Archive for May, 2009

Morning Joe…just the last hour plus a little bit

Posted: May 20, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Crashed on the couch after game night and woke to Morning Joe:

7:45 a.m. Did I just wake to see Chris Dodd talking credit cards, oh joy.

7:47 a.m. How can you question Dodd about his troubles and not mention Countrywide or the Irish Cottage?

7:49 a.m. Joe forgot the last line of the quote…go and avoid this sin.

7:52 a.m. This guy Rubin seems to be cheering $4 gas. He should be thinking WWGPD? What Would Gateway Pundit Do? He would Drill!

8:05 a.m. More people get killed on the roads and new cars become more unaffordable, also Since steel is removed US steel makers take another hit. Plus the taxpayer will end up paying for the re-tooling as Rush said

8:07 a.m. The problem is the price of the car, I haven’t bought a new car in almost 20 years, they are too expensive. This is due to the Union costs

8:09 a.m. The Gitmo trap has bit them on the rear, and Mika is actually spinning a bit on the we didn’t build Gitmo.

8:16 a.m. Ford talks sense.

8:28 a.m. Barnicle’s doctor is Ryan’s uncle. Small world.

8:32 a.m. Specifics from a pol. Amazing!

8:45 a.m. Yeah Cheney is bad, that’s why Obama and Pelosi is running away from their Gitmo and Waterboarding stuff.

8:47 a.m. I would point out that Goldwater led directly to Reagan.

A nice problem

Posted: May 19, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: ,

Picking up on the post yesterday concerning the supreme court something hit me this morning.

As you might have gathered I have a beef against the 60’s. I think the cultural changes have produced a lot of problems but there have been some changes of a very positive nature and one of the results of those changes is before us.

Professor Hutchinson and I have a chicken and egg argument in that would like to see “diversity” highlighted as a reason for a choice while noting that there are many qualified candidates who meet that test. I wish to see qualifications highlighted and diversity de-emphasized but note that there are plenty of “diversity” candidates that meet the qualifications standard that I have and if that standard is achieved I’m satisfied.

The amazing and wonderful thing is the increase of the pool of “diverse” candidates that are without a doubt qualified for the position.

Think 1968, there is no question that Thurgood Marshall would be a on short list for the supreme court in terms of qualifications but how large would be the pool of “diverse” candidates with his qualifications existed? Or at least were known by the general public?

Fast forward two generations we are having the debate over a new opening on the court. If the president wants to make a choice based on color or race it is actually much harder, not because of the breaking of a barrier but because of the number of qualified candidates to choose from, in fact it would take real effort for the president to choose an unqualified “person of color”.

This is an incredible thing, and the country should celebrate this fact. This is the ultimate success of the civil rights movement and the reason why at the time affirmative action was not a bad idea. The moves made two generations ago produced the pool of qualified candidates and assures us of that pool from this point on.

President Johnson had the problem of getting the country to accept a supremely qualified candidate for the high court who happened to be black. President Obama has the opposite problem, choosing one candidate from a large pool of supremely qualified candidates.

The fact that nobody notices how wonderful this is , shows how far we’ve come. Life is pretty good and we don’t even realize it.

Nordlinger and the future

Posted: May 18, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: ,

Jay echos Steyn in today’s impromptus with this bit:

Begin with the flight — my flight from JFK in New York to Queen Alia International in Amman. I can’t help thinking of Mark Steyn. It’s natural to think of Mark Steyn, isn’t it? In this particular case, I’m thinking of demography, and all the arguments Mark has made over the years. He speaks about “demographic energy”: and this is not coming from Westerners.

On my Royal Jordanian flight are many, many children. I believe half the passengers are under ten. Seriously. Parents have brought along three children, four children, five children, more. And I find myself thinking, “My, what large families.” But, when I was growing up — in good old America — that was pretty unremarkable, routine. Now there’s one child, or two if you’re really, really fecund and reckless. And these Middle Eastern families seem: large. “It’s all relative,” as the saying goes (and in this case there’s a double meaning, I guess).

Whenever I am on a “Third World flight” — impolite term — I notice this: children. On the flights within the U.S. I take, children are almost a novelty. Same with flights to and from Europe. But whenever I wander beyond those regions: kid-o-rama.

This cannot be without consequences, can it? Whether you regard them as good or bad: It cannot be without consequences. For more, please consult Mark Steyn.

You just don’t think long range when you have few children or no sense of an afterlife, you tend to be narcissistic and live for the now. This is what the drug culture and the changes of the 60’s have wrought. I’m not likely to live to see the final results but it will be a tough time for my boys.

The Anchoress misses the point…

Posted: May 18, 2009 by datechguy in catholic, war
Tags: , , ,

…and that doesn’t happen all that often:

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Because only Obama, who did very little before taking on the Oval Office, has the wisdom and the gravitas to bring Netanyahu to such a position. You can’t expect the 83 year-old professor who lived through Nazism and Statism and understands that the greatest evils of the 20th century began with people disrespecting the personhood of the guy standing next to them, to have had any impact on Israel’s thinking.

You can’t expect an old intellectual who has been talking about the battle between truth and relativism from his teenage years in a POW camp, through his elevation to the papacy, to have contributed anything of value to the decades-long acrimonies of the Middle Eastern Nations can you?

It’s the Bookworm who nails it:

What the loopy-loo wackos on the Left (and, increasingly, in the middle) don’t understand, is that the Arabs have never wanted and will never want a two state solution. They want a Judenrein world, and they’re patient.

It is this desire for a one state (all Arab) solution, that explains why, as Rick Richman points out, no Middle East solutions have worked thus far.

Until the Arabs want a “two state” solution it doesn’t matter what Israel thinks. One of three things will happen. Either the Arabs will manage to slaughter the Jews, the Jews will finally decide they have enough and decide to slaughter the Arabs (which they’ve had the ability to do for decades, for all the cries of Jewish genocide of Arabs they are sure doing a lousy job of it aren’t they), or the Arabs will decide to live in peace.

Unless choice three comes about, choice one or two is inevitable. It’s just a question of when.

Oh and if you are of the mind that God will not permit the destruction of Israel (choice 1) that’s just not true. He has allowed the Kingdoms of Israel to fall over and over again, but he has never allowed the Jewish People to be eliminated. The history of the people of Israel is a sine wave; they rise and fall just as Moses predicted. In fact it pre-figures the cycle of confession and repentance in the church: man sins, man repents, God forgives, man is tempted and repeat until death or man escapes sin state.

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