We Had All The Good Songs

As Tom Lehrer deftly pointed out, songs don't win battles. They might make you feel better, though. Here are two musical takes on the debt ceiling, if we apply the term "musical" somewhat broadly.

The Debt Ceiling Rap


You're Gonna Pay


There are more at Powerline. Search with "powerlineprize" tag.

In Which I Turn Against Paul Ryan

Bill Kristol may be touting him for President, but I can never support a candidate who favors repeal of the Cover the Moon with Yogurt Bill. Most cultured bill to come out of Washington in years.

NHS Turns to Ice Floes for Elder Care

Cost containment, National Health Service Style? Mandatory 4-month waiting periods, so the sick and elderly will go to private services or to glory, makes no never mind to the system.

Since 2006, NHS patients who need routine elective care have had the right to choose between at least four hospitals including privately-run units. But there have been claims that trusts, the local bodies that pay for treatment, restrict choice and favour some hospitals to balance their books. The panel investigated whether the allegations were true.
It found “many examples of PCTs excessively constraining patients’ ability to choose, and providers’ ability to offer routine elective care services”.
Managers restricted GPs’ ability to refer patients to some hospitals by imposing “caps” on the number a provider would be paid to treat and by imposing minimum waiting times, its report said.
Under government targets, patients should be treated within 18 weeks of referral by a GP. But even when surgeons could see them far sooner, the study found that some trusts made hospitals wait as long as 15 weeks before operating.
[snip]
Some managers insisted that longer waiting times would lead to overall savings as “experience suggests that if patients wait longer then some will remove themselves from the list”. Interpreting this statement, the panel noted: “We understand that patients will 'remove themselves from the waiting list’ either by dying or by paying for their own treatment at private sector providers.

There's also this little bit, emphasis added:

The tactic forced private hospitals, which were more likely to be able to treat patients quickly, to operate as slowly as overcrowded NHS units in an “unfortunate levelling down." 

By the way, here's a list of all the operations and treatments you may not have under the NHS: cost containment, you know.

What I like is that you can't have any treatments until you are in excruciating pain, almost blind, or on the point of death. At which point, presumably, you wait four months to see if you'll die or seek care elsewhere.

A thought: since the aim of this fully developed and "model" public healthcare system turns out to be getting people into private health-care, couldn't we just cut out the middle-man and keep our private system?

ObamaHood

ObamaHood by Mr. Fish, curtsy: Hanc Aquam

Read The Whole Thing

Mr. W. was telling me about this (literally) Clintonian argument that the President can simply ignore the debt ceiling on 14th amendment grounds.

The provision in question, Section 4 of the amendment, was meant to ensure the payment of Union debts after the Civil War and to disavow Confederate ones. But it was written in broader terms.
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion,” the critical sentence says, “shall not be questioned.” 

Clinton says were he in Obama's shoes, he'd simply ignore the ceiling and the Congress & dare the courts to come after him. Highly dubious proposition in the first place, but before he gets carried away with the notion that Congress can be bypassed on this question, Mr. Obama should perhaps be warned to read on to the next section of the amendment:

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Nice try.

She Had Me At "Heh"

ninme knows what I like. Sam Seaborn would never have let Obama give last night's speech:


Attacking people with private jets?

Sounds like a high school girl

And:

the top 1 percent of wage earners in this country pay for 22 percent of this country. Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it.

Harry Reid Is The Problem

Debt Ceiling negotiations aside, on budget questions generally, why is no heat being focused on Harry Reid? (Mr. W. is shooting eye daggers at you, TPaw, for taking the cheap shot that President "isn't leading," when he's the Chief Executive, not the Legislator-in-Chief.)

In 1974, Congress passed the Congressional Budget & Impoundment Control Act, which obligates the President to propose and Congress to pass a budget each year. Congress has flagrantly failed to follow its own law for two years now, the Dems refusing obey the law presumably because they'd rather not put on paper for all to see how high they wish to raise taxes.

The President proposed a budget (although his own party squealed so much that a month later in his GWU speech, he walked away from it). The House has done its part; it passed a budget earlier this year.

