Last week, Iowahawk did a hilarious send-up of JournoList, the hush-hush list-serve for liberal “deep thinkers”:

JOSH MARSHALL: How about we do something about how wingnut bloggers live in an echo chamber

JESSE SINGAL: sweeet!!!! gmta

MICHAEL COHEN: ya its like those f*****z are in a echo chamber or something

CHRIS HAYES: gmta

JONATHAN CHAIT: ya total echo chamber

BRAD DELONG: echo-o-o-o-o-o-o cha-a-a-a-mber-er-er-er

ISAAC CHOTINER: lols

EZRA KLEIN: ok,,, we agree. Yglesias its your turn to write it

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: cant, I have h/w assignment due for rahm emanuel

OK, that’s a spoof – but I have a hunch I know what one of the recent topics must have been. There’s been such a wide-spread synchronicity of – for lack of a better word – “thought” among so many regional and national leftybloggers, I can’t help but think it’s not only no coincidence, but in fact a symptom of the most caustic initiative on the part of the American left.
———-

Before we get to the story, let’s talk aphorisms.  Aphorisms can be taken way too far – but they can be useful memes for categorizing things like human behavior.
One of my favorites I get from watching the odd episode of House.  In and among all the glib causticness, House trips upon the odd ingenious bit of human nature.

Many of those bits tie back to his main rule – his Prime Directive, if you will – for human nature; everybody lies.  It’s true, really; at some point or another, everyone finds it in their self-interest or sense of emotional self-preservation to bend the truth.

I’m positing that this rule as a corollary when it comes to the left-leaning “alternative” media.  Indeed, let’s call this “Berg’s Second Law of Leftyblogging”:  whenever liberals toss out defamatory generalizations about conservatives, they are projecting. (Classic example comes about 1:04 into this video).

You can pretty much name your slur; the party that yaps about “fatcats” is the party that owes its soul to plutocrats.  The party that whinged about Bush’s record on civil liberties has always been the party that actually did crush civil liberties (see the ’94 Crime Bill, the ’96 Counterterrorism Act, and the various Dem plans on the “Fairness” Doctrine, bank takeovers and the ). The party that complains about violence, corruption, wastrelcy and incompetence is violent, corrupt, spendthrift and incompetent.

It’s a theory, but I’ll stand by it. Indeed, you’ll see why as this piece continues.

There’s one more aphorism.  It’s George Orwell’s note that dictators always need enemies to keep the people occupied.

They don’t even need to be dictators!

———-

It’s a running joke among conservatives; if you order a pizza, and a lefty hears about it, it’s an example of extremism.  Pushing to liberalize charter-school laws and vacant-housing ordinances? Activism for the Second or Tenth Amendments?  Extremism.  To paraphrase the old drill sergeant aphorism, “everything you do can get you labelled an extremist, and everything you don’t do can get you labelled an extremist”.

I started seeing little trickles and dribbles around the regional Sorosphere a couple of weeks ago: references to “right-wing extremism” (this in reference to a quip by Michele Bachmann that uses some kind of guerrilla warfare reference to refer to conservatives in Minnesota), usually with more-than-muted warnings about “militancy” and “violence”.

It’s tempting (and in the case of the link above, accurate) to write it all off as examples of intellectual laziness, of the febrile thrashings of inferior minds.  Indeed, both of these play into the larger point.

But there is a larger point. The leftybloggers involved in these casual, petty, paranoid defamations are unwitting tools in a long-running campaign to control the English language, if necessary by devaluing it to uselessness.

More tomorrow.

…when the last American merchantmen were seized by pirates, polite society was a lot more polite than today.  Paradoxically, impolite society was a lot rougher than today, in a lot of ways (depending on where you were, yadda yadda bla bla bla).

And so it was considered the height of manners for gentlemen to be armed – to carry some kind of personal protection, a firearm or a sword or whatever – to protect themselves and theirs from life’s ugly exigencies.  It was their responsibility.

Back around the same time, cargo ships were almost invariably armed as well.  Piracy was a real, constant threat on many of the world’s key trade routes; the richer the trade route, the more dangerous the threat.  Some merchantmen – the British and Dutch East Indiamen, which traded between Europe and South/Southeast Asia, were basically warships with cargo holds, due to the threats they faced from pirates both indigenous (the Horn of Africa was a hotbed of piracy then as now) and official (“Privateers” were pirates hired out by nations to do the dirty work of screwing with their enemies’ commerce).

