in the world' for misunderstanding the phrase 'animal husbandry' to mean 'having a long term sexual relationship with animals'. This occurred during the pressing state business of outlawing bestiality, a practice that until now has apparently been legal in the sunshine state.

RWP doesn't actually think Ms. Bullard is bad: just about as ignorant as you'd expect of a state senator from a Democrat district in Miami. But he has to admit she has a wonderfully appropriate name for a politician.

Hat tip: doc30 on the inestimable Darwin Central website

A typical but quite engaging little internecine feud is going on over at the New Nebraska Network, between Kyle Michaelis and various other 'progressives'. It's all about who lost Initiative 424. I happen to think that nobody lost it; once ACRI put the highly talented Doug Tietz in charge of the initiative petition effort, the good common sense of Nebraska citizens made this basic piece of legislative fairness a done deal. But, in Lib'rul Land, there must always be a scapegoat. Some of them want to nominate Kyle for the position, although his suggestion of amending Christensen's LR 233 CA to add sexual orientation was IMO an ingenious poison-pill that might have given us trouble (though, frankly, I have no problem adding 'orientation' to the amendment -- I don't think we discriminate against gays in state business anyway, and if we do, we shouldn't.) Others -- e.g. Patrick D. Jones, a colleague of mine here at UNL, are of the opinion that the fault lay in the take over of the anti-424 effort by professional pols David Kramer and Danielle Nantkes, derailing a winning 'grassroots' effort. Oh yeah, sure.

But it's time to 'fess up. Patrick is almost right, but it's far worse than that. David Kramer deliberately sabotaged the whole thing. Yep, he was our mole in Nebraskans United. (He's a former GOP State Chair, fergawdsake, how could he not have been working for us?). We infiltrated him into the anti-424 effort by suckering them into thinking that he could get the state GOP to oppose the initiative. Instead, he spent huge amounts of their money, and made sure they wasted all their efforts on a futile petition-blocking drive, leaving them dispirited and broke going into the actual election campaign. His staged debate against Pete Ricketts at the GOP state convention, which he deliberately threw to his opponent, was his masterful pièce de resistance. Even Danielle Nantkes, who worked closely with him throughout the campaign, suspected nothing. Nothing!

Obligatory evil laugh: BWAHAHAHAHA!

David, of course, will be richly rewarded from Warren Buffett's confiscated fortune once the anti-Obama military coûp goes down next month. It's a shame Warren turned on his plutocratic kindred, but his fate will be a lesson to others on the importance of class loyalty! And it's a bigger shame we didn't get his loot before the market crashed! BWAHAHAHAHA again!

The London Daily Telegraph reports that our President is 'overwhelmed' by the job, and that his several snubs of, and gaffes involving, Prime Minister Gordon Brown were a result of his being 'too tired' to give the visiting dignitary a proper reception.

The American source said: "Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.

Good grief! Any questions about why some of us were worried about electing a Chief Executive with no executive experience and precious little experience of any kind? Will he make it though the first three months? Will we?

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Even the mainstream media are voicing doubts. Howard Fineman says the 'Washington Establishment' are beginning to doubt Obama.

Nice to have you on board, guys, but 6 months ago it would actually have made a difference.

Mark Schniederjans and I went down to the State Capitol building Monday to get our fair share of abuse, testifying against LB 440, a bill that would modify what in less politically correct days was known as the Minority Scholarship Program, to remove references to race and ethnicity (while retaining the 'diversity' component which is a proxy for those characteristics). Mark gave his three minutes of testimony, and was met with arrogant hostility by State Senator Bill Avery. I then gave mine, which you can read here. I was cut off after three minutes, and then Ernie Chambers got up to testify.