The hold-up is Harry Reid's Senate, which voted down the House budget, the President's budget, and I think other budgets as well, though I am too lazy to look that up. The person who is "failing to lead" on the budget is Harry Reid. Where is his plan? How many years can the Senate simply ignore the law with no penalty? Which other laws is Congress permitted to simply ignore?

The Big Lug-In-Chief

If you want a rundown on everything the President said last night that wasn't so, go here. I simply notice that the President does not seem to understand the meaning of the word, "President."

1. He addressed the nation for the sole purpose of denouncing Republicans. The President, qua President, is supposed to represent all the people. Yes, he's also the symbolic head of his party, but he should save the partisan attacks for Party venues like fundraisers and conventions. A speech to the nation is supposed to be given on behalf of the entire nation, in the name of the entire nation, and appeal to the entire nation. There is no right to attack the GOP from the White House (a principle to which he paid lip-service, even while violating it with impunity). If he cares to resign and run the DNC, let him be my guest, but that display last night was unworthy of the office and made him --and the nation itself-- look small. (Steve Hayward calls it possibly the most squalid presidential speech ever, though not without competition.)

2. Nobody needs the President to be involved in these negotiations at all, as Boehner's rebuttal makes clear. The House has a bill, the Senate will probably pass it, why is this Big Lug involved? The power of the purse belongs to Congress, and it's Congress' job to pass a budget, which he can then either sign or veto. He's the Chief Executive, not a legislator, as Mr. W. sighs every night lately.

Moreover, Obama is actively obstructing the process and seems to be out of his league. He had a deal with the GOP, and then backtracked on his agreement. He played heavy-handed on Friday with his press conference. He rejected the bi-partisan Reid-Boehner-McConnell offer yesterday.

May I respectfully suggest the President go play golf for a few days?

Update: I got distracted and forgot my main point! 3. On a regular basis the President reveals that he does not understand the difference between governing a people and ruling them. He conceives himself as our ruler, not as one who governs us by our consent. Witness little remarks like these before La Raza the other day:

Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you.

Yes, he immediately added "But that's not how the system works," but small comfort in that if you ask me. That's the kind of thing you might sigh to your wife, but not ever express in public unless you have seriously misconceived your role. We're supposed to all understand that power is dangerous and to be wielded conservatively, and want to be restrained. Frustration is one thing; indulging yourself in a lot of Walter Mittying about if you ruled the world is beneath the President of the United States and reveals an inner impulse the exact opposite of Lincoln's "as I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master, that is my idea of democracy."

Bill Kristol noted the same thing in last night's address. Commenting on these lines of the President

Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling – a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.

Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up.

 Kristol remarks:

These “people outside of Washington” are not little children being lectured on an obscure subject by a worldly adult. These people outside Washington are ... citizens. Judging by the polls, most of us have opinions about whether, and under what conditions, the debt ceiling should be raised. We don’t seem to be as ignorant as Obama thinks we are of the term or concept of a debt ceiling. But the president assumes we’ve never bothered our pretty little heads about such a thing.

Obama thinks he's here to rule over us little people, not to preside over the government of free and equal citzens. That's what I mean when I say he doesn't understand the meaning of the word, "President."

Help For Haiti Paved With Good Intentions

Curtsy to Brett McS for sending me this little piece about the lessons kind-hearted Westerners learn when trying to help Haitians.

Anthony Bourdain, for example, who thought he'd do something nice for the locals while he was filming an episode of his show there:
Bourdain thinks of a way to do something nice for everyone. Realizing that in this one sitting, he is eating a quantity of food that would last most Haitians three days, he buys out the remaining food from the vendor and gives it away to locals.
Nice gesture! Except that something goes wrong. Once the word spreads about the free food — word-of-mouth in Haiti is faster than Facebook chat — people start pouring in. Lines form and get long. Disorder ensues. Some people step forward to keep order. They bring belts and start hitting. The entire scene becomes very unpleasant for everyone — and the viewer gets the sense that it is worse than we are shown.
Here is the scene.
Bourdain correctly draws the lesson that the solutions to the problem of poverty here are more complex than it would appear at first glance. Good intentions go awry.