It was their responsibility.

Now, with the Navy’s successful rescue of Captain Phillips and the expungement of three pirates, and the Obama Administration’s threats to attack pirate strongholds ashore (is that where Osama Bin Laden’s been hiding?), the pirates are threatening to ratchet up the violence.  Which, by the way, more or less belies the notion that they’re just in it for the money, as some were saying last week.

Some of the world community’s been getting the vapors about this.  But the past offers at least part of the solution today.

Just as it is the duty of every real American to own and be proficient with a firearm, merchant ships need to be armed; merchant crews need to meet skiffs full of thugs with gunfire.  If they are in it for the profit, hard targets are a drag on the market,with ships as with people.  If they’re not, then it’s war  anyway.

With piracy as with economics 101 – if you subsidize bad behavior, you’ll get more of it. Ransoms – as the US discovered in 1803 against the Barbary Pirates of the western Mediterranean – merely create more pirates looking for the big payday.  It was only when Thomas Jefferson broke with pure libertarian tradition and built a Navy and Marine Corps to track down and kill the pirates that the threat abated (and it was only when the “international community” in the 1840’s launched a concerted effort to crush them that they went away for good).

Reading this piece reminds me – tomorrow afternoon is the Minnesota Tea Party. It’ll be at the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds and, thankfully, it starts after working hours for a change, running from 5-8!

Yes, indeed – I’ll be there. There’s a list of speakers – some excellent leaders in the fight against government wastrelcy, and a couple radio guys from stations that are either johnny-come-latelies or mavis-left-earlies from the limited government movement – but I’ll be there to meet people.  That’s who this thing is all about.

Hope to see you there.

Tigers great Fidrych found dead yesterday:

Fidrych, who won 19 games as a rookie in ’76 but had his pitching career abbreviated by injuries, was found dead by his friend Joseph Amorello beneath his 10-wheel truck at about 2:30 p.m. State police detectives are investigating the circumstances of the accident, said Worcester Country District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.Fidrych, who worked in trucking and construction since his baseball career ended in 1983, had a job scheduled for this morning, but the site wasn’t ready, so he returned home. Later in the day, Amorello, the owner of the A.F. Amorello & Sons construction company for which Fidrych often worked, stopped by Fidrych’s home to say hello and discuss an upcoming job, only to encounter a gruesome scene.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the Northborough Police Department would confirm further details of the accident. Reached via cell phone tonight, Amorello said, ‘‘It was obvious there was nothing I could do at that time.’’

Fidrych’s story reads like a B movie.  Drafted low in the pecking order, pulled out of the minors more or less as an afterthought, Fidrych got his first start when the scheduled starter was out sick.  Fidrych got 19 wins in a rookie season where he was paid – this blew my mind – $16,500.

He became a flash-in-the-pan superstar, got injured, never got near the record of his rookie season, and eventually left the game.

But it was fun while it lasted.  And it may have been among the last times I personally followed the Tigers for more than a game at a time…

Early in the Obama Administration, I predicted that the President and his minions would use the carnage in Mexico as an excuse – a veritable “Reichstag Fire”, if you will – to ratchet up US “gun control” efforts.

As part of my prediction, I noted that it was highly unlikely that Mexican narcotraficantes, with access to generations worth of guerrilla-surplus weaponry and Mexican Army weapons, not to mention all the swag that Narcopesos could buy on the international arms market – full-automatic military stuff – not the neutered, semi-auto stuff you could buy for much more money at gun shows in the US, and that as a result the Administration and the gun grabbers who want to use Mexico as a pretext more “gun control” were likely lying about the guns reaching Mexico from the US.

No big surprise that I’ve been proven right on that last bit:

You’ve heard this shocking “fact” before — on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.– Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City.

— CBS newsman Bob Schieffer referred to it while interviewing President Obama.

— California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at a Senate hearing: “It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors … come from the United States.”

— William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified in the House of Representatives that “there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States.”

There’s just one problem with the 90 percent “statistic” and it’s a big one:

It’s just not true.

