Tim Carney takes on the ad hominem fallacy of attacking policy papers based on the funding sources of the institute that generated them.
Two Years Ago
Why Now?
A speculative discussion of why we’re only now hearing about the finding of chemical shells in Iraq, and what else the administration isn’t telling us.
[Update in the afternoon]
“Formerspook” has the back story.
I Wouldn’t Have Apologized
I thought it was in fact pretty damned funny:
Rep. Steve King (news, bio, voting record), R-Iowa, was discussing the June 7 death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Saturday when he mentioned 85-year-old Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House for nearly 50 years and is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
“There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he’s at,” King said about al-Zarqawi, in a recording transcribed by Radio Iowa. “And if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas.”
But then, I’m not a politician. And would probably be an utter failure as one.
Oh, and here’s a shocker:
Thomas did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
I Wouldn’t Have Apologized
I thought it was in fact pretty damned funny:
Rep. Steve King (news, bio, voting record), R-Iowa, was discussing the June 7 death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Saturday when he mentioned 85-year-old Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House for nearly 50 years and is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
“There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he’s at,” King said about al-Zarqawi, in a recording transcribed by Radio Iowa. “And if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas.”
But then, I’m not a politician. And would probably be an utter failure as one.
Oh, and here’s a shocker:
Thomas did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
I Wouldn’t Have Apologized
I thought it was in fact pretty damned funny:
Rep. Steve King (news, bio, voting record), R-Iowa, was discussing the June 7 death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Saturday when he mentioned 85-year-old Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House for nearly 50 years and is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
“There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he’s at,” King said about al-Zarqawi, in a recording transcribed by Radio Iowa. “And if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas.”
But then, I’m not a politician. And would probably be an utter failure as one.
Oh, and here’s a shocker:
Thomas did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
A Failed Revolution
It’s been half a century, and many good people died or were imprisoned in the attempt to liberate themselves from one of the great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. But they won, eventually, no thanks to the US State Department. Or perhaps even the CIA, which seems in many ways to be our greatest enemy these days.
Fashionable Criminals
And idiotic ones:
…As she recounts the incident, he snatched the purse and took off.
But then he ran into trouble. As he ran, his loose trousers slipped down below his hips. As he reached down to hold them up, the teen was forced to throw the purse aside.
“That boy, he could run fast but he got caught up by his pants, which were real big and baggy,” says Ms. Chandler, whose purse was retrieved by a parking attendant who had heard her cries for help.
It’s a problem for perpetrators. Young men and teens wearing low-slung, baggy pants fairly regularly get tripped up in their getaways, a development that has given amused police officers and law-abiding citizens a welcome edge in the fight against crime…
…Mr. Green, 30, rode away on a bicycle, with copies of “Donnie Brasco,” “The Bourne Identity” and “Sin City.” When a patrol car knocked over the bike, he fled on foot. As he ran, his trousers slipped down past his hips, and he tripped. He hitched up his pants and ran a few more yards before falling again.
Things got worse and worse for Mr. Green. He finally kicked off his pants and shoes and “ran into the yard of 1720 Beaufield,” police officer Kenneth Jaklic said in a report of the incident. “I ran after [Mr. Green], yelling at him to stop.” Instead, Mr. Green jumped over a fence behind a garage, and Mr. Jaklic immobilized him with two Taser darts in the back…
…Karl Franklin tried to run from police in Tallahassee, Fla., in pants that were on fire. According to a police report, the 30-year-old had stashed a lighted cigarette in his baggy pants and appeared to be preparing to urinate at a traffic intersection.
Seth Stoughton, a police officer at the time, approached Mr. Franklin and noticed the man’s pocket was smoldering. Mr. Franklin, who could not be reached, started to run, but his pants dropped and tripped him up.
Sorry, link is for subscribers only, but I thought that this article was a hoot. I guess I’m supposed to be an old coot because I have such a low opinion of young men’s fashions, but baggy pants don’t just look stupid–you’d have to be stupid to put up with such dysfunctional clothing just to be fashionable.
Wrong Turn
Lileks, on the Dems sloganeering:
…the Dems needed something new to accompany their new vision for Western civilization. The winner was another phrase focus-tested into a thin smear of rhetorical mush: “A New Direction for America.” Disaffected Republicans were heartened. You mean less spending, quicker confirmation of conservative judges, permanent tax cuts and increased military outlays? Well, no. Nancy Pelosi announced that should the Democrats retake the House, item No. 1 will be bold and sweeping: They will “give America a raise by increasing the minimum wage.”
Apparently Pelosi believes that America makes the minimum wage. The population consists of industrial workers who get a dime each day for the number of fingers they haven’t lost to the machinery, a few million skinny Bob Cratchits shivering in underheated counting houses, and six plutocrats whose tight control over Consolidated Spats, Amalgamated Whalebone and other nefarious trusts keeps everyone poor and shoeless.
The minimum wage was indeed a New Direction — last century, anyway. But when the unofficial GOP slogan is “Fight and win the War on Terror by blowing up more bad guys real good,” a call for a wage boost is like running against FDR with a pledge to reduce postal rates.
A Defense Of Ann Coulter
By Mark Steyn:
…it wasn’t until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry’s pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush’s Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he’s still down there. It’s gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can’t attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you’ve got most of your arms and legs and he hasn’t. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn’t have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry’s speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, “If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards.”
“What crackpot argument can’t be immunized by the Left’s invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?” wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. “If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we’re allowed to respond to?”
Why not, indeed?
I will note that I haven’t read Coulter’s book, and don’t intend to. It’s sad that she couldn’t make her many legitimate points about the secular religion of the left without dragging science and Darwin into it. Unfortunately, though, it’s the inevitable pushback from evangelizing against God by the likes of Dawkins and Dennett.