Alida Valli: August 2011

Ron Johnson - The Wisconsin Way Redux

I wrote earlier this month about "the Wisconsin Way" -- the pragmatic conservatism of Governor Scott Walker and Representative Paul Ryan. I should have mentioned a third, newer, but just as strong voice for common sense, pro-business conservatism: newly-elected Senator Ron Johnson. Johnson, a businessman who ran for Senate without any political experience and beat three-term Senator Russ Feingold soundly, has a great article today in the Washington Times, talking about what we need to get the economy going. Read the whole thing; he has a great list of bullet points, all of which would be great to enact. Here's the introduction, which hits all the right notes:

When stock prices were plunging earlier this month, President Obama strode to the teleprompter and utterly failed to calm the markets or the American people. Sadly, they saw what I saw - and have come to exactly the same conclusion: Mr. Obama does not know what to do. He never did.

Since taking office in admittedly tough economic conditions, the president has taken America 180 degrees in the wrong direction. His failed $825-billion stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the explosion of his administration's other job-killing regulations have combined to put a stranglehold on our economy. Until these policies are reversed, the lack of confidence that dampens consumption, business investment and job creation will be the order of the day. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is blinded by ideology and refuses to acknowledge the harm his agenda has wreaked on America and our economic future.

Fortunately, some in Congress understand the harm his agenda is causing and are working hard to reverse course.

As a thought experiment, imagine how much uncertainty would be removed and the level of confidence that would return if the entire Obama agenda were repealed tomorrow. A pretty pleasant thought, isn't it?

We can't repeal the additional $4 trillion that has been added to our nation's debt during his tenure, but we can repeal his agenda - the sooner the better. I can't think of a more effective first step in any "jobs program," and I challenge anyone to come up with a better one. I'm confident the president's umpteenth attempt at a jobs program will be nothing more than a slight variation on already-tried-and-failed themes. Why would we expect anything different or think he has any personal knowledge on how to create jobs?

Michael Ramirez Nails It

The best conservative cartoonist going, Michael Ramirez nails our incredible shrinking President:

And While I'm On The Topic Of The Global Warming Scam

Consider this article from Investor's Business Daily, discussing the recent experiments at CERN:

The results from an experiment to mimic Earth's atmosphere by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, tell researchers that the sun has a significant effect on our planet's temperature. Its magnetic field acts as a gateway for cosmic rays, which play a large role in cloud formation.

Consequently, when the sun's magnetic field allows cosmic rays to seed cloud cover, temperatures are cooler. When it restricts cloud formation by deflecting cosmic rays away from Earth, temperatures go up.

Or, as the London Telegraph's James Delingpole delicately put it:

"It's the sun, stupid."

This new finding of 63 scientists from 17 European and U.S. institutes from an experiment that's been ongoing since 2009 is, if we may paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden, a big deal. Which is exactly why the mainstream media, with so much invested in global warming hysteria, is letting last week's announcement from CERN pass like a brief summer shower, ignoring it.

Here's another article on the CERN experiment from the Financial Post:

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

Again, an intelligent citizenry in a democracy should be highly skeptical of so-called "experts" -- but particularly so when they are apparently willing to corrupt the scientific basis of their own fields by ignoring contrary evidence that would impact their own careers and livelihoods. The global warming industry won't want to hear the CERN evidence, but on its face what CERN has discovered should be earth-shaking.

Science, Experts, Models and Uncertainty

Our society tends to think of science as high school physics class, and maybe as the first week of high school physics class. You have plastic pucks on an air table, which should create the illusion of a frictionless surface, and you bounce them off of each other and you study two dimensional motion, collisions, angular momentum, torque, center of mass, etc. But the world isn't two-dimensional, and the number of variables in real world problems is infinite.

For instance, consider this article from The Fiscal Times:

What caused the financial crisis that is still reverberating through the global economy? Last week’s 4th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany – a meeting that brings Nobel laureates in economics together with several hundred young economists from all over the world – illustrates how little agreement there is on the answer to this important question.

