Quick links

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We've been busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest of late but we did want to bring your attention to the following:




First, Leslie at Temple of Mut with this priceless quote which relates to a California Assembly bill that would require statewide initiative and referendum petition sign-ups to be in 11 different languages effectively choking out the entire process and which also relates to our pending fire season:

I guess we don’t have to wait for Santa Ana’s to destroy our way of life this year. Thanks Sacramento!

Please go to the link, here, for more information and follow-up links to your local elected reps contact info.





Here's Kevin Williamson channeling his inner P.J. O'Rourke and espousing on out-sourcing/off-shoring and global economic ignorance:

What’s interesting about this controversy to me is the naked xenophobia of the Left on display alongside the amusing ignorance. Liberals love a good talk about the value of learning from other cultures and other peoples, so long as those foreigners don’t mind staying poor. If they want to sell goods and services, they are the enemy. Asians are allowed to be airy gurus and quaint villagers, but the day one of them wants to set up a factory, Democrats have a fit. Mohandas Gandhi good, Ratan Tata evil. You want collective, coordinated global cooperation to solve the world’s most pressing problems? That doesn’t look like a working-group meeting at the United Nations; it looks like what Bain does. You want a display of backward, ignorant chauvinism? Put Obama in front of a union hall.

There’s a famous and probably apocryphal story about Milton Friedman being taken on a tour of a giant Chinese infrastructure project of some kind, in which the workers were using old-fashioned shovels and picks and wheelbarrows. Curious, Friedman asked his guide why they weren’t using bulldozers and other heavy machinery. The answer was: “We care about creating jobs for our people.” To which Friedman responded: “Then why not use spoons?” I wonder if Barack Obama could answer Milton Friedman’s question.

We're name-dropping O'Rourke and Williamson is name-dropping Friedman... what more can a person want..? go to the link!





And speaking of fire season, The Denver Post has a great photo essay of the wildfires that have been burning out of control in the Colorado Springs area. The following are just a couple of examples:

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The President is supposed to be out in Colorado today to check in on things. We here in San Diego know a thing or two about wildfires so our thoughts and prayers go out to those folks in the great state of Colorado and, in particular, the men and women on the line trying to contain this beast.


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Photo images of the day...

... and an essay thrown in for good measure.



It's summer time and with that it means the La Mesa car show is back in session every Thursday night. What better excuse to kick off the weekend a day early?


Alas, P.J. O'Rourke bemoans the end of our love affair with our cars.

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away.

We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie

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Don't tell any of this to the folks milling up and down La Mesa Boulevard but a tell may be that you don't see anything made past the early 70s parked there or driving up and down the drag looking to be admired.

Smack of the day

Ordinarily, we would just link you to the piece right away but we decided to cut'n'paste first vast swaths of his verbage because it's just too doggone important. Besides, we don't trust you.

But Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”

It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream, and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it’s a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, tweet on, MacDuff. Tough on our young college ladies. But, as Queen Victoria advised her daughter on her wedding night, lie back and think of England. Download and think of America.

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Between Occam’s Razor (it’s Weiner’s junk, and he tweeted it) and Occam’s Lip-Syncher (the ghost-tweeter did it) lies a third possibility — that the tweets aren’t by Weiner but the Twitpic crotch shot to the cute co-ed is. The republic’s “citizen-legislators” do hardly anything for themselves these days, starting with reading the thousand-page legislation they cheerily pass, but if they can’t even perform their own sex scandals there really is no point to them. For the last quarter of 2010, Weiner listed 19 staffers, a few with highly specific job descriptions (“Deputy Director of Immigration Affairs”) but most with the kind of blandly nebulous titles (“Staff Assistant”) that could cover almost anything, including in-house ghost-tweeting. For the sake of argument, let us take it as read that American men are e-mailing their genitals across the fruited plain all day long, and that in the nature of these things one or two attachments go awry and wind up in the inbox of the elderly spinster who runs the quilting bee and you have to make a rather sheepish apology. Congressmen are among the few in this land who, in such a situation, can breezily say, as Weiner did to CNN’s Dana Bash, “You have statements that my office has put out.” Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an “office” with “staffers” to “put out” “statements” on the subject.


