This blog will be three weeks old tomorrow; it was started October 29th.

I had been gloating over finding a few dozen hits per diem, many from actual strangers, and considering that real progress, until Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online linked a fairly frivolous posting responding to some moonbat who calls himself “Hunter” on Daily Kos, and I found four thousand hits this morning.

A hearty welcome to all our new visitors. Please look in again from time to time. I believe I can promise some rational observations from the political Right, and some links providing passing amusement.

Wonkette informs us that the Smithsonian National Zoo has an Internet pandacam on Animal Planet, at the moment, allowing viewers worldwide to watch Mei Xiang, a giant panda, and her recently born cub, Tai Shan (renamed “Butterstick” by Wonkette?) sleep.

Wonkette has been posting about this since the panda was born last summer. I guess I haven’t been reading Wonkette too closely lately.

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page reports the cancellation of the development of the XM8, another lightweight assault weapon chambered for the 5.56×45 mm NATO (.223 caliber), owing to growing reports from Iraq of American forces’ disenchantment with the groundhog round’s poor killing power on white-tailed deer-sized targets, i.e., human beings (Too often, enemy troops require several 5.56mm bullets to put them out of action), and because of the small round’s lack of ability to penetrate walls and doors in urban fighting.

Reports from Iraq indicate that the infamous M-16 is just as prone to jamming on account of desert dust, as it was from jungle mud in Vietnam.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway supplies a very informative collection of reactions and opinions on the launch of the new bloggers’ consortium.

Iowahawk adds a precis today (11/18) of the ” new multi-aspect business concept in which many of the top superstar and mega-hyper superstars of the internet blogosphere have formed a powerful alliance to create shareholder value, and piss off Ann Althouse. ”

Ms. Althouse is not amused, and takes a hard-core reductionist view of the plot:

In Phase A, various important blogosphere blogs are coerced into a mutual non-aggression pact under the auspices of the OSM directorate. This is very similar to NATO, but French people are excluded. In Phase number B, there is large alcohol party in New York, which is an important center for media business discussions. In Phase 3, the system creates values, which are translated into very large checks for everybody. In Phase number D, I drive my new yacht, the “Ha Ha Ha,” to a tax-free Caribbean island.

Dennis the Peasant is also very anti OSM and is blogging defiance. Roger L. Simon (11/19) explains Dennis’ dudgeon.

The notorious Frank J. (11/19) offers the consolatory promise to all of us without stock options: when I get my yacht, I’ll let you all look at it.

Julia Gorin, writing in Jewish World Review, is not a fan of the metrosexual urban liberal who makes a lot of noise about hating guns:

LET’S be honest. He’s scared of the thing. That’s understandable–so am I. But as a girl I have the luxury of being able to admit it. I don’t have to masquerade squeamishness as grand principle-in the interest of mankind, no less.

Many are boiling over with anger at Congressional calls for retreat from Iraq:

Dympha calls Senate Republicans a bunch of wusses, and refers to them as the Gang of Invertebrates.

Will Malven describes the behavior of 46 Republican Senators as Cowardice Under Fire:

They waited until the President was out of the country. They waited until he was in a plane 35000 feet in the air. They waited until he was unable to respond appropriately before betraying him. Then they abandoned him to the Democrat wolves.

Mark Steyn says: I would be in favor of wrapping virtually every Republican Senator in asbestos, and using them to insulate my attic.

Van Laskey, quoted in The American Thinker,

There is no more spineless group of men than our esteemed Senate Republican leaders with the exception of Allen and Santorum. Had Rockefeller gone to Italy prior to 1941 and told Mussolini that he thought that Roosevelt was planning to aid Britain he’d have soon been looking at the business end of a noose…

And Marines are especially disgusted by calls for American withdrawal from Iraq by former USMC colonel Congressman John Murtha.:

Gunny Bob declares that Representative John Murtha soils the Corps, and urges that

John “The Jellyfish” Murtha should be shunned by all Marines and, if possible, legal steps should be taken to prevent this betrayer from being buried in a national cemetery upon his demise.

Here’s a great on-line rifle and pistol shooting simulator. (I should have kept this one to myself a lot longer. )

Today is really comedy day in the Blogosphere.

The Los Angeles Times had the unmitigated bad taste in liberal eyes, it seems, as to profane that newspaper’s editorial shrine by admitting the unworthy person of conservative syndicated columnist, and NRO editor-at-large, Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg’s inaugural piece has a promising opening:

STOP ME IF YOU’VE heard this already. But there are people out there — honest, decent, sincere people and deranged moonbats, too — who think that George W. Bush lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. No, seriously, it’s true.

Unfortunately, Goldberg immediately changes course, and turns the whole thing into a mildly amusing bit of sophistry contending that: Bush is right, even if he lied, because FDR lied the country into WWII, and we all agree in the end that he was right to do so. Therefore, we must recognize that presidents may very well need to lie on grave occasions to get the country to support hard choices and naturally intrinsically-unpopular policy decisions, like going to war.

Maybe so. And, though I did not find myself completely carried away with admiration, I recognize that syndicated columnists do have to turn in something regularly in order to collect a paycheck, and they can’t all be gems.

Over on Daily Kos, however, the incongruously named “Hunter” summons the literary equivalent of a carpet-bombing B-52 airstrike to express precisely how shocked… shocked he is to find such incivility as the opprobrious epithet of “deranged moonbats” being applied to a particular category of ideological opponents in a political editorial. “Hunter” then undertakes to fight the good fight for more and greater politesse in the political wars by donning his literary critic Halloween costume, raising a pinkie finger delicately in the air, and proceeding to find Goldberg’s prose-style wanting and his manners uncouth at very considerable length.

One is simply compelled to conclude that the term deranged moonbats must have struck a nerve.

Goldberg clearly meant by that term the sort of people on the political left who are so carried away by emotion, enthusiasm, and passion that their actual grip upon reality has become unhinged, and they have modified their own memories, and subverted their own powers of reason sufficiently as to believe that what “Hunter” refers to as speeches about mushroom clouds and African uranium really have been established in the eyes of anyone less deranged than an indubitable, barking, and likely card-carrying, moonbat to represent anything other a false line of partisan political obfuscation entered into the public debate by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose report was actually subsequently established to indicate the exact opposite of what he said it did.

The Right Brothers, a conservative duo out of Nashville, have a new song, Bush Was Right, intended “to teach the youth of America the TRUTH.” Well, I don’t think many of the Youth of America will prefer this one to Eminem’s latest, but you can certainly annoy the heck out of any of your liberal friends just by clicking on it.

US Patent No. 6,960,975 B1
Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
Boris Volfson, 5707 W. Maple Grove Rd., Apt. 3046, Huntington, Ind. 46750 (US)
Filed on Mar. 14, 2005.

Full text.

It certainly looks like a joke, but the patent can be found by the search engine on the US Patent Office site.

Science Daily is not pleased.

Nature comments.

The NY Times writes:

To avoid having to account for his administration’s misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He’s tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He’s tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he’s gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists…

It’s hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working – a view we now know was accurate.

What Mr. Clinton actually concluded may be seen in the video here.

confesses Point Five who observes:

Senate Demonstrates Republican “Big Tent” Large Enough For Anti-War Left.