Surprisingly, the financial crisis did not receive much attention at the conference. Many of the sessions on macroeconomics and finance didn’t mention it at all, and when it was finally discussed, the reasons cited for the financial meltdown were all over the map.

It was the banks, the Fed, too much regulation, too little regulation, Fannie and Freddie, moral hazard from too-big-to-fail banks, bad and intentionally misleading accounting, irrational exuberance, faulty models, and the ratings agencies. In addition, factors I view as important contributors to the crisis, such as the conditions that allowed troublesome runs on the shadow banking system after regulators let Lehman fail, were hardly mentioned.

Macroeconomic models have not fared well in recent years – the models didn’t predict the financial crisis and gave little guidance to policymakers, and I was anxious to hear the laureates discuss what macroeconomists need to do to fix them. So I found the lack of consensus on what caused the crisis distressing. If the very best economists in the profession cannot come to anything close to agreement about why the crisis happened almost four years after the recession began, how can we possibly address the problems?

What? Nobel Prize-type economists don't understand how the financial crisis occurred? Our experts upon whom we rely so much lack expertise on the essential issue? Really? The same experts who told us that if we borrowed, oh, a trillion fucking dollars from our grandchildren, then the economy would recover?

Or consider this, similar point, from an article about Hurricane Irene:

The computer models, and the meteorologists who wielded them, put in a "gold medal" performance when it came to predicting Irene's track — but there was much more uncertainty about the intensity of the storm. That's typical for tropical storms, said Frank Marks, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory's Hurricane Research Division. "Irene really exemplified the issues that we've been trying to tackle," he told me.

Hurricanes typically follow a pattern in which an outer ring of storms will tighten up to replace an inner ring surrounding the hurricane's eye, intensifying the storm system in the process. In Irene's case, that pattern (known as eyewall replacement) was interrupted, and the storm didn't gather as much strength as most of the models suggested. "Some of the models did represent it well," Marks said, but there wasn't enough confidence in those models to change the storm forecast.

Researchers have been working to reduce the error rate for hurricane track and intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, with the goal of a 50 percent reduction from 2008 levels by 2018. The University of Washington's Cliff Mass, an expert on weather modeling, said Irene showed that much more progress still has to be made on predicting a storm's intensity.

"The classic is good forecast for track, bad forecast for intensity," he told me. "Let's face it: This happens all the time. ... To get the intensity right, you have to be able to predict the inner workings of the storm, and that's what we don't do well yet."

What? The meteorology experts who have been telling us for years that global warming will make the seas rise and devastate the planet can't tell us how hard the wind will blow in a storm? Really?

An intelligent citizenry listens to experts when they have demonstrable expertise in their fields. I listen to doctors in deciding how to treat my children's illnesses, for instance. But an intelligent citizenry should be highly skeptical of so-called "experts" who purport to have answers to questions whose variables are so numerous and complex as those that govern the functioning of our economy or long-term weather patterns.

And we should be extraordinarily skeptical of so-called "experts" whose solutions to problems involve taking money from taxpayers and arrogating power to themselves.

Girl of the Day - The Magical Wife (Elizabeth Montgomery and Barbara Eden)

When I was growing up in the 1960s, most mothers stayed home while dads went to work and the kids went to school. So, from both the dads' and the kids' perspective, magical things happened while Mom was home alone. Laundry miraculously cleaned itself and folded itself and put itself away. Food miraculously appeared in the refrigerator and pantry, and dinner was miraculously ready when we got home. The house miraculously cleaned itself. And, meanwhile, Mom was beautiful and perfect and sweet and smart and read books and volunteered in the community and.... how exactly did she get all that done? It must have been magic!