Ernie then launched into a 25 minute, rambling, hate-filled diatribe against white men in general and Mark and myself in particular. White men, he said, were only interested in destroying things, and lived by putting other people down. White men had destroyed the financial system. White people (there must have been some evil white women too, I guess) cut ahead of Ernie in line. Guys like me had gotten ahead by getting advantages over non-whites (there weren't too many of the latter in Ireland where I grew up, but anyway...) While he had had to be diplomatic, Ernie said (and it sure escaped most people's notice) in the State Senate, now he was just a private citizen, he thought he might come back there and punch Mark and myself. All the teachers he'd had, he said, were white men, and he'd never failed a class (probably because they were scared). He went on, and on, and rambled back and forth, about pensions and immigration and Creighton and the Nebraska constitution, with no coherent theme except Ernie's hate for white men. And the committee chair let him. I wonder how many of the rest of us saw the irony in restricting two white men to three minutes apiece, while allowing Chambers unlimited time to rail about how we had always been favored over him?

I'd say Ernie was losing it, but I've seen him in action before. It's never been any different. Since his Black Panther days, he's been the same old hatemongering lunatic, and his fellow senators were always just too scared of being called a racist to do what they should have long ago, which is to tell him to sit down and shut up.

The Lincoln Journal Star, as it its practice, sanitized the whole thing, and then has refused to post comments that correct Nancy Hicks' warped reporting. And Michael Nelson, the LJS editor, has the gall to pontificate about integrity.

...is here.

Fight LB 674!

After posting some blog-shaped drool about teh 0's speech last night, Obamabot airhead Mary Kate Cary takes out her crystal ball and sees:

Expect Rising Stock Market and Poll Numbers

The S & P 500, as it happens, is off 2.5 % as I write this. In fact, I've noticed every time Obama or a member of his cabinet makes any kind of public statement about the economy, the market tanks. Maybe we could get the recovery started if they'd all just shut up?

Last night, Obama said his administration is

committed to a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it, and I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.

Uh, sorry to have to correct teh 0 (blessed be He), but Karl Benz invented the automobile, in Germany. His Motorwagen was patented, and driven on the road, in 1886. Americans didn't make them until seven years later.

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John Derbyshire on the corner at National Review noticed another blooper; Obama claimed the first transcontinental railroad was built during the Civil War, when in fact it wasn't even begun until June 1865. What Obama said struck me as odd at the time, but I forgot to check it out.

Teh 0, yesterday:

I just want to make sure that we're having an honest debate and presenting to the American people a fulsome accounting of what is going on in this program.

Maybe he picked it the mis-usage from his campaign's senior policy director

We had a fulsome debate on this in the Senate

...although his campaign manager David Plouffe has also misused the word

If we want to go play in a state like Georgia - TV advertising, staff, mail - in the most fulsome way, we'll be able to do that.

... a usage deplored by Bill Safire, the language-curmudgeon-in-chief.

On his word choice, Plouffe goofed. Fulsome does not mean "full." Nor does it mean "complete, well developed" or other synonyms of abundance. On the contrary, the adjective is used not in a compliment, but in an insult, meaning "excessive." Its frequent use in "fulsome praise" gives that phrase the meaning of "cloying, unctuous, obsequious flattery." Though loosey-goosey usagists may accept the turning of the word's meaning on its head, most of us draw the line at such surrender to error. Fulsome is to "full" what noisome is to "noisy"; a word that sounds the same but means something quite different. Noisome, rooted in Old French for "annoying," means "smelly," and fulsome means "too much." If you're on the side of clarity, hold that line.

Are we going to let the Obamoids do to the English language what they're doing to the Federal budget. Never, I say!

A couple of months ago I was worried what sort of shape we'd be in after four years of Barack Obama and at least two years of big Congressional Democrat majorities. Now I'm wondering where we'll be in three months. The market tanked (again) today on rumors that the US would soon be nationalizing banks, rumors promulgated by now defunct Countrywide Mortgage's favorite Democrat Senator, Chris Dodd. Even the good news that the CPI was up in January, which at least temporarily dispels fears of deflation, didn't help much.

Meanwhile, the White House, in what's almost invariably a sign of desperation, is trying to shoot the messenger. In an unusual move, White House Press Secretary attacked YouTube sensation and CNBC journalist Rick Santelli, mentioning him at least five times by name. Santelli's crime was expressing the widespread disgust that Obama is planning to reward people for taking on mortgages they can't pay.

