I’m Sure This Is Evil …

and that I’m going to buy it.  Cuz I’m evil, ya know?

Laura Ingraham’s The Obama Diaries.

From the way it’s being played up, I suspect it’s pretty funny.

Well, go on.

Interesting Places on the Intertubes

A roundup and link dump, all in one!  So you won’t have to!

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity

Americans for Tax Reform

The Cato Institute

Go on!

More Government Perfidy on BP Oil Spill

CNSNews reports:

Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, sensed that a chart showing 140 oil skimmers at work — a chart given to him by BP and the Coast Guard — was “somewhat inaccurate.” So, Nungesser asked to fly over the spill to verify the number.

The flyover was cancelled three times before those officials admitted that just 31 of the 140 skimmers were actually deployed.

The incident is detailed in a report released Thursday by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republicans say the report provides evidence that the Obama administration misrepresented the assets devoted to the cleanup, misrepresented the timing of when government officials knew there was an oil spill and misrepresented the level of control the government had over the matter …

Tuck this into the file with previous reports.

Go on.

New Taxes Hit 1/1/11

January 1, 2011, will see a massive increase in taxes and reduction in tax breaks, including:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief …

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. …

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes …

Mug tip to Power Line.

Yeah, go on, while you can still afford to do so.

Had Enough Therapy?

An interesting blog from a life coach. His most recent instalaunched post is The Hotness Gap, after which a few genuine he-man woman-haters come out in the comments, but it is a good post none-the-less.

To his point that hotness affects election results, so do sports results, apparently.

Go on!

MM Reminds Us of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest

Winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

Molly Ringle
Seattle, WA

The winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington.

And some history:

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

Mug tip to Mad Minerva.

Go on!

Riehl Warning to the GOP

Dan Riehl warns the establishment GOP:

…

A big part of my thinking in coming to DC was to try and help to create a synergy between the Right on-line and the establishment GOP. I had hoped to forestall anything like an insurgency from the Right by finding common ground. What I didn’t realize is that today’s GOP is interested in no such thing. It can’t hear anyone outside the Beltway echo chamber and isn’t interested in listening to them even if they could.

And I don’t believe today’s Beltway entrenched GOP is going to bring about the kind of change America needs. The leadership is weak, wasteful, misguided and out of sync with the people. The signs are all there, from Dede Scozzafava, to Charlie Crist – and worse.

And even if they reclaim this, or that majority in the fall, we will most likely see the same old politics as usual that so frustrated the Right under Bush. You don’t really believe they are going to repeal ObamaCare and tell millions of people expecting health insurance at taxpayer expense they can’t have it, do you? That will be politically imprudent to our Beltway ensconced GOP.

Illegal immigration? Led by soon to be ex-border cop John McCain, assuming he’s re-elected, they will be calling us racists and haters, again. They have to worry about that Hispanic vote, after all.

… Today’s Republican Party is broken and corrupt. And they are not my friend, any more than they are yours. They are only interested in themselves.

…

Preach it, Dan!

Go on!

Why BP Stockholders Should Sue the US Gov’t

When Obama is looking for whose ass to kick, he should begin taking yoga lessons.  According to the Financial Post:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

…

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks,” remarked Visser, despite BP’s desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer –the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment –unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

…

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

If I were the CEO of BP, this would come up every single time the media interviewed me.  Of course, to do that would be to anger the politically powerful.  I’m cool with that.  I would document every way the government took its revenge (as it inevitably would).  Of course, at that point the MSM would no longer report on it, but it would be there, official documents on an official website somewhere, to provide ammo for someone who cares about justice.

Go on, then.

Megashark Infographic: Shark vs. Airliner

FANTASTIC!

Oh, go on!

New Class from Telos

Well, not a journal I’d usually pick up, but Kenneth Anderson over at the Volokh Conspiracy recommends this article at Telos, and it is an interesting one.  Here’s the first paragraph:

The paradigm of a “new class” originated in socialist Eastern Europe among dissidents and other regime critics as a way to describe the ensconced stratum of managers, technocrats, and ideologues who controlled the levers of power. The rhetorical irony of the phrase depended on the implied contrast with an “old class” as well as the good old class theory of the orthodox Marxism that once served as the established dogma of half the world. The history of class struggle, which had been history altogether, had culminated in the victory of a proletarian class that in turn had ushered in—or was well on its way to ushering in—a classless society. Or so the grand narrative went. To talk of a “new class,” then, conjured up the unquestionable epistemology of class analysis, while simultaneously challenging the notional outcome: instead of the end of the state and classlessness, one was stuck with police states and a new class that, while eminently cooler than the Bolsheviks of yore, still exercised a dictatorship (of the not-proletariat) while skimming off the benefits of unequal power. The phrase turned Marxism against Marxism during those decades when the fall of the Berlin Wall was not even imaginable.

Go on!