Palin mocks hand notes story

The big news of the day (from the perspective of the left blogosphere) was the HuffPo photo taken during her speech at the Tea Party Convention revealing some talking points jotted on the palm of Sarah Palin’s left hand.

This one did not impress many people outside the left, but it did provoke derision from Ann Althouse and a humorous response (see photo above) from Sarah Palin herself.

Jack Cashill, best-known for the Bill-Ayers-ghost-wrote-Dreams-From-My-Father theory, proposes a new explanation about why Barack Obama’s birth certificate might be worth concealing.

Ingenious, but I don’t see how anyone can invest very much in this one in the complete absence of any actual evidence.

Yesterday, backyard fence nearly buried in the morning. It snowed until evening.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., Spetember 24, 2008 in the LA Times:

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.

Via David Freddoso.

Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, identifies four liberal methods of denying the legitimacy of conservative political victories which are still consistently employed to avoid intellectual engagement.

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It’s an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Read the whole thing.

Nicholas Carr has the bad news.

I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.

Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It’s only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to.

Strange Maps:

This map shows Europe dominated by three so-called ‘alcohol belts’, the northernmost one for distilled spirits, a middle one for beer and the southernmost one for wine. Each one’s existence and extension is determined by a mix of culture and agriculture.

It seems oversimplified to me, aquavit and vodka are hardly identical, and surely Scotland is misplaced.

I think a more detailed New World alcohol map would be interesting. You’d have grain alcohol in Canadian Indian Reservation woods, followed by a long Maritime Rum belt. Flavored gins in French-speaking Quebec. Scotch in the BosWash coastal corridor. A swatch of Rye from Pennsylvania down through Maryland. Bourbon in the South. Canadian Whiskey where? Michigan and Upper Canada, possibly. Beer in the Heartland. White Wine in the suburbs.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Charles Krauthammer finds the liberals explaining to themselves that they are losing only because the American people are so dumb, and conservatives are so evil.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid, and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it [health care] more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda that the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them. …

Part Two of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement, and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Bury the health care bill in an Obama t shirt.

Byron York marvels at a president who stoops to this kind of tasteless emotional manipulation. The democrat crowd laughs uneasily because even they don’t quite know how to take the president’s story.

(around 8:25 in this 10:46 video)

I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.

Personally, I think the story is so strange that I tend to doubt it is even factual. And, beyond that, there is something downright disturbing about encountering a public figure who is not actually embarrassed at the idea of such an expression of such macabre personal devotion. Obama’s vanity is without limit or reason.

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Donald Boudreaux retorts:

What have we here? A politically successful multimillionaire stands idly by as an employee – who seems also to have been Mr. Obama’s personal acquaintance – dies because she cannot afford proper medical care. Then Mr. Obama deploys this tale of woe not to apologize for, or to criticize, his own refusal to help a friend but, instead, to criticize millions of other people who never met this woman for their refusal to be forced into ponying up for her health insurance.

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UPDATE 2/7:

Tom Maguire links a story explaining that the lady actually did have catastrophic health coverage with a high deductible but skimped on routine exams.

People used to think he was a Lightworker.

Fellow Yale conservative John Brewer writes to a private email list:

How many of you remember the wacky column from ’08 that said inter alia:

“Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”

Do I see some hands? It was pretty notorious at the time.

Well, in any event the very same columnist (Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle or at least its website) has now put out a column bitching and whining about totally unproductive ungrateful and unrealistic liberals who don’t understand how the world really works and ask annoying questions like “Why the hell can’t he step up and fix the entire planet in under 400 days like he promised he would, in my dreams and fantasies and impossible liberal grass-fed organic tofu greengasms?“

Wikipedia describes Ernest Shackleton’s unsuccessful Nimrod Expedition of 1907-1909:

Nimrod arrived at McMurdo Sound on 29 January, but was stopped by ice 16 miles (26 km) north of Discovery’s old base at Hut Point. After considerable weather delays, Shackleton’s base was eventually established at Cape Royds, about 24 miles (39 km) north of Hut Point. The party was in high spirits, despite the difficult conditions; Shackleton’s ability to communicate with each man kept the party happy and focused.

The “Great Southern Journey”, as Frank Wild called it, began on 19 October 1908. On 9 January 1909 Shackleton and three companions (Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams) reached a new Farthest South latitude of 88°23’S, a point only 112 miles (180 km) from the Pole. En route the South Pole party discovered the Beardmore Glacier, (named after Shackleton’s patron), and became the first persons to see and travel on the South Polar Plateau. Their return journey to McMurdo Sound was a race against starvation, on half-rations for much of the way. At one point Shackleton gave his one biscuit allotted for the day to the ailing Frank Wild, who wrote in his diary: “All the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me”. They arrived at Hut Point just in time to catch the ship.

The expedition’s other main accomplishments included the first ascent of Mount Erebus, and the discovery of the approximate location of the South Magnetic Pole, reached on 16 January 1909 by Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and Alistair Mackay. Shackleton returned to the United Kingdom as a hero, and soon afterwards published his expedition account, The Heart of the Antarctic. Emily Shackleton later recorded: “The only comment he made to me about not reaching the Pole was “a live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?” and I said “Yes darling, as far as I am concerned.”

