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If you have a problem with America, you have a problem with us.
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| Van Helsing (read all posts) First Order of Business for New Congress: Continue Wasting Our Money (January 7) Global Warming Freezes the Sea off Southern England (January 7) Queers Undermining Sanity (January 6) NBC Cancels Coulter (January 6) Obama's Terrorist Mentor Is Blogging at HuffPo (January 5) Al Franken to Be Handed Coleman's Senate Seat (January 5) |
| Robert Stacy McCain (read all posts) Democrats agree to seat Burris? (January 7) Breitbart's Big Hollywood debuts (January 6) Sonny Corleone in Gaza (January 5) |
| rwnadmin (read all posts) Introducing My New Blog, Right Wing Video. (January 7) Doing Radio At 10:30 PM EST & 4:07 PM EST (January 7) Conservative Grapevine/Right Wing Video Promo (January 7) Conservative Grapevine Promo (January 6) Suggest The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes For 2008 (January 6) Conservative Grapevine Promo (January 5) Week 1: RWN & CG Ad Contest (January 5) |
| Melissa Clouthier (read all posts) About Food Nazi Moms (January 6) The Travolta Tragedy (January 6) Vote Like You're ACORN (January 5) Senator Smalley And The Republican Problem He Reveals (January 5) |
| McQ (read all posts) Cheezy Tax Tricks: Look For New Taxes To Be Indirect And Regressive (January 6) |
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Our new 111th Congress is in session, and straight away it has taken bold action to show us how serious politicians were about all those promises of change. Its first order of business: a measure to suppress energy production in Wyoming, build an extravagant road to nowhere in Alaska, and blow $1 billion of our hard-earned money defending the interests of 500 salmon in California. The omnibus lands package includes:
• A provision that takes about 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 300 million barrels of oil out of production in Wyoming, according to the Bureau of Land Management. The energy resources walled off by this bill would nearly match the annual production levels of our two largest natural gas production states — Alaska and Texas.
• $3 million for a "road to nowhere" through a wildlife refuge in Alaska.
• $1 billion for a water project designed to save 500 salmon in California. At this price, each salmon would be worth far more than its weight in gold.
• $3.5 million to help celebrate the 450th birthday of St. Augustine Florida, in 2015.
• $4 million to protect livestock from wolves that Congress helped reintroduce into the wild.
• $250,000 to help bureaucrats decide how to designate Alexander Hamilton's boyhood home.
• $5 million on botanical gardens in Hawaii and Florida.
The actual change will come in the near future, when this ongoing profligate moonbattery presents us with a choice of national bankruptcy or Weimar Republic–style hyperinflation.
A more sensible generation would have dragged most of these clowns out of the Capitol by their ears for a tarring and feathering. But then, a more sensible generation never would have elected them in the first place.
On a tip from V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.
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Too bad CO2 doesn't really cause global warming. Then we could warm things up by cranking out more of it. But then, that might ruin the ice skating off the southern coast of England:
Temperatures plunged so low today that the sea actually began to freeze as Arctic conditions continued to grip the UK.In the exclusive enclave of Sandbanks in Poole, Dorset the surf had frozen solid as the waves lapping the shore began to frost over.
A half-mile stretch along the shoreline reaching about 20 yards out to sea is covered in ice on the expensive peninsula.
In southern England, normally immune to the worst of the cold weather in winter, temperatures fell as low as -12C — and the chill will go on for several days according to forecasters.
I'll save the trolls some trouble by noting that cold is weather, which is different from climate, and besides it's caused by global warming.
On a tip from mandy. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.
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A Democratic Party crisis averted?
Roland Burris, the man appointed to Barack Obama's Senate seat by embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, will be allowed to take the seat, according to the Associated Press. Spokespersons for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin are denying the report.Some people haven't gotten the memo, it seems. The Obama transition keeps "chugging down the tracks to Smoothville," as MK Ham said.
Burris showed up in Washington for yesterday's Senate swearing-in session, but was turned down by Senate Democrats who had previously vowed not to seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich. The governor has been charged with effectively trying to sell the seat and hearings are being held in Illinois over impeaching him. Now, however, the Senate Democrats "plan to embrace Roland Burris for President-elect Barack Obama's vacant seat," the AP reports.
