The Straight Hype

Pick Your Poison - Blogging by Numbers

2012-01-10T21:19:00.001-04:00

Excuses, excuses, but once again, I must apologize for the lack of content lately. This place has been emptier than a Jon Huntsman rally at a Red Lobster restaurant. If anyone is wondering what the meaning of the Chinese expression he used during the Saint Anslesm College debate was, it roughly translates as "I won less than 1% of the Ames straw poll, but the media is succeeding in making me relevent." Actually, he couldn't even muster less than half a percentage point. He's actually taken out an ad that ends with a befuddled old Wilford Brimley-ish guy who grumbles "Why haven't we heard of this guy?" Solid statagy Jon - but we'll get back to that.

Truth is, I have recently embarked on a whiplash inducing career change, and am currently practicing as an addictions and human services couselor. I am also working on securing the necessary certifications that will allow me to open a private practice as a grief and loss counselor. I am also incredibly lazy, and my fingers hurt from trying to play a C chord on the sweet acoustic guitar my wife bought me for Christmas.  Let the blogging by numbers begin!

1 -  It seems that as conservatives, every GOP primary since 1992 has been about trying to make the best of a bad situation. Doth we protest too much? Perhaps, but if the 2010 mid-term election taught us anything, it's that we can demand more and get it, even against an orchastrated campaign by the leftist establishment to derail us at every turn using their yes-men in the media. The usual suspects are already starting to line up behind Mitt Romney, who, as Jonah Goldberg said, "looks like the picture that comes with the frame."

Romney is running a textbook campaign: Don't bet the house on one State, build your base, raise buckets of money, stay on message, and disect your opponents with surgical skill. He is becoming more at ease during the debates, and breezed through the St. Anslesm debate because the rest of the pack, oddly enough, passed up the golden oppportunity to unload their guns on him when he was the most vulnerable.

Romney is weak on social issues, and "Romneycare" was the model for Obamacare, whose individual mandate was recently declared unconstitutional by the 11th circuit.

Many in the conservative press, most notably the former Governor's cheerleaders at the otherwise sensible National Review, have been quick to wag their fingers at those of us who think Romney is far too slick. I would counter that he goes beyond slick to downright greasy at times, refusing to take definitive stands on any issue, and evades difficult questions by falling back on his new soundbite about how this election is a fight for the "Soul of America."

Governor Romney may not be the "Massachusetts liberal", as his detractors have painted him, but he is certainly not the all-American conservative we deserve.

2 - If you ever refuse a friend request on Facebook, never make the mistake of sending a message giving a reason as to why you are doing so. Trust me on this. It prompts people to act like jilted 14 year old girls who cyber stalk classmates who don't like Justin Bieber. Über creepy.

3 - A couple of months ago,  former Republican Utah Governor and Obama admistration lacky Jon Huntsman tried to boost his staggering 0.4% poll numbers before the GOP primaries by spitting on the very same social conservatives he's now trying to court by tweeting "To be clear. I believe in evolution... Call me crazy." Of course, this triggered a frenzy of media attention, as liberals dusted off the old canard that the conservative lobby of the GOP is waging a war on science! This is utter nonsense, and Huntsman and the liberal media know it. It was Christian conservative Dr. Francis Collins who discovered the new cancer treatment which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.

Huntsman is a tree-hugging RINO, who has lobbied to give valid ID's to illegal immigrants, and supports granting China non-reciprocal trade favours that would further promote the decay of the American economy while propping up a communist dictatorship.

The media is continuing to clamour on about the supposed Huntsman surge. I guess in the MSM, polling almost 25 points behind the front runner in one single state is surging.

4 - Ron Paul, trying to deflect attention from his racist past, made the disingenuous argument that African Americans receive the death penalty at a disproportionately higher rate than whites. The Justice Department's own stats show that in federal cases "The Attorney General approved seeking the death penalty for 38 percent of White defendants, 25 percent of Black defendants, and 20 percent of Hispanic defendants.” Ron Paul has referred to African Americans as animals, and once encouraged radical libertarians to arm themselves for an upcoming race war. I'm sure Dr. Paul is awaiting the KKK's endorsement...or does he already have it?

5 - No one in this race is a "Washington outsider." No one. That just grinds my gears.

6 - The editorial board of The Straight Hype is officially supporting Newt Gingrich for the GOP nomination, with a hopes of an eventual Gringrich/Santorum ticket, based on Gingrich's 30+ years of service, his knowledge of not only the national stage, but also his intricate understanding of the problems facing individual states, right down to matters of obscure New Hampshire infrastructure and veteran's healthcare. Much has been made about the former Speaker's "baggage." He has addressed his personal failings, and, more importantly, his political fumbles, and the wisdom obtained from those miscalculations. Newt Gingrich would demolish President Obama in a debate and would extinguish the media created myth of superficial "electability." God Speed Speaker Gingrich.

7 - Have a great week! Enjoy!!

Cordially

Joe

Kim Jong II - Your Lunatic BFF

2011-11-15T20:30:00.000-04:00

Hey there. Remember me? I'm Kim Jong II. Ring a bell? No? Back in '06 I was the man. I detonated a low yield nuclear weapon off the coast of North Korea. How crazy is that? Plenty crazy. That's sniffing airplane glue, huddled in the corner of a rat infested basement writing cryptic Greek messages on the wall and screaming about ants and Wilfred Laurier crazy - but oh no. 2 years ago everyone was talking about me and my sweet nuclear stuff, but no one cares about me anymore.

You're all obsessed with Mahmoud and Bashar al-Assad. Freakin' losers. Can you even pronounce "Ahmadinejad?" That's just a mess of vowels and consonants no man should be made to decipher. You know what else? Mahmoud may be short, but I'm waaaay shorter. I am so short I am literally staring at the urinal puck when I take a leak. Most of it dribbles down my leg.

I'm not unreasonable, though. I'm willing to meet you half way. Give me a couple of slots on CNN showing how moon bat crazy and scary I am, and I am willing to go the extra mile for you. I'm already off to a good start. I'm an unstable despot who is constantly drunk on Hennessy brandy. I wear lifts in my shoes (mostly because of the dribble) and I spend endless hours in my private screening room watching Godzilla movies.

I can tell. You're not impressed. My man Gaddafi got sodomized with a knife while they dragged him through the streets. Tough act to follow you say? NAY! I will sodomize myself with a bat covered in rusty nails while giving you bedroom eyes. I will set my taint on fire and poop out a bar of uranium if that's what it takes.

That's dedication. That's the kind of nuttier than squirrel poop crazy that you're not going to get from that little dandy Al-Assad. It's not enough to be scary.

You deserve Skeletor crazy, and I promise - give me a chance, and I will be your lunatic bff.

Lots of Crazy Love

Kim Jong Il

Poppy - Remembering the Haida

2011-11-11T01:11:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: The following Remembrance Day blog is a guest article written by my wife and editor, the lovely Mrs Claire. This moving tribute to her grandfather is in honour of all those who fought and sacrificed for our freedoms.

We have become accustomed to the term 'family unit'. It is a dry phrase, for when I reflect upon my own family, one word trumps this commonplace expression, and that word is 'legacy'. It is a legacy of a family, and a man I knew as 'Poppy'.

My mother's family are very close-knit, and would do anything for one another, and by extension, for anyone that can be considered family. I believe this is because of the values instilled in them by their parents. My grandfather and grandmother, Clyde and Edith Crews, were feisty Newfoundlanders, a rare and special breed of Canadian.

We, their grandchildren, knew my grandfather, quite fittingly given this subject matter, as Poppy. Poppy, as I knew him, was a gentle, soft-spoken man, who loved bear hugs and back scratches. He was a warm, kind, and genuine person, and the delight in his eyes was obvious when he saw family coming. When I was young, if he saw our car coming up his long driveway, he would lock the door, knowing that I would be the first one out of the car. Running excitedly to the door, I would knock, and he'd look through the little window and yell 'Go away, foreigner!' (they had since moved to Nova Scotia; we lived in the neighbouring province of New Brunswick), then, flinging the door wide, give me a giant hug.

As I got older, I started learning about World War II in school. At some point, we were given an assignment: To speak to a veteran about his time during the war. When I got home, my mother suggested I call Poppy. I found out he had served in the Navy. I called him, and he told me a story. At the end, he was quiet for a moment, and then he said 'That was the most scared I was, during the entire war.'

My mother doesn't remember, growing up, hearing stories about his service, because my grandmother didn't want her children to know of the horrors of war. Once grown, my grandfather would speak of it, albeit rarely, at times prompted by televised images of the war, or, quite simply, if he was asked about it.

Through the years, I've heard many stories about his service, from my mother, my aunts, and my uncles. Please forgive the scattered nature of the stories, I don't know them in chronological order:

Newfoundland, the province in which my grandparents were born and raised, did not join the Canadian Confederation until 1949. During the war, my grandfather signed up to fight for his country, a country to which he did not yet belong. His younger brother, my Great-Uncle Mickey, lied about his age and joined as well. Newfoundlanders (or Newfies as we now endearingly call them) were treated as the mud on every one's shoe, but, for the most part, they never complained, and followed orders - or at least they did on my grandfather's ship.

He served on the HMCS Haida, which served multiple functions - everything from convoy escort to full-blown warship - from 1943 through to the end of the war. My grandfather was a gunner. He once recounted to my mother that his and an Allied ship were sailing out on open water when a U-boat surprised them and fired on the ship closest to it, which was not the Haida. They managed to evacuate the Allied ship and sink the U-boat. They were not always so lucky.

Once, they came upon another Allied ship that had been fighting an enemy ship, but was at that point sinking. My grandfather said he could see the men from the ship bobbing in the waters of the Atlantic, and the Haida neared in an attempt to pick them up. They began drawing enemy fire, and had to pull out of the battle. They saved as many men as they could, which was not many. They were forced to retreat, leaving the vast majority of their brothers behind.

The story he recounted to me was what he described as being 'the most scared I was, during the entire war.' While fighting an enemy ship during a storm, firing at one another, huge waves were beating down on them, pounding the ship into the ocean. At some point during the fight, an enormous wave pushed the Haida high up in the air. He recounted that while they were technically still in the water, they were basically at a 90 degree angle to the ocean. They were completely exposed, and there was a 50-50 chance they'd land properly. The ship could have easily tilted the other way and landed upside down. When they landed bottom down, he said it was an ear-splitting booming noise that probably would have been louder had he not been so terrified. They won the battle.

The HMCS Haida sank more enemy surface tonnage during the war than any other Canadian warship. He was proud to have the honour of serving his country, and even as an elderly man, he could describe every detail of his ship. My parents gave him a framed photograph of the ship one year for Christmas, and it hung with a quiet dignity until he and my grandmother passed away and their house was sold. My parents now have the picture.

I can't begin to imagine the horrors he must have encountered during World War II, the stories no one ever heard. He fought with stoicism and pride. He fought for our freedom. He fought with honour.

After the war, he went on to marry my grandmother Edith, moved to the province of Nova Scotia, and had 14 children. My mother, the eighth child, can hardly remember a time he raised his voice (with one exception, funny, but not appropriate here). He contracted tuberculosis around 1956, and spent a year in a sanatorium. The doctors eventually removed a portion of his left lung. He worked at the docks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to support his family, and support them he did. He raised a beautiful family, and each of his children can and do tell stories that highlight the great man he was.

When he passed away in January of 2008, he was survived by his wife, 14 children, 25 grandchildren, and 30 great-grandchildren, as well as a multitude of nieces and nephews. Those numbers have grown, and, if the world has luck on it's side, we will instill the same virtues of kindness, gentleness, generosity, and all of his wonderful traits, all the things that made him such a wonderful man, into our children as he instilled in his, who in turn instilled into us. This is his legacy.

He was my hero.

Cordially

Claire

Howdy, I Might Be Rick Perry

2011-11-10T19:48:00.005-04:00

Howdy! I'm Rick Perry, and I'm running for somethin' in Norway. Wait...that ain't quite right. I'm a dang ol' Texas boy, and I made these Gucci loafers...I mean, snake skin boots with a bear I caught with my own three hands. Confused? Me too.

You see, after I went and started forgettin' stuff at the last debate, ma' campaign advisers decided it might temporarily boost my poll numbers if I start forgettin' stuff more often. From now on, I plan to forget a ding-dang pile of stuff to anyone who will listen, like them fellers on the late night radio, David Letternumber, and Jay Pruno. But I can get up before the crack o' dawn and do the morning shows too, cause that what we do here in Ohio...I mean, BIG OL' TEXAS. We get up nice and late so we can have an early lunch before the kids go to work or whatever. You see, I went and forgot again. Ain't that just so electable. Seriously.

Now, you might think it was a case of the nerves that made me forget that I wanted to abolish the Department of Energy and some other stuff, but heck, I've gone a step further and plum forgot what Energy is. I think it's that thing they put in toothpaste. I might get rid of some of them other departments as well, but I can't remember what they are. When I do remember, they're as good as gone, but for now, I forget stuff and remind people of it because we decided at a brain storming session that it's a solid strategy for the next week as it seems to be artificially inflating my poll numbers...I mean screw letters. Sorry, I forgot that I was supposed to be forgettin' stuff. Ain't that the dangest thing?

Anyway, I'm David, and...HEY! WHO THE HELL ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH 'MA POPCORN?"

What? Is that too over the top guys?....You want me to reign it in? Yeah, that's just making me sound crazy.

Howdy again. It's me, and I'm fairly certain I'm Rick Perry. I know my fellow Canadians don't like how they've started to get all cheap with the sprinkles at Baskin and Robbins, so if I remember, the Department of Ice Cream Toppings is GONE.

Now, I know in these uncertain times, it's hard to know just what to remember, but if you remember anything, forget this: I'm Rick Perry, and I'm going to be forgettin' stuff for a yet to be determined amount if time, and I will continue to fight for your rights until I am Prime Minister.

(This message would have been approved by The Committee to Elect Rick Perry but they forgot as well.)

Cordially

Joe

Yes we Cain? Herman Cain's last stand - Blogging by Numbers!!!

2011-11-03T21:07:00.001-03:00

My brother is getting married. He likes to play it safe. He's planned a 2013-"ish" wedding date, which gives him lots of time to devise an exit strategy in light of the fact that my crafty soon to be blister-in-law called his bluff and said yes. Bad play on his part. He was planning to propose ~~over a sewer grate in New York~~ amongst the lights and bustle of New York city, but pissed the demon off so badly one night that he proposed on the spot to abate her wrath. After that kind of counter strategy, I don't know what he'll have to pull out of the top hat to appease "The One" the next time the knucklehead does something to land him on the couch for a week. How do you top a diamond ring?

I kid, of course. Angie is a darling and I could not be happier for the both of them - plus she makes great lasagna. My brother asked me to be his best man, and I was honoured.

Let the blogging by numbers begin!!

1 - When National Review's Jim Geraghty is dragging your body through the town square in a triumphant auto da fé in Morning Jolt, you are in very deep trouble. This weekend will be make or break for GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain. The last 24 hours have been a virtual "creepy uncle explosion" for his campaign. Cain continues to climb in the polls despite his clumsy reaction to allegations of aggressively propositioning a female attendee at an NRA conference to come up to his room for a little more than a slice of pizza (the restaurant NRA, not the rifle NRA). He even grabbed front runner status, knocking Perry into the single digit realm in a national Quinnipiac poll.

As the story began to gain momentum, more came forward with similar stories of the married Cain's aggressive womanizing. Most still viewed the accusations with a suspicious eye, as the AP and other news outlets had nothing more to offer than "anonymous sources", but then NRO's Geraghty stated he believed the claims based on stories from a staffer of conservative talk show host Steve Deace.

The Steve Deace allegations have been the most damning and credible, despite Mark Block's allegations that this is nothing more than political carpet bombing from the Perry camp. The Perry camp is blaming Romney for all of this, of course, but the tale grows stranger. The Washington Times is claiming Rahm Emanuel's office leaked the story to the Perry camp via NRA reps from their Chicago office.

Cain has exploded at the press, and as frustrated as he may feel, it was not a flattering moment for his image. If he survives the Sunday talk show circuit this weekend, he may get past this. The "who leaked what" circus of the bizarre may play in his favour, as it forces other candidates to make magnanimous statements about Cain's impeccable character. The Cain camp is calling on his accusers to step up and show their faces.  If these women are telling the truth, and they call his bluff at a press conference, the "Godfather of Pizza" may end up "sleeping with the political fishes."

2 - Let me get on record as saying I like Herman Cain. I don't know if I'll be so fond of him if the stories of his alleged womanizing goes beyond some clumsy drunken flirting at a conference years ago, but for now, he's fine by me.  He has injected life into the debates, and his front runner status has made the leftist establishment very nervous. Cain has made some tactical errors, notably the ad that inexplicably ends with his campaign manager, Mark Block, taking a drag off a cigarette, making you feel like Rick Hanson is right around the corner with a camera crew.  His 999 plan would double dip into seniors' pockets, and may affect property values, but to his credit, he is the only candidate who has a comprehensive tax plan so far, despite it's flaws.

Cain frequently makes the folksy claim that he is the only candidate who is not a politician, that he's a businessman from outside the beltway who understands the concerns of everyday Americans. Please. Cain has been knee deep in politics since he was a senior economic advisor to the Dole campaign in 1996. If he survives this bimbo eruption, makes it to the next debate, and continues with this shtick, it may just provide fodder for a knock-out sound bite from another candidate.

This may all be moot if the allegations that swirl around him are true. Cain chose to deny the charges instead of saying his personal life was none of anyone's business. and that choice could make or break his political future. If Cain is vindicated, it will hurt both the Perry and Romney camps, as they accuse each other Callender-style politicking . If the allegations are true, then Cain is a creep and a liar and American conservatives deserve better.

3 - Quote of the week: "I wonder if teen vampires read fantasy novels about the lives of heavy middle aged secretaries as a form of escape?" - Mike Polk Jr.

4- The collection of unemployed sociologists and college dropouts called Occupy Wall Street is losing steam, mostly because they're wearing out their welcome and they have no coherent message to speak of. Ask a protester what they hope to acheive, and you can make a drinking game if you take a shot every time you hear them use the word "bourgeois." So far, from Atlanta to New York, there have been thousands of arrests including destruction of property in the millions, arson, rape, assault, and there have also been several deaths from drug overdoses.

Drum circles aside, there are so many things that make this movement simultaniously comic and tragic. First of all, they aren't really occupying Wall Street. They are actually loitering in a residential neighborhood. "Wall Street", as a collection of financial institutions, actually moved to midtown Manhattan over four miles away years ago (Geography is often static, but you can't move away from stupid). Funnier still is that OWS leaders, such as self described "socialist" independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, voted to   protect subsidies for millionaires’ mortgages, and supported an amendment to a bill that "...will allow Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back home loans as large as $729,750." He returned to lead the protesters without so much as a peep from anyone, because most of them don't even know the difference between North Korea and South Korea

The residents of Wall Street, who at first tried to be charitable to the protesters, now want them out after allegations of rape surfaced. In Britain, St. Paul's Cathedral had to close it's doors for the first time since 1940 when"... German bombs rained indiscriminately down on the city during the Blitz and an unexploded incendiary forced evacuation for a few days while the device was removed." This was after the church allowed them some space to protest out of good will. Now the human debris refuse to leave.

It was Stephen Colbert who had the last laugh when he, dressed as Che Guevera, lampooned the protesters in an attempt to "co-occupy" them. When liberal comedians can't take you seriously anymore, you know you're in trouble.

5 - Have a great weekend!!!

Cordially

Joe

Down the Rabbit Hole - Fluffy Bunny and the Progressive Media

2011-10-12T16:12:00.004-03:00

During the week, the lovely Mrs. Claire and I baby-sat our friend's beautiful little girl overnight. She's at the age where she wants to know what everything is. She gets this curious little look on her face, points at something, and asks "wassat?" This goes on for most of the day, kind of like a Joe Biden foreign policy briefing, only she has a better grasp on retaining knowledge accurately. She also, like Joe Biden, has her favourite story books, and will swat away anything new that has too many words and not enough pictures.

One of these books was a simple enough tale about a fluffy bunny who loved carrots. This velveteen sybarite loved carrots so much he one day found he could no longer enter his rabbit hole. TLC would have been all over it, but fluffy bunny, in a moment of keen introspection, decided to cut back on the carrots, up his cardio, and he was fit as a fiddle in no time. Soon he was able to frolic and play with his friends again. Now, this may all seem innocent enough, but I'll bet my fluffy little tail that when she hits 12, the very same people who told her it was not ok to be bigger or different when she younger will make a whip-lash inducing value change and start lecturing her about how the fashion industry sets unrealistic standards of beauty by filling magazines with emaciated models, and that being heavier is just fine and dandy. By the time she is 16, these busy little fascists will have her dabbling in vegetarianism; Now they're telling her that bigger is not ok again, because McDonalds is evil, and people are too stupid know that eating there every day will make you fat and the government needs to get involved (did you know the same advocacy group who is suing many fast food outlets for using trans fats is the very same organization that forced and bullied them into using trans fats in the first place because they claimed it was healthier?).

Well, believe it or not, despite the fact that the morons at PETA call feeding your kids McDonalds "child abuse", our friend's little munchkin (gasp!!) has McDonald's from time to time, and guess what? She's healthy, active, and is an ideal weight. Do you know why? Because her parents aren't stupid. They know feeding their child fast food every week would make her sick, and they don't need the government to tell them so. Isn't that something? They don't need giant warning signs on the side of every kid's meal telling them that the cheeseburger and fries inside are high in fat and calories. Their functioning brains already know this, so McDonalds is a treat maybe once a month.

Another curious thing happened during the various readings of Fluffy Bunny. Little Karlee, on the third or so reading, began to flip the pages back and forth repeatedly. In a neat little flash of her cognitive development on display, she frantically pointed out that there were only carrots on the first and last page of the book. She might not quite grasp why fluffy bunny came close to appearing on Dr. Phil yet, but she was able to spot that something was wrong. Lots of carrots, no carrots, then just one carrot. Like the magically reappearing carrot, messages about food and body image will change as little Karlee grows up. They will be told by the same people - liberal educators, celebrities and the progressive media - and the message will always be garbled and changing with whatever is in vogue at the time.

Remember the guy from Supersize Me? A documentary filmmaker named Morgan Spurlock made a splash by going on a 30 day, 3 meal a day McDonalds binge. It was just the sort of propaganda tool the progressive food Nazi's needed to force McDonalds to put items on the menu that nobody wanted. McDonalds became more expensive, and even stopped the practice of super-sizing in some regions - an option, by the way, which was only offered to Spurlock 9 times out of his 90 meals. Seems to lend a certain irony to the title of his movie, don't you think? It also turns out that Spurlock's nutritional facts are under fire. In a rebuttal documentary called "Fat Head", Tom Noughton exposes that the numbers provided in Supersize Me don't add up. Spurlock claimed to have eaten over 5000 calories per day, a feat that was impossible based on what Spurlock consumed during the movie. Noughton did the math, and even with three supersized meals a day at Mcdonald's with dessert thrown in, he showed it's impossible to reach the 5000 calorie goal.

What few people know is that the impending lawsuit against McDonalds shown in Supersize Me failed, and Morgan Spurlock is refusing to release his famous "food journal" to prove his 5000 calorie diet claim. In addition, like the hapless and evasive McDonalds executives he harassed in his film, now Spurlock has lawyered up, and is not answering calls or requests for meetings.

But Supersize Me is just one of the many faux-exposes that the progressive establishment does best. It's post-reporting slight of hand that has become so polished and fine tuned by the likes of Jon Stewart that you if you blink, you'll miss how Stewart's decided what's a "media ready" scandal and what's worthy of belief.

When the President awarded a half million dollar loan to a failing company against the advice of council and warnings from the OMB, and even after he had provided them with a post restructuring 75 million dollar bankruptcy protection umbrella, Stewart hissed on The Daily Show that this was just part of the right-wing media's attempt to make a scandal where there was nothing to see. Really? This specific violation of the Energy Act of 2005 carries a 30 year jail term. That's not news?

Apparently not, but you know what is news, according to folks like MSNBC, CNN, and Jon Stewart? The conservative lobby of the GOP is waging a war on science! This old canard was dusted off for re-use after former Governor Jon Huntsman, in an attempt to try reviving his campaign after a dismal performance at the August 11th debate in Ames, Iowa, tweeted "To be clear. I believe in evolution... Call me crazy." Really? So do 76% of Republican voters. Who cares what a bottom of the pack candidate with a 2% approval rating feels about evolution? The federal government doesn't mandate policy on the teaching of evolution. It worked though, with cyber rags like the Huffpo, where callow old liberals go to die, declaring Huntsman a brave dissenter from bourgeois norms. The usually hilarious Mike Polk Jr. even chimed in, huffing "Jon Huntsman has sabotaged his Republican primary run and rendered himself thoroughly unelectable by acknowledging the existence of science." Don't get me wrong, I believe Polk is probably the funniest comedian of my generation (click here, here, and here), but for someone who has blogged about how people are so easily led by the nose from the media, he was quick to jump on the Huntsman/science bandwagon, a story that has no genesis except for a banal tweet from a virtually unknown candidate. Huntsman also believes life begins at conception, so if you believe that Jon Huntsman is getting a bum rap because "he believes in science", then I am so very pleased to welcome all you liberals to the pro-life movement. Thank you for finally coming around. Ahhhh - but that doesn't fit into your neat little narrative, does it? So, you just leave it out. Just like you chose to ignore that President Obama vocally opposed gay marriage on the campaign trail because it conflicted with his Christian beliefs.

Like those who write books about Fluffy Bunny's carrot consumption, they feel no need to adjust the narrative to fit with the changing facts, because no one ever points out the train of logic's central fallacy. The media are also masters at the game of making people believe that they actually don't believe what the sensationalist media is telling them.

Little Karlee was quick to pick up on the subtle absence of carrots by flipping a few pages. She sensed something was off, looked at what little evidence was before her, and came to a conclusion based on the facts. How many people who believe the "War on Science" tubthumping ever took a moment to click their computer mouse a few times to check Governer Huntsman's record to see if Mr. "Call me Crazy" was at least consistent on issues relating to this belief (not that they're even relevant)? This is an election about the economy, and not one Republicans are ready to hand over to a guy who can barely muster enough excitement to grab more than 2% of the vote. Latte liberals have a lot more resources than little Karlee, but that only touches on the grander point.

Celebrities, comedians, and just about all of my liberal friends who think they are so much more clever than the rest of us love to beat the science issue to death, yet not one of them could tell me at what percentage Huntsman was polling before the Ames debate, or before his famous tweet even became an issue. That's because folks like Jon Stewart taught a generation of college students that it's better to be clever and ill-informed with a smug sense of superiority than to know where all those carrots went.

Cordially

Joe

Commander in Thief - Jon Stewart Plays Point for Obama on Solyndra

2011-09-22T20:33:00.002-03:00

In October of 2004, liberal comedian Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's Crossfire and effectively killed one of the best shows on television. Crossfire, argued Stewart, represented the very worst of the cable news world and amounted to little more than "partisan hackery." When asked by hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala why Stewart allowed high profile left wing guests to escape his acidic tongue on The Daily Show, Stewart hid behind his usual disingenuous firewall, claiming he was just a comedian, and it wasn't his job to conduct hard hitting interviews. This, of course, is complete nonsense. Stewart leaves his wit at the door when conservatives make the mistake of appearing on his show. A recent example: National Review contributor Jonah Goldberg appeared on Stewart's show to promote his book "Liberal Fascism", only to be berated by Stewart for 20 minutes over book's cover. Ha ha - funny stuff. Anderson Cooper and Matt Lauer, members of the media Stewart's show is supposed to lampoon, get treated like rock stars.

What the tone deaf Stewart seems to have missed back then is that Crossfire represented the very best of the media. Every night, for 30 to 60 minutes, a liberal and a conservative duked it out on different topics without moderators and limited editing. It was straight from the horse's mouth - no media filter. Viewers got real debate, not soundbites, but Stewart's ego had done it's damage, and the show was cancelled in 2005.

I bring this up because last week Stewart went to bat for the leftist establishment once again, defending the Obama administration over the Solyndra affair, calling it a "Custom Tailored" scandal invented by the media. Stewart then proceeded to lecture us about the free market, claiming that companies fail all the time and there was nothing newsworthy about it.

True enough, but most "failed companies" don't make 20 visits to the White House, receive half a billion dollars in federal loans, then file for bankruptcy slightly over a year later amid charges of fraud and embezzlement. Most companies that fail are also not forced to testify before a Congressional committee with its board of directors claiming they will "plead the 5th." But what is Solyndra, and why is the scandal that surrounds it so serious?

In securing a loan for the failing energy company, President Obama committed fraud under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 30 years. I am not joking.

Solyndra was a green company that made unreliable solar cell panels. The company went begging for a half a billion dollar loan from the Bush Administration in 2007. Their application was rejected, based on the fact that their expenditures more than doubled their revenue, and with Chinese companies selling the same panels for a fraction of the price, Solyndra appeared to have no chance of survival, nor did they have a business plan to prove otherwise.

President Bush also rejected their application based on information that the company intended to go public. If the administration had approved the loan, it would essentially have been "vouching" for Solyndra, misleading future private investors into believing the company was sound because the government had deemed it sound enough to invest in. That would have violated the Energy Policy Act, and would have constituted fraud. No deal, said the Bush Administration. Approving the loan would have been tantamount to doing what Martha Stewart went to jail for, only on a massive scale.

But what politician would be crooked, corrupt, and frankly, arrogant enough to not only loan these guys money, but try to protect them financially afterwards? President Obama, that's who.

6 days after taking the oath of office, President Obama "renewed" their application. Solyndra officials proceeded to visit the White House 20 times, until the loan was secured. Despite the report that Solyndra could not compete with the cheaper Chinese solar panels, and that it did not have any coherent future strategy, President Obama personally vouched for the them in May of 2010, publicly praising their clean energy "green" company. This prompted the private sector to invest a billion dollars when the company went public. Solyndra's executives thanked the president by donating big bucks to his 2012 re-election bid. Sound sleazy? It's more than that. It's a crime. The President knew about the damning report of the coming collapse, but on May 26th, 2010, he told the American people that Solyndra was:

"...expect[ing] to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world.”

Plants and thousands of workers selling panels around the world? Only 9 months later, Solyndra had already shut the doors of its first plant and fired close to 1200 workers. Solyndra needed to protect themselves, and quick. The administration was getting nervous. In a quote worthy of Watergate, the OMB stated that "...questions will be asked” if unjustifiable restructuring proceeded - and proceed it did. The law states the investors are the first to get dibs on liquidated assets of a company that goes belly up. President Obama created a provision for Solyndra's executives, that they would be protected for the first $75 million in the case of bankruptcy.

On September 11th, 2011, their offices were raided by the FBI.

But where is the investigation? Lots of people are asking that very question, but it seems that Holder's justice department is asking for little more than a bankruptcy inquiry on Friday, and Solyndra's board of executives, who just a day ago were planning on pleading the fifth, are now considering not showing up at all. For anyone else living in America, this is called contempt of Congress; For President Obama's friends, it's no big deal.

So here it is: a scandal that would shake Washington to it's core under any Republican administration; A criminal act involving the nation's commander in chief; A scandal that would bring down any other President.

This should be the only thing being covered on the 24 hour news networks. We should be sick of hearing about it by now. This is not a complicated matter. The facts are clear and linear, and they are not in dispute, but Jon Stewart, a sanctimonious comedian with delusions of profundity, has declared it just another run of the mill bankruptcy, and the nation nods and shrugs while they wait for the Colbert Report.

