CNN: Hey, Why Not Try To Link Our Discredited "Political Hate Caused The Giffords Shooting" Narrative To The Hate Speech of the 60s?
— Ace

Because, I guess, in their view, Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted it that way.

Casey Hayden knows something about hate.

She's seen how hateful words can cause people to demonize their political foes, grab guns and commit murder.

She's a survivor of one of the most brutal episodes of the civil rights movement.

Long before the January 8 shootings in Tucson, Arizona, sparked debate about the role of heated rhetoric, Hayden and other civil rights veterans worried about the nation's recent political tone -- and what it might wreak...

Long before -- in fact, almost exactly two years before Tucson, the left began worrying about overheated rhetoric and violence.

They also worried from 1992-2000. They seem to have put these concerns aside during a period of time that coincided, coincidentally coincided, with the presidency of George W. Bush, a period when no lesser light than the former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore thundered that Bush "lied us into war." Literally shouted that the current president had lied us into war.

There appears to be no direct evidence that politics motivated Jared Lee Loughner, the man accused of killing six people and wounding 13 -- including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Internet postings attributed to Loughner show what one expert called "classic signs of psychosis."

Appears? No direct evidence? There's also no indirect evidence; why caveat it like that? In fact, there is a lot of direct, first-hand witness evidence and direct, perpetrator's-writings evidence against this claim.

Does CNN mention that? No, of course not. Keep the Narrative alive, even if on life-support, at all costs.

Thanks to Ben.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (755)
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Communicating with Krugman on Health Care Costs
— Geoff

Paul Krugman certainly made an idiot of himself last week, when he should have either focused on his supposed area of expertise (SAoE), or on grieving for the victims in Tucson. Or both. Instead........well, you know.

So it's somewhat refreshing to find him a little closer to his SAoE this morning, where we observe him writing a carefully reasoned, well supported, critique of the GOP's claims about health care costs. Hahahaha!! Like that'll happen. No, here's what he really wrote:

My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account.

Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when weÂ’ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick.

Now, I read that with an immense sense of confusion, but also a sense of relief. Because I finally see what the problem is: we haven't presented our case to Dr. Krugman using embarrassingly trite analogies - analogies so feeble and so misleading that they represent an insult to taxpayer and patient alike. Yes, it's now clear that Dr. Krugman will never understand budgets and simple math with resorting to analogies so insipid and pedestrian as to be below the ken of almost all pulse-bearing mammals.

So. Our bad. Ima fix it, but first let's get back to Dr. Krugman: more...

Posted by: Geoff at 07:55 AM | Comments (282)
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Are You Able to Accept Blows Without Retaliating?
— Dave in Texas

That was the question King asked of himself and those who stood with him in Birmingham.

In "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", King sought to respond to criticisms from fellow clergymen regarding their active demonstrations for Civil Rights in Alabama in the 60s.

I'm just a moron in Texas, but for what it's worth, I lived in Alabama until 1969, when one month before my tenth birthday we moved to Texas. I saw many of these things through a kid's eyes. There were questions I asked my father that had no good answers.

Anyway, I have no remarkable insights, but I have gleaned a few things from King's letter.

more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 07:29 AM | Comments (114)
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Tea Party Delenda Est [Andy]
— Open Blogger

The ridiculous attempts by the MFM and the left (BIRM) to link the tea party movement to the paranoid schizophrenic Tucson shooter, in retrospect, shouldn't come as any surprise. From the second it appeared that Rick Santelli's "shot heard 'round the world" (can I still say that?) might just have awakened a sleeping giant that would wrest power away from the statists in D.C., the effort to smother this grassroots movement in the crib (too violent?) has been increasingly strident.

When people were shouting "STOP!" to their representatives regarding Obamacare at town hall meetings across the country, the Speaker of the House engaged in this classic piece of slander with a healthy dose of projection thrown in:

I think there are AstroTurf — you be the judge, carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.

This initiative is funded by the high end. We call it "Astroturf," it's not really a grass roots movement. It's AstroTurf by some of the wealthiest people of America.

