Happy New Year! (or not)

As crappy as 2011 was, I predict that 2012 will somehow manage to be even crappier.

Merry Christmas!

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Syria – The Tipping Point Into Hell" by The Noisy Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Daniel Greenfield's post "Mr. Islam's Blindfold and Machete" over at Sultan Knish. Congrats!

The state of the race so far

I only caught bits and pieces of the most recent GOP debate... all I really took away from it is that Rick Perry finally seems a little less awful at the whole debating thing, Jon Huntsman seems a little less douchey now than he did in the early debates, and Ron Paul is still batshit crazy at worst and incoherent at best.  It was nice seeing Michelle Bachmann go after Ron Paul, but unfortunately I think she's already destroyed herself with all the unfair attacks she's previously made on other candidates.

I don't know if there was a clear winner of this last debate, but from what I saw of it Rick Santorum had the best line of the night when he said something along the lines of: "We don't need a president we can believe in, we need a president who believes in us."

So where do I stand as of now?  I'm still not really sure yet who to support, but I think Ace makes a pretty persuasive case for Rick Perry.  Sadly, at the moment it still looks like a battle between Romney and Gingrich for frontrunner status... I'm really not too keen on either one of them.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "My Mother’s War, Courtesy Of Pearl Harbor" by Bookworm Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Barry Rubin's post "Middle East: We’re Going to Have a Revolution and We Can Do it the Hard Way or the Easy Way" over at Rubin Reports.  Congrats!

Some sad news

Christopher Hitchens passed away a few days ago after a long bout with esophageal cancer.  And today Vaclav Havel has also passed away.

Rest in peace.

Update: Wow, I guess they really do come in threes... now Kim Jong Il has died, or North Korea finally admitted that he died.  This reminds me of a speech Christopher Hitchens made where he ragged on North Korea quite a bit:

8 candidates, 10 words

We've had lots of debates, but I'm still not sure which GOP candidate to root for in the primaries...  and I think I actually get less sure with each debate.

To help me sort out my thoughts on all the remaining candidates, I thought I'd try to force myself to describe each candidate in exactly ten words.  Here goes nothing...

Newt Gingrich:  Giant head.  Funny name.  Not exactly a one woman man. 

Mitt Romney:  Nice hair. Funny name.  Taken every side of every issue.

Michelle Bachman:  Nice name.  Crazy eyes.  Forever tainted by the Tardasil incident.

Jon Huntsman:  Former Obama lackey.  Current douchebag.  Definitely in the wrong primary. 

Rick Perry:  Created lots of jobs.  Awful debater.  Forgets too many things.   

Rick Santorum:  A decent guy, but too conservative for Pennsylvania in 2006.  

Ron Paul:  Insane foreign policy.  Screechy voice.  Often answers easy questions incoherently.

Buddy Roemer:  I keep hearing this name mentioned, but not sure why.

Not sure how much that actually helped me, but that was kinda fun...  ok, now it's your turn!  ;-)

Beck threatens to vote for Ron Paul

Glenn Beck recently floated the idea that he might vote for Ron Paul as a third party candidate if the GOP ends up with Newt Gingrich as the nominee.  I've listened to his explanation a few times now and I am really having a hard time following it... basically, Beck is claiming that Gingrich is somehow a progressive, and that he prefers the lesser evil of Ron Paul's nutty foreign policy to Gingrich's progressivism.

Gingrich has supported a lot of stupid stuff, but is it really fair to call him a progressive?  Seems to me like his problem is a defect of personality, not ideology.  He has managed to come up with some pretty good ideas over the years, and he's come up with loads and loads of bad ones too... but he's such a vainglorious prick that he thinks all his ideas are equally brilliant.

Furthermore, even if you think Gingrich is a progressive, how is voting for a crank third party candidate going to keep progressivism out of the White House?  There is no chance in hell that Ron Paul could ever come close to winning a presidential election... honestly, I don't think he could even manage to come in second in a three-man race.  The only question would be whether or not he steals more anti-war votes away from Obama than he steals anti-Fed votes from Gingrich.

Update: Ok, if Gingrich is going to run around calling himself a "realpolitik Wilsonian" then I can't really criticize Glenn Beck for calling Gingrich a progressive.

RSM on Obama's stupid Keynesian crap

Robert Stacy McCain didn't care for Obama's recent '60 Minutes' interview at all:

Obama thinks he can just rattle of a laundry list of spending projects, call them “common sense, mainstream ideas” and — POOF! — the money magically appears to pay for this stuff.

And something else: He loves to talk about infrastructure — “investments in road and bridges” — as if that was the majority of the what he’s spending money on, when in fact, infrastructure projects were less than 5% of the stimulus bill. It’s like me sprinkling a turd with sugar and asking you to eat it and when you refuse, I accuse you of disliking sugar.

Ace on Obama's apparent lack of smarts

Ace is less than impressed with Obama's supposedly keen intellect:

This occurred to me due to Obama's claim that paying people not to work creates more jobs than actually creating jobs.

It is a thoroughly stupid and ignorant statement. Even as a weak bit of political spin, it verges, apologies for the word but I mean it, on being mentally retarded.

A year or two ago one of those guys who's supposedly a libertarian but seems to make his rent attacking conservatives posited that the right suffers from "epistemic closure," a mis-named term which he claimed to mean "closed off to information or experience inconsistent with one's prior views."

A tasteless and unnecessary neologism for the very old idea of a Community-Based Reality, a group which decides what reality is according to a group. Contrary information will not be permitted to interfere with the Community-Based Reality the group is deciding upon; they reason backwards from their conclusions to decide what the Facts are which prove those pre-supposed conclusions.

Not a particularly new idea. But he made up a (poor) neologism for it, and attacked the right, so of course he got lots of links and probably a few invitations to MSNBC.

Using this terminology: Is Obama's mind epistemically closed?

Obama is supposedly a learned man. We are told he is a rara avis, in Chris Buckley's dribblings, a true intellectual.

When was the last time Obama actually learned something about the world?

Did he, as the book's title might have it, Learn Everything He Needed To Know By Second Semester Sophomore Year?

When was the last time Obama was actually confronted by new information and new experience and actually adapted his beliefs to fit the new fact-pattern, rather than consistently adapting the new fact-pattern to fit his old beliefs?

For, we were told, anyone who does not do this is is "epistemically closed."

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Heart Of Darkness; Obama’s Campaign To Make Israel A Scapegoat And Fool America’s Jews" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Andrew McCarthy's post "Fears and Smears" over at National Review. Congrats!

Sorry

I've been working out some computer problems, so haven't been posting as much lately... I'll try to get something new up here soon.

Adam Carolla on OWS