Only in Obama's America could a joker save the king.

Cordially

Joe

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-11T19:56:00.000-03:00

On this day, 10 years ago, there was not a computer, television screen, or radio station that was not broadcasting the images of two commercial airlines crashing into the Word Trade Center. Before that day, 9/11 was only known as the number you dialed in an emergency.

That night, as Mark Styne noted in National Review, many Americans went to bed wondering if they would wake up the next morning. At the time, I was a dealer support liaison for a major telecom company. That night, filled with neither fear of rage, just an empty, surreal desolation, I wrote the following column.

Sipping strong coffee in the breakfast nook of his downtown apartment on 14th and Union, National Review's rookie Editor Rich Lowry hears the low roar of a plane. It is a quarter of nine, and though he has learned to tune out the noisy bustle of the city that is New York, the sound seems out of place. It's too loud, louder than what he ever heard living in Manhattan.

"That's the sound people talk about when they report seeing plane crashes."

Lowry quickly tucks the thought away; New York is by nature a noisy animal. His thoughts return to work and the business of editing one of the largest and most respected magazines in the United States. Lowry is wrapping his brain around a possible follow up to his article advocating the decriminalization of marijuana, when the phone rings. The disembodied voice dispenses with conventional pleasantries:

"Turn on the TV."

What blazes across the screen is one of the most surreal and horrifying images the 30-year-old editor had ever witnessed. A live video feed from 5th avenue, just a quarter block from his apartment gives him a front row seat to the destruction that is unfolding. The North Tower of 2the World Trade Center is engulfed in a cloud of gray smoke. Just moments earlier, American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked by a group of unknown terrorists, pilot the doomed commercial airliner into the upper floors of the behemoth structure. In another 20 minutes, United Airlines Flight 175 will collide with the South Tower - within an hour, both structures, straining under the pressure caused by the massive structural damage will be flattened into a pile of twisted steel and shattered concrete.

The South Tower is the first to collapse. As it crumbles towards earth, it rains down a path of deadly debris destroying surrounding New York landmarks. The Marriott, the Commodities Exchange Building, the Dean Witter Building, and the US Customs house, all are destroyed within seconds. Over 300 police, firefighters, and rescue crews working to evacuate the doomed towers would be crushed beneath the falling rubble.

Back at his apartment, Lowry scans the chaos on Union Street below. He describes an almost carnival like atmosphere as hoards of people hurry out to 5th Avenue to get a better view of the unfolding disaster. Ghoulish spectators rush to snap photographs of themselves, grinning like imbeciles against the backdrop of the falling towers. Lowry describes the scene:

"The street was clogged, because cars, including a bunch of cabs, were pulled off along the side of the street, their drivers standing next to their cars, with the doors open, sometimes with their radios turned up high. One moron had pulled his pick-up truck over and sat up near the cab so a friend could snap an Instamatic picture of him with the worst terrorist attack ever on the American homeland burning in the background."

As the South Tower of the Trade Center Collapses, the FAA makes a dramatic decision to close all air traffic across the nation, an unprecedented step never before taken. Hundreds of flights are rerouted to Toronto and Halifax, leaving local emergency workers scrambling to find makeshift accommodations for the stranded travellers. 40 minutes later, Flight 77, a Boeing 757 en route from Washington's Dulles International

Airport to Los Angeles, carrying 58 passengers and six crew members aboard, slams into the Pentagon. The Pentagon was on Alpha security alert at the time. While the administration commences the evacuation of all federal office buildings in Washington, United Airlines' officials report that that United Flight 93, en route from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco is missing. The smoldering wreckage of the plane would be found in a field southeast of Pittsburgh.

Back in New York, Rich Lowry sits in his office scanning the latest cover art for National Review's October 1st issue. In bold imposing letters set against a black background read the words "AT WAR". 24 hours has passed since his Nation was attacked by faceless cowards. CNN is reporting that the death toll will exceed 10,000 souls, more than the Revolutionary War, Pearl Harbor, and the war of 1812 combined. There are no words to describe the deep sense of loss and anger we at the Rant feel at this time. Platitudes about defending the shinning City on the Hill feel hollow as one watches footage of rescue crews sifting through the shattered remains of our cherished symbols of freedom.

Our day of infamy was a perfect September day in New York.

Joseph Leger

We're on a brief vacation. See you in a week!!

2011-09-07T15:31:00.000-03:00

I'll do my best to post from the road, but we'll be back in a week!! Enjoy the site!

LURID COURT TV!! - Blogging By Numbers!!!

2011-08-19T17:59:00.019-03:00

Confession time: That was a misleadingly sexy title. There's nothing lurid about this blog piece, nor is there anything riveting enough in it to make the cut for a popular cable TV network. There will be a few things pertaining to courts, though. Important stuff. Feel cheated? Used? I guess this makes me the cyber equivalent of a guy with a black van and candy. Wait...That was a rather creepy analogy - doesn't even really work when you think of it. I guess I'm more like one of those guys whose online dating profile picture was taken 20 years ago and you've flown halfway across the country to meet me only to discover I'm wearing jogging pants and a Looney Tunes tank top and you want to cry because you've blown most of your savings and all of your AirMiles to get here.

Anyway....It's Blogging By Numbers Time!!!!

1 - The official Facebook fan club has been moved. We like "likes", so come on over and and join the party.

2 - It's been a bad week for the Obama administration in the courts. The administration, who has often used an activist judiciary to vacate electoral decisions and nullify laws which have inconvenienced them, have been dealt some significant setbacks. Last Friday, the 11th Circuit declared Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional. This is a victory for the 26 states currently fighting the mandate, and also fast tracks this fight to the Supreme Court, much to the chagrin of the President, who had hoped to keep this tied up in legal limbo until next year. The court did not mince words in their decision, stating;.

"It is over inclusive in when it regulates: it conflates those who presently consume health care with those who will not consume health care for many years into the future. The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life. This theory affords no limiting principles in which to confine Congress’s enumerated power."

Essentially, the 11th Circuit ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional.

On Monday, a federal district court in Wyoming struck down regulations the Interior Department have been using to delay the issuance of drilling leases. This is a victory for American energy independence and a slap in the face to the President, as the decision was handed down from a partisan judge picked by Obama under ethically shaky circumstances.

The Imperial Judiciary the President had banked on are not playing along. Let's hope the Constitution continues to win the day.

3 - I hear they're thinking of bringing Sex and the City back to TV after all these years. I thought they already had a show like that. It was called the Golden Girls.

4 -I'll try to do this in the best taste possible considering the levity of - and the seriousness attached to - this situation, so buckle up junior.

My brother wants to go to New York. You know, do all the touristy things - Stay near 5th Ave, see Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, catch a show, go to Barney's and buy expensive pants...I don't know, whatever you do when you go to New York. My brother is king of the deal, but sometimes, the emperor finds himself without his robe. A few days ago, bursting with the energy of that bald guy from the Six Flags commercials, he called me to boast of the mother of all deals.

His flight from Canada to New York? Peanuts!! His ride from the airport to the city? As cheap as a duplex in Cleveland. His accommodations? Inexpensive and near the action. This deal did not take him much time at all to find. For some odd reason, everything was really cheap this one weekend. This one weekend in September. The weekend of September 11th - The 10th anniversary of September 11th.

Yep, things are pretty cheap when there's a good chance your flight is going to be one way, your limo is going to get hit with an RPG, and the coat check at your restaurant has a special ticket for suicide vests. My brother only realized this as we were speaking, which made the tirade of one liners I unleashed while I was talking to him on the phone all the more delicious.

OF COURSE - I do not think anything will happen to my bro. It's probably one of the safest times ever to go to New York, considering the heightened security, and he'll get to pay his respects to those whose names we remember and pray for every year...still though.

5 - Last weekend a few people told me I should blog about a certain subject which seemed like a good idea at the time - but I don't remember what it was. Bet it would have been awesome though.

6 - Have a great weekend!

Cordially

Joe

Debt Disgrace - The White House and The Media Spit On Americans

2011-08-04T00:00:00.003-03:00

According to Vice President Biden, and former speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, if you are a Republican and believe America should approach it's fiscal future with prudence, targeted tax cuts and gradual reductions in spending, you are a terrorist. You read that correctly - a terrorist. The media, who less than a year ago made farcical pledges to cut words like "cross hairs" and "targeting" from their lexicon claiming such commonplace political expressions could incite mass murder, quickly forgot their pledge and let their freak flag fly, calling the GOP everything from segregationists to suicide bombers. Ironically the most vicious verbal assaults from the media and Democrats came on the day Gabbie Giffords returned to work - you'll remember her shooting was what prompted the media, led by the very important hair of John King, to take their vow of verbal chastity in the first place.

So outrageous and egregious has been the conduct of the left, that the usually even tempered voice of reason, Jonah Goldberg, penned a blistering rebuttal in NRO's the corner at the shameless partisan game the media has been playing.

- but the winter of the left's discontent had been brewing long before the uninspiring debt compromise had reached it's crescendo.

A few months ago my ear in Washington, a former PR man and French Euro-liberal was at the ready, setting the mise-en-scène of a dire landscape to come. Even before most had begun to grasp such concepts as austerity measures and debt ceilings, my dear friend was fervidly insisting that if the debt ceiling and taxes were not raised, people would be lining up at bank machines with handguns to shoot themselves like Bender at the Suicide booth in the first episode of Futurama. As most people do their banking at home, if a suicidal frenzy swept the nation over the collapse of America's banking system, I suspect people would be more inclined to depart this mortal coil with a good Chardonnay and a bottle of Ambian. As a spin doctor and European used to singing the praises of socialism, I know my friend is a master of conjuring specters of free market bogeymen even when the mechanisms that drive his beloved institutions have been collapsing like drunken narcoleptics for the last quarter century - but he's certainly on message. The late Michael Crichton, referred to this practice as conjuring up a "State of Fear", and subsequently wrote a novel of the same name that I consider one of the most important books of the last quarter century.

We all know the liberal shell game, but what about the recently passed debt deal? Like any movie reviewer worth his salt would ask; "Is it any good?"

The answer for the most part is - no.

The deal's one saving grace is that it's a step in the right direction. but let's dispense with the notion that there are any real cuts in spending - there are simply decreases in increases. Spending is still rising across the board, but Republicans have forced the Democrats to pull in the reigns. Rep Boehner and Ryan looked at what the CBO thought was an appropriate amount to keep program A or B solvent, and refused to allow the President to spend anymore beyond that point. (this is what Vice President Biden calls terrorism and it is why he is a moron.)

- But this is the the bill's most fatal and unforgivable sin. The drastic reduction in military spending. America's constitutional Republic is based on whatever comes out of forced compromise from two sides who refuse to budge. It's to be expected that each side has to hold their nose and concede this or that to get a lollipop in return, but this concession was a dreadful folly on the part of House Republicans.

There are drastic cuts to the defense budget and a 10 year freeze on defense spending. The 15 to 20 % graduated reduction is based on the assumption that the US will not be drawn into any protracted conflicts over the next decade. These cuts will come out of "personnel, procurement, and training." That's a dangerous chance to take.

As for the non-defense stuff, you can parse the details here and there, but most experts still say a year from now we'll have already borrowed what we managed to cut. We may continue to be standing still at that time, but at least with a little help from the Tea Party folks, we've managed to keep the President and his allies from pushing the country over the economic cliff and into the jaws of a hungry China. So before we start slinging eggs at our fellow conservative friends and colleagues, remember that in Obama's Washington - this is actually a small sign of progress.

Addendum;

Yes, there is a lighter and funnier "Blogging by Numbers" coming soon for those of you who come here for the armpit noises and fart jokes.

Cordially

Joe

Crotch of Fury

2011-06-13T23:35:00.002-03:00

Let me get ~~my Weiner~~, I mean, get the Weiner stuff out of my literary TVO. My quill is 40% hard hitting commentary, 15% disgust over the cultural vortex we live in, about 25% Family Guy references, and the rest is pretty much that windy sound they play when you see tumbleweed fly by in those old westerns. The fact that people who wear Che T-Shirts and stick a Darwin decal on their Prius annoy me, but at the same time, I can watch back-to-back episodes of Family Guy all evening either makes me a closet quasi-libertarian or it gives me street cred with my liberal readers who come for a laugh then get pissed off at me because they lack the language skills to call me out. Anyway, where was I? Oh the ignoble end of the mighty Weiner.

Just about every major news outlet has sucked the air out of the punchlines with bylines like "Pelosi to Ask House to Probe Weiner" and the New York Post's zinger "Weiner Roast." As we go to print, disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner is in rehab, slowly coming to the "turgid" realization that you can't take pictures of your junior member of congress, send them out to every gal who tweets you, and still expect to keep your job. Yeah, yeah, I know all the claptrap about how your personal life is your own business, but if you're doing it on the company's dime, and "doin' it" means sending nasty Facebook messages and snapshots to 17 year old girls, well, there shouldn't be any ethical discussions about the status of your employment.

Spare me the usual "they all do it." They don't. He torpedoed his new, pregnant bride (who is an up-and-comer at the State Department) with his cavalcade of depravity, and he is now under investigation because of the age of some of these girls. Now this is becoming a possible criminal matter, not to mention the terse letter he's going to get from his HR department - and that's the least of his worries. His wife's boss is Hillary Clinton. She can turn people to glass just by staring at them.

It's become the "riguour" to say that your weekly pants-off dance-off with your harem of barely legal mistresses should have zero impact on your job. Maybe I'm wet behind the ears, maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but maybe it's time we start expecting a little more from the men and woman who pick our pockets to make our country move, or in the case of this administration, come to a grinding halt. Everyone screws up, and I don't expect politicians to be paragons of virtue, but if you want to be a serial creep with teenage girls you lose the privilege of representing my interests in the hallowed halls of Congress.

We could debate nuance and at what point does behaviour A or B cross the line. You could make some sophomoric debating point about Jefferson and think you've ended the argument - but at the end of the day, Anthony Weiner didn't just cross the line, he moved it 5 miles south and ran it over with a tractor.

Sorry Tony. There's no way to wiggle or spin your way out of this one. Sit tight, though; CNN will probably give you Spitzer's time slot when his ratings start to tank.

Cordially

Joe

From the Archives - The Best of TSH by Request - Drag Me To Hell

2011-06-13T18:08:00.000-03:00

The poster advertisement at the bus terminal shows a picture of a guy who looks as though he accidentally walked in on his roommate's hot girlfriend taking a shower, and has sprawled out on a plush comfortable couch, hands laced behind his head, just reliving the moment. The caption reads "Get Ready For Comfort". Poster guy has a laptop, an I-Pod, a stack of books, and what appears to be a rather large man-purse ready at his side. Must be nice.

Presently, I'm not feeling so much like poster dude. I feel like I'm sitting on Robert Byrd's skeleton, and there's about 6 inches of space seperating my neck from the broken cup holder precariously holding my scorching cup of coffee, which I am fairly certain will soon be gracing my twig and berries with 2nd degree burns.

"Get Ready For Comfort". I think "Get Ready For The Chiropractor" would be a slightly more honest assessment of what to expect after buying a ticket to ride the iron maiden on wheels.

I find myself in the present situation because I forgot an appointment 3 hours out of town that I had scheduled for today. Necessity and expedience has made quicker and more convenient forms of transportation inaccessible at present. These types of things happen to me quite frequently. Though the lovely Miss Claire continues to buy me beautiful leather bound day planners from Barnes and Noble every year, I persist in keeping track of all important engagements on miscellaneous scraps of paper that I randomly stuff in my wallet. You would think that a guy on is his way up the conservative-libertoid blogosphere ladder would have his s%$t together. You would be wrong.

We just passed a car with a New York license plate adorned with "Obama/Biden '08" and "War is not the Answer" bumper stickers. I quickly wrote "Obama is a wiener" on a scrap of paper to flash at them as we drove by, but thought better of it in honor of my credo that good manners are the glue that hold society together. The lady two rows in front of me appears to hold manners and decorum in much lower esteem than I do, as she seems quite fine with the fact that her 12 year old is wearing a crisp white t-shirt with the word F#$CK emblazoned in large black letters on the front. What's odd is that he appears to otherwise be a well mannered and immaculately groomed young man. He even held the door open for me to the coffee shop during our last stop. Not a trace of angst to be found for a kid making such a bold statement with his t-shirt. Maybe he's playing, as James Bowman might say, "a little pomo joke on us all".

I'll spare you the details of what I will only refer to as "the incident" that just happened in the tin box that is posing as a bathroom at the back of the bus. Push the bubble on a Trouble game board and watch the dice jump violently about inside the confined area. That would sum up the PG part of what just happened to me in the charming little rolling wash closet.

I just had to change buses. I wasn't aware that this particular form of travel had stop overs. My hopes were briefly buoyed when I noticed this appeared to be a shiny new vehicle; Maybe it would be filled with those big comfy seats with all kinds of room for laptops and I-Pods and leg stretching. Nope. It is indeed brand new, but the only modification appears to be an illustration on the near eye level cup holder warning that if the person if front of you suddenly decides to rapidly recline his seat, the coffee in your cup holder may cause a painful crotch incident.

In perspective, there are far worse things in this world than having to take a brief but uncomfortable bus ride - like making the mistake of reading a Maureen Dowd column with the false hope that the mean little shrew will put down her bile-filled pen and start being witty again...or listening to Vice President Biden trying to explain complex government policy by using arbitrary percentages to determine how successful they might be...or maybe even choosing to read an up and coming conservative blogger only to suffer through a long, rambling diatribe about his transportation prejudices.

Seriously though, I can't feel my ass anymore.

Cordially

Joe

Back in Business - Blogging by Numbers!!!

2011-05-11T16:08:00.000-03:00

First off, I get it. The vlog was not the most popular item I've posted. It looks like I'm speaking from a dark cave in the mountainous regions of Pakistan, and because I was suffering from a nasty respiratory tract infection the day I posted it, I sounded like a Canadian version of the Taco Bell Chihuahua with throat cancer. Some kind readers have suggested that if I tweaked it a little here and there, it might be something they could get on board with, but the overall consensus is that it was bad. Not Vanilla Sky bad, but not the sort of quality my fans have come expect from the Hype. You've all said pretty clearly that you come here for the writing, and that's extremely humbling and flattering.

Many of you have been waiting for the "year in review" article I write each January. Unfortunately, it's not happening this year because ~~I'm a lazy bastard~~ I think it's a little late in the game at this point - unless of course, I take a cue from Charlie Sheen and declare it so late that I'm winning. It's now no secret that my mother was battling cancer for the last 14 months. She passed away April 19th, and my father, who never left her side, passed away unexpectedly a few weeks earlier, on March 28th. As you can imagine, my priorities were adjusted accordingly. The blog has been on a break, and it might be a slow year for the Hype, but TSH is not going anywhere, so please be patient and I'll be back up to speed at some point.

The Hype has never really been a "blog", in the traditional sense. Blogging is simply a means to an end - a format I use. I have always considered TSH to be a website. I don't like to cram scatter-shot opinions every day, the way Justice Sotomayor crams Pabst Blue Ribbon and dog-eared back issues of "The Public Interest" on Friday nights. There's lots of daily red meat on my facebook page, so feel free to "like me" if you want in on some of that sweet libertoid-conservative moonshine.

Let the Blogging by Numbers begin!!

1 - This morning I was scrolling through Google News to check out the disastrous OMB stats, when I noticed we are still being forced to suffer through the ranting of NPR's answer to Rooster Cogburn, Prima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnic. For my Canadian readers, NPR is America's answer to CBC radio, if CBC was twice as liberal and a third less boring. Most locals know Dupnic has a long a career of hogging the spotlight with his myopic left wing views on everything from immigration to the Tea Partiers, but ever since he grabbed the global media spotlight as the self-appointed National Discourse Referee in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, it seems he has no intentions of shutting up.

For those who may not recall, while Sherriff Dupnic was spending his time making the rounds on the national talk show circuit, his deputies were wasting the crucial first 48 hours of the investigation trying to find evidence to support his hypothesis that right wing talk radio and the conservative movement had somehow triggered Jarad Lee Loughner into committing the shooting spree that left six people dead and 13 injured. The media was quick to take the lead on this narrative, with Paul Krugman and Keith Olbermann blaming Sarah Palin and other conservatives for the massacre, even before the name of the shooter had been released. As we go to print, Krugman is still refusing to let go of his pet theory, proving once again that intelligence is not a prerequisite for winning the Nobel Prize in economics (can't remember who first made that joke, but please accept a hat tip).

Would it be nice to have more civility in public discourse? Of course, but claiming that increased awareness and passionate engagement in the political process incites mass murder is the cheapest and lowest form of treating the supposed illness some disingenuously claim they want to cure.

2 - YES WE CAN!! By 'we' I mean President Obama, and by 'can' I mean can drive the economy into the tank faster than you can say 'Sister Suzie Sittin' on a Stimulus'. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the housing market has tanked for the 57th consecutive month. 7 million Americans have joined the ranks of the jobless, with unemployment touching double digits, and the deficit sitting at 16.5 trillion dollars. The President campaigned on a plethora of feel good platitudes and olive leaf diplomacy, and handing him the Presidency brings to mind the famous P.J. O'Rourke quip about how handing over power and money to a politician is like handing car keys and whisky to a teenage boy. Obama is driving drunk with your money, and has wedged himself further into the "car in the ditch" metaphor he was so fond of using on the campaign trail.

3 - There's nothing I deplore more than junk science and left-wing media hysteria (except for people who say 'fuss-strated' instead of 'frustrated'). Combine the two and people usually start dying as a result of activism by affluent Western liberals who think third world poverty is better than American capitalism...just as long as they're not the ones living in squalor.

Over thirty years ago the restriction on the use of DDT - based on the faulty claim that it posed a risk to wildlife - contributed to the deaths of an estimated 20 million people from malaria. Five years after the ban on DDT was placed in Sri Lanka, cases of Malaria jumped from an astounding 17 in 1964 to an estimated 2,500,000 by 1969. When environmentalist Charles Worster was presented with the disastrous effects the restrictions were having on human life, he responded;

"So what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any."

While Japan was dealing with the aftermath of a wide scale disaster and recovery efforts were ongoing, the hemp soaked, Leary incarnates took to the streets with "No Nukes" signs. As Jonah and I pointed out at the time, no one was hurt or died in the infamous Three Mile Island accident that was often dragged out as a comparison. What type of power source has provided the most fatalities in the last decade? Eco-friendly Wind Farming! The global media focused so much attention on a nuclear Holocaust that never transpired, man power was diverted from rescue efforts where they were really needed. God rest their souls.

4 - There is no Joe - there is only Zuul.

5 - Osama Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes, and it was only a matter of time before sanctimonious liberal terrorist apologists would begin wagging their fingers at the victims of 9/11 for cheering the end of a man who caused so much death and destruction, and the disruption of American life to this day (if you've hopped on a plane recently, you probably got the full cavity shake down without the happy ending). There are reasonable arguments detailing why we should show restraint - many of my staunchly conservative readers have made very strong cases for just that. James Bowman pointed out, drawing from the lessons of the sinking of the Santiago by Captain Philip during the Spanish American war, that there is a solid case to be made for restraint, but none of those reasonable arguments are coming from the global left.

The most annoying of these arguments is the "how would Americans feel if Osama Bin Laden killed President Obama, and Arabs took to the street cheering with placards showing the President's body?" Please. First, Osama Bin Laden was not the President of any country. He was the leader of a terrorist organization living like a coward in the comfort of a villa in a Pakistani suburb. Secondly, radical Arabs make a weekly habit of showing the latest head they've lopped off on the Internet. Lastly, as the twin towers were crumbling to the ground, much of the Arab world erupted in a week long Islamic mardi gras. Restraint, harkening back to Bowman's point, is in keeping with the best traditions of the Western Honor culture. As for the complaints of liberals, they're nothing more than the usual boiler plate loathing of America they can't help from voicing.

6 - DON'T STIFLE MY CREATIVITY!!!

7 - My editor/wife/~~dominatrix~~ would like to remind everyone that the 3rd annual Oslo Freedom Forum is underway, and the only game in town as far insightful commentary comes from the invaluable Jay Nordlinger over at NRO. It's must-read stuff, so head on over after you've forwarded the link to this blog piece to everyone you know and some you don't.

8 - Life is too short to read the Huffpo.

Cordially

Joe

Evangeline Leger - (Mom) - May 28th, 1932 - April 19th 2011

2011-04-21T16:24:00.000-03:00

Evangeline “Nine” Leger

Bathurst – Mrs. Evangeline "Nine" Leger, 77, wife of the late Joseph Leger, of Bridge St. Bathurst, passed away on Tuesday (April 19, 2011) at the Chaleur Regional Hospital, Bathurst, following a lengthy illness.

Born in Bathurst, she was the daughter of the late Henri and Ida (Vienneau) Guignard.

She was a Head Nurse at the Nursery Department at the Chaleur Regional Hospital, Bathurst and was a member of the New Brunswick Retired Nurse’s Association.

She was pre-deceased by her husband, Joseph on March 28, 2011.

She is survived by: Two sons, Joseph Leger Jr. (Claire) of Moncton and Paul Leger (Angie Scribner) of Rothesay. One sister, Sr. Imelda Guignard, n.d.s.c., Dieppe. Four brothers, Gérard Guignard (late Anna) and Raoul Guignard (late Melva), all of Bathurst and Jean-Claude Guignard (Francine) of Richibucto Village, NB, Yvon Guignard (Joan) of Dunlop. Several nieces and nephews.

She was pre-deceased by brothers, Laurent, Patrice and a sister, Sr. Stella.

The body will rest after 2 p.m. Monday at Elhatton's Funeral Home (www.elhatton.com), Bathurst. Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Tuesday (April 26, 2011) at 11 a.m. from the Sacred Heart Cathedral, St. Andrew St., Bathurst. Visiting are Monday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 and Tuesday from 9 a.m. until time of Funeral. Donations in memory of Evangeline may be made to the Canadian Cancer Society or a favorite charity.

Joseph A Leger, April 17th, 1934 - March 28th, 2011

2011-03-30T18:00:00.001-03:00

Bathurst - Joseph Leger, 76, of Bridge St. Bathurst, passed away on Monday (March 28, 2011) at the Chaleur Regional Hospital, Bathurst, after a brief illness.

Born in Bathurst, he was the son of the late Raymond and Evelyn (Hodgins) Leger.

He was a former employee of Consolidated Bathurst Paper Mill.

Besides his wife, Evangeline (Guignard) Leger, he is survived by: Two sons, Joseph Leger Jr. (Claire) of Moncton and Paul Leger (Angie Scribner) of Rothesay. One brother, Kenneth "Butch" Leger (Irene) of Nackawic. Two sisters, Joyce Thibodeau (Jerry) of Bathurst and Jeannie Dobson (Ernie) of Florida. Several nieces and nephews.

The body will rest after 2 p.m. Thursday at Elhatton's Funeral Home (www.elhatton.com), Bathurst. Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Friday (April 1, 2011) at 2 p.m. from the Sacred Heart Cathedral, St. Andrew St., Bathurst. Visiting hours are Thursday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 and Friday from noon until time of Funeral.

The Democrats send a Final Screw You to America

2010-12-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

I Guess We're Just Too Stoopid Mister Gergen - and other tales from Intelligentsia

2010-12-03T19:28:00.000-04:00

It's nice that ~~the people at the institution~~...rather, it's great to get a chance to spit a blog out - though I think starting out with a literary mucus joke might make you think twice about why you're reading this. I've always wanted to take a slice out of David Gergen and other aging "moderate" pundits to explore just how "insightful" the progressive intellectual crowd really are - so if you want to go back to YouTube to watch that video with the fat kid playing with the light saber, no one's going to blame you.

First, before diving into that soup, let me be very frank about the WikiLeaks affair - from the mouth of Bing West, who is always there to put things in context when my eloquence eludes me;

"Placing hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables on the Internet constitutes a massive betrayal of America. A nation must safeguard its military and diplomatic secrets if it is to be trusted in the international system. Whoever provided the material to WikiLeaks should be prosecuted under the ...death sentence, regardless (of their) alleged motivations. Traitors always feel aggrieved."

This situation has gone far beyond the farce as the media has been portraying it. This is not about the media created fiction of "the people's right to know", which is just a euphemism the media uses for being intrusive and reckless. This is sedition at the very least, and treason at the worst, and I would be hard-pressed to find a way to reduce the gravity of this to fit the parameters of sedition in a legal context.

Batter up!

The always brilliant and insightful James Bowman, in his diary entry of Nov 15th, rhetorically mused "Why do the best and the brightest hate us simple folk as they do?" It's a fair enough question, and Bowman dissects it in a way that only a man of his remarkable talents can. Why do people like the G-20 protesters - who bombed a bank, chased and harassed the adolescent son of a hapless bank executive, and went on to cause millions of dollars in property damage to the city of Toronto - get a free pass from the media, while the peaceful tea party protesters incur the full wrath and scorn of every news organization (barring perhaps Fox)? Curious still is why the violent G-20 protesters were given an undeserved level of legitimacy from the media.

Anyone who's read Bowman's "Media Madness" or anything by Bernie Goldberg already knows the answer to that question, but let's take it a step further and ask the question "why do they keep getting away with it?"

The thing about Washington intellectuals, both inside and outside of the beltway, is that they have an uncanny knack for being wrong, and the good fortune of rarely being held accountable for it - with the exception of folks like Bowman, who have a singular talent for what the kids say in their post-modern vernacular "calling out" the David Gergen's and Michael Tomasky's of the world.

Gergen's been around Washington for a long time and would probably have lots of interesting anecdotes were he not constantly playing the role of Monday morning quarterback for his own cult of personality. It's a role he's been playing for almost 40 years. Gergen was one of the coveted few who fed Bob Woodword and Carl Bernstein information for their 1976 tell-all book about the final days of the Nixon administration. Gergen, a peripheral figure (at best) in the Nixon administration, paints himself as the quiet voice of modulated reason. Gergen is a buffoon, but he has cemented a place for himself both in the media and academia, making rounds at Harvard, Elon, Duke, and The Ford Foundation.

But every so often, we poor peasants don't like to play along to the media narrative set by these much coveted eggheads. Every once and a while, when they least expect it, we break from the story line and "go rogue", so to speak.

Remember the Jan 11th debate moderated by Gergen, when the plain spoken dark horse candidate Scott Brown laid him out for asking if he'd be

"...willing to sit in Teddy Kennedy's seat and say I'm going to be the person who's going to block liberal health care policy for another 15 years",

To which Brown responded;

"It's not the Kennedy's seat, it's not the democrats seat....it's the people's seat."

Few can forget that moment, but fewer remember Gergen's smug prediction, when he admitted to National Review that he had been taken off guard by the quick witted Scott, but that the voters

"...want to show their frustration, but they aren’t willing or ready, yet, to send a Republican to the Senate."

Brown went on to handily win the "people's seat", and Gergen added yet another failed prediction to his extensive collection without ever being reminded of it. Does anyone still listen to this guy?

Since the November GOP sweep, it's become fashionable for beltway intellectuals holding court in the lofty pundit corners provided by their all too willing media sycophants to wax philosophically about the how the GOP won by scaring the elderly about health care. Funny, considering the left has made a cottage industry of telling Americans that the GOP were coming to end school lunch programs, drag seniors out of nursing homes, and drown every last kitten in the lower 48.

In fact, the Democrats went so overboard in 1994 with scare tactics and nasty campaigning it cost them both the House and the Senate.