In retrospect, then, it probably was predictable that TV shows of the 1960s often centered on the "magical Mom," who accomplished all that she did through actual Magic. Two of the biggest hits were Bewitched with Elizabeth Montgomery and I Dream of Jeannie with Barbara Eden. Montgomery played about the hottest witch ever seen who unaccountably was married to a nebishy advertising executive, and Eden played a genie discovered by an astronaut after splashdown. Needless to say, they were both the first crushes of probably millions of American boys, and it's easy to see why:

Point of personal privilege: these gals have nothing on the Regular Wife, who also works magic on a daily basis.

The Desperation Strategy

Yesterday I noted an anonymous blogger named Ulsterman who posts "interviews" with an anonymous "White House Insider." Again, I don't know if these interviews are real or fiction (albeit detailed and plausible fiction by a writer who can write very good, realistic dialogue). But a recent interview with the White House Insider relayed this supposed Obama re-election plan:

Ulsterman: How? What’s the plan? What’s going to be different from all the other campaigns?
Insider: You’ve already seen it. A taste of it. Race. The race card. Racism. Race-race-race. It’s all they fucking got to run on these days.
Ulsterman: Race? Hasn’t Obama played that one out already? It’s become a joke.
Insider: Played it out? No, not…you might think so but no…his people are going to raise the issue of race to a level this country hasn’t seen since the Civil Rights movement. White guilt got Barack Obama the nomination. White guilt got Barack Obama into the White House. At least it was a big part of it…they are not sure they can run on the economy by summer of 2012. Motivation is way down – the people on the ground. Many of them will be sitting this one out. The campaign conducted over five internals in the last few months. Each time the one issue that came back favorably for the president was the color of his skin. People are not comfortable…white people are not comfortable going against a person of color.... Look, you got generations of voters in this country who have been hammered with guilt for being white. Schools, television, movies…decades of this racism shit coming at them from all sides. White guilt is very real. I’ve used it-done it myself… countless times in an election campaign. And for Barack Obama…his re-election team – they are banking on it bringing victory in 2012. Even if it means the threat of race riots. They are willing to go that far – go down that road if need be. If the Obama team can’t guilt enough of White America into voting for them in 2012 – they are just fine with trying to scare the shit out of them to do it.

Okay, that's certainly scary. But is it real, or is it fiction? We don't know, and we may never know. On the other hand, if that is Obama's plan, there's evidence that it's being put into action already. Here is an article from Politico today talking about recent comments from a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Andre Carson (D - IN):

A top lawmaker in the Congressional Black Caucus says tea partiers on Capitol Hill would like to see African-Americans hanging from trees and accuses the movement of wishing for a return to the Jim Crow era.

Rep. Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana who serves as the CBC’s chief vote counter, said at a CBC event in Miami that some in Congress would “love to see us as second-class citizens” and “some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me ... hanging on a tree.”

Carson also said the tea party is stopping change in Congress, likening it to “the effort that we’re seeing of Jim Crow.”

Speaking from Milwaukee, where we have already had two serious incidents this summer of black-on-white mob violence (on the Fourth of July and at the opening day of State Fair), this is an extraordinarily dangerous brand of demogoguery, essentially an incitement to riot. If the White House is directing it (as the White House Insider interview might be read to suggest), it's an extraordinarily desperate strategy. It makes you fear for your country.

Birthday Today - Van Morrison

It's Van Morrison's 66th birthday today. Has there ever been a better, more soulful rock and roll singer? I doubt it. Stevie Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band once said that Morrison's late 1960s album Astral Weeks "was like a religion to us." Here's Morrison doing a great song from that album, "Ballerina," live in Montreaux in 1980:

Compare and Contrast

Rick Perry as a young man in his early 20s, fresh out of college, in the Air Force, flying a T-38 fighter (this was a training aircraft; he was assigned to fly and did fly C-130 transports):

Now, here's Obama in his early 20s. Hmmmm, seems like a different kind of guy:

Social Security as a Ponzi Scheme

Veronica de Rugy in NRO has this funny Venn diagram comparing Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme to the federal government's Social Security program:

The only difference to me (but it's a big one) is that the victims of Madoff's fraud did not know it was a fraud until the end. But we've all known all along that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme -- that the "trust fund" or "lockbox" is filled with nothing but our own IOUs to ourselves, payable by our future, our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. We are all co-conspirators in this conspiracy to defraud generations of Americans yet to be born.