Sheesh, guys, you've been at this only a month, and you can't keep a dry shirt through mid-morning. Panic is contagious. Time to grow some stones.

Don't you wish we'd elected a president who we know can deal with crises and adversity without needing a change of underwear?

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Meanwhile, in Obama's corner, we have this 'progressive leftist' (a.k.a. self admitted moron) claiming the revolt against the Obama Moocherama is somehow a racial problem among 'white ethnics'. Race card, anyone?

RWP has been noticing something rather funny recently about crime reports in the Lincoln Journal Star. For example, take this report, from Monday's paper, about the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl on 27th street south of O street in broad daylight on Saturday at lunchtime. It's really too bad they don't have a description, because it's important to get this creep locked up, huh?
Oh wait, the police do have a description.

Police are searching for a black man in his 20s, around 5' 8" to 5' 9", weighing around 170 pounds. They said the man has short hair, and was last seen wearing a red jacket with blue accents and jeans.

It's just a shame the LJS didn't print that; it might have helped catch the perp. No doubt just an accidental omission, though!

Sexual assaults in that area of town are rather common. Here's another report, this time about a serial groper. You'd think that five assaulted women could come up with a good description of the suspect. But they can't have -- if they did, surely the Lincoln Journal Star would print it? I mean, isn't it important that we catch this pervert?

But wait...check out the KOLN/KGIN website. They do have a description!

In each case Flood said the suspect description is similar, a young black male with a medium build. He was wearing a bandanna in both of Tuesday's crimes.

Even though the police now have a photo of the suspect in the first sexual assault, and the LJS published it, there's just one little detail they can't bring themselves to print.

Lincoln Police Capt. David Beggs said the man was described by the victims as 5-foot-8 or 5-foot-9, about 170 pounds and in his 20s. She also said he was wearing a red jacket and dark blue or gray jeans.


Particularly odd is that the first report did irrelevantly mention another, entirely unrelated case, in which the ethnicity of the perp is quite clear from his name. Obviously, it's OK to reveal some ethnic or racial identities, and not others.

RWP is baffled by the thought processes over there on P street (or is that PC street?).

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Update at 5:03 p.m.: the police got the asshole who sexually assaulted the 14 year old. The groper is still at large.

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Update 2/21/2009: looky here. Here's a story about a Lincoln crime spree where they do publish a description of the suspect!

The suspect is described as a white male in his 20s, 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 180 pounds. He has a cut lip and a brown goatee.

The President will tour the solar-power facility at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature today, for a photo-op and to sign the 'stimulus' bill. The facility has 465 solar panels, which were installed last June.

President Barack Obama plans to inspect a solar-power facility at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science Tuesday just before he signs the $787 billion economic-stimulus package. The museum's rooftop solar photovoltaic system consists of 465 solar panels on the southeast and southwest wings of the museum. The panels generate a portion of the museum's electrical power. The tour is in keeping with the alternative-energy theme of the bill-signing event at the museum.

A quick calculation posted on Michelle Malkin's website shows that 15,000 gallons of fuel will be used to fly Air Force One from DC to Denver and back for the signing ceremony/photo-op. Aviation fuel releases about 36.86 MJ of heat per liter on complete combustion, or about 39.4 kWh/gallon. So the energy released as heat in trucking the Prez. from DC to Denver and back is approximately 600,000 kWh.

According to the museum's website, the photovoltaics will generate 134,500 kWh per year. With 4 years of uninterrupted operation, therefore, they will not quite manage to offset the energy used by Obama in one visit. However, if you allow for the fact that the electrical energy they replace would probably be generated from heat at about 35% efficiency, the fuel used for the photo-op is really only equivalent to about 1.5 years of continuous operation of the solar cells.

The solar cells have been operating since June, so around January 2010, they will have generated enough 'green energy' to offset Obama's visit.

As that great thermodynamicist Kermit the Frog said, it's not easy being green!