Readthe whole, damning thing.

Hope and Change, Obama style; they Hope you’ll be gullible enough to Change the Constitution to suit their agenda.

Sari Gordon Mwrites about moving to the country to be a writer:

I coerced my husband into moving out here so I could pursue what so many other writers dream of, a nice place to be alone with my thoughts. My husband went along with it because the farmhouse came with a huge new garage.

Another “slick urban fish in a rural pond” story?  More “I can’t find kickass Oaxacan tacos, and my neighbors are bible-thumping gun-toting rubes!” anecdotes?

My dream was inspired by Dolly Parton. The story goes that, once a year, Dolly spends a week in her childhood cabin in the mountains alone. She ditches the wardrobe, the make-up, and the wigs. In the cabin she has no phone, electricity, no plumbing. And once she gets there, she fasts for five days. After that, she says, the songs come, and she writes.

OK.  I’ll cop to it.  I wanted to hate the story.  I tried to hate the story.

But it’s not bad.  Worth a read.

Especially for the slick urban fish.

It’s been almost four years since I codified the various “Berg’s Laws” in one convenient place.

It’s high time I updated things.

Berg’s First Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary – “No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the President’s justifications for the War in Iraq at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive”

Berg’s Corollary to Bissonnette’s Law – (Whenever someone introduces an “Old West” analogy into a discussion on civilian firearms ownership, the person can be presumed to be covering for absolute ignorance on the subject). Corollary: Whenever anyone says “people who favor guns are compensating for something, ifyaknowwhatImean”, know what they mean only in the most academic possible sense.

Berg’s Third Law of Human Resilience – After any disaster, whenever government and the media declare “there can not be any more survivors, and this is now a recovery operation”, they will be wrong.

Berg’s Fourth Law of Media/Sports Inversion – The Vikings will be contenders until the moment the local media actually believes they will be contenders. At that moment – be it pre-season or Week 12 – the season will fall irredeemably apart.

Berg’s Fifth Law of Historical Illteracy – 99% of the invocations of Godwin’s Law are done by 1% of the online population. Corollary: That 1% understands .000001% of the history required for a literate invocation of Godwin’s Law.

Berg’s Sixth Law of writing a Blog in a city full of people with dubious senses of Humor – To every joke, there is an equal and opposite inappropriately petulant reaction.

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Blogging – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.

Military spokespeople say the the SEAL snipers took only three shots to kill the three pirates yesterday.  It’s the kind of thing that you roll your eyes over when you read it in a Tom Clancy novel.
But yes, SEAL/Delta/Marine snipers are that good:

Asked how the snipers could have killed each pirate with a single shot in the darkness, Gortney described them as “extremely, extremely well-trained.” He told NBC’s “Today” show the shooting by the snipers was ordered by the captain of the Bainbridge after the pirates “exposed themselves” to attack.Military officials were widely praising the snipers for three flawless shots, which they described as remarkable, coming at night and from the stern of a ship on rolling waters.

Yeah, that’s pretty praiseworthy…

To: Marketing departments at Gibson Guitars, Saab, Hecker & Koch, Schechter, Apple, Fender Guitars, Lenovo, Springfield Armory, The Saint Paul Hotel, Amazon.com, Mesa Amplifiers, NoodleCo, Cannondale Bikes, Fabrique Nationale, Best Buy, 1-800-FLOWERS, Sony, Guitar Center, Rainbow Foods, Schweize Industrie Gesellschaft, Jeep, Chipotle, Marshall Electronics, General NanoSysterms, Taqueria Pineda, Bentley, Marriott, ParaOrdinance, Kowalski’s Market, The Park South Hotel in Manhattan, Hamer Guitars, DOD Electronics, Colt Firearms, Line Six Amplifiers, Shure, Kelloggs, Kimber Firearms, Guild Guitars.

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Solving that pesky FTC issue.

All,

I’m not sure who did what to whom to get the FTC all up in your grille, but it musta been a doozy of a lie!

As part of its review of its advertising guidelines, the FTC is proposing that word-of-mouth marketers and bloggers, as well as people on social-media sites such as Facebook, be held liable for any false statements they make about a product they’re promoting, along with the product’s marketer. This could present a significant issue for marketers, including the likes of Microsoft, Ford and Pepsi, who spend billions on word-of-mouth and social media. PQ Media projects that marketers will spend $3.7 billion on word-of-mouth marketing in 2011.