Bells Are Ringing Alert™: Lady Gaga's secret wedding.

Publication: National Enquirer

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

Fresh trash tomorrow! Last trash of the week... right now!

The Enquirer has a story that Lady Gaga is going to have a secret wedding and tells you, the reader, how you can attend.

This story is odd for several reasons. Let me list them.

This is the first time the Enquirer has mentioned Lady Gaga this decade. She's really not aimed at their demographic.
It's a generally positive story from the Meanest Tabloid In The United States.
If the wedding is a secret, how can any old person in a supermarket checkout line attend?

As odd as the story was, I didn't open the rag up to find the answer to the last question.

He Fought The Law Alert™: What the Aruba suspect told the cops.

Publication: National Enquirer

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

The Enquirer gives a lot of ink on the cover to the investigation of Robyn Gardner, the woman who recently went missing in Aruba, and they name Gary Giordano as the prime suspect. Here are the headlines.

Robin killed in suspect's hideout
What happened in her final minutes - cops believe

Weekly World News alert: Woman gives birth to alien baby.

Publication: Weekly World News (via the Sun)

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

The Weekly World News tells us this week that a woman has given birth to an alien baby after a Close Encounter of the Hubba Hubba Kind. The Weekly World News needs a new recurring character, especially since Bat Boy is now Bat Middle Aged Guy With A Beer Belly.

Nokia E6 Mobile Review Unboxing & Package Contents

via : mastergadgets.com Here is a detailed Nokia E6 Mobile Review Unboxing & Package Contents

Motorola Atrix 4G mb860

Motorola Atrix 4G

Take This With a Grain of Salt

There is an anonymous blogger named Ulsterman, who has, over the past couple of years, published "transcripts" of his conversations with a supposed White House "insider," who is also anonymous. The conversations ring true, but they could be simply the truth of good and intelligent fiction, much like the dialogue of a Hemingway or a Tolstoy rings true, in that it tells us some truth about the world we live in. For these reasons, they must be read with a big grain of salt. That being said, his most recent posting is chilling (again, possibly in the way that a horror movie is chilling):

President Obama, when he is in his de facto office upstairs – the one that is closer to Jarrett’s own office, and a short hop over to the residence, he spends his time there often in shorts, or sweats, a t-shirt, and those sandal things…flip-flops. There is a large screen television in there and that’s where hours of his time are spent when he is actually at the White House. Day in and day out. The First Lady rules the residence, and the president heads over to his 2nd floor West Wing study. Starting around last spring, he started to take regular briefings in there. And the instructions that went out on those briefings to the president were that they were to be most importantly – brief. Anything more than about 15 minutes is unacceptable to Obama. So let’s look through the eyes of someone heading into Barack Obama’s upstairs office at the White House to give him a briefing. Maybe it’s on national security. Maybe the economy. Energy policy. Whatever – doesn’t matter. The scenario being played out these days is pretty much the same regardless of the particulars. You knock on the door – it’s always closed. Always. Often you have to knock for some time before being given approval from inside to enter. The big screen will be on – the volume loud. You can easily hear it from outside the door. The sports channels are the ones most commonly playing, though sometimes the channel will be set to music, or Fox News. Sometimes Valerie Jarrett might be there, but most often it is just the president and his personal aide. A large leather chair will be facing the television – it’s well worn. Not part of the White House furnishings but something the president must have brought in from back home. That’s where you’ll most often find the President of the United States – the most powerful man in the free fucking world. He often sits with one leg draped over one of the chair’s arms and the other leg stuck straight onto the floor. Shorts, sweats, a t-shirt, and like I said, no shoes or just those sandal things that so many of the younger people like to wear these days. And that leg that’s draped over an arm of the chair will be bopping up and down, like…like someone with a lot of nervous energy. Like a kid does. And there’s the smell of smoke hanging on the president. The guy never quite smoking – that was all bullshit. I told you that already. In fact, there’s one of those smokeless ash trays on the desk in there. And that desk, it’s a mess. Magazines spread out all over it. Stupid shit too. Real low brow reading material the president is into. People. Rolling Stone. Lots of those tabloid things. The most common thread with this shit is it’s about the president. If it’s about him, he’s gonna read it. Good or bad – doesn’t matter. If somebody is talking about him, he’s reading it. He’s watching it. Whatever. The guy’s self-obsession is off the fucking charts.

