Advice from Barack Obama on how to commemorate 911.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
An Early Obama Letter
…confirms his inability to write:
Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review’s affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
I am completely unsurprised by this. I think it at least partially explains why we aren’t allowed to see his transcripts.
Orbital Technologies
Here are some pretty pictures of their proposed space hotel. Still no explanation of how they get the price down below a million dollars (I don’t think anyone is going to get to orbit cheaper than SpaceX in that time frame, and they’re charging twenty million a seat). I also wonder when the “space tourism season” begins and ends. And where does it get its power, and how does it get rid of heat?
If you’re guessing I’m skeptical about this proposal, you’re correct.
AGW Is Just The Latest
A brief history of hysterical environmental false alarms. Some of which have killed millions. Rachel Carson’s holocaust was bigger than Hitler’s.
But I Thought He Was A Dumb Uncle Tom
There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings. Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.
At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonio Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.
If Toobin’s revionist take is correct, (and I defer to his knowledge of the direction of modern constitutional thought) it means that liberal America has spent a generation mocking a Black man as an ignorant fool, even as constitutional scholars stand in growing amazement at the intellectual audacity, philosophical coherence and historical reflection embedded in his judicial work.
Kind of surprising that this would come from Toobin. I hope he’s right. I recall reading an interview with Thomas at Reason back in the eighties, and being pretty impressed with him at the time.
Hmmmm…[searching]…here it is.
[Update a few minutes later]
Now that I’m reading the whole thing, I’d urge everyone to read the whole thing. Really.
The prospect of a serious judicial rehabilitation of the Tenth Amendment is real, though perhaps not immediate. And change this sweeping is unlikely to come simply because a relative handful of judges and lawyers change their minds on an issue of constitutional interpretation. A broader change would need to take place in society so that the idea of transferring more activities from Washington to the states appeals to public opinion to the point where presidents appoint judges who share this philosophy, the Senate confirms them, and the new majority begins to set a new direction for the law.
Arguably, we are nearing a zone where something like that could happen. The apparent Republican front-runner Governor Rick Perry has strong views on the Constitution. His book Fed Up! Our Fight To Save America From Washington is essentially an essay calling for a return to the concept of a federal government limited to its enumerated powers. Let unemployment stay above 8 percent through November of 2012 and President Perry could be sending the names of judicial nominees to a Republican Senate. With a couple more allies on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas could get pretty close to the lava pits of Mount Doom.
I have to confess, I like the LOTR analogy.
A Soundstage On Mars
This isn’t a new XKCD, but I hadn’t seen it before.
Another Bad Day For The Church Of AGW
Some more thoughts on those cosmic-ray studies. It is an interesting theory, and as he notes, it does have more explanatory power. However (as with the greenhouse theory) the science is far from “settled,” and will likely remain so for years.
The Real Disaster Begins
Now that the worst is over for the DC and the Big Apple, the media will probably grow bored with the story, and ignore the massive flooding that is already wiping out whole towns in upstate New York, Vermont and other places.
[Update a while later]
Well, it looks like Fox is covering it now.
The Obama Asteroid
…has struck the left. The damage will continue for years, I suspect. And they can’t say we didn’t warn them.
I Am So Relieved Now
Obama takes charge at the Hurricane Center:
I mean really: does he look like a man who has a clue about what to do? Ponder the official NOAA name plate emblazoned with “Barack Obama President of the United States.” Why does that seem ridiculous? After all, he is the President of the United States. Maybe it’s because it put me in mind of that iconic image of Mike Dukakis in his tank. Anyway, if it failed to be reassuring, it did introduce a welcome moment of levity.
I agree with Frank J. that he could be productively replaced with a sack of hammers. As he says, it’s not even close.