AFP describes the triumphant recovery of some historic relics of Shackleton’s expedition.

Five crates of whisky and brandy belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after being buried for more than 100 years under the Antarctic ice, explorers said Friday.

The spirits were excavated from beneath Shackleton’s Antarctic hut which was built in 1908.

“To our amazement we found five crates, three labelled as containing whisky and two labelled as containing brandy,” said Al Fastier of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, who previously believed there were only two crates.

“The unexpected find of the brandy crates, one labelled Chas Mackinlay & Co and the other labelled The Hunter Valley Distillery Limited Allandale are a real bonus.”

Some of the crates have cracked and ice has formed inside which will make the job of extracting the contents delicate.

However, Fastier said the trust was confident the crates contained intact alcohol, given that liquid could be heard when the crates were moved.

The smell of whisky in the surrounding ice also indicated full bottles of spirits were inside, albeit that one or more might have broken.

Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte and Mackay, whose company supplied the Mackinlay’s whisky for Shackleton, described the find as “a gift from the heavens” for whisky lovers.

“If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated,” he said.

“Given the original recipe no longer exists this may open a door into history.”…
Shackleton’s expedition ran short of supplies on their long trek to the South Pole from Cape Royds in 1907-1909 and they eventually fell about 100 miles (160 kilometres) short of their goal.

No lives were lost, vindicating Shackleton’s decision to turn back from the pole, first reached in 1911 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

Shackleton’s expedition sailed from Cape Royds hurriedly in 1909 as winter ice began forming in the sea, forcing them to leave some equipment and supplies — including the whisky — behind.

You can see just how much the world has descended into pettyfoggying regulatory statism in the course of the unhappy ensuing century in this detail noted by another news service:

The New Zealanders agreed to drill the ice to try to retrieve some bottles, although the rest must stay under conservation guidelines agreed to by 12 Antarctic Treaty nations.

Mustn’t retrieve historic hundred-year-old abandoned Scotch from the Antarctic wastes! That would be removing something.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Main courtyard Branford College, Yale University

The Yale University Undergraduate Admissions Office boasts of having set out to “reinvent the dull genre of admission videos… with something… a little different.”

That something turns out to be this generally lame and appalling, faux hip 16:49 musical video, produced in collaboration with undergraduates and recent alumni.

It is intended to appeal to today’s high school students as a take-off on the popular high school musical television series Glee, and was praised by one alumnus on the LinkedIn discussion as “clever, fun and effectively ma[king] the point, without being boringly traditional, pretentious or elitest. (sic)”

Of course, I am myself boringly traditional, pretentious and elitist, so my soul positively writhed in horror at the spectacle of a Yale education being marketed in bad rhymes on the basis of a strange combination of consumerism (a salad bar and grill, college laundramats and gyms), the collegiate architecture of James Gamble Rogers, conformist political correctness (4 “cultural houses,” a sustainable farm), and the mere quantity of organizations and activities.

Somehow or other, Yale’s distinctive identity, described by F. Scott Fitzgerald thusly:

I think of all Harvard men as sissies… and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.”

was wholly overlooked.

Today’s young people are implicitly being expected to decide on their choice of college in much the way they would choose between holiday resorts or apartment complexes, purely on the basis of appearance and amenities. Yale today has no distinctive character or identity at all, it seems. The video has nearly 17 minutes of musical performances (of a sort), and no one ever sings “Bright College Years.”

It was not completely without its moments, however. Near the beginning a motley crowd, obviously made up of Yalies, is sitting there pretending to be parents and prospective students. A fashionably racially diverse admissions officer (played by Kobi Libii) is unctuously answering questions.

He answers an inquiry as to whether all Yale professors teach undergraduates in the affirmative, boasting that all tenured Yale professors teach undergraduates, so that even a freshman might be taking a class from a Nobel Prize winner. At that point, a wife goes “Oooo!” and elbows her husband, an Asperger type sporting a pocket protector, who blinks confusedly a few times in response and who (one strongly suspects) is, in fact, himself one of those very same faculty members just referred to.

Liberal blue state soak-the-rich tax policies have real consequencs, as New Jersey is discovering the hard way. New Jersey Business News article.

Can you imagine what the wealth drain from California over the same period must look like?

More than $70 billion in wealth left New Jersey between 2004 and 2008 as affluent residents moved elsewhere, according to a report released Wednesday that marks a swift reversal of fortune for a state once considered the nation’s wealthiest.

Conducted by the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, the report found wealthy households in New Jersey were leaving for other states — mainly Florida, Pennsylvania and New York — at a faster rate than they were being replaced.

“The wealth is not being replaced,” said John Havens, who directed the study. “It’s above and beyond the general trend that is affecting the rest of the northeast.”

This was not always the case. The study – the first on interstate wealth migration in the country — noted the state actually saw an influx of $98 billion in the five years preceding 2004. The exodus of wealth, then, local experts and economists concluded, was a reaction to a series of changes in the state’s tax structure — including increases in the income, sales, property and “millionaire” taxes.

“This study makes it crystal clear that New Jersey’s tax policies are resulting in a significant decline in the state’s wealth,” said Dennis Bone, chairman of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce and president of Verizon New Jersey.