She said what ?!

Ann Coulter's gone too far this time. Calling Obama "Chocolate Jesus" doesn't offend me. Like Clint Eastwood I'm an equal opportunity offender. But Fox should ban that lilywhite beanpole pronto or the race hustlers will come a-hustlin' and when the hustlers come a-hustlin', well, dot dot dot ...

Oh wait, it wasn't Ann Coulter? It was Bill Maher? Impossible. Liberals don't use racist trash talk, it's against their religion. See this clip at 6:40 -


But for the real McCoy enjoy Tom Waits:


Update: After a little reflection I realise that 'liberal' doesn't apply to Bill Maher. I do think he's a liberalesque dope on Bush, Cheney, Iraq, religion and probably a lot else, but he's my kind of guy on some stuff, as in this clip from 1:17 -

Eonnagata

I know a little girl named Sylvie. She's named after Sylvie Guillem, the dancer, so last night I took her and 4 other distinguished ladies to Sadlers Wells in London to see this:



The subject matter was gender - a topic dear to ballet dancers for some reason. I'm increasingly of the view that gender is not destiny, but that the unsexed human spirit makes its destiny and our externals are just that, externals. That's a conceit of course, but it's my conceit and I like it. A lot of Eonnagata was brutally slow for my attention span, let alone a young child's, but Sylvie endured and one day she'll astonish her children when she tells them that she saw the great Sylvie Guillem.

Lest we forget

Right Wing News was almost the first blog I read. (I think Normblog was the very first.) I enjoyed John Hawkins' directness and the man can write. Lately RWN has dropped off my daily tour. It's grown into a less pithy, slightly snarkier, group blog which is plenty meaty but less flavoursome. Don't get me wrong - I like what they say and they say it well, but vita brevis and all that. Hawkins is still a good read after all these years. Sometimes he sounds like me:

The Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, is a tax cheat. Let me repeat that: Timothy Geithner, the guy who is the head honcho of the IRS, is a tax cheat. One more time, Tim Geithner, the guy who will be in charge when the Obama administration institutes what will probably be the single largest tax increase in American history, later in Obama's first term, is a tax cheat.

Moi:

I can be a bore on this Geithner thing. It doesn't take a holistic view to condemn Geithner. There's no nuance required. It's black and white. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. One more time. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. It destroys consent and taints the whole Administration.

Pass the sick bag, Alice

Reading this bollocks on Bloomberg put me in mind of John Junor's catch phrase above:

Obama, a 1991 Harvard Law School graduate, is surrounding himself with intellectuals who, like the president, have pursued careers in public service. They bring policy and political expertise, without the ideology that marked the George W. Bush administration, said Jeffrey Frankel, a professor of capital formation and growth at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“All of them are completely open to new information,” said Frankel, who was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers for three years during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “They are trying to find out what really works. People don’t value competence, but you do need it.”

Methinks Larry Summers tried to impart some new information at Harvard. They were so open to that, he resigned.

The real deal

Mick has repeatedly dissed Frost/Nixon, the movie. I saw it last night. The whole production is a liberal artefact which makes it all the more delicious that Nixon emerges as hero, willy-nilly, and the creep is the mean-spirited, cowardly (in the film), liberal apparatchik, James Reston Junior. The sheer quality of Nixon, the world-class operator, shines through. It's hard not to compare the sophisticated, battle-hardened Nixon with the juvenile imposter Obama. Would that Nixon were President now! His sins were fighting fire with fire. He'd been subjected to liberal shenanigans and voter fraud for many years. Then as now the media protected the more telegenic, but more scandalous liberal candidates, while emoting with outrage at the relatively humdrum crimes of their cultural arch-enemies. The script nicely symbolizes the culture war with lace up shoes versus elasticated shoes. The movie does more to rehabilitate Nixon than anyone involved could imagine. We crave ruthless competence in the service of America, the city on the hill.

Lifecycle of a bubble

As the Dow Jones Index approaches decade lows. I'd say we're moving thru Capitulation to Despair. The markets are realising that the US is now run by quacks and scoundrels, who prescribe poison for medicine. Worse the quacks and scoundrels won't go away for 4 years, maybe 8 years, maybe 12 years. Then it may be too late. There is a moral component to government. This lot don't have it, so why should politics be self-correcting ? The liberals can now fix the census, fix citizenship, fix electoral rolls, fix freedom of speech, fix the media and fix the courts. If politics no longer self-corrects, why should markets ? 'Return to the mean' isn't guaranteed. Maybe that's a sign of Despair.

