Morning Intell: Weekend Edition: October 31, 2009 – Halloween

SPECIAL “GET A CUP OF COFFEE” Edition

• HALLOWEEN TIME-WASTER: Carve your own Pumpkin!
• OBAMA’s AFGHAN POLICY: Throwing the Objective Out with the Bathwater.
  Obama’s Afghan policy appears to be what one would expect from a politician who counted “running a presidential campaign” as his sole executive experience prior to being elected. So, why be surprised when foreign policy is run like a presidential campaign? It’s a case of “piss off some, placate others”. It doesn’t matter who has the experience or knowledge in the matter: they all have one vote. In Obama/Axelrod’s calculus, Joe Biden’s voice is as legitimate as Gen. McChrystal’s.

  Noonan refers to it as “splitting the baby.” Commentary’s J.E. Dyer has another name for it. We’d just call it what it is: an old-fashioned clusterf**k, and leave it at that.

• GOOD CAUSE: Send Doug Hoffman a few bucks..
  For the price of a Big Mac and fries, you can help send a message to both the RNC and the DNC. That’s a dynamic two-fer if ever there was one.

• D-LISTERS: Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston: White Trash, Joey Buttafuoco, and John Wayne Bobbitt
  Our own LBG looks at how Levi Johnston compares to a few D-list celebrities of the recent past: John Wayne Bobbitt and Joey Buttafuoco and where they are today.

• ONE OF THE BEST POLITICAL COMMERCIALS EVER:

• SERIOUSLY, ANOTHER WAR FOR THE WHITE HOUSE TO FIGHT??? The White House Stupidly Goes To War With Car Website Edmunds.com.
  Seriously, who’s the White House Domestic War Czar? ‘Cause he’s certainly one of the few in Washington earning his pay these days. Ought to be interesting when the Pay Czar gets around to him.
  [h/t: Instanpundit]

• PARITY: NFL Standings.
  NFC has 8 winning teams; AFC has 7 at nearly the half-way point in the season. Only another 9 weeks and it will be time for DBKP to announce the 2009 Parity Dog. NFL Parity Scheduling: Some Playoff Teams Are Dogs–Parity Dogs.
  NOTE: The above article has the NFL Parity Dogs of 2003-07. We’ll have to get an article out on the 2008 winner this week(!)

• THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP: Pelosicare Is All About a Government Takeover of Health Care.
  Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft: “Let me get this straight. We’re going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn’t read it, and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke.”
  Bingo!

• SORTING OUT THE DAY: Daily Scoreboard
• OBAMA DATA CRUNCHERS: Quotes of the Day
  

  Major Garrett, Fox News: ““In a briefing with reporters, officials acknowledged they can’t tell the difference between jobs ’saved,’ and jobs ‘created’ by the $787 billion stimulus package.

  “They said they also can’t tell the difference between private sector jobs and government jobs…”

  * At the end of the day, all the made-up economic statistics in the world aren’t going to change the mind of an unemployed construction worker about how great the economy is.

  IF their personal economic situation doesn’t improve by the time they hit the voting booth next year: those who remain unemployed aren’t going to be seeing rainbows, no matter how many administration spokesmen are pissing fauxtistics in the wind.

• GREEN POWER: Texas: Field of Dreams for Wind.
  $1.5 billion of stimulus money for Chinese-built windmills that created 30 jobs. What’s not to like?

• DANG! The Recoveryless Recovery.
  Randall Hoven, American Thinker: “The recession is over, supposedly.”
  Is the National Bureau of Economic Research practicing political hackery instead of economics? Hoven points out the many inconsistencies the NBER has lately had in determining when “recessions” begin and end.
  MORE: Stock analysts issue ‘Black Tuesday’ warning
  Trends on anniversary of 1929 collapse indicate markets on verge of ‘crash’

• HERE THEY COMING: Movies opening this week.
  It appears to be a threadbare week, highlighted by the early opening of “Michael Jackson’s This is It”.

• TWO for ONE POLITICAL TRICK: Hate Crime Legislation Attached to the Defense Spending Bill.
  ‘Cause that’s how political hacks work: they’re more intent on trickery than being on the record voting for this legislative crapola.

