Here’s another October Surprise! Says the BBC:
A new book by a former US official says President Bush’s top political advisers privately ridiculed evangelical leaders, while publicly embracing them.
David Kuo says the aides recognised the religious leaders’ political use in securing election victories.
The White House has denied the claims by Mr Kuo, a former official in the Faith-Based Initiatives programme.
….The former official alleges senior aides to the president described the evangelical leaders in private as “nuts” and “goofy”, while acknowledging their political use in securing election wins.
It’s desperation time in Democrat land. And it just shows what they think of the religious right, that their surprises these days are always aimed at that group. They think that whole faction is populated by gullible morons.
Well, the new PrBoom is out, which finally picks up the new screen resolution features I’ve had in the Launcher for some time.
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Hard for me to recommend you to people when you do this for a period of minutes, idiots.
Peter King advises trading for 10 players in fantasy football, and I have two of them: #4 Marques Colston, and #10 Amani Toomer. Both are in my lineup for this week, in fact, being tied for my second-highest scorer outside of kickers and defenses.
And the idiot of the day award goes to… Kevin Garnett!
Minnesota forward Kevin Garnett threw out the word “communism” to describe the new crackdown on decorum. “To the fact that you can’t really speak to the ref and the refs don’t want to hear it, that’s almost like communism,” Garnett told Minneapolis reporters. “That’s like Castro, you know what I’m saying?”
While I am glad to hear he disapproves of Castro and Commies, to compare brutal Communist oppression with an NBA league policy is just dumb.
A North Korean soldier reacts to a photographer today on a passing boat, on the waterfront at the North Korean town of Sinuiju, opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong. (AP)
Random thought: I’d support the US ending the six-party talks with the DPRK, in favor of bilateral talks, under one condition: Pyongyang must be occupied by US troops after the destruction of the Juche/Communist regime there.
Noted academic N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard is pressing the Pigou Club, his name for a list of people who have publically called for punitive taxation on oil, ‘carbon’, or things like that. His justification is entirely academic: If we knew the ‘cost to society’ of the use of oil, then we could raise taxes by the amount needed to neutralize exactly that cost, and therefore this tax hike would actually be positive for the economy and society, because the revenue could be used to pay that cost.
Of course, the trick is that we don’t know such costs, and on top of that, we already collect a couple trillion dollars every year in federal taxes alone here in the US. Apparently they don’t need more taxes in Canada either, because Terence Cocoran is creating the NoPigou Club in the National Post, and lists good reasons for it:
There is no end to the planning mayhem that could be generated once Pigovian taxes become the economic norm. Taxes on cigarettes have risen hundreds of per cent over the years, in part to offset the alleged externality of rising costs of treating cancer and other diseases caused by smoking. Still people smoke. Anything that can be politically whipped up into an unwanted development — taxes on food to reduce obesity, taxes on alcohol to reduce alcoholism, taxes on babies to reduce population growth — or subsidies on babies to boost population.
There’s nothing new in Pigou, no matter how he’s dressed up by Prof. Mankiw.
Mankiw is right on a lot of things; that’s why I read his site. But I think he’s showing an academic bent on this issue by pressing this correct-in-theory but unnecessary-in-practice idea, unfortunately for the country.
Michelle Malkin (see, I told you I like a lot of what she writes) has some across some great news in USA Today:
A Florida woman has been awarded $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit against a Louisiana woman who posted messages on the Internet accusing her of being a “crook,” a “con artist” and a “fraud.”
….Scheff says she wanted to make a point to those who unfairly criticize others on the Internet. “I’m sure (Bock) doesn’t have $1 million, let alone $11 million, but the message is strong and clear,” Scheff says. “People are using the Internet to destroy people they don’t like, and you can’t do that.”
Some people forget that you’re still dealing with real people on the other end, when you’re on the Internet. It’s high time the people who get out of hand, started to pay.
Having a friend who was in Seoul recently to visit family, and was in Japan when the nuclear test was announced, I quickly mailed him to ask for his thoughts on the matter.
He assures me that the situation is not as bad as I think. I’ll hit a few highlights, not wanting to ask his permission to just paste in hunks of the email. First off, he says Seoul is not in as much conventional danger as I think, due to advances in counterartillery technology. I’m very glad to hear that.
Second, he suggests the nuclear test may have been faked, given that if the test was real, the evidence shows it to be smaller than even the bombs used in World War II. Or if it wasn’t fake, then perhaps they’re just so short on fissile material that they had to conserve like crazy. Either explanation would be good news.
Third, he suggests that the test was a political failure. It didn’t prevent an ROK politician from becoming the next UN Secretary-General, it won’t cause the Japanese people to turn back from their increasingly tough course led by PM Shinzo (who’s showing himself even tougher than Koizumi so far), and even the ROK popular reaction isn’t what the DPRK could have hoped. Failure for the bad guys is great, of course.
So if my friend is right, the situation is bad, but not Cuban Missile Crisis bad. Here’s hoping.