Beneath The Oil Slick

A nice visual representation of how the oil is leaking in the Gulf of Mexico. Via NOLA.com.

I Think Janet Napolitano Had This Talking Point Written On Her Palm

Thanks to Stacey.

One More Conservative Out Of The Hollywood Closet

Via Speak, Dog! Speak!*

I've heard rumors about her being right of center but I think this pretty much confirms it. Janine Turner is out, promoting her new site, Constituting America. From their mission statement:

A renewed, rekindled enthusiasm and a patriot’s desire for the understanding of our Constitution begins with its accessibility. Challenging the mindset of those who consider our Constitution to be antiquated, is our mission. An enlightened America regarding her roots, her basis, and her thesis is the key to America’s pertinent survival. Americans have rights. Americans must have knowledge to understand them.

Constituting America’s mission is to reach, educate and inform the youth and all citizens through modern technology and modern means, because we must not let those who devalue freedom dominate the debate.

She's probably best known for her role in the show, Northern Exposure. She wasn't quite as blond then. She had more of a pixie cut.

*Which is one of the cooler names for a blog, in my opinion.

GM To Answer Some Tough Questions

Reason TV called out Ed Whitacre earlier here. Soon, Whitacre may have to answer to Congress.

Now Whitacre is not a dumb guy, nor are there any ethics scandals in his previous record as a very successful CEO at AT&T. He was even the national head of the Boy Scouts of America, so why all of a sudden is he making a transparently false statement in a GM TV spot?

Three Republican members of Congress are asking the same question and they are also demanding some answers from Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who oversees the TARP program and who issued a statement endorsing the GM claim and citing the repayment as evidence that the government's bailout effort is working.

Be sure to read the entire thing.

With Friends Like These. . .

Richard Gere can do the Public Service Announcement for this. Friends don't let friends stick animals into someone else's hindquarters.

The 50cm long Asian swamp eel was allegedly inserted into the unnamed man's bottom, after he passed out drunk, by pals playing a prank on him.

Medics said the eel had devoured his bowels.

Rectum? Hell, it killed him.

Via the sidebar at Ace.

"Utopia's Always End In Death Camps"

A friend of mine is fond of saying that, and if you follow the reasoning out to the logical conclusion, he's right.

Sometimes I think the biggest cleave in politics is between the Abstract Party and the Concrete Party. The Abstraction Party is largely, but not entirely, the liberal Democrats, and the Concrete Party is largely, but not entirely, the conservative Republicans.

The Abstract Party thinks, of course, in abstractions, and elevates these abstractions -- often speculative or plain fantastical -- over real-life human lives, the concrete, the real, the demonstrable, the solid. And part of what sustains the Abstract Party is their faith, a religious faith, really, that what they "know" abstractly they know with 100% surety, so if they're told by their priests (their politicians and pundits) that it's better in a the long run that some dirty farmers are bankrupted and die penniless than we allow the delta smelt to die off, then they just believe that, on faith (as it's speculative, and who has anyway of knowing what's best in the long run; in the long run, as they say, we're all dead), and simply push forward with plans that result in catastrophic ruin for real-life people because they are so damn sure their belief in a speculative abstraction trumps any of that.

As a member of the Concrete Party, that gives me great pause. I don't really possess that level of intellectual arrogance. I can't believe in speculation and abstraction enough to think that, when the rubber meets the road, I can choose obliterative poverty for an entire region of the country with the confidence that I'm doing the right thing by basically ending human lives.

The Abstract Party has done an awful lot of evil in the world. I'm going full Godwin here to note that the Nazis were a party of abstraction, fueled by the unproven belief, which they nevertheless were willing to kill for, so sure of it were they, the Jews were somehow responsible for just about every ill in Germany and that some abstract and speculative Utopia would arise if only the lands could be purged of the Jews.

Elevating, again, a belief in some dreamy abstraction over the real and inarguable suffering created by it.

You've got to be borderline crazy to do this. Seriously. I'm sure Lee Harvey Oswald had some belief he was quite sure of -- Kill Kennedy and the World Becomes A Wonderful Place -- and you have to be pretty insane to be sure enough of that proposition to kill someone you've never met and have no actual quarrel with.

At some point you'd think that the testimony of their own eyes -- seeing people suffer and die in the real world -- would shake them out of their unshakable belief in the abstract "Good" they're pushing for, but you'd be wrong.

They have a religious conviction about it. They are religious zealots-- lunatics, cultists -- who believe in Paradise on Earth and if you have the chance at Paradise on Earth human lives are small potatoes in the scheme of things.

And they tend to call this lunatic religious passion "reason" and "science." And they're quite serious about that.

More Zooey!

If Hollywood wants to make another movie about Loretta Lynn, here's your gal.

Reason TV Calls BS On GM

Did GM really pay back the Government loan in full and ahead of schedule? Short answer, yes. Long answer, with someone else's money.



In other news, I made a buck by taking a dollar out of my right pocket and putting it in my left.