Posted by Richard on September 29, 2016
Happy National Coffee Day! USA Today has a list of places where you can score free or reduced-price coffee today. Krispy Kreme will even throw in a free doughnut.
It seems that yesterday was National Drink a Beer Day, so if you celebrated that to excess, some coffee might help. I celebrated National Drink a Beer Day without even being aware of it. Go figure.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: beer, coffee | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on September 19, 2016
Shiver me timbers! I almost forgot that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. And there’s not a drop of rum in the house!
Q: What comic strip do pirates like best?
A: Gary Larrrson’s The Farrr Side
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: fun, humor, talk like a pirate | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on September 15, 2016
First, there were weeks of recurring coughing fits (which prompted this gem from Mad Magazine). Then, she was rushed out of the 9/11 remembrance ceremony, and some private citizens recorded her collapsing and being dragged into a waiting van. She became overheated, her staff said. It was 77° at the time. Oh, she was dehydrated, they added, due to the pneumonia she was diagnosed with last Friday. That’s why she’s been so frail that she needs to be helped up steps and is always coughing.
So of course, that van rushed her to the nearest hospital emergency room to get IV fluids and be checked out, right? Um, no. They took her to her daughter’s apartment. An hour later she came out and danced a jig. And a small child just happened to walk toward her, so she exposed the child to her pneumonia in order to complete the photo op.
Bill filled in for her on the campaign trail and, having failed to get the pneumonia memo, talked about her “flu.”
If you’re confused and/or suspicious, some posts by Aesop at Raconteur Report will make you less confused (but much more suspicious). He apparently has expertise in emergency medicine, as well as some personal history that’s relevant. The first post from last Tuesday includes this about the latter (emphasis in original):
1) I’ve had actual “walking” pneumonia, for real. In my twenties.
It absolutely kicked my 20-year old ass, around the block, and down the hill.
Forget about what it would do to a corpulent 68-year old woman.
I did not, for instance, simply go into an air-conditioned apartment for an hour, and come bouncing back to normalcy, same day.
Not just no, but HELL NO.
I was put on a course of antibiotics for a week. I dropped half my college classes for a semester, and it took two weeks at home, doing abso-effing-lutely nothing, to get to where I could come back and struggle through the half that I didn’t drop.
And before and after I got to that point, I looked and felt like death warmed over, thinking I just had a bad chest cold. I did not, for example, look bright and perky in the morning, and then faint dead away in a matter of an hour and a half on a pleasant fall day.
After you’ve read the eight other important points he makes in that post (note: I think he was wrong about Chelsea’s apartment), read the follow-up from Wednesday. And then read today’s update regarding Hillary’s miraculous recovery. If, by the time you read this, Aesop has posted again, you’ll probably want to read that too.
Hillary’s real health problem isn’t her health per se. It’s that this health issue has further exposed the fact that Hillary and her campaign staff are, as Kurt Schlichter says in his latest must-read column, not even competent liars. Even Bill, once the world’s greatest prevaricator, has become maladroit.
Yet why should they bother? Why should Task Force Pantsuit expend any effort at all trying to construct convincing prevarications when the mainstream media is going to smile and nod at whatever they say? Without resistance, you aren’t going to get any stronger, and Clinton’s lies have just gotten weaker and weaker. For her, lying to the mainstream media is like weightlifting by pumping Styrofoam.
Personally, I think all the covering for them that their sycophants in the media can muster isn’t enough to hide the clumsiness of their lies from the public.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: clinton, elections, health, hillary, politics, presidential candidates | 1 Comment »
Posted by Richard on September 11, 2016
Fifteen years have passed since that awful September 11th morning. Many millennials have no meaningful recollection of it, and apparently their parents and teachers did nothing to inform and educate them. They haven’t seen the video or images (or saw just fleeting glimpses with no context) of what happened to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and to the Pentagon. They don’t know or understand the significance of what the passengers on Flight 93 did, and they aren’t moved, as I am to this day, by the words “Let’s roll!”
That might explain (but not excuse) a mattress store advertising its “twin towers” mattress sale with a spoof in which two “towers” of mattresses collapse. Nothing can explain or excuse what Comedy Central did, as reported on Twitter by Tabitha Bliss, since apparently mature adult entertainment industry professionals approved and aired it. I refuse to view it and hope you won’t either, but here is her tweet:
Comedy Central Jokes About People Burning Alive In the Twin Towers on September 11th https://t.co/am2cNhxnfv
— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) September 11, 2016
Most of the rest of this post is, with minor changes, what I’ve posted in past years on this grim anniversary. It’s my hope that someone will stumble across this page who is too young to remember or who has forgotten, and that it will have an impact on them.
But before moving on to that portion, let me suggest that you read an Esquire article by Tom Junod entitled The Falling Man. It’s about one of the most horrifying aspects of that horrifying day. It’s about something that to this day wrenches my gut and makes my eyes well up when I think about it or see images of it, and which caused me some years ago to struggle to create lyrics for a song in my head that, if I had any musical talent, would have been recorded by now. It’s about this picture, and the countless others who did what the man in it did, but perhaps not quite as well.
Some people have forgotten now
It was many years ago
And peaceful here at home since then
So just let the memory go
But I close my eyes and see it still
Like it was yesterday — Oh no!
People jumping from a hundred-story building!
I can still see those Americans
Jumping from a hundred-story building …
© 2009 Richard G. Combs. All rights reserved.
Fifteen years ago this morning, we watched in horror as people jumped a thousand feet to their deaths because it was better than the alternative. Later that day, we learned that the heroic passengers of United Flight 93, knowing the fate that awaited them, had fought and died to prevent their plane from crashing into the White House or Capitol. In the ensuing days, we learned the details of that brave struggle, and “Let’s roll!” became a phrase that brought goosebumps to me whenever I heard it.
We must not forget the events of September 11, 2001. We must keep the images fresh in our memories. It’s necessary, I believe, if we’re to retain the resolve we need to understand, oppose, and defeat the ongoing Islamofascist effort to destroy our way of life, of which the attacks of 9/11 were a part.
We must not forget that there is a large, powerful, well-financed international movement dedicated to destroying Western Civilization.
On September 11, 2001, barbarians with box cutters — primitive 7th-century savages who could never build a World Trade Center or a 747, but whose insane ideology is dedicated to making the building of such things impossible — murdered 2,996 innocent people and changed Lower Manhattan from this:
to this:
Never forget.
Never forget.
Never, ever forget.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: 911, al qaeda, barbarism, flight 93, heroism, islamofascism, new york, terrorism, twin towers, war, world trade center, wtc | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on September 10, 2016
For many pro-freedom folks, the strongest argument for voting for a deeply flawed GOP presidential candidate revolves around the Supreme Court. Donald Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court appointees a while back, a list strongly influenced by the Federalist Society and widely praised by conservatives and libertarians. Of course, there’s no guarantee that he’d stick to that list (although he’s promised to nominate people like those on the list). But it’s a virtual certainty that Hillary Clinton would nominate candidates like Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor, if not worse.
But the Supreme Court isn’t the only judicial issue of concern. The Heritage Society points out that President Obama has fundamentally transformed the federal judiciary:
When Obama entered the Oval Office, liberal judges controlled just one of the 13 circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Fifty-five successful presidential nominations later, liberal majorities now control nine of those appeals benches, or 70 percent.
Outside of legal circles the transformation of the influential federal appeals courts has gone largely unnoticed, though.
“The Supreme Court grabs the spotlight, but it hears fewer than 100 cases a year,” Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett said, “while the 13 federal courts of appeals handle about 35,000.”
More than one-third of the 179 judges on federal appeals courts owe their seat to Obama, Willett told The Daily Signal. “That’s a legacy with a capital L.”
Obama also has left his mark on the U.S. District Courts, which are the lower federal courts, successfully appointing 268 judges—seven more than President George W. Bush.
All those appointments were of course confirmed by the Senate. The GOP establishment and its critics disagree about whether Senate Republicans did the best they could or “handed over the keys to the judiciary without a fight,” and the Heritage article fairly presents both sides. Personally, I think the critics have the stronger argument. That’s not just water under the bridge; it gives us an idea of what to expect if Hillary Clinton is elected.
The next president could tip the balance of the four remaining circuit courts of appeals still dominated by conservatives.
“It’s hands down the most fateful issue of the election,” said Willett, who is on Republicans’ short list for the Supreme Court.
“When Americans vote in November, they’re choosing not just a president but thousands of presidential appointees, including hundreds of life-tenured judges.”
In 2013, Sen. Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” for all appointments other than to the Supreme Court, ensuring that a simple majority could end debate (quash a filibuster) and vote to confirm. This precedent will cut both ways going forward.
If Clinton is elected and the Democrats retake the Senate, anyone she nominates to the federal bench is, barring a scandalous revelation, certain to be confirmed. Even if Republicans retain the Senate (I think they probably will, but wouldn’t bet on it), history suggests that most of her nominees would be confirmed. There are several Republican senators who will will not oppose a Democratic president’s nominally qualified nominee based on ideology (unless the nominee is an avowed Stalinist, and maybe not even then).
If Trump is elected and the Democrats retake the Senate, I suspect the self-described deal-maker would nominate judges and justices who could get enough Democrat votes to be confirmed, perhaps people like Souter and Roberts. But I consider this scenario highly unlikely. Given the tepid support for Trump among the GOP base, I can’t imagine him being elected, but the GOP losing the Senate.
So the election of Trump would almost certainly be accompanied by the election of a Republican majority Senate. The nuclear option would then ensure that his lower court appointments could be confirmed, and he’d have every reason to nominate judges acceptable to the conservative base and no reason not to. In just four years, that could easily mean 25 or more circuit court and 100 or more district court appointments.
The Reid precedent doesn’t cover Supreme Court nominations, so that’s a different story. Senate Republicans could tell their Democrat colleagues “you started this, we’re going to finish it” and extend the nuclear option to cover Supreme Court nominations. But I can’t see Mitch McConnell doing that; it would require new leadership with a stiff spine.
The more likely scenario is, again, the nomination of people like Souter and Roberts in order to attract enough Democrat votes to invoke cloture (Roberts was confirmed on a 78-22 vote, with fully half of Senate Democrats voting for him). That’s not something I’d cheer, but it would be far better than two to four more Breyers or Kagans. So maybe a sigh of relief.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: courts, judicial appointments | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on September 9, 2016
Protesters rallied at the State Capitol in Denver last night in solidarity with the lawsuit and violent protests by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and environmentalists against the Dakota Access pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux claim the pipeline will “disturb sacred sites” and its passage under the Missouri River will imperil their drinking water. In addition to the above-linked article about the rally, the Denver Post published an Associated Press “explainer” purporting to tell us what we need to know about the pipeline and the protests. But that “explainer” omitted some information critical to putting the claims of the protesters into perspective.
Rob Port of the Say Anything blog actually read through the 1206-page report on which the Corps of Engineers based their approval of the Dakota Access pipeline. He learned something interesting from a graphic on page 1008 (emphasis added):
Before reading this report I had no idea there was another pipeline already running through this area, but there is. It’s called the Northern Border Pipeline. It’s a natural gas line built all the way back in 1982, and the Dakota Access Pipeline follows it often, including through the areas currently being disputed by protesters.
…
This is no mere coincidence. I spoke with Justin Kringstad at the ND Pipeline Authority who told me that the Dakota Access line “generally follows the same corridor” as the Northern Border line, and that this sort of thing is “not uncommon.” It can be easier to get easements and regulatory approval for a pipeline built where another pipeline has already gone through.
Public Service Commissioner Julie Fedorchak also told me that the Dakota Access line “tried to follow wherever possible the Northern Border pipeline.”
The two routes aren’t exact, but through the area where pipeline construction has sparked violent protests the two lines run side by side according to Energy Transfer Partners.
Digging into the history of the Northern Border pipeline’s approval, Port learned that the Standing Rock Sioux, who now claim that the new pipeline will “disturb sacred sites,” had no such objection (in fact, no objection of any kind) to the building of the Northern Border pipeline along the same route.
The attempts to stop the Dakota Access pipeline aren’t really about sacred lands or water quality; those are just cover stories. This is just another battle in the leftist/environmentalist war on fossil fuels (and thus on affordable energy and economic growth).
This is another example of a blogger doing what the journalists reporting the story failed to do: dig into the facts to determine how credible the claims they’re reporting are. Most journalists today can’t be bothered with that, except maybe for whatever Trump says. Certainly not for whatever claims their environmentalist and leftist allies make. Those are simply accepted without question. These aren’t real journalists, they’re just leftist/environmentalist PR flacks.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: dakota access pipeline, environmentalism, journalism, oil | Leave a Comment »
