Perhaps you've seen the pictures released by Brazil of what is purported to be a tribe of people near the Brazil/ Peru border. These folks have never been in contact with the outside world. In other words, they're living in the Warmist's dream world. No nasty, dirty, filthy carbon footprints for these people. Ain't it swell!
Around the globe Bill Murray is known as a TV and movie star, an amusing amateur golfer, and a die-hard Cubs fan. Around our Palmetto State many people also know him as the co-owner and "Director of Fun" for the Charleston RiverDogs, the Yankees' single A team in the SAL. This morning the story broke in the Charleston Post and Courier that Mrs. Jennifer Butler Murray has sued her husband Bill for divorce. The Murray's bought a home in the Charleston area in 2006 where Jennifer and their four kids live, thus the filing here in SC. (1414 Thompson Avenue, Sullivans Island, SC if you nosey people want to look at it on Google Earth)
There's an adage in baseball that goes like this: even a good team will lose 60 games, even a bad team will win 60 games, the final standings are determined by how you do in the remaining 42 games. Detroit's Memorial Day weekend showed just how true this "rule" is.
On Friday the Tigers scored 4 runs but had an uncharacteristic poor pitching performance from Galarraga. Put that one in the 60 games that even a good team would lose. The next night Tigers' bats went on a rampage and clubbed the Twins like baby seals. That 19-3 win goes in the list of 60 games even a poor team would win. Which brings us to Sunday. Staff ace Verlander pitched by far his best game of the year and left with a 1-1 tie. The bullpen, however, couldn't hold it and a game that has to be won falls into that list of 42 games that decide your season. But one game doesn't make a season so it was off to Anaheim for a Memorial Day game. The Ancient Gambler, Kenny Rogers, was masterful in a 7 inning shutout performance. The game went through 11 and a half scoreless innings until the Angels scored the lone run in the bottom of the 12th on a bases loaded walk. Another game goes straight to the list of 42.
Not every loss is the same. Those last two were games a successful team finds a way to win.
is wild in the best of conditions but today's race started in a downpour and ended in bright sunshine. Teams were switching from rain tires to wet track tires to dry tires-- at least they were doing that when they weren't busy putting new noses or back wings on the cars that were spending all day running into each other. The winner, Lewis Hamilton, ran out of serious trouble for the most part to get a well-deserved win.
It's been about a month since we were as excited about a Detroit Tigers game as we are about tonight's contest. Partly this is because the boys finally showed some life last night with 17 hits, 12 runs and a solid starting pitching performance from Justin Verlander. But it's also because their manager, Jim Leyland, delivered two lectures in accountability last night that go in the annals of salty and to-the-point language. The second lecture was delivered to the team and the first one was to the press and is right here for your edification. (LANGUAGE ALERT!!!)
Yesterday the word got out that our old buddy Fred Thompson has started a blog.
I don't know how much blogging Fred will do, but he has been hired to write a monthly column for Townhall Magazine-- his blog is on Townhall.com. Senator Thompson has been in New York this week meeting with publishers, so a book is also forthcoming. All of this is actually just an excuse to say, again, "I miss Fred." And also an excuse to post a couple of the pictures we took when he came by to visit in January.
Last night John Edwards came out and endorsed the elegant, sleek, handsome, nattily-attired, impeccably-groomed, young Democrat Party front-runner. Edwards, you may remember, is the incredibly wealthy ambulance-chasing trial attorney who in 2003 saw that his US senate career would end after just one ineffective term and therefore decided to run instead for the 2004 Democrat nomination for president. He lost. John Kerry picked him for the VP slot, however. Together they lost. Next, former Clintonista operative Erskine Bowles became president of the University of North Carolina and gave Johnny E. a made-up job so he wouldn't have to go back to shaking down insurance companies full time. He got to travel all over the country giving speeches about mill workers, little girls without coats, his dad's flickering B&W TV set, blah blah blah and was paid for this by the benevolent tax payers of North Carolina through the offices of UNC Chapel Hill. Hey, it beats working in the mill! Chapel Hill is, of course, the town near Johnny's huge estate-- built with the money he pocketed while driving up the cost of health care in America. Sweet! Some people create wealth, others are born to confiscate it. Why, it's almost like there are "two Americas."
One of the delights of an endless and otherwise horrific presidential campaign is tracking the depth and width of the pandering. One particular pander is the proposed federal gas tax holiday this summer. On one side ol' John McCain says "let's knock off with this tax from Memorial Day through Labor Day" because, "people are hurting" out there amongst the great unwashed. On the other side of the issue young Barry Obama believes a gasoline tax reduction is one CHANGE he HOPEs doesn't happen. Because, you see, if the feds don't take their tariff the evil big oil companies will just keep the price the same and collect even more horrible, ill gotten profits through their nefarious, gouging schemes. Well, that's how it sounded to me anyway. I admit, anti-capitalist demagoguery is a foreign language for me so sometimes my translations are a tad off.
scam artists, drug dealers by the dozens, and others who could funnel beaucoups bucks to the Clinton Library Fund (AKA: the world's biggest house trailer-- have you seen it?) in Little Rock, Arkansas. Now, to be sure, many of us already knew what his true legacy would be: 42nd POTUS impeached and disbarred for lying under oath to federal grand jury whose only memorable oratory was two lies, "I did not have sex with that woman..." "The era of big government is over." But the dinosaur media, the academy, and others perpetually in the tank for the D Party hoped for better things. Oh, how they hoped, as their boy swanned around the world giving speeches and turning out 800 page door stops full of howlers. Seven years and $120 M dollars in Clinton family income later we have the definitive answer to that old legacy question. Much like the Soviet Union they admired, Bill and Hill are on the ash heap of history. Put there not by their Republican rivals but by the base of the Democrat Party. The same people who saved their two behinds time after time have now kicked them to the curb.
