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It was time for a new look. The previous one, based upon a theme called Tandil, was pretty cool and had a sort of Tangiers bazaar look to it plus a lot of jazzy operational do-dahs. But it just got to be too dark.
A lot of what is going on with the country seems to be not so hot. A lot of times after going through press outlets and blogs my mood would get kind of dark and it seemed unhelpful to have gloomy thoughts or even funny, satirical thoughts — about gloomy events — presented in a setting that ran to burnt orange and umber, whose brightest accent was a hazy gray or a radiation-yellow.
So I went shopping for a new Theme.
Unless you’re a blogging-platform veteran, for whom <? and ?> are as natural as breathing, shopping for a theme is similar to [I know this is going to sound silly but sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do] a young girl shopping for a new hat [I know. I know. I should be talking tattoos or piercings. But this is my blog and I have a right to my two sq. ft. of earth just like anybody else so I’m going to employ images that are germane to what you might call the Apollonian aspects of my experiences].
Will my mother like it? Will it look good if I get transported into a movie with Tommy Dee and Sandra Sands? If I get hit by a car and Keanu Reeves is the ambulance attendant will he keep it forever as a treasured memento? Will my dad say it makes me look cheap?
Well, anyway, the smart thing to do would have been to set up a local server here on my own machine so I could try out the various looks until I found one that I liked, and, when I did, get it tweaked just right before it went “live.” Yeah. Right. Doing things the smart way. Pull the other one.
So things will be a little chaotic for a while and if something disappears and then reappears in a different place do not adjust your set.
Well, that’s an explanation of sorts for the chaos. If you’re interested in the idea of blog themes you can go HERE. It is to me almost magical that in a matter of seconds a blog can be changed from a serene, studied mien to steam punk.
Thing is, each time you change themes you have to set some stuff up again, and it will take me a day or so to do (actually, figure out how to do) a few things, like fix the RSS subscribe button.
But please don’t desert me.
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It is kind of sad, but it is instructive. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Even if it is helping “his people” (which people he remembers when it suits him and assumes are , to coin a phrase, shiftless and lazy) he can’t help himself. It’s automatic. It’s like the infant’s mouth seeking the nipple. Here he is, raging!
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Skippy is a Black Man in America. This affords him special insights on just about everything including how to deal with the more dullish elements of local law enforcement.
“At the hospital, DC police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a ’special agent.’ He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.
It’s time for Skip Gates to give something back. I say once more: Where is Skippy Gates? Surely his encyclopedic knowledge and serene demeanor can resolve this!
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Lost in all the snarky disquisitions of the president’s remarks on Haiti — yeah, he said corpse — is the fact that he was praising America. This might be the first time that a president begins to appreciate the values of the nation he leads after he has taken the position of leading it.
But this uplifts me not because I believe that as soon as he leaves (left?) the podium somebody will remind him that America is not perfect and then we’re back to the remoulder-in-chief. But there is… dare I say it … hope.
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This is like a reporter living in a Normandy Beach house on June 6th, 1944, and not noticing something unusual going on.
I lived in Chicago for several years and one thing I can tell you: in that town Lech Walesa is both more popular and better known than a movie star. Just a little less popular than Pope John Paul II. I was living there in the 80’s when Walesa’s Solidarity got fired up.
There are Polish newspapers. There are Polish radio stations. There are Polish aldermen. There are Polish Congressmen. There is (or, at least, was) a high-rise building next to the expressway with a big sign on it: The Polish Union. At the time I lived there it was said that Chicago was the second-largest Polish city in the world, second only to Warsaw.
Unless Ed Driscoll is lying and cleverly fabricating evidence, complete with manufactured video footage, this is all those words which have been so over-used of late: stunning, startling, stupefying, surprising, and possibly even supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Walesa was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. If the Chicago media did not treat Walesa’s visit to Chicago, attendance at a Tea Party rally in single-digit weather, and endorsement of a candidate for governor as the biggest local story of the year it is not complacency. It is not bias. It is malice.
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Sure. We’ll obscure your face in the broadcast.
These people don’t keep promises. They don’t have to. They’re important people. They’re CNN.
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Hot Air has a post up contending that many of the President’s religious supporters are disappointed by him and offers a snapshot from a Newsweek article of one such disappointed religious leader.
