A commenter asked the other day why no one was attributing the spate of revolutions to Iraq. Given that the goal of the Iraq mission was to create a sort of Plymouth Rock in the Middle-East, a model of democracy that would "tip the dominoes" in favor of freedom -- given that that was the intent, why was no one at all speculating that that had something to do with it?

Well, obviously, the media doesn't speculate that way because they are kneepadded fellatists for liberals and would never even suggest there might be some upside to the Iraq War.

But conservative commentators did not exactly rush to make this speculation, either. I can only explain my own thinking: I had seen none of these revolutionaries credit Bush or Obama, so absent evidence for any US presidential urging spurring this on, I didn't want to make that case.

See, unlike the media, which is supposedly professional, most conservative commentators make modest observations and only when supported by actual evidence. Sure, I could have followed the media's evidence-free, partisan-cheerleading lead and just offered an equal and opposite bit of puffery for my favorite recent president; but, to me, the media is childish and unprofessional and rather stupid, and I don't wish to be any of those things.

I did allow that the Plymouth, Iraq theory was plausible -- but there was no actual evidence to support it.

Isn't that strange? The so-called unbiased and professional and objective and reality-based media rushed to claim that Obama's Cairo speech (which did not in fact call for any reforms in Cairo) was responsible for the Cairo uprising, based on no evidence at all, when the supposedly hyperpartisan, make-up-facts-as-you go, unprofessional alternative media generally refrained from such immodest claims?

At any rate, this is all by way of preamble to note that there now is in fact evidence on the record that Bush the Liberator, and not Obama the Procrastinator, is at least being thought of during the Libyan uprising.

"Bring Bush! Make a no fly zone, bomb the planes," shouted soldier-turned-rebel Nasr Ali, referring to a no-fly zone imposed on Iraq in 1991 by then U.S. President George Bush.

Does this prove that Bush's Liberation Doctrine is a major driver in these uprisings? No, not at all; I'm a smart, ethical commentator, not Wolf Blitzer, so I refrain from making evidence-free claims at the drop of a hat.

But we now have some evidence that the revolutionaries look to Bush, and none so far they look to the dithering, jerky jackass Obama.

We also have at least one revolutionary's testimony as to whether he believes soft power alone can evict tyrants, or whether he believes some hard power is advisable in some circumstances.

Note this guy did not call for President Asshole to "issue another firmly-worded statement."

Oh: Gee, I missed that these media spinners attempted to "clarify" that the Libyan rebels were calling out to Bush the Elder. They note Bush the Elder established the no-fly zone in Iraq.

Um, I suppose that is a possibility, but Bush the Younger maintained the no-fly zone for two years, too, before he ended the Hussein regime.

Somehow I think they're calling out for the last Bush, the one more strongly associated with toppling dictators and who served two terms ending two years ago, and not the one who served a single term more than twenty years ago.

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (182)
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The final frontier. This has been bothering me since I first saw Fermat's marginalia about a proposed solution to the mathematical question of Power Tool, Sex Toy, and LadyPud.

Now we know.

More than 100 Northwestern students watched as a naked woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her boyfriend during an after-class session of the school’s popular “Human Sexuality” class.

The demo, which was optional, was part of the popular class taught by Prof. John Michael Bailey, the Sun-Times is reporting. More than 600 students take the class, which the course description says “will treat human sexuality as a subject for scientific inquiry.”

This class is popular? I guess so. Pornography is popular. So is playing XBOX. So is getting drunk and hitting on people. We need classes like these, because we really need to issue academic credits for stuff people do in their downtime.

The professor defiantly stated that he will not succumb to the forces of "sex negativity."

This Pajamas Media article from a month back puts this sort of thing into context. Colleges are losing any sort of discipline and playing to the desires of their clients -- their clients being 18 to 21-year-olds finally out of their parents house and looking to hook up and get their drink on.

Look — if your child did well in high school, got excellent SAT scores, and signed up for a demanding major, you have nothing to worry about, except the price tag. And if that’s not a problem, you can stop reading right here.

But plenty of you parents know you have children who rarely cracked a book, got mediocre high school grades, and really have no interest in the demands of a real college learning experience. They got into less demanding schools or curricula, or youÂ’re paying out-of-state tuition money for the privilege of sending your kid someplace he couldnÂ’t have gotten into if he lived in-state.