Republicans warned that Obamacare would give less coverage to more seniors - and that's exactly what happened. Last month, seniors saw a remarkable 8% increase in their out of pocket expenses, and we're not just talking about the older folks living the good life in Florida, God's waiting room. It's the poor that have been hit the hardest, and irony of ironies to those who demonize the corporate world, it's been the drug companies that have stepped up to the plate to help those who have also lost their jobs due to the inept and reckless spending of President Obama. It has been the "evil drug companies" that have provided drugs to those hit the hardest at little or no cost to them.

Last week, at the end of a fascinating presentation by the wonderful (and very human) execs of a major drug company, a dear friend, whose firm did some PR work for President Clinton, said; "The GOP have only got two years left." He's made a few bad predictions in the past (though he's reluctant to admit it), so I made him repeat it twice, saying

"Remember this moment and what you've just said standing right here in the lobby of this nice hotel - I'm going to hold you to it, and there's no squirming out of it this time when you end up being wrong."

I suggest you get yourself a score card for the next time one of the great intellectual overlords looks down their nose at you and explains the way things are and how they're going to be. Hold on to that score card and swack them over the head with it like a frozen salmon after the next election.

Perhaps over time, if we conservatives devote ourselves to this practice, intellectuals will have to trade in their label for the one that once was reserved for them - Eggheads.

Cordially

Joe

Down for the Countdown - Olbermann and the Dems get the Boot

2010-11-05T18:29:00.001-03:00

Hey there loyal readers! Do you lack integrity? Do you wait to speak out until after an issue has been voted on, then feign outrage and ooze sanctimony over the outcome? Have you ever compared yourself to Winston Churchill or Walter Cronkite? Do wear a protective plastic bubble over your head to keep your very important salt and pepper hair perfectly coiffed while you nap underneath your desk? Do you possess only a peripheral knowledge of current events and compensate for it by saying everything in a loud baritone voice? Do you show a complete lack of respect for your colleagues, your employer, and frequently make interns cry? Can you shout "MISTER BUSH" repeatedly while pounding on your desk? If so, you may just be what MSNBC is looking for.

On Friday, MSNBC announced that it has suspended prime-time host Keith Olbermann indefinitely and without pay for making political contributions to the campaigns of three Democratic candidates. What is most curious about this, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, is that the network is doing this under the guise of ethics. Did anyone think that MSNBC had ethics to begin with? Does anyone really buy that network president Phil Griffin gives a damn about the appearance of bias and integrity? This is the same network that ran ads weeks before the last election with all its major players standing in front of an Obama style banner that read "The Network of Change."

Olby's temporary replacement, Chris Hayes of The Nation, also gave close to $2000 to various Democratic candidates - a violation of the same rule that was used to kick Olbermann to the curb.

So what's really going on?

MSNBC is a sinking ship. It is hemorrhaging money, and while that ass monkey Olbermann hosted the network's only popular program, his salary is probably more than the station makes in advertising revenue in a year.

But most of all, Olbermann is known to be an insufferable boor. He has repeatedly belittled and terrorized staffers and interns. He throws legendary temper tantrums at anyone who dares look at him sideways, and has even come close to starting on-air fist fights with colleagues like Chris Matthews during the 2008 elections coverage. Olbermann's ego has gone from being an annoyance to an open sore that's oozing puss.

AHHHH - but the schadenfreude! Olbermann's suspension is the icing on the cake after the GOP literally and figuratively cleaned "House." Even after holding almost absolute power in every branch of government, the Democrats still had to fight and bend the rules to pass every piece of legislation they rammed down the public's throat - and, like Olbermann, they got the boot.

America has opened the first page in a new chapter of a very old book called market driven constitutional republicanism. The supposed "racist" Tea Party movement managed to elect the most ethnically diverse candidates in the nation's history, and they have a lot of work to do. Reversing the damage done in 2 short years of reckless big government taxing and spending will be a daunting task.

Reports today indicate that instead of helping seniors, Obamacare has increased their out of pocket expenses by up to 8%, and companies such as John Deere have reported that co-pays will rise by 40%, increasing their expenditures by millions. The President's stimulus bill has created an unemployment rate just shy of 10%, and in September, almost 4 million Americans joined the ranks of the poor. How are you liking that "change?"

There will be no overnight magic, and Republicans would be well served to be cautious in promising too much. Over the summer I asked Jonah Goldberg if a Silent Cal, hands-off President would be what the nation needed. Goldberg confided that even under the most optimistic of conditions, the GOP would have to do some degree of legislating for at least 8 years to begin to reverse the damage the boy president has caused.

Republicans have been gracious in their victory, and they must never forget that they have not been given a mandate to return to business as usual - they have been given another chance to restore order and good government to the greatest nation on earth. The Tea Partiers should remain vigilant to ensure the folks up on the hill keep their noses out of the pork barrel, and their hands out of the pockets of hard working Americans.

Thank you all for your patience while we dealt with a very personal loss. It's good to be back.

Cordially

Joe

No, It's Not a Conspiracy - You're Just an Idiot

2010-09-09T21:39:00.001-03:00

Every year as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many readers write in to express their outrage and grief over the increasing apathy for the 2,985 people were murdered by crazed Jihadists who believed Christians were unclean, Jews were demons, and western women were whores for wearing skirts and going to school. This year their anguish is further compounded by the decision to allow a radical anti-Semite to build a mosque on the very site where the majority of the horror occurred that day.

Almost every month a new documentary appears mocking the brave men and women who are fighting and dying to ensure our safety, or another inane book is written accusing the United States and Israel of conspiring with the "Military Industrial Complex" of plotting 9/11 so they could line the pockets of the rich and have a convenient excuse to invade Iraq. If you believe such things, I'm inclined to think you're an idiot who eats things off the floors of public washrooms and shouldn't be allowed to use sharp scissors.

Still, many people do believe such outlandish things, and dedicate much of their lives trying to connect half-truths, propaganda and out-right lies to try and prove these delusions - but why? A reader of some importance asked to me to try to answer that question, and I have before, but I thought I would try to dig a little deeper this time - and it's been a long night.

For the last three hours I have been staring at a cryptic paragraph plucked from an online edition of The Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper from January of 1877. It's a small paragraph that makes little sense and seems benign enough - depending on what you consider "benign". A thimble is an enormous bucket to an ant, but a marble is a tiny sphere to a human - that is, unless that human slips on it, breaks her back, and is forced to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. That small marble quickly becomes a wrecking ball.

But why do I find myself reading a 113 year old article three hours into a blog that should have taken 45 minutes? Because some say this is where it all started - an article that makes reference to a strange courtroom transcript. An article that mentions a term that probably would have been very foreign to people of that age.

A few decades later in 1909, the Oxford English Dictionary decided to put two words together, officially making the term mentioned in the newspaper part of the English lexicon - "Conspiracy Theory."

In the process of writing what I thought would be a simple blog peice, I found myself searching for the "first conspiracy theory", only to find that the debate over what the original conspiracy theory is, is considered another conspiracy theory. It's actually far worse than that. Those who ply in the trade of conspiracies hardly spend any time at all exploring the history of this phenomenon, and eventually find themselves trying to make sense of the same obscure article I stumbled upon, losing interest when, it seems to me, the story is really becoming interesting.

This is no small matter to me, because when we engage in fanciful thinking, we not only debase historical discourse, we debase history itself - and I love history.

History is a white wall and to engage in healthy debate of history is to take a fine quill pen and make an interesting mark upon it. Plying in conspiracy theories, on the other hand, is to take a can of spray paint and recklessly scar that wall with crass graffiti. Why do extremely intelligent people continue to believe in such fanciful notions?

Let me give you a few examples:

In the early '90's, DNA evidence proved beyond dispute that Anastasia was murdered with the rest of her family and didn't escape to some fairy tale life.

People forget that a conclusive study in 1993 by military professionals, historians, computer and ballistics experts showed that not only was there no magic bullet or 2nd shooter in the JFK assassination, but the trajectories and locations of Oswald's bullets were the only ones possible. This reality was actually a surprise to all involved.

Many very smart people who believe the moon landing was faked don't realize their assumptions are grounded in faulty evidence. For example, there is no "Zero Gravity Room" at NASA. The vomit comet is actually a Boeing 707 airplane. There actually IS gravity in space, and an astronaut can survive a tear in his spacesuit outside a shuttle. The Apollo missions did not take off from Cape Canaveral, but Merritt Island. Long before the moon landing conspiracy ever reached America, it was taught by Cuban and Nicaraguan schoolteachers as political propaganda.

Take 9/11 - If the Bush/Cheney administration really wanted to bilk middle eastern oil that badly, wouldn't it have been a lot easier just to re-negotiate the Iraqi oil deals they struck in the mid-eighties? Why are rational people so eager to believe their government conspired with Israel to slaughter thousands of it's own citizens for a few Halliburton contracts?

The world wouldn't lack mystery and magic if conspiracy theories went away. God fills our world with so much beauty and mystery we could not even begin to scratch the surface in four lifetimes. Theology and philosophy, even these are things that are filled with questions that have no certain answers and offer great meaning and fulfillment.

On March 1st, my first child will be born (well, the exact date and time is up to kid in the end). I have already seen the baby's heart beating. It beats between 160 and 169 beats per minute. I have seen it's little arms and legs. It already has tooth buds and can recognize and is comforted by my wife's voice. I too, am comforted - comforted by the fact that my baby will always give my life purpose.

It's a short stroll down the path called crazy, and the trail is littered with greasy haired wingnuts adorned with tinfoil hats slurring from behind fumes of bong smoke that "it's all a cover up, dude. Open your eyes, man." But when we open our eyes to their kinds of magical thinking, we are closing our minds to the oftentimes much simpler truth.

Cordially

Joe

Mixed Bag of Blogging by Numbers

2010-08-26T21:05:00.002-03:00

I don't have a movie review for you this week. Not surprising, considering that the offerings at your local theatre this weekend include Piranha in Real 3D and Eat, Pray, Love, a film based on Elizabeth Gilbert's inane quasi-memoir of the same name filled with pages of childish gibberish masquerading as profound insights on life.  I wish they would make a movie based on Azar Nafisi's much more engaging memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I would gladly pay double the price of admission to go see. If you haven't read it, you should. It chronicles the author's life in Iran's Islamic theocracy and follows the lives of seven female University students who joined Nafisi's (their former professor) secret book club where they meet to discuss banned Western literature after her resignation from the University of Allameh Tabatabei.  The book is filled with lots of eating, praying and love, but they are of a deep and profound nature that puts Miss Gilbert's gimmicky book/film to shame. Hey! Let's do some blogging by numbers!

1 - I may not have a movie review for this week, but I do have a movie recommendation. Vigilante movies are a staple of American cinema, but as iconic as many of them have become - think Taxi Driver and Falling Down, for example - their heroes are usually a tad unstable.

Gran Torino was a satisfying film in many respects, but Eastwood can never divorce himself from his trademark tortured "victim hero", like he played in Unforgiven or Million Dollar Baby - oh yeah, did it ever occur to anyone that once those gang members posted bail, they or their friends were probably going to massacre the entire neighborhood? Kind of a huge plot hole, one would think.

Anyway, I think that up-and-coming director Daniel Barber may have given us the best movie in the genre to date with his first feature length film, Harry Brown.

Harry Brown stars the ever brilliant Michael Caine as a recently widowed ex-marine living in London's south end, an area being terrorized by gangs of violent young thugs. After Brown's friend is murdered trying to fend off local hoods, he finds the police sympathetic but unable to exact any real justice under Britain's bureaucracy-laden justice system. Harry, of course, takes matters into his own hands.

What sets Harry Brown apart from other vigilante films is that Brown is not a wise-cracking Hollywood bad ass. The movie has wonderfully suspenseful moments, but Harry's body count is modest and not sensationalized. What keeps the film grounded is that the young punks who harass and terrorize the neighborhood are frightening and believable. The other well played card is the frustration of the movie's detectives, Hickock and Frampton, whose hands are tied by a PR obsessed upper brass more concerned with public opinion and press conferences than actually tackling crime.

Harry Brown is well acted, well paced, and succeeds were it's predecessors have failed. Go see it.

2 - The Ground Zero Mosque debate is taking on the same tone I witnessed during theTea Party movement's early days, and as I discussed in the last blog, it's a tone intentionally set by the media. The MSM has decided to frame the debate as the forces of the crazed, Muslim hating "Christian Right" vs the sober-minded liberal voices of tolerance and understanding. Unlike the smear campaign the media launched on Tea Partiers, they are having less success painting the Mosque's detractors as crazed lunatics - but they sure are trying.  A recent protest against the Mosque was widely dubbed as an "anti-Muslim rally." Strange, considering many of the people at the protest were Muslims. Rima Fakih, the first Muslim to wear the Miss USA crown (bestowed upon her by those intolerant Americans!!), has spoken out against the building of the Mosque. Hell, even Howard Dean has come to the defense of the protesters.

Those of us who oppose the building of the Mosque are opposed to it because it is in poor taste. The first amendment issues are utter hog wash and the so-called "Cordoba Center" has no more business being there than a Confederate flag would on a former slave plantation, or a Christian church would on the grounds of Auschwitz (yes, I do recall the "Cross Shadow" incident).

Putting aside the utter and complete disrespect the Mosque represents to the victims of 9/11, one must also question the motives of its supporters.  Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the Mosque’s principal backer and an outspoken ally of Iran's brutal theocracy, has previously blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy, claiming "America has blood on it's hands." How can anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty look at Imam Rauf's history of notoriously anti-American utterings and believe in the purity of his motives?

The Ground Zero Mosque is a mockery to the memory of those who died there almost 10 years ago. We are not anti-Muslim, we are pro-respect.

3 - Please email any tips on the types of food that helped you with nausea during your first trimester of pregnancy. My editor/incubator the lovely Mrs. Claire is re-enacting the ipecac scene from Family Guy every 2 hours and we welcome any suggestions that might help to ease the stomach of my dear wife. I know most writers wish this sort of thing on their editor, but I can't in good conscience allow this to continue.

4 - Speaking of editors, my precious wife is quite sick, so if you notice that my articles are full of mixed metaphors, egregious punctuation and split infinitives, it's because she's too ill to edit my pieces at the moment. Any sloppiness is entirely of my own hand and not that of my talented editor.

5 - Oh the joy!! Oh the schadenfreude!! It's rare that an arrogant Hollywood liberal actually gets humiliated in public for his outspoken political beliefs, but James "the bully" Cameron finally shot his mouth off one too many times and got slammed for it. Now, there's nothing wrong with being a Hollywood liberal. Ben Affleck is surprisingly courteous and well informed, and people like Brad Pitt put their money where their mouth is and actually do some good in the world. I don't agree with most of their beliefs, but they're not pompous little dilettantes. James Cameron, on the other hand, has encouraged enviro-terrorism and has called people who question climate change "swine." Cameron decided to "call out the deniers" by challenging them to a debate, and here's what happened;

"... as soon as everything was organized, Cameron began changing the rules. First, he wanted to change his team. Then he wanted the format to be changed from a debate to a roundtable discussion. Then he wanted to ban the opposing side's cameras. Then he wanted to completely get rid of all cameras, stating that audio should only be recorded.

Breitbart, Morano and McElhinney agreed to all the unexpected changes, but Cameron kept going. He next said that he wanted all media to be banned and to make the roundtable open only to those attending the conference. He then decided against streaming the discussion on the internet and then concluded with a rule that no recording of any kind would be allowed.

The three men once again agreed. And finally, on the day before the event, Cameron withdrew, claiming that he no longer wanted to take part. According to Cameron's spokesman, the director did not want to participate because "Morano is not at James Cameron's level to debate. Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society."

Cameron is a coward and a liar and he knows he would have been laughed off the stage. Maybe now you'll shut your gd mouth, James.

6 - Have a good weekend!!

Cordially

Joe

The Pied Pipers of Political Piety

2010-08-16T15:18:00.005-03:00

I'm using a new format for blogging, after relenting to a three year campaign by my brother and webmaster to revamp the look of the site. I liked the old site because it was clunky and accessible, with no doodads and flashing thingies to distract you - like that seedy motel room Barney Frank rents every other weekend for what Jefferson might have called "extra-constitutional purposes." I have to admit he did a great job with the overhaul, and the general consensus seems to be "Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific", so I guess I'm going to stick with it - not that I have a choice. The treacherous little bastard made certain there was no way to revert back to the old format, so I'm sure he's still cackling in his basement, petting a gray cat and stroking his chin like the bad guy in a James Bond movie. Nah, seriously, he did a wonderful job, and if you bat your lashes over to the right, you can see a live, real time scroll of all my latest tweets which the all knowing, all seeing Ali Velshi has called "neo-con" and "idiotic." How many times a day does that guy google himself?

Lots of readers have been lobbing ideas across the court for me to blog about, and I'll touch on all of them in the next blogging by numbers. What I'm itching to address is ~~that rash I got from~~...I mean, the coconut shuffle game the Administration and left wing pseudo-intellectual columnists and bloggers have been playing as of late.

The left is acutely aware of two things - If you control the language, you control the debate, and once you control the debate you can set the parameters of that debate in the media. If you're not quite sure where I'm going with this, why is the opposing conservative viewpoint always considered "anti?" We're never "pro-life", we're "anti-abortion." We're never "pro-border enforcement", we're "anti-immigration." We're never "pro-second amendment" we're "anti-gun control." We never think to question these labels because they've become so embedded in the national psyche we take them for granted. A colleague of mine was gently chiding me for being critical of my company's carbon emission reduction program.

"Oh. You're an anti- environmentalist?" she asked.

I grinned and responded, "No. I'm pro-common sense."

As the Democratic party continues to implode and the President's approval ratings dip to all time lows, conservatives are asking some tough questions:

Why did an obscure financial institution called ShoreBank got a 20 million dollar Tarp bailout from the Administration, and why does the President appear in a video on their website talking about overseas micro-management?

How could a judge rule on in favour of the DOJ on a facial case regarding Arizona's immigration law when she opened her judgement by conceding it was impossible for the Administration to meet the standard required? The administration had to prove that the law could never be carried out in accordance with the Constitution. Judge Bolton admitted that standard of proof could never be met, but ruled in favour of the Feds anyway.

If Republicans are the so-called "party of the rich", why are career Democratic politicians like Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters facing numerous ethics violations over tax evasion and financial fraud? Why is big business sharing so much pillow space with the left?

But most troubling of all, why is so little attention being paid to the "Amnesty Memo" which states in no uncertain terms that the Administration will simply skip over the legislative branch altogether if they can't get satisfaction from an activist judiciary? These are all hot button issues, but if you try and engage in a scholarly debate about any of these things in the MSM or the blogosphere, you will either

A - Be accused of calling members of the adminstration communists;

or

B - Be ridiculed about the tea parties while being peppered with sexual inuendo about tea bagging.

The other day I read a column by some obscure left wing New England blogger who rambled on in pitch perfect 'above the fray' sanctimony about how conservatives were debasing the political discourse by "listening to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck" and actively accusing members of the administration of clandestine meetings with communists. He wrote that the right needed to act like adults and talk about issues instead of hurling insults. Funny thing is, about an hour after he had posted his self righteous sermon about maturity, I peeked over at his Facebook wall, and he was posting comment after comment laced with X-rated tea bagging jokes and mocking Sarah Palin's down syndrome child. Class act, this guy.

I don't know what the tea party has to do with the 13 ethics charges that have effectively put an end to Charlie Rangel's career. I also don't know what tea-bagging has to do with the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, a corporation Rangel set up under the guise of helping the community that turned out to be nothing but a slush fund to line his pockets and evade taxes.

I don't know what communism has to do Judge Bolton's brazen disregard for Federal law when the Justice Department succeeded in mounting a bogus and weak challenge to Arizona's proposed immigration law. I don't watch much Glenn Beck or listen to Rush Limbaugh, but I do read enough National Review and James Bowman to know that Judge Bolton stacked the deck to deliver a predetermined decision.

There's nothing wrong with Glenn Beck or Limbaugh, I find them entertaining and very good at what they do - but why do conservative pundits constantly have to defend something Beck said 3 weeks ago when they were called on a cable news show to talk about Federal preemption?

They have to because the media and the left are engaging in political misdirection. Ask a conservative like Andy McCarthy about SB 1070 and you'll get an air tight argument about the multiple errors in judge Bolton's decision. If you head over to NRO's "The Corner", you'll see a variety of conservative opinions about immigration law, both pro and con.

The right is not some monolithic, glassy eyed cabal of like-minded people.  It's a vibrant intellectual movement that spends very little time engaging in conspiracy theories about the President's birth certificate, but click on any cable news network and you're led to believe we're all a bunch of yokels with a mouth full of rotting teeth screaming about how "Dem Eemeegrints needs to git back to Mexico!"

Since this morning, conservatives have been talking about reforming rule 501 and the so-called "Stealth Energy Tax". No one is talking about communists or dubious birth certificates - but if you turn on MSNBC or CNN, you would think the only thing we're discussing is building up a network of state militias to overthrow the government.

Again, I hate seeing my conservative colleagues appear on cable news programs only to spend 10 minutes defending talk radio hosts when they were asked on air to discuss different demographics and how they might affect incumbent Senate seats.

The media doesn't want you to see the real conservative movement, the one William F Buckley started 50 years ago - and the media doesn't get the intellectual conservative movement. They know it's not to their benefit to try to understand it.

Remember that CNN video that went viral showing disgraced reporter Susan Roesgen getting lippy with peaceful tea party protesters? What struck me the most was not the exchange between Rosengen and the protesters. It was her smug, condescending attitude, going as far as to openly suggest they didn't undertand the historical impact of the Lincoln adminstration, or the American constitution itself. It's the type of pinched nose, intellectual elitism that's rampant in the media and within the current Adminstration that says "we know what's best for you, you ignorant peasants."

So the next time someone starts laughing at you about being a stupid tea bagger, just smile right back and ask;

"That's funny, but all jokes asside, don't you feel that a facial challenge in a constitutional case can't be satisfied by using anectdotal evidence?"

You'll quickly find out that their liberal intellectual chest puffing is just a lot of hot air and insults with little substance beyond blaming everything on George Bush.

Cordially

Joe

The Blog before the Blog

2010-08-13T11:51:00.003-03:00

What a week. I know you're all saying "So where's the new blog Joe?" to which I respond, "Oh my God you are the neediest kids!" No, seriously, you guys are the life blood of this blog and thanks to your dedication and support we will soon be approaching the 10,000 hit mark.

Anyway, a couple of things to touch on before I post the new article.

Ever feel fatigued and stressed? Ever feel like everything aches or find yourself constantly reaching for the Tylenol and you have to pop a couple of Adderall to get that "ready to go" buzz in the morning? Did you ever wish there was some kind of profession that specialized in alleviating pain, the inducement of relaxation and the promotion of good health? Well hey! Turns out there is! It's called massage therapy, and you can't be callin' it a massage unless it's done by a licensed, certified professional with years of experience.

Just like you you wouldn't go anywhere else but TSH for the latest in razor sharp, political commentary, I wouldn't go anywhere else for a massage unless it was done by Amanda at Scroll Tree Massage and Bodyworks. Scroll Tree promotes; "...a holistic approach to health care that's aimed at treating physical ailments and maintaining a pain-free lifestyle." So click on the link above, check out their website and book an appointment today! For the record, though TSH fully endorses Scroll Tree, neither Amanda or Scroll tree necessarily endorse this blog or the views expressed here.

On to other business....

Since the blog went live again, lots of people have been asking why there hasn't been as many updates as in the past. Well, first off, ~~I'm a notoriously lazy asshole,~~ I mean, things have been very hectic.

I mentioned several months ago that my mother has been battling an aggressive cancer in an advanced stage. This has been a very trying time for my family with lots of oncologist appointments, rounds of chemo, and watching my brave mom battling the unpleasant side effects that come with all of the above.

I'm happy to report that we recently received news that her chemotherapy, against all odds, is working. Mom is getting healthier, and my family thanks all of you for your prayers and kind words and we ask that you continue praying. This is a miracle that would not have been possible without the wonders of modern medicine and the power of so much prayer and love. Thank you to everyone.

New blog will be up soon! Hang tight!

Cordially

Joe

Weekend DVD Pick - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2010-08-07T10:40:00.000-03:00

During it's original release date The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford made many movie critics' top ten list and with good reason. The film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert Hanson was the first major directorial debut by Aussie filmmaker Andrew Dominik. It is a sweeping epic with a pitch perfect score by Nick Cave, magnificent cinematography, and brilliant performances by Brad Pitt as James and Cassey Affleck as the star struck, and ultimately spurned, Robert Ford.

Those who praised the movie unanimously echoed that it was the best western since "Unforgiven", which, it would seem to me, is setting the bar rather low. What makes the movie so appealing is the absence of a Clint Eastwood, Byron-esque hero running recklessly towards his own damnation. A thematic hero Eastwood has been unable to break with since "Unforgiven" swept the Oscars in 1993.

Conservative critics, most notably James Bowman, praised the film's score and cinematography, but accused it of being little more than a post modernist study in celebrity worship. While it's difficult to dispute that Affleck's Ford is a sycophantic admirer of James, I doubt the film is in any way meant to be allegorical.
The film has many flaws, the most glaring being it's 160 minute running time whittled down from it's original span of well over 3 hours. When a movie, especially a Western, asks it's audience to sit for over 2 hours one would expect a little more red meat than the movie provides. The only heist scene we are let in on, the Blue Cut Train Robbery, serves as the opening sequence of the film. Also, precious little is seen of the supporting cast, most notably the talented Sam Shepard (Frank James) and the always wonderful Sam Rockwell

The movie centers around Jesse as a man living on borrowed time. James takes into his confidence the star struck Robert Ford, who he misjudges as being too simple minded or spell bound by his own cult of persona that he feels no real threat from him until it is much too late.

Jesse's brutality is slow and methodical, and for the most part unseen as he systematically hunts down the remaining members of the Blue Cut Train Robbery gang. What's brilliant about Pitt's performance is that his obsessive paranoia is always masked behind a facade of cordiality and stoicism. His piercing blue eyes miss nothing as he casually makes house calls to those who have betrayed him. Not to discover where the chess pieces are falling, but to confirm what he already knows by peppering casual conversation with seemingly benign questions.

Pitt allows us brief opportunities to witness the cracks in his veneer, the first being the furious beating of a gang member's young nephews to give up the location of his uncle. James must be forcibly subdued before he risks killing the boy in a frenzy. After leaving the barn, Pitt is seen sobbing uncontrollably, his arms wrapped around the neck of his horse. It is one of many great moments in an imperfect film - Is his grief the product of self-pity or is he weeping in disgust at his own brutality wrought upon a child similar in age to his own children?

The ambiguity of his inner torment and the cause of it are left for the audience to ponder. The only insight into the true motives - or competing motives are given in scattered piecemeal throughout the film. In one scene, as the gang awaits the coming of the train in Blue Cut, Missouri, one of the bandits is heard singing an anti-union hymn about "that bastard Lincoln". Earlier on, the robbers engage in a conversation about the virility of General Lee. There is no doubt James has become a folk hero to buoy the spirits of the South after the humiliation of reconstruction, as is well evidenced by the penny books Ford lovingly collects in a box underneath his bed extolling and exaggerating the exploits of the James gang as redeemers of the South's honor. Is James the avenger of the South, or a common thug with a serpentine charm? The movie seems uninterested in answering this question, though it has close to 3 hours to do so.

Ford eventually becomes little more than an errand boy to James, fueling his rage and ultimately leading him to accept the $10,000 bounty for shooting James dead at the request of Missouri's Governor Crittenden.

James' demise is a classic reworking of the tale that has been retold countless times in movies, books, and oral tradition. It involves being shot in the back while fixing a picture - expect in this case, James is seen dusting the picture on a stool, after leaving his sidearms on the love seat. I had wrestled for some time with whether the scene is meant to show James as being careless, or whether it is an explicit act of resignation. The answer is no doubt the latter; James is clearly aware that Ford is simply biding his time, waiting for the opportune monent to dispatch of him.

The fact that James removes his guns and turns his back to Ford is his way of removing any glory Ford hopes to gain for his treachery. As Jesse watches Ford aim the revolver at him through the reflection of the picture, Ford also sees the condescension on James' face reflected back, as if to say "There will be no parades for a coward who shoots an unarmed man in the back".

There are indeed no parades for Robert Ford. Though the act has brings him wealth, he is ridiculed, beaten, spit on and ultimately assassinated himself.

If you're a fan of Tombstone or The Quick and The Dead, this movie will probably bore you to tears. If you fancy yourself a cinematic intellectual of sorts, you won't find the character's rambling on in any post modern soliloquies either. This movie is a visual feast and as mentioned earlier, Nick Cave's subdued but haunting score is complimented beautifully by the pitch perfect narration of Hugh Ross. Pitt and Affleck are spellbinding, and the supporting cast are flawless.

This movie is far from a masterpiece, but when set beside the endless junk being spit out of Hollywood, I still strongly recommend it to my readers.

INTERESTING TRIVIA NOTE!!

The movie was co-produced by Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator. In a salute to his fans, there is a scene in the early moments of the film where Jesse's hand is seen gliding over the top of a field of wheat - an almost identical shot that Ridley used at the beginning of Gladiator.

Cordially

Joe

Twitterati to Arizona Injustice - Blogging By Numbers

2010-07-27T21:30:00.013-03:00

I was going to open the week's blogging by numbers by mentioning that TSH is now on Twitter. As most of you know, CNN's resident "bald headed profit of doom" did the heavy lifting for me, making sure half the world knew before the paint had time to dry on my Twitter page. On Tuesday, CNN'S Chief Business Correspondent loaded up his trebuchet of rage and devoted an entire hour to lobbing a litany of agitated tweets at yours truly.

I remember a great article by Jonah Goldberg in which he recounts being called "an idiot" by George Will during a lecture at Groucher College. Regrettably, being called "idiotic" and a "neo-con" by a buffoon with a liberal pedigree that dates back to his days as a left wing activist at Queen's will probably not bring on a case of the warm and fuzzies 20 years later.

Well, at least he's a snappy dresser - Let the blogging by numbers begin!!!

1 - The Administration's decision to drag Arizona's new immigration law before the courts was problematic on several fronts. At it's core, S.B. 1070 simply re-asserts the authority of law enforcement officials to ask citizens to provide proof of their immigration status during the course of conducting their duties, such as traffic stops or investigating criminal complaints if there's a reasonable suspicion they're in the U.S. illegally.

Note "re-asserts". Most people forget that it's been a Federal law since 1940 that ALL citizens are required to carry proof of citizenship. Over at NRO, Mark Levin joins a growing list of legal scholars gob-smacked by Judge Bolton's Decision;

"This is a typical example of a judge stating the correct legal standard, but then ignoring it and applying the test in a fashion completely divorced from the facts of the case in order to reach a predetermined decision.

First, the court states correctly that the sort of constitutional challenge brought here — a facial challenge — is the most difficult challenge to mount successfully. It requires that the plaintiff (here the federal government) must demonstrate that the law can never be applied in a constitutional fashion. The test cannot be met with hypothetical arguments — yet that is exactly what the court relies on in its ruling: the assertion that the AZ law will impose an impermissible burden on law enforcement, which is to determine the legal status of a person detained pursuant to the AZ law on the reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally. The court does not provide any empirical basis to support its conclusion. It’s pure supposition."