I reached Jim Wallis, the progressive evangelical leader whose new book is called Rediscovering Values, as he was leaving for Davos. Wallis has been close to the president, advising him early on about whether to run and exchanging e-mails with him amid the Jeremiah Wright turmoil. “We need a leader,” Wallis told me, “to call not for incremental change but transformational politics. The president could do that. I think he still has it in him, but the American people don’t perceive it.”
Davos. Say, these sky pilots who are convinced that America is going to Hell (well, come to think of it, that is kind of in their bailiwick) in a hand basket seem to live a pretty up-trodden life worrying about the down-trodden. The aforementioned Wright retired to a nice pension and a free six-million dollar mansion.
But I digress. What struck me about the quote was the not for incremental change but transformational politics part. When did these guys eschew the Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s gig and start schmoozing with the Caesar crowd in the Congress Center in Switzerland? Well, if not Caesar, then Melinda French Gates and her hubby, Bill, and Andy Stern who runs the Service Employees International Union, which partners with ACORN on things like voter registration, and Vladimir Putin. If Putin doesn’t qualify as a Caesar I’m sure I can’t think of someone who does. One wonders if Wallis took the clunky old single-engine helicopter, or the deuce model.
And what’s with this transformational bit? Is that just to sound stirring, so as to increase the weekly rake off? Or is the guy serious? And, if serious, does he understand what it is he is whining about? Oh! He’s a progressive evangelical leader. That’s right. I forgot. Progressives don’t like space travel (or air travel for that matter unless it is they who are doing the traveling) and aren’t too crazy about cars either. Or manufacturing. Or free trade. Or personal autonomy. A little skeptical about having families. That’s why they call themselves progressives. And since he is a progressive he surely hasn’t considered the import of his remark. Because they don’t. When their schemes cause widespread suffering they just dust off their hands –wipe wipe– and say, Well, it really wasn’t given a fair shot. Let’s try that again somewhere else.
Because incremental really is the way to go unless you are starting from scratch. Or are willing to. I used to work on some old mansions in New Orleans. Incrementally. 150 year old cypress. You can’t get any more. Against the law. So incremental is the Way to Go. The least disruptive way. We are talking about a country which already has 300 million people in it who already have 300 million lives they are living.
We could incrementally fix the health care system.
- Eliminate the disparity between employers buying health insurance for their employees and people buying their own. That’s more fair.
- Tort reform. People like John Edwards don’t have to make millions a year because they have shiny hair and are good in front of a jury. If a doctor didn’t have to pay $300,000 a year for malpractice insurance he could charge a little less.
- There is no reason it should cost several billion to bring a drug to market.
- Let people choose the insurance company they want, rather than being stuck with the one or two in their state that the state legislature has loaded up with regulations put there to appease lobbyists.
Small steps. Big change when added together.
Transformational, on the other hand, is much more emotionally satisfying. Because it sounds so grand. Like the old Shirley Temple — Mickey Rooney movies: Let’s Put On a Show!
We’ll make everybody buy insurance whether they want to or not. That way, by having healthy 20 year olds paying top dollar for health insurance they don’t need, we can cover other people with their diseases that they had before they bought coverage.
We’ll have the IRS snooping into everybody’s bank account to see if they’re pulling their fair share.
We won’t just have Insurance Companies. We’ll have Exchanges! And they’ll add an entirely new level of presidents and vice-presidents and attorneys and accountants and PR people on top of the ones the insurance companies already have. And that will make things simpler!
If you don’t buy the insurance policy the Exchange says to buy from the company the Exchange says to buy it from the Exchange will fine you and maybe arrest you. Unless you can’t afford it. In which case you will apply to another level of bureaucracy created to interview you and investigate your finances and talk to your neighbors and then provide a supplement to buy the insurance that the Exchange is making you buy.
These rules will apply to everybody. Except unions. And three states. Transformational.
I have only lived through one transformational event: Hurricane Katrina. What fun! But I can think of others. Pearl Harbor. World War I. That was really transformational! Got rid of the ruling heads of Europe and put the Bolsheviks in power. Or how about the Black Plague? Transformational! 1492? Although that was bad. Started globalism. All progressives hate THAT.