• NOOOOO! Halloween Head Turner! Eddie Munster Is All Grown Up.
  Would it be unkind to make the observation that he may be scarier today than in the 1960s?

• CONAN O’BRIEN: “A newspaper in Denver is planning to hire a critic to write reviews of all the medical marijuana clinics in the state. My one suggestion to the editors: Give the guy a deadline.”

  

• OVER-KILL: All Crisis, All the Time.
  Weekly Standard’s Irwin Savodnik: “Americans are overreacting to events: to the “Great Depression” of 2009, to the increasing numbers of young people with Attention Deficit Disorder, to the histrionic fantasy that climate change will become global boiling. None of these issues is without substance, and none of them should be ignored; but in one way or another, we are overreacting by turning each of them into a crisis.

  We seem to have fallen in love with crises, and the more crises we find the more animated we seem to be. We are immersed in a Crisis of Crises, replete with illogic, a surfeit of emotion, and strings of events vying for crisis status.”
  The 24/7 Crisis aids and abets the “There ought to be a law” crowd. They never miss an opportunity to throw another law on the book, no matter if existing laws cover the behavior that sparked their latest outcry. The odious hate crimes legislation oozing its way through Congress is but the latest example.

• LIONS, TIGERS, THIRD PARTIES…OH MY! Reports: GOP gives up on Scozzafava? Update: Issa switches to Hoffman.
  Hot Air’s Allahpundit resumes his daily Cassandra routine about third parties.
  “If the worst happens and the GOP is deluged with independent challenges next year (possibly spurred on by Glenn Beck?), then you know what the headline will be the day after the midterms, don’t you? “Dede’s Revenge.”

  How many smackdowns do RINOs have to have laid on them in general elections before establishment Republicans get the message.
  The problem hasn’t been that the RNC has been some conservative bastion that sends forth legions of troglodyte candidates that 60% of the country won’t vote for. The only place this fantasy occurs is in the eternal sunshine of the clueless minds at the RNC.
  Note: Much of the speculated hand-wringing could be averted; the RNC could simply stop foisting McCain clones on a no-longer-willing-to-be-compliant conservative electorate and the problem fades–until resurrected by the NY Times or the odd David Frum-alike commentators.

• RUSSIANS IN SPACE: Russia Hopes Nuclear Ship Will Fly Humans to Mars.
  

  Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation’s space chief said Thursday…President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.

  They’re not after a new source of vodka. [h/t: PhoenixFreedom]

• NO WORD ON UNCLE JOE: The Hooterville Gazette
  The blog description reads, “Dedicated to Bitter Small Town Americans Who Still Cling to Their Guns and Religion!!!”
  That would be everyone here at DBKP–except for the ‘bitter’ part.

• CHEESE-EATING CHEESE PRODUCERS: While at Hooterville Gazette, I noticed on the sidebar a graphic for contacting Sargento Cheese over the company’s pulling advertising from the Glenn Beck show. This was after Beck exposed Van Jones to the world and Jones was forced to resign as Green Jobs Czar.
  This writer used to enjoy Sargento String Cheese products. There are many others on the market and we were surprised that there wasn’t any difference in the taste. Want to contact Sargento? Ask and ye shall receive: Contact Sargento information.

• WHEN YOU’VE LOST KATIE COURIC: CBS: Administration’s Trillion-Dollar ‘Stimulus’ Claims “Hard to Believe”.
• CHANGE: No Bundler Left Behind
  Michelle Malkin: “Many Obama bundlers have secured slots on federal advisory panels and commissions. Still more have benefited from the time-honored patronage tradition of rewarding political benefactors with ambassadorships. Clinton did it. Bush did it. And despite all his fantastical, Balloon Boy-level rhetoric of bringing a “new politics” to Washington, Obama’s done it, too.”

  This administration has raised talking out of both sides of its mouth to an art form at a level that would challenge Bill Clinton himself.

• IMAGINARY Non-FRIENDS: The Straw Men of the Left.
  Bernard Chapin, PJM: “The quip regarding the GOP being disinterested in “the poor” is but a leftist straw man posing as a legitimate argument.”
  Which reminds one of a joke:
  A husband and wife are driving to Washington, DC, when the wife sees two nude guys masturbating in a field.
  “Oh look, honey! It’s a couple of Democrats!”
  Her husband looked over and said, “How do you know they’re Democrats?”
  “Well, if they were Republicans, they’d be f**king some poor people instead.”