So that’s what you first see when you enter the room – the upstairs office of President Obama. Next you’re gonna notice how small the guy looks. Really thin. He pads his suits up you know. The top end. The shoulders. It became an actual issue during the 2008 campaign – some of his handlers were saying it made his neck look too small. Fact is, it made his neck look just like it is – small. The guy is scrawny. All knees and elbows sitting in that chair. Sometimes he gets up when you come in, sometimes he remains seated and will just turn the volume on the TV down with the remote and say, “What you got?” That foot is bouncing up and down while you give him the briefing, but he rarely looks over at you – always looking at whatever is on the television. If it’s Jarrett in the room, or the personal assistant, one of them is there to keep the time. Your time. Don’t go over that fifteen minutes. And even if the president doesn’t look like he hears a word you’re saying, they are listening to everything. Every goddamn syllable coming out of your mouth, and if something is said they don’t like, they jot down notes. Been told it’s to use for the end of day summary they give the president – their own version of what is important and what can be ignored…and who might need to be pushed down, or pushed out…or whatever. So you’re looking at the president, this skinny guy, who’s ignoring you, who’s dressed like some kind of fucking frat boy wannabe, with somebody else taking notes on what you’re saying, and then you get up and walk out. The president might acknowledge you on some days, give a little nod, maybe even a thank you, but most often he just continues to look at the TV, bounce that foot on the chair, his skin looking off-color, pale, the eyes out of focus, the hair a helleva lot more gray than is shown in public, the wrinkles around the mouth far deeper…and the hands. His fucking hands are so…they are just these thin little stick digits. They are like these long-fingered woman’s hands. And his wrists, you could wrap your own fingers all the way around those wrists – again, so much like a woman’s hands. Almost freakish. Certainly not the strong alpha-male type image that America was given during the 2008 campaign.

That’s who you see in the room – the real Barack Obama. Pretty fucking unsettling. Those world leaders, they sensed this. They saw through the façade and saw who was running the United States of America, and the word went out – “Don’t count on this American president – he doesn’t have a fucking clue.” And they’re right.

Again, take this with a grain of salt. Just because it has the density of detail of truth -- and it does -- doesn't make it so. But still... chilling.

Girl of the Day - U.S. Open Version (Caroline Wozniacki)

I strongly suspect that the tennis being played today is far superior to the tennis that was played thirty or so years ago by Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and that like. But the popularity of watching tennis among the casual, general sports fan, is at a very low ebb, and the popularity of playing tennis is even lower. When I was a teenager, it was literally impossible to get on a public tennis court without waiting. Now, it's practically impossible to find anyone using them -- vacant tennis courts litter the American landscape like archaelogical sites. Perhaps it's different abroad, where most of the great tennis players now come from. Perhaps in the Spain of Rafael Nadal, or the Switzerland of Roger Federer, or the Serbia of Novak Djokovic -- the three giants of today's men's tennis. Perhaps in Denmark, where the current women's #1 comes from -- Caroline Wozniacki. Wozniacki has been #1 for almost a year, yet has never one a Grand Slam tournament. Maybe she will in the U.S. Open, which just started yesterday. If she does, I suspect her name and face will become very widely known in America -- she's a pretty cute girl, not Anna Kournikova cute, but still... cute:

Oh, and since I mentioned Kournikova:

OK, that's just wrong.