And it wasn't just Pelosi. The president's own press secretary made the same "astroturf" accusation and the usual suspects on the left talked about how awful it was that the unwashed masses actually had the gall to show up at town hall meetings and express their opinions. Their preferred option where the citizenry just lies back and thinks of England wasn't working this time.

Then Massachausetts elected Scott Brown. The left pulled out all manner of parliamentary tricks to ram Obamacare down our throats despite the fact that Brown's election was a loud "NO!" vote on it from a state that had already implemented version 1.0.

Time to play the race card.

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis was taunted by tea partiers who chanted n***** at least 15 times, according to the Associated Press ... confirmed by Lewis spokeswoman Brenda Jones and Democratic Rep. Andre Carson, who was walking with Lewis. "It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis," said Carson, a former police officer. "He said it reminded him of another time."

Many cameras were present when San Fran Nan and the Congressional Black Caucus trolled through the crowd on the way to casting their "historic" vote. However, no one (including the CBC members who were filming) apparently managed to capture any of these slurs, not a single one, and Andrew Breitbart's offer of a $100,000 reward for footage went unclaimed.

Despite the fact that we passed the bill so now we could find out what was in it, the noise didn't subside. Worse, the left's time-honored tradition of shouting "RACIST!" to shut its opponents up was ineffective. Time for them to move on to mockery. And who better to pull this one off than the Condescender-in-Chief:

I've been a little amused over the past couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes ...you would think they would be saying "thank you."

Yeah, right. I can't imagine why people whose main concern is about the crushing debt burden facing their children and grandchildren weren't falling at Obama's feet thanking him for a couple of tanks of gas worth of a tax cut.

You know the rest of the story ... an historic refudiation of the left in the November elections that was orchestrated entirely from Sarah Palin's fully armed and operational battle station Facebook page (to hear them tell it).

The left's calls for "civility" in the wake of the Tucson shootings are just their latest attempt to tell people opposed to their policies to shut up. Nothing more, nothing less.

I favor Don Surber's response. Bite me!

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:12 AM | Comments (65)
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China: It's on like Donkey Kong!
— Monty

[Edit: It is rude to refer to China's president as "Jintao" since that is his given name; "Hu" is the family name. Thanks to Lou in the comments for pointing that out.]

China's President Hu Jintao announces that the USD's status as the default world reserve currency is a "product of the past". Jintao Hu also announced his intention to make the Renminbi (Yuan) a bigger player in the world currency markets.

I see this as a fairly stupid move on JintaoHu's part. The Yuan is worthless as a reserve currency because no one outside of China uses it (and China treats "domestic" Yuan differently than "international" Yuan, which is mainly an electronic bookmark and not a currency per se). And China is trying to flex their financial muscles at a time when much of their own strength is illusory.

JintaoHu's main point may be that while China currently dances to the USD tune -- they buy hundreds of billions worth of USD-denominated Treasuries, after all -- they are not happy about it and do not plan to continue with the status quo forever. China has apparently had enough of Obama's pissing and moaning about the exchange rate, Chinese currency manipulation, and the trade deficit, so they're serving notice that the USD's days as the world's reserve currency are numbered. (This is probably true, though the Yuan certainly won't be the currency to displace it.) China's long-term financial outlook is even bleaker than our own, and the markets know that full well. But China is in the midst of a sugar high, and their dreams of an ascendant Middle Kingdom (never very far below the surface) are bubbling up once again.

Add to that the fact that China is still run by a bunch of authoritarian Communists, and you see why investors might be a little suspicious of China's motives.

Posted by: Monty at 06:02 AM | Comments (93)
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Top Headline Comments 1-17-11
— Gabriel Malor

You shut your mouth when you're talking to me.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:46 AM | Comments (148)
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Overnight Open Thread - The Pain Issue [Rajiv Vindaloo]
— Open Blogger

In 2007, a crap writing unit was recruited to fill space by a milblogger for skills they didn't possess. These men promptly escaped from the minimum-security moronsphere to the blogging underground. Today, still read by absolutely nobody, they survive as jokesters of misfortune. If you need an emergency ONT, if no one else will help (and they won't), and if they're semi-sober but still have a couple of Adderall pills left over, maybe you can hire ... The L-Team.

