Frostie, a Bare-eye Cockatoo, also known as a Little Corella (Cacatua sanguinea), dances to Ray Charles’s version of Twist & Shout.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

Amusing takeoff on those LDS and Scientology ads currently appearing all the time on network television.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day cartoon

Back on April 20th, when producers censored a portion of a South Park episode featuring the prophet Mohammed following Muslim threats, Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris responded by publishing the above cartoon on her (now vanished) website and declaring May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”

Norris’s comment struck a chord with bloggers and was widely reported, but all the attention she attracted made the cartoonist uneasy. Only a few days later, April 26, Norris was backing off and trying to distance herself from the whole affair.

Crawfishing, of course, did her no good at all, and in June,
Anwar al-Awlaki, our own home-grown jihadi cleric, now broadcasting agitprop and threats on the Internet out of Yemen, placed Molly Norris on a hit list including 8 others guilty of blasphemous caricatures of the prophet as a “prime target” whose “proper abode is hellfire.”

Now Seattle Weekly reports that Norris has gone into hiding.

[Molly Norris], on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI,.. is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

Personally, I think she should just move to red state America where everybody has guns.

The winner in Delaware

Big Apple quotes the Buckley Rule:

Conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley (1925-2008) was asked, in 1967, whom he would support in 1968 for U.S. president. Buckley responded with what would late be called the ‘Buckley Rule” for primary voting: “The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.”

Yesterday, in reference to the Delaware GOP Senate primary in which Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell supported by Sarah Palin defeated moderate Republican Mike Castle supported by Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh proposed replacing the Buckley Rule with a new rule of his own.

So we have professional Washingtonians now telling us that Mike Castle’s the only option we’ve got. Well, it’s time, ladies and gentlemen, for the Limbaugh Rule to supplant and replace the Buckley Rule, because the Buckley Rule requires clairvoyance. The Buckley Rule requires people who can’t possibly know the outcome of anything in the middle of September to support or not support somebody based on what they think’s going to happen in early November. Christine O’Donnell can’t win, she’s 25 points down. Can’t win? If a constitutional conservative can’t win in this climate coming down from 25 points, we need to find that out, find out where we are. Why not go for it? The stakes dictate it, do they not? Here’s the Limbaugh Rule: In an election year when voters are fed up with liberalism and socialism, when voters are clearly frightened of where the hell the country is headed, vote for the most conservative Republican in the primary, period.

Rush was perfectly right.

In general, it is better to back the conservative candidate and go down to defeat in the general election in an unfavorable year than to try calculation and support a RINO Republican, like John McCain, Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and the like, in hope of support on the organization of the Senate and the occasional vote.

In every serious contest during the Bush Administration, confirmation of judges, making tax cuts permanent, Social Security reform, reforming Fannie Mae, RINO Republicans sided with the democrats and foiled GOP policy. If we had not had so many RINOs, George W. Bush might have successfully privatized Social Security and prevented the Housing Bubble from collapsing. There might have been no Panic of 2008 and no democrat control of Congress, no Barack Obama.

We have to win the battle of idea and achieve victory in the national debate. There is no shortcut to conservative success achievable by compromising and taking a certain number of liberal RINO Republicans along for the ride. They will always undermine and betray any possibility of actually accomplishing something with a Republican majority. We need to elect a majority of real Republicans, and if we can’t put a principled and conservative Republican into a legislative seat, we should just need to go back and try again, and do a better job of opposing the incumbent democrat in the next election.

In its 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision, The US Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag constituted “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

Burning the Koran, on the other hand, gets you detained and questioned by New York City police, and fired by your employer, if you work for NJTransit.

NY Daily News:

The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday. …

“Mr. Fenton’s public actions violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics,” an agency statement said.

“NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed.”

Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.

Mr. Fenton has the grounds for a successful law suit against NJTransit.

Date and location unknown. Good airstrike video. One commenter says it wasn’t the roof sailing through the air but the floor slab.

Christian opinions:

“Qur’an… an accursed book… So long as there is this book there will be no peace in the world.”
—William Gladstone (1809-1898) British Prime Minister

“Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.”
—John Wesley (1703-1791) Methodist leader

“Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he [Mohammed] humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST. TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant … While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.” [The words in caps are as originally printed].