At any rate – just to be safe (and protect your shareholders), feel perfectly free to dump whatever social networkers you’re working with now, and send products to me to review.  I guarantee absolute, fiercely-honest lawsuit-proof reviews of your products and services.
All of them.

It’s your fiduciary duty!

That is all.

For six years, I’ve had to listen to lefties barbering about the supposed butchery of civil liberties under Bush.  They are never, of course, able to actually specify any civil liberties being denied American citizens, but no matter; they’re on a roll!

Among the few who do attempt to answer the question, the common thread seems to be something along the lines of “Bush wants to do away with Habeas Corpus”.

Now, I think it’s become nearly axiomatic; when a liberal issues a group defamation of conservatives, there will either be some such behavior in the recent past, or there will be that exact behavior – beknownst or otherwise to the speaker – in the near future.  So axiomatic is it that I am going to coin “Berg’s Seventh Law of Leftyblog Behavior” to taxonomize it.[*]
…well, take a read:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

So the new law is: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting”.
(more…)

The Missouri House of Representatives voted to allow concealed-carry permittees to carry and (in the case of students) store their firearms on the U of Missouri campus.

Of course, Athat’s got the usual pants-wetting crowd in an uproar

“Missouri’s college students should be allowed to learn and exchange ideas in an environment free from the threat of concealed guns,” University of Missouri System President Gary Forsee said in a news release Thursday. “It is hard to imagine that such a proposal could gain support given the magnitude of gun-related tragedies experienced on college campuses across the country.”

Yes, it is hard to imagine, given the illogical hysteria on the subject, much of it fed by the media.

Read the whole thing.

And realize – as President Foresee, the failed former CEO of Verizon, apparently does not – that the people with the permits are not the ones doing the fraternity pranks and playing the drinking games, much less the ones shooting up classes, like happened in the “gun free zones” at Virginia Tech and Columbine.

Have you noticed how many crises and near-crises are, to the media, “distractions” from the really important news (like the new Obama puppy)?

Mark Steyn certainly has:

Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran — now Somali pirates.”Er, okay. So the North Korean test is a “distraction,” the Iranian nuclear program is a “distraction,” and the seizure of a U.S.-flagged vessel in international waters is a “distraction.” Maybe it would be easier just to have the official State Department maps reprinted with the Rest of the World relabeled “Distractions.” Oh, to be sure, you could still have occasional oases of presidential photo-opportunities — Buckingham Palace, that square in Prague — but with the land beyond the edge of the Queen’s gardens ominously marked “Here be distractions . . . ”

Why, it’s almost as if the mainstream media want the whole world to cooperate with a triumphalistic narrative they’ve already written, in which the Obamessiah and his Hope and Change sweeps all the world’s benightedness before it!

Or something like that.

NOTE TO FLASH:  This piece is a commentary on the media’s kid-gloves treatment of Obama.  Not, as it happens, on his performance in the pirate standoff.

Chris Cilizza may think you’re hot stuff, but around here, you’re still just Flash. 🙂

Let’s interrupt the local leftyblogosphere’s giddy tittering over Rachel “Kirk Cameron” Maddow’s referring to the Tea Party protests as “teabagging”. If they weren’t a bunch of giggly arrested adolescents in the first place, they’d be conservatives, and the Sorosphere is largely so devoid of wit that this is what passes for clever in those quarters.

No, let’s look past the juvenilia and into the beef of the tax-mania that Maddow so dumbly short-changes for her gullible (and tiny) audience.  Jamie Delton breaks it down well:

Does she realize during the campaign the $250K figure originally claimed was gradually modified by Obama and Biden to $133K?

Is she confusing this “tax cut” with Obama’s deception of quadrupling the deficit and then saying he is cutting the (quadrupled) deficit in half? Does she not realize tax payers will be forced to pay the needless debt being incurred now by the democrats in the budget and stimulus bills through the ultimate tax authority of the federal government and the Federal Reserve’s inflated printed money, which is the same as a tax? When does a Democrat stop cheerleading taxes and begin to turn their attention to responsible government?

