Remember all of those stories in 2004 in which the media and the Democrats encouraged President George W. Bush to tone down his party because we were at war, and tsk-tsking about the fact that donations bought access?

That was then. This is now.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Unemployment is on the rise. The stock market is in the tank. Is this any time for a party?

For the sake of the masses of people expected for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, let's hope so. While Obama must be sensitive to the nation's time of war and recession, there's still reason to expect a rollicking time.

"We're mindful of the fact that people in this country are hurting, that they're going through hard times," said Linda Douglass, spokeswoman for the Presidential Inaugural Committee. "On the other hand, we see this not just as a celebration of an election, but as a time for people to come together and celebrate their common values and shared aspirations and goals."

As for the cost, I wonder why Obama doesn't save a few bucks and do some recycling.

Posted by: Slublog at 05:08 AM | Comments (41)
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I'm the evilest of evil Conservatives. I recycle nothing. Not a single can, plastic bottle, nor newspaper goes into our recycle bin. As a matter of fact, ever since our city put out recycle bins, ours has sat at the side of the house, doing nothing, because the whole recycling thing is one big scam. The only thing that would make me more evil would be clubbing baby Harp seals for their fur. If any moron wants to pony up the dough for a trip up north, though, I'm there.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Norm Steenstra's budgeting worries mount with each new load of cardboard, aluminum cans and plastics jugs dumped at West Virginia's largest county recycling center.

Faced with a dramatic slump in the recycling market, the director of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority has cut 20 of his 24 employees' work week to four days from five, shuttered six of the authority's drop-off stations and is urging residents to hoard their recyclables after informing municipalities with curbside recycling programs that the center will accept only paper until further notice.

"The market is just not there anymore," Steenstra said.

Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown. As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills' demand for scrap, paper and other recyclables.

Why isn't there a market there? Because recycling is an expensive amount of utter bullshit foisted upon us by the EPA. Penn and Teller do a nice job of exposing this bullshit in their episode of, well, Bullshit. All three parts below the fold.

See you next Open Blog. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:29 PM | Comments (117)
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(The article’s headline should’ve read “Earmarks Help Businesses and Powerful Senators, not Troops,” but why quibble…the text of the article takes care of that.)

Sometimes newspaper reporters do actually hit on something important, and this is one such case. According to this article in the Seattle Times, earmarks continue to put our armed forces in danger with regards to chemical warfare protection.

HereÂ’s the setup for the article:

”After being lobbied by companies making a decontamination powder, powerful U.S. senators Charles Schumer, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Arlen Specter forced the military to keep buying what it considers inferior chemical-warfare protection for the troops.”

”Scientists have discovered a lotion that can save the lives of U.S. soldiers exposed to chemical weapons — a product vastly superior to the standard-issue decontamination powder.”

“Naturally, the Defense Department wants to scrap the powder and switch to the more-effective lotion.”

“But there's a problem: After being lobbied by the companies making the powder, several members of Congress pushed through two earmarks worth $7.6 million that forced the military for the past two years to keep buying the inferior product.”

”Among the lawmakers who championed the earmarks are Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.; Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.”

“Clinton, who is poised to become secretary of state, received nearly $7,000 in campaign donations from the beneficiaries of these earmarks in recent years. Specter got more than $47,000.”

Posted by: Open Blog at 07:32 PM | Comments (26)
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Its not a joke. They're serious. more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 04:42 PM | Comments (70)
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Stealing from Ed.

Before World War II, the US was an isolationist nation struggling through a protracted economic disaster, mostly uninterested in foreign entanglements. After this attack, America began its quick march to becoming a superpower projecting its might around the world. Pearl Harbor provided the impetus for that transformation, with a nation vowing never to be taken by surprise again — and succeeding for almost 60 years in preventing it.

Here's an interesting part of that history.

Both residential and commercial end use of electricity grew rapidly from 1941 to 1945, despite the war. Almost one-half of all farm dwellings were electrified by 1945. Growth in demand was helped by continuing technological improvements, yielding overall heat rates below 16,000 Btu per kilowatthour(13) and residential electricity price drops averaging over 2 percent a year.

Ponder that. In December of 1941, we were learning to project power, at the same time we were electrifying our country. The light switch, which we take for granted, was so unknown over so much of the nation. Reeling from economic pain, we found the burners and lit them up, and became the country who led the world from that time on.

A sleeping giant. Filled with a terrible resolve. I pray we never forget it.

more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:40 PM | Comments (22)
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Provisional ballots seem to have done the trick.

Posted by: Ace at 04:37 PM | Comments (16)
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Posted a link to this video in comments on a post down the page. Since some of you liked it, here ya go. Funny facial expressions in this one (supermarket guy cracks me up), and it also features one of the stars of The Sopranos.

Putting it below the fold. Not safe for work on account of content/ language.

Mild earworm danger, but that seems to go away after half an hour or so. Still, it's not a good thing to be absentmindedly singing aloud. more...

Posted by: LauraW at 02:31 PM | Comments (34)
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Damage mitigation:

The results of a tight congressional race in central Ohio were expected late Sunday as election officials finished counting thousands of provisional ballots.

Officials of the Franklin County Board of Elections began processing the 24,000 ballots Saturday in the race between Republican state Sen. Steve Stivers and Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy.

Stivers leads Kilroy by 594 votes out of nearly 290,000 cast in the 15th Congressional District. About 40 percent of the 24,000 provisional ballots came from voters in the district.