• VROOOM UPDATE: STANDINGS 2009 Unofficial Driver Standings: Tums Fast Relief 500.
  We looked for the highest authority on the point standings but couldn’t find one. They’re headlined as “unofficial” but they come from the NASCAR “official” site? Jimmy Johnson in the lead with 4 races to go; Mark Martin 118 points back.

• MORE ‘SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND’ FEVER: Patriotic Gore.
  Obama’s speech urges banks to lend to small businesses–not because of the profit it will bring to those who’ve invested their money in banks, but “on the premise that the loan will not return money to shareholders, but will “spread the wealth around.” “
  Note to investors: add “banks” to the sell list–along with “insurance companies”.

• SECRETS REVEALED: Divine Diary.
  This blog’s description is “Blog Money, Make money online, Blog for Money, Cash for Blog”. What do they know that you don’t? The answer’s not coming from this writer–who doesn’t have a clue. But, they’re mentioned here because for some reason, they have DBKP on the sidebar. So, what the hell? They gotta know something…

• WHICH BRINGS US TO: Pepsi apologises for girl-getting iPhone app.
  At the aforementioned Divine Diary site, this post stood out:

  US soft drink giant PepsiCo has apologised for a free iPhone application crafted to help men seduce women and keep records of conquests but the programme remained available on Tuesday.

  Pepsi’s “AMP Up Before You Score” iPhone application categorises women into 24 types and then uses the Apple smartphone’s Internet capabilities to link users to information about them and what they like.

  Sad. Most guys this writer knows don’t need an iPhone app to keep track of how many times they’re in the sack with a girl. And if they do, they’re way too busy to be messing with an iPhone app.

• BEFORE OBAMA THERE WAS NORMAN ANGELL: The Precedented Peace Prize.
  Once upon a time back in 1933, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to someone “primarily for his ideas, philosophy, and aspirations for the world.”
  That one didn’t turn out so well. We were tempted to add “either” on the end of the preceding sentence, but time enough for that later.

  
  [ABOVE: One man's efforts to carve an on-line pumpkin. Link at top of page.]

• A MEDIA MATTERS PRODUCTION: Here’s Some Real Hate Speech for You.
  NRO’s Mark Krikorian: “The “Drop Dobbs” campaign, to get CNN to fire the only anchor on their network whose show anyone watches, is sponsored by — surprise! — La Raza, the SPLC, Media Matters, LULAC, et al. Last Wednesday, October 21, saw a series of coordinated protests by open-borders groups in cities around the country. The following day, Geraldo Rivera said in a speech that the opponents of amnesty have been “reckless beyond imagining” and that Dobbs in particular “is almost singlehandedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country.”
  MORE: Lou Dobbs Target of Leftie-Liberal Frenzied Media Attack and Media Matters: The Left’s Media Attack Watch Dog.

• LORD SCAM SMACKDOWN Lord Monckton: Who is Al Gore Nemesis, Lord Monckton?
• ‘CAUSE NOTHING IS FUNNIER THAN MEGHAN McCAIN TRYING TO BE SERIOUS: And now, a few words from Meghan McCain’s funbags
• STILL LOVE THE STEELERS, BUT: How Rush Limbaugh gave America its Sundays back.
  America is just little sadder place since the NFL and Commissioner, Roger Goodell, jumped on this political bandwagon–at least for one fan. The last NFL strike put an end to “automatic Sunday viewing of every NFL game”. The Rush episode may take longer than a few years before the NFL is viewed as anything else than a political battleground instead of a sport to “get away from it all for a few hours”.

• JAY LENO: “A 66-year-old deputy U.S. attorney general in South Carolina named Roland Corning lost his job after police discovered him at a cemetery with an 18-year-old stripper, a bag of sex toys, and a bottle of Viagra. To be fair, people do grieve differently.”
• ANOTHER SQUISHY REPUBLICAN DOES THE FACEPALM: We’re Governed by Callous Children: Americans feel increasingly disheartened, and our leaders don’t even notice.
  This time, it’s Peggy Noonan in the Wall St. Journal.
  Noonan: “We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.”

  by Mondo Frazier
  images: DBKP file

  

  
  
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