(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)
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40) "Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security." -- Obama foreign policy adviser Richard Danzig
39) "I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg." -- "Journalist" Chris Matthews
38) "Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don't care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks." -- Democratic Congressman Alcee Hastings on Sarah Palin
37) "That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair and someone pointed a gun at him and he dove for the floor." -- A remark Mike Huckabee made while he was speaking at the NRA
36) "Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul." -- Mark Morford
35) "The broader question if Sarah Palin becomes vice president, will she be shortchanging her kids or will she be shortchanging the country?" -- NBC correspondent Amy Robach
34) "You got into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." -- Barack Obama
33) "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." -- George Bush
32) "Could I get an apology from the commissioner, in this day and time, you don't sit around a table where you have diversity and refer to a black hole. ...You shouldn't." -- Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price explains that black hole is a racist term.
31) "What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority." -- Seattle Times editorial writer Bruce Ramsey
30) "Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together." -- Matthew Yglesias
29) "To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh." -- Kathleen Parker
28) "(Sarah Palin's) greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman." -- Wendy Doniger at the Washington Post
27) "Why couldn't, uh, why couldn't have (Rush Limbaugh) croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?" -- Bill Maher
26) "We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals." -- Ted Turner
25) "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction." -- Michelle Obama
24) I realized almost within a minute, I don't have to apologize for my country when I'm abroad. I can say, "I belong to a great country," and there are Europeans who say, "Aren't you glad to be here in France where we don't have the racism you live under? Aren't you glad you're here in Britain?" I mean, I've been on the defensive so long. But this time I can say, "I am an American, look at us, look at what we've just achieved." -- Maya Angelou on Obama's election
23) "The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person..." -- Barack Obama
22) "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. 'Gangsta rap' didn't exist." -- Alicia Keys
21) "I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." -- Barack Obama
20) "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." -- Hillary Clinton makes up a ridiculous, untrue story about her trip to Bosnia.
19) "What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first." -- Michelle Obama
18) "Bad Mother Palin is blabbing about how her pregnant teenage daughter has made the right CHOICE!!! Well, first of all, Ms. Palin, I mean MRS. Palin, your slutty daughter wouldn't have a CHOICE to make at all, if you had your way!!! ...I can see that she gets off talking badly to Barack, and I am sure the "N" word is rollin around that empty head of hers somewhere." -- Roseanne Barr
17) "At least half of the [Ten] Commandments are stupid!" -- Bill Maher
16) "Should I be worried about being a slave, about being returned to slavery because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change?" -- Whoopi Goldberg to John McCain
15) "F*ck Jesus" -- ESPN anchorwoman Dana Jacobson
14) "I had a recurring fantasy in which I took (Rudy Giuliani) out during a press conference (it was nonlethal, just something that put him out of commission for a year or so), saving America from the horror of a President Giuliani. If that sounds like I had some trouble being 'objective,' I did." -- Newsweek reporter Michael Hastings
13) "I think that (the Iraqi insurgents are) patriots and that they don't like us because we've invaded their country and occupied it." -- Ted Turner
12) "...It seems this time around, the Bush family is trying the more subtle approach to open bloodshed: first create a crisis, then under the guise of addressing that crisis, overthrow democracy. Yes, it does sound terribly conspiracy-theory-esque when explained just this way. But what else does one call a criminal conspiracy to destroy Congressional powers permanently, alter Judicial powers permanently, and steal public funds?" -- Larisa Alexandrovna at the Huffington Post
11) "Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state." -- Naomi Wolf
10) "If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets." -- Erica Jong
9) "The argument has been made that one of the reasons that the US government assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. was because of his speech at Riverside Church in New York, I think it was Riverside Church, where he came out fully against the war in southeast Asia and fully against the policies that were being perpetuated against the American people in general. He left his little safe niche of, oh, well, he's a spokesman for the Negroes, and stepped outside that and started taking on greater issues and so the United States government said, well, it's time to get rid of this guy." -- Mike Malloy
8) "F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead." -- Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.