Well, I have to be going. As I’m on the 42nd floor I think I will use the incremental stairs rather than the transformational window.
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(sigh) Here We Go Again…
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is beginning a major campaign against banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority applicants in lending, opening a new front in the Obama administration’s response to the foreclosure crisis.
Say! How does a bank or mortgage broker convince everybody that it’s not discriminating against minority applicants? Hmm. That’s a hard one. Let us ponder awhile.
I know! I know! I know! We can make lots of mortgage loans to minority people. Whether or not they can qualify for them or can afford them or are lying through their teeth on the mortgage application.
Then we sell all the risky ones to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. They’ll buy them ’cause they just got big blank checks for just this purpose. That we we can show we didn’t discriminate and when a lot of these mortgages go belly up we won’t be on the hook for them. The government will!
It’s nice to have a government that is up to its ears in debt and frantically trying to acquire more of it telling the banks how to do business with the advice and consent of Jesse Jackson.
One of these days they’re just going to let the little boy who cried
unnnhnn mmmnhnnn enh I cah caw aye eee uh eh!
hope he can hold out until the next thaw.
h/t Darleen at Protein Wisdom
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This is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.
–Barack Obama, State of the Union.
And he was right. Through a confidential source at the Richmond Times-Dispatch a first draft of the groundbreaking Health Care Bill for Dummies has surfaced and I must say now that I feel very guilty about complaining that the president was calling us a bunch of dummies because, again, he was right. With this new, simpler explanation now I understand it. For example:
There so many things man with nice voice need to explain gooder. Like, if some people still need health insurance, why not just give them insurance voucher, like housing voucher or food stamps? Why put entire U.S. medical system in Cuisinart and set on Liquefy?
I won’t detain you any longer because this thing is, to quote a president who was a little better at explaining things, beyond our poor power to add or detract. If you’re holding any hot liquids put them down because this one’s a laugher.
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If not, coming right on the heels of the skulduggery and royal huffiness over the health care boondoggle, then there won’t ever be a point at which the public says That’s far enough.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review.
In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch’s request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws.
Reading the article I felt like Joseph Welch must have when he said to Joseph McCarthy
Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
Have these people not the decency to read the document they have sworn to protect and defend? OK. Forget decency. How about A single lick of sense? I know that who wins football games is a big deal for some colleges because it means really serious money. That is their problem because that is a trap they have made for themselves. Institutions of higher learning really don’t have any business being farm teams for the National Football League. But they are. Institutions of higher learning really don’t have any business spending millions researching high school football players, writing elaborate agreements with them, and engaging in Byzantine arrangements with other schools to make sure that no school is getting an unfair advantage in the area of snaring likely stars for their football teams. But they do.
Dumb? Yeah. Silly? Yeah. Venal? Yeah. Discreditable? Yeah. Big money involved? Yeah.
But how for the love of Mike does all this have anything to do with the federal government? After all the hoopla has died and all the pom-poms put back and the coaches have flown home in their private jets (when Nick Sabin was at LSU he had a two-million-dollar salary) this is finally a game between school boys.
Is there any difference between our government not liking the way they pick bowl contestants and King George III getting mad at they way they ran a fox hunt? Or Saddam, Udai, and Qusai not liking the way a soccer match turned out?
Oh, but they will say, We have a stake in this because these schools get federal dollars.
Exactly! But they weren’t always federal dollars, were they? They once belonged to real people who probably had better uses for them than handing them out to colleges so the government could force the colleges to do things its way.
I never heard anybody mention the 10th Amendment until last year. Wasn’t exactly sure what it was and had to look it up. It’s the one which says that powers that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly grant the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people.
You might think the fact that this amendment is getting talked about would inform some people that perhaps it is time to try and act like they’re not completely beyond help. But they are behaving like the monkey in the monkey trap, where the monkey puts his greedy little paw inside a vase with a narrow neck to get some goodies and then can’t get his arm out because he won’t undo his fist and let the goodies drop. So he is stuck there until the hunter comes along and takes him back to be the guest of honor at a dinner.
The elements of American life are the goodies and they want to grab as much as they can and, once having grabbed, will never let go until they are forced to.
People of good sense will probably assume that I am making this up. I assure them I am not.
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