I've heretofore not thought much of Sean Penn, but sounds like the ol' boy might be learning something, and God bless 'im for this:

By the time the show was made, the glamour of the postearthquake onslaught of American visitors seeking to help had vanished. One who remains is actor Sean Penn. Although he's known as a Hollywood lefty, he's actually living there, chugging up and down the hills of a shanty town, unshaven and disheveled, being what he calls a "functionary" and getting stuff for people who need it. He had no easy answers, and he had sharp words for American donors who think that dumping money into new projects is going to help anyone.

Indeed, many Western notions fade to ashes in Haiti:

the earthquake destroyed most homes. If this had been the United States, this earthquake would not have caused the same level of damage. This led many outsiders to think that somehow the absence of building codes was the core of the problem, and hence the solution is more imposition of government control.
But the reality shows that this building-code notion is some sort of joke. The very idea that a government could somehow go around beating up people who provide shelter for themselves while failing to obey the central plan is simply laughable. Coercion of this sort would bring about no positive results and lead only to vast corruption, violence, and homelessness.

There follows a little lesson on the "capital" part of capitalism, because actually Haitians are as entrepreneurial and enterprising as anyone else. The problem is that the government doesn't permit capital to accumulate, and therefore all business is day-to-day. That's the best part of the piece.

The conclusion is a little much for me, in that it lumps together a lot of different impulses. I don't think the desire to have some kind of human scale in life, or the desire to foster community by supporting a local farm, necessarily has to go along with statism....as often as not the contrary. Nonetheless:

there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti.

As I say, that's a little heavy-handed for me, but Haiti as a laboratory for testing economic theories is fascinating.

Who Is Ronnie Bryant?

Life imitates Ayn Rand: "I'm Just Quitting."

It's The Culture, Stupid

ninme found an interesting take on why Conservatives don't make it in Hollywood. This guy thinks it's actually not the politics.

all the love is unstructured and useless. The obsession with telling good personal stories means that charity is atomized (“I personally, like, believe, you know, that education is so important … and that’s why I, like, read books.”) When asked what he does for a living, one man told me earnestly, “I fight poverty”. The how, when, and why were never followed up, but he seemed very sincere about it. “I’m building a website. To fight poverty.”
That might be one reason why Buddhism is so popular out here. It’s all about personal narratives – one man’s voyage from ignorance to enlightenment. And I’ve heard many, many of them. One Buddhist movie producer explained that, “We don’t judge or evangelise; we are all on our own journey”. But for faith to transcend personal therapy, it relies on externals – doctrines, churches, monks, priests, communities. No one in Los Angeles, I sense, exists for other people. How can they, sitting as they do on their yoga mats in perfect isolation from one another – colliding only at vegan picnics to save the white tiger? Everyone is very friendly, friends even. But for relationships to have value there must be flickers of love and hate. In the purple light of the Pacific Ocean, everything in Los Angeles is … Zen.

There seems to be a genuine insight there. Here's his commentary on a famous writer who got in trouble for saying he voted for W. 

the real problem with what the writer said wasn’t the content but the act of disagreement itself. Hollywood conversations deal in hyperbolic affirmations covering for lies: “You’re amazing. That pitch was the best ever. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Adam Sandler is the funniest man alive!” Disagreement and contradiction are acts of verbal rape.

So if you smiled and said, "You're beautiful, baby, and the President is faaaabulous," no one would notice if you continued to promote Conservative ideas? I can see that.

The only thing that makes me doubt is this:

Many Republicans claim that they are locked out of making movies by their politics. But that’s not how Hollywood works. This town is all about business, and that business is driven by ideas. For anyone to exclude any idea on the grounds of ideology would be stupid – it would lose the viewership of at least half the country.

Is he not aware of the string of war movie flops? Hollywood for years has not minded losing the viewership of at least half the country.