When Weiners have staffers, it’s very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an “office” to issue “statements” about your tweets, it’s hardly surprising you’re indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.

Let's see... P.J. O'Rourke, Iowahawk and Mark Steyn. Yeah, that about covers it.

And now for the movie review we've all been waiting for...

P.J. O'Rourke weighs in on Atlas Shrugged and though he didn't particularly care for it, he isn't going to pan it, either.

“Atlas Shrugged–Part I” has to be praised just for existing, for keeping the premise available. Perhaps Hollywood progressives — inveterate takers — will take it. Many another movie could be made about a labor action by those who perform life’s actual labors. Maybe it’s a slacker comedy where Zach Galifianakis shaves, loses weight and refuses to speak in non sequiturs. Maybe it’s a sci-fi thriller where the Internet has gone on strike and mankind must face a post-apocalyptic world without Twitter. Or maybe it’s a horror film set at my house, “Wife on Strike!”

Though we have yet to see the film, O'Rourke's point is well taken. The one about the mere existence of Atlas Shrugged, the movie, that is.

When we heard the buzz a few years ago that Angelina Jolie was rumored to play Dagny Taggart, we thought there was no way in hell that she'd take the part because there was no way in hell that movie was ever going to get made. But here we are, in the year of our Lord, 2011 and Atlas Shrugged is a god-forsaken multi-plex reality.

O'Rourke obviously pens our sentiments better than we as win, lose or draw, how can you not admire a movie and the folks who made it for running directly counter to the over-bearing maternalistic and collectivist impulses of Hollywood and the culture of this nation's political class, in general?

Semper Fi!

To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke, no single entity has done more globally for the cause of freedom, liberty and human rights than the United States Marine Corps.


Happy Birthday to the Corps which turns 235 today.


Go on over to B-Daddy's Other Blog for a tale of Marine Corps discipline, punctuality and mess decking.

It is what it is

Via Carpe Diem: Consider this a missive from the reality-based community.

"The free market is not an ideology or a creed or something we're supposed to take on faith, it's a measurement. It's a bathroom scale. I may hate what I see when I step on the bathroom scale, but I can't pass a law saying I weigh 160 pounds."

And against all logic and common sense, that's precisely what regulatory regimes and diversity brigades attempt to do. They are false prophets altering natural order and constraining the potential of mankind.

The best thing you'll read this week (UPDATED...again)

(please scroll to bottom for update)


We feel duty-bound to draw your attention to a fantastic piece written by Angelo M. Codevilla for the The American Spectator titled, "America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution".

We've written before in these pages that in our lifetime, there has not been a greater rift between the ruling class and the rest of us which Codevilla terms "the country class" as there is at this very momemt. Codevilla takes his time in explaining why and how it is we got to this point and what is to come.

It's a tremedously well-written essay that brought to mind some of our favorite contemporary writers as it contained the sage probity of Victor Davis Hanson, the historical context of George Will, the humorous contempt of P.J. O'Rourke and the unshakeable faith in American exceptionalism of Tom Wolfe.

It's a long read but well worth the time. As such, we're debating excerpting portions of it but one thing did catch our eye as it related to another item we saw over the weekend.


From Codevilla's pseudo-manifesto:

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

And this from Russell K. Nieli:

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."

Exit question: How are all those Ivy League educations littered throughout Wall Street, Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. working out for America?


(UPDATE #1): Codevilla's essay is absolutely blowing up around the internet and on the airwaves. Wanted to link you to The Liberator Today and B-Daddy's thoughts here as well as Left Coast Rebel who has the entire essay posted at his site (that's totally cheating, Tim ;)).

(UPDATE #2): The conservative equivalent of the cover of The Rolling Stone chimes in on Codevilla's essay here describing the situation as due to what we like to refer to as the West Potomac virus.

A bad idea that just can't be killed?

A conservative pundit of some note, once remarked something along the lines that the fact you can’t get a decent cigar in Havana or quality take-out in Beijing tells you all you need to know about collectivism and its progeny socialism and communism.