Poor deluded little things.

Ben Nelson has been tooting his own trumpet for the last week, as the man who will clean up the stimulus package in the Senate. Yep, Ben's going to put together a bipartisan coalition of centrists to strip out the pork and turn it into a lean, clean job-creating machine. And his loyal sycophants in the local media have been sucking it all up.

Problem is, on the first vote to remove a chunk of pork from the bill - a $245 million dollar gift to Hollywood production companies - Ben was AWOL. Most of the centrist Democrats in the Senate voted with the GOP to strip out the give-away. But not Ben; he apparently thinks that buying movie film for Hollywood is 'job-intensive infrastructure development'.

Mike Johanns, by the way, voted for the amendment, which passed 52-45.

1931: Al Capone: convicted of evading $55,365.25 in income tax.

Sentenced to 11 years in Alcatraz

2009: Tim Geithner: admitted to evading $35,000 in income tax.

Confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury.

2009: Tom Daschle: evaded approximately $130,000 in income tax.

Nominated as Health and Human Services Secretary

Now that's real change we can believe in!

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But why listen to little ol' me? Listen to a former senator from South Dakota!

Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter!

Let's follow Tom Daschle's advice, and run Tom Daschle out of DC on a rail!

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It was just announced that Daschle and another Obama pick have withdrawn their candidacy, both over tax evasion. So the most ethical administration in history is two weeks old, and two cabinet level appointees have had to withdraw over ethical issues!

The books, of course, say they shouldn't be here in January, but they often are. A pair were checking out nesting boxes yesterday. Lousy picture -- hopelessly backlit -- but I think it clearly shows a bluebird.

I say this means an early spring.

Is here.

It's about Billy Ayers.

The Lincoln Journal Star's Don Walton, mused this morning about how Ben Nelson will attempt to be all things to all men by first voting 'no' on cloture, and then 'no' on the Democrats' give-aways to unions -- the cloture vote being the only important one when you have an ironclad majority. This is Don's version of the Democrat proposal to elmininate the secret ballot in union origanization votes.

Norquist wants Nelson to vote against cloture on labor legislation that would allow workers to organize their workplace and choose a union without a secret ballot vote.


Translated out of Democrat weasel speak and into plain English, this becomes:

Norquist wants Nelson to vote against cloture on labor legislation that would allow the union to organize workplaces without a secret ballot vote.


'The workers' is of course a collective noun without any correspondence to reality. There is no way to determine the will of 'the workers' without a secret ballot. Anything else is vulnerable to external pressure. 99% of workplaces are organized by pre-existing, external labor unions, usually headquartered out of state. The workers, in fact, have no option to choose a secret ballot under the pending legislation. If AAUP decides to organize UNL, I can ask for a secret ballot, but they won't give me one. I and ten of my friends could request a secret ballot, but we wouldn't get one.

An entirely polite comment suggesting the above rephrasing of Don's statement was not posted on the Journal Star. But heck, if he's against secret ballots, why would you expect him to be for free speech?

I just got word from Doug Tietz that Nebraskans United lost their court challenge to Initiative 424, which bans racial ethnic and gender preferences in Nebraska. The Nebraska Civil Rights Amendment has been the law of the State of Nebraska for the last month; now we know it won't be struck down by judicial fiat.

Nebraskans United brought losing to a new pinnacle in 2008. Supported by most of the major institutions in the state, run by luminaries of the state GOP and Dem parties, they collected $200 K from Warren Buffett and three other Omaha millionaires, and took in other mega-donations from the NEA, Omaha Chamber of Commerce, etc.. They staked everything on keeping the initiative off the ballot. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to scores of petition blockers, and flouted Nebraska disclosure statutes by refusing to name them. They tried every dirty trick in the book. And despite all the money and the backing and the legal shenanigans, they lost. NCRI collected far more valid signatures than we needed.