What?  Ask Rachel Maddow questions?

Well, goodness knows the Sorosphere won’t.  On Marty Owings’ internet talk show a few weeks back, I took a dig at some of Maddow’s assertions.  One of the liberal panelists’ responses – well, it boiled down to “how dare you question her.  She was a Rhodes scholar!”

Cecil Rhodes should demand his money back.

I’m not the one to gainsay President Obama’s performance in the Somali hostage crisis that ended yesterday with three dead pirates and a rescued captain.  I imagine the President believes he has a lot of diplomatic eggs to balance in thinking of taking these sorts of actions (even though the pirates don’t represent a country).

But Jeff Emanual has no problem speaking up:

Philips’s first leap into the warm, dark water of the Indian Ocean hadn’t worked out as well. With the Bainbridge in range and a rescue by his country’s Navy possible, Philips threw himself off of his lifeboat prison, enabling Navy shooters onboard the destroyer a clear shot at his captors — and none was taken. The guidance from National Command Authority — the President of the United States, Barack Obama — had been clear: a peaceful solution was the only acceptable outcome to this standoff unless the hostage’s life was in clear, extreme danger.

The next day, a small Navy boat approaching the floating raft was fired on by the Somali pirates — and again no fire was returned and no pirates killed, thanks again to the cautious stance assumed by Navy personnel due to the combination of a lack of clear guidance from Washington, and a mandate from the Commander in Chief’s staff not to act until Obama, a man with no background of dealing with such issues and no track record of decisiveness, decided that any outcome other than a “peaceful solution” would be acceptable.

After taking fire from the Somali kidnappers again Saturday night, the on-scene commander decided he’d had enough. Keeping his authority to act in the case of a clear and present danger to the hostage’s life, and having heard nothing from Washington since yet another request to mount a rescue operation had been denied the day before, the Navy officer — unnamed in all media reports to date — decided the AK-47 one captor had leveled at Philips’ back was a threat to the hostage’s life, and ordered the NSWC team to take their shots.

All’s well that ends well.

But as Emanuel describes it, it had every opportunity not to end well.

Ah, well.  As Vice President Biden told us, there are all sorts of crises spooling up for The One.  Hang on.

Of course not all of the world’s intractable problems can be solved by sending in the commandos.

But it’s nice to know that when when we need to – no matter who our leader is…:

Right before his rescue, Richard Phillips, the 53-year-old captain of the Maersk Alabama, was being held in a capsule-like lifeboat in the Gulf of Aden. The pirates, armed with AK-47s and small-caliber pistols, were pointing the rifle at the captain, Vice Admiral William E. Gortney said at a news conference in Washington. The situation amounted to “imminent danger,” the vice admiral said, noting that the Navy had standing orders from President Obama to attack if the captain’s life were in jeopardy.

A little after 7 p.m. in Somalia (which is seven hours ahead of Eastern time) , U.S. special forces aboard the U.S.S. Bainbridge shot and killed the pirates from 25 to 30 meters away, the vice admiral said, and pulled the captain from the water…

…“I’m just the byline. The real heroes are the Navy, the Seals, those who have brought me home,” Phillips said, according to John Reinhart, the Maersk Line president and chief executive. A Navy photograph showed Mr. Phillips shaking hands with the commanding officer of the Bainbridge.

…that we can.

I don’t normally blog on Easter, but I read this, and had to sound off
This time, when Captain Phillips jumped overboad, the Navy was ready.  Three pirates are now chum, and Captain Phillips is free.

An American ship captain was freed unharmed Sunday in a swift firefight that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, the ship’s owner said and a U.S. official said.A senior U.S. intelligence official said a pirate who had been involved in negotiations to free Capt. Richard Phillips but who was not on the lifeboat was in custody.

His crew was duly happy:

When Phillips’ crew heard the news aboard their ship in the port of Mombasa, they placed an American flag over the rail of the top of the Maersk Alabama and whistled and pumped their fists in the air. Crew fired a bright red flare into the sky from the ship.

Thank God and the US Navy.  And God Bless America.