7) "Call me wacky, but hurray for the tiger that killed the kid who was... taunting him. Now, I know this is not right... but let's hear it for the wild... I loathe zoos. I'm still cheering the fact that some stingray whacked that Aussie pain in the *ss Steve Irwin." -- Air America radio host Lionel
6) "I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that." -- Stephen King
5) "White people shouldn't be allowed to vote. It's for the good of the country and for those who're bitter for a reason and armed because they're scared." -- Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jonathan Valania
4) "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration." -- Al Gore
3) "I'm glad [Al Qaeda terrorists] finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington." -- Democratic Congressman Rep. Wiliam Delanhunt to David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief of staff in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
2) "General Betray Us? Of course he has. MoveOn.org can hardly be expected to recycle its slogan from last September, when Gen. David Petraeus testified in support of escalating the U.S. war in Iraq, given the hysterical denunciations that worthy group received at the time. But it was right then--as it would be to repeat the charge now." -- Robert Scheer
1) "So, 4000 rubes are dead. Cry me the Tigris. Another 30,000 have been seriously wounded. Boo f*cking hoo. They got what they asked for--and cool robotic limbs, too....The nearly two-thirds of us who know this war is bullsh*t need to stop sucking off the troops. They get enough action raping female soldiers and sodomizing Iraqi detainees." -- Ian Murphy
Also see,
The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes Of 2007
The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes Of 2006
The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes For 2005
The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes For 2004
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Today, my new blog, Right Wing Video, is going live.
Right Wing Video is going to be the Conservative Grapevine of videos. All videos, all the time.
So, go take a look at Right Wing Video, bookmark it, email your friends about it, Twitter it, tell everybody at work, and then just sit back and enjoy all the vids.
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At 10:30 PM EST, I'm scheduled to be on the Scott Hennen show in North Dakota at 10:30 EST. You can listen to it live, here.
At 4:07 PM EST, I will be doing the Jaz McKay show.
Click on Stickam in the left corner to listen to the show.
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Back in October, I noted that the New York Times might be headed towards bankruptcy in the near future based on a post my pal Cara Ellison made back in August.
"Cara correctly predicted that the New York Times would be downgraded to junk, but is she correct that the paper is destined to collapse? Maybe. It certainly seems hard to see how a fading business with over a billion dollars of debt, in a dying industry, is going to keep its head above water when it only made 10 million dollars last quarter.As far as I'm concerned, the New York Times can't go belly-up fast enough to suit me -- and that goes for most of the rest of the mainstream media outlets out there."
According to Michael Hirschorn at the Atlantic, the Old Grey Lady's print edition could conceivably fold by this May,
Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business--like, this May?It's certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company's debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper's future doesn't look good.
"As part of our analysis of our uses of cash, we are evaluating future financing arrangements," the Times Company announced blandly in October, referring to the crunch it will face in May. "Based on the conversations we have had with lenders, we expect that we will be able to manage our debt and credit obligations as they mature." This prompted Henry Blodget, whose Web site, Silicon Alley Insider, has offered the smartest ongoing analysis of the company's travails, to write: "'We expect that we will be able to manage'? Translation: There's a possibility that we won't be able to manage."
Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon--sooner than most of us think--the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: "Fitch believes more newspapers and newsÂpaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010."The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press's ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there's no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience--not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.
A few honest questions; how many truly big stories does the average paper break in a year? How much of their reporting is humdrum and could be done by anybody with a phone? Why wouldn't a half-dozen "best-of-the-best" reporters from a few organizations do just as good a job covering stories overseas as 100 reporters from across the country? Isn't that the whole idea behind organizations like the Associated Press?
Most importantly, why should we expect an "online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience" when there's no need for it right now? The market is over saturated with deep pocketed newspapers providing that service, so it doesn't make much sense to try to compete with them. When there is a need for it, it'll be developed. That's how capitalism works with everything else and it's how it'll work with the media.
Long story, short; change is coming to the newspaper business, but there's no need to fear it. We do need a free press and so, even if many newspapers turn out to be too slowfooted to adapt to the changing environment, nimbler, better suited organizations will spring up to fill the gaps -- and quite frankly, the country will probably be better served by it.
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A lot of people scoff at that old saying, "Money can't buy you happiness." Granted, poverty won't buy you any happiness either, but money isn't a cure all for people's problems. The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich just end up with a different set of problems.
