Sunday Tree

"What are Those Picnic Tables Doing?"

I was told that spring will see another brood of Adirondack chairs...

Sunday Walk

Anne Wortham

I feel uncertain as to this letter's provenance...I snopsed it but it did not turn up.

Update: There is an interview of her by Bill Moyers that I wish I could view. It is mentioned in an interesting post here, and the comments are also worth reading.

(Mr. Moyers has a history of taking public funds for his work and then retaining the rights to profit from the material long afterwards. I suspect the interview probably falls into that category and his lawyers pulled it, but I don't know...

"In his dual roles as head of the $75 million Florence and John Schumann Foundation and PBS Pontificator-in-Chief, Moyers regularly interviews the people he funds (conflict of interest). He has gotten rich at "the public trough," producing shows partially financed by taxpayers and lining his pockets with the royalties (profiteering). And while he demands strict disclosure of others in the public sector, Moyers rarely tells his viewers when his interview subjects are the recipients of his foundation's grants or discloses details of his own financial relationship with public broadcasting."

This is also interesting regarding Moyers.)

I will do the ol' copy and paste with link:

"Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival – all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration – political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead – and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine – what little there is left – for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

November 6, 2008

Anne Wortham [send her mail] is an individualist liberal who happens to be black and American."

Judge Napolitano

Is a good man.

Here is a Reason interview.

His book "A Nation of Sheep" and Levin's should be acquired.

Can't wait to see his reactions to B Hussein.

Wow

That's an incredible clock.

Go over to Watchismo Times to read about it...

CLOCK WISE - Ulysse Nardin Planet Earth Desk Clock

Cavuto Rocks

This is entertaining, via YidwithLid and DirectorBlue:

Movie Plot Generator

via Generatorblog a device to generate movie plots.

It had this one when I clicked over:

This March at a cinema near you . From the controversial Artist Bud Light who was the main inspiration for the motion picture "The Day the World Said Soldier " and the other worldly "Searching for Toyko ", the motion picture that critics are calling "very upsetting ".

Space Panther

He was a chiseled retired astronaut, who had a a phobia of snakes and an ability to heal the sick. She was a towering mom who bungie jumped from bridges and wanted the family life that THEY said she could never have. Together they fought fires in New York. Fighting wrong-doers and protecting the American Dream.

Mark Bowden on Pinch

I love Bowden's work. This piece on Pinch in Vanity Fair, however...

There is an elephant in the room, so to speak. A great bloated flatulent elephant which Bowden refuses to acknowledge...I kept reading...to the end...and Bowden had given in...

Iowahawk

is on the short list for funniest bastard ever.

He managed to get another JournoList thread...4 reals!

Holy Crap

I apologize for the profanity of late...

But I must put my pitchfork down to laugh!!!:

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

His "administration" is certainly between me and a pitchfork...does that make me a banker?

Buy All the Guns You Can

almost more importantly, buy all the ammo you can...

In Binghamton they waited for it to be safe to enter the zone:

The Cops up there suck (the people suck more though...can't we all guess by now that you run AT the stupid geek with the gun? Dozens hide while loser wanders? WTF?):

Thirty-seven people in all made it out of the building, including 26 who hid in the boiler room in the basement, cowering there for three hours while police methodically searched the building and tried to determine whether the gunman was still alive and whether he was holding any hostages, Zikuski said. Those in the basement stayed in contact with police by cell phone, switching from one phone to another when their batteries ran out, Zikuski said. Others hid in closets and under desks.

Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers. They then spent two hours searching the building.

Remember now:Police said they arrived within two minutes.

I'm sorry but unless one of the Officers responds in the comments I must call: THE COPS WERE FUCKING PUSSIES!!

BINGHAMTON COPS ARE FUCKING PUSSIES!!

Now I know that cannot be the case. So I welcome input from anywhere on an anonymous basis regarding any information period.

It's important.

That looks like crap. I know those officers must not have behaved that way.

I suspect the newspapers and the PD management are covering up like crazy. I also know no one will see this...but I will relay info if I receive it...

Let's get the Tea Parties rolling on many levels...

Alright..I will admit...this is called baiting...

Harold Koh

Obama supreme court candidate.

Disgusting, but this is what the people chose.

More here.

Here is only part of an interview with Richard Epstein which I look forward to watching.

Instapundit links to Ted Olson defending Koh but I am not won over in the least. The Republicans have blown SCOTUS nominations badly in the past out of some sad desire to curry favor with the left. When the left picks someone far left they then write it off as only reasonable all things considered. So we are left, (no pun intended) with a bench that is one vote shy of voting away the 2nd amendment and 5-4 in favor of affirming the Government stealing private property for tax profit and the benefit of campaign contributors who want the land as in Kelo.

W actually put in some good Judges...but the left fought tooth and nail shamelessly...Now they already have the "community activism" in place to thwart the same play by conservatives.

Disgusting.

Ian Mcewan

Ouch. I enjoyed a profile of him in the New Yorker and recalled enjoying his work as I read it in Granta years ago...Yeeeeaaars ago it seems.

I mentioned watching "Atonement".

This passage from the New Yorker piece smacked of Vonnegut and Dangerfield (Greg is Mr. Mcewan's son):

'Galen Strawson, a philosopher who lives in Oxford, said that the breakup freed McEwan to “become radically more scientific than any one of us.” McEwan’s next novel was “Enduring Love.” Whereas in “Black Dogs” the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose’s logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remembers that not every reader accepted the point: “Poor Greg had to study ‘Enduring Love’ in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, ‘Well, I think Clarissa’s got everything wrong.’ He got a D. The teacher didn’t care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too ‘male’ in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing.”'

Is Fox Fisking Itself?

Michael Yon links to a Fox piece on the Mexican-U.S. gun canard. I was unhappy with the pathetic Greta Van Susteren interview...

It seems so are some at Fox:

There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:

It's just not true.

In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

Hmmm...I think I was disgusted at Greta's failure to pursue that:

"He does say that "90 to 95" percent of the "traceable" guns are "traced" back to the states. Need I fisk that?"