"Civic and legal duty" - that sounds important

The Feds are fixing to fix UBS for enabling US citizens to hold offshore accounts out of sight of the IRS. They want names:

“At a time when millions of Americans are losing their jobs, their homes and their health care, it is appalling that more than 50,000 of the wealthiest among us have actively sought to evade their civic and legal duty to pay taxes,” John A. DiCicco, acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s tax division, said in a statement.

Here's a name - Geithner, capo di tutti capi at the IRS.

Update: Emanuel.

Give war a chance

There is a credible report that Hamas will agree an 18-month ceasefire. Presumably the promise from Netanyahu to come back to Gaza and finish the job that Barak and Livni left half-done concentrated the terrorists' leaders' minds.

By the way she is Israeli. She'd look good with a rifle, but I'm sorry to say she's an airhead peacenik. Still, braver men and women will kill to keep her safe.

The liberal-industrial complex

Yet another failed approach to fighting the 'Aids Virus' prompts me to record my view that the HIV/AIDS model is probably wrong. The chance of HIV being the cause, repeat 'cause', of AIDS (if AIDS even exists as a disease) is about the same as the chance that manmade carbon emissions cause Global Warming (if Global Warming even exists). It's possible, but the argumentation is weak.

Immune deficiency is not a disease, it's a propensity to disease, and is predominantly caused by lifestyle choices of the rich and lousy nutrition, hygiene and water of the poor. The greatest cause of 'AIDS' is fraudulent statistics prompted by good motives and bad motives. Iatrogenic, drug induced immune deficiency seems rife among rich and poor. Re-thinking Aids is one hub for scientific arguments against the social construct of HIV/AIDS or, for a polemic, read Paglia. The vocabulary and coercive techniques of the AGW and AIDS liberal-industrial complex are remarkably similar. Would that there were a pill against them!

The savior-based economy

I laughed when I saw on Drudge that Mark Sanford had immortalised the Obama Government Stimulus Bill as "the savior-based economy." How true. When a future "The Forgotten Man" comes to be written, that will be the title.

I hadn't heard of the South Carolina governor until recently, but I was impressed by this video which I'll link to as I can't embed it.

St Pancras Station

I rarely take a shot that makes me gawp and when I do it's usually of my children. I took this snap as I was changing trains today. When I saw it on my big screen I turned the lights off and played Spem In Alium.

Some thoughts about the best railway station in the world here.

A gallery of shots in both dull and dramatic light here.

Visa waiver for jihadis

The greatest terrorist threat to America comes from my country, Britain. Political correctness and security budget incorrectness mean that the danger from British Islamists is out of control:

Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. "We don't have anything approaching comprehensive coverage," he said.

Recent footage (suppressed by the BBC) of British police running from a mob in London, shows how cowed the UK has become:

Tho I am a frequent beneficiary of the visa waiver program, it makes no sense without serious profiling as opposed to the resources spent randomly searching my wife for half an hour when she left London for Newark a week ago.

This lady is not my wife.

The US should suspend the visa waiver program until Britain gets serious.

Kleptocracy

As Obama's Government Stimulus and Middle Finger to Future Generations Bill slouches towards Bethlehem, I reflect that I am not a Democrat or a democrat or a Republican. I am a constitutional republican. An Obama-voting self-described 'conservative' friend calls me 'extreme right-wing', but my position on democracy, tax, rights, responsibilities and the Republic is barely distinguishable from America's founders.

Some quotes from Jefferson:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

Me and Joe Biden, we told you so

Let's take stock:

• The new President has apologized to Arabs for Bush's arrogance;
  
• The appointments' process has been a clusterfuck;
  
• America has a tax cheat as tax chief, but 'no 2-tier tax system';
  
• The President's $1t emergency stimulus bill is stuffed with pork, protectionism and social engineering - stimulus, not so much.." Oh, but it wasn't my bill, it was that awful Nancy Pelosi, I just put my name to it...and it was a first attempt anyway"; *
  
• Iran has launched a satellite and told America where to stick its handwringing about nukes;
  
• N.Korea threatens to test a missile that can reach Alaska;
  
• Israel is about to elect Netanyahu who may be less receptive to State Dept bullshit and may take on Iran;
  
• But it's ok.....the President has initiated a study on how to close Gitmo. More: he's funding embryonic stem cell research and abortion promotion in America's aid budget.
  

