Welcome to SDA Late Night Radio. Tonight’s musical attraction is the talented and delightfully idiosyncratic New Englander Jonathan Richman, who was featured previously here, here, and here. In tonight’s song, Richman firmly but empathetically advises a heartsick friend that he’s going to have to emotionally let go of his former girlfriend; even though her new guy doesn’t deserve her, and might be leading her down the wrong path, the only thing to do is Let Her Go Into The Darkness.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
VDH: Our 1979
VDH does his own version of Back to the Future:
We have sowed and now we shall reap, and so soon we shall endure our first post-national, post-racial, Nobel Laureate president treated quite shabbily by those whom he was supposed to mesmerize. In places like Teheran or Damascus, Obama’s racial heritage, his Harvard Law Review billet, his membership in the Trinity Church, his brotherhood with Wright and Ayers, all that and more mean less than zero. To such thugs, Obama is the face of America, and he is to be tested rather than worshipped. Hugo Chavez is not a Harvard dean; Putin is not a senior Newsweek editor. Their legs do not tingle when they hear the president, except perhaps in giddy anticipation of what they might wrestle from him. They are not impressed with identity politics; they care little for degrees or titles; they have no elite white guilt. Again, Obama is just an American president who must be analyzed, tested, and if need be dared and humiliated.
Bonus entertainment, a comparison.
Not Waiting for the Asteroid
… Interviewing 101 … teaching the old media how it’s done:
Or, “259 Pages Of Faulty Premise”
Canadian Political Blogs: Online Opinion Leaders or Opinionated Followers? (pdf)
h/t Alberta Aardvark
Progressia: What Did You Elect?
Y2Kyoto: Into The Red
They’ll run the planet like they run everything else;
The already fraught international climate change negotiations are facing a fresh challenge after Yvo de Boer, the outgoing head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, revealed that the secretariat does not have sufficient funds to host two additional meetings ahead of the Cancun summit in November.
I know – why don’t they invest in a bunch of giant mirrors and pay for their conferences out of the profits?
h/t Manotick
Say It Isn’t So, Joe
Biden’s embarrassing habit of blurting out the truth is finally put to good use;
“[The Israelis have] said, ‘Here you go. You’re in the Mediterranean. This ship — if you divert slightly north you can unload it and we’ll get the stuff into Gaza.’ So what’s the big deal here? What’s the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza? Well, it’s legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don’t know what’s on that ship. These guys are dropping eight — 3,000 rockets on my people,'”
I Can See Joe McGinniss From My House
“I favour a merger of the Liberals and the NDP.”
Don’t think of it as a coalition poll gone horribly wrong… think of it as the beginning of the end of the Liberal Party.
Bad News For British Pensions
[Is] that the government may be preparing to prosecute BP, alleging criminal negligence. BP denies it took any safety shortcuts – despite the shameful history of its Texas City refinery explosion in which 15 workers died – and insists it is doing everything possible to put things right in the Gulf of Mexico.
But the American government and media seem to have decided the oil company put profits above safety in its list of priorities. Nor is there any reason to suppose British politicians and journalists would behave any differently if it was an American company that suffered similar setbacks here.
Or is there? When the Piper Alpha rig exploded in the North Sea in July, 1988, no fewer than 167 workers died and environmental damage pushed insured losses to £1.7bn. It was the worst offshore oil disaster in the world at that time and feelings ran high in Aberdeen, where many families suffered bereavement and financial loss.
But I do not recall Margaret Thatcher seeking to make political capital out of that tragedy by using inflammatory language about having her boot on the throat of Occidental Petroleum, the American oil giant which operated Piper Alpha. Oxy, as it was known because of the Los Angeles-based company’s New York Stock Exchange ticker, did not become the target of any government-sponsored hate campaigns in Britain.
Reader Tips
Welcome to SDA Late Night Radio.
The jaunty march Hail to the Chief has been associated with American Presidents for almost two hundred years, but frankly it just doesn’t sound right anymore. I’d like to propose a new song which, I suggest, is more suitable for President Obama’s entrances on important ceremonial occasions. Performed here by a nifty little trio consisting of Rob Bourassa on ukulele, Mike Karoub on cello, and Gerry Phillips on hand fart, here is my suggested new entrance music for President Obama: Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard and Kenneth Casey’s 1926 hit song Sweet Georgia Brown.