Alex Trebek mystery!

Publication: National Examiner

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

I have to say, the low rent Examiner did everything right with this story on the front page. Here is the headline.

Alex Trebek mystery
The hooker, the hotel, the fall
What happened that night?

Doesn't that make you want to open the magazine and read the story?

For the record, I didn't open the magazine, but I was tempted.

The truth about Omer Bhatti's parents!

Publication: National Enquirer

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

Welcome to gossip hell 2011 style Omer Bhatti! The kid was a hanger-on in the Michael Jackson universe back in the 1990s, and there were rumors that he was Michael's illegitimate son.

But now the story gets a little crazier. Etterlene DeBarge, mother of the DeBarge clan and Janet Jackson's former mother-in-law, says Omer is the child of El Debarge and Janet.

The Enquirer printed this because crazy old bats are never wrong.

On the rocks alert: Katy Perry divorce drama

Publication: Star

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

According to Star, recently wed Katy Perry and Russell Brand are going through a rough patch. The magazine promises to tell "the truth about Russell & blonde".

This is probably my least favorite couple outside of some reality TV pairings. To me she represents what's wrong with the music industry and he represents what's wrong with humanity.

Nokia 5230 Nuron For T-Mobile USA - Part 1 Of 2

Nokia 5230 Nuron for T-Mobile USA - part 1 of 2

Part 1 of our look at the Nokia 5230 Nuron, the first Symbian S60 5th edition smartphone to be offered by a US carrier. This 5800-like device is ...

Girl of the Day - If We're Going to Hell in a Handbasket, We Might As Well Have Fun Version (Marilyn Monroe's Heart Belongs to Daddy)

I've been reading Mark Steyn's new book, After America. So I'm more than usually cynical and depressed. In such moments, you have to fall back on the mental list of what makes life worth living. The Regular Family: Wife, Son, Daughters, Dog. The St. Louis Cardinals. The Green Bay Packers. The Duke Blue Devils. Listening to good music at the tip of your fingertips on Youtube -- I listened to Arturo Toscanini conduct Beethoven's Fifth last night and then, with the click of a button, I listened to 1975 Bruce Springsteen doing "Kitty's Back." What a great world we live in.

And, of course, there's this sort of thing:

Let me also say: the Polish subtitles really do it for me. Again, what a great world!

Oh, And One More Thing...

Who exactly is the dunderhead in this picture?

This was today. President Wonderful used his teleprompter-in-chief (TOTUS) to give a three minute introduction for his new economics adviser, Alan Krueger of Princeton (a huge lefty, by the way, who thinks a VAT tax would be just peachy).
Is he really so incompetent that he can't give a three-minute talk off-the-cuff about a relatively minor government appointment?

The question answers itself.

More on the Rick Perry is Dumb Meme

Ace of Spades is noticing the same new trend in the Mainstream Media, specifically, the lefty political blog, Politico, where the blogger argued for the proposition that Perry is unintelligent by noting that -- I kid you not -- although he had been an Air Force pilot for five years, all he did was follow flight plans:

Where exactly does this guy think a flight plan comes from if not the pilot who has ultimate responsibility for the flight? I don't think being a pilot means you are a genius but it does mean a couple of things...

To fly a plane like a C-130 you have to understand how multiple systems work and interact with each other. You don't have to be an electrical engineer but you have to have a working knowledge of electrical systems. You don't have to be physicist but you have to have a passing familiarity with the physics of flight. You don't have to be a meteorologist but you have to have an understanding of weather and the mechanics of the environment you are going to fly into.

