URLs du Jour

2017-01-07

After nearly thirty years' residence at Pun Salad Manor, I've finally acquired a snow blower. Looks as if I'll get a chance to take it out later today.

Why now? Mrs. Salad was worried about me keeling over while shovelling. Fine, honey. But reading through the manual shows the snow blower can kill (or maim) me in all sorts of different ways.

So, if this is my last post, you'll know what happened.

  • Have you been wondering what the upcoming "Women's March on Washington" is really about? Find out from PJ Media's D. C. McAllister: "What the 'Women's March on Washington' Is Really About".

    Whether it’s dictating to private companies their work-leave policies, redistributing earnings, put[t]ing the safety of Americans at risk by ignoring immigration laws, taking over healthcare decisions from individuals and families, demanding use of public restrooms by the opposite sex, pushing for violation of Second Amendment rights, suppressing free speech on college campuses, violating religious liberty, or telling fellow Americans that they have to pay for women’s contraception and abortions, this group’s agenda is about taking power from the individual and private sector, expanding the role of the Washington in our lives, and increasing dependency on the state.

    Today's Getty pic: women marching in Washington, wondering: "Where is everyone?"

  • The "Russia hacked our election" story will peter out and die someday, I suppose, but today is not that day. The Director of National Intelligence released a declassified version of their evidence of Russian meddling. Disturbing!

    But, as Power Line's John Hinderaker notes, the report is long on assertion, short on actual evidence, that Russia was behind the break-in of John Podesta's e-mail account. Fact remains: it was an unsophisticated hack that any moderately talented black-hat could have managed.

    But as Hinderaker also notes in a separate post, the report is pretty credible in documenting Russia's history in interference in other areas of US politics (continuing the tradition of the USSR). The Russia Today (now "RT") cable channel, for example, put its thumb on the scale for Trump over Clinton, true enough. But they also were pro-Obama before that, provided aid to the Occupy movement, engaged in anti-Diebold voting machine FUD, and are notable in their anti-fracking propaganda. Hinderaker concludes:

    So, while it is pathetically inadequate as support for the claim that Putin’s regime somehow influenced our 2016 presidential election, today’s report provides interesting and long-overdue perspective on Soviet and Russian efforts to influence American politics through the decades.

    We don't get RT at Pun Salad Manor. Sad!

  • At NR, Andrew C. McCarthy recommends a new US policy toward the UN: goodbye, get out, good riddance. Bottom line:

    It is not enough to cut off funding from a bad organization. We should disassociate from that bad organization. We should stop helping it be a consequential bad organization by denying it legitimacy. Don’t defund the U.N. Just say, “Go!”

    Works for me.

  • Oh, yeah. The GOP promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare is probably going to be a disaster. Peter Suderman has been one of the most knowledgeable critics of Obamacare since it was first proposed, and now he notes:

    Republicans have talked about repealing and replacing Obamacare for years, but it's not clear that many of them ever thought much about how they would do so or what the consequences might be. At this point, it's enough to make you wonder whether the GOP really wants to repeal and replace Obamacare—or simply say they did.

    I don't like to keep mindlessly appending "Read the Whole Thing" to these pointers, it should be obvious, but… really, if you want to understand what's going on with Obamacare repeal, Read the Whole Thing.

  • Hey kids, remember when Bernie Sanders stressed that he was a "democratic socialist", and simply wanted the US to be more like Denmark? Where they have, like, free college and stuff?

    Well, well:

    The Danish parliament on Monday passed a bill that will bar students from taking a second university degree.

    They need the money that would have paid for that "free" stuff, and use it to pay for different "free" stuff.

    As Margaret Thatcher (not quite, but essentially) observed: "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

  • Back on December 27, I blogged the story about Bill Murray getting assisted by Rochester, NH civilians after a rental car breakdown. I speculated that it might be fake news at the time.

    Guess what? It was! Other celebrities getting good-samaritaned by local yokels: Adam Sandler, Miley Cyrus, Bruce Willis, … And all over the country, too, not just Rochester.

    But I stand by my original position: I really wanted that story to be true.


Last Modified 2024-03-13 7:34 AM EDT