Red Reagan

Ronald Reagan’s Memoirs: [F]or the eight years I was president, I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.
Rudy Giuliani, 2010: A nuclear-free world has been a 60-year dream of the Left, just like socialized health-care. This new policy, like Obama’s government-run health program, is a big step in that direction. President Obama [just like that stinking hippy Reagan] thinks we can all hold hands, sing songs, and have peace symbols.

Hot out there

By my gauge, it’s currently 86° in sunny Boston, MA. NOAA says we goin’ to 92° (though that figure clearly represents a government takeover of weather forecasting). Today’s low will likely turn out to have been 57°, four degrees above the average high.

This is all terribly embarrassing for the climate change deniers. I’m sure they will be called to account for this deviation from their unsubstantiated by any data ever collected anywhere “nothing’s changing” stance. How can “nothing’s changing” possibly account for the fact that it is warm today? I demand to know. ‘Merica demands to know. Also, Al Gore is fat.

Tax and Spend

  • GE 2009 pre-tax earnings: $10.3 billion. Tax paid: $0. Tax refund $1.1 billion.
  • ExxonMobil 2009 pre-tax earnings: $19.3 billion. Tax paid to the US: $0. Subsidies received: 122

    • Just two examples. Let’s count how many times we hear about this sort of thing in the 2010 election cycle. I’m boldly setting the over/under at 0.

    Old McDonnell’s Farm

    The previous post seems irretrievably glib and insufficient when compared to this:

    […] not only does McDonnell venerate those who took up arms against their own country, he does so without acknowledging that the institution for which they fought was the right to preserve the right to own human beings as slaves. He then papers over the horrors of reconstruction, lynching, and Jim Crow that followed.

    This isn’t a coincidence. There is no place in which a frank acknowledgment of the realities of the South prior to the Civil War or immediately following can possibly coincide with a veneration of the Confederacy. So McDonnell just leaves that history out. When McDonnell talks about “all Virginians,” it becomes painfully clear that he isn’t.

    (h/t jasencomstock)

    Old McDonnell’s Farm

    NOW, THEREFORE, I, Robert McDonnell, do hereby recognize April 2010 as CONFEDERATE HISTORY MONTH in our COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, and I call this observance to the attention of all our citizens.

    Robert McDonnell, governor of Virginia.
    Early returns on this move have the GOP 7% whiter and 12% angrier.

    Optimistically assuming that demand for [helium] continues to grow only a few percent each year, and that the entirety of the globe’s remaining natural gas reserves will be processed for their helium, the NRC report estimates there will only be enough to last another 40 years.

    Lee Billings, writing for Seed.
    Articles like this make me think we are going to be back to living in caves and trading hides along the riverfront inside of a century. It sounds like apocalyptic science fiction, but perhaps there is a narrow window of opportunity for any global civilization to either figure out how to efficiently get off its particular rock (and access vastly greater industrial resources that (hopefully) reside nearby) or be stuck there, forever.
    Seems like we’re deep down in the slowness more every day.

    STARTing to sink in

    I suppose this qualifies as PAM; Spencer Ackerman over to the Washington Independent has finally noted that even if you manage to keep Dick Lugar aboard the START train, you still have to find seven other GOPers willing to vote with the President on anything:

    that acrimonious tenor is likely to flip some of the [relatively few GOP] yes votes [on arms reduction under W Bush for fuck’s sake] to either no votes or abstentions, however striking the hypocrisy.

    Indeed it is. Now, of course, this isn’t considered to be the result of faulty logic or lousy governance on the part of the GOP, mind you. Oh no, definitely not that. They’re just playing the game and trying to win the day, politically. All that matters is what happened five minutes ago, and that’s only for the next 15. What we have here is plainly, plainly a failure on the part of The Democrat:

    It’s just not clear yet [if the GOP votes will be there]. If not, it won’t just be an indictment of the Obama administration’s legislative acumen.

    I guess we’re supposed to celebrate the “won’t just be” part of that. Strikingly bad construction. Rest assured that we shall never, ever see an article that systematically attacks the GOP’s stunning and repeated hypocrisy and categorizes the brazen lies, all of which is made worse by being lies and hypocrisy in service of nothing; they have no policy ideas to offer that go beyond a four word, rhyming phrase, and they never do. Because they aren’t required to. Nihilism works because it’s allowed to work by the Washington media establishment. At least it is when it’s coming from the GOP. And, in this case, it’s a brazen hypocrisy that threatens us all, directly and existentially. This ain’t kids with dirtbikes, these are actual fucking hydrogen bombs. And it’s a brazen violation of what was supposed to be a long-respected construct that “politics ends at the waters edge” when it comes to granting the President reasonably wide leeway on foreign policy, and especially when it comes to nuclear foreign policy.

    START is a dead letter under a Democrat. Period. May not even get out of committee. That’s what the MSM should be looking at, day after day, 24/7: how can the country’s governance be this fundamentally broken? Instead, we’ll get plucky dogs and Clinton’s penis.
    The Democrat should be hollering today and every day about the thousands, thousands of potentially loose nukes that are now going to be sitting around, just waiting to find a use. And putting it all on the GOP’s doorstep. We’ll see none of that. Instead, Obama will just stroll into the messaging buzz-saw. Again.