We All Have Jobs

One of the major arguments I've heard advanced to support Roman Polanski, lover of young girls, is that the prosecutor or "the Americans", in international shorthand, were overzealous in their pursuit of a 70+ year old artiste/rapist. Defenders of Polanski have asked, "why are the Americans pursuing an old man for non-rape-rape crimes he committed decades ago?". They say - "Just let it go man".

Well, as you know, prosecutors don't work for free. They get paid to do a job. Defenders of Polanski may only see those who get paid millions of dollars to put images and sound on film as the only true laborers but, in fact, there's this whole other class of laborers out there. They are typically called the "middle class" and it is their job to get up every morning, go to work and make the world run. For example, deputy districty attorneys, police officers, detectives, etc. These people are work their tails off to ensure that everyone from shoplifters to burglars to sexual deviants are brought to justice. Sure, it has to be nice for them to be able to say they worked on the Roman Polanski case and brought the famous scofflaw to justice. It's also their job.

So, Scorcese, think about this - just as it's wonderful to win an Oscar for your work, it's also wonderful for others to see thousands of hours of labor spread across decades finally bear fruit.

[Fox News is] not really a news station

So, let me straighten this out in my own mind. The Right is Manichean and the Left is Nuanced. We see things in black-and-white and you see things in shaded of grey. Got it.

Tip: Donald Sensing

Pakistan is On Fire

Yesterday, 2 suicide bombers blew themselves up inside the Islamic University in Islamabad. As Michael Medved pointed out in the 5 minutes of his show I heard yesterday, this should be shocking to the West. This is the kind of thing that was on the air 24x7 between 9/2001 and 2005(?).

Americans have grown tired of this story - we're sick of hearing about Islamic terrorism.

Unfortunately, the Islamists the world over don't really care. They're blowing up women at the Islamic University in a place called Islamabad in an Islamic country. This is not going to end well for us. But we're fast asleep.

Why Would They?

Via the Corner:

• A majority of German schoolchildren do not know who built the Berlin Wall or when it was erected.
• Only 1 in 3 children in eastern Germany knows the wall was built by the Soviet-backed East German government; others think it was built either by West Germany or its Western allies.

If school teachers in Germany had to take time out of their day to teach about the Berlin Wall they would have less time to teach about the evil that George W Bush and the Americans have inflicted on this world. Teachers need to focus on the totalitarianism that America represents, they don't have time to talk about the various historical threads of a century everyone has tried to forget.

Btw, interesting story. I was having a conversation with someone just recently and we were talking about the Stasi - he didn't know what that was. I explained that after WWII, East Germany went from Nazi rule to Communist rule overnight. He said - wow, that's such a dramatic shift. I asked him to explain why that was "dramatic". He couldn't.

Sorry I Missed This One

Looks like a great lineup...

The Under Secretary of Education from the Obama Administration followed by some short presentations, bio breaks, working sessions, William Ayers, some more working sessions and then The Secretary of Education himself. What's that? William who? His friends call him Bill.

Tip: J1M

1,502 Pages Huh?

Well, it's not fair to compare pages, so I did a quick analysis based on a sample of pages taken from the legislation (which is 2.25MB in PDF format with no images). In that sample, I found the average number of words per page to be 207 words and that was after I removed line numbers, header numbers and the header tag containing the file name.

Once I got the average, I multiplied that times the number of pages and came up with 310,313 words. This is approximately how many words are contained in the document. Here are some novels for comparison:

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy = ~560,000 words (English translation)
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo = ~513,000 words (French Original)
Bible, New Testament = 138,020 (New Greek Edition)
Koran = ~80,000

Chris Matthews: Signs of Desperation

In this video, Chris Matthews tries to bait a Dallas organizer of the Tea Party movement into saying something crazy and fails mightily. It's a bit funny to watch his desperation in jumping from topic to topic, looking for a hole - birtherism, Texas secessionism, etc.

At one point he demands that the gentleman, Philip Dennis, own up to who he voted for in 2000 and 2004. He then goes on to try a game of gotcha, suggesting that this man is a hypocrite (a mortal sin of the Left) because he voted for the man who doubled the deficit. Let me help you out here, Chrissy.

The Right voted for W in 2000 because they believed he was a good conservative who would limit spending, cut taxes, etc. That was in 2000. When he became POTUS, he began to show that he was truly a big government conservative. And then 9/11 happened and a war followed. Contrary to Chris Matthews, there's no such thing as a deficit neutral war unless we begin stealing money from the countries we invade, something we do not do.

In 2004, in the middle of a very hot war, conservatives had a choice between a big government conservative who was leading the nation during wartime and a Europhile, leftist who had never demonstrated any desire to cut deficits, taxes or anything else except defense spending. Who were conservatives supposed to vote for?

Ah, Merry Olde England

"We're here to warn him"

Steyn: What's Repugnant?

Following up on comments from another neo-Marxist in the Obama administration, Mark Steyn scores big with a nice constrast of what is and what is not morally repugnant according to today's Left:

If you say, "Chairman Mao? Wasn't he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?," you'll be hounded from public life for saying the word "Chinks." But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any schoolroom in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it's so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.

Oh this is too funny

Remind me. Is it the Left that loves to claim that they are the ones who've mastered the art of "nuance" while the Right flails away in a black and white world? I thought so.

Well, Media Matters decided to post a printed pages long post about all of Rush's racially charged statements. For God's sake - wouldn't it have made more sense for them to pick out the 3-5 things that people can agree could be taken as offensive by some? Instead they list dozens of things that Rush has said that are nuanced and part of a long and potentially valid line of argument. If you listened to MM, you would have to believe that any conservative who mentions race in any way is a racist. Oh wait, that is what they believe. Something tells me they aggregated all of the Rush transcripts that George Soros pays people to compile and did a Ctrl+F on "black", "african" and "Obama".