Once the issue was on the ballot, instead of trying to argue their case with the voters, Nebraskans United bet the house on the court challenge, claiming the petition process was fraudulent. Problem was, while they were waiting for the verdict, the voters opted 58-42 for the constitutional amendment. And, guess what? Lancaster Country District Judge Karen Flowers, in an admirable exercise of judicial restraint, let the will of the people stand.

The final loser was Baird Holm, David Kramer's law firm. Evidently to avoid having to disclose what was a massive donation of the time Kramer spent opposing the ballot initiative, his law firm decided instead to defer billing Nebraskans United for Kramer's services until after the election. They then took a loss of $75,000. Of course, it's only a paper loss. They couldn't deduct from their corporate taxes an in-kind donation of $75 K to a political cause , but they can deduct it as a business loss. I'm not qualified to determine whether it's legal to do so, but it's clearly one more end-run around Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Law, another loser in this whole process

But there's one consolation: a loser on one's tax return is the only kind of loser to be.

Joseph Lowery's inaugural benediction included a nasty piece of race-baiting; teh 0 himself, with the aid of Chief Justice Roberts, screwed up the oath of office so badly it'll take a week to figure out if he actually said it; the inaugural poem is gibberish, and the S & P is down 4% more than 5%!

Feel the hopey changey tingle!

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Meanwhile the Lion of the Senate and the Grand Kleagle of the Senate both collapsed at the inauguration luncheon. Kennedy had a seizure; word has it Byrd passed out when someone finally found the nerve to break it to him that we now have a black president.

Canada evidently feels the same way as many Nebraskans do about unrepentant terrorist Billy Ayers. He was turned away yesterday at the Canadian border, because of his arrest record! The usual suspects are upset.

This is all very unfair. After all, the U.S. is willing to import Canada's garbage.

2008 was a year to be a grasshopper. 2009 will be even worse.

People who took out loans they couldn't afford get to keep the house and have the loan reduced to a cost that does not reflect their credit history. The banks that made the loans, and other banks who bought repackaged versions of the bad loans, already have $350 billion of our money, and will be getting more. Meanwhile, if you're one of those ants who pays the mortgage on time, runs a zero balance on the credit card, and generally lives within his means, you get to pay for the deadbeat grasshoppers, individual and corporate.

The social contract is always to a greater or lesser extent a hostage situation where the parasites leech off the hosts by using the threat of illegal or legal force. But this year it got worse, and next year and the following years the ants are really going to take it in the abdomen. So to speak.

So grit your mandibles, fellow Formicidans, and keep the spray gun at hand.

The bloated, hyper-ostentatious monster of an inauguration party is in full swing. Probably the only thing keeping RWP from spending the afternoon working on research are the NFL playoffs, the only (mostly) inauguration free spaces on broadcast TV. And of course, conservatives are already noticing that while the media copiously grouched about Bush's too-expensive inauguration in 2004, Obama's is so much more opulent than Bush's they don't even bear comparison, yet the media are gushing, not grousing. The Guardian of London, not a conservative source, estimated teh 0's inauguration bill at $150 m, compared with Bush's 2004 bill of $42.3 m. Obama's committee spokeswoman admits the expenses will be considerably greater than previous years

Combine a President whose fondness for grandiosity is so extreme it hurt him in the campaign (think 'Greek Temple'); a political party who really are only truly happy when they're spending other people's money, and a vast collection of Hollywood celebritards for whom 'over-the-top' is really the only fashion statement they know, and this is inevitable.

To be fair, as Media Matters points out, some of these numbers compare apples and oranges. To do a proper comparison, you have to factor in all the costs, most notably security, which dwarfs the figure spent by the inauguration committees. (Media Matters are also playing fast and loose with some numbers, by the way). I myself only care about public expenditures, anyway. If you're spending your own money, party hearty! But the estimates I've done still put the Obama figure well in excess of any past inauguration.

'Excess'. As the 'economic stimulus package' moves forward, keep the word handy.

I saw this little guy on Mount Le Conte in Tennessee on June 3, 2008, but wasn't sure of the ID until I found a picture of him on my camera. The little white spot on the back of his primaries is diagnostic.