The counting of the provisional ballots — issued at polls to people who believe they have been wrongly denied the right to vote — went forward after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday that 1,000 of the ballots in dispute must be thrown out because of voter error.

In a 4-2 decision, the court struck down a directive by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner saying the votes should be counted.

Justices said Brunner improperly instructed county officials to apply conflicting standards to election law by ruling that the votes should be counted, even though the envelopes failed to comply with legal guidelines set out before Election Day, Nov. 4.

The disputed ballots contained errors on the outer envelope, such as no signature or name. Others had the signature or name written in the incorrect space.

If Stivers holds his lead, Ohio's congressional delegation would be evenly split among nine Republicans and nine Democrats.

A reminder of how critical down-ticket state races are. The Secretary of State has an enormous amount of power, and may just be inclined to use it corruptly.

Posted by: Ace at 01:04 PM | Comments (34)
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More apologism from the left, and a fiery response to such excuse-making:

It didn’t take long before the apologist industry was cranked up to explain the latest terrorist outrage in Bombay. Joshua Kurlantzick at the New Republic suggested that “After years of moderation, India’s Muslims—including even some middle-class Muslims—finally may be striking back at the discrimination stacked against them.” A piece in Time chimed in by noting that “the roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held sense of injustice....” So falls into place the usual response of Western liberals to any acts of intolerant savagery committed by Muslim “militants” —that it is somehow in some way caused by those they attacked, that “Muslim rage” over their mistreatment leads Muslims to slaughter Hindus, Jews, Christians, Orthodox Russians and even thoroughly secular Europeans.

...

Some intrepid, politically incorrect soul might even have the temerity to draw attention to the fact the Islamic terrorists seemed to have grievances against just about everybody, every ethnic or religious group that isnÂ’t Muslim along with all those Muslims who refuse to fall in line with the Islamist project. Muslim terrorists have, after all, killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims in the past decade.

The sheer diversity of it all is part of the problem. There are so many rag-tag Muslim terrorist groups launching so many attacks based on such a bewildering array of grievances—infidels in the land of Mecca and Medina, the existence of Israel, disputes over Kashmir, Russian colonialism in Chechnya, etc. —that we bend ourselves into pretzels trying to define them all as understandable responses to mistreatment.

We are left to wonder why Muslims here, there and everywhere seem to be so badly mistreated and respond to such mistreatment in such drearily predictable fashion, which is to blow other people (and sometimes themselves ) up.

I'd quote more but I think they rapped me last time I ran an extended quote from them. Read the whole thing. It's worth it.

At Least Time They Mostly Did Property Damage: Like fellow "militant" Bill Ayers, I guess, who also mostly did property damage:

Pakistani militants attacked a parked convoy of trucks carrying military vehicles for Western forces in Afghanistan near Peshawar early on Sunday, destroying 96 trucks, police said.

Security guards said they were overpowered by more than 200 militants who attacked two terminals on the ring road round the northwestern city of Peshawar, where the trucks carrying Humvees and other military vehicles were parked.

"It happened at around 2.30 a.m. They fired rockets, hurled hand grenades and then set ablaze 96 trucks," senior police officer Azeem Khan told Reuters.

Most of the fuel and other supplies for U.S. and NATO forces in landlocked Afghanistan are trucked through Pakistan, much of it through the mountainous Khyber Pass between Peshawar, capital of North-West Frontier Province and the border town of Torkham.

Khan said one private security guard was killed in an exchange of fire between police and the militants.

"They were shouting Allah-o-Akbar (God is Great) and Down With America. They broke into the terminals after snatching our guns," said Mohammad Rafiullah, security guard at one terminal.

Of course they were.

Posted by: Ace at 12:53 PM | Comments (38)
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Why are police demanding his release?

Even if he's innocent, seems to me he's worth looking at.

Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir today demanded the release of one of their undercover agents after he was arrested by police in Delhi for allegedly supplying a mobile SIM card used by the Mumbai gunmen.

Mukhtar Ahmed, 35, originally from Indian-controlled Kashmir, was detained on Friday in Delhi. He is being held with another man, Tauseef Rehman, 26, who was arrested in his home city of Calcutta on the same day. Â…

The arrests of the two men also provided the first indication that the Indian authorities, who have so far insisted that the Mumbai attacks were planned in and launched from Pakistan, believe the gunmen may have received help from inside India.

It is alleged that both men were in Calcutta in October when Mr Rehman used a dead relativeÂ’s identification to buy several SIM cards, some of which were later used by the Mumbai terrorists. Mr Rehman gave or sold the SIM cards to Mr Ahmed, police allege. Both men have been charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy.

Also at the link: Condi Rice affirms the plot was hatched in Pakistan. And also swiped from Hot Air: As might have been guessed, the US talked India down from an attack to "teach Pakistan a lesson:

The Pakistani High Commissioner in London, Wajid Shamsul Hassan, said he had learned from sources that India was about to launch a military strike to "teach Pakistan a lesson".

Speaking to Sky News, he said: "On the day of the Mumbai attacks, I got some information in London that India was going to act very drastically against Pakistan in retaliation to what happened."

The senior diplomat said had alerted the Pakistani government and President Asif Ali Zardari to the threat.

In turn, Mr Zardari urgently contacted high level British and American officials who intervened to calm the situation.

Who can say if this is a good thing or bad. Pakistan's behavior never seems to change.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (6)
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