Merchant of Little Italy

Photo by Scott Suchman, shamelessly pinched from here.

Counting this evening, just three more nights in the Shakespeare Theatre's production of Merchant of Venice.

It's a thoroughly workmanlike production, if that doesn't sound like damning with faint praise. You can see from the photo it's set in 1920's New York, such that Antonio's an Italian businessman and Shylock dwells on the Lower East Side. This is amusing in the opening scenes (during which all Antonio's interlocutors order espressos), and allows for delightful flapper costumes on the ladies, but it's not so distracting that we laugh where we ought to be moved (Portia doesn't proclaim: "Da quality of moicy ain't strained, youse guys.")

A triumph of this interpretation is it's the first time I've seen Merchant performed in which my sympathies weren't entirely with Shylock. A perennial problem for this play is that it's not actually about Jewish-Christian relations at all, yet that's all we moderns see. Contemporary performances usually play down Shylock's negative traits, leaving us with a tour de force performance from whoever plays Shylock as the Victim of Society. It's a tribute to Mark Nelson's performance and Ethan Sweeney's direction that this is the first time I've watched the trial scene and understood that Shylock's ruination is not an injustice, but Shakespeare's illustration of the scriptural warning: "with the measure that ye measure will ye be measured." Shylock is shown no mercy not because the Christians are out to get him, but because he himself has insisted repeatedly that no mercy be shown.

Julia Coffey makes a wonderful, three-dimensional, lively Portia and it was a thoughtful and moving evening at the theater.

My only hesitation is that I've come to believe the play is about the sacraments: the bloodless flesh offered in atonement for another, the rings of marriage not fully meaningful until the Christ-figure, Antonio, is the pledge of them.....Once you're convinced of this interpretation (pp.45 ff), it's hard to be satisfied with others.

Yo, Marylanders

Persuade Gov. O'Malley not to sponsor same-sex marriage legislation in the GA this year. He's supposed to announce a decision today or tomorrow.

Update: Here we go again. O'Malley pushing gay marriage for 2012.

Obama Throws Support To Gay Marriage

Not in the least surprising. I note it only because the bill to overturn DOMA is called The Respect for Marriage Act.

And your chocolate ration has been raised from 4 grams/ week to three!

Chaput To Philly?

Awesome if true.

SEIU's Intimidation Manual Made Public

SEIU is defending itself against racketeering charges, and lookee what came to light during Discovery. A 70-page intimidation manual. Note the shrewd use of "community organizing."

Curtsy: Hanc Aquam

Rejoicing In Failure

The Formerly Grey Lady has been on an anti-marriage crusade. Story after story aimed at convincing you there's nothing to it. The latest entry is this piece on how some leading Protestant spokesmen for Natural Family Planning have now embraced artificial contraception and divorced. Conveniently unexplored is the fact that the first decision preceded the second by at least three years.

I won't go further in that direction since it's impossible to understand the inner dynamics of a marriage from afar. There does seem to be something presumptuous about giving marriage advice as newlyweds, as this couple did. Marriage is hard, and particularly the years of multiple wee ones clinging to your legs are hard. It's probably wiser to get through them successfully before doling out the advice.

Nevertheless, the transgressive outlook of the Grey Lady is disgusting. How about this:

In August 1999, Bethany Patchin, an 18-year-old college sophomore from Wisconsin, wrote in an article for Boundless, an evangelical Web magazine, that Christians should not kiss before marriage. Sam Torode, a 23-year-old Chicagoan, replied in a letter to the editor that Ms. Patchin’s piece could not help but “drive young Christian men mad with desire.” The two began corresponding by e-mail, met in January 2000 and were married that November. Nine months later, Ms. Torode (she took her husband’s name) gave birth to a son, Gideon.

Don't you love that parenthetical? "She took her husband's name!" Because the hip, transgressive, feminist, post-marriage readers of the New York Times wouldn't recognize that custom, having never encountered it.