Tonight's theme.

How Long Will This Be Going On?

Last night, Genghis kicked off with a video of the obviously-picked-the-name-for-the-free-blog-publicity band Ace on the Midnight Special. He slyly implied that the video was somehow painful to watch.

I see his embed and raise him one big-ass red fedora.

This man has been married for 49 years. To a woman.

Underneath this little flippy thingy here: More from the land of travails, malaise and woe. (I use the word "malaise" as it is supposedly the mating call of the Great Caddell.) more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:51 PM | Comments (404)
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Sunday Playoff Thread BUMPED for Jets/Pats
— Dave in Texas

Jets up 7-3.

Also why is Belichik wearing a Darth Maul hoodie?

Hey, remember when the Pats redefined "home field advantage"?

more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 01:54 PM | Comments (1044)
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Open Thread: BevShots Creates Art With Booze
— rdbrewer

BUMPED: NEW AND IMPROVED! Now includes tequila and white Russian!

Salute!

If you have often wondered what exactly lies within the various concoctions that make our favourite alcoholic drinks, then here is your answer.
These incredible pictures show popular cocktails magnified up to 1,000 times under a high-tech laboratory microscope.

Produced by U.S. firm Bevshots, they reveal the incredible molecules and kaleidoscopic colours created by the different combinations.

Capturing the constituent parts of favourite drinks such as vodka, pina colada and Chablis, the pictures were taken in Florida State University's chemistry department.

'What you can see in the magnified pictures are the crystalised carbohydrates that have become sugars and glucose,' explained Bevshots founder Lester Hutt.
'Each image was created by using a pipette of each particular drink and squeezing a crop onto a slide.

'Then the droplets are allowed to dry out and then once they have the slide is placed under the microscope and a picture taken.'

That one is Australian pale lager. Beautiful! Below the fold are several others. In no particular order, they are whiskey, vodka, vodka tonic, scotch, sake, rum & coke, red wine, margarita, Irish stout, German pilsner, martini, daiquiri, tequila, and white Russian. Test your skillz. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 12:47 PM | Comments (70)
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Earthquake Deaths Linked To Corruption
— LauraW

Countries that are very corrupt allow for the most construction fraud, which is difficult to see when the buildings are being built but becomes obvious when the Earth shakes.

The authors determined that there is roughly a one-to-one relationship between a nations' wealth and its perceived level of corruption. "Less wealthy nations are the most corrupt," said Bilham, also a fellow in the CU-Boulder based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. "We found that fully 83 percent of all deaths from earthquakes in the last 30 years have occurred in nations where corruption is both widespread and worse than expected."

Relative wealth is the most obvious parameter that influences a country's corruption, according to the authors. Bilham and Ambraseys chose the gross national income per capita to compare the relative wealth of the countries. High wealth is strongly linked to countries with a stable government conducive to the rule of law, they said.

Emphasis me.

Wow.
WOW.
These scientists, I tells ya. What will they discover next?

Being poor kind of sucks, doesn't it? Huh. Go figure.

I pose to you that makes people (in the aggregate) more slithery than they ordinarily would be if they were more comfortable and didn't have to cut corners. And being poor makes you less able to protect yourself when things go awry, as they always occasionally must.

Not exactly a chicken-or-the-egg type puzzle, is it?

Where the rule of law protects citizens and allows us to become wealthy, and to therefore increase the wealth of the nation, we are better able to not only withstand adversity personally and as a group, but to prevent it in the first place.

And are more likely to demand that our builders (and most others we do business with) do the right thing. Because we are willing and able to pay for it (in the aggregate).

Lots of rich people propagating wealth = we are all better off

Holy Fucking Shit. Science.

This isn't just true about earthquake fatalities of course. There's a larger political point about econ policies which actively thwart wealth creation in the name of 'economic justice.'

Somebody is going to pay for those retarded policies in a million other little surprising and painful ways- I guess we already are, actually- and it won't be the Rockefellers.

Posted by: LauraW at 12:20 PM | Comments (45)
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