Poor Adolf Merckle could have told you all about that,
German billionaire Adolf Merckle, one of the richest men in the world, committed suicide Monday after his business empire got into trouble in the wake of the international financial crisis, Merckle's family said Tuesday in a statement.Merckle, 74, was hit by a train in the southwestern town of Ulm, police said.
His family said the economic crisis had "broken" Merckle.
He was number 94 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people. He had fallen from number 44 on the Forbes 2007 rich list as his fortune declined from $12.8 billion to $9.2 billion in 2008.
Did Merckle really kill himself solely over losing a few billion dollars? Maybe. After all, very few people are going to acquire that sort of money in the first place without being obsessive about fattening their bank account.
However, who knows what kind of health issues, family issues, and relationship issues he had -- and the stress involved with dealing with his financial problems may have been the last straw.
All that money, 9.2 billion dollars, and he thought life was so terrible he couldn't bear to continue living. People may believe that if they had that much money, they'd always have a smile on their face, but it just isn't so.
It's certainly better to be rich than poor, but money, in and of itself, isn't going to really put anyone on "Easy Street."
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Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:
A.V. Club: New, not improved: 14 disastrous product revampsCopious Dissent: Ann Coulter guilty, book review
Aim for Awesome: 9 things that will kill you quick.
Popoholic: Jenny McCarthy bikini pics
Also, you'll want to see these links on Right Wing Video,
Cute video of a cat and rats palling around -- really!Hamas Militants and Weapons in Urban Gaza Hit by Israel Air Force 6 Jan. 2009
Dog eats Bean Burrito in 1 second
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Ericka Anderson quotes Laura Bennett who says:
I just want to let the food Nazi moms in on what happens when your kids come to a house where junk food inhabits the pantry. They have no decision-making skills or sense of moderation when faced with the forbidden fruit roll-up. Like deprived animals, they are determined to consume the lifetime allotment of sugar they have been denied; all before pickup. I have seen one such child eat Swiss Miss Cocoa with a spoon directly out of the family-size container, only to move on to conquer a box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts....Sheltering children from every evil in the world does them a disservice; decision-making is a skill, learned with practice from the time they are small. At some point my boys will go out into the world and have to decide for themselves what is right and wrong. One would hope that by then they have ascertained that Krispy Kreme doughnuts are not really for breakfast...
Indeed.
Some of my kids friends have Food Nazi Moms and their reactions to Doritos is pathological. They shove into my pantry and consume chips and pretzels and Gold fish crackers like locusts.
How do you teach a child about good decision making if they never make decisions? Food is a dangerous thing to fetishize because people always have to eat. Obsessions around food rarely turn out well.
I remember a kid who ate nothing but McDonalds growing up. His mom wasn't particularly domestic and my mom clucked about the malnutrition. Admittedly, the kids in that family looked sickly. He's now a friend on Facebook and looks fit as a fiddle. He probably eats soy nuts and tofu sandwiches every day. I don't know. I haven't asked.
There have been patients who have the worst eating habits and need help. You wouldn't believe what some people view as "healthy" nutrition. Still, when giving advice, I try to be balanced. Perfection can be challenging to obtain--if it's even desirable or definable when it comes to food. All sorts of things thought to be healthy at one time are now considered off-limits (Wonderbread). Things that used to be considered unhealthy are now considered fine in moderation (coffee, wine, chocolate, fat).
Good rule: Eat food as close to the source and least handled as possible--salad, fruit, veggies, protein. The more processing, the less healthy. Still, one of the joys of life is having complex taste buds that can be delighted with something as bad for you as a Dorito or piece of chocolate cake. If 90% of person's diet is healthy, 10% indulgence can make for balanced fun. And a child raised in a tolerant environment will be less likely to be obsessed and have issues as an adult.
Aside: Laura also mentions TV, computers, pop culture, etc. Nazis. Protection from a certain amount of "junk food for the mind" is also helpful, but obsession creates obsession. Kids are resourceful and the forbidden fruit tastes sweetest. I go for more of the "poison the pot" school of thought. That is, sit with them during Hannah Montana, say, and dissect in excruciating detail the superficiality, narcissism, and wrongness of some of the things therein. It sucks the joy right out of the experience to actually "see" what you're watching. The other benign stuff, teach them moderation.
Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com
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