URLs du Jour

2009-10-31

  • "Strange New Respect" is a phrase invented long ago by Tom Bethell of The American Spectator to describe the phenomenon of liberal media suddenly fawning over a conservative who's unexpectedly tilted leftward on one or more issues.

    Now, also in the Spectator, Shawn Macomber finds one of the stranger instantiations of Strange New Respect: the latest entry in the Saw movie franchise. "Jigsaw", the prime splatterer of the series' gore, turns out to have been driven to his elaborate killing schemes "by a bad experience with an insurance company lackey who denied him cancer coverage on the basis of a—wait for it—preexisting condition." Observes Shawn:

    Jigsaw slaughters a few of the establishment left's hackneyed bogeymen, makes a couple scathing speeches about the "f–cking insurance companies," damns the naïveté of the Tea Partier, government-out-of-healthcare set, and—voila!—the series has gone from gutter phenomenon to clever satire, Michael Moore unbound

  • The NYT story on the uptick in GDP yesterday contained this:
    Before the third quarter, the gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the government’s total goods and services produced — had been shrinking for a year. It bottomed out with a 6.4 percent rate of decline in the first three months of this year, the steepest fall since 1982.
    Um, see anything wrong there? Mark Skousen does. In addition to more technical quibbles:
    … the New York Times may well want “the government” to produce the entire GDP, but it doesn’t yet. Currently government spending represents approximately 20% of GDP. The remaining 80% is privately produced.
    Skousen is quoted at Steve Landsburg's new blog, already a regular stop for me.

  • Yesterday, following sheeplike in the opinions of other right-wing lunatics, I was all depressed about Honduras. The WSJ is telling us buckaroos today that we can cheer up, alleging the agreement was mainly designed as a face-saving out for Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration. Hope that's right.

  • Jamie Lee Curtis opines on Halloween at the Huffington Post. You'd think that might be interesting, but … nope.
    After seeing The Exorcist for my 15th birthday I received the nickname "Dimmy" from the ghost of the priest, Damien's mother calling out to him "Dimmy, (short for Damien) why you do this to me Dimmy?" I was so freaked out that my 1972 Mercury Capri had the vanity plate "Dimmy."
    Sure, Jamie Lee. That's why they called you Dimmy.