schachterrific!

Sometimes you hear a voice in the crowd and you immediately sense that this is a special moment; that you are listening to truth, raw and unvarnished. Katy Abram spoke the truth.

I stumbled over this incredible blogpost about Sarah Palin, and for once I think someone got it right. This is the executive summary of what a mean, sad country we’ve become.

All national politicians take their share of potshots; it comes with the territory, and anybody who can’t take the heat, as Harry Truman famously said, should get out of the kitchen. And with that heat inevitably comes some spillover onto a politician’s family members – especially if those family members are politically outspoken adults, Washington lobbyists, or businesspeople involved in shady practices. But some grief will come as well to soft-spoken spouses and minor children. It’s the nature of the business.

But no politician in modern memory, not even Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, has faced the sort of ferociously personal assault that greeted Palin from the instant she set foot on the national stage, in many cases before her detractors even knew anything about her besides that she was female, attractive, pro-life and pro-gun. And while the pervasive crude sexual references to Palin were horrible, the assault on her family was the worst of all. Palin has worn many hats in her life – Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor, Mayor, Oil & Gas Commissioner, City Councilwoman, sportscaster, point guard, runner, beauty queen, moose hunter – but it’s clear that the role that defines her is her role as the mother of five children. And as James Taranto put it, “If you’ve never met or had a mother, the thing to know about them is that they tend to be very protective of their children.”

Probably, one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read.

And Sarah Palin? Don’t count her out just yet. Take it or leave it.

For the longest time, I’ve thought that the world is being run by idiots, but felt it wasn’t PC to say that out loud. (Come to think of it, the whole concept of PC is pretty idiotic, so what does that say about me?) Anyway, along comes American Thinker and puts to print my whole point. In. Its. Entirety.

As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean? That’s not just incompetence. It takes special stupidity, almost a deliberate, willful absence of real thinking.)

The Federal EPA is about to officially declare carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. That’s not just false and unscientific; it’s not just an excuse for taxing everything in sight, including breathing. It’s not merely wrong. It’s idiotic. It marks a low point in our national conversation. Scientists or engineers with a grain of sense shouldn’t be taking the EPA seriously for a second. Forget the “climate experts,” with their grossly inadequate computer models. Normally intelligent people should boggle at the EPA. They are bizarre. Only the truly ignorant could fall for this level of ignorance. Or those who just can’t think.

Read more here. A real eye-opener.

The free internet is about to go the way of the dodo bird, From American Spectator:

New York’s legislation… (requires) …online retailers to collect state and local sales tax if they had affiliate advertisers within the state. (It depends on what the meaning of physical presence is?) Affiliate advertisers basically consist of websites, often run by small businesses or organizations like the Parent Teacher’s Association, that carry advertisements from other online retailers, like Overstock.com or Amazon.com. As a result of the massive administrative costs that the law would have imposed, Overstock.com immediately terminated its relationship with approximately 3,400 affiliates. Jonathan Johnson, Overstock.com’s president, explained that “New York’s law made the cost of doing business with affiliates based in New York prohibitively high.”

That’s why New York is at the bottom of the list of states when it comes to personal freedoms….

Hat tip to my bud, Phil Millman

All my friends already know pretty much where I stand on this. Yet i recently found an article that pretty much says it for me. The John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University runs a blog called Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH). In a recent article entitled “On the Ground in Gaza”, Barry Rubin pretty much covers it:

…many in the West think Israel has some kind of choice in this matter, that diplomacy was an option, that Hamas could be reasoned with. Those people have clearly never heard a Hamas leader speak or read anything on the group’s Arabic-language websites. In a real sense, Hamas is more extreme than Osama bin Laden, who periodically offers his enemy the chance to repent. Hamas’s goal is genocidal.

This has nothing to do with being dovish or hawkish, left or right. For those who are the biggest peaceniks—and this is true in Israel—know that Hamas must be defeated if Israel is ever to make peace with the PA. Even the PA knows it, and that’s what they say in private, no matter what they say in public.

Take it or leave it.