[On the Koran:]
The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.
— John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Sixth President of the United States

“[Islam] is essentially an obstructive, intolerant system… It has consecrated despotism; it has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated slavery. It has declared war against every other creed; it has claimed to be at least dominant in every land… When it ceases to have an enemy to contend against, it sinks into sluggish stupidity and into a barbarism far viler… It must have an enemy; if cut off…from conflict with the infidel, it finds its substitute in sectarian hatred of brother Moslems…”
—Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) British historian

“Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to, and including, the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.

The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia, exists today at all, only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization—because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel, in the eighth century, and those of John Sobieski, in the seventeenth century. …There are such “social values” today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do—that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”
—Teddy Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) Twenty-sixth President of the United States

“Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans — still nominally Christian — and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.”
—Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) Author/Historian

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia [rabies] in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. …The fact that in Mohammedan law [sharia] every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities—but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
—Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British Prime Minister

———————————————

Muslim voices:

“Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world…. Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says, kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! …Whatever good there is, exists thanks to the sword, and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient, except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! …Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
—Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) Iran’s Supreme Leader from 1979 to 1989—the highest ranking political and religious authority of the nation.

“Arise. O sons of Arabia, fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history, and religion.”
—From a radio broadcast by Amin el-husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. After instigating a pro-nazi putsch in Baghdad in 1941, he left for Germany, where he spent the remainder of WWII broadcasting propaganda to the Middle East.

“We should fully understand our religion. Fighting is a part of our religion and our Sharia [Islamic legal code]. Those who love God and his Prophet and this religion cannot deny that. Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in Islam.”
—Osama bin Laden

“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Qu’ran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
—Omar Ahmed CAIR (Council for American Islamic Relations) Founding Chairman

Death of Achilles, Villa Reale, Milan

Louis Case, at American Thinker, points out that the complicated Machiavellian shenanigans needed to get Obamacare through Congress inevitably include the potential legal seed of the destruction of the entire bill.

Virginia’s lawsuit argues that the federal government has no constitutional authority to require individuals to purchase health insurance policies.

Virginia is asserting that certain portions (that is, the personal mandate) of ObamaCare are unconstitutional. If Virginia prevails, it leaves the question of what happens to the rest of the ObamaCare statute. This is where the concept of severance comes in. Normally, all comprehensive laws contain a boilerplate severance clause: it says that if any portion of the law is found to be unconstitutional, that portion is severed from the rest of the law — that is, the rest of the law stands.

But ObamaCare contains no severance clause. Virginia is asserting that if it prevails on its substantive claims, the whole law is unconstitutional. (If Virginia does not prevail, any one of the twenty-plus legal challenges have the same severance argument available.)

If a severance clause is normal boilerplate, why does not ObamaCare contain one? This is where Scott Brown’s election enters. Recall that the House passed its version of ObamaCare. On Christmas Eve, after much horsetrading and bribing, the Senate passed its version. The Senate version was not drafted to be in its final form; it was drafted to get 60 votes. Normally, these bills would be reconciled in a conference committee, and the final version would have to be voted on again with 60 votes in the Senate. However, before it could be sent to conference and reconciled, Scott Brown won in Massachusetts — a reconciled bill could no longer get 60 votes! That is why the House had to vote up or down on the Senate bill, which was basically a draft without the normal boilerplate inserted.

As Virginia argued in its Memorandum (Pages 24 to 28), the presence of a severance clause raises a presumption that Congress did not intend the whole statute to depend on the constitutionality of any particular clause. But with no severance clause, they are not entitled to that presumption. A court cannot sever the offending clause on its own if the statute would not function as Congress intended.

Most living Americans, including now approaching geezerhood Baby Boomers, have never seen anything like the current economic hard times. When I go out out of doors, I sometimes feel a bit surprised that the world is actually in color, not in black and white, and no one is dressed in 1930s styles.

But, on the whole, most of us have been facing current adversities with grim good humor. It’s our turn, we tend to reflect. We’ve had it good for so long. Sooner or later, government was bound to screw things up seriously.

But, we shrugged, we can survive. Our parents did. And the world has changed. We have vastly more education, more skepticism and sophistication. The peasant mentality that permitted the Great Depression to drag on for over a decade as the result of one socialist monkey wrench after another thrown into the engine of the economy and the Smoot Hawley Tariff just can’t happen today.

We’ve learned a lot. The policy errors of the New Deal have been exposed and its economics debunked. Today’s American population will not sit passively by and let Washington drive the economy into the ground year after year after year. The democrats will get slaughtered in 2010 and our Kenyan Caliban will be sent packing in 2012. A conservative Republican will take office in 2013 and the land will heal.

But, I have just read two news items in the Wall Street Journal which give me pause.

1) Despite the fact that the newspapers are full of foreclosure auction notices, and we all know people moving and abandoning homes to the banks, we tend inevitably to think that real estate disaster is well along and that we can look forward to the end of all that within an endurable interval.

We may be wrong.

This WSJ article from yesterday ends, I think, with whistling in the dark.

Housing markets began to stabilize early last year as low prices and government interventions broke the downward spiral. Policy makers spurred demand for homes by holding down mortgage rates, offering tax credits for buyers, and extending low-down-payment loans through the Federal Housing Administration.

The government also attacked the supply problem. Regulators relaxed mark-to-market accounting rules, giving banks more flexibility in valuing certain real-estate assets and removing some of the impetus for banks to quickly foreclose. Meanwhile, the Obama administration put in place an ambitious program to modify mortgages.

The Home Affordable Modification Program has fallen short of its goals. So far, fewer than 500,000 loans have been modified, below the target of three million to four million. Yet the program served as a “closet moratorium” on foreclosures that stanched the flow of bank-owned homes to the market, said Ronald Temple, portfolio manager at Lazard Asset Management.

The result: The share of distressed sales fell by November to 25% of home sales, and prices stabilized. After rising in the winter, the distressed share fell to 22% in June, before bouncing to 30% in July.

The problem is that these measures are wearing off. Demand plunged this summer after tax credits expired, and unsold homes are piling up. More foreclosures could move onto the market as borrowers fall out of the loan-modification program.

“We see the perfect storm brewing with rising supply and falling demand,” said Ivy Zelman, chief executive of research firm Zelman & Associates and one of the first to warn of trouble five years ago. She estimated that distressed sales could account for half of the market by year-end if traditional sales didn’t rebound.

The market does have some tailwinds: Housing starts are at all-time lows. Banks have hired more staff to manage problem loans and government entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that own a growing share of foreclosures are less likely to deluge the market.

The next leg down in prices “isn’t going to be the foreclosure-induced freefall where you just had inventory coming out the wazoo, and it was going to be sold one way or the other,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin Corp., a real-estate brokerage.

Prices also have come down so much already they have less distance to fall. During the housing boom, prices inflated much faster than incomes rose, thanks to speculation and lax lending. The ratio of home prices to annual incomes reached 1.6 at the end of June, which is below the ratio of 1.88 from 1989 to 2003, according to Moody’s Analytics.

By those metrics, prices are actually undervalued in markets that have already seen huge declines, such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles. But Moody’s data show that prices remain “significantly overvalued” elsewhere, including Boston; New York; Seattle; Orange County, Calif., and Charlotte, N.C. Markets in both camps face supply imbalances that will pressure prices for years.

What I see is houses being offered for sale at significantly lower prices which are not selling, and a huge, absolutely enormous backlog of not-yet-foreclosed, not yet fallen out of the Home Affordable Mortgage Program houses yet to hit the market.

Who would be crazy enough to buy at any price in the current, totally unpredictable circumstances?

It is easy to find experts venturing predictions that home prices may fall another 10%. Why not another 30%, another 50%, or even 90%?

The market is flooded with homes. An enormous number more are somewhere in the pipeline headed for distress sale. Money is tight. People are still out of work, still losing jobs. Mortgage rates are low, but it is very difficult to get a mortgage. And, in the final analysis, who is going to buy now? Who will not believe that the market is still going down?

How low can we go? No one knows. People my age have lived through a period in which government policies lifted home prices into the stratosphere by arranging for 30 year financing for everyone. When I was a boy, working class families bought $5000-$12,000 houses, paying cash or arranging for two or three years of seller financing. The same kind of homes were selling for as much as $500,000 near Eastern cities a few years ago, and for $1,000,000 or $1,200,000 near San Francisco.

There is a very long way down between the prices of homes decades ago and recent prices. And deleveraging is just not happening. That backlog of unliquidated defaulted properties is sitting there, still unprocessed, like a ticking bomb.

2) Then, I read in the same WSJ of internationally-designed new banking rules intended to reduce risk by reducing liquidity and dramatically raising banks’ capitalization requirements.

The focus of the agreement is on the amount of “capital” banks are forced to hold. Capital is what banks use to absorb losses. Regulators and analysts typically believe that banks with more capital have a lower risk of failure or insolvency.

Regulators agreed to require banks to hold a specific level of a basic type of capital known as “common equity.” Common equity is considered the most effective type of capital because it is used to directly absorb losses. Officials agreed large, internationally active banks will have to hold levels of common equity equal to at least 7% of their assets, much higher than the roughly 2% international standard or 4% standard for large U.S. banks.

Who said governments in our time would not undertake “reforms” that reduce credit, constrict economic growth, and preclude recovery?

Remember Japan? Back in the late 1980s, everyone was afraid that Japan was going to replace the United States as the world’s leading economic power. Then along came recession, and Japan responded with the same kind of policies we see being applied right here today. Japan is still in recession, and nobody has been afraid of Japanese economic performance in years and years.

We have been saying to ourselves that housing prices may drop another 10% and that the real beginnings of the recovery may take another year, or maybe two, to arrive. We could be wrong.

Michael Barone observes HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius demonstrating exactly what Obamacare is really about: Power.

“There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”

That sounds like a stern headmistress dressing down some sophomores who have been misbehaving. But it’s actually from a letter sent Thursday from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans — the chief lobbyist for private health insurance companies.

Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.

She acknowledges that many of the law’s “key protections” take effect later this month and does not deny that these impose additional costs on insurers. But she says that “according to our analysis and those of some industry and academic experts, any potential premium impact … will be minimal.”

Well, that’s reassuring. Er, except that if that’s the conclusion of “some” industry and academic experts, it’s presumably not the conclusion of all industry and academic experts, or the secretary would have said so.

Sebelius also argues that “any premium increases will be moderated by out-of-pocket savings resulting from the law.” But she’s pretty vague about the numbers — “up to $1 billion in 2013.” Anyone who watches TV ads knows that “up to” can mean zero.

As Time magazine’s Karen Pickert points out, Sebelius ignores the fact that individual insurance plans cover different types of populations. So that government and “some” industry and academic experts think the new law will justify increases averaging 1 percent or 2 percent, they could justify much larger increases for certain plans.

Or as Ignagni, the recipient of the letter, says, “It’s a basic law of economics that additional benefits incur additional costs.”

But Sebelius has “zero tolerance” for that kind of thing. She promises to issue regulations to require “state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases” (which would presumably mean all rate increases).

And there’s a threat. “We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.”

That’s a significant date, the first year in which state insurance exchanges are slated to get a monopoly on the issuance of individual health insurance policies. Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs. …

The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.

John Dennis is running against Nancy Pelosi and has cleverly targeted this advertisement to appeal to the hyperactive and numerically significant Friends of Dorothy voting bloc in the relevant congressional district.

Late period knives, featuring his optional Naked Lady stamp

America’s greatest custom knife maker and most influential designer, Bob Loveless, passed away recently at the age of 81 of lung cancer.

I’ve never owned a Loveless knife.

I called Bob Loveless once about 20 years ago and asked to purchase his catalogue. He offered to send me one, but assured me it was basically pointless. His waiting list was somewhere beyond 6 years. He charged (at that time) a cool $100 an inch for a knife, and there was an extra charge for a Naked Lady stamp. Both for the frontal and rear versions. I remember asking him if he charged extra not to put that on a knife, and he laughed.

“Most of my customers are rich, vulgar guys, who absolutely love it.” he assured me.

He proceeded to explain that he thought it was a pity that people who actually wanted to use them couldn’t afford to buy them and that the enormous wait made every knife a financial opportunity for the buyer. But he liked making that much money, he conceded.

It was kind of a shame that the excellence of Loveless’s designs propelled within his lifetime his products into a stratospheric world of high-end collecting, but admirers could at least console themselves that Loveless spawned a nearly infinite number of imitators and copies of Loveless patterns could be found by the score, some made by bladesmiths collectible in their own right as well as by mass market cutlery companies.

Like a lot of artists, Bob Loveless was an extremely smart guy and a colorful rascal. He will be missed.

Local LA Times obit

Wall Street Journal article

Wikipedia article

A Loveless dealer website

Bob Loveless, 1974