I would link to all of the politicians, pundits and (supposedly) straight news reporters who are urging the once inevitable Democrat nominee to exit the race but it would take too much space. They are out there everywhere begging, demanding, cajoling Hillary to depart, vamoose, pull the chain... to just GET OUT NOW! For the good of the D Party. I can't imagine why "news reporters" have a vested interest in the health of Democrats, but we'll leave that for another day 'cause I got bigger problems this AM.
If you listen to the endless gloom and doom media and the economic populists running for President you would have to believe that the majority of Americans are in soup lines or selling pencils and apples down on the corner as tumbleweeds blow by. And populists, like their kin the conspiracy theorist, must have someone else to blame for any perceived woes. Often high on the list of culprits is China. To listen to Hillary and BXO you'd think trading with China has brought nothing but despair and agony to America. Of course reality is about 180 degrees from that, but they seem to be having fun with their fantasies so we'll just let them be for today.While politicians continue to try to demonize free trade in this election year I'll just say, "Welcome to the neighborhood, Liu Keli. May your company expand a hundredfold in our beautiful state."
Capital flows where it's welcomed.
After the 2006 mid-term elections our political parties and pundit class spent a great deal of time explaining what the vote meant. They didn't agree, of course. Democrats at that time tended to like the notion that the American public rose up and put them in charge of the House and Senate to "end the Iraq war." Time has proven that to be the lie it always was. If there was a winning constituency for that action Speaker Pelosi would have secured the de-funding of OIF. She hasn't because she and her advisers know that the political consequences of abandoning Iraq to the tender mercies of the terrorists would be a huge liability for Democrats in future elections.
In the 70's a Democrat controlled Congress de-funded aid to the South Vietnamese with a Republican, Gerald Ford, in the White House. The result was literally millions of Southeast Asians slaughtered by Communists, tens of thousands of others sent to re-education (AKA: detention) camps, and still others clinging to anything that floated to get away from the Reds. To this day Democrats see the exit from SouthEast Asia as something great and honorable. That's only because they don't know anyone personally whose skull ended up in a filthy pile in Cambodia's killing fields. They can't risk de-funding Iraq operations and having the next set of skulls piled closer to their door.
Republicans said the 2006 election was a referendum on scandal. In fact, the exact point where futures trading showed the R's losing the Congress was when the Mark Foley scandal was getting full play on TV screens and in the general press. They never recovered from that one-- it was the last brick in the stack. So, the Republicans may have a point although as a "lesson learned" I'm not sure it's very actionable. And in the intervening two years there have been many Democrat scandals and the press never seems to link them to a political party, quite unlike the way they published Dem press releases about "the culture of corruption" in the run-up to the '06 election. Being the party of "fewer, less icky scandals" isn't really a glorious banner on which to run and win.
My view then and now was a bit different than these two streams of thought. I think 2006 was evidence of a populist wave. This economic populism has only strengthened since. There is now much talk of protectionism, restrictions on free trade, taxing profitable companies with extra levies beyond the confiscatory ones already in place, taking money from one group of Americans to bail out others who took out loans they couldn't pay, or to buy them health insurance they can't or won't buy for themselves and on and on. It's not just a Dem thing-- on the Republican side we saw the improbable rise of Gov. Mike Huckabee whose only message outside of his cultural positions was pure Populism worthy of Huey Long. Even one of the most successful capitalists to run for President in history, Mitt Romney, when faced with needing a win in Michigan promised billions in US taxpayer money to bail out an industry nearly destroyed by unionism in a state struggling under the weight of preposterous levels of taxation.
Yes, I think the election in 2006 that saw raging, angry, populist clowns like Sherrod Brown make it into the US Senate from a state won by George W. Bush twice, was the start of a new wave-- hopefully a short one. And now my air tight proof: The Hillary Clinton campaign. Other than her Wellesley/ Ivy League Marxism, Hillary Clinton stands for nothing. The one thing she learned from her husband's political career was "DON'T LEAD, TAKE A POLL AND FOLLOW!" So when you see Hillary saying this to a crowd in Indiana, "Why don't we hold these Wall Street money-grubbers responsible for their role in this recession?" (her campaign later argued that she said, "money brokers"-- that's a lot better) you can be pretty sure that the populist message is poll-tested. Then she laid out this choice chunk of Boob-Bait to a crowd in Indiana: ... OPEC "can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world" to set the price of oil. She even promised to use US antitrust law to sue OPEC for price-fixing. The USA, although America's biggest supplier of crude oil, is not a member of OPEC but that won't stop Hillary from telling them how it's gonna be. Our second largest supplier, Canada Oh Canada, ain't in OPEC either, by the way. I wrote about this particular bit of petrophobic hysteria earlier. On the trade front she's even turned her back on one of the few successes of Bill's long eight years in the White House: free trade agreements. Populism is in full effect.
An old truism is "Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do." When Chelsea Clinton finished up school she entered the business world eventually taking a six-figure position with a New York-based hedge fund. Thankfully she isn't one of those "money-grubbers" her mom hates. That would lead to all sorts of unpleasant mommy-daughter issues. Almost as unpleasant as a nation in the grip of economic populism.
Like, um, this. And, er... ah, this. (Totally legal and absolutely devastating, by the way.)