When you toured the campus and saw the surrounding bars and clubs, when you saw the campus shopping mall that was designed to look like Rodeo Drive, and when you toured the athletic facility that rivals an upscale sports club, did you pause to think that those were not assets to the pursuit of the life of the mind?

...

We have to sit through lectures by our incomparable elected officials and our distinguished administrators telling us how many people the state needs by such and such a year with college degrees. We know how to give degrees. WeÂ’re good at that. But an education?...

Now your son is carrying a load of debt that he canÂ’t pay off, and he canÂ’t find a meaningful job because he really has no skills that translate into the marketplace. He never committed himself to the discipline, rigor, and fortitude it takes to get a meaningful education. He didnÂ’t know what to do with himself; you didnÂ’t know what to do with him, and you thought he should have a college experience. He did, in the sense that four years of recreational sex, hard drugs, and bars that are open late into the night provided him with a college experience.

You would have been better off giving him the cash to invest and sending him to the Caribbean or Vegas for several weeks every year where he could have indulged his sexual appetites and legally smoked ganja. Financially you would have both been ahead. So too would we.

(That article tends to attack both the unprepared, unserious student as well as the college catering to his non-academic agenda; I've omitted the stuff about the students' failures because it's not on the point I'm making.)

All of this stuff -- dildoing a woman in class For Great Science, creating your own major about media criticism of Gilligan's Island, etc., etc. -- is the university attempting to become the Cool Mom or Cool Dad, that is, the parent who strains mightily to be a "bud" to his or her kid instead of, you know, a parent. Such parents are popular (but not respected) since you can walk all over them and they are all too eager to let an inexperienced, unwise child make impulsive and hedonistic decisions without the restraint (or even the elder counsel) of an adult.

Colleges are similarly abandoning standards and tradition in order to appear hip to what are, basically, hyper-libidinous know-nothing barbarians.

If colleges are basically now "learning" from their students -- Oh, you want to see a woman frigged in class? Okay, we can do that -- what is the point of sending your kid there? Shouldn't the college then be paying him, since he's apparently designing the curricula?

I do believe that there should be nothing off-limits to actual science, and that includes sex. I hate to point out the obvious here, but there is no actual scientific inquiry going on here -- I know how to do the Disappearing Dildo Illusion, and I'm pretty sure that our current crop of kids, raised on the Internet, know this magic trick too.

This wasn't science; this was, as they used to call staged outrages in the 60s, an "Event."

And you're paying for it. And professors know that to keep their jobs and make tenure they either have to be outstanding in their fields or stage a series of public outrages that will make their classes overenrolled and, therefore, make them in-demand.

Since the first option is hard and the second is easy... well, the alleged students want it easy, the alleged professors want it easy. So "education" shall be easy. Works out for everyone.

Except when you leave college $120,000 in debt and your unqualified to do much except write a pseudo-scholarly paper on comparative dildology.

Posted by: Ace at 08:55 AM | Comments (149)
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High speed rail isn't cheap.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is not amused.

Given the record deficit this year, Sessions said he was surprised to see ObamaÂ’s 2012 budget call for an 11 percent spending increase and a 9.5 percent increase for the Education and Energy departments, respectively.

But he said “I was flabbergasted to see Transportation wants 62 percent increase in spending.”

Sessions noted, ahead of LaHoodÂ’s testimony on the request, that the Obama budget calls for an unspecified new tax to raise $435 billion to pay for the new six-year, $556-billion infrastructure build-out.

“I just have to say that is unrealistic,” Sessions said. “If you can’t tell us what kind of tax this is, I think there is zero chance of us passing such a tax as this.”

...LaHood said “we want to work with Congress on that.” He said Obama is not in favor of raising the gas tax in a “lousy economy.”

$556 billion over 6 years is a nice chunk of change to dole out to unions, eh?

Let's see, that's about $93 BILLION/year in new spending over that time. Yet when Republicans proposed cutting a bit more than that across the whole federal government it's draconian. But spending another half billion dollars we don't have? Why that's how things are done, it's for the unions after all.

