In case you had the sense not to watch last night’s debate, you can read my Chirpstory of the live-tweeting snarkathon on my blog.
(I can’t post the script here because FYWP that’s why.)
Archives for 2011
Send in the Drones
Anyone even remotely surprised by this needs to have their head examined:
Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.
Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.
He also called in a Predator B drone.
As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.
How long until we are dropping freedom bombs on our own population. Oh, wait. Been there done that.
One of the largest disappointments for me with this administration has been their unchecked use of drones pretty much anywhere they want in the world.
*** Update ***
Ohfercrissakes- I’m not making a connection between this admin and this use of a drone. The final sentence was just an aside about something that really bothers me, which is this administration’s reliance on drones all over the world. I should have known that the reflexive Obama defenders would think I was conflating the two.
As to those of you poo-pooing this and saying “how is this any different than a helicopter,” in five to ten years when unmanned drones are flying all over your neighborhood surveilling and storing info at random, you can think back to mocking us privacy hysterics. I’m sure very similar arguments were made in years past about police needing armored vehicles and .50 cals and every locale needing a SWAT team armed to the teeth. But hey, it’s much more fashionable to be too cool for school and just say “no big deal, shut up hippie.”
Love me like a man
Everyone’s talking about Romney’s 10K bet last night, but I don’t think it hurts him much with Republican voters. It just shows that he knows how to make it rain. Where’s your spare 10 G’s, bitch?
Romney had a weak debate performance because he didn’t come across as a straight-talking tough guy during the rest of the debate. Here’s a good analysis from a debate coach, which is fairly similar to Steve M’s take:
The first error was when George Stephanopoulos directed a possible bonanza question to Romney. He asked Romney if he was more conservative (his potential weakness) and more electable (his potential strength) than Gingrich. Perfect softball. In one answer, Romney could erase doubts about his conservatism for the base of Republican voters and he could talk about how he is the only candidate who can beat Obama (as evidenced in polls).
Romney’s answer? Moon mining. Seriously. After starting with some generic answer about the direction of the country, his first specific example was that he was different from Gingrich on moon colonies. “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.”
[….]Gingrich was far from passive, stepping up repeatedly to attack. A favorite line: “I am a Reaganite, I’m proud to be a Reaganite. I will tell the truth even at the risk of causing some confusion, sometimes with the timid.” That’s what the Republicans are looking for. They want tough conservative talk and someone who can take the fight to Obama. Gingrich behaved as though he was ready and willing to do so. And Romney missed his chance in this debate.
Keep it simple: Reagan good, Jesus good, free market good, Obama bad, soshulism bad, terists bad. And say it like you mean it. No one gives a fuck about moon minerals anymore than they gave a fuck about bear DNA in 2008. Romney thinks he can win by being the knowledgeable, serious one, who knows that the others’ ideas are all crazy (and it’s true that they are crazy) but that won’t work. It sure hasn’t worked so far.
Before Romney was behind Gingrich in the polls, he was behind Donald Trump, then Rick Perry, then Hermain Cain. Then one day they had to crash, but seriousness wouldn’t have helped that batch. Trump crashed when Obama smacked him down with the birth certificate, not because voters thought Trump was crazy for believing it, but because Obama made Trump look weak and unmanly. Perry crashed, not when he talked about lynching Ben Bernanke, but when he started acting like a candy ass pain-killer addict. Herman Cain’s I-don’t-know-Korea-but-I-know-crazy act was playing just fine before the librul media paid those she-devils to accuse him of harassment.
Romney thinks he’s competing on Jeopardy when he’s really on Quien Es Mas Macho.
Let Newt Get His Geek On
I didn’t watch the debate last night, but I gather that this fell flat for Mitt Romney:
Asked where he and Gingrich differed, Romney said, “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.”
… On moon mining, Gingrich doubled down — “I’m happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way” …
Amazing — Gingrich not only defended this, he wrapped it in the last refuge of a wingnut scoundrel, entrepreneurialism.
But that’s the thing about people like him: if you have that particular combination of screws loose, yes, you’re going to make manic, half-schizophrenic pronouncements about space colonization and the like, but you’re also going to have the cornered-rat instinct to jujitsu any direct attack on such pronouncements, so the attacker is the only one who winds up flat out on the mat. What I’m saying is that, with Gingrich’s particular brand of crazy, it’s futile to go at him head-on.
Far better to lull him into making even crazier pronouncements on the spot. Try doing it like this:
Romney: “We’ve suffered greatly in the three years of the Obama administration, and, well, it would be nice if we could just go into a time machine and turn back the clock to a moment before all that damage was done. Unfortunately, going back in time is just impossible — right, Newt? It’s really a shame that we can’t reverse all this damage with a time machine — isn’t it, Newt?”
Gingrich: “Well, in fact, Mitt, there’s been some extraordinary work done on time travel at a laboratory in Belarus, and it’s my belief that the United States would benefit tremendously from a massive program of research not only into time travel, but also into related possibilities, including astral projection….”
Now you’ve got him going.
Newt’s going to ambush you (his attack last night on Romney as a would-be career politician who just couldn’t manage to build a lengthy career was, I see, quite effective), and Newt’s primed to rebuff most direct attacks (though attacking him for supporting child labor, as I see Romney did, is a waste of time, because the stance is one of punishing the weak, which means it naturally appeals to the right). In short, I’d say you can’t actually defeat Gingrich — you have to find a way to get him to defeat himself. Which really shouldn’t be all that hard.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
Running (Away From) The Numbers
Before we get to this afternoon’s various sporting contests, one more thought on the Clown Car Cavalcade: The latest NBC/Marist polls for Florida and South Carolina show a big lead for Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney, 15 points in the Sunshine State, 19 points in the Palmetto State.
That’s not the shocking part. This is, buried in paragraphs 20-23 at the tail end of the MSNBC First Read article (but on page 2 on each poll’s full results, pretty much right up top.)
Turning to the general election, President Obama’s standing has improved in Florida, always a key presidential battleground state.
Forty-six percent of registered voters in the state approve of his job, which is up five points since October.
In hypothetical match-ups, the president leads Romney by seven points (48 to 41 percent) and Gingrich by 12 points (51 to 39 percent).
In South Carolina — a reliable Republican state in presidential contests — Obama’s approval rating stands at 44 percent, and he holds narrow leads over Romney (45 to 42 percent) and Gingrich (46 to 42 percent).
Yeah, see, President Obama leading in South Carolina over both these chuckleheads should be a big, fat story. But no, it’s all about Newt’s double digit lead in the primaries. And yes, I know I’m supposed to keep this on the down low in case the Republicans figure out this whole “the further to the right I catapult myself in the primaries, the worse I’ll do in the general” thing, but it’s far, far too late for that.
Funny how that works.
Man, I Wish I’d Written Something This Nasty (Sunday-ish Open Thread)
They just don’t make invective like they used to.
I am something of an insomniac, and one of my tricks to get back to sleep when those 4 a.m. broadcasts from KFKD* just won’t let go is to pull out at random a volume from my copy of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s the last pre-World War I version, and it contains some truly brilliant Edwardian (and Victorian) prose. (See, for example, Swinburne’s entry on Mary, Queen of Scots.)
So on last Wednesday or Thursday night — or rather, on Thursday or Friday a.m., 0-dark-hundred — I found myself nose-deep in Volume V, Camorra to Cape Colony and came across this in the entry on Campbell, John Campbell, Baron, who in 1841 gained the post of Lord Chancellor of Ireland for a grand total of 16 days. The controversy that arose over that appointment cast him into mostly self-imposed political exile for most of the 1840s. As the Britannica entry put it, that was when “the unlucky dream of literary fame troubled Lord Campbell’s leisure.”
Now, y’all may know I enjoy the odd bit of invective. I may even have been called a bit harsh in some of my commentary on a few of our scribbling friends of the rightish persuasion. But I can only dream of scorching earth with the zeal, brio and sheer music of this, on Campbell’s project:
The conception of this work is magnificent; its execution wretched. Intended to evolve a history of jurisprudence from the truthful portraits of England’s greatest lawyers, it merely exhibits the ill-digested results of desultory learning, without a trace of scientific symmetry or literary taste, without a spark of that divine imaginative sympathy which alone can give flesh and spirit to the dead bones of the past, and without which the present becomes an unintelligable maze of mean and selfish ideas. A charming style, a vivid fancy, exhaustive research were not to be expected from a hard-worked barrister; but he must certainly be held responsible for the frequent plagiarisms, the still more frequent inaccuracies of detail, the colossal vanity which obtrudes on almost every page, the hasty insinuations against the memory of the great departed who were to him as giants, and the petty sneers which he condescends to print against his own contemporaries, with whom he was living from day to day on terms of apparently sincere friendship.
Smokin’. Just an orotund symphony of Victorian disdain. I love it.
And strangely, I just can’t place who amongst us this demolition of Campbell calls to mind….
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*Ann Lamott’s name for the radio station in your head
Image: English School, Mary, Queen of Scots, in Captivity, 1575
I believe you may consider this an open thread.
Man, I Wish I’d Written Something This Nasty (Sunday-ish Open Thread)Post + Comments (30)
How to Lose Your RIM Job
Two drunken VPs from Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, caused an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing to divert and land in Vancouver. Here’s how drunk they were (via):
One of the men “assaulted a flight attendant and threatened to punch another,” the prosecution told the court.
Crew members eventually handcuffed the two unruly passengers with plastic restraints and then with tape. But they eventually “chewed their way through their restraints.”
One of these guys also threatened to “off” other passengers. They’ve been fired and were fined $36K each by the Canadian court that heard their case. I realize this case has been in the news, but how drunk or stoned do you need to be to chew through your ziptie handcuffs?