When you learn to fly, you get to learn a good bit about a lot of things. You might not be an expert on any one of these things but you have to be able to grasp the basics, how they interact with each other and how to balance competing challenges and limitations.

More importantly, as an intellectual exercise learning to fly (especially at the military level) means havi8ng a disciplined mind. You get hit with a lot of information and you have to be able to retain it, prioritize it and most importantly, when push comes to shove, be able to use it in the proper way.

That's actually not bad training for an executive when you think about it.

All of that is exactly right. Who is the Left to tell us that Perry's background as an Eagle Scout, yell leader at Texas A&M, door-to-door salesman while he was in school, commissioned officer and pilot in the Air Force (with overseas tours in Europe and the Middle East), and cotton farmer up until the age of 34 somehow isn't "intellectual" enough for national politics? By the time he was 34 and entering politics in the Texas House of Representatives, he had done all those real jobs and was married and had a baby son; his second child would follow soon after. To me, that sounds like a grown-up who's had some significant life experiences and work experiences.

Meanwhile, at age 34 Obama had graduated from college, gone to law school, practiced a little law (not much), been a community organizer in Chicago, and gotten himself a position as a part-time lecturer at a law school. He was married, but he had no children yet. Yet based on those "accomplishments" he had managed to get a book contract for his first "memoirs." Other than the chutzpah to write his memoirs after not having done much to remember, how exactly is it that Obama was more accomplished as of that age than Perry? What exactly is the evidence that he was smarter? Because he'd gone to Columbia and Harvard Law? Because he'd taught at the Uniersity of Chicago? If you leave out the names of the schools, his record was actually pretty meager. Really, is that all the Left has left -- snobbery because he went to cooler schools?

Show me the transcripts!

Sheesh!

On the Topic of Conservatives Whose Intelligence Is Routinely Derided By Liberals

Walter Russell Mead is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. Today he's writing about Clarence Thomas, and it's a doozy. Mead takes as his jumping off point the recent article by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, and basically lays out why Thomas, far from being the dolt he's been made out to be by the MSM, is actually the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court's right wing:

There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings. Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.

At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonin Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.

The point about Thomas' intellectual leadership is important, but I just want to make one point about Thomas' supposed sexual indiscretion, which was such a focal point of his confirmation hearings.   Starring Anita Hill, the Democrats in the Senate put on a show trial, accusing Thomas of the ugliest forms of sexual harassment.   Yet, as I've written before about other issues, it is often most revealing to try to see what isn't there.   The Thomas-Hill hearings were in 1991.   It's twenty years later.   What isn't there?

Well, what isn't there is any evidence whatsoever that Thomas has ever indulged in any similar behavior in the twenty years since.   Not one whiff of scandal, not one hint of infidelity or indiscretion, not one moment of ungentlemanly conduct, nothing, zip, nada.   As anyone who has been around men who are womanizers can tell you, leopards don't often change their spots.   If Thomas was a vulgarian, a sexual harasser, a serial groper, or whatever else it was that the Left tried to paint him as, all human experience points to the conclusion that he would still be that person, that he wouldn't have changed, and that there would be evidence that he has continued the same predatory behavior.   But there isn't.   Again: nothing, zip, nada.   It's like Big Foot. If Sasquatch existed, it stands to reason that you'd see more examples of the species, roaming the Pacific Northwest woods.   Species don't occur in singletons; they evolve from hundreds, if not thousands, of generations.   But we don't see large populations of Sasquatches, do we?   My conclusion:   that Sasquatch was a hoax.

I reach a similar conclusion about Clarence Thomas and his supposed harassment of Anita Hill.   The incentive for Hill to lie to make herself part of the biggest story in town in 1991 was huge; she could make herself a hero to the Left.   And maybe she even convinced herself that her story was true over time; as a lawyer, believe me, it happens all the time.   But it wasn't true.   It was a hoax.   If Clarence Thomas was what they said he was, there would be more evidence.   But there isn't.