Then there's the celebratory tone. They used to be NFP-practicing, Conservative, married breeders and now they're divorced liberals who've lost their faith and she's on the pill! Chalk one up for our side! Small children have had their lives ripped apart and now have a series of men who aren't their father shagging their mom. Yay!

“I feel like I’m a secular Christian the way you can be a secular Jew,” she continued. “I appreciate my Christian roots, but I think all the ways humanity has developed are good things. Freedom is a good thing.”
Mr. Torode, who lives minutes away, is a book designer and now writes only fiction.
“I was always primarily more of a comedy writer,” Mr. Torode said when reached by telephone. “It’s unfortunate that I went through this serious period of trying to write theological works. I wrote a comedy novel called ‘The Dirty Parts of the Bible.’ ” 

Ah, yes, the Dirty Parts. That's all the Grey Lady can celebrate. There are two kinds of prostitutes in literature. There's the prostitute with the heart of gold who is weak herself, but wouldn't wish her life on anyone and intervenes to preserve the innocence of nice girls. Then there's the sort so debauched she lives to see others debauched as well. One is still capable of love and good will; the other is consumed with hate. When you're gloating over people losing their faith and their families, which are you?

What A Croc!

Shamelessly pinched from Kaching, who pinched it from here.

Giving me nightmares this evening: it's no photoshop, it's a huge missing-legged croc named Brutus giving a show to tourists on the Adelaide river.

Incidentally, he lost his leg to a shark. Life is different in Oz.

Tom Friedman's House

 

Shamelessly pinched from here.

I don't know why I tortured myself on a Sunday morning by reading Tom Friedman, except that My Spy in New York pointed out that the first third of this column appears to get it right: future generations of Greeks are being robbed by the current generation, which ran up debt lavishing perks on itself, with no concern for justice to anyone else. Could Tom Friedman of all people have gotten on the Die, Boomers, Die bandwagon?

Sounded promising, but no, the fault turns out to be Capitalism's. I actually agree with him, because he's describing crony capitalism, which ain't capitalism at all, but Big Business' corrupt collusion with federal regulators to make actual free markets impossible. Friedman thinks the solution is more federal regulation and less liberty, and that Eric Cantor is the epitome of Boomer self-indulgence.

Let's just all picture Friedman's house in our minds whenever he lectures us about such matters.

History is History In California

Not just there, of course, but the Golden State now requires LGBT History in its textbooks. The problem with this is not merely the crass attempt by the state to prevent its citizens from imparting their own beliefs on the topic of the meaning of marriage to their children, but that it's an affront to the discipline of History and to truth itself.

What contributions means is unclear (surely no negative “contributions” will be mentioned), but it is sure to cause much discussion among the historians (or their simulacra) who write the textbooks. I do not envy them their task.
For example, in writing about Shays’ Rebellion, do the historians just write about Shays’ Rebellion per se, or must they first ask whether Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck had a “thing” for each other? Before allowing kids to read about Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, must the historians first ask how Lincoln’s disability (he was tall and ugly) made him feel, and would he had rather signed wearing a dress?
If they cannot find, in the traditional battery of events and people, those whose sexuality was non-heterosexual, others will have to be ferreted out from the record. This will not be an easy task, because records of men who slept with the husbands of others’ wives, or who slept with the both the husbands and their wives (separately or at once), or who wished they had rather had been a girl, were not kept with the ferocious assiduity they are today.
Certain creativity will thus have to be demonstrated by these writers. Speculations will have to be made. Lesser personalities and incidents will have to be magnified. What is important is not fidelity to the historical record, but what the history ought to have been, if only those in the past were as Enlightened as we now are.
Of course, with these new inclusions, and with the necessary limitations of space, some of that old stuff, like the constitutional debates and World War II, will have to be left out of textbooks. There is only so much time in the day, after all. And what’s more important? Learning about John Marshall and “Black Jack” Pershing or that the transgendered are people too? The question answers itself.

We are choosing, daily and inexorably, to reject liberty, truth and civilization and favor instead a geometrically accelerating descent into ignorance, license and barbarism.