This was sloppy jurisprudence and this matter is far from over. While the administration and their msm counterparts celebrate this short term victory, they should remember this will have ramifications that go beyond the Democratic wipe-out sure to occur this November. Americans have had Obamacare and financial reform rammed down their throats, and now the President has thumbed his nose in the eye of a State's right to enforce existing Federal laws. President Obama will soon join the list of one term Presidents. Let's just hope a new Republican Congress can help mitigate the damage in the interim.

2 - I know it's summer but before you slap on the sandals, make sure your toenails don't look like the Lamisil Monsters are about to jump out of your feet.

3 - Adam Liptak has written another one of those irritating New Time's Articles (are there any other kind?) that comes right out of the media's David Gergen-style, "Gee I'm so clever" school of punditry. The article tries to make the tenuous case that the Supreme Court under Justice Roberts is the most conservative in history. Seriously?

Mr. Liptak takes a widely discredited political science study that crudely separates Supreme Court cases and litigants into highly subjective categories then, using a magic formula plops them into a "liberal" or "conservative" bucket and assigns them a score. Even the author acknowledges how flawed the study is admitting it probably throws off the results of a few cases, but trudges full speed ahead anyway.

The study casually skips over the numerous cases where this clever equation doesn't apply. For example, the casually dubbed "conservative" justices almost always side with criminal defendants in cases where the constitutional protection of these defendants is in question.

Is Justice Kennedy more conservative than Powell? Powell voted to uphold Georgia's laws prohibiting sodomy and oral sex. Kennedy reversed that decision. Dozens of law scholars have been inundating the web with numerous examples that sweep away Liptak's knee jerk conclusions.

I wish this study had been correct. Some day Americans would be well served if they could call the SCOTUS a "Roberts' Court."

4 - Last month Muhammad and Waqas Parvez were convicted of the murder of Asqa Parvez and sentenced to life in prison. She was the victim of a violent death springing from a medieval and barbaric practice that takes the lives of over 5000 woman each year. This crime did not occur in the brutal theocratic dictatorship of Iran where adulterous women are stoned to death, minors are executed for the most fleeting of infractions, and religious and ethnic minorities are murdered and jailed without trial. This did not happen in the tribal regions of Pakistan where ad hoq Sharia law is still practiced and tolerated by local authorities. This happened in a quiet suburb of Mississauga, Ontario. She is estimated to be the 12th young woman to be the victim of an honor killing in Canada in less than a decade.

Dr. Amin Muhammad, a professor of psychiatry at Memorial University of Newfoundland who specializes in honor killings and cultural psychology predicts that; "...the cases are increasing, and very soon we'll have a problem in Canada."

The media barely devoted a day to the short life of Asqa Parvez - rest in peace.

5 - Have a good week and a warm welcome to all of our new readers. You can get updates from TSH by becoming a member of our fan club on Facebook.

6 - Take care!

Cordially

Joe

Weekend Must See DVD Review - Frost/Nixon

2010-07-23T10:18:00.007-03:00

The tag line of Ron Howard's engaging film, Frost/Nixon, tells us quite a lot about what was otherwise a refreshing and sympathetic look at President Nixon:

"400 Million people were waiting for the truth - Their legendary confrontation would revolutionize the art of the confessional interview, change the face of politics and capture an admission from the former president that startled people all over the world . . . possible even including Nixon himself".

Well, not exactly. After the first of four segments, viewers were bored to tears, and tuned out for the rest of the interviews. The climactic scene of the movie - when the intrepid Frost (Michael Sheen) pins Nixon (Frank Langella) in a corner, causing the disgraced former President to fall into an endless moment of reflective silence followed by a semi-confession of sorts - is utter hog wash. Nixon revealed nothing new in the interviews, and virtually all major news networks were unanimous in their opinion that Nixon had bested the ill prepared, and at times star-struck, Frost. If you're doubting this, here's some excerpts from the major newspapers the day after the supposedly historic "gotcha!" moment:

What did Watergate super-sleuth Bob Woodward think?

“a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal.”

Hmm. What about Haynes Johnson, a colleague of Woodward's at the Washington Post?

“Last night’s program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he’s swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match.”

What about you the supposedly exotic liberal foreign intellectual papers? Surely the Times of London must have seen the interview through different eyes? Nope.

“It was clear that David Frost let Mr Nixon escape in the interrogation . . . Frost finds less adulatory coverage this morning than his advance men expected. . . . whenever the matter strayed from his clip-board of notes he was not informed enough to counter some of Mr Nixon’s most brazen revisions. The main mysteries of Watergate are still intact.”

Public sympathy for Nixon actually increased after the interviews. Americans were somewhat more forgiving when they discovered that the President's chief motivation for lying about when he actually found out about the break-in was more out of loyalty for his friends than it was to protect his office at any cost. Some may justifiably find this behaviour inexcusable regardless of the motivation, but why doesn't anyone direct the same outrage at President Kennedy, who we now know ordered his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to bug the offices of Martin Luther King Jr?

So why did Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind/Angels and Demons), in tandem with one of the sharpest screen writers in the business, Peter Morgan (The Queen, Last King of Scotland), fudge the ending on what was otherwise the first refreshing look at Nixon in over a quarter of a century? The kindest explanation is that the building tension throughout the movie needed a dramatic climax - the so-called "money shot". A more plausible explanation is that Hollywood liberals can't refrain from the annoying tendency to be gripped by media hubris, or what James Bowman called "the saga of media triumphalism".

The good news is that movie breaks ground that no other Hollywood director - let alone media personality - dared to break before.

President Nixon was a kind, loyal, intelligent, witty and wonderfully eccentric - if somewhat insecure - man. To it's credit, Peter Morgan and the hypnotic Frank Langella capture all of these traits beautifully. This is the first movie in which Nixon is not a villainous cartoon caricature. Nixon is portrayed much like every aide and advisor who worked with him described - the kind of guy who despised the snobbery and intellectual elitism of what Jefferson called the "natural aristocracy", and who treated everyone from Henry Kissinger to the guy who washed the windows with respect. A White House janitor recalls that Nixon always remembered his name and the birthdays of his children. Nixon showed an interest in everyone. He found the tiniest details of people's lives fascinating. He inspired a unique and heart-felt loyalty from his staff and advisers, a quality that Kevin Bacon portrays with wonderful sincerity.

The movie partially redeems itself at the end when Frost pays Nixon a farewell visit at his villa:

"Those parties of yours. The ones I read about in the papers. Tell me, do you actually enjoy them?", asks Nixon.

"Yes, of course," replies a befuddled Frost.

"Really?", wonders Nixon. "You have no idea how fortunate that makes you. Liking people. And being liked. That facility you have with people. That lightness. That charm. I don’t have it. Never have. Makes you wonder why I chose a life which hinged on being liked. I’m better suited to a life of thought. Debate. Intellectual discipline. Say, maybe we got it wrong. Maybe you should have been the politician. And I the rigorous interviewer."

For all of what the movie gets all wrong, it's more than made up for with what the movie gets completely correct - and it's a must see for that reason alone.

Cordially

Joe

(Quotes from Bob Woodward, The Washington Post, and The Times of London were researched by National Review Online's Fred Schwarz)

The Curious Case of Shirley Sherrod

2010-07-21T18:52:00.005-03:00

Robert Gibbs was acting contrite today. This is kind of like saying Charlie Sheen was enjoying a soda and chef salad at the church fund raiser, or Whoopie Goldberg made a coherent and enlightening argument today. I don't get it. Gibbs was distancing the White House from Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, claiming there was no pressure from the Administration to fire Shirley Sherrod, the state director of rural development in Georgia. Sherrod was forced to resign after a video was released which at first, appeared to show her making racially charged remarks at a NAACP banquet.

Stanger still is that NAACP CEO, Benjamin Todd Jealous, also wanted her head on a platter claiming the group was "appalled by her actions." The NAACP'S initial reaction was curious in light of the fact that Mr. Jealous loves to play the race game himself. Why should the NAACP, the MSM, and the administration get themselves in a twist over comments from some obscure government bureaucrat when other higher profile officials have done or said things far worse?

Sherrod is claiming that the administration was spooked after hearing she was going to appear on Glenn Beck to clear her name - the full speech is actually quite moving as she speaks from the heart about how she, an African American, overcame her own personal prejudices towards white farmers and became a colorblind advocate for all those who toil the land.

So, Vilsack is falling on his sword claiming there was no contact with the White House, and the media has moved on to playing a disingenuous game of self flagellation - chattering about their "rush to judgement" and how this is "a teaching moment." We've seen this act before. Remember Dan Rather, the 2000 election, Richard Jewell...?

Something isn't sitting right, and I just can't put my finger on it. Gibbs was walking on egg shells over the whole affair, and Gibbs is usually a smug little jerk. I don't believe for a second that the administration was in the dark about this. It is impossible that as this story exploded in the media, the White House had absolutely no contact with the department. Gibbs was lying, and to quote a famous movie - "I can't think of one reason big enough for him to lie about, that's small enough not to matter."

Anyway, there's lots more stuff coming on deck so stay tuned to TSH and remember, we're on Facebook so join the fan club!

Cordially

Joe

Justin Bieber, Blick v. Connecticut, and Blogging By Numbers

2010-07-04T09:17:00.013-03:00

Justin Bieber creeps me out. Not just Bieber, but this entire Bieber fever. Grown women should not be swooning over a kid who's not even old enough to legally drink in Quebec. Ephebophilia aside, he looks like Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird, or a homeless Rice Krispies elf. That's what`s swirling about in our cultural vortex these days. Vampires and a 16 year old R&B singer who sounds like he wanted to be a castrato but chickened out half-way through the snipping, leaving us with nothing but a quasi mezzo-soprano abomination. How many years before that kid's sniffing airplane glue out of a Doritos bag on a curb somewhere with Lindsay Lohan?

Anyway, I better get to some actual punditry or my Editor, The Lovely Mrs. Leger, will discover a provision in the 25th Amendment for dealing with delinquent writers. Let the blogging by numbers begin!!

It's about to get judicial up in this mug.

1 - Justin Bieber has nothing to do with Blick v. Connecticut but I had to rope you in somehow.

2 - Speaking of Blick v. Connecticut, June was a month of surprising victories for conservatives in the courts. On June 21st, a Connecticut trial court soundly rejected a petition by two doctors seeking to legalize physician assisted suicide. What is significant about the Blick decision is that firmly quashed the game of punting legal euphemisms about in an attempt to try and circumvent the state's manslaughter laws . The court clearly asserted that using the term “aid in dying” to describe what the doctor's claim is “the choice of a mentally competent terminally ill individual” still constitutes suicide. As William Saunders & Mailee Smith of Bench Memos noted;

"Looking back at the history of the Connecticut manslaughter statute, the court found that official comments by the statute’s drafters “make it quite clear” that the prohibition was intended to include physician-assisted suicide. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that suicide advocates have tried and repeatedly failed to amend the statute."

- and for all of you anarchists, I mean, libertarians and RINOS out there the court also held that such matters are best left in the hands of the legislature, not the courts, providing that such laws do not jeopardize the rights of the elderly, mentally challenged or other vulnerable persons.

3 - Speaking of "would you like some hemlock with your Geritol?" the Supreme Court in Montana overturned Baxter VS Montana, a lower court ruling that stated physician assisted suicide was "a right" and not subject to the state's homicide laws. While the decision was a victory for conservatives, it shied away from explicitly outlining any boundaries protecting those most vulnerable should the Montana legislature decide they want to be the next Switzerland where you can take your elderly mother skiing before strapping her to a bed with a glass full of Nembutal.

4 - It's really creepy that Microsoft Office knows how to spell check "Nembutal".

5 - If you've ever pondered whether Gonzalo Higuain, Thomas Mueller, or Mesut Ozil is the most impressive rookie, chances are you're a pretentious douchebag who should have a vevuzela rammed up your a%*.

6 - While Elena Kagan tried to explain away the astoundingly stupid White House memo in which she compared the NRA to the KKK during her SCOTUS confirmation hearings, the very same bench she is aspiring to sit on handed down the most resounding and definitive ruling on the 2nd amendment in the court's recent history. In a landmark ruling in the case of in McDonald vs. City of Chicago, the court declared that the second amendment applies to federal and state governments. David Rittger`s opined that;

The McDonald decision is a harbinger for the end of gun prohibition as an idea. The simple, undeniable truth is that gun control does not work. McDonald brings the law up to speed with reality, where advocates of gun control have been wrong since the issue became a national discussion.

A generation from now, legal and policy discussions will look back and see gun control for the sham that it has always been. The real shame is that it took decades of political action, millions of dollars in litigation, and thousands of lives lost to end the preposterous idea that governments can reduce the number of victims of violent crime by first taking away their means of resistance.

I couldn't have said it better myself - so I won't.

7 - Anyway, for those who haven't left to do whatever it is people do in "Café World", reason scored yet another victory in June when U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman overturned President Obama's 6 month moratorium on drilling. The MSM briefly acknowledged the ruling to allow for the perquisite feigned outrage, then quickly went back to the business of pretending it never happened. Judge Martin's ruling may well be overturned but we would well served to remember that the executive, or legislative branches for that matter should not as a rule, engage in reactionary legislation. Government mechanisms should jump into action to stem the bleeding from acts of God or man-made mishaps, but politicians should resist the urge to "do something" in the way of legislation, bans or massive government spending every time the wind blows a tent over. The President assured the American people that the moratorium would last no longer than 6 months, but as the lovely Mrs. Leger loves to remind me;

"There's nothing as permanent as a temporary government solution".

Take us out Hugh!

Cordially

Joe

From The Archives - Rick Sanchez and The OJ Effect

2010-05-30T13:09:00.002-03:00

(During our down time I will be posting some favourites from the past years - Enjoy)

I've often said that the Washington Post bares the brunt of the blame for the sub-standard level of journalism we see today in the form of cable news networks. Were it not for the relentless and vengeful glory-seeking attack on President Nixon by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - the douchebags that launched a thousand careers - perhaps the news would contain more reporting and less smug editorializing by the likes of Rick Sanchez and Solodad O'Brien. Sanchez's endless self-aggrandizing - like using twitter and Myspace to generate publicity for his frequent appearances on CNN - would almost be comic, were he not spinning in a constant state of self-righteousness. You would think that someone who not only hit and killed a pedestrian while driving intoxicated, but also fled the scene of the accident, would have some semblance of humility. You would be wrong.

In an industry that loves to shout "HYPOCRISY" at any conservative politician who so much as jaywalks, it was almost surreal to watch Sanchez endlessly replay footage of the day he chased down a Georgia State Legislator who refused to overturn a 2006 prohibition that would have reduced the prison sentence of Genarlow Wilson. The legislator - who worried that changes to the law could possibly allow convicted sex offenders back on the streets - was relentlessly badgered by a sanctimonious Sanchez, whose usual tunnel vision blinded him from appreciating the difficult situation the man was in. Maybe someone should have played the tape from the mid-eighties that forced Sanchez to resign from his job as a Miami TV anchor when he was unexpectedly caught accepting favours from a corrupt political operative during a police sting.

I'm picking on Rick because he is perhaps the best example of how low the bar has dropped since the age of "Gotcha!" journalism erupted. In the post-Watergate cable news world, he proves that as long you are in constant attack mode, your own credibility - or past criminal conduct for that matter - is of trifling importance. Stranger still is that Sanchez lacks even the respect of his own peers. After a recent "tweet" claiming he could easily get a job at Fox News as a Latino "sellout", the industry erupted in a cacophony of laughter, and prompted a Fox News' spokesman to wryly reply "Everyone knows that Rick is a joke, he shows that he's a hack everyday. And he doesn't have to worry about working at FOX because we only hire talent who have the ability to generate ratings."

Perhaps Ace Smith and James Bowman were right to lament about how our society has abandoned the quaint notion of shame.

But what about the OJ Effect? I'm not talking about the popular urban usage of the term, which implies money buys justice. I'm talking about the birth of modern media-created spectacles that turn virtually unknown and unexceptional people into overnight celebrities. What brought this to mind was Jeffrey Toobin's rather odd "brief" that appeared in the New Yorker magazine critiquing the Stupak amendment. Not only did the article skirt the boundaries of outright plagiarism, it was plagiarized from a 1989 Supreme Court briefing, whose contents were later proven to be entirely fraudulent. It appears that Toobin has been a "legal analyst" for so long he's forgotten he's an actual lawyer.

Shortly after former Heisman trophy winner OJ Simpson was arrested for the double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, murder became not just news, but entertainment, and CNN needed a ready slew of "legal experts" to keep up appearances. Suddenly an adjunct faculty member from Georgetown Law of no particular distinction named Greta Van Susteren became a household name; OJ's freeloading house guest, Kato Kaelin, is now a regular fixture in a variety of TV and radio shows, resulting from nothing more than hearing a bump in the alley below his window; A Los Angeles prosecuting attorney named Roger Cossack is now enjoying a cushy job as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, as well a good paying gig at ESPN. As for Toobin, he has the distinction of being the "First TV Legal Analyst" at ABC - all a direct result of being plucked from virtual obscurity to provide commentary during the OJ trial (as a matter of fairness, I must admit I've always had a grudging fondness for Cossack).

There seem to be more self-professed analysts making the daily rounds of cable news stations than there are actual journalists. One hour of watching CNN produced commentary by a "Gaming Analyst", a "Fashion Analyst", and even a "self esteem expert", whatever the hell that is. There was a time when the only kind of analyst who had any business being anywhere near an anchor desk was a "Financial Analyst" or a "Political Analyst", and even the latter have been wearing out their welcome as of late.

Could anyone have envisioned a world, even years after Ted Turner cut the ribbon on CNN in 1980, where people would tune in every night to watch disgraced former prosecutor Nancy Grace speculating on the contents of bottles seen in grainy pictures of the inside Anna Nicole Smith's fridge?

The "news as entertainment" shtick is an old hobbyhorse of writers who fancy themselves a cut above the pack for making such a painfully obvious observation. What I'm really driving at is why a news anchor like Rick Sanchez sometimes doubles as a financial commentator on CNN's "Your Money". Why does Jeff Toobin sit in every election night as a political commentator, when he can't even avoid being duped by a dubious Supreme Court briefing? Everyday we watch the village idiots act like interchangeable polymath titans playing a bizarre game of musical chairs.

As I write this, Rick Sanchez is reminding us that using words is much better than settling disagreements with bats and clubs (I had no idea), after quite deliberately referring to a band of thugs who are on rampage in Mumbai as "conservatives" because they are "anti-Muslim". He's making sure to repeat the dishonest conservative angle, and has it blazed across the screen, just in case someone's not listening. Really Rick, how do you know they aren't liberals? Did you interview any of the looters to find out if they thought free markets, limited government, personal responsibility, and fiscal restraint was the answer to India's third world conditions?

My wife, a graduate of a grueling 2 year massage therapy course, said that when we hear that an elderly person fell and broke their hip, it didn't really happen that way - their hip broke first, causing the fall. Her comment reminded me of a buffoonish Rick Sanchez, clumsily trotting about in a post-Watergate post-OJ news world. Sanchez's daily rantings and Toobin's half-baked legal ramblings aren't what caused the media to break, it was broken long before they got there.

Cordially

Joe

Multi Multa; Nemo Omnia Novit - Blogging by Numbers!!

2010-04-26T22:21:00.003-03:00

If the Latin in the title escaped you, it means "Everything tastes better with Nutella" - Caligula was a big fan of the stuff. He claimed the hazel-nutty goodness soothed his neurosyphilis. Actually it means "many know many things; no one knows everything", which is a good description for blogging by numbers. It might sound a little pretentious, like those people who decorate their kitchens with replicas of obscure French advertising posters from the 1920's (actually, I'm one of those people - which makes me a bit of a douchebag, I guess). I bring it up because there's been a rather curious debate amongst our friends at NRO over the habit of using a foreign word or phrase when an English one would have been equally suitable. John Derbyshire and James Bowman are probably the worst offenders (if this can even be considered an offense), but in Mr. Bowman's recent article The End Of History, he makes the best case against dumbing down society in his critique of Christopher Alden's rather flighty take on Don Giovanni.

"What else was Christopher Alden doing by taking away Don Giovanni’s tragedy and terror and making him into a rock star avant la lettre? What else was what Maria Aitken doing with As You Like It but converting Shakespeare into an extended essay in celebrity-worship? The idea in both cases was to make the works "accessible" to modern audiences — which sounds like a good idea until you reflect on what it takes to make something accessible to those with no interest in history."

I like fart jokes and making armpit zerberts by flapping my arms like an epileptic duck as much as the next guy, but I've often noted the weird trend of people using texting acronyms in conversation. OMG's were bad enough, but over the weekend Claire and I overheard people loudly exclaiming "Question Mark!" in the place simply saying (or asking) "pardon?" I don't even know where to begin with the myriad of problems I have with this, or the overarching implications of such a thing for our society in general.

Let the blogging by numbers begin.

1 - Alicia Lewis and Ashli Briggs like to dig through the trash. Around these parts we call them hobos, but over at the Huffpo and The New York Times they're the next Woodward and Bernstein. Lewis and Briggs, students at California State University, brought two bags of garbage to Attorney General Jerry Brown in a pathetic attempt to bring trumped up ethics violation charges against the university administrators under a vague public disclosure law. The students claim to have found five pages of a contract for an upcoming speaking engagement featuring Sarah Palin stuffed within 2 massive garbage bags of shredded paper.

The university has shot back, claiming (correctly) that they are "...protected by both a privacy clause in her contract and a state law that shields public university foundations from the Public Records Act."

The students are motivated by nothing other than pure hatred of Sarah Palin, who Attorney General Brown has stressed is in no way involved with the dispute. They are wasting both tax payer money and time trying to smear former Governor Palin's name by proxy. No public funds are being used for Governor Palin's speaking engagement, and the details of a private contract between the university and a speaker should be of no concern to anyone. The university has not violated any laws, but the students' very public appearances, garbage bags in hand, and the media's eagerness to imply impropriety has certainly left the University in a difficult position. Lewis and Briggs should focus more on their studies, and to quote The Narrator from Fight Club ; "...maybe you shouldn't bring me every little piece of trash you happen to pick up"

2 - The Hype will be updated less frequently in the coming months. My mother is battling cancer, and I'm sure you can appreciate that family concerns are my immediate priority. Mom is doing well and asks for your prayers. Well wishes and emails of support for her can be sent directly to TSH's mailbox at joe_leger@hotmail.com .

3 - Mark Steyn proposed an interesting scenario for contemplation on National Review last week;

"...imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand . . . but not even mentioning Germany."

True enough. If the president was truly committed to non-proliferation, he would have made actual global threats such as Iran, North Korea, and Syria the focus of the summit. That sort of bold action would have been, to quote the President, “what this moment in history demands".

4 - Our good friend Jonah Goldberg managed to finagle a sweet gig over at the American Enterprise Institute as a visiting fellow. I guess they figured he can't screw it up any worse than David Frum...At the very least, he'll show up. He may show up drunk, but he'll show up. I joke of course. Jonah Goldberg has not only become the face of National Review, he has repackaged conservatism to a new audience without compromising any of the core principals of our ideology - though I've always suspected he's reluctant to define conservatism as an ideology (see H Stuart Hughes). We wish Jonah nothing but the best in his endeavours to protect us all from a fiery death by being a staunch advocate for the latest in volcano lancing technology.

5 - Have you not heard?

6 - That is all.

Cordially

Joe

Easter? What's Easter?

2010-04-02T11:05:00.006-03:00

It's the end of the Easter weekend, a time when we remember the day the Easter Bunny rose from the grave to punish bad children by giving them bellyaches caused by cheap chocolate from Walmart. Each year we hide eggs in an attempt to confuse his spirit, in the hopes that he will leave our homes and families untouched until the next year.

I joke of course. The Easter weekend is a very integral part of the Catholic faith, as it is for those of other Christian churches and faith traditions. At one time, even those of a more agnostic mindset still used the occasion as a time to be with family and partake in the more secular traditions of the holiday - some universal, some long-standing and personal to the family. Observing tradition (my editor, the lovely Mrs. Leger, hates it when I repeat the same word too many times) is one of the cornerstones of preserving culture and heritage in our society. Leonard Cohen (a man who holds tradition with the greatest of reverence) foresaw almost 2 decades ago that we would one day be compensating for "the hole in our culture" with all sorts of superficial banalities.

I remember when we used to bemoan the commercialization of this or that holiday years ago. If only we could have flashed forward to the present day, to watch as 12 year-olds receive Ipods and X-Box's for Easter while their parents dismissively quip "It's just another weekend to me". In the blink of an eye, generations of a family's cultural identity - of joyous dinners, Easter Egg hunts, chocolate bunnies, and watching the Ten Commandments - is gone. They remain only as curious and dusty artifacts from an age that seems alien to us.

It reminds me of a scene from the brilliant, funny, and touching Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions (if you've never seen it, leave work and rent it today to see what Obamacare has in store for you). The scene shows a melancholic Catholic priest walking though a basement filled with discarded statuary and relics, remnants of an odd phenomenon that occurred in Quebec in 1966 when, as the priest explains, "...everyone stopped coming to church, and they never came back."

And so it goes with our once-cherished holidays like Easter. Once upon a time kids got dressed up in their new Easter clothes, went to mass, came back and gorged liked Romans on ham (yeah, I get the unfortunate irony of that metaphor) or turkey if you're french, then ate chocolate until they went Linda Blair all over the kitchen floor.

Last year I took some comfort in watching parents and relatives scrambling to get the few remaining chocolate items at a local pharmacy on Easter eve, whispering into their cell phones like cold war double agents when they overheard there were still a few hollow chocolate hens to be had at Walmart. This year the shelves were still looking healthy by Easter Monday. The jerks haven't even discounted the Lindt gold wrapped bunnies yet - and I like my Lindt gold wrapped bunnies.

Let me indulge in an analogy (one my editor isn't completely buying into). There's an entire line of study dedicated to the year 1948. Much of it is left-wing academic nonsense that focuses primarily on the cottage industry of postwar victimization. You've probably heard the old mantra that 20- something year old alternative rock singers like to put into their songs to showcase their vapid intellect about how "They made it past the enemy lines, just to become enslaved on the assembly lines". This irritates me, because it blindly skips over millions of "The Greatest Generation" who took advantage of the GI Bill and forged a nation. But underneath the intellectual bravado lies a certain longing for a time gone by, a faded snapshot of a past that's but a fleeting memory.

We can't stop the march of time, but if we are to jettison tradition, it should be for a better reason than the misguided belief that any Sunday is just another Sunday.

Easter is important to me as a Catholic. I don't preach on this blog, nor do I preach in my personal life. I will admit the secularization of religious days of observance is a sad thing, but to see even the secular remnants be tossed away so easily is all the more tragic. We once watched Charlton Heston part the waves as Mom cooked turkey - or ham for you weird english people. Now moms and dads watch "Jersey Shore" as little Sally downloads the latest Lady Gaga tune to upload into the latest gadget she will soon discard. After all, it's just another Sunday, except with presents.

(Oh - Happy Passover to all our Jewish friends. The Obama administration has abandoned you, but this blog will forever be a steadfast ally.)

Cordially

Joe

Bubble Trouble - Sunday Musing

2010-03-28T11:47:00.005-03:00

My editor has been "gently reminding" me of the lack of regular updates lately. She has a point - The Hype is starting to look more barren than David Frum's blog over at AEI (BA-ZING!!). With the sincerest respect for my fellow Canadian Mr. Frum, who showed me nothing but utmost kindness in our brief correspondence years ago, I am beginning to suspect that since his adoption of the term RINO as a badge of honor, he is on a fast track to becoming a daily columnist over at the Huffpo. I don't think he's reached the level of sharing elbow space with Andrew Sullivan and David Gergen yet, but he certainly is one of the loudest cheerleaders on the sidelines of those holding the ridiculous notion that the GOP's opposition to bloated government is "outrageous", "dangerous" and "ineffective". Colin Powell may have liked the idea of a "Big Tent GOP" during his dud of a speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention, but right now the tent is filled with free market conservatives who champion the idea of limited government. Frum and Powell are welcome to squeeze into the tent, but no one is buying into their vision of a soft socialist nanny state, so they don't get dibs on the megaphone - not that the Wolf Blitzers and Chris Matthews' of the world aren't more than willing to oblige their favourite pastime of playing whack-a-mole with fellow conservatives.

Hey, remember last week when we talked about how the President created another housing bubble that's going to burst? Well the bubble is a-burstin' (again) and the Treasury is deciding where 50 billion dollars of your tax money under TARP should go. On Friday, the US Treasury announced they want to "modify" the existing plan - that's Washington speak for "take out your wallet". What the President and the Treasury want to do is so monumentally stupid it defies reason. Let me break it down for you.

In the waning years of the Clinton administration, the government decided that banks should grant home loans to people who couldn't afford them, or who had such bad credit not even my cousin Knuckles the loan shark would give them $20. Doesn't make much sense, does it? If you have bad credit and your monthly income is lower than what your monthly loan payments are, you can't afford a loan, and you're going to lose your home while the bank gets stiffed. Still with me? People like President Clinton and Congressman Barney Frank didn't seem too bothered by this, and pressured banks to hand out loans to people who didn't have the money to pay the loans back.They even pressured banks to allow people who had already defaulted on their loans a chance to renegotiate the terms of their mortgage - kind of like a do-over for grown-ups. If you don't eat things off the floor of public washrooms, you probably have trouble imagining how anyone could be so stupid. Well, never underestimate the power of government when it comes to being moronic.

The government felt that owning a home was a right - a right that banks were obliged to provide to poor people and those with bad credit. That sounds nice. Most people like the idea of a poor family having a nice roof over their heads instead of an apartment in a bad part of town. The problem is that by dangling a magic carrot in front of them, you are dooming them to financial ruin, and putting them on the road to homelessness - and that's exactly what happened. People envision fat cat banks preying on struggling low income families, but a closer examination can be very revealing. My friend and fellow blogger, the talented Ace Smith, discovered just such a case in his own backyard in June of 2008. A lady living across the street was regaling the neighbourhood with tales of the predatory bank coming to take her house. When Ace dug a little deeper, this is what he discovered:

"Two months after closing on the mortgage, she secured a $20,000 home equity line of credit on the home. A month after that, she somehow was able to get another line of credit for an additional $30,000. Based on my recollection, this is roughly around the same time she started driving a spiffy, new BMW 335. Retail price: $40,000. I also noticed several big ticket items appeared around this time, including a top-of-the-line 56” television that was clearly visible through the living room window from the street, and the delivery of various furniture and new appliances."

To top it off, during the same time, the average American household owned 13 credit cards. By October of that year, 936 439 American homes had completed forecloser, and the housing "crisis" began (I've quibbled over how much of an actual crisis this was in the past, but that's a debate for bean counters much smarter than I).

You would think that everyone would have learned their lesson by now, but you'd be wrong. What the government had once considered a fair shake for every American to own a home was now being referred to as "predatory loan practices". The same banks that had been pressured by the government to "help" the poor were now being accused of taking advantage of them. Let's ignore the fact that most of the so-called "poor" had stacks of plastic credit the size of a deck of cards and some snazzy wheels in the driveway and entertain the false notion that the banks were the sole culprits in the bubble burst. Logic would dictate that this was a bad idea, that the government had made a terrible mistake, and we should never allow banks to engage in this sort of tomfoolery again. You would think that government had learned their lesson. Again, you would be wrong.

President Obama rolled out his massive TARP scheme, thinking he could do the same thing all over again and expect different results. Despite a projected foreclosure rate of over 60%, the administration decided to throw billions of dollars of your tax money into the exact same scheme, only this time they allowed even more people to make the same mistake, and gave yet another chance to the idiots that had already screwed up under the provisions from over a decade ago the opportunity to screw up again. The gas was thrown onto the fire, and we're still smelling the smoke.