And the fact that the Democratic Party went to the mattresses to label a successful black man as a sexual predator is a scandal of the first magnitude, a moral failure of supposed "liberals" that ought to shame them, but won't.   It's a sad commentary, but it appears that Clarence Thomas is having the last laugh.   He's 63.   God willing, he'll be on the Court for another 15-20 years.

Rick Perry, Dunce

Get ready for this meme. The MSM won't want to mention Perry's extensive experience as an executive and they'll belittle his consistent conservatism on the issues. So they'll do what they always do with Republicans -- they'll say he's dumb. Here's Hot Air noting the opening notes of what will be a symphony of condescension:

Doubts about Perry’s intellect have hounded him since he was first elected as a state legislator nearly three decades ago. In Austin, he’s been derided as a right-place, right-time pol who looks the part but isn’t so deep – “Gov. Goodhair.” Now, with the chatter picking back up among his enemies and taking flight in elite Republican circles, the rap threatens to follow him to the national stage.

“He’s like Bush only without the brains,” cracked one former Republican governor who knows Perry, repeating a joke that has made the rounds....

Perry has been governor for three terms and the latter part of Bush’s interrupted second term, more than 11 years in a high-profile office. That leaves plenty of room to debate his record, but his rumored lack of brainpower has mysteriously not kept him from successfully running one of the largest, most populous, and most visible states in the Union. Perry went through a high-profile primary fight in 2010 against US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison without the press discovering this supposed intellectual defect, but now that he’s running for President, we are supposed to believe that Perry has lost 30 IQ points?

Notice that these memes never get applied on the other side of the aisle, either. Did any media question Obama’s intelligence when during the campaign when he made these whoppers?
The Selma March in 1965 did not contribute to his birth in 1961.

Kansas tornadoes in May 2007 killed 12 people, not “ten thousand”.

Afghans do not speak Arabic.

Within 24 hours, Obama reversed his assertion that Iran did not pose a “serious threat” to the US to an assertion that the threat is “grave”.

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

57 states

No, they didn’t. Why? Because the media only uses the weird, scary, and idiot memes for Republican candidates, that’s why.

This is so old and tired it's hard to even get too worked up about it. Does anyone really believe some jerk on MSNBC or some idiot in the New York Times when they start talking about how dumb the Governor of one of the biggest and easily the most successful states in the country supposedly is?

Republicans should be demanding to see Barack Obama's transcripts every day from now until November 2012. See if the country would want to re-elect our first affirmative action President.

And the camera noses in to the tears on their faces: Rose McGowan's escape from a cult.

Publication: People

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

Welcome to gossip hell, Rose McGowan! People interviews the actress, who currently can be seen in the box office dud Conan the Barbarian, about growing up in a hippie commune in Italy that she fairly describes as a cult and how she escaped from it.

Let us recall that Rose got her big break replacing Shannen Doherty on the TV show Charmed when Doherty became just too difficult to work with. Ms. Doherty is still in a creepy cult called the Republican Party.

She Fought The Law Alert™: Casey Anthony's death car scrapped!

Publication: Globe

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

The Three Wicked Step Sister tabloids, the Enquirer, Globe and the low rent Examiner, have been the main carriers of headlines about Casey Anthony now that her trial is over and she has been found not guilty. The Globe headline reads "Auto used as Caylee's coffin crushed at junkyard!" To my mind, this says they are really stretching to find anything interested or new about the situation.

Casey is not quite in the top ten of popular cover stories of 2011, but it's possible she could get there before the end of the year.

Bundle of Joy Alert: Tia Mowry's baby boy Cree.

Publication: Us Weekly

Date: 5 Sept. 2011

Welcome to gossip hell, Tia Mowry! It's more appropriate to call it gossip heck, because the star of the 90s sitcom Sister, Sister makes her supermarket rag debut this decade as the mother of a cute and healthy baby named Cree, the most positive kind of story the gossip rags carry.

Best wishes to all concerned.