Curtsy: American Digest

Not Your Usual Catholic Apologetic

In which the superiority of Catholicism is proven via its villainy.

Max Weber links the rise of the middle class to the emergence of the Calvinist work ethic. Historians and sociologists may dispute the point; what is indisputable is that scandals involving Protestant clergy are dreary and cheesy in a unmistakably middle-class way. Take the PTL thing. Jim Bakker makes a few million ripping off hayseeds and pays a quarter-million in hush money to a secretary who later becomes a Howard Stern regular. And what does he have to show for it? Heritage U.S.A. Not even PJ. O’Rourke had the heart to make fun of the guests there. As he put it, “it would be like hunting dairy cattle with a high-powered rifle.”
When we put our hand to shady direct-marketing campaigns, we get St. Peter’s, the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel. Game, set and match to us.

Conclusion:

Even our sissypants wonk patsies are hardcore.

Picasso On Picasso

Excerpts from an article Picasso penned in 1963 for Le Musee Vivant. First, on the demise of great art and great artists:

When I was young, like all young people, great art was my religion; but as the years passed, I realized that art as conceived up to the end of the 1800s was finished, moribund, condemned, and that the so-called artistic activity for all its prosperity was nothing but a multifaceted manifestation of its own death throes. People today are increasingly indifferent to painting, sculpture, poetry; contrary to appearances, people have embraced something quite different: wealth, machines, scientific discoveries, the conquest of natural forces and of the world. We no longer feel that art is the vital spiritual necessity it was in the past.

He continues:

Many of us continue being artists for reasons that have very little to do with real art, but rather for the sake of imitation, for nostalgia of tradition, because of inertia, love of ostentation, luxury, intellectual curiosity, to be fashionable, or by calculation. Such artists survive because of habit, snobbery, the recent past; but the great majority of artists in all the fields of art lack a sincere passion for art, which they consider a pastime, a relaxation, an ornament. 

What strikes me is its similarity to a complaint Darwin makes in his diaries about his own theory stripping him of his intellectual energy and spiritual passion. At a certain point he (Darwin) felt he'd sucked out his own soul and could no longer believe in anything. Picasso has rightly intuited here that "art for art's sake," for all the seeming nobility of that proposition, is a headless chicken. Art is actually for Beauty's sake or for Worship's sake, and the death of God means also the death of art, however long it takes for anyone to notice.

The new generations, lovers of technology and sports, being more honest, cynical and brutal, will gradually abandon art altogether, relegating it to the museums and libraries as an incomprehensible and useless relic of the past. The moment the arts cease to feed the best minds, the artist will deploy his talents in all sorts of experimentation with new formulas, stray fancies and fantasies, and resort to intellectual chicanery. People no longer seek consolation or exaltation in the arts. And the refined, the rich, the idle, the purveyors of quintessences look for the new, the unusual, the original, the extravagant and the scandalous.

On his own work he comments:

For my part, from 'cubism' and even further back, I have humored these gentlemen, these critics, with the numerous extravagances that have popped into my head which, the less they understood, the more they admired.
Amusing myself with these games, the squiggles, the jigsaw puzzles, the riddles and arabesques, I quickly became famous. And celebrity for the artist means sales, commissions, fortune, wealth.
Now, as you know, I am famous and rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to consider myself an artist in the grand old sense of the word.
There have been great painters like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya. I am nothing but a public buffoon who understood his times. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may seem, but it has the merit of being sincere.

Cited in Myths of Modern Art, Alberto Boixados

And That's How I Evaded My Breathalyzer Test

Had to pass through a sobriety check-point on the way home last night. You always hear about them, but I've never actually seen one in action. Four lanes of traffic funneled into one, then they stop 5 cars at a time. A very courteous cop & I had the following exchange.

Cop: Evening, Ma'am, County Police. We're conducting a sobriety checkpoint. Have you had anything to drink this evening?
Me: Not a drop.
Cop: Where you coming from?
Me: (name of town)
Cop: You're the 3rd person, what's going on up there?
Me: (laughing and a little sheepish) It feels a little odd to tell you this, but I'm coming from an hour of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, making reparation for my sins and those of the whole world.
Cop: (laughing heartily) Ooooookay then (waves me through).