(Just to be clear..the Transportation budget Sessions is talking about is for the 2012 Fiscal Year which starts on October 1, 2011. That's different from the Continuing Resolution debate that's ongoing for the 2011 Fiscal Year which started on October 1, 2010. We're still dealing with the latter because the Democrats failed to pass a budget before they got kicked out of the House majority.)

It's almost as if Obama is not a centrist budget hawk and is fundamentally not serious about curbing spending. Quick! Get some fainting salts for Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks.

Obama keeps saying his future budget plans ensure "we live within our means" which is a load of BS and now you also have to pretend there will be at least $435 Billion in new but unidentified taxes. Oh and what ever happened to Obama's pledge (long since broken) that he wouldn't raise taxes on people making less than $250K? How's this going to work? Um, they don't know or won't say. The "magic asterisk" lives!

I get that budget documents are wish lists and Presidents toss out a lot of things they know they'll never get so they can "give them up" in the negotiations and still get what they really want when all is said and done.

That's one of the flaws with the GOP's $100 billion in cuts. That's supposed to be our end point. They should have started out with Rand Paul's $500 billion plan and 'compromised' at $100 billion. Yes, they should have just adopted thee $500 billion in cuts or more but there's still a Democratically controlled Senate and Obama to deal with. We're not going to get the full loaf, so we need to start much higher than our likely end point.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:56 AM | Comments (158)
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I don't present the Initial Unemployment Claims data unless either it's the day before the Unemployment Rate comes out, or it's interesting. Today's release satisfied both those criteria: the Department of Labor reported a drop to 368,000 - the lowest level we've seen since April 2008.

The drop continues the trend we've seen since last August. If that trend continues, we'll be back to pre-recession levels of claims in about 20 weeks. That would be great - the first step to getting the unemployment rate down is to stop flooding the economy with the newly unemployed faster than it can take them up.

Posted by: Geoff at 05:59 AM | Comments (168)
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Ace was the first to blog about this earlier in the week and now the US News report is available online.

Ladies and gentlemen, your post-racial president:

But Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent "Tea Party" movement that was then surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn't helping them nearly enough, he said.

A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to "take back" their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn't dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a "subterranean agenda" in the anti-Obama movement—a racially biased one—that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it.

Yes, he's exactly who we thought he was.

Added Thought [DrewM.] So if you want to "take back" America you're a racist? Well then, what do you call someone who give a speech at conference called "Take Back America"? You might want to ask Barack Obama who spoke at this conference at least two times.

The group that organized these conferences that hosted Obama even have a music video with a song called...Take Back America.

Oh wait, that's ok because they are "progressives".

Thanks to Gabe for letting me add this.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:18 AM | Comments (138)
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This space is for comments on the items in the Top Headlines Sidebar. It's also a space to share your own Top Headlines and to otherwise shoot the shit.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:31 AM | Comments (184)
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Who Loves Cars More?

So global warming change activists are always carrying on about how the American love affair with the car is destroying the Earth Gaia. Yet when you look at world statistics of cars per capita it turns out we only have one car per 2.2 people while Germany and Italy have nearly one car per every 1.7 persons (and that's even with their glorious high speed trains). But somehow we're the ones who are killing the planet with our personal vehicles.

And then you have New Zealand which has nearly the highest number of cars per capita in the world - one car for every 1.6 Kiwis. But apparently their cars run on smugness.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:09 PM | Comments (743)
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Much news created today with polls sympathetic to the cause of "worker rights" in Wisconsin, specifically a) Americans are more sympathetic to public sector union workers and b) these empowered union educators get the better results.

Well, not all the polls conducted recently support point a).

- 46% say govt shut down ok, 44% think it's bad (I think this is a throwaway)

- 35% say govt worker pay about right, 42% say it's too much

- 63% to 31%, govt workers should contribute more to their benefits and retirement programs

- And "Efforts by governors to limit collective bargaining rights are motivated by a desire to reduce government costs rather than to weaken unions", voters agree 47% - 41%

Second point in this post made this evening by Iowahawk, a rascal from the heartland. Educational outcomes between Wisconsin and Texas when broken down by ethnicity. I hate to be a numbers guy (except tonight), but the comparisons are misdirected if you ignore the root cause of underperformance. The thing that drags down educational performance is broken families and impoverishment.