Which brings me back to the Treasury's announcement, if you're still with me and haven't surfed over to Youtube to watch "epic fail" videos - The President wants to "restructure" the TARP bailout to decide which of the 4 million Americans currently on the rocks with their mortgages (again) qualify for help. The Treasury says they're not going to give any of the 50 billion smackaroos to those who have been irresponsible, but this is the exact wording of the what the guidelines are:

"Homeowners must live in an owner occupied principal residence, have a mortgage balance less than $729,750, owe monthly mortgage payments that are not affordable (greater than 31 percent of their income) and demonstrate a financial hardship.”

That sounds like the definition of irresponsibility to me. If someone bought a 3/4 of a million dollar house, with mortgage payments equaling about a third of their income, and they can demonstrate the vague provision of having "financial hardship", everyone else (that's you, by the way) has to fork out 50 billion dollars of tax money to let some idiot keep his sweet pad. The talk about 'modification' is troubling because many suspect the Treasury intends to allow those who bought even more expensive houses and can't afford them to be able to put their snouts in the trough as well.

Hollywood likes to portray the banks as heartless scrooges and the families an inch from losing their homes as victimized saints. In the recent movie "Armored" the main character is trying to take care of his younger brother after the death of their parents, begging for double shifts from his boss and bumming rides to work to keep his no-frills home. It tugs at your heart strings, because we like to romanticize those in need as being victims of forces beyond their control. This is because Americans are good people. They see the best in everything and everyone. It's why I think the United States is so wonderful, but if you stop the movie projectors and take a closer look at reality you'll discover that the supposed "down and out" are living beyond their means, drowning in credit card debt, and buying flat screen TV's, IPOD's and big shiny trucks.

As hard as it may be, and as counter-intuitive as it is to our nature, we have to let people be idiots and suffer the consequences, or they keep on being idiots. President Obama - health care aside - is on the verge of creating another crisis, only this time he's making the people who aren't wearing dunce caps pay a stupidity tax.

No matter how hard it tries, government can't magically make the house you can't afford available to you by strong-arming the bank into giving you a loan you can't repay. The problem trickles down to responsible citizens because the money has to come from somewhere to make all this magic happen - and magic is just an illusion pulled off by a clever slight of hand.

Cordially

Joe

Kittles 'n Bits - Blogging By Numbers

2010-03-21T22:27:00.004-03:00

When I was a kid my next door neighbour ran over his cat Kittles while backing up in his driveway. Had I been the investigating officer for the cat police, my report would have listed several contributing factors that led to the incident. The first thing I would have noted was that the victim enjoyed sleeping under the shade of the car's back tire - not exactly a smart life plan for Kittles. Another factor would have been age, both of Mr. Pierce, an 89 year old British ex-pat who made Mr. Magoo look like the poster boy of vehicular vigilance, and of Kittles, whom I suspect may have been 124 in cat years. Mr. Pierce would have fiercely contested my findings, as he blamed my brother - who had been reading an Archie comic book on our front porch over 60 feet away - for having intentionally distracted him, a bizarre claim to which he held steadfastly until the Church of England laid his tired bones to rest.

I bring this up because, like Mr. Pierce, the Obama administration has "run over the cat" politically, and, also like poor old Mr. Pierce, Robert Gibbs and the President are placing blame where it doesn’t belong, which brings us to our favourite feature of the Hype - It's blogging by numbers time!!!

1- Now that my brother has hopefully recovered from reliving the traumatic berating of our posthumous childhood neighbour, let's get back to the blame game on Capitol Hill. With the Democratic party in both Houses and the President at record low approval ratings, it seems the administration is in full finger-pointing mode. The White House has blamed everyone from President Bush to Glenn Beck to the tea parties for their woes. It all rings a bit hollow. The President promised to bring a new tone to Washington, to rise above partisan politics, and of course to bring lots of "hope" and "change". He also promised job creation, tax breaks for the middle class, and a new direction in foreign policy that would repair America's supposedly tattered image abroad.

Well, President Obama got his stimulus package, and a chance to play the foreign appeasement game as well. Over a year later we now have double digit unemployment (10.4% as of February 2010), threats of tax hikes on the lower middle class, an Iran that has gone nuclear, an emboldened Kim Jong Il (who has gone nuclear in more ways than one), and the contempt of not only the Arab world but of the sycophants in Europe who were once so entranced with the young senator from Illinois.

It was the President who decided to throw billions of dollars in seemingly aimless directions under the misguided Chomskyesque belief that government can create jobs. It was the President who provided a provision to allow those who had already defaulted on their sub-prime mortgages to renegotiate the terms of their loans, despite a projected default rate of almost 68%. Appeasement has led to an emboldened Iran and attempted terrorist attacks on American soil for the first time since 9/11. Robert Gibbs likes to complain that the Reid/Pelosi legislative juggernaut has come to a grinding halt because of an "obstructionist Republican party". I believe a more honest assessment shows that all fingers point to an arrogant Democratic administration.

2 - In James Bowman's review of Burn After Reading, he draws attention to a curious bit of banter between the Coen brothers near the end of a New York Times interview. In an exchange that had no relevance to the discussion at hand, Joel quipped ‘didn’t Karl Popper go after Wittgenstein with a poker?" This is a very telling remark, not only because it's false (it was Wittgenstein who had the poker), but - like their movies - it was forced and contrived, as if it's only purpose was to showcase the towering intellect they seem to believe they possess.

There is no denying the Coens are filmmakers of incredible talent, but as I've noted before, the well of their talent is running rather dry as of late. Their latest film, A Serious Man, like No Country For Old Men, is another banal romp in mindless nihilism that seems to be all the rage in Hollywood lately. A Serious Man is a retelling of the story of Job set in the mid-1960's, but unlike the biblical God of the Old Testament’s story, the Coens' Deity is one who seems to revel at the misfortunes he hurls in the way of Larry Gopnik, played by the talented Michael Stuhlbarg. The sufferings of poor Larry are meant to serve no other purpose than to amuse us (and presumably, the Coens’ "god"). That's not to say that the misfortunes of others can't be funny, but in order for the audience not too take the subject matter too seriously, we must get the sense that the filmmakers don't take themselves too seriously. As of late, that seems to be an almost Job-like pox to expect the Coens to endure.

3 - If you are above the age of 18 and still use the expression "helloooooo", or even worse, "It's like...hellloooo", you may not be an idiot, but you sure do sound like one.

4 - President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have waged a war of words on Israel that has left no ambiguity as to the hostile nature the administration has chosen to take in its diplomatic relations with the embattled nation. On March 11th, in a statement approved by the President, Secretary of State Godzill...I mean, Clinton spewed forth a 45 minute condemnation of Israel, claiming it was not showing a serious commitment to the peace process.

This is utter nonsense.

In today's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer reminds us that Israelis have been

"...dying for peace since 1947, when they accepted the U.N. partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.) In these long and bloody 63 years, the Palestinians have not once accepted an Israeli offer of permanent peace, or ever countered with anything short of terms that would destroy Israel."

President Obama continues to fawn over tin pot dictators like his "amigo" Hugo Chavez, and make conciliatory gestures towards the leaders of brutal Islamic theocracies, but spits in the face of a steadfast ally. What could possibly be the motivation behind such a heavy-handed and unwarranted Carter-like approach to Israeli diplomacy? The Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick may have the answer:

"The final explanation for Obama’s behaviour is that he is using his manufactured crisis to justify adopting an overtly anti-Israel position vis-à-vis the Palestinians. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that administration officials are considering having Obama present his own “peace plan.” Given the administration’s denial of Israel’s right to Jerusalem, an “Obama plan,” would doubtless require Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and expel some 700,000 Jews from their homes."

With friends like this....

5 - This blog started out with a story about a dead cat. No cats were harmed in the writing of this blog...except the one I stuffed in a bag and threw over a bridge.

Cordially

Joe

You're Older Than You've Ever Been

2010-03-08T17:59:00.008-04:00

I'm feeling old lately. Not the kind of old Bill Cosby used to schlep about in his stand-up routine, lamenting the inevitable forgetfulness that comes with age, like the panic you feel when you've forgotten who you're calling before the intended party has answered the phone. It's more an ever-growing sense that there is a chasm that's widening between myself and the past. It first hit me while listening to the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want in the car. I was pondering how the song is a reflection on the end of the 1960's freewheeling drug culture in London, a culture that by 1969 had long outlived its welcome. It's the 1969 part that nags at me. Using my astonishing mathematical prowess, I realized the song is over 40 years old. I remember when I was a kid, my mom used to sing the Andrews Sisters' "Rum and Coca Cola" when she was in the kitchen. Back then, that song was barely 40 years old.

There's something unsettling about that to me. When I think of songs that are 4 decades old, I like to imagine the list would be strictly relegated to the likes of Glenn Miller, Perry Como, or Johnny Mercer, but definitely not Rolling Stones' guitar licks.

Recently, some hip-hop artist sampled Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London, and I was dismayed to discover that hordes of people not even a decade younger than I am mistakenly sing "Where are the Wild Things?" when the chorus rolls around. I even had some kid argue with me over it. I dropped it, realizing that debating the finite points of music with a strung out stoner was an intellectually reductive process. He probably would have steadfastly insisted that the Statue of Liberty is actually holding an ice cream cone, and that William F Buckley Jr is a guitarist who is still very much alive.

I know 37 isn't old, but it seems life is intent on convincing me each day that there's a Scoot-About with my name on it waiting for me just around the corner. As most of my avid readers know, my wife is 14 years younger than I am - she was trick or treating when I first met her (just kidding). Often times I'll show her some movie from the early 80's that I enjoyed as a child, during which she'll methodically point out half a dozen sub-plots that were never adequately explored or were completely abandoned by the end of the movie. I try to explain that what's pivotal to the movie is that by the end the hero has killed all the drug dealers and Communists and mobsters before shooting the dirty chief of police. Apparently how the hero deduced that the chief of police was double crossing him all along is not sufficiently explained by simply declaring "I knew it was you all along" before throwing him out of a window and walking away to the beat of a Duran Duran song that fades as the credits roll. Hey, works for me, buzz kill.

I think it all came crashing down on me while we were watching an episode of Family Guy, during which a cartoon Rob Schneider does an imitation of his "Copy Guy" character from Saturday Night Live, prompting a perplexed young lady - oblivious to the cultural reference - to declare "Umm, I was born in 1987." While Claire understood that Family Guy often uses obscure or dated cultural references, she also had no idea who Copy Guy was. I enthusiastically Youtubed it to show her just how incredibly rib splitting this recurring character was, only to realize the skit was rather dull and annoying.

The lovely Mrs Claire loves that I'm older than her. It tickles her for some reason, and I am certainly a lucky man to have an intelligent and beautiful young wife. I don't know why the looming thought of 40 troubles me so much. The zero reminds of the O in LOST that comes looming out of the screen at you in the beginning of every episode. I know I should round off this column with a nice tie-in to some reference I made at the beginning - but hey, I knew it was you all along.

Cordially

Joe

From The Archives - The Folly of Youth and the Simple Truth

2010-03-04T09:35:00.009-04:00

The following appeared in the July 2009 edition of The Straight Hype

While having coffee with two very bright and thoughtful young friends, one of them said something which could only be referred to as "whiplash-inducing". After briefly describing the bizarre plot line of the fun but incredibly hair-brained movie The International, he took a sip of his French roast and wondered aloud how such a movie could have ever been made in Hollywood. What was disconcerting about this statement is that it wasn't an attempt at sarcasm. He was actually surprised that Hollywood was finally speaking truth to power - that such a film would not usually get the green light under the watchful eyes of the financial puppeteers who are part of a larger international network of duplicity and greed.

Truth is, these types of movies - in which America, the media, world banks, and the CIA are entangled in a web of deception - have been Hollywood's bread and butter for the last 20 years. Think Syriana, State of Play, The Corporation, The Bourne movies, Lord of War, W., Orwell Rolls in his Grave, The Conversation...well, just look up at the marquee and 4 times out 5, the bad guys won't be crazed Jihadists or jilted lovers. Oh no, your villains these days will more often than not be the international cabal of evil, the military-industrial complex, or the "Christian Right".

My young friend is by no means some uninformed, knee jerk liberal. In fact he is educated, charming, and very well spoken. The problem is that he's yet to realize that like an audience member at a magic show who is desperately trying to see how Marvin the Magnificent is pulling the rabbit out of the hat, he's been duped by misdirection, and still hasn't figured out the trick.

It's the ever eternal "folly of youth", and even we ardent conservatives were probably of a similar mindset before we hit our twenties. It's a curious phenomenon. People believe with great sincerity that Rupert Murdoch's media empire is controlling the flow of news for the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush/Christan right brigade while soulless companies are anaesthetising the populace into buying things they don't need. Most of us have heard all of this before, but those who really buy into this particular school of thought think they are in possession of a great secret - like they've just received the shiny ring from Bilbo Baggins and must hurry to Mount Doom to dispose of it in the fires of Mordor.

Here's the great irony - Watch any thriller at the multiplex, or tune into CNN or MSNBC for less than an hour, and you'll find out they're shoveling out this very same nonsense at a quicker pace than the Shamwow guy mops up those nasty spills. They've missed the bait and switch, and failed to realize they've been as easily duped as the guy they believe has somehow been subtly coerced into buying that exploding Prius he can't afford.

At the heart of the discussion was the BCCI, the now defunct bank whose questionable financial dealings eventually led to their downfall. Many people believe that the bank was caught red handed undermining the financial and governmental workings of third world countries in a Machiavellian scheme to secure absolute control over their development. The BCCI became the most scrutinized bank in financial history, and it was the focus of an intense investigation by American and British agencies, including Manhattan's district Attorney's Office. The third world financing scheme is utter fantasy, but like the 9/11 "Truthers" who believe the attacks on the World Trade Center was the work of "The Jews" and "The Neocons", they demonstrate that a conspiracy theory is like a wildfire - hard to put out once started, and leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.

The truth about BCCI is far less sexy than we would like to believe. They cooked the books, used false identities to open accounts (and even banks) for questionable clients, and there were charges of tax evasion brought against former partners in the bank. They certainly were dirty, but the more outrageous claims, like The International, are pure fiction. In fact, most of the more credible evidence points to the BCCI acting as a agent to finance anti-American, and anti-Israeli operations. A conspiracy can be twisted to fit the whims of anyone's particular political leanings. Even my own.

So what are we to conclude once we wade through the mess of international intrigue, media conglomerates, and unabated capitalism? Well, when the government pressures banks to make loans to people who can't afford them, those people are going to default 68% of the time. The pretty lady on TV can't force you to buy that flat screen plasma TV on your nearly maxed credit card. Detention of enemy combatants has been a practice of every armed conflict in history, and if the Bush administration really wanted to bilk middle eastern oil that badly, wouldn't it have been a lot easier just to re-negotiate the oil deals they struck in the mid-eighties? Why are rational people so eager to believe their government conspired with Israel to slaughter thousands of it's own citizens for a few Haliburton contracts?

Did the US deal with some shady middle eastern characters in the past? Yes, but as NR sagely noted, should they have continued to do so for consistency's sake?

It's a short walk down the road to Lochness, and the path is filled with bogeymen, creepy crawlies, and things that go bump in the night - but by engaging in these fantasies, we turn our heads away from the real dangers of this world. There have been dozens of honor killings in the past 2 years in the US, the UK and Canada, and like it or not, there are people who live by an ancient and barbaric honour code who want to kill Americans and wipe Israel off the face of the earth - Not because of something so trivial as middle eastern domestic policy, but because radical Jihadists believe Westerners are infidels for being tolerant of women's and gay rights, coupled with a sincere belief that Jews are descended from apes and rats. It is proclaimed daily on Palestinian TV shows, the most disturbing being children's shows.

There is an old latin expression; "Libenter id hominus quod volunt credunt". It means people believe what they most desire to be true. Yes, the world is sometimes an ugly place, but not for the reasons many well intentioned people believe.

Cordially

Joe

The Hugs and Cuddle Zone

2010-02-24T21:49:00.005-04:00

Bill O'Reilly is a hard man to pin down. He's disarmingly calm and persuasive one moment, and screaming like a goat on fire the next. The targets of his occasional wrath certainly have it coming, like the day he laid it down most royally on Congressman Barney Frank. Frank had received over $40,000 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and fought against proper oversight of these committees, claiming they were stable entities free of financial duress, and dismissed rumours of the companies' excessive "non-traditional" loan practices. After the 2008 collapse of the housing market, O'Reilly lambasted Frank for his ties to Fannie and Freddie, and the Congressman's disingenuous remarks that he had been at the forefront of those warning against an unsustainable housing market. Frank was lying and O'Reilly was having none of it. It was an epic confrontation.

O'Reilly has also managed to have judges who have shown leniency toward pedophiles thrown off the bench, and has forced universities and colleges to dismiss radical left-wing professors. Lately, however, O'Reilly has been falling out of favour with many conservatives. Many feel that his famous "No Spin Zone" has gone soft, and that O'Reilly has dialed it down to attract high profile guests. He was surprisingly kid-gloved with then-Senators Clinton and Obama during the 2008 election campaign. Everyone wanted him to be fair, but he avoided asking any tough substantive questions. In 2009 he proclaimed it was too early to tell if the President's monstrous stimulus bill was a bad idea. Surely someone as politically engaged as O'Reilly knows that massive government spending projects filled with funding for all kinds of left-wing nuttery are bound to be dismal failures.

Again, some could argue that O'Reilly is toning down his caustic style to attract more high profile guests. Since Bill has become more huggable, everyone from John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, even the President himself has made appearances on his show. There was a time when it would have seemed inconceivable that any of these folks would have stepped anywhere near the set of 'Factor'; now they seem to be cutting line to get face time with papa bear.

In fairness, O'Reilly has always pointed out that he's not a lacky for any political party or philosophy. He seems to define himself as a no nonsense, right of center everyman who serves as a watch guard against the liberal mainstream media - but O'Reilly's cautionary finger-wagging over the tone of the recent CPAC convention was truly bizarre.

On last Thursday's 'Factor', O'Reilly accused the CPAC participants of "attacking the President" instead of "attacking his policies". I can't wrap my head around just what O'Reilly found so distasteful. The CPAC convention was a very well organized conservative pep rally with an impressive guest list. There were a few good natured jabs at the President's declining popularity, but no one was calling for an armed insurrection.

He later went bellyaching to Laura Ingram that the GOP should accept the President's offer to meet to discuss new ideas for health care. Has Bill gone off the reservation? How many times has the GOP been lured into Obama's den, leaving with promises of milk and honey, only to be bushwhacked by Senator Reid's steamroller? Killing Obamacare was one of the greatest legislative triumphs of the last decade. Nobody wants health care reform. Maybe Americans would like less onerous regulations and the right to buy insurance out of state, but no one wants to revisit this issue. As Ingram sagely noted, "Why would I want to re-litigate a court case I had already won?" That sounds logical enough to me, yet O'Reilly seems insistent on re-igniting a debate that came very close turning the greatest nation on earth into some sort of quasi-socialist basket case.

Nothing good can come from accepting the President's offer to continue the debate on health care. It reminds me of the scene in Gladiator when Maximus is persuaded by Lucilla and Senator Gracchus to break out of jail and join his waiting army, only to be thwarted by Commodus. Cicero ends up with a belly full of arrows and Proximo gets a back full of swords at the hands of the Praetorian guards.

The most glaring disservice Bill has done to the conservative movement with his inane criticism of the CPAC conference is that it has given ample ammunition to the mainstream media he purports to despise. Now buffoons like Anderson Cooper can say "Even Bill O'Reilly thinks the right has gone too far."

There are legitimate concerns about the grassroots movement that has sprung up across the country. The tea party movements - which I think are healthy and productive in energizing the conservative base - have been attracting the Ron Paul lunatic fringe of the libertarian wing. They make up a small but vocal faction, and serve as easy targets for the media, who are desperately trying to discredit the GOP's resurrection.

Bill O'Reilly is entertaining, and it's good fun watching him eviscerate pedophile apologists and radical leftists - but nobody likes pedophiles or left wing whack jobs. Maybe he's making way for the talented and energetic Glenn Beck to take over his time slot, or maybe he's seeing something we're all missing. Whatever the reason, if he continues to show those strange 5 minute montages of the celebrities he's interviewed over the years, there may be more than a few viewers who decide to rotate the channel away from the "No Spin Zone".

Cordially

Joe

The Lovely Bones

2010-02-11T14:46:00.008-04:00

Peter Jackson's screen adaptation of Alice Sebold's supernatural suspense novel "The Lovely Bones" ends with a moral plot twist of sorts. Don't be too hard on yourself if you missed it. After 2 hours of watching Jackson stumble about in this ethereal, clunky mess of a movie, his protagonist's last minute afterlife epiphany (which we'll come back to) becomes irrelevant and silly. Having not read Ms Sebold's novel before viewing the film, it's difficult to discern whether or not Jackson's problem was the source material. Seeing that he acquired the movie rights shortly after reading it coupled with Jackson's obsession with staying true to the author's vision makes me assume that his film is an accurate representation of the book.

The problem with The Lovely Bones is that like so many other films, it is trying to do too many things at once, and is unsuccessful at doing any one of them particularly well. Jackson tried to use elements of European surrealism and new age spirituality as the backdrop for an American supernatural crime thriller. These elements certainly could have worked, but Jackson seemed incapable of tying them together, or even making any of them all that interesting.

As other critics have pointed out, the film starts out promisingly, as the film's protagonist, Susie Salmon, played by the exceptional young actress Saoirse Ronan, narrates from beyond the grave the days leading up to her abduction and murder - and it proves to be very effective. Susie is both wise and witty, and the movie captures the feeling and imagery of the early '70's - the set design, wardrobe, album covers, and other knick knacks are sheer perfection, and the ambiance is further accentuated by Susie's monologue;

"It was 1973, a time when people believed things like that didn't happen."

By "things like that", Susie is referring to her abduction (technically she's lured) and brutal murder by serial killer George Harvey, played with eerie perfection by the immensely talented Stanley Tucci. By this point we instinctively know that Susie will try to contact her grieving father, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg), to comfort him and to exact justice for her and her family. It's far from an original scenario, but Jackson has us captivated. Unfortunately, the momentum he has built comes to an almost grinding halt and disintegrates into a complete and dismal failure.

The first hint of trouble (with the movie) occurs right before Susie's murder, when she and her budding love interest Ray Singh (played by the grossly untalented Reece Ritchie) have an intense emotional encounter after leaving a movie review club. Their brief flirtatious moment at Susie's locker is painfully hokey and unbelievable. It's meant to evoke a strong emotional response from us, as Susie previously informs us that she will never live to experience her first kiss. Earlier in the movie, we are shown that Ray and Susie have but a passing acquaintanceship with a mutual crush (at best). Now, suddenly, they are speaking to each other like Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

After the murder, several essential plot devices are used rather sparsely, as Jackson seems more interested in showing off the CGI-created-Microsoft-screen-saver-heaven (or limbo) that he has created for Susie than in character and story development. Jack's grief and obsession to find Susie's killer leads to the disintegration of his family, but this is assumed and never really explored. When Jack's wife leaves the family home, we never have any clear picture of the lengths to which Jack's obsession consume him. We know that he starts his own investigation of his neighbours' credit reports and pesters the detective assigned to his daughter's murder, but we're never left with the sense that Jack has gone over the fence.

No one seems interested in delving into how combustible the family unit has become, but things surely must be bad, because Susie's wise cracking, chain smoking, alcoholic Grandma Lynn (wonderfully played by Susan Sarandon) is called in to save the day and restore order. Well, if by order you mean a bizarre 2 minute montage of Sarandon doing household chores to the beat of "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress". Aside from a brief conversation with Susie's brother, Grandma Lynn's only purpose - outside of the snappy montage - is to stand with a look a of worldly wisdom at various pivotal moments (speaking of bizarre montages, there a doozy of one in Susie's CGI heaven where she and her spirit guide Holly do a psychedelic dance in a circle as their clothes change to show the passing of time - grooovy).

Again, one of the fundamental flaws of the film is the failure to use key plot elements to effectively relay the story. Early on in the film, Susie is chastised for using up all 12 rolls of film her parents had given as a gift with a camera for her birthday. Jack agrees with his wife's reluctant approval to allow her to develop one roll of film per month. After her death, Jack decides to keep his promise and begins to develop the film rolls at monthly intervals. Good story telling would have our father hero being shown bits of a puzzle unravelling as each roll of film is developed. Instead we get a couple of scenes showing Jack making an important connection, but only with the other-worldly aid of his non-corporeal daughter. It would have been exciting to see Jack rushing to the photo shop, tearing open envelopes, trying to piece together the clues his daughter had unwittingly left behind for her father to find.

Wahlberg, like Tucci, is given little to work with and must make do with the scant, heavy-handed dialogue. There is so little character development that when Jack finally confronts his daughter's killer, there is no real sense of dramatic tension. Everything leading up to the scene is so poorly written that this pivotal moment is as flat as warm soda - and it's a shame. Tucci is positively creepy, and Walhberg, despite some less than glowing reviews, is excellent as an easy-going, all American blue collar dad. In fact, most all of the central cast were phenomenal, but anyone in a supporting role were so abysmal it seemed like they were picked from a supermarket and told to wing it.

Then there's Susie's peculiar limbo, where she walks through dreamy Salvador Dali-like landscapes inundated with imagery that never manages to transition smoothly into the real world inhabited by her killer. It reminds me of an early Simpon's episode when the producers of the show place Homer in a CGI world for close to a minute, and he says and does nothing beyond quip about how expensive everything looks. Jackson's 'Bones' breaks no more new ground artistically than Gothika did over seven years ago.

SPOILER ALERT!!

But now we come to the real dilemma of the film - what we in the biz call the movie's "central fallacy". As Susie wanders through her own fantasy world and George Harvey's real world begins to unravel, she is finally shown the location of all of Harvey's victims and the destruction he has left in their wake. As Harvey throws the rusted safe containing Susie's body into a pit that's soon to be filled in - forever obscuring her final remains - we think that the killer is about to get his comeuppance, that Susie will finally get justice for herself, and bring peace to the families of the other victims by using her supernatural gifts to reveal the locations of their bodies.

Not really.

This is where an already weird movie takes an even weirder turn into the realm of bizarre new age spirituality. As Ray and Susie's quasi-psychic friend Ruth look on from an abandoned building while the lecherous Harvey disposes of Susie's remains (oddly doing nothing to stop it or alert authorities), Susie possesses Ruth's body to finally steal that last kiss she never got from Ray. Oddly, after Susie has her last moment of earthly bliss, leaving Ruth's body, neither teenager feels it necessary to...oh, I don't know, ALERT AUTHORITIES.

Susie's family is finally reconciled once her killer has been exposed (but is on the run), and she is finally persuaded by her irritating spiritual guide Holly to leave this mystical nether world and move on to heaven. Instead of staying to use her ability to reach into the earthly world to bring closure to all, Holly persuades her that she must move on so that she may be happy in heaven and her family happy on earth - but that doesn't make any sense at all. There is no ultimatum given to Susie forcing her to choose between staying behind to right the wrongs in the world she departed, or leave so that her soul may enjoy peace in heaven. It seems she could have done all of these things before moving on, and, if she can't, we are offered no explanation as to why. The movie seems to have the temerity to suggest that 14 year old Susie and the the people that love her are happier and more enriched because of her murder.

There is justice of a sort given to Susie's killer. Later that winter he is struck by a falling icicle, causing him to slip down a cliff to his death, taking with him the secrets of where so many of his victims are buried (the icicle actually melts at it's base causing it to fall, as Jackson seems obsessed with water imagery throughout the movie). It is an unsatisfactory sort of justice, and perhaps would have been more palatable had the movie tried to make the point that the world is sometimes an unfair place where evil men go unpunished and good people are left to suffer. The movie's moral message is so convoluted it prompted film critic Roger Ebert to declare;

"The Lovely Bones is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were."

I couldn't have said it better myself. This movie is a muddled mess with a bizarre moral smugness that defies reason. Don't bother with this one.

Cordially

Joe

Diagnosis: Enablement - Blogging By Numbers

2010-01-26T20:36:00.004-04:00

Looks like stuff and things and other manifestations of the sort have been occurring around the world, which means you - my loyal readers, groupies, and sycophants - are expecting another blog piece. I guess it works out, because I have a lot of things to say about the aforementioned events, but because I lack motivation I want to cover several topics at once, and there's only one format that can facilitate that end. It's blogging by numbers time!!!

1- The only thing worse than the horrific pictures from Haiti is the self-righteous finger pointing by the likes of The New York Times and my local "paper", L'Acadie Nouvelle. The Nouvelle, a second rate French Acadian Newspaper - apparently staffed by writers who failed finger painting in kindergarten - are stuffing their editorial pages with daily columns about how "we failed Haiti, hence, Haiti failed." They're right about the symptoms, but wrong about the diagnosis (sorry, I've been watching too much House). Liberals guided by Saint Clooney seem to be under the illusion that Haiti is the country the world forgot.

Haiti is not the country the world forgot, it's the country the world has been enabling. One pompous editor at L'Acadie Nouvelle called for the formation of a bizarre international coalition of countries that would continue to keep Haiti running with a steady stream of hand-outs. Too bad Smarty McFrench isn't big on researching before spewing forth a litany of self-righteous nonsense. He might have discovered that prior to the day the earthquake devastated the country, there were over 10,000 charitable and foreign aid organizations operating in Haiti. According to the Wall Street Journal, Haiti receives ten times more foreign aid than foreign investment. Jonah Goldberg pointed out that;

"It’s true that Haiti has few natural resources, but neither does Japan or Switzerland. What those countries do have are what Kling and Schulz call valuable “intangible assets” — the skills, rules, laws, education, knowledge, customs, expectations, etc. that drive a prosperous society to generate prosperity. That is where the real wealth of nations is to be found — not in factories, oil deposits, and gold mines, but in our heads and in the habits of our hearts. Indeed, a recent World Bank study found that 82 percent of America’s wealth could be found in our intangible assets."

Feeding the mechanisms that fuel Haiti's poverty may make us feel good about ourselves, but it's the real reason behind the mythical "cycle of poverty" liberals seem to be so dedicated to breaking.

2- Aside from Maxim magazine covers, what is the appeal of the hot tub? Who wants to marinate in a petri dish of bacteria? Aren't the 1970's over?

3- What the GOP needed after the november Gubernatorial wins was momentum. The wins in New Jersey and Virginia were a clear repudiation of Obamanomics and health care reform, but the MSM either outright ignored the results or quickly brushed them away as irrational tea-party induced reactionism. The dismissive attitude of the media was to be expected, but november 2010 was a long way off, and Harry Reid had a vice-like grip on his unruly Senators. Many doubts remained - could a grass roots conservative resurgence combined with a populace movement be enough to return the GOP esse quam videri? How long could the Tea Party movement sustain itself? Such questions seemed irrelevant to arrogant Dems, as the Pelosi/Reid health care monster ploughed it's way through every obstacle that crossed it's path, by hook or by crook.

Our own arsenal was incredibly powerful, but our powder was wet. The Democratic defections in the House, the Dodd/Reid bow -outs, even Barbara Boxer's declining Rasmussen numbers were of little use with november so far off. Reid's soldiers were standing at attention, and the ghost of Woodrow Wilson floated in the wings (have I milked the moment enough?) - but then an unexpected occurance changed the balance.