Well, he asked.

We've Won?

WaPo: Panetta: U.S. 'within reach' of defeating al-Qaeda. Administration blather? I don't know, but I've come to respect Panetta, he's not just a hack; it's note-worthy that bin-Laden's document stash is filled with complaints about funding problems. And several grafs in, General Petraeus agrees:

His statements about a fading al-Qaeda were echoed shortly after his arrival in Kabul on Saturday by Gen. David Petraeus, the outgoing commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Petraeus said that the counterterrorism campaign in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghan border, had done “enormous damage” to al-Qaeda beyond the killing of bin Laden.
“That has very significantly disrupted their efforts,” Petraeus added, “and it does hold the prospect of really a strategic defeat — if you will, a strategic dismantling of al-Qaeda.” Petraeus is retiring from the Army this summer and is scheduled to take over Panetta’s job as director of the CIA in September.

The Tomatoes Don't Lie, VII

In spite of it feeling like a mild summer to me --not nearly as hot and humid as usual; in spite of my putting the plants in the ground a good two weeks later than usual out of sloth, I plucked the first home-grown tomato of 2011 today, July 7.

You'd have to go back 5 years to find a tomato ripened that early around here. Maybe it is warming after all.

Thanks to the late start, I wasn't expecting any fruit until late in the month at the earliest. But then I was looking out the window while speaking on the phone and what caught my eye but a bright red Early Girl. (For control purposes, the First Tomato of Summer is always an Early Girl). An excellent cap to the day.

Local warming trends as measured in tomato ripening: 

• July 7, 2011
• July 23, 2010
• July 16, 2009  
• [July 12th, 2008]
• July 8, 2007
• July 5, 2006
• June 23, 2005

Geez

Over the weekend, a statue of Reagan was unveiled in London, as part of the celebration of his centennial.

That night, a dinner was held in honor of Reagan.  It capped a day of events that celebrated the life and extraordinary achievements of the 40th President of the United States.  Yet, missing from the dinner – clearly the biggest event of the day – was United States Ambassador Louis Susman.  While he did host a VIP breakfast that morning, Susman was absent from the grandest event, where speeches were given and the memory of Reagan was put forth – reminding everyone of his impact, and his legacy.
...
From all reports, Susman was not sick, stricken with illness or involved in a really intense game of Farmville.  He simply didn’t show up, as the representative of the United States, to an event honoring one of the greatest presidents in US history.

Brutally Honest thinks this was a deliberate snub on the administration's part, and he may be right. Given how inept and lacking in class the WH protocol people have shown themselves to be time and again, and considering Obama's efforts to wear the mantle of Reagan, I wonder if they knew it was happening?

Class Warfare Is Not An American Tradition

Rubio to Obama:

...the kind of language you would expect from a leader of a third-world country, not the President of the United States.

Curtsy: Hot Air

The True Reason For Local Fireworks Codes

NYPD detonates 5000 lbs. of contraband fireworks. You know the boys in blue had a blast with this.

Happy Independence Day!

 

A Leon Kass column (behind the WSJ firewall) has people talking about Calvin Coolidge's speech on the Declaration. Kass begins:

Parades. Backyard barbecues. Fireworks. This is how many of us will celebrate the Fourth of July. In earlier times, the day was also marked with specially prepared orations celebrating our founding principles, a practice that has disappeared without notice.
It is a tribute to a polity dedicated to securing our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we can enjoy our freedoms while taking them for granted, giving little thought to what makes them possible. But this inattention comes at a heavy price, paid in increased civic ignorance and decreased national attachment—both dangerous for a self-governing people. 

And therefore highlights this passage from Coolidge.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.  It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter.  If all men are created equal, that is final.  If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.  If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.  No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.  If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.  Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress.  They are reactionary.  Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

So, happy Independence Day, to all genuine revolutionaries. Everyone else: try and catch up.