Tony Ryan, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, writes: “LEAP’s first ever billboard – now showing at 108th and I street in Omaha, NE. It is up high, where many can see it, and it shows a new website for us which we can use to measure response and effectiveness.”

Cross-posted at the Explorers Foundation blog [link].

So, the National Enquirer reports that it caught 2004 Democrat Vice Presidential candidate Senator John Edwards with a mistress and a love child. In the article, Edwards denies the allegation in a way that sets up an old joke:

Edwards responded: “The story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous,” adding: “Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years.”

Too bad he didn’t finish with, “and if my wife finds out about her she will kill me.”

It would have wrecked his life but how often does a set up like that come along?

The difference between a politician and a statesman is the breadth of their horizons.  But have we ever seen people with horizons as limited as our modern Congress?  Of course their ratings are low – we return their judgment of us.  They think we have no sense of deferred gratification; they think we are children – and not very bright, not very disciplined children at that.  We return the compliment.

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This could be big! Or not. It should be fun in any case.

We’re going to meet next Monday after work at a convenient location in Northwest DC.

If you want to join us, please email me: jonathan at chicagoboyzdotnet.

We are the bloggers we have been waiting for!

Or something.

Now, Obama is supposedly some kind of genius, as well as being a messiah-figure who transcends politics, and maybe can even fly and turn sand into rice, like Kim Il-sung used to do. He inspires heart-felt music videos, unlike John McCain. Also, he May Not Be Mocked, much like Louis XIV, Hirohito (in his prime) or Ramses II.

Yet, this super-being just said he will be dealing with foreign leaders, presumably as president, for the next eight to ten years.

Knowing that Presidents are limited to two, four-year terms, is mandatory, basic knowledge that should be, and usually is, second nature to every single reasonably educated American. Everybody knows this. Children know this.

This guy was some kind of Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago. He went to Harvard. Now say “ooooh!”

Yet, this kind of thing happens a lot with him, oddly enough.

This is my proposed Quayle Test. Ask yourself: How each time Obama says something stoopid, would the press would have crucified Dan Quayle for it?

Each day, each new gaffe from Obama, imagine Dear Old (supposedly) Dumbsh*t Dan saying it. Then compare what would have happened to him compared to the response Sen. Obama gets from his cheering gallery in the Press.

Obama, and the MSM, are failing this test almost daily.

If I had time to monitor it, I would put a Quayle-O-Meter on the blog.

But I trust we will all be keeping track informally of errors of “J. Danforth Obama”.

The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It’s a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.

T.M. Lutas

John Robb has related, more generalized, thoughts on resilient communities.

Appealing to a man’s strength is a coquette’s trick (& a man’s weakness), but it works.  Calvin Trillin repeats his father’s advice – “You might as well be a mensch.”  A man wants to be heroic, virtuous, strong, manly.  My daughter explained her husband’s appeal: she could count on him to take care of her.  That view of him was her appeal.  (My somewhat strident daughter stands at 5’10” and holds many fully formed opinions – she doesn’t appear dependent. But she leans on him.)   A boy becomes a man by finding his strength; however, heroism –  rescuing a community from plagues and a princess from a dragon – has taken a sentimental turn.  We’ve always found vulnerability attractive, but a pattern has emerged in which the hero rescues the most vulnerable – seeing in a child his own unformed self.  The rescue redeems. The hero’s transcendence, increasingly difficult in our ironic world, remains possible with a fragile baby or toddler.

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Link

Sry!

The modern anti-Semite looks entirely different. He does not have a shaved head. He has good manners and often an academic title as well…The modern anti-Semite does not believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But instead he fantasizes about an “Israel lobby” that is supposed to control American foreign policy like a tail that wags the dog. For the modern anti-Semite, it goes without saying that every year on January 27 he will commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. But at the same time he militates for the right of Iran to have atomic weapons.

–Henryk Broder, in a speech to the German Bundestag.

I recently had a post about the movie The Dambusters.

For the anniversary of the raid the Brits had a Lancaster bomber fly over the dam the crews trained on in England during the war. Photos here.

It is good to see that at least one of these monsters is still flying.

Lex and I have been having a friendly back and forth here about love songs. I think this is one. You may or may not…Death Cab for Cutie, “Grapevine Fires” (I particularly like this version because it is live):

When the wind picked up the fire spread
And the grapevines seemed left for dead
And the Northern sky looked like the end of days
The end of days

The wake-up call to a rented room
Sounded like an alarm of impending doom
To warn us it’s only a matter of time
Before we all burn

Before we all burn
Before we all burn
Before we all burn

We bought some wine and some paper cups
Near your daughters school when we picked her up
And drove to a cemetery on a hill
On a hill

And we watched the plumes paint the sky gray
But she laughed and danced through the field of graves
And there I knew it would be alright
That everything would be alright

Would be alright
Would be alright
Would be alright

And the news reports on the radio
Said it was getting worse
As the ocean air fanned the flames
But I couldn’t think
Of anywhere I would of rather been
To watch it all burn away

To burn away

And the firemen worked in double shifts
With prayers for rain on their lips
And they knew it was only a matter of time

I got slagged like never before in my posts about copyright infringement here and here.  Eventually I came to the realization that I was wrong in my practice, no matter how hard I wanted to justify it.  It killed me, but I decided to stop watching the show through the illegal means.

Well, I see today that one of my favorite networks, Versus, is going to be airing the very show that I never thought I would get to see, Contender Asia.  They will call it Contender Muay Thai over here.  Unfortunately I know who the eventual winner is, from my normal surfing in the Muay Thai and fighting forums.  Sometimes maybe there is good karma to be had.  I can’t wait.

A little double-standard action from the Reverand.

What a dolt.

One guy left a comment, which I deleted, on my post about Jackson, saying it was sad to see all this fear and hate.

That is funny.

The only fear and hate I am seeing is from a political has-been, Jackson, who has contempt for the people of his own color whom he has pretended to represent all these years, as some kind of unelected permanent spokesman, like some Sub-Saharan President-for-Life.

Jackson is the guy who said he wants to cut Barack’s nuts off, when he was being honest, when he thought no one was listening.

That could be hate, I guess.

I just want Barack to lose the election. I don’t wish him ill, or wish him harm, I merely wish him political defeat. I am probably not going to get my wish.

Jackson is full of fear and hate for Obama for a reason. He is watching his whole ongoing scam go down the drain since someone who has actually won some elections, who has some cross-racial appeal, is now the Leading Black Person in America. And it is about damn time, too. Could that be a reason for Jackson’s hate and fear? Ya think?

I still say “Black” and I mean no disrespect. When I was really little, I can still remember the use of the word Negro, as a respectful improvement on what had come before it. Then at some point, it became “Black”, and we were all taught in elementary school that we were supposed to say “Black”, and that was just fine with me. Then at some point we replaced a clear, simple, one-syllable word with six ambiguous syllables, African American. I get a yuck out of TV announcers trying to find a way to talk about actual Africans, for example.

Just like Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain’s hero, I don’t like hyphens.

And I don’t think of my Black colleagues, classmates, friends and neighbors as … what Jackson calls them.

I think of them as Americans.

…if people can’t afford to live there.

Some group has declared that San Francisco rates highest for ease of getting around on foot. Of course they are considering only the people who are already there, not those who have been priced out of SF by its sky-high real-estate valuations, the result of land-use restrictions imposed by the Bay Area’s notoriously anti-growth political culture.

One of the comments on the site where the walkability story appears puts the issue well:

The problem has never simply been walkability. It’s always been affordability. Take New York City. Rent for a studio apartment is $2000. In the burbs? $1000 for a one-bedroom. The $1000 difference pays for an awful lot of gasoline. Oh - and I should mention the 4% income tax New York City levies on its residents.
 
The effect of higher gasoline prices won’t be people moving en masse into marginal inner city areas. Instead, it will be the progressive reduction of property prices in the suburbs to compensate for higher gasoline costs, coupled with the gradual move of businesses to the suburbs to accommodate their employees, and save on real estate costs.

To paraphrase a statement one often hears from the Left, the rich and the poor are equally free to walk on the streets of San Francisco.

(Note that by “monster” I really mean, “about 8 inches long, not including the tail”. This may not seem like much but it is sure to impress the true anole aficionado, as most anoles are much smaller. Unfortunately there was no dewlap action here, perhaps indicating that this specimen is a female.)

The consensus among Chicagoboyz seems that Obama will win; I would not argue. But the first commentor at Belmont Club’s post makes a point with which we might also find consensus (if, as one Chicagoboyz notes, also depression):

Last summer McCain said he would rather lose the nomination than lose the war and possibly this allowed some people who hadn’t before to understand the stakes involved.
 
McCain is no longer saying this because he doesn’t have to. But more than that, I think he now realizes the stakes involved require he win the election.

Fernandez analysis of McCain’s speech on Iraq & Afghanistan is thoughtful. Further commentary by Hanson is also to the point. This follows Belmont Club’s earlier analysis of Obama’s speech.

L-R: Suffeli (laulu, kitara) Milla (rummut) Salla (basso) Maria (kitara, taustalaulu)

More outstanding girl rock. Thee Ultra Bimboos are (or were) an all-girl punk/pop/garage rock band from the frozen wasteland of Finland. All the songs on here are good. But one called “Liar, Liar” is just killer — big punk rock guitar sound, and beautiful harmony vocals on the chorus. It is almost like garage rock meets bluegrass or something. I listened to it about ten times and decided to share.

(Special girl rock bonus for our readers: Kim Shattuck’s handpicked Best of the Muffs.)

Saw a car today with two bumper stickers–one said “Support Israel” and the other was some kind of pro-Democratic-Party statement.

It struck me that this was like a car in 1938 Britain with bumper stickers (did they have bumper stickers in those days?) saying:

“Keep Czechoslovakia Free”

and

“Support Neville Chamberlain”

Commenting on this outrageous story, about which Glenn Reynolds
and Brendan Loy make the obvious (and correct) points about the need for more accountability, Rand Simberg says:

Should ignorance of the law be an excuse for this man? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that those enforcing the law should be much more responsible for knowing it than those who are being oppressed by ignorance of it.

I would add another question along these lines. Why is it acceptable not only that ordinary citizens (particularly members of racial and ethnic minorities) must behave with extreme discretion, and often show humiliating deference, to avoid being abused or arrested when dealing with police, but also that a significant fraction of police are power-abusing bullies with hair-trigger tempers? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that those enforcing the law should be selected for thick skin and the ability to defuse adversarial situations rather than make them worse. Many police behave decently and even admirably, but there are also so many who are hot-headed jerks that it’s obvious that the police culture has systematic management problems.

UPDATE (July 16): Brendan Loy posts an update to his original post.

(I wrote this post for my personal blog, but Lexington Green requested that it be crossposted here. Here it is, in full, with update. There is a discussion already going at personal blog, so check it out there, too.)

I have written on the nature of Professionalism. An element to true Professionalism is the maintenance of a course of independent, continual study. Here I will speak to my personal reading program, which is a core part of my Professional military education.

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