Not just any kind of unexpected either. It's James K Polk circa 1844 unexpected. It's Swedish female volleyball team "our bus broke down, could we use your shower?" unexpected. The most liberal of senate seats held by the most liberal of liberals, Ted Kennedy, was taken by a guy that not even I had heard of. Against all odds, Republican Scott Brown won what has been described as an "epic" and "miraculous" victory in Massachusetts. Suddenly the equation has changed. Health care is off the table, Cap and Trade is in jeopardy, Democrats are running for cover, and the President is giving incoherent and bizarre speeches that seem like they were ripped out of a Saturday Night Live skit. But will the GOP get the message?

It would be easy to become complacent with this win, but after the bumbling punditry and Monday morning quarter-backing has stopped, the media will be doing a full court press to help stem the bleeding in November. There is no libellous accusation they will not hurl, no minor scandal they will not exploit, no misfortune they will not try to lay on the doorstep of the GOP. The GOP is like a cat in room full of rocking chairs - When they should be strutting proudly with their tail in the air, they get spooked by the media, and start pandering to the imaginary boogeyman called the "moderate voter". Now is not the time to stop the Tea Parties or become apathetic. Conservatives must remind the GOP every day that they can easily lose what the voters are willing to give them in November.

4 - I don't care what this diet I'm on says, skim milk is not - and never will be - a "snack".

5 - I hear I have new young reader from the deep unforgiving liberal vortex of British Columbia, the land of irritating lefties who sip latte's from coffee shops with names like the "The Ethical Bean" and stick those annoying Darwin Fish on the bumpers of their Priora. I hear she is even so bold as to show this blog to her teachers! Hats off to you, Amanda! One day, a political science teacher will tell your class that socialism works in theory. Be ready to raise your hand and challenge that remark. You are a true Hypester.

6 - Time to groove out children.

Cordially

Joe

Redux - Oh Canada? - From the Archives

2010-01-17T21:14:00.007-04:00

While preparing for work this week, I tuned into a popular local talk show. The topic of discussion was whether playing the Canadian national anthem before hockey games served any useful purpose. Several listeners phoned in showing an almost even split between those who thought this was a meaningless tradition, (given that most players on Canadian hockey teams are drafted from other countries), and others who - admirably, if not somewhat clumsily - spoke of the need to preserve tradition in a country that seems hell bent on dismantling what little traditions we have left.

The host, through a clever slight of hand framed the question in a manner that pigeonholed the parameters of the discussion. The topic, formulated by the host, was actually whether or not the national anthem "inspired the players". Yet no matter how slippery the question was, the fact that the program was even having such inane discussion is symptomatic of a much larger problem. The lack of cultural identity.

Ask any bloke or blokette on the street what it means to be Canadian and they will frequently spew forth a litany of ready-to-order items off a check list, most of them declarations about how they are not like Americans. The common version of our watered down notions of national pride boils down to silly tub thumping about how we don't let sick people die because they're poor, how we're all walking saints because we don't carry guns and of course, the ever annoying lament about how we don't start "useless wars". You know you're in deep trouble when you define your national identity in the negative. Who you are, should not be explained in terms of who you are not. If someone were to ask me to define myself as a person and I responded; "Well, I'm not a pedophile, and I certainly don't torture animals", it may make you feel safe about letting me spend the weekend with Spuds and little Johnny, but it speaks very little to what makes me tick - and therein lies in the rub.

In the 1960's we were beginning to mold into our collective psyche what it meant to be Canadian: Honour in combat, the majestic railway that connected this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, our natural resources and our pioneering ancestors - but there was a counter movement eager to crush this burgeoning sense of national pride. They progressives declared that patriotism was a dirty word and insisted we were all hand-holding members of the kumbaya cult of pan-ethnicity. Their leader? The white-on-white wearing liberal/Liberal hipster Pierre Elliot Trudeau. If America was a melting pot where people of diverse backgrounds and heritage stood proudly under the banner of a united culture that welcomed inclusion, Canada was to become a bizarre soup sitting in an another type of pot, where the burner was never turned on and it's colourful ingredients were left to sit in stagnant cold water.

Multiculturalism - the abra-cadabra, all encompassing, non-threatening name of one the most misguided experiments in social engineering ever hatched. Multiculturalism frowned at any patriotism of the whole and encouraged a strange ethnocentric loyalty to your nation of origin. The result almost a quarter of a century later are ethnic ghettos where poverty runs rampant in large cities and entire swaths of the population that do not posses adequate proficiency in English to compete in the job market.

The true Orwellian nightmare of multiculturalism in all its glory is a nefarious little group of jackbooted bureaucrats called the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Anyone who doesn't like a magazine article or feels excluded from some facet of society can drag magazine editors, writers, artists, priests and even night club owners in front of the commission. Last year, Canadian writer Mark Steyn was ordered to appear before the commission after a complaint was launched by the Canadian Islamic Council over an article he wrote in Mclean's magazine that warned of the ever growing threat of radicalization within the Islamic community. They didn't like it, so in the spirit of free speech for all they hauled Mr. Steyn before the tribunal which almost led to his brilliant cautionary tome "America Alone", being banned in Canada.

Woodrow Wilson, the first American President to try - but ultimately fail - to turn America into a Canadian-style welfare state with a pimped-out European fascist whip was a bit more heavy handed. He routinely shut down newspapers and even had his own personal goon squad at his beck and call to intimidate those who spoke out against the government. Now Canadian citizens are being forced to endure the same type of bullying, albeit under the guise of a "Human Rights Commission".

It's all a bit disheartening that we've reached a point where sober minded people debate whether or not we should still sing the national anthem at sporting events. Perhaps soon, such quaint traditions will be but a memory if the jackbooted intellectual thought police at the Canadian Rights Tribunal have their way.

Cordially

Joe

TSH 2009 Year In Review - The New Year's Blog!

2010-01-08T00:35:00.010-04:00

Just before I started pecking away at my New Year's blog, I realized that we are stepping into a new decade, and perhaps a decade in review blog would be more appropriate than a year in review piece. It then struck me that writing that sort of thing would be rather long and tedious, and I am far too lazy and lacking the proper motivation for that sort of undertaking. It takes me forever to write about what happened last week, let alone the last 10 years. I could have lied to you and wormed my way out of the whole mess with some quasi-scholarly wonking about how when our AD/BC system was set up, the concept of "0" wasn't well recognized in Europe, so they started with the famous "year one" - but that tripe is not set in stone, as 1980 to 1989 was considered a decade, and most scholars view the first decade of a new century as running from 01 to 10.

Anyway, I'm pretty much avoiding a decade in review article on principle, as I generally find them bizarre and pointless, and again, that whole unmotivated/lazy thing comes into play. Now, I realize my New Year's blog is one of the most anticipated articles I write every year, and after the overwhelming response to my "Enemy at the Gates" piece, I thought I might get out of writing it altogether, but my editor, the lovely Mrs Leger, starting shaking a bag off M&M's, saying "You can do it Joe, you can do it!" So, enticed by the prospect of M&M's, I got right to it, only to realize that she didn't have any M&M's at all - she was just putting her hand over her mouth and going "chika chika chika" and I was too dumb to look - friggin' infidel. Anyway, let's get on with it.

Worst Decision of the Year - The election of President Barack Obama

How are you liking your hope and change? Americans had a choice between a decorated War Hero with 30 years of experience in both the House and the Senate or a slickster from Chicago who barely served two years in the senate and whose closest friends and advisers range from convicted criminals to a guy who bombed a Police Department, The Pentagon, and The United States Capitol building. Sounds like a no-brainer, but somehow Americans didn't vote for the seasoned politician with a reputation for reaching across the aisle and compromise. They threw away their vote for some guy who had nothing to say but "Yes We Can" and "We are the ones we've been waiting for". What the hell does that even mean? Now Americans are getting hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending and taxes, a massive and unworkable health care bill no one asked for or likes, and an attempted terrorist attack that almost killed 260 Americans. How do you like that change?

(yeah yeah, he was elected in November of 2008, but it can take months before the symptoms of herpes show up too...not that I would know anything about that. )

Best Article of the Year - Fossil Future by Jonah Goldberg

The cover story of the July 6th issue of National Review by Jonah Goldberg, "The Beauty of Drilling from an Oil Platform - Fossil Future", was a fascinating and humorous first-hand account of Goldberg's time aboard a drilling platform that dispelled many myths about this plentiful and largely untapped resource.

Worst Movie of the Year - Avatar.

Haven't even seen it and have no intention of doing so. I don't care how pretty it's supposed to look. I'm not going to waste three hours of my life watching some condescending enviro-lecture by James Cameron. Yeah I get it James - humans are mean, nasty and evil and will no doubt one day be massacring emaciated smurfs on far away planets. Maybe someday I'll see it after falling into a quasi-vegetative state during a spelunking accident and someone will slip it into the DVD player at the special care home I'll soon be living in.

Most Disappointing Movie of the Year (with a few caveats) - Inglorious Basterds

2009 was a terrible year for movies, but a great year for performances within those terrible movies. The best example is Inglorious Basterds, another over-rated, over-hyped piece of nonsense from the ever declining talents of Quentin Tarantino. However, a virtually unknown Austrian named Christoph Waltz as "The Jew Hunter" Standartenführer Hans Landa gave us one of the most memorable acting performances in recent memory. The opening sequence of the film, as well as the bar scene with British actor Michael Fassbender as Lt. Archie Hicox, are cinematic perfection in an otherwise campy and unremarkable film. There were, however, some films of note that are worth renting on Beta cassette, Stingray, or whatever the kids are calling those movie playing thingies these days.

Best Movies of the Year

1 - The Hurt Locker - An unrelenting, pulse pounding action movie about a bomb disposal unit in serving in Iraq.

2 - Sunshine Cleaning - From the makers of Little Miss Sunshine comes another darkly comic and touching film, quirky and human with a wonderful script by Megan Holley.

3 - Is Anybody There? - Michael Caine and the talented young child actor Bill Milner explore questions of death and redemption. The film never quite seems to be able to smoothly gel the competing plot lines, but it's worth seeing.

4 - Dead Snow - What happens when a group of German medical students pick the wrong cabin for a winter weekend vacation? A delightfully fun spoof of conventional horror films that involves a gruesome attack at the hands of an army of Nazi zombies. Good fun, but not for the squeamish.

5 - A Christmas Carol - In a year filled with duds, the one movie I avoided seeing until the bitter end turned out to be the best movie of the year. Robert Zemeckis and Alex Silvestri have created a breathtaking and faithful adaptation of Dickens' timeless novel. This movie was by far the most surprising treat of the year.

6 - Up In The Air - Jason Reitman hits a home run with his 3rd directorial outing. Both comic and bleak, George Clooney gives perhaps his best performance to date alongside the formidable Anna Kendrick.

Political Play of the Year - Harry Reid

Now, before you drag me out into the streets with a screaming mob in an auto de fé revival, hear me out. The political play of the year goes to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Yes, he's a weasel, and I suspect that repeated incantations of his name could probably summon unspeakable creatures from the bowels of hell itself - but what he managed to do was remarkable. The Democrats' health care bill is an obscene disaster that promises nothing but billions of dollars in new spending, sky-rocketing tax hikes on the middle class, and reduced services to seniors. Still, as the bill came close to being booted into oblivion, he fought tooth and nail to bring 60 of the most disorganized and unruly Democratic Senators together to pass this thing. Did he skirt the bounds of ethics to win some of those votes? I have no doubt he did, but his dogged determination and crusading won the day in the end. Republicans could learn something from that kind of unrelenting persistence.

Album of the Year - Regina Spektor's "Eet"

Eet is more tame and restrained than Spektor's previous two outings, but it remains a powerful album that was a welcome treat for her ever-growing fan base.

What would Happen if you Drank a Bottle of Drain-o?

I suspect you would die a painful death as your insides singed like goats on fire.

Best Decision of the Year - Marrying my editor

As a general rule, this sort of thing should be avoided the way children should avoid sticking forks in power sockets, but marrying the lovely Miss Claire - now the lovely Mrs. Claire - has made me the happiest blogger (and man) in the world. I love her dearly, and my life is all the richer for having her in it.

A Final Thank You

Thank you to all my readers, from all parts of the political spectrum, for making The Straight Hype the success it is today. Thanks most of all to my wife and editor Claire, and my brother and glue sniffing webmaster Paul. I could not do any of it without your support, and I thank each and every one of you for your loyalty. God bless you.

Happy New Year!

Cordially

Joe

(I know I missed lots of stuff...feel free to add your own thoughts - we do have a comments section.)

Enemy At The Gates

2009-12-30T20:52:00.003-04:00

On Feb 10, 1970, three terrorists attacked a bus at the Munich Airport armed with guns and grenades. One passenger was killed and 11 were injured. The Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack. If one is so inclined, a cursory search of the State Department's website lists a seemingly endless array of terrorist attacks committed by radical Jihadists going back close to 40 years.

In February of 1993, radical Islam reared it's ugly head on American soil with the first bombing of the World Trade Center, leaving 6 dead and over 1000 injured. The Federal Government lists over 25 separate and active Islamic terrorist organizations operating around the world, yet despite the best efforts of law enforcement and vigilant prosecutions, bombings, kidnappings and high-jackings persist. Prior to Sept 11th 2001, many warned that a sort of global tunnel vision had emerged, which viewed terrorism, wherever it occurred, as just another manifestation of crime, to be dealt with by the auspices of the civil justice system as various countries saw fit.

The temptation to view terrorism as a matter of domestic law enforcement is a direct result of the quick and easy prosecutions that are obtained through civilian trials. The proponents of this worldview are fond of using past convictions as a shining example of how the criminal justice system provides swift and exacting results. It is indeed tempting, but also extremely misleading. If we are to measure success in terms of incarceration, then many a Federal prosecutor can rightly claim that terrorism is best left to civilian jurisprudence.

The most glaring examples are the chest puffing by Attorney General Eric Holder over the current trials of the 9/11 conspirators in New York, and the Clinton administration's prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. But what is the goal of national security? As Andrew McCarthy asked on NRO's The Corner, "...does litigation success equals national security success"? If Friday's foiled attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on it's descent into Detroit is any indication , it's clear a return to the previous strategy is not working.

Following calls for her resignation after boasting that the administration's Clinton style anti-terrorism strategy prevented the attempted bombing, HHS Secretary Janet Napolitano finally conceded that the country's security structure had "failed completely". Even Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs has resurrected the administration's once forbidden phrase "war on terror". In fact, the administration not only bungled the lead-up, they are horribly bungling the aftermath with mixed signals, conflicting statements, and ever-morphing euphemisms.

For close to eight years, under the vigilant policies of the Bush administration, America remained safe. We were at war, and the foot soldiers hell bent on destroying us were treated as enemy combatants. But as the years passed, images of the two majestic towers collapsing to the ground in a plume of fire and smoke became a distant memory, and the public grew apathetic. Liberals were hell bent on allowing captured terrorists to be treated as common criminals at the dock, with the full rights and privileges of the American justice system, and a young Senator from Illinois with eyes on the Oval Office was willing to oblige. This return to a failed 40 year old policy led to a day that almost cost the lives of close to 260 Americans. President Obama believes that because Abdulmutallab's improvised exploding underpants malfunctioned, this is a no harm no foul situation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The administration seems to be in a national defense free-fall, and - as McCarthy laments - sorely missing the point:

"Here, no thanks to the government, the plane was not destroyed, and we won't get to the bottom of the larger conspiracy (enabling the likes of Napolitano to say there's no indication of a larger plot — much less one launched by an international jihadist enterprise) because the guy got to lawyer up rather than be treated like a combatant and subjected to lengthy interrogation. But the terrorist will be convicted at trial (this "case" tees up like a slam-dunk), so the administration will put it in the books as a success . It is a dangerously absurd viewpoint, but it was clear during the campaign that it was Obama's viewpoint. The American people — only seven years after 9/11 — elected him anyway. As we learn more painfully everyday, elections matter."

Umar bragged to law enforcement officials shortly after his capture that more attacks were planned and on the way, but he has now, as McCarthy points out, "lawyered up", and Homeland Security is desperately trying to resurrect the policies of the Bush administration that had managed to keep Americans safe for the better part of a decade. But have we really gotten the message, and for that matter, what is the message? I think Daniel Pipes put it best when he sagely warned;

"Diplomacy in general does not resolve conflicts, ... Wars end not due to peace processes, but due to one side giving up. Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.”

Cordially

Joe

Merry Christmas - Blogging by Numbers Edition

2009-12-21T20:48:00.003-04:00

Happy non-denominational, pan-ethnic, globally inclusive late December!!!! But seriously folks, Merry Christmas to all, and that means a special Christmas blogging by numbers!!!

1- It's refreshing that, this year, there seems to be less of the usual sand-poundingly stupid attacks on our treasured Christmas symbols. For the first time in years, I've been seeing all the cherished cartoons I loved as a child showed nightly on TV. In the various cities to which I travel, there are Nativity scenes proudly displayed in front of City Halls and other civic buildings. There are fewer aggravating stories about school boards banning red and green construction paper and Salvation Army Santas being kicked off curbs. When we ban the Christmas symbols of our Christian heritage because a certain group feels offended, we like to think we are being respectful of others' beliefs - but we are not. We are only catering to their intolerance.

2 - It looks like fascist Santa...um, I mean President Obama gave out some early festivus gifts to those pesky democrats who wouldn't play the Pelosi/Reid health care shell game. The Dems won yet another round in the health care blowout after Senator Ben Nelson finally sold his vote for full and permanent federal aid for expanded Medicaid goodies for his state. Sen. Mary Landrieu got $400 million in federal aid under her Christmas tree, and billions more ended up in the stockings of Senators from Mass., Florida, New York and Vermont. Backroom Chicago politics imported to the capital for all, just in time for Christmas.

What do the American taxpayers get? Well, the CBO says you'll be getting $800 billion dollars in new federal spending over the next decade, cuts in Medicare Advantage plans that would force about 8.5 million seniors out of the coverage they would prefer, and across-the-board payment rate cuts for hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies. Yay! What a deal. Keep up those tea parties, my dear friends - your representatives won't be losing their generous health benefits. Don't let them take this any further.

3 - My father in law recently underwent some unpleasant knee surgery. Thankfully, all went well, but he appears to be favouring a plastic broom handle over his rather functional crutches to get around. He kind of looks like a dollar store Gandalf, but he's rather attached to this dangerous home crafted walking aid, and I have the feeling this is going to end quite badly, making his certain catastrophic fall an overnight Youtube sensation. He's starting to put some weight on the knee, now I just hope he can part with the broomstick.

4 - Give a 40 ouncer to a homeless guy on Christmas day. Yeah, it's not the help he needs, but, come on.

5 - Claire and I are looking into adding to the family in a year. She got a pamphlet about fertility, and it says guys should keep their jewels away from tight clothing and heat, so I guess my unitard/hot tub nights are over.

6 - Have a wonderful Christmas. Be kind to everyone, remember to keep Christmas well, and read this blog.

Merry Christmas

Joe

The Radical Left and The Creepy Cult of Green

2009-12-13T22:49:00.019-04:00

I watched Sling Blade for the second time in almost a decade, and Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of Karl Childers reminded me a little of what Joe Biden might sound like if someone hit him over the head with a baseball bat, shaved him bald, and yanked his pants up to his nipples;

"They got me a job with the President...some people calls him a socialist, I calls him the President. Hmmm. He brought two fellars up there from some college that weren't getting along proper..hmmmm. We all drank some beers. Bible says a man shouldn't take to drinking and I figure the good lord knew what he was talking about after we was about done, ah hmmmm. Sometimes the President...some people calls him Obama I calls him the President...he says he'll give me some french fried pataters if I got sense enough not to talk so much. I reckon that's a pretty good arrangement, um hmmmm"

I bring up Sling Blade because, in the movie, Billy Bob Thornton's antagonist, Doyle, is a volatile sociopath whose laid back good naturedness is nothing more than transparent window dressing to hide his otherwise dark and unpredictable nature. Granted, this is a weak segway, but I thought the Biden bit was pretty damn funny.

I recently had a (thankfully) brief rekindling of a friendship with a radical socialist friend of mine, whom I hadn't spoken to in almost a decade. It was a bizarre but telling window into the strange Kabuki theatre of the extreme left and how their perceptions of the conservative movement - and the world for that matter - seem limited to parroting talking points spit out by the callow hacks at the Huffington Post. The HuffPo has always struck me as a kind of cyber saloon where discredited journalists and a rogue's gallery of other has-beens gather together to form tightly packed manure balls to stuff into their Trebuchet of lunacy.

Radicals who get all dressed up trying to look respectable usually use the same MO. I've seen it so many times I can spot it quicker than Columbo on his best day: They whisper about how they're secretly disappointed with the hostile tone of their compatriots on the left, and (not so) subtly remind you that they've been to Europe so they can use terms like "social Swedish-style democracies" and mention, without the slightest trace of irony, "how different the Euro-right is". Then, faster than you can say "Dorothy Hewett on a corndog", they spin around like Linda Blair's head in the exorcist and begin moaning about being stuck in a world of uneducated morons who only listen to Glen Beck and think women shouldn't use "big words". Usually the good people they claim to be so savagely victimized by are tolerant and educated folks whose only crimes are working in the oil industry and not living in a constant state of fear about an imaginary warming trend that will wipe all of mankind off the face of the earth.

Of course, there is the usual stock footage: Frothing at the mouth and throwing cyber feces at Sarah Palin for the unforgivable crime of attending a cancer benefit; Recycling discredited reports by unethical scientists to give each other high five reassurances about how climate change is an undisputed fact; and of course, living in a state of perpetual victimhood.

The thing that really creeps me out is the fervent, almost evangelical, pulpit pounding zeal when they discuss environmental issues. They kind of get, well, all Jehovah's Witness-y on you. I half expect them to whip out some green version of "The Watch Tower" with David Suzuki on the cover.

As the green intelligentsia camp out in Copenhagen - taking advantage of comped CO2 spewing limos and sampling the after hours local delicacies - they're finding themselves up against a tide of scientific elites who have finally found their voice after years of threats and intimidation spearheaded by the tribal mentality of environmentalists. They are also having to answer to an increasingly skeptical public wondering if their "green lifestyles" have been nothing but hollow gestures to prop up a cargo cult that has fueled a multi-billion dollar industry (we'll touch on that later in my Climategate piece I'll have up in a few weeks).

What disturbs me the most about some foot soldiers of the green movement is their glazed-eyed, batten-down-the-hatches, straight-jacket-with-the-sedatives craziness they seem to possess. Environmentalism, to some, is a sort of pre-packaged quasi-socialist religion. Fundamentalist Christians are often ridiculed by the left for believing that if man doesn't change his ways, the end is nigh. They share a lot more with these folks then they would care to admit. The apostles of the environment believe that if man doesn't change his ways it will trigger a global Armageddon juggernaut that will bring floods, famine, and a Mad Max society where we will be using our neighbors' skulls for soup bowls. The biblical end of days doesn't differ all that much from the more secular death and destruction scenario brought to us by the tree huggers (anyone see 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow)?

Oh, but back to the creepy Wilsonian aspect of all of this. Last week in Copenhagen, journalist and documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer was stopped in the middle of a question to Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider by armed UN guards at the request of Schneider's assistant. McAleer, a global warming skeptic, was ordered to stop filming, manhandled, and threatened, even though he had full press credentials. When I asked my socialist friend whether she was disturbed by this, she responded;

"They were inconvenient and irrelevant questions".

It seems the pacifist anti-gun crowd doesn't mind silencing dissent with the butt of a rifle when journalists ask "inconvenient" questions. Armed response to "protect" the environment is OK, but roving wire taps to prevent terrorist attacks is unacceptable.

I wish UNAMIR would have felt as passionate about genocide as the UN as a whole feels about "pointless questions" from journalists. Maybe some of the 800,000 people slaughtered in Rwanda would still be alive today.

Today in Copenhagen, hundreds of bored young Europeans and rich white American progressives are shouting for the global community to amp up it's commitment to reduce greenhouse gases. Several of the protesters are waiving large flags of the former Soviet Union, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the evil ideology that is Communism has killed over 100 million people. I'm sure many who escaped the horrors of Stalin's Gulags could tell these folks quite a bit about waterboarding.

I doubt any of them would listen. They're too busy being victims of invisible bogeymen, shadow governments, and the military industrial complex. If you have a radical liberal on your Christmas list, maybe you should buy them a crowbar. It might help them pry the nails out of their hands and feet so they can come off of their crosses....Oh wait! Crosses are symbols of patriarchal Christian oppression. Scratch that. Buy them a Snuggie instead.

Cordially

Joe

Giggity! Blogging by Numbers!

2009-12-06T19:58:00.009-04:00

Well, it's been a few days, and I suppose you good folks are expecting a blog or something of the sort. I thought maybe I could distract you with this Youtube video of a giant bouncing ball, but my paint sniffing webmaster assures me that cats don't account for any fraction of the various demographic groups that read my blog. Some of my leftist/Marxist demographic may still be watching the video and have long since forgotten they were reading this, so we'll continue on without them. Let the blogging by numbers begin.

1- Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane seems to be making good on his promise to back off the left wing preachyness that was beginning to make the show boring. I've always loved that MacFarlane holds nothing sacred, and that there is no line he will not cross. The problems started when the writers of the show made the fatal mistake of forgetting that a satirist must never think himself above that which he is satirizing. To his credit, he's gone a step further and made the show's Prius driving liberal character, Brian, the butt of the majority of this season's most cutting jokes. Hats off to the folks at Family Guy for creating this scene, which has quickly become one the show's most memorable moments - and thank you.

2 -Who would win in a fight? A Navy SEAL, a real seal, or the singer Seal?

3 -Lots of you are wondering if I'm going to tackle climategate. The myth of global warming has fueled a multi-billion dollar industry for close to twenty years, and while we addressed it quite regularly on the old website, it's not something I've written much about over the last few years. The recent release of emails that were discovered after hackers broke into the server at the CRU have finally proven that a group of scientists have been hiding data, manipulating statistics, and silencing critics by intimidating the editors of publications that print research articles contrary to their own findings. Phil Jones, the head of The Climate Research Unit, has been forced to resign, and the media is finally realizing they can no longer turn their heads and hope this will go away. I've already started what will be a rather detailed piece on the issue, but it's a labour of love, so sit tight.

4 - Claire and I were worried about the crazy homeless guy who lives under the bridge near our home after he was chased away from his newspaper padded nook by a gang of more aggressive panhandlers (Apparently, the politics of begging can be quite nuanced and complex). After a couple of weeks of not seeing him, I was oddly relieved to find him hiding in the trees across the street. Well not exactly hiding in the trees, but standing very still next to a tree. Claire and I help him because he is certifiably insane, and not just some guy who only needs to sober up. He proves this quite often when we overhear him quoting biblical passages that involve Paul's Letters to the Corinthians mixed in with lyrics to Kenny Rogers' songs.

"I say onto thee, as our Father told us, you've got to know when to hold them..."

5 - I'm not kidding about that last part.

6 - Hey! Speaking of the Green Guardians at the Gate in Copenhagen, it's nice to know that the rules they are hell bent on imposing on the bigbadcorporations don't apply to them. The current "carbon footprint" of the defenders of the environment rings in at 1,200 Limos and 140 Private Jets - not counting the emissions from the mounds of pseudo-scientific horseshit that will be emanating from the conference all week.

7 - Challenge: To those who continue to make the bizarre comparison between the perpetually medicated Amy Winehouse and the brilliant Regina Spektor - if you can find one Winehouse song that sounds even remotely like this song by Spektor, I will admit on this very organ that Spektor is, indeed, just another "emo" hack.

8 - Have a great weekend, and watch out for the man!!

Cordially

Joe

Mr. Nice Guy - The Final Word on The Internet Age

2009-11-30T19:12:00.006-04:00

It may come as a surprise to those of you who have never met me, but I have somewhat of a reputation for being a "nice guy". Not the kind of "nice guy" actors like Steve Carell are always portraying, who are so socially awkward and bumbling they are more the object of pity than respect. Nor am I the "nice guy" of lore who is eternally doomed to walk the earth as a single and lonely man playing the role of the perpetual sympathetic ear to every broken hearted girl - the male version of "always a bridesmaid, never a bride."

I won't irritate you with the list of things you might find on the last page of a YMCA job application, but I will say that I've always taken a certain pride in being known for my warmth, courtesy, good sense of humour, and quick wit - but lately, a strange phenomenon has been occurring. Some seem to be questioning that warm and fuzzy feeling they once harboured toward me. They're no longer quite sure what to make of me. A strange look crosses their face - kind of like the look you see on people who keep swigging from a carton of eggnog, trying to decide if it's gone bad or not.

It seems that with the dawn of social networking sites, people are discovering that I'm a Stephen-Harper-loving, George-Bush-cheering, Iraq-war-supporting capitalist. I have no use for quasi-fascist politicians like President Obama or Jack Layton (or the NDP as a whole for that matter), environmentalists, socialized medicine, socialism, or people who think that wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt makes you cool.

This is nothing new. I'm a university educated political scientist who's been writing about politics and the media for close to 15 years. In 1999, my former website "The Rant" was voted one of the top 5 conservative sites, and my blog has been mentioned by some of the largest political websites on the Internet, and was even referenced twice by a New York Times #1 best selling author. After my wife, my faith, my family, and maybe music, American politics has always been the great passion of my life. I live, breath and eat it. I've seen James Madison's wine cellar; I stood only a few feet away from Thomas Jefferson's desk and telescope; I even stood on the glass floor showing the foundation of the first Church in Jamestown. People often admonish Claire and I for not taking the same pains to visit the homes of our own country's leaders. It's a fair criticism, but one that has an easy enough rebuttal. Traveling 10 hours to see a crumbling duplex in Baie Comeau doesn't quite hold the same breathtaking appeal as walking the grounds of Jefferson's Monticello - a protected United Nations World Heritage Site.

Again, all of this is nothing new. These beliefs have been a part of my identity since I was 16 years old, but lately I've been feeling like the old guy who's exposed at end of every Scooby Doo episode when his rubber mask is ripped off by "those meddling kids". So it begs the question - what gives? The Internet, that's what gives.

Ever since Facebook came on the scene, there's a weird social cross-pollination occurring, and I've written about it previously. As people read and watch the things we post on our Facebook pages, they are peering into parts of our lives and personalities they didn't know existed. I've discovered some of my friends and acquaintances swear like cabbies and drink like sailors on shore leave. Some are devoutly religious. Some like to talk about their sexual escapades in graphic detail. Some are die hard anarchists, who believe the world is run by a covert network of Freemasons, Oil Executives, and "the military industrial complex". Others seem to blow through relationships like Micheal Jordon blows through money at the tables in Vegas.

And you know what? Who cares? Freddy foul mouth doesn't cease to be a nice person because he drops F-bombs like cracker crumbs on his profile page. It actually makes me admire him all the more, because it demonstrates that he has enough respect for the rules of polite society to realize it's not appropriate to 4-letter it out loud at the office. Amy the anarchist's views may annoy the hell out me, but that doesn't necessarily mean the sweet and caring attitude she demonstrates towards her co-workers is a phony pretense she puts on to lull us all into a false sense of security while waiting for the day she and her merry band of political malcontents succeed in tearing down the world's governing class.

At the end of the work day, everyone goes home, and if you're not near and dear to any given person, it shouldn't shock you that the tapestry of experiences and emotions that make up their personalities go beyond the realm of please, thank you, and idle pleasantries. We are the sum of our parts, and well, some of us let our parts hang out a little more than others in that strange little world called the "profile page".