Look, the guy is out of his depth and covering it with bluster and weak attempts at charm. Even BDS sufferers are noticing:

It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Before he recanted, his hand forced by a cascade of appointees who “forgot” to pay taxes, his reasoning was creeping perilously close to that of the outgoing leaders he denounced in his Inaugural Address: that elitist mentality of “we know best,” we know we’re doing the “right” thing for the country, so we can twist the rules.

Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt “like a mosquito in a nudist colony.”

Maybe a Big Lie will work, maybe not:

Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.

The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying — and failing — to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks.

You, Obama voters, sit up. You can't say you weren't told:



* Give me strength.

Comedy Central

VDH garottes Obama like a kind executioner, but bear in mind that Biden is next in line. You thought of that? What about this? After Biden comes Pelosi !!! You knew that already? Does it make your flesh creep? Well, get this: if Obama, Biden and Pelosi all perish under a pile of journalists' underwear, next in line is....ta da!....the Exalted Cyclops, the one, the only, Senator Robert Byrd!

A teachable moment

All this kerfuffle about taxes! Geithner, Rangel, Killefer, Franken, Daschle....I'm losing track. Is there a pattern here? Limousine liberals who don't pay taxes even on their limos. I wouldn't be surprised if the Daschle nomination is withdrawn by the time I finish writing this post.....the gale of ridicule is shredding Obama's credibility with even a few of the credulous. This campaign ad is all over the internet and enough to finish him off:
But now there's a New York Times editorial against him and Nancy Killefer has withdrawn from her appointment as performance czarina because, uh, she didn't pay some tax.

The great Victor Davis Hanson derives a lesson:

This is all about as good an argument for a flat tax as one can imagine.

Flash: And lo! the deed is done. Daschle out. So how in tarnation can Geithner stay in charge of the IRS? How can Rangel run tax legislation? Answers on a postcard to: Office of Hope, Change and Expediency, West Wing.

Morning rant #3

I disliked reading Anne's 'This is the way a society dies'. As a Briton I find these things so shameful that I avert my eyes. I thought that America would stay self-reliant, then came Obama. Truth is stranger than fiction. The standard model of politics is that the pendulum will swing back, but this time liberals may engineer prolonged power. Let's face it, Obama's domestic agenda is mostly Bush's compassionate conservatism on steroids + disdain for unborn children.

'1984' hit the zeitgeist in 1948, still in the age of Hitler and Stalin, but the negative utopia of 'Brave New World' better describes present trends: hatcheries, conditioning, vaccination-workers, embryo-workers, psychotherapists, counsellors and so on. Were distopian Islamism prematurely to pursue total war before the West has hollowed itself out, then the West would be forced to a moral re-armament. Liberals realize that war breeds virility. Virility + American history = live free or die....soooo 18th century. The deep, sometimes subconscious motive for hating the Iraq war wasn't hatred of war, but fear of the politics of martial virtue. Hence both liberals and subtle Islamists will avoid all-out war, but rely on the ease with which a pacified, passified, dependent society can be switched from Brave New World to 1984 and Big Brother may be an Ayatollah. It's not a conspiracy, it's a co-incidence of interests.

So where's hope? Where's change? Well, events, dear boy, events.

A new Ice Age in London

In 1991 British Rail was paralysed by a light dusting of snow. The immortal explanation was that it was "the wrong kind of snow." Last night's once in a millennium hell-storm dumped a stupefying 3 inches or more and London's shut down, at least the public sector, with one brave exception; His Excellency, BoJo, the Mayor of London, cycled into City Hall to announce:

"This is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities. I have never seen anything like it."

I look forward to the London Olympics. Meanwhile it's been fun to wander round with my new camera, a Canon 5d2, and 2 fine lenses, Canon 85mm f1.8 and Sigma 50mm f1.4. This gallery shows the area round my apartment in the last 24 hours.

Thoughtcrime

Snow in London