And with our statist stateside, the condescension that is employed when rationalizing undead legislation ("there, there, little people - we’ve probably just been talking a little too fast for you all") is very revealing when it comes to healthcare reform.

B-Daddy has more here on the zombified legislation and what its current state and the proposed way ahead says about its biggest champion.

"Where was the government with Studebaker?"

Reason.tv sits down with P.J. O’Rourke to talk about automobiles, Bailout Nation and loose lefty chicks. Also, it gives us an excuse to do something we haven’t done in a while… a poll!

We want your take on whether or not you would buy a Chrysler or GM product. Poll can be found in the right hand margin.


If embed no worky, please click here

Line of the Day

Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook." Now the government's going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result--a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn.

- P.J. O'Rourke from his latest missive in the Weekly Standard and where he also admonishes the President-elect as if he wants to give us "big, fat government, you need to be a big, fat politician", a quality in Obama, P.J. finds lacking.

We're so unprepared for this

First, the bad news: One of this generation's finest political satirists/humorists has cancer.

Now, the good news: This form has a 95% survival rate… for the victim, that is.

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I've been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it -- as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound -- my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.
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I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy's. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass ... well, I'll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?


More brilliance from our leading literary influence, P.J. O’Rourke, here.

Good luck, P.J.

H/T: Libertarian Republican

Big Oil in the Parliament of Whores

The Senate, unwilling to let the House continue their unprecedented run of unhinged, irrational and childish behavior unaccompanied, hauled before them the leaders of Big Oil and strapped them to the whipping post for a public flogging on Capitol Hill, yesterday.

In a regrettable affront to 3rd graders everywhere, we imagine the leaders of Big Oil trying to explain global market dynamics as it relates to oil, would be like talking to a roomful of schoolchildren who haven’t yet been put down for their nap.

Typical of the exchanges between the petrol evil-doers and Congress:

Big Oil…

Lee R. Raymond, Exxon's chairman and chief executive, said that the industry's profits, measured as a share of its revenue, were no greater than those in other industries. We are in line with the average of all U.S. industry," Mr. Raymond said. "Our numbers are huge because the scale of our industry is huge. How are these earnings used? We invest to run our global operations, to develop future supply, to advance energy-producing and -saving technologies, and to meet our obligations to millions of our shareholders."

And the Senate…

“None of us knows much about pricing…” Senator Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota.

Of course, this harangue-op will do absolutely nothing to lower the price of oil nor will it do anything to bring more of the world’s currently most economically feasible energy commodity to market. It won’t… we promise.

Full story here.


Some of the planet's perturbed, scaring children and crinkling noses at the hearings yesterday.

Sexy?

You may think we sit around all day and wait for gems like this to fall into our lap. Normally you’d be wrong but since we were out for a few days we can take no credit for doing any actual homework as this has been very big news in the sporting world… at least in the European Formula One racing sporting world manner of speaking.

It seems that FIA (Formual One’s governing body) HMFIC, Max Mosley is in a bit of hot water for what a British tabloid alleges as him having sex with multiple prostitutes (sometimes referred to as an “orgy”). Probably no biggie given the European sensibility regarding private affairs but the tabloid claims this particular romp to have involved “Nazi role-playing”. Woops. Story here.

Several F-1 teams have asked Mosley to stand down from his position of President. Mosley, for his part, has termed the tabs actions an “illegal invasion of privacy” but has not come out denying the event took place as described.

We're kinda with Max on this one if for no other reason than to shamelessly exploit his misfortune for the sole purpose of recalling the wisdom of P.J. O’Rourke regarding carnal pursuits and political affiliation. O’Rourke in the introduction of his masterpiece, "Give War A Chance", slices open the liberal mindset and motivation with surgical-like precision. At the very end of the intro, though, he realizes his politics leave him open to certain unsavory accusations for which O’Rourke, of course, finds the silver lining and reminds us to, perhaps, quit our own bellyaching over this matter:

“…you may be wondering-don’t I sometimes get called a Nazi? Yes, name-calling, in which conservatives such as myself are so loath to indulge, is a favorite tactic of the liberals. I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don’t let it bother me. I don’t let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.”