It's all a little weird, and it's getting weirder:

Potential employers are now checking Facebook profiles before they even look at a someone's resume, and if you have a photo of the night you did a Jello shooter off the belly of that waitress, you may be the best accountant this side of Toronto, but your application is going to make a fast acquaintance with the office shredder. People are "Facebook stalking" old flames to see who they are with, who they talk to, and even try to track what bars they frequent. But I'm getting off topic. The world will always have it's weirdos and misguided HR departments. Facebook is just another vehicle to do - whatever it is they do.

So is "Mr. Joe Nice Guy" still a "nice guy" even though he's Reagan lovin', National Review reading, bomb the hell out of 'em all, right-wing son of a bitch? Well, not even my own wife can recall the last time I ever raised my voice. I am as cordial to strangers as I am to my friends, but some of my hippy dippy liberal friends can't square my sweet guy attitude with my conservative beliefs.

Let me help you.

I give food and sometimes money to the homeless guy who lives under the bridge near my home. I just don't think the government has any business forcing me to give my own - or anyone else's - money to him. I don't like being forced to recycle because some people are under the misguided belief that we're "killing the planet". If you want to recycle, have at 'er. Just don't fine me for putting a carrot peel in the "dry" garbage bag. President Bush may well have been a cowboy, but I felt safe at night knowing that he was a cowboy with his six shooter ready, saying "Stand back partner". I don't feel so safe anymore.

No one is a monolithic robot of banal pleasantries, and neither am I. Just because I believe in limited government, low taxes, free markets, and military spending doesn't mean I don't care about my fellow man. My wife was so shocked at people's bizarre and hostile reactions to both of our rather mainstream political beliefs that she's decided to remain silent when a conversation turns political, even though she often wants to blow her brains out when she's listening to someone parroting some idiotic banter they heard on CBC that morning.

Guess what? Not everyone thinks like you do- not even the occasional nice guy.

Cordially

Joe

Can't Stop the Shop - Black Friday Attack

2009-11-28T00:10:00.008-04:00

Though the turnout was slightly more encouraging than expected during the post-American Thanksgiving Greco-Roman orgy of shopping called "Black Friday", it will still be interesting to see how the retail sector holds up as the holidays draw nearer. So frenzied was the shopping and eating extravaganza that plumbing calls for clogged sinks and backed up toilets increased by 50%, as they do every year on this day.

As always, I encourage all my loyal readers to keep the free market rockin' in the free world, and spend, spend, spend - like Rosie O'Donnell on all you can eat shrimp night at Red Lobster.

Now, as always, there are a few festive malcontents who smugly refrain from any form of holiday philanthropy because of their disdain for the very economic system that allows them the freedom to waste my hard earned tax money, and organize protests so they can rid the world of Walmarts, while the rest of us have to actually work for a living. Frankly, if these whiny little enviro-freaks want to knit reusable hemp tampons for the person on their Secret Santa list, that's fine with me, as long as they don't try to sell me any "Fair Trade" coffee beans. Remember, the next time one of these anti-trade layabouts starts screaming about how your cup of coffee comes from the work of exploited child labour, remind them that it's their tiny hands that make it so tasty!!!

Ok, maybe the acidic nature of this update is a little out of sync with the very spirit of Thanksgiving, which is supposed to melt the heart of even the most ardent of misanthropists amongst us. But, just like turkey ain't turkey without the stuffing, the Hype ain't the Hype without taking a few bow shots at lefties, liberals, paleo-liberals, extreme libertarians, and their unkempt cousins, the anarchists (to borrow a phrase from the invaluable Jonah Goldberg).

Anyway, if you're still waiting for the plumber to retrieve the PS3 you dropped down the toilet while trying to get the high score on 'Grand Turismo 5 - Prologue' in the bathtub, hang tight. They're probably next door trying to unclog the catastrophe some Ritalin-fuelled kid stuffed down the kitchen sink.

Cordially

Joe

Rick Sanchez and the OJ Effect

2009-11-21T00:00:00.003-04:00

I've often said that the Washington Post bares the brunt of the blame for the sub-standard level of journalism we see today in the form of cable news networks. Were it not for the relentless and vengeful glory-seeking attack on President Nixon by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - the douchebags that launched a thousand careers - perhaps the news would contain more reporting and less smug editorializing by the likes of Rick Sanchez and Solodad O'Brien. Sanchez's endless self-aggrandizing - like using twitter and Myspace to generate publicity for his frequent appearances on CNN - would almost be comic, were he not spinning in a constant state of self-rightousness. You would think that someone who not only hit and killed a pedestrian while driving intoxicated, but also fled the scene of the accident, would have some semblance of humility. You would be wrong.

In an industry that loves to shout "HYPOCRISY" at any conservative politician who so much as jaywalks, it was almost surreal to watch Sanchez endlessly replay footage of the day he chased down a Georgia State Legislator who refused to overturn a 2006 prohibition that would have reduced the prison sentence of Genarlow Wilson. The legislator - who worried that changes to the law could possibly allow convicted sex offenders back on the streets - was relentlessly badgered by a sanctimonious Sanchez, whose usual tunnel vision blinded him from appreciating the difficult situation the man was in. Maybe someone should have played the tape from the mid-eighties that forced Sanchez to resign from his job as a Miami TV anchor when he was unexpectedly caught accepting favours from a corrupt political operative during a police sting.

I'm picking on Rick because he is perhaps the best example of how low the bar has dropped since the age of "Gotcha!" journalism erupted. In the post-Watergate cable news world, he proves that as long you are in constant attack mode, your own credibility - or past criminal conduct for that matter - is of trifling importance. Stranger still is that Sanchez lacks even the respect of his own peers. After a recent "tweet" claiming he could easily get a job at Fox News as a Latino "sellout", the industry erupted in a cacophony of laughter, and prompted a Fox News' spokesman to wryly reply "Everyone knows that Rick is a joke, he shows that he's a hack everyday. And he doesn't have to worry about working at FOX because we only hire talent who have the ability to generate ratings."

Perhaps Ace Smith and James Bowman were right to lament about how our society has abandoned the quaint notion of shame.

But what about the OJ Effect? I'm not talking about the popular urban usage of the term, which implies money buys justice. I'm talking about the birth of modern media-created spectacles that turn virtually unknown and unexceptional people into overnight celebrities. What brought this to mind was Jeffrey Toobin's rather odd "brief" that appeared in the New Yorker magazine critiquing the Stupak amendment. Not only did the article skirt the boundries of outright plagiarism, it was plagiarized from a 1989 Supreme Court briefing, whose contents were later proven to be entirely fraudulent. It appears that Toobin has been a "legal analyst" for so long he's forgotten he's an actual lawyer.

Shortly after former Heisman trophy winner OJ Simpson was arrested for the double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, murder became not just news, but entertainment, and CNN needed a ready slew of "legal experts" to keep up appearances. Suddenly an adjunct faculty member from Georgetown Law of no particular distinction named Greta Van Susteren became a household name; OJ's freeloading house guest, Kato Kaelin, is now a regular fixture in a variety of TV and radio shows, resulting from nothing more than hearing a bump in the alley below his window; A Los Angeles prosecuting attorney named Roger Cossack is now enjoying a cushy job as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, as well a good paying gig at ESPN. As for Toobin, he has the distinction of being the "First TV Legal Analyst" at ABC - all a direct result of being plucked from virtual obscurity to provide commentary during the OJ trial (as a matter of fairness, I must admit I've always had a grudging fondness for Cossack).

There seem to be more self-professed analysts making the daily rounds of cable news stations than there are actual journalists. One hour of watching CNN produced commentary by a "Gaming Analyst", a "Fashion Analyst", and even a "self esteem expert", whatever the hell that is. There was a time when the only kind of analyst who had any business being anywhere near an anchor desk was a "Financial Analyst" or a "Political Analyst", and even the latter have been wearing out their welcome as of late.

Could anyone have envisioned a world, even years after Ted Turner cut the ribbon on CNN in 1980, where people would tune in every night to watch disgraced former prosecuter Nancy Grace speculating on the contents of bottles seen in grainy pictures of the inside Anna Nicole Smith's fridge?

The "news as entertainment" shtick is an old hobbyhorse of writers who fancy themselves a cut above the pack for making such a painfully obvious observation. What I'm really driving at is why a news anchor like Rick Sanchez sometimes doubles as a financial commentator on CNN's "Your Money". Why does Jeff Toobin sit in every election night as a political commentator, when he can't even avoid being duped by a dubious Supreme Court briefing? Everyday we watch the village idiots act like interchangable polymath titans playing a bizarre game of musical chairs.

As I write this, Rick Sanchez is reminding us that using words is much better than settling disagreements with bats and clubs (I had no idea), after quite deliberately refering to a band of thugs who are on rampage in Mumbai as "conservatives" because they are "anti-Muslim". He's making sure to repeat the dishonest conservative angle, and has it blazed across the screen, just in case someone's not listening. Really Rick, how do you know they aren't liberals? Did you interview any of the looters to find out if they thought free markets, limited goverment, personal responsibility, and fiscal restraint was the answer to India's third world conditions?

My wife, a graduate of a grueling 2 year massage therapy course, said that when we hear that an elderly person fell and broke their hip, it didn't really happen that way - their hip broke first, causing the fall. Her comment reminded me of a buffoonish Rick Sanchez, clumsily trotting about in a post-Watergate post-OJ news world. Sanchez's daily rantings and Toobin's half-baked legal ramblings aren't what caused the media to break, it was broken long before they got there.

Cordially

Joe

Obamacare and My Dog Zeke - A Guest Editorial by Ace Smith

2009-11-20T09:26:00.006-04:00

Hey there readers! I have a new article on Jeff Toobin's bizarre little piece of plagiarism that recently appeared in the New Yorker and the ever declining standards of journalism that keep the likes of Toobin and Rick Sanchez around.

We should have it up later tonight or by the morning. In the meantime, here is a special guest editorial by our former financial editor Ace Smith. Enjoy!

Zeke's Eye and Obamacare

A guest editorial by Ace Smith

Zeke, my six year old Beagle/Retard mix, punctured his right eye last Monday chasing a bunny through some thorny brush, which prompted a trip to the closest animal hospital with a 24-hour emergency room. As I sat in the waiting room with the furry moron, it occurred to me that I was smack dab in the middle of a pure market-driven, fee-for-service medical operation, albeit for veterinary care. It was a bonafide working model of a system that is far more efficient and desirable than anything His Holiness The ObaMessiah was pitching on his ABC infomercial in typical snake oil salesman fashion.

Granted, I wasn’t overjoyed about shelling out $166 for an emergency exam and some eye salve, but Zeke did receive prompt and professional care from a skilled and courteous vet staff. Had I purchased pet health insurance for him previously, it might have been preferable to my own coverage. Unlike me, Zeke is unemployable; he does not have opposable thumbs, a brain larger than a kiwi, or the ability to speak. Consequently, his range of insurance options is defined by the marketplace, not by his employer, and is mostly free of onerous regulations. His insurance would not be subject to artificial inflationary pressures from state-bound coverage mandates or bureaucratic meddling with reimbursement and rationing. Lucky, care-free little bastard. I haven’t decided if I’m actually going to buy him some insurance in case his next bunny hunt goes horribly awry. If he gets hit by a cement truck in the process, I can always have him euthanized.

My trip to the animal ER also reminded me of a story about a former boss of mine (a committed liberal of the 60’s hippie variety) who once paid $10,000 for a series of surgeries to save a stray cat that died a few months afterward. He was also a huge proponent of single-payer universal health care. I don’t think the rationale behind these threads are unrelated, as they offer a glimpse into the pervasive empathetic reasoning that has obscured rational assessments of socialized medicine’s true cost. The mainstream news media and Hollywood have worked diligently the past two decades to push hard for the universal care agenda by playing the empathy card to a society that seems increasingly swayed by feelings and imagery over substance and reasoned argument. By exploiting exaggerated medical horror stories in a two-pronged approach, they have consistently demonized HMOs, the insurance industry and greedy doctors, and lauded the supposed greatness of socialized medicine in other counties while conveniently ignoring the substantial drawbacks. The true source of America's healthcare problem, government, is never labeled as such; rather, government is invariably celebrated as a benevolent provider to the ever-ailing masses.

Ultimately, the inflation and inefficiencies that plague the US medical system stem from market distortions caused by Ponzi-esque government programs and burdensome regulations that pervert the price mechanisms necessary for a viable and free health care marketplace. In spite of this rather obvious fact, here we are, 15 years after the death of HillaryCare, on the cusp of adopting myriad radical changes at the federal level which would distance us even further from a free market solution, with guaranteed disastrous fiscal and medical consequences. I can't say I'm entirely surprised. This is, after all, just the sort of “change” His Holiness promised to deliver. Sadly, we've drifted far from the days when less bombastic presidents could speak openly about affirming the limits of federal power without being considered a cruel heretic. It was Silent Cal who once said, “Government should not assume for the people the inevitable burdens of existence.” Now that's the sort of “change” I can believe in. Yes, I can!

Ace Smith

No Soup For You!! Midweek Pit-Stop

2009-11-17T18:54:00.005-04:00

I have never rejected a comment submitted for posting on the blog until today. A reader, identifying himself as "John", emailed a comment on a recent piece of mine entitled "Heydrich's Ghost". He lamented about; "...why we're to feel sorry for the Jews" and repeated the tired old canard about how those; "...not glorifying the Jews are considered anti-Semitic".

We are not opposed to debate at the Hype. On a message board hosted by Prospero forums, the article received over 130 comments. There are legitimate arguments to made about settlements, boundaries, and historical claims on the region, but I will never let this blog become a forum for bigotry - no matter how cleverly disguised it is.

Every day we are bombarded with anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the ranting of lunatics who think 9/11 was a Jewish/American neo-con conspiracy. We have made it very clear in the past that we won't post comments sympathetic to those views - anything else is game, and will appear unedited within 12 to 24 hours.

So have at it. Write in! Have your say! Leave a thoughtful comment, or a semi-coherent alcohol induced diatribe about the merits of socialism and eating 8 small meals a day! If the fancy strikes you, go ahead and write a long and insulting post about how I'm a right-wing whack job who murders homeless people, drowns kittens, and volunteers as the guy who pushes the buttons on lethal injection machines on the weekends. We even encourage naked pillow fights, cage matches and also dueling when warranted.

Have a great week everyone!

Cordially

Joe

Weekend Musings - Welcome to TSH

2009-11-14T09:44:00.009-04:00

The Hype has picked up lots of action this week - kind of like Barney Frank on 2 for 1 Tuesdays at Mort's House of Flapjacks, or Eliot Spitzer on coupon day at Miss Kitty's House of Leather (read whatever you like into either of those jabs). The blog has received close to 100 hits in less that 48 hours, and the counter continues to click away, like that nifty statistics keeper that continually updates the world's population. We are at a loss to explain just what to attribute this phenomenon to, but I am extremely grateful for all of you who take the time out your day to check out my punch-drunk ramblings. For our newer readers, note that I view blogging as the most convenient format to transmit information, and treat it more as a website than a Facebook-like profile page. I try to post once or twice a week, but if good taste and proper sleeping habits are your thing, you may want to shop elsewhere. I am grateful to everyone of you for making The Straight Hype what it is today. Thank you!!

In other news, today was my lucky day! I just got an email from Mr. Amala Kumbadi, President of the First National bank of Sierra Leone, and he's chosen ME of all people to help him release a rather large unclaimed inheritance. He just needs my social insurance number and some credit information. I'll be flashin' Benjamin's to the tune of $2.5 million once I wire $5000 American for the processing fees.

I really don't get it. Thousands of North Americans are victims of this kind of Internet fraud every year, and losses are estimated in the range of $150 million. Experts claim there are three main victim groups: The greedy, the sympathetic, and the vulnerable. They should add a fourth: The astoundingly stupid. What would cause anyone to think that an official from a corrupt country - without any real infrastructure, an average life expectancy of under 40, and no functioning government - would be in possession of that kind of money? I can understand people falling victim to certain phone scams, or a good hearted person being suckered via email into sending money for Little Sarah's operation on her deviated septum. I just can't grasp how people could believe that someone claiming to be an official from a country where 12 year old's wield machetes like nerf balls and elections are decided with M-16's could hold employment in an institution that requires a nominal amount of stability to operate.

Law enforcement officials are usually very charitable in their warnings, repeating non-offensive axioms about how "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is." How about this instead: If you send a substantial amount of money to a stranger you've never heard of simply because you've received an email asking you to, you shouldn't be allowed to use sharp objects unsupervised. If you huddle over the ATM machine to hide your PIN number, but willingly send your SIN number to some guy in Nigeria, no number of FBI or RCMP warnings are going to protect you. You might as well burn the money in your savings account in a bonfire and roast S'mores over the blaze.

Anyway, consider that my PSA for the week. By the way, I recently have come in possession of some classified information that may be of the utmost interest to you. I usually would not contact you by this method, but the director of my bank has asked me to handle....

Cordially

Joe

A Little Bit of Everything...Blogging by Numbers!!

2009-11-09T18:30:00.012-04:00

I learned two things the hard way this Halloween: Parent's didn't appreciate my "naked french guy" costume, and dressing up as a dog does not give you licence to pee on the lawn and bark at your neighbors. Hey! It's blogging by numbers time!!!!

1 - Remember the day you discovered that underneath Robert Penn Warren's breathtaking prose and beautiful writing lies...well, nothing? Today was that day for me. I flipped through my cherished 1st edition hard cover of World Enough and Time (a treasured gift from my wife), and realized that Warren was very much like the big Hollywood directors of today.

Think of Pan's Labyrinth or There Will Be Blood. Fantastic movies - hypnotic, really. They are masterpieces of cinematography and soundtrack, but beneath the shiny surface layers they have very little to say, and fail miserably when they try. In Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro uses neo-realism and existentialist trickery to weave a convoluted tale about Franco's Spain and father-son relationships. It may seem oh so very clever to the hordes of pseudo-intellectuals who buy into such nonsense, but it's audio/visual wizardry that really wins the day - and that is no small feat. It is nearly impossible to tear your eyes and ears away from the astonishing beauty of his camera work, or the sheer perfection of Javier Navarrete's score.

I guess it's the price we pay for living in the age of fancy doodads and whatchamacallits. We can all take comfort in the fact that, every so often, a movie like The Royal Tannenbaums, The Aura, or In Bruges comes along to remind us that there are still a few directors out there who are true masters of their craft. Well, almost - The Aura's young director Fabian Bielinsky died after making only two movies.

2 - Message to the Cohen Brothers - You've lost it. There used to be two types of Cohen Brother movies: Simple morality tales (Fargo), or flashy show pieces with snappy dialogue (The Hudsucker Proxy). Now there is only one type of Cohen Brother movie - overrated nihilism with a few good lines (No Country for Old Men). Take a break guys. It was annoying enough when you started to make movies whose only goal was to showcase your rapidly declining cleverness. Now you're just boring. Go for an ego check and come see us in 2 years.

3 - Spraying cheap vanilla-scented air freshener in the washroom after you've taken a crap makes everything smell like you took a dump in a gingerbread house.

4 - What's on deck? I just finished a piece, which will be the last in a series of articles dealing with this weird sort of cross-pollination I'm seeing that's blurring the lines between reality and cyberspace, a direct result of social networking sites, message boards and texting. It should be up in less than a week.

5 - My wife is more than a decade younger than I am. We actually met during a filming of "To Catch a Predator" - just kidding. She once recounted that when she was in high school, her English assignments sometimes consisted of dissecting songs from the 1960's. One such assignment was to write an essay about the meaning of Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence. Here's a warning to any current or aspiring teachers: Claire and I have decided that when we have children, if one of our spawn ever comes home with an assignment that involves writing an essay about anti-war nonsense by useless counter-culture icons (or even rock stars from this decade), I swear by the beard of Zeus I will become your worst nightmare. There is not a principal or superintendent who will not burst into tears from an incessant campaign to prevent you from infecting our children with your mindless drivel. Keats, Shelley, Burns, and Chaucer were put on this earth for a reason. Consider yourself warned.

6 - To all you Prius owners - this one's for you!

Cordially

Joe

CNN - Theatre of the Bizarre

2009-11-04T13:37:00.013-04:00

The expression on the faces of CNN's panel of "analysts" were similar to the look my dog gives me when I try to feed her a gummy bear. After suffering a crippling defeat in the first round of voting on the President's Health Care bill in late October, the Democrats were dealt yet another blow Tuesday night, as Republicans soundly won the Governorships of both New Jersey and Virginia. These were no small victories. In Virginia, Robert McDonnell became the first Republican in over a decade to win the state. In New Jersey, Chris Christie defeated Democrat John Corzine in a race that most pundits had written off as a lost cause.

Not even the androgynous bubble gum king of cable news, Anderson Cooper, could deny what was happening. I almost felt a pang of sympathy for John King, whose considerable talents and nifty little pie charts could probably be put to good use, were he not buckling under the weight of CNN's liberal overlords.

Holding court in the "fair and diverse" pundit corner was the forever moribund and professional ideological prostitute David Gergen; Pamala Gentry from BET; token conservative Mary Matalin; and her freak of nature husband James Carville, who I suspect is a hybrid version of a Ferret mixed with the DNA of Orville Redenbacher. The panel was rounded off by those faces you see every now and then, but can never put a name to - that skinny white guy in the off the rack suit, and the black dude who has that weird pattern going on in his receding hairline that looks like some kind of Etch-a-Sketch that went terribly awry. Wolf Blitzer popped in now and then, but was frequently interrupted, as if no one really cared what the old man had to say anymore.

This merry cavalcade - still high off the fumes of "Yes We Can" gas soaked bandannas - seemed unable to grasp that these wins, specifically in Virginia, were a clear repudiation of not only beltway Democrats, but the President's laundry list of pet projects. "Hate" was a word that was liberally brandied about as the abracadabra word of the night to explain away the crushing blow delivered to the Democrats a year after such a resounding victory. You see, the American people were filled with hate, or so the CNN intelligentsia would have us believe, running amok in the streets like punch drunk anarchists ready to tear up their driver's licences and burn down the White house - but something doesn't quite add up.

The network had spent the entire month of November declaring the "death of conservatism", and they paraded a never-ending Tonga line of left-of-center "pragmatists" to ensure us of this. The GOP had to "moderate", we were told, or they would be exiled to farthest corners of Mount Doom, never to be seen again. Curious. They said the same thing in 1977 - then along came Reagan. They said the same thing in 1993 when President Clinton soiled the oval office and a few dresses along the way - then came the 1994, 104th Congressional blow out. And now, we have have New Jersey and Virginia solidly in the pockets of not just Republicans, but principled conservatives. I pointed out on the pages of this very site that this media game was nothing but a clever ruse, and American voters demonstrated they were no one's fool.

- but back to CNN.

The cable news network has always been a reliable stage for the theatre of the bizarre. Who can forget the election night interview with WILL-I-AM from the Black Eyed Peas, who was beamed in as a sort of hologram from a cheap episode of Star Trek (Don't believe me? Click here). I have been a media watchdog for over 10 years now, and I have seen a lot of strange things, but nothing in my experience caused as much intracranial combustion as the stunt liberal journalist Soledad O'Brien pulled.

As the night deteriorated, O'Brien bumped poor John King off the set, and produced a computer generated pie chart showing that close to 65% of the American public were dissatisfied with the way the country was being governed. The unhappy folks were displayed in blue. Next she showed the 35% demographic who were happy or unsure with the way things were being handled in Washington - they were displayed in yellow. This was good news, proclaimed O'Brien. It sure didn't sound like good news, but she proceeded to point to a small section of the yellow "happies" that was shaded slightly orange. This, she said, suggested a trend. What trend was that, you ask? With a quick wrinkle of her nose, O'Brien switched to a new chart where the stats were reversed. Apparently, one year from now, the 65% of unhappy folks were going to be completely satisfied with the their elected officials - "a positive sign for the Democrats", declared Soledad. The trend that was alluded to was never explained. My wife and I exchanged the most puzzled glance that has ever crossed between us. Even the Coop seemed confused, and also embarrassed - so embarrassed that he actually mumbled something about possible "...spin from the liberal segment of the media". Anderson will no doubt be going to the Principal's office, and it ain't going to be pretty.

Wednesday morning, if you clicked on CNN's website, you didn't see any mention of the shifting of the electoral tectonic plates that had occurred. It was down in the politics section, hidden underneath a story about a homeless guy who plays the cello. This is shameless, but the administration's weekly Sunday morning finger wagging at FOXNews is meant to convey a not so subtle warning to the folks at CNN: Step out of line, and you'll be sitting in the cheap seats at the next White House press briefing.

Bizzaro hour aside, we should temper our victory with an ounce of prudence. The GOP is notorious for fumbling the ball, and reports of vote tampering and fraud by the Democrats are beginning to trickle in. Had the margins been a little slimmer, Tuesday night's results could have been drastically different. Polls are showing that over 40% of Americans identify themselves as conservatives - Republicans would do well to remember that.

Maybe Soledad's magical political forecast is correct. One year from now, perhaps 65% the population will be happy with the way things are being handled in Washington - right after we send the Democrats packing in the mid-term elections. Pie anyone?

Cordially

Joe

Texting - Welcome to the New Idiocracy

2009-10-29T15:55:00.006-03:00

Anyone remember the 2006 movie Idiocracy? No? Well, that's not entirely surprising. It was written and directed by Mike Judge (Office Space), and starred Luke Wilson (Vacancy). Despite the enormous success of Office Space and the popularity of Judge's King of the Hill, 20th Century Fox pro-actively killed the movie, releasing it in less than 150 theatres, without a single trailer or press kit. The motives behind Fox's decision to derail Judge's movie remains an issue of much contention, and most folks who've seen the movie can venture a few guesses as to why. The movie grossed less than $500,000 - barely a quarter of it's estimated 4 million dollar budget - but still managed to develop a rather sizable cult following.

The movie envisions a world 500 years into the future, where a bizarre type of reverse natural selection has taken place. A cryogenically frozen Wilson awakens to find himself in a society where the intelligent and even marginally cognitive elite have become virtually extinct, having been out-bred by pot-smoking, beer chugging, video gaming, Perez Hilton twittering morons. The result is a world dominated by slack-jawed idiots, whose only preoccupations seem to be violent reality TV shows and excessive consumerism. Hospitals have only two diagnoses, "'Retarded" or "F#$ked up", and the world is facing a massive draught resulting from crops being watered with an energy drink called "Brawndo" whose slogan is "It's got electrolytes - It's what plants crave". James Bowman wryly suggested that the movie got the plug because; "..to today's (progressives), a future world where they are not in charge, having put right all the world's wrongs, is almost inconceivable."

Bowman's jab is delightful, but liberals aside, it feels like we are already living in an "idiocracy", resulting more from behaviour than breeding. Exhibit A is the absolutely eerie obsession with texting. A few weeks ago I called a friend's cell for several hours, but could not get a response until I finally left a text message, which was immediately returned. It appears she was unwilling to answer the phone because she had been too preoccupied with dwarf typing. She was fully aware that people were calling, but couldn't quite pry her thumbs away from her Blackberry crack pipe.

Even more disconcerting is the weird way that Internet acronyms have snuck their way into our modern day lexicon. It was annoying enough when they first reared their ugly head over a decade ago in emails, causing the less Internet savvy to become instant cold war code breakers. By 1999, I had deciphered such gems as btw, brb, omg, imo, and for the more modest among us, imho. The most irritating of these letter bombs has always been ttfn (tata for now). Who in the hell would actually say that to anyone? Have we turned into a society of gay Victorian socialites? I am fairly certain the last time anyone ever said "tata" to me was as an infant being admonished for missing the toilet - but how in God's earth did these literary abortions find their way into our every day vernacular?

I was gob-smacked the first time someone - without the slightest trace of irony - said "O-M-G" to me in the process of expressing surprise. I thought they were referring to some kind of car insurance company until the full horror of what had just happened dawned on me. Later that week someone layed down a "WTF?" on me, and I sadly resigned myself to the fact that our society has become so lazy and idiotic that full words, let alone complete sentences, are far too taxing on our constitutions.

There is also an emotional component to all this, worth addressing since we live in the age of feeling and the "cult of authenticity." Facebook - Cyber-crack laced with meth. Judging by some of my friends' profile updates, they don't eat, sleep or go to work - and if they do, they are probably doing so while texting their latest inane "quote of the day" from the Facebook application on their Blackberry. It's also encouraging all kinds of passive aggressive behaviours in people - De-friending, friend blocking, and status updates meant to embarrass someone over something they seemingly didn't have the maturity to simply discuss with the person face to face. Do people not realize there are real life consequences to what they say and do on the Internet, or have we become so disconnected from reality that we have blurred the line to such a degree that it no longer exists?

Maybe Judge's Idiocracy got the axe because it had struck a nerve that had already become raw 3 years ago. I think we have stepped on the crack that broke our mother's back, and there's no returning from the precipice.

Oh well. WTF. I have to update my Facebook profile.

Maybe my favorite song siren Regina Spektor said it best.

Cordially

Joe

Paging Dr. Reid

2009-10-22T09:32:00.011-03:00

Wow, Wednesday was a bad day to be Harry Reid. Well, just about any day is a bad day to be Harry Reid, when life is a constant struggle just to get people to take you seriously because you remind them of the guy from those old Peppridge Farm commercials - without the sittin' on a rocking chair in ma back porch country charm - but I suspect, especially this weekend, Reid isn't feeling that "Riunite on Ice- Ooooh that's nice" feeling.

Despite holding the balance of power in the Senate, Reid lost the first fight in a series of upcoming battles Wednesday, when 12 Democrats broke rank and aligned themselves with every single member of a strongly united Republican party, and voted down the so called "doctor fix" that would have added 247 billion dollars to the tag of President Obama's already astronomically priced health care bill.

What is significant about the loss is that it was a surprising illustration of just how legislatively shaky Obamacare is. As Yuval Levin wrote in NRO's The Corner last evening, Reid and the President are facing more than just an increasingly skeptical public:

"The problem for Reid is more than substantive — more than unhappy doctors and an unhappy AMA. The biggest problem is the danger of losing the confidence of his Democratic senators. Passing health-care reform remains an extremely difficult challenge: There are two Senate bills, with very significant substantive differences between them, which need to be combined, voted on, then merged with an even more different House bill, and voted on again. Each of these votes would require the support of just about every (if not indeed every single) Senate Democrat, and each would be a very tough vote for one or another group in their caucus. It is an exercise in serial needle-threading that will call for an extraordinary degree of discipline by the Senate Democrats — a group not known for discipline."

The administration spent the better part of Thursday trying to spin the situation in a number of bizarre and comic ways, until deciding the official talking point would be that they had planned this defeat all along to show the world what a bunch of puppy-kicking buzz-kills the GOP are. Yes, that's right - They're saying they held a vote so they could lose on purpose.

By Friday, even the bill's co-author, Rep Peter Stark ,was distancing himself from the enitre mess, after the reason for the unexpected defeat became apparent - a damning audit performed by the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The report concluded that:

- Total national health spending would increase by $750 billion over the next decade. (So much for “bending the cost curve.”)

- The overall cost of the House bill will be $1.2 trillion over the period between 2010 and 2019. By 2019, the annual cost of the entitlement expansions would be $236 billion, rising at a rate of 9 percent annually. After all this spending, there would still be 23 million uninsured residents in 2019.

- The president’s signature initiatives to slow the pace of rising costs — comparative effectiveness research, prevention and wellness efforts, and payment changes in Medicare — won’t work as advertised. The savings are almost non-existent.

- The cuts in Medicare Advantage plans would result in “less generous benefit packages” for millions of seniors. The actuaries estimate the House’s Medicare Advantage cuts, which are unlikely to change in any new version of the bill, would force about 8.5 million seniors out of the coverage they would prefer and back into the traditional program. (So much for “keeping the coverage you have today.”)

- Democratic proposals to impose arbitrary, across-the-board payment rate cuts for hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies based on presumed “productivity gains” are unlikely to work as planned. The actuaries suggest that some institutions won’t be able to hit the targets because health care is more labor intensive than other sectors of the economy. Consequently, the cuts could force some organizations to leave the Medicare program, thus “possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries."

Pelosi and company are promising a new and improved bill that will ring in at just under $900 billion - news that is unlikely to win too many fans.

President Obama's health care scheme is slowly going the way of his Secretary of State's own failed attempt so many years ago. Hopefully, Americans will soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Cordially

Joe

(Breakdown of the CMS's findings were derived from an assessment by James C. Capretta)

Heydrich's Ghost

2009-10-14T17:33:00.009-03:00

In the minutes of the Wannsee conference of Jan 20th, 1942, there is a reference to Reinhard Heydrich remarking how "...the Jews whisper in Roosevelt's ear." It's chilling to read, even within the context of a document that chronicles how in less than 90 minutes, the final solution was set in motion, leading to the Shoah, the extermination of close to 6 million Jews - 78% of Europe's Jewish population at the time.

Early in the transcripts, it becomes evident that Eichmann had carefully prepared coded language to shield the participants from any legal consequences should the document be discovered by allied forces as the war disintegrated. The facade didn't last for long, as Heydrich (who headed the meeting) appeared to lose his patience with Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery, who is said to have become increasingly alarmed at what was being proposed (Eichmann later claimed that the word "extermination" was freely used as Heydrich grew tired of the euphemisms).

Heydrich's off the cuff remark was looming in the back of my mind in June when long time Obama mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright lamented to the Daily Press that "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me" . Wright's hateful slur was widely reported in the press, but there were more troubling comments made during the interview that were seemingly ignored. He accused the President of making decisions based out of "...fear of offending Jews", and referred to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as " Ethnic cleansing (by) the Zionist(s)".

Now, President Obama's long and close relationship with this man, and his reluctance to cut his ties with him, are matters we've discussed before - in fact, the list of Obama's closest friends and associates reads like a who's who of people not to leave your children alone with. We've gone there, and will probably go there again - just not today.

Wright's comments are expected, because he's a lunatic who spends most of his time stacking Saltines in complex domino patterns in his living room and setting fire to Tin Tin comics. He relished the thought of his anti-semitic comments being broadcast around the world, because no one really cares what he has to say anymore. Outside of the town where the Reverend lives - called "crazy" - Heydrich's ghost still haunts us.

You all know where this is going, so let's get one thing clear - I am not suggesting that American progressives, along with their cohorts in Pat Buchanan land, are plotting to round up Jews in trains and ship them off to concentration camps. But there is a sort of quasi anti-semitism creeping back into our society. It is dressed up as clever cocktail conversation or intellectual ponderings on the legitimacy of Israeli power. Sometimes it wears the mask of a supposedly even-handed and serious news item in the media; sometimes it comes in the form of academic bullying from left-wing elitists who think anyone who writes articles such as this one possess only a shallow understanding of the world they live in. At it's worst, it comes in the form of the annual "World Conference on Racism" where the world's most oppressive Islamic theocracies and thick-skulled Eurocrats get together to discuss just how awful America and their friends the Jews in Israel are.

"...the Jews whisper in Roosevelt's ear."

An observant friend of mine recently emailed to say that it's a "scary time to be Jewish" - and I believe her. Just 10 days before the world " discovered" that Iran had a long range nuclear missile capable of wiping Israel off the face of the world (the thing can go as far as Athens and back), President Obama dismantled the European missile defence network that was the only thing with any real teeth keeping Iran on a leash. The administration claims it was done as a "good faith" gesture towards the Russians - odd, considering that in international diplomacy, the country being offered the "good faith", so to speak, must have something to reciprocate. America and it's allies got nothing in return but a smirking Putin shutting down newspapers and hurling insults at the United States.

Israel bashing is anti-Americanism by proxy. So fervent and irrational is the of hatred of the United States that any of its foreign interests and allies are immediately treated with intense suspicion - but how did we get this far? How can Western liberals continue to turn a blind eye to the atrocities that have been heaped upon Israel for just short of half a century? As Victor David Hanson noted in his brilliant article published earlier this year;

"First the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis. From 1967 we witnessed 40 years of bombers, child murdering, airline hijacking, suicide murdering, and gratuitous shooting. We in the West usually cried crocodile tears, and then came up with all sorts of reasons to allow such Middle Eastern killers a pass.....When the U.N. and the EU talked about “refugee camps,” none asked why for a half-century the Arab world could not build decent housing for its victimized brethren, or why 1 million Arabs voted in Israel, but not one freely in any Arab country. "

We in the west are indeed to blame for turning our heads the other way for so long, but post 9/11, you would think that many of us would have awoken from our ambivalence.

Liberal intellectuals continue to slander Israel, and their irrational rantings are all the more vehement because of Israel's relationship with the United States. Recently, Brandeis University made the astonishing decision to bestow an honorary doctorate to the self professed "secular Jewish left-wing" playwright Tony Kushner, who once said in an interview that;

"...the biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community and Israel itself has got this disgraceful record…Israel is a creation of the U.S., bought and paid for…There are lots of beautiful little orange groves and olive groves which the Palestinians had before the Jews were there"

"Bought and paid for"? ...really, Mr. Kushner?

Other leftist Israeli detractors seem to be fueled by disturbing comments made by public figures such as Kushner and Noam Chomsky, simply because they are Jewish (in name only), giving them license to take their rhetoric a step too far, such as Reverend Wright did.

The UN is also ready to lob its hostility towards Israel at every opportunity. On Wednesday, President Obama addressed the National Assembly proclaiming that “America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”, a sentiment that was greeted with a chorus of raucous cheers and applause.

The Western media saturates the airwaves with gruesome images each and every time Israel is forced to defend itself, portraying their actions as heavy handed and negligent. However, little is heard of the almost daily attacks on innocent Israeli and Palestinian citizens at the hands of Hamas and other extremist groups in the region. Since the year 2000, 1176 people have been killed by Palestinian terrorists. This number includes 18 Israelis who were targeted while abroad, and 3 American service personnel working to help the people of Gaza. The number of wounded at the hands of militant Palestinians tops the scale at an astounding 8300, for a total of close to 10,000 wounded and killed in just 8 short years.

Nor is any attention given to the horrific cartoons that are aired on a daily basis to indoctrinate innocent young Palestinian children into a culture of anti-Semitism, hate, and violence. Even when confronted with this disturbing footage from a popular children's show, CNN made the bizarre decision to defend the video, a sickening propaganda piece that could have come straight out of Hitler's Germany. I was shocked.

Another curious trend I noticed while researching this article was the countless number of sites purporting to be tourist information for people visiting the Nazi death camps, and others claiming to be educational in nature. The sites would, more often than not, turn out to be holocaust denial propaganda.

Indeed, Heydrich's ghost still haunts us. He haunts us in the writings and speeches made by left-wing intellectuals who defend Hamas and their ilk; He haunts us in the world's apathy to the unapologetic bile broadcast each day on Palestinian tv; And most disturbingly, he haunts us through those in the media who make apologies for terrorists that promote genocide and declare that Israel must drip with the blood of every last Jewish child until it is wiped from the face of the earth.

As my Jewish friend remarked, it is indeed a scary time to be a Jew. In a world filled with ambivalence and apologists, anti-Semites masquerading as intellectuals, and major news organizations who try and convince us that a children's TV show that depicts a popular Palestinian children's character being stabbed to death by an Israeli Government official is just "misunderstood", my Jewish friend undoubtedly has much to fear.

Golda Mier once famously remarked; "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us."

I wonder if Eichmann would have felt the need to so carefully code his language in 2009 as he did in 1942.

Cordially

Joe

Weekend of Weirdness and Thanksgiving

2009-10-09T12:56:00.018-03:00

It's the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, where we give thanks for being obscenely taxed for sub-standard health care, being dragged before "human rights" tribunals for writing books or letters to the editor, being dragged to the polls every other year because the Liberal party can't accept the fact that it's not 1974 anymore, and of course, those little bottles of maple syrup at the airport.

Seriously, I love Canada. Our Prime Minister is slowly trying to turn around over 25 years of damage to this country. We are weathering this recession very well, because Prime Minister Harper understands the basic free market conservative principles of tax-cutting and realistic deficit reduction in the context of this economic climate. He is also healing our relations with Israel, after our previous government's embarrassing (and borderline immoral) refusal to put Hamas on our nation's list of terrorist organizations.

Speaking of Israel, I am working on a piece tackling anti-semitism masquerading as clever cocktail conservation among westerners, and the similarities to some of the same language that was being bantered about 50 years ago. It is taking a lot of research - and a great deal of tact - to avoid stepping over the line. It's going to be a great follow up to one of my favourite articles that was well received by readers and actually brought some wonderful friends into my life (that would be you Leah - the most Hebrew-tastic person I know!).

I am feeling a pang of sympathy for the recent embarrassment that has befallen my dear American friends. Losing the Olympic bid? Well, that's a big ouchie, but I'm actually referring to President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Everyone knew the left-wing intellectuals who hand out the award would eventually do this, I just didn't think it would happen this soon. Not only has the President been unable to do anything noteworthy to deserve such attention as of yet, he is actually - as NRO'S Mark Hemingway noted - making an ungodly mess of everything:

"The economy may be the worst since the Great Depression, the situation in Afghanistan rapidly deteriorating, and a psychotic regime in Iran on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons — but thank goodness the administration's self-regard is holding up."

Upon hearing the news, Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton remarked:

“I was nominated three years ago and I’m still waiting for the call. Today’s news is just another demonstration of how politicized the Nobel Peace Prize has become, from President Carter winning in 2002, to Al Gore in 2007, and President Obama in 2009. When the award was given to President Carter, the chairman of the committee said that it was a ‘kick in the leg’ to the Bush administration,” recalls Bolton. “This is yet another ‘kick in the leg’ for the Bush administration.”

A kick in the leg indeed, and one that a bunch of 2nd rate has-been Eurocrat nations never miss a chance to seize upon.

One thing I won't be giving thanks for this weekend is Facebook, a tool that I will forever have a love/hate relationship with. Two passive aggressive friends of mine removed (and one blocked) me as a "friend" as a result of, I suspect, their disagreements with my rather mainstream conservative political views. One is a harmless quasi-hippie I have no real problems with; the other is an angst filled young man who believes the world is controlled by a nefarious network of corporations in tandem with shadow governments and the military industrial complex. Sigh...you guys are...weird.

Anyway, I wish a wonderful weekend to everyone! Your continued support, confidence, and freshly baked cookies are not taken for granted - well, maybe I made up the cookies part.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

Cordially

Joe

Back in Business - Blogging by Numbers Time

2009-09-28T18:48:00.009-03:00

Thanks to all for being so patient over the last few weeks. As most of you know, the lovely miss Claire and I were married on the 18th, and I have entered into that inextricable bond that John Adams referred to as the "Tyranny of the Petticoat". My editor has become my wife, which is a little like Godzilla finding out that Mothra is his new landlord - the only difference being that we are not radio-active mutants. Well, at least I'm not.

I am flattered but a little puzzled by the numerous requests to send as many wedding photos as possible to various friends and fans alike. Usually the phrase "Let me show you some photo albums" makes me want to put a bullet through my head, or jump out the nearest open window. Anyway, enough with all these Canadian pleasantries - It's blogging by numbers time!!!!

1 - Few outside of academia noted the passing of Professor J. B. Kelly this month. In his long and impressive career, he taught imperial history at various universities in the United States and London, but his most lasting and treasured achievements are the large and impressive tomes he penned delving into the treaties between Britain and the Islamic world in the 18th century and the creeping influence of radical Arab honor cultures throughout the middle east. As NRO'S David Pryce Jones noted, Professor Kelly's greatest achievement was his relentless quest to shake Western liberals out of their apathy over the threat the radicalization of Islam posed to the free world;

"Nobody and nothing was going to prevent him speaking his mind. He was all too familiar with the cruelty of modern Arab rulers, the disaster of Arab nationalism, the bigotry of Islamism, and the tremendous price that everyone in the Middle East has to pay for the frightful inhumanity that follows. But those John really went for and destroyed were the apologists in the West who pretend that everything is fine, that the Arabs are really doing well and we have only to give them everything they ask for."

J. B. Kelly, dead at 84. RIP.

2 - Our friends and relatives were exceedingly generous to us over the course of the wedding. As with many newly married couples, we find ourselves blessed with a little extra cash. I suggested that we invest the money in obscure 1980's arcade games, which I would devote the next five years to mastering. The suggestion was quickly vetoed. At least I tried.

3 - The irony of the Obama administration's astounding decision to dismantle its missile defense system in Europe on the 20th anniversary of Poland's break from communism was not lost on anyone paying attention - that would be anyone who doesn't work for CNN, MSNBC, or The New York Times. The President's naive rationale was that Iran's nuclear capabilities were grossly over-estimated, and the act would also serve as a symbolic gesture of good faith towards the Russians - a weak diplomatic move, as the Russians have offered nothing in return but international bullying and further crackdowns on individual freedoms. The topper on the cake, however, came last week, when it was revealed at the G-20 summit that Iran has tested two short range missiles, and are in possession of a long range missile that has the potential to reach Athens and destroy Israel - a fact that was confirmed when the missile was tested on the 28th.

President Obama is now adopting - with much chest puffing - a hard line on Iran, despite the allegations that he may have known about the missile construction site as early as March. This begs the question, is the President a foolish naif, or a blatant liar playing a dangerous game with the security of Israel? Whichever statement proves to be more accurate is, at this point, seemingly irrelevant. The drama that has unfolded over the past ten days demonstrates that Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors, is alone in it's defense, and must take measures to protect itself from the destruction that the Mullahs in Iran are promising. May God, and all men of conscience, be on their side.

4 - My wife's adorable 11 year old twin cousins have suggested that the leading cause of mysterious unsolved deaths are either crazed hobos or scurvy - I'm loving 'em more every day.

5 - Remember how Patrick Fitzgerald spent millions of dollars investigating the supposed outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame? It was a farcical, politically motivated witch hunt that ruined the reputations of many good men, and almost sent an innocent man to jail, had it not been for a Presidential commutation. The left was outraged - The Bush/Cheney regime was compromising the security of assets abroad and playing cover-up, screamed the media. Well, the ACLU is now actively asking the public to photograph people they think are covert CIA agents, so the pictures may be given over to military defence lawyers, who in turn will give them over to their terrorist clients at Guantanamo bay. Will Attorney General Holder and the main stream media show the same outrage? Are rigorous prosecutions in the works? Don't hold your breath.

6 - TSH is back. Time to do the Kansas City Shuffle.

Cordially

Joe

The Hype Will Be Down For A Few Weeks!!

2009-09-21T13:10:00.005-03:00

We will be back up and running soon! As you can see, there have been a few life changes that have kept me busy recently!

Cordially

Joe

FDR's Grassy Knoll

2009-08-26T09:58:00.005-03:00

I used to believe that infamy was its own reward, that the grandiose madmen of our society enjoy a certain level of macabre immortality by committing acts so brazen that their names are forever burned into our subconscious. The Jack Ruby's and John Hinckley Jr's of our world will never be forgotten, their deeds will remain ingrained in the national psyche for generations to come.

There are those rare souls, however, who defy this rule. They are the Milli Vanilli's of infamy, those who shone for a brief moment only to be discarded and forgotten on the ash-heap of history. Can you still recall the name of the serial killer who murdered Versace? At the time everyone knew it was Andrew Cunanan, though not many people can recall the name now without taxing their memory. Such is also the case of FDR's would-be assassin, Guiseppe Zangara. Zangara, like Cunanan, is one of those odd historical figures who just didn't have staying power.

On Feb. 15th, 1933, at Miami's Bayfront Park, an unemployed Italian immigrant, armed with a .32 revolver, stood atop a wooden chair and fired 5 rounds at FDR, who was seated at the back of his convertible, talking with supporters and guests. Zangara - apparently a bad shot - managed to hit everyone and everything, but FDR. Three of the shots lodged into the car, the other two bullets hit flesh, seriously injuring the wife of a prominent Miami doctor, and fatally wounding Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Zangara was immediately tackled by secret service agents and brought in for questioning. The national media quickly descended on Miami to cover the story. Was it a communist plot? Was there a conspiracy bubbling beneath the surface? One paper submitted that mayor Cermak was the actual target of the shooting. Cermak was a fervant anti- prohibitionist who had made enemies with the Chicago mob. Another paper opined that it was the work of a renegade band of socialists. The actual motive would prove to be far less spectacular...an ulcer.

Hollywood itself could not have created a more colorful or bizarre character as the 5'2" Zangara. During the weeks that followed the shooting he would baffle the FBI and the local Sheriff’s Dept. with his blunt, and often times bizarre answers. Reading the transcripts and press accounts of Zangara's statements to the FBI is surreal and often times comic.

In one interview, Zangara is asked to explain his motivations for wanting to assassinate President-Elect Roosevelt. It would the first in number of times he would make reference to his stomach pains.

"I shoot kings and presidents, capitalists got all-a the money and I got bellyache all-a the time."

Trying to probe the mind of the mind of Zangara for further information on his background, his affiliations, and politics would also prove to be futile. Zangara hated anarchists, socialists, capitalists, and probably even puppies. He belonged to no special group, and seemed to have no friends. During his trial, he would defiantly shout to the judge;

"I kill capitalists because they kill me, stomach like drunk man. No point living. Give me electric chair."

Zangara would eventually get his wish. On May 6th Mayor Cermak died from his injuries and the presiding judge sentenced Zangara to death. 14 days later, he was strapped into the electric chair - a quick execution, even for the time. Bouncing into the chair like a hyperactive child, Zangara continued to display his trademark brand of defiance;

"Viva Italia! Goodbye to all poor peoples everywhere! Pusha da button!!"

All media interest and coverage of Zangara ended with his death. The press packed up and went home, Roosevelt was inaugurated, the doctor's wife recovered, and the scrawny, unemployed brick layer who had almost killed an American President over a tummy ache was quickly forgotten. The difficulty I encountered researching this article serves as a testament to Zangara's obscurity. Articles on the internet about the shooting were scant and often inaccurate, confusing dates and names. Many websites devoted to FDR made little, if any mention of the incident. Perhaps the fact we entered into a war shortly after, is the reason Zangara was so quickly forgotten. Perhaps it was simply because he missed his mark. Maybe his lack of a grander political motive doomed him to irrelevancy. In the end, I think Zangara's life can best be summed up in his own words;

"I don't like-a no peoples"

Cordially

Joe

Editor's Note - I wrote this article nearly a decade ago and information about Zangara is much easier to come by these days with the dawning of such things as Wikipedia. Several new books have since been written about the incident, yet this failed presidential assassination attempt continues to remain an odd historical blind spot.

Reference material for this article was drawn from "The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara" by Blaise Picchi and "A Date Which Should Live in Infamy" by Florence King.

The Anderson Cooper Pooper Scooper

2009-08-13T20:28:00.006-03:00

There's a crazy homeless guy who panhandles near my home. I know it's rather impolitic to refer to him as such, but anyone who mutters incessantly about knives and Donna Summer has pretty much paid his dues to the nutter-butter country club. He's harmless enough, and Claire and I give him food, and occasionally money if we are in a position to do so (liberals talk about helping people, conservatives actually help them). That's not the point, though. This guy, we'll call him Charlie, has an uncanny ability to predict the weather. It's probably an intuition that homeless people develop from being at the mercy of the elements on a daily basis. It could be a beautiful balmy day, but if Charlie says "rain is a-comin'" you can be sure that rain is about to "a-come". He's like the Weather Network, if the Weather Network lived under a bridge and smelled like old Doritos and rotting fish. Thing is, I trust this rambling, possibly schizophrenic homeless fellow to convey more accurate information to me than CNN and MSNBC combined.

Our old friend Anderson Cooper is at again. No rain forest trekking in pre-wrinkled designer cargo shorts warning of the upcoming enviro-Apocalypse for the Coop these days. No indeed! He seems pretty busy right at home lately, playing the role of fear-monger in chief to the President.

"Right Wing Militias On The Rise", screamed the headline below Cooper as he interviewed Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which recently published a paper supposedly confirming this phenomenon. CNN calls the group a "non-partisan organization that monitors hate groups" - a claim I'm sure even crazy Charlie knows is blatant intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind. The SPLC is a left-wing attack group that is so extreme even die hard liberals like journalist Alexander Cockburn characterized them as “...frightening elderly liberals (into believing) that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street.”

This is tantamount to running a story claiming that smoking is healthy and delicious based on a report published by Phillip Morris. But what has CNN and the folks over at MSNBC in such a state? Everyone knows they ceased parading the pretense of objectivity long ago, but even this is laying it on a little thick. You see, things aren't going very well for President Obama as of late, and his lackeys in the press will have none of it.

No one much cares for the President's new health care proposal. Republicans don't like it, Democrats don't like it, the liberals down at the AARP don't like it - I don't even think homeless Charlie cares much for it. This has the media in full attack mode, and the cannon balls are flying. So what does the left do when things aren't going according to plan? You call in the media and create a crisis, and believe me, the "C" in CNN stands for crisis.

All over America, discouraged citizens are showing up at town hall meetings to express their displeasure at their elected representatives - both Democrat and Republican. They want to keep their family doctor; They want to keep the insurance provided by their employer; And most of all, they don't want to throw away more of their hard earned money to fund another expensive pipe dream that promises to be an even more dismal failure than the President's last massive spending project. They are not feeling stimulated.

In the weird and distorted looking glass world of the media, these people are dangerous zealots ready to torch the White House. Yep, those senior citizens who criticized Rep. Steny Hoyer at a town hall meeting are heading straight to the nearest compound to stock up on canned goods, bibles, and semi-automatic rifles. They're going tear up their "Scoot-About" licenses and hunker down for the next armed rebellion. I joke, but this dangerous little game the media is playing with public opinion is deadly serious.

Americans are exercising their most basic and cherished first amendment right in a peaceful and legal manner, but are being portrayed as dangerous wing nuts by the media because they're not coming down on the right side of this debate.

Remember the eight years President Bush was in office? People took to the streets protesting in large numbers with signs depicting him in Nazi paraphenalia; They camped out for over a year in front of his Crawford Ranch; They threw things at him -they even made a movie shot in "cinema verite" style that was aired in American theatres in which he was assassinated. No one seemed to be concerned then. I don't remember anyone in the MSM warning that this was going a step too far. Now ordinary Americans of all political stripes are simply demanding that their elected officials explain themselves and CNN would have you believe that they are ushering in a Mad Max society where rules will be thrown out the window, and people will be eating soup out of their neighbors' skulls.

As a Canadian looking in from the outside and a scholar of American politics, I find this alarming. Woodrow Wilson used the media skillfully and even had his own goon squads to intimidate the public when they weren't buying Wilson's "change" inspired by his admiration of European fascists.

The next time you see Anderson Cooper trying to pass off a left-wing radical nut job from a shady activist group like the Southern Poverty Law Center as an unbiased authority on "extremists groups", shut off the T.V. and go for a walk. Some spare change and the rantings of a homeless guy will at least get you a fairly accurate weather forcast.

Cordially

Joe

Capitalists of Convenience

2009-08-11T23:19:00.006-03:00

Nicolas Sarkozy wants the French to work on Sunday. I probably lost you between "French" and "work", but if you can compose yourself for a moment and stay with me, the ambitious young playboy President wants the smell of over-priced wine and fromage wafting through the air and mimes in striped shirts and berets to punch in for a normal work day on Sunday at their employer's discretion. Perhaps if the French could be made to work during the normal work week this little dust-up wouldn't have started in the first place.

Debate will begin today in the National Assembly to overturn a 1906 law declaring Sunday a day of rest, with the exclusion of some fresh food providers that can still remain open until noon. A small side note to this story, which I find wonderfully delicious, is that special arrangements had to be made for the Obama's during a recent visit so they could do a little high-end shopping at an exclusive luxury clothing store. Apparently, the horrors of unabated capitalism don't apply to it's most ardent detractors.

All jokes about 3 hour lunch breaks and neglectful personal hygiene aside, Sarkozy deserves some credit for trying to inject some desperately needed deregulation into France's nightmarish economic labyrinth, but the fallout West of the pond has produced some curious insights into the left's knee jerk politics.

On various political message boards and comment sections of internet editorial pieces, America's liberal foot soldiers were strangely silent, until some thoughtful folks interjected the most dreaded word in America's political lexicon into the argument - God. Once that happened, any sympathies they may have had for the "workers of the world" in their battle against "the soulless capitalist corporations" were quickly thrown out the window. The left often defines themselves by using what they are "not" as a guideline. When Al Gore, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry believed deposing Saddam Hussein by military means was a National Security priority, I don't remember the moveon.org crowd mobilizing their code-pink protest brigades into the streets. When a Republican President decided to act instead of simply paying lip service to the idea, the same cast of characters went nuts.

When I first shared my observations about Sunday shopping in another forum I frequent, a progressive friend of mine went absolutely apoplectic. To be fair, his argument was simply that he was annoyed at being "inconvenienced" when in France on a Sunday, which was all the more disconcerting to me.

There is a non-religious argument for keeping shops closed on Sunday. Sunday shopping is pretty much the norm, at least in Eastern Canada. When Sunday shopping legislation was first introduced in Nova Scotia, pompous government employees who still enjoyed a regular 9 to 5 work week complained "When are we supposed to shop?"

Many retail workers were infuriated by this. Government employees could shop after 5 every day of the week and all day Saturday. The folks on the lower rung of the economic ladder just wanted some time to spend with their families - one day out of the entire week. This is a similar argument to what trade unions and those on the left in France are making.

But in North America, it's strange how liberals become capitalists of convenience when God comes into the equation. Because there is a religious element for some people in this debate, the left has suddenly become Adam Smith incarnate.

Aren't these the people who are supposed to stick up for the little guys? The poor single mother who wants to know she can have at least one day of the week to spend with her kids? I guess not at the expense of sharing political elbow room with conservatives, or the horror of having to eat stale bread because they couldn't be bothered to get to the bakery before noon.

This seems like a rather small blip on the radar, but it's opened my eyes to an entire array of issues where the left adopts a more right-leaning stance when it directly affects their lives. Over the weekend, I witnessed one of the most astounding examples of this, which we'll explore more broadly in the coming weeks. This is definitely a phenomenon, and I think we may be on to something.

In the meantime, I guess my European friends will have to wait until Monday to buy that 211EUR purse they had their eye on, and suffer the indignity of having to munch on a baguette they bought at 11 am.

Cordially

Joe

How Gauche!

2009-08-10T11:35:00.005-03:00

Good afternoon loyal Hypesters! I get lots of interesting emails from readers every day. Some are from gracious fans sending kind words of encouragement - some are from less enthusiastic readers telling me to stick things in places where things shouldn't be stuck. Lots of people new to the blogosphere write in to ask for advice on the craft, and how to get started. I also get lots of emails from people purporting to be from The Bank of (insert third world country here), asking me to send a few grand so they can collect their inheritance and in turn richly reward me for my trouble.

While I was pecking away at two new blog pieces for the week, our good friend Bob from Texas sent along an interesting article from Yahoo's Rita Mauceri and Elycia Rubin on etiquette. Seeing that we at the Hype live by James Bowman's axium that manners are the last remaining vestige of the Western Honor Culture, I thought you might enjoy Madams Maurceri and Rubin's article from their Foxy Festivities blog. Enjoy, and thanks Bob!

Hang tight readers. New stuff is on the way!

Terrible Etiquette Mistakes From Around the World

By Rita Mauceri and Elycia Rubin

Coffee Break We may gulp lattes all day long, regardless of what time it is here, but in many European countries cappuccinos and other coffee drinks made with milk are enjoyed during the morning hours only. Espresso is what's consumed in the afternoons and evenings. So, don't be surprised when you get a funny look from the waiter after ordering your double latte with extra cream after that pesto pasta lunch.

No Ketchup Please Many French chefs are appalled if guests add condiments like ketchup and mustard to their culinary masterpieces before taking the first bite. They think it masks the true taste of the food -- so get used to your "pommes frites" without that dousing of ketchup.

Oops, All Gone Here in the States, it seems we've been taught to always clear our plates. In China on the other hand, if you gobble up every last morsel it could be insulting to the host as it means that he/she hasn't provided enough food. Keep things on the up and up and leave a few bites left. We're guessing it's probably best not to ask for a doggie bag, either!

Heads Up In Thailand, no matter how adorable someone's child is, resist the urge to give them a friendly pat on the noggin. It's taboo to touch the head, which is a revered body part.

No Sharing No matter how mouthwatering your palak paneer is, offering someone a taste from your plate is a big no-no in India, since it's considered unclean. Enjoy your dinner and rave about it all you want, but keep it to yourself.

A Few Pointers In India, if you want to call someone over, never use your finger to point or wag -- it's seen as condescending and insulting. Instead, hold your hand out, palm down, and scoop with your fingers. You'll get much better results!

Better Than Butter While dining out in Spain, get used to the idea of bread without butter. Ask for it at a restaurant and you'll most likely be told they don't have any. The preferred practice is to dip bread in olive oil -- and if you ask us, it's much yummier anyway!

A - O - K Never give anyone in Brazil the "OK" hand signal (using your thumb and pointer finger to make an O)... it's an obscene gesture that's likely to get you labeled both ignorant and extremely offensive!

Meat 'n' Milk In Israel, unless you know otherwise, assume that a household keeps kosher. That means mixing meat and dairy is not allowed. So no milk in your coffee after a belly-busting beef dinner (and no cheese on that burger, either!).

Sticky Splinters We're all familiar with the wooden chopsticks you get at Asian restaurants. They come stuck together, and you snap them apart which usually leaves a few stray splinters on the end. If this happens in Japan, holding the chopsticks between your palms and loudly clattering them together is a big insult to the waiter or sushi chef because it indicates that his utensils are cheap. Instead, rub one chopstick against the other gently.

Throw In The Towel In a Japanese restaurant, if you're given a hot rolled towel, use it only to wipe your hands. It's generally considered rude to wipe your face with (although at more informal restaurants, people may occasionally be seen doing it).

Service With A Smile Here in the US, many of us are used to serving ourselves and digging in family style at meals. But in China it's common for the host to place food on the guest's plates, so resist the urge to scoop up another helping of rice -- practice sitting back and relaxing, and enjoy letting the host put you on a pedestal.

Sole Purpose Think twice before sitting too casually in Egypt, or even stretching out your gams. Showing the soles of your feet or shoes is considered to be terribly rude -- yes, even if you're sporting Jimmy Choos!

Lip Service No matter how parched your lips may be, when traveling in Zimbabwe, never lick your lips while looking at someone of the opposite sex. While it may seem innocent enough to you, they consider it an obscene gesture.

Baby Steps Have a friend in Russia who's expecting a babe? Go ahead and browse all you want, but don't give them anything until after the little one arrives. It's considered bad luck to do so sooner.

Cordially

Joe (with thanks to the gals from Foxy Festivities)