Which state is doing a better job of stemming the tide?

You tell me. Numbers don't lie.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:28 PM | Comments (219)
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Usually a tyrant has so many advantages on his side a revolution seems futile.

Gadaffy has not only lost most of his land, but even when he puts together a counteroffensive, he loses.

Rebel forces routed troops loyal to Moammar Gadhafi in a fierce battle over an oil port Wednesday, scrambling over the dunes of a Mediterranean beach through shelling and an airstrike to corner their attackers. While they thwarted the regime's first counteroffensive in eastern Libya, opposition leaders still pleaded for outside airstrikes to help them oust the longtime leader.

Airstrike? Right, they have jets and stuff too, from defecting air force pilots. The plucky, ragged renegade rebellion has artillery and jets.

He really does not enjoy any of the advantages of your usual tyrant. He fails at evil.

I'm no military theorist but at this point, it seems like the rebels could afford to just consolidate and set up their own governments just hold a long siege of Tripoli.

Not saying they should or will, just that they could.

Posted by: Ace at 03:56 PM | Comments (76)
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Apparently only eight are eligible to be recalled, and they're going after all eight.

Of course, now we'll have to recall the Fleebaggers.

I guess I underestimated exactly how critical union contributions -- especially government union contributions -- are to Democratic campaign coffers.

“The strategy for Democrats has been public union growth. If we’re able to put any restraint on public union growth, it will put a significant restraint on their political clout,” said Saul Anuzis, chairman of UnionRefund.org, a group that works to inhibit unions’ political spending.

Allah thinks it's mostly about galvanizing the base, preparing the battlefield, for 2012, and while surely that's part of it, I think that overlooks the obvious in favor of the clever: No, this is really mostly about how absolutely critical government unions are to the Democrats. It's the only segment of union growth in America. And every raise given to a government union worker is just more money that flows directly into Democratic campaigns.

A good quote over there from a Republican Senator, Randy Hopper, who basically vows that if he's looking into his political grave -- he's ready to jump.

I continue not believing the polls showing 62% of the public opposing taking "rights" to collective bargaining away from union members. For one thing -- that loaded word "rights." Rights that Obama's federal government workers do not have, thanks to noted right-winger Jimmy Carter, who realized that government workers should not be allowed to extort from their employers.

“The fact of the matter is, the president told us at the White House that he had unilaterally frozen spending for federal employees. Federal employees don’t have collective bargaining rights,” Barbour told reporters during an event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Wednesday. “The idea you guys have given the country is it’s just like there’s some constitutional right to collective bargaining. About half the states either don’t have it at all – my state does not have collective bargaining – or they limit it. The federal employees are not allowed to have collective bargaining for pay, for pensions, for health care.”

Even Jimmy Carter was wise enough to stop unions from collectively bargaining with the government. People need to think about that.

For another thing, it's easy to say someone should have "rights," but do non-union workers care enough to vote against those who strip them of such rights?

There's an old joke about the difference between mishap and tragedy: When your house burns down, it's a mishap; when my car gets a flat, it's a tragedy. People are of course most concerned about what they're most concerned about, which is naturally themselves.

Which means they may intellectually, or for "being nice" reasons support PEU's "right" to extort money from taxpayers and launder it back into Democratic coffers -- how passionate are they in this opinion? I think they don't give a rat's ass, personally, and while they may say they don't support this, I think they view it as a mishap (something that happens to you) and not a tragedy (something that happens to me).

Who'll flip against the Republicans? Well, among the, say, 20% of the state and municipal union workers who actually vote Republican, maybe half of them will flip. Almost no one else will.

By the way, I'm misremembering that joke; if you can think of the proper way to write it, let me know.

Joke Wrong: The actual joke doesn't really work so well to illustrate my point. oblig. says it's the Mel Brooks explanation of the difference between tragedy and humor:

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Humor is when you fall down a sewer and die."

Ah well, it still gets at the same idea.

Rephrasing the Question: “Do you favor forcing all state employees to join a union and empowering government unions to take union dues directly from employee paychecks?”

Posted by: Ace at 03:19 PM | Comments (133)
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