There. That’s better.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.
No Kitchen Sinks Were Harmed
… during the filming of this episode.
Selective outrage
Peter Hitchens on a certain “Aid Convoy”:
If you want to be wholly dispassionate, you might call it a ‘convoy’ without adornment. But to call it an ‘Aid Convoy’ is itself a departure from neutrality. I myself would call it a propaganda fleet, but then I am openly partisan on this issue. The use of the expression ‘humanitarians’ is likewise suspect, as is the use of the word ‘activists’ without saying what sort of activists they are.
…
It emerges that these ships were not entirely peopled by pacifist vegetarian idealists from the Isle of Wight.
For instance, one of these ‘activists’ is a lawyer who once represented a terrorist for free (his client was the interesting Kozo Okamoto, still in the Middle East and anxious not to return to his native Japan). Mr Okamoto took part in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 25 innocents were massacred.
Aboard were others who are active supporters of Hamas, the despotic and murderous Islamist rulers of Gaza. Hamas hurled their Fatah opponents to their deaths from the tops of high buildings when they took over, and recently imprisoned in disgraceful circumstances a British freelance journalist, Paul Martin (look it up) to a chorus of almost total silence from the British media and left-wing intelligentsia.
Then there were some members of the Egyptian ‘parliament’, who are supporters of that country’s rather unmoderate, and barely-tolerated, Muslim Brotherhood.
etc.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Climategate: the little genie who could…
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect — there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”
The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.
“Remember Haibar Oh, Jews “
An Inconvenient Tipper
Love means never having to say you’re a sorry loser.
On Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, with the help of the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, Sharyl Attkisson managed to blame news, that Al and Tipper Gore are separating, on how they never got over being denied the presidency despite winning the popular vote in 2000. If only Bush hadn’t taken it from them.
It wasn’t just CBS. Yesterday, Saskatoon’s CKOM “afternoon news” host Richard Brown got in on the sentiment – and then added a “historical” footnote that Gore had actually won the 2000 election, only to have it snatched away by the Supreme Court.
As I flipped the dial to a country music station, I felt a little twinge of sadness for John Gormley. All that work building an audience each morning with intelligent, informed commentary on the day’s current events – only to have it punted away by the idiocy of the so-called “news department”.
(Or, is it a case of convenient division of assets? – h/t ES)
A Good Game For Delicate Boys
A brand new pilot project uses the soccer field to prepare children for careers in government.
h/t maz2
They’re Going To Plug The Hole With Leonardo DiCaprio
Federal officials are hoping film director James Cameron can help them come up with ideas on how to stop the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The world is being run by crazy people.
Reader Tips
Welcome to Late Night Radio. Tonight we feature Richard Thompson’s fine guitar playing, and, especially, his talent as a narrative songwriter, as he tells a long-ago tale of unrequited love. The song’s verses are short biographical vignettes of a moment in time when shifting cultural forces collided in the figure of two strong-willed but differing characters; this clearly-recalled detail floats a lyrical chorus wherein the narrator’s wistful sense of loss, whetted by those remembered circumstances, now soars in pure feeling far above them.
Here’s Shakespeare-headed English songwriter Richard Thompson performing Beeswing. (Lyrics here.)
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.
The Da Vinci Left: Not Conflicted Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Ezra Levant – It’s one thing for Messrs. Martin and Duceppe and Ms. Mc-Donald to dislike Christians. But what’s new — and disturbing — is that this once-passive intolerance is becoming active: There is a concerted effort to name Christians and drive them out of office, to delegitimize the very idea of Christians participating in public life.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) – “And that Word is, we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word. The Word. Isn’t it a beautiful word when you think of it? It just covers everything. The Word. Fill it in with anything you want. But, of course, we know it means: ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’ And that’s the great mystery of our faith. He will come again. He will come again. So, we have to make sure we’re prepared to answer in this life, or otherwise, as to how we have measured up.”