Not the conversation he expected, is it?

When he was campaigning for election, Barack Obama said the country needed to have a “conversation about race.”  In the wake of the Martin-Zimmerman tragedy, we’re getting it, but I don’t think it’s the I-talk-you-shut-up-and-listen conversation he imagined.  Black folks are disenchanted, and some white folks are tired of shutting up.  The President may have triggered a serious gunnysacking, one that could cost him re-election.

Update (7 April).  Derbyshire’s widely discussed article got him bounced from National Review.  Contrary to Dan Rielhl’s observations, things like this tend to support Derbyshire’s contentions.  And of course, right on cue, the usual suspects generate a rumor about the Neo-Nazis showing up (from Detroit, no less!).  Some conversation!

Wow! Down the (404) Memory Hole

DOTPOTUS Malia Obama and twelve of her friends are vacationing in Mexico (on our dime, no doubt), and it seems that stories about the trip are disappearing down the Memory Hole at an alarming rate.  So far the Masters of the Universe haven’t been able to disappear Mexican reports.

After all the travel advisories from the State Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety, this seems to be a bit of “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Just what I’d expect from our political class.

Tip from the Instapundit, who’s too famous to disappear quietly.

Update (19 March).  Never mind.  I think she’s just went to Mexico to find cheaper gasoline.

Update (20 March).  The White House ‘fesses up. After it was all over Drudge.  But wait, it gets better: the Double Scrub.

Weekly geekery

Statistics

• Taking the bias out of crowd counting.  (Tip from the Geek Press)
• A bad vita trumps bad statistics.  (Outraged tip from The Endeavour)
• Doing statistical graphics?  Worry about color.  (Tip from the Endeavour)

Security

• Typosquatting.  (Tip from the Geek Press)

Food and Drink

• We took my sister-in-law out to dinner at Il Sogno a couple of weeks back, and discovered a tasty green pea pesto.  I’ve reverse-engineered it:
• 2 cups fresh peas (a small bag of frozen ones worked fine)
• 1/4 cup ricotta cheese
• 6 mint leaves (to taste)
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• dash of salt
• Pulse in a food processor to chunky, not smooth.

Politics

• The ugly truth about candidates “throwing their support” to competitors.  Plus some comments on the current Republican field. (How could anyone have EVER been serious about Tim Pawlenty for President?  C’mon, President T-PAW?  Really?)

Congressional Reform Act?

The folks in my larger social circle have become disenchanted with our current national leadership.  Check out this chain email I received recently:

The only way this will work is if all of the people you send this to  are registered voters and actually vote! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

I have totally cleaned this e-mail of all other names and I’m sending  it to you in hopes you will keep it going. This is bipartisan in nature  and is going to both Democrats and Republicans. This is short so please  read it all the way through and then forward. You will be glad you did.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took  only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded  it. That was in 1971…before computers, before e-mail, before cell  phones, etc.    Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less  to become the law of the land…all because of public pressure.

I’m asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty  people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.  In three days, most people in The United States of America will  have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension.   A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay  when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.  All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social  Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social  Security system and Congress participates with the American people. It  may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all  Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional  pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in  the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American  people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective  1/1/12 . The American people did not make this contract with  Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.  Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers  envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.
THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS! ! ! ! !
If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.  You are one of my 20+. Please keep it going.

I’m not into spam, for fun or profit, but if you’re into “going viral,” cut and paste away. There are some good points here, even if it doesn’t have a Snowball’s Chance in Hell of passing.  Congress, beware!

That’s it, Obama’s toast…

…he’s lost the all-important Texas Jewboy vote.  Kinky Friedman indorses Rick Perry:

…I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me. So would I support Rick Perry for president? Hell, yes! As the last nail that hasn’t been hammered down in this country, I agree with Rick that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.

Tip from the Instapundit.

“We need more Texans.”

Gary Jones sums up the recent discussion about Rick Perry and the Texas job market, and explains why working beats living on the dole:

The chief defect is “social death”. You may have a safety net, welfare payments and rationed health care but you don’t have a job. You have no career, no status, no place in society, no respect, no prospects and so no life. You are a dead man walking, a rider of the purple wage, a “shitter”. Worse, you are watched and regulated tightly, your freedoms are defined and limited to those that the majority considers sufficient, that satisfy their views of an “adequate” existence.

Texans, wherever you are, pull up your socks, and get to work. And don’t forget to vote, in every damn election that comes along.

Updates (28 August).  Here’s your basic Social Zombie, the Perfect Citizen of the Blue State.  (Tip from Parkway Rest Stop) Mark Steyn weighs in on the subject, too.

Update (9 September).  Richard Fernandez takes our education system to task for the problem:

What globalization implied, once embarked upon, was the destruction of whole series of gates which defined the privileges of established Western society. Once down that road you either destroy all the gates and accept both the costs and benefits of globalization or you keep all the walls of the city up. But embarking on “globalization” while maintaining the guilds and social contracts of a welfare state does not seem to work. You get the worst of everything. And once globalization takes hold, credentials become progressively worthless. The only thing that retains its value is real skill, real human capital.

And my students wonder why I insist they learn skills along with theory….

Treat him ugly? How about tar and feathers?

Four days into his announced candidacy, and our rather rough-hewn Aggie governor is already ruffling feathers by suggesting that “Texans might want to treat the Republican economist ‘pretty ugly’ if he ‘prints more money between now and the election.’”  And of course, the usual band of thumbsuckers from President Obama to this Emory University professor who can’t maintain his own web page are admonishing Perry to “tone down his rhetoric.”

Tone it down?  Under the weaselly banner Quantitative Easing, Bernanke and the Fed have been debasing the dollar while President Zero and his spendthrift Congress were maxing out our national credit line.  So now we have gas at $3.60 a gallon, dollar Hersey bars, 60¢ for a freakin’ donut, and $3 for a G*ddamned comic book!  Treat him ugly?  Given half a chance, I’d unleash a twenty-year gunnysack* on the stupid sumbitch and kick his ass from the Alamo (Davy Crockett’s digs) to the San Fernando Cathedral (Santa Anna’s HQ) and back.

Let’s hope Rick Perry continues to let slip the occasional “unpresidential” remark so he can solidify his standing with his fellow pissed-off-Americans.

* “gunnysack” may not be perfect term, since it connotes something inappropriate.  Getting even with white collar thieves is NOT inappropriate.

Update (17 August).  Wrong-o, Barack-O.  The buck shrinks with you.

Flash mobs and flash robs

Walter Russell Mead talks about the mobs we don’t want to talk about.  The Mayor of Philadelphia takes it to heart.  Meanwhile, London burns, and this dingbat is in complete denial.

Update (10 August).  Aha.  This isn’t random violence perpetrated by criminal layabouts. It’s a cry for social justice:

Here are some of the demands from protestors, according to Reuters:

• Increase personal tax brackets for top earