Favorite poster from NR's "The Corner"

empiricist, imperialist, whatever.

love how people who pull out these anecdotes about it being unseasonably cold somewhere are usually willing to acknowledge that the global avg temp has gone up ("oh but it was only a tenth of a degree") but can't put it together enough to realize that that means that someone, somewhere is saying it's gotten hotter where they are. duh.

but, my fucking vineyard??!?

oh, my grapes are 10 days early. weird.

just a simple agrarian, thinkin baout things

Jay Nordlinger: the screwiness moves:

There is mail in that column, too. And I so like one letter I publish, I’m going to talk about it again, here in the Corner. The letter comes from an Italian-American friend of ours — reader, cruiser, etc. (I’m not implying anything by “cruiser” — it’s just that he has come on at least one of National Review’s cruises.) He was thinking about the Ricci case. And he says that, when he was growing up in Kansas City, Italians weren’t considered white — far from it. Now they’re lily, it seems.

“I can’t figure out if we got a promotion or a demotion. I mean, just as it’s time to line up for minority benefits, we get bumped to the back of the line for being white.”

And I especially loved this: “Heck, here in Los Angeles” — where our cruiser now lives — “people refer to me as Anglo. Imagine that, in the very place where Rudolph Valentino was the original Latin Lover.”

Valentino would not be a “Latin lover” today — Sonia would definitely say no. He would be an unwise non-Latino, with a poverty of experience. America has always been screwy about race and ethnicity, of course. But you’ll agree that that screwiness moves.

does the screwiness move in a corkscrewy motion

screwiness may be long, but it bends towards justice

what are "minority benefits" please

future telling bald hotties, touch sensitive wii justice with apple controls, jetpacks

Newt Tweets Andy [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Jonah:

While annoying, none of this surprises me. I can't tell you how many people have told me that my book is idiotic on its face because the dictionary says so. By the way, my dad wrote about the deep-seated bias of dictionaries for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago.

my DAD, that's who!

"the deep-seated bias of dictionaries"

the deep-seated bias of the phone book

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110001946

it's conservapedia type stuff

Jonah is the Michael to his Joe.

shorter schiffren: there are two qualities in life, misery and power, choose one

On Sanford [Lisa Schiffren]

Even after a hard day of canoeing down the Dordogne river in southwest France, I felt the need to comment on a few of the more pressing stories of the day. I agree entirely with Mark Steyn about Mark Sanford. Last week I believed that he could tough it out by just moving forward and continuing the good fight. After his most recent public wallow, he’s toast.

Toughing it out requires ceasing the whinging, adolescent babbling about your stupid, trite reasons for straying, and your sense that your personal adulterous relationship is deeper and more wondrous than everyone else’s dumb affair. You know what we call men who have dumb affairs and keep their mouths shut? Husbands. Occasionally, presidents. Hard to see how a wife with any self-respect could tolerate hearing the guy she’s trying to forgive and reconcile with refer to the other woman as his soulmate — on the record, and in public. There are limits to what marriage therapy can do when someone doesn’t want to be there. Ditto being politically sound. You can have great ideas and be such a head case — in this case, such an egotist — that voters can’t pull the lever. We’re there. And I bet that Sanford — unlike Newt, Giuliani, Clinton, etc. – isn’t unhappy with that resolution. Mark Sanford doesn't want to be president.

I think the love affair is over for Rich Lowry!

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Nzc0MzY3MWRjMjE1OTE0NmI1ZjYzYzQwMWY1ZTE5Njk=

It’s just too absurd. Palin mentioned Alaska or Alaskans 34 times in a 17-minute statement that must be a new record in the history of protesting too much. Palin says she hates politics as usual, and true to her word, on July 3 she staged a spectacle in politics as unusual. But she still proved adept at the traditional political art of extreme disingenuousness.

She didn’t want to put Alaska through the hell of a lame-duck governor who would “hit the road, draw the paycheck, and ‘milk it.’” Never mind that if she feared becoming a lame duck, she could run for re-election — especially if “serving [Alaska’s] people is the greatest honor I could imagine.” Or that she could endeavor to work her hardest at her job until her last day in office. That may sound outlandish, but it’s been done before.

I hate being in agreement with Rich Lowry on anything.

Little fartbursts.

Lowry writes with the disdain of a recently abandoned lover.

Could this be the scandal?

AP headline "Palin breaks silence about resignation". Didn't she resign on Thursday? Not exactly shutting up for long, is she?

hell the governorship took up too much of the time she could be using for blabbing inanities to the press and updating her facebook status.

i guess it was just a matter of time before the lazy, self-absorbed nitwits the Repubs have spent years courting finally ended up in the driver's seat. or something.

i wouldn't characterize it that way -- the GOP has an extremely good track record running charismatic lightweights.

this is a couple days old, but, when do american right wingers get really credulous about the chinese government? when they start killing muslims:

Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . [Andy McCarthy]

even though the ones we were holding at Gitmo were trained in al-Qaeda-affiliated camps.

The Wall Street Journal (as flagged in the NRO web briefing) reports on rioting in China by Uighur "students" that has left scores dead and hundreds wounded. The "students," described elsewhere in the story as from a "predominantly Muslim ethnic group[, which has] long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent," expressed their dissent by torching cars and buses, as well as — according to accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media — rampaging "with big knives stabbing people" on the street.

No reason for non-Muslims in Bermuda, Palau, or the United States to worry, though. The lovable Uighurs are merely trying to address "economic and social discrimination." Once they get social justice, I'm sure they'll stop.

07/06 08:55 AMShare

christ

i wouldn't characterize it that way -- the GOP has an extremely good track record running charismatic lightweights.

^true. i guess it's this whole white trash celebutante component that's off-putting

that's not meant to read classist or sexist fwiw

(but i guess "white trash" sort of ensures it anyway : /)

Dem's uncharismatic lightweights vs GOP's charismatic lightweights

btw "charismatic lightweight" only sounds true for a few seconds. Other than Reagan (who was no lightweight) and Romney, who are the other charismatic Wonder Boys – Dole? the two Bushes?

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/photos-trivia/DanQuayle.jpg

Dubya for sure

The latter Bush was def. a light-weight.

None of these guys had charisma though.

The Guvernator fits the bill too.

i think historically there have been a few efforts by the republicans to put forth fresh-faced lightweights who represent some great white hope, and who also end up never getting beyond a certain point because lightweights can only get so far really. exception: GWB, who only got that far because of his last name.

gwb didnt really even get that far given that he lost the 2001 election by everyones count except the supreme courts

plus gore ran a pretty terrible campaign, i think if it was even just slightly better he would have taken it

He didn't lose the election, but let's not reopen that can.

just saying gwbs an anomaly by almost any measure!

I wonder if NRO will change their site's colors to red in solidarity with China in their battle against Islamic extremism.

GARRISON: We're going back into the case. The taking of the Presidency.
BROUSSARD: Lord, wake me. I must be dreaming.
GARRISON: You're awake. I'm deadly serious.

gwb was an anomaly because as teflon as clinton was, people still kinda wanted to react against him imo, and it felt like there was this weird nostalgia for bush sr around that time

didn't the Poppy Bush nostalgia peak around 2006-2007 (e.g. a few Dem primary candidates taking Kerry's cue in waxing nostalgia for Smart Foreign Policy, etc)?

i dunno, i feel like when bush was running a lot of people were comparing the moral "decency" of bush sr to clinton, and so when his son stepped up they looked at him and then looked at gore as clinton's VP, and made their choice based on that.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDE3MmE5MDVmMGM1YjQ2NmVhMjJkN2I2ZTcxMzhlNjU=

Gave me a queasy feeling in my stomach when I read it. Particularly because of all the people on FreeRepublic who were taking it as a call to start killing Democrats.