There’s still time to sign up.

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All this is not as crazy at it sounds. There is a book associated with this annual event by Chris Baty, titled: No Plot? No Problem!

The whole affair (book and annual contest) is really an exercise in learning how to write, by building confidence that obstacles can be overcome, and by establishing firm and productive work habits.

Look at it this way: the November writing project does demonstrate annually that it really is possible to produce some kind of novel by only a month of determined and persistent effort. So if it really would take most of us a few more months to produce anything worthwhile, it is still good to realize that the work is really finite and well within the capabilities of a great many of us.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

A giant with a magnifying glass is destroying the city.

game

Paul Mulshine, in the Star-Ledger, notes, as we did ourselves, that if you try to find the reference to “equal protection” in the Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey State Constitution (mentioned as the basis of its ruling requiring Gay Marriage by the New Jersey Supreme Court), you will seek in vain. And he adds:

You will note that the words “equal protection” do not appear in it. They couldn’t have. That article first appeared in the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. But it wasn’t until 1868 that the concept of equal protection came into being, and that was in the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14th amendment doesn’t apply here, but if it did, the state Supreme Court would almost certainly be re versed in the federal courts. That was the case with the court’s last ruling on the question of gay rights. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a New Jersey ruling in which our high court ordered the Boy Scouts to accept a gay scoutmaster. That decision was also based on the nonexistent “equal protection” clause in Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the state constitution.

The seven justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court have a habit of putting words into the Constitution—and of taking them out.

If a court made up of liberals was working on the basis of a Constitution whose only text was the Second Amendment’s provision That the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed, I have no doubt they could find Equal Protection, a Right to Abortion, Gay Marriage, Affirmation Action, Forced Busing to Achieve Racial Integration, and Confiscation of Private Firearms all mandated by the same text.

The Never Yet Melted Blog was started October 29, 2005. Current statistics are: a total of 1800 posts, visitors from 176 countries, more than 26,000 unique visitors this month, and 800 blog links (by Technorati’s count). Our thanks to the many generous bloggers who linked our new and obscure effort, and to all our readers around the world.

A short 3:32 demonstration of Wushu (Chinese Kung Fu) by Wim Demeere for Belgian television (in Flemish).

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A video reading of the famous Robert W. Service poem. Very well done.

When Bill Clinton out-maneuvered House Republicans in the 1995 budget battle, and they found themselves under fire for “shutting down the government,” wholesale incumbency timidity returned.

In 1989, Newt Gingrich rose to the number two leadership position in the House after a contentious three-way race pitting young backbench conservatives such as myself, Bob Walker, Joe Barton and others against old bulls such as Minority Leader Bob Michel and other ranking members. We thought they suffered from a minority party mindset and were too accommodating of the Democrats. Out of congressional power for nearly two generations, Republicans had become complacent. Senior members of the party were happy to accept the crumbs afforded by Democratic chairmen. Life was comfortable in the minority as long as you did not rock the boat. Members received their perks—such as travel abroad and special banking privileges—and enough pork projects for reelection. The entire Congress lived by the rule of parochial politics.

Gingrich and I and a handful of true believers in Ronald Reagan’s conservative vision set the goal of retaking the House. The “Contract With America” outlined our platform of limited government. This vision appealed to both the social and economic wings of the conservative movement; equally important, it included institutional reforms for a Congress that had grown increasingly arrogant and corrupt. The contract nationalized the vision of the Republican Party in a way that unified our base and appealed to independents. We championed national issues, not local pork projects or the creature comforts of high office.

In 1994, this vision was validated when Republicans took 54 seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate and control of both houses of Congress.

Welfare reform in 1996 only affirmed the revolution. Bureaucrats, special interests and the White House all claimed that the sky would fall if we touched this failed Great Society program, but we held firm. When you take on a sacred cow, you must kill it completely—tinkering on the margins is ineffective. In the end, the reform proved so successful and popular that President Bill Clinton (who rejected the original bill twice) considers it one of the best ideas his administration ever had.

At one point during the welfare reform debates, a member approached me and said, “Dick, I know this is the right thing to do, but my constituents just won’t understand.” I told him, “So you’re telling me they are smart enough to vote for you but not smart enough to understand this?” He ended up voting to pass the bill.

Yet despite such successes, we didn’t learn the right political lessons. A few months before the victory on welfare, we lost the battle over the federal government shutdown of 1995, when we were outmaneuvered by Clinton, a masterful political operator. After that fight, too many Republicans apparently concluded that America wanted bigger government. This misreading was the first step on the road away from the Reagan legacy.

We emerged as a wounded party; we stopped trusting the public; and we internalized the wrong lesson. Since the party won the majority in 1994, the GOP Conference had been consistent in requiring offsetting spending cuts for any new spending initiatives. (In fact, during the aftermath of a large Mississippi River flood, Rep. Jim Nussle even waited to find and approve offsets before moving the relief legislation for his own state of Iowa.) But by the summer of 1997, the appropriators—rightly called the “third party” of Congress—had begun to pass spending bills with Democrats. As soon as politics superseded policy and principle, the avalanche of earmarks that is crushing the party began.

Read the whole article.

I noticed that Dick Armey failed to discuss how in 1997, with Newt Gingrich under fire from ethics charges trumped up by democrats, House Republicans led by Armey himself attempted to remove Gingrich as Speaker. Consequently the following year, after unexpected electoral setbacks (Republicans lost five House seats), Gingrich was blamed. He resigned the Speakership and left the House, rather than face another rebellion. It’s impossible to avoid comparing the quality of Republican leadership, and ideological commitment, before and after Gingrich’s departure.

Build the ultimate potato cannon.

Instruction file

Caution: large .pdf file.

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page reports that the Department of Defense is turning to the Internet and the Blogosphere to hold the MSM’s feet to the fire, and force them to correct mistakes and inaccuracies.

The U.S. Department of Defense is now taking its requests for corrections public through a website known as For the Record. Here, the Department of Defense is openly calling for corrections from major media outlets, and even noting when they refuse to publish letters to the editor.

The most recent was this past Tuesday, when the DOD published a letter, that the New York Times refused to run, which contained quotes from five generals (former CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, current CENTCOM commander John Abizaid, MNF Commander George Casey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, as well as his successor, Peter Pace) that rebutted a New York Times editorial. This has been picked up by a number of bloggers who have been able to spread the Pentagon’s rebuttal — and the efforts of the New York Times to sweep it under the rug — across the country.

Lynn Cheney asks Wolf Blitzer why is CNN broadcasting terrorist propagada videos showing the shooting of Americans, and wonders if CNN wants the US to win. Blitzer responds by imitating the Times’ Byron Calame.

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British Police warned a jeweller not to distribute to neigboring jewellers pictures of a thief captured on the shop’s video camera, because doing so would infringe the woman’s human rights.

It seems to me that I’ve already linked and quoted, or at the very least already read, Michael Bywater’s jeremiad, in today’s Telegraph, about the infantilization of modern Britons, but I know people who will like it, so here it is again.

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture…

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible…

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.

The comedian is alarmed at the prospect of Mrs. Pelosi occupying a position two heartbeats away from the Presidency. Miller seems to think Pelosi is just a trifle dim. I’d hate to hear what he’d say if he ever ran into Barbara Boxer.

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And, as a matter of fact, only today Nancy Pelosi declared: I have supported legislation, including H.Res.316, that would properly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. It is imperative that the United States recognize this atrocity.

The Armenian Genocide is a term applied to deaths resulting from the forcible mass evacuation of Armenians by the Turkish government in 1915.

Armenians want to play the victim card and refer to genocide. Turks say Armenian deaths were inadvertent, and blame ethnic strife, disease, and WWI.

Fascinating as all this is, the precise relationship of Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915 to the government of the United States in 2006 is less than obvious to me. All this ethnic pandering may get Cher to vote for Pelosi, but the rest of us are not impressed.

A West Indian manatee Trichechus manatus, for reasons which doubtless seemed good to him at the time, took a 700 mile (1127 kilometers) swim up the Mississippi to the vicinity of the city of Memphis.

Busybody do-gooders, experts, and officials of all kinds (as they always do these days whenever an unusual form of wildlife appears) hurried to the scene to “rescue,” i.e., to interfere with, shoot with tranquilizer guns, and typically kill-with-kindness, the hapless visitor. In this case, so far, however, the manatee has had the last laugh. He simply submerged, and vanished from view, leaving the experts up the river.

AP:

MEMPHIS, Tennessee A meandering manatee who took an unheard of swim 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) up the Mississippi River played hide and seek Thursday with a rescue team led by marine mammal specialists from Florida.

The manatee, believed to be 7 to 8 feet (2.10 to 2.40 meters) long and weighing 800 to 1,000 pounds (360 to 450 kilograms), has been hanging around since at least Sunday in a river chute along the downtown Memphis riverfront.

The rescue team, made up of marine biologists, wildlife agents, police officers and Coast Guard personnel, began searching the 3-mile (5-kilometer) chute, called the Wolf River Harbor, early Thursday but had not spotted the manatee by afternoon.

Pedro Ramos, a team leader from the marine amusement park SeaWorld of Orlando, Florida, said he was unsure how long the manatee could survive in the 60-degree (15 Celsius) water or how long the searchers would look for it.

“This is something very unique,” Ramos said. “It’s never been recorded before this far up the Mississippi.”

Manatees, an endangered species, are generally found along the southern U.S. coast, though they do stray farther north along the eastern seaboard during the summer. They are docile, warm water animals.

Ramos said his team would search through Friday and then re-evaluate its plans. The manatee was spotted late Wednesday afternoon floating near the bank in the he bank in the dark, brown water.

“We can’t just stay up here indefinitely,” he said. “As long as he’s eating he could probably survive for a few days. It will really depend on the water temperature.”

In early August, another manatee travelled up the Hudson as far as Westchester County.

Michelle Malkin asked that miserable prevaricating worm Byron Calame (who makes his living as a fraud, apologizing for, and defending, the New York Slimes’ lies, treason, and arrogance, while posing as a supposed in-house representative of public criticism) exactly what he meant by saying that he had allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger [his] instinctive affinity for responding as he did in the case of the Times-published SWIFT leak, last July. (What Calame did, of course, was kiss up to his employer, and dismiss all criticism from the outside public, as always.)

That pillar of journalistic integrity Calame took a few days to think about it and replied: “I was referring to criticism of the article that has been amply documented in a wide range of published reports.”

There is the New York Times in a nutshell: too cowardly and dishonest to try to defend what it publishes in an open dialogue, taking refuge behind its own pomposity and self-importance.

Reading Byron Calame makes me want to go out and buy a parakeet, so I could line the bottom of the bird cage with his column.

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