NOTE: There are two kinds of people in the world who still know Morse Code; old sailors, and Special Forces signal operators (and, I guess, Navy signalmen, now that I think about it…OK.  Three kinds of people in the world who still know Morse Code, as well as people who took their ham radio license before about 1997…Four kinds of people who still know Morse Code…)

OK.  From the top; here’s a fearless prediction: five’ll get you ten when this story is finally told, it’ll involve someone surreptitiously signalling to Phillips “let’s do a mulligan on that whole ‘jumping from the boat’ thing; we’ll be ready this time”.

Just a prediction. Not putting any money on it.

Watching Wall Street (for the umteenth time) this week had me thinking about my last post and our Great Recession. Conservatives accurately lay the blame at the feet of liberals who forced banks to loan money where it should not have been loaned in the interest of “fairness.”

Liberals lay the blame at the feet of greed, capitalism, lax regulation – or all of the above.

But greed and capitalism are not the same thing – although liberals will assert otherwise; if not in their words, then certainly in their policy making.

While greed is a necessary element of capitalism, as attraction is to procreation, the villain in this Great Recession is not greed or capitalism.

In Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech to the shareholders of Teldar Paper is widely celebrated and at the same time offered as a cautionary tale respectively by proponents and opponents of the American entrepreneur’s quest for profit.

Having heard it again in its entirety, I was reminded of another famous passage, misused and misunderstood by those who would unintentionally, or intentionally as it were, twist its meaning by ignoring it’s full context or deliberately plucking it therefrom.

Exhibit A: “Money is the root of all evil” which is derived from scripture. Observe it however, in full context:

1 Timothy 6:10 (KJV) [emphasis mine]: For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Exhibit B: The infamous and polarizing “Greed is Good.” Now, behold the famous passage from Gordon Gekko [emphasis mine]:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re not here to indulge in fantasy, but in political and economic reality. America, America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of the free market, when our country was a top industrial power, there was accountability to the stockholder. The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company!

…

The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated.

…

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Thank you very much.

As an aside, read it again.

…and pretend he’s not speaking in 1985.

Now there have been plenty of bubbles and subsequent crises where unchecked greed coupled with insufficient regulatory oversight or intervention led to systemic havoc and widespread suffering.

This just isn’t one of them.

Only the federal government led by ill-informed “visionaries” can create a crisis this wide and this deep. More of the same can not and will not restore our economy.

It’s high time the other 53% of us came to grips with that fact.

The Lord Has Risen.

Death has been defeated.

Have a happy and blessed Easter, all.

All three NARN shows are taking the day off today to observe the Easter holiday.

May you and yours have a blessed Easter, Passover, or whatever your observe this weekend.

I got my kids cell phones for Christmas.  The cheap ones, mind you – the kind you get for next to nothing at WalMart, and use the ultra-cheepo pay as you go plans.  It’s mainly so I can stay in touch with ’em.

But they hit me up for the unlimited text plans. 

“Unlimited?”, my taciturn Norwegian and thrifty Caledonian sides exclaimed simultaneously.

“Yeah.  We text more than we talk.”

“Well”, I responded, “how about the $4 for 1000 a month plan”.

Bun rolled her eyes.  “I can do a thousand in a week, Dad”.

However, I did find that by trading talk time for text messages, it made the whole deal cheaper while actually improving my main goal – having my kids reachable (it’s much cheaper to make sure they never run out of text messages than talk time) anytime, anyplace.

Although I was a little skeptical about that whole “thousand message a week” thing.

I said I was skeptical.  No more.

A cell phone used by a Wyoming 13-year-old to run up a nearly $5,000 phone bill will text no more thanks to her angry father and his hammer. Dena Christoffersen of Cheyenne sent or received about 20,000 text messages over about a month, and her parents’ phone plan didn’t cover texting.

Gregg Christoffersen told KUSA-TV of Denver this week that he thought texting had been disabled on her daughter’s phone, which he smashed hours after getting a phone bill for more than $4,750.

There’s good news, too:

The family said Verizon has been willing to knock the bill down to a reasonable level.

20,000 a month.

Where does she find time to breathe?

Mona Charen takes down the Congressional Black [Liberal] Caucus’ trip to Havana.

It’s a long, detailed beat-down, full of juxtapositions like…:

In finest useful-idiot fashion, Representative Rush said this of 77-year-old Raul Castro, who has served Fidel throughout the 50-year totalitarian siege of the island: “I think that what really surprised me, but also endeared me to him,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities. I intend to do everything that I can when we get back to the States to make sure that normalization with our relationship with Cuba is given proper consideration both within the House of Representatives and the neighborhoods of America.”

Here’s the Black Book of Communism again on treatment of prisoners in Cuba:

The violence of the prison regime affected both political prisoners and common criminals. Violence began with the interrogations conducted by the Departamento Tecnico de Investigaciones (DTI). The DTI used solitary confinement and played on the phobias of the detainees: one woman who was afraid of insects was locked in a cell infested with cockroaches. The DTI also used physical violence. Prisoners were forced to climb a staircase wearing shoes filled with lead and were then thrown back down the stairs. Psychological torture was also used, often observed by a medical team. . . . The children of detainees were banned from higher education, and spouses were often fired from their jobs.

Please, Democrats. Keep these hamsters out front.  Thanks.

So yesterday was the first “round trip” commute – riding both ways – of the season.  Which means the first climb up Cathedral Hill of the season.

Make no mistake about it; by June, I’ll be zipping up Grand Hill like it’s hardly there (although Ramsey Hill is kinda the great white whale for me; maybe this year, maybe not.  Even when I was in my twenties, I didn’t ride up Ramsey Hill).

But the day-by-day hill that I face in my workadaddy, hugamommy routine is Cathedral Hill – the big hill from which the, doy, Cathedral of Saint Paul looks over downtown.

The BikeRadar map says it’s about a 100 foot climb from my office to the corner of Summit and Selby.  And in about three weeks, that’s all it’ll be.

But that first climb-out of the year is always a bear, even if you take the long way up the hill – up Wabasha to the 94/Capitol frontage road, and then up John ireland Boulevard.
But a smaller bear every year.  Two years ago, when I started bike-commuting, I ran out of wind aroud Marshall and had to walk it the rest of the way on my first attempt.  Last year, I made it to the top (in first gear, nice and slow and easy).

I did about the same yesterday, but feeling much better about the whole thing.

And by golly, it’s time to get on the road again!

Shucks!

…as they say in every investment ad and prospectus.

But hopefully this time it offers tuition for those that would rebuild Wall Street. Again.

Wall Street, or what remains of it, has dealt a catastrophic blow to its reputation in the past eight months of bonuses, bailouts and bankruptcies. What its current leaders, and the young who are lucky enough to be entering business, have to do now is begin rescuing and restoring that reputation.

This will, in fact, be the great work of a generation of American business leaders.

More is at stake than their standing. At stake is the standing of a free-market system that has flourished since America’s founding and made it the wealthiest nation in the history of man.

Peggy Noonan likens these days to those not so long ago when Wall Street was literally rebuilding itself after an unprecedented disaster.

Those days offer hope to those that would count Capitalism dead. They serve as a blueprint for redemption for those vilified justifiably, or more predominantly in this left-dominated environment, those vilified for the sake of political opportunism – lest this crisis be “wasted.”

And so the next morning, Monday, Sept. 17, 2001, the New York Stock Exchange opened with a podium full of firemen, cops, emergency medical workers and elected officials. A Marine Corps major sang “God Bless America.” There was silence. Then a Port Authority police officer, one of the last guys to come out of the pile, began to ring the bell. The others on the podium joined in. And as the bell rang out in triumph, the traders on the floor began to cry and cheer and shout themselves hoarse. Catherine Kinney was below the podium. “Was there a cheer—oh my God, you wouldn’t believe. I cried, I did. And prices start to go across the tape . . .”

America was open for business again.

It was a great moment in Wall Street history.

I dare say, despite speaking from the bottom of a metaphysical crater this time, that Wall Street has had a great many more good days than bad, for all Americans.

…where “Well-Regulated” means “can hit what they shoot at”, and “militia” means “civilians with guns”, can have an incredible impact on the world when they need to.

It was 69 years ago today, during Germany’s invasion of Norway, that an ad-hoc group of Norwegian soldiers and armed civilians repelled a German attempt to capture King Haakon VII and his cabinet.

King Haakon VII and Prince Olaf

Germany invaded Norway by surprise.  Norway’s policy at the time was absolute neutrality – in other words, belief that all belligerents were equally wrong – which led them to hold that the British, French and Poles were just as wrong as the Germans for World War II.  It’s a footnote in history that they were, for their own purposes, basically right; as the German invasion force sailed and flew toward Norway, a British force was also moving to try to seize Narvik, as the jumping-off point of a campaign to cut off Swedish steel supplies from the German war machine.  Events changed the British invasion force into group of timely reinforcements.

Norway, being officially pacifist both as a practical matter (it’s a small country stuck between military giants) and a political one (they were controlled by a socialist government), had only very recently decided to modernize its military.

Norwegian soldiers, 1940

Its navy’s small destroyer and torpedo boat fleets had been built in the 1910s at the latest; it’s two “battleships”, really nothing more than harbor guard ships, were antiques from the 1890’s.

Torpedo boat HNoMS Kjell, built in the 1890s, still in service in 1940

Coastal defense “Battleship” HNoMS Eidsvold, blown up and sunk in the opening moments of the war after being torpedoed by surprise, with a loss of all but six of its crew of 181. 

The Germans went straight for the Norwegian jugular, attempting the contemporary equivalent of a “shock and awe” campaign.

Narvik on fire

Fallschirmjäger (paratroops) landed at key spots around Oslo, seizing key government installations; ships with German troops landed out of the blue at others.  One of them – the heavy cruiser Blücher, loaded with a battalion of German troops – went barrelling up Oslo fjord.  I’ts mission was to land the troops at the head of the fjord, cutting the only real road out of Oslo to the interior, preventing King Haakon and his government’s escape on the chance that the paratroopers missed him.

Germans advancing in Norway, 1940

And it was there, and only there, that Norway’s formal defenses worked; an antique, 40-year-old torpedo, fired from a tube at the Oscarsborg fortress, sank Blücher, killing hundreds and preventing the rest of the invasion fleet from blocking Haakon’s escape route.

KMS Blücher blazes as it sinks

Haakon and his cabinet escaped into Norway’s interior, to lead a motley collection of troops from Norway’s tiny army, and thousands of “reservists” who were, truth be told, mostly members of outdoors and hunting clubs.

It’s there we pick up our story.

With Haakon’s escape, the German command detailed a raid to try to capture him.

A detachment of Germans Fallschirmjäger, the elite of the German military at the time, trained and armed with the best the Wehrmacht [*] had, launched what we’d call a “commando raid” today (the term “commando” wouldn’t be introduced to these types of troops for another year or so).  They drove off into the interior…

…and smacked into a Norwegian roadblock at Midtskogen Gård, near Elverum.

Norwegian troops, 1940

The Norwegians – a company of Norwegian royal guards, reinforced by a bunch of rifle club members armed only with antique-y Krag-Jørgensson rifles and hunting pieces, kicked Nazi ass, killing two Germans (one of whom had been the German military attache to Norway before the Nazi treachery unfolded and he took his place as an officer) for a loss of three wounded Norwegians. Rumors that anyone yelled “Wølverijne” while shooting at the Germans are completely unconfirmed.

“The founding fathers were writing about muskets when they wrote the Constitution!” Norwegian citizen-soldier, armed with the “assault rifle” of the day, takes aim at an invader.

Most importantly, the Germans realized the motley collection of Oles and Svens had delayed them to the point where King and Cabinet had escaped; the Germans retreated to Oslo, and King Haakon got away to the UK, where he led Norwegians in exile against the Germans for the next five years.

And so while the militia couldn’t defeat the Nazi war machine outright, it did give it a bloody enough nose to give Norway – and freedom – a chance to fight another day.

The rear guard; Norwegian and British soldiers in the interior, 1940

Further proof, were any needed, that Liberals are wrong.

(more…)

Obama reaches out to ‘Moderate’ Pirates:

For too long, America has been too dismissive of the proud culture and invaluable contributions of the Pirate Community. Whether it is their pioneering work with prosthetics, husbandry of tropical birds or fanciful fashion sense, America owes a deep debt to Pirates.

The past eight years have shown a failure to appreciate the historic role of these noble seafarers. Instead of celebrating their entreprenuerial spirit and seeking to partner with them to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

Oh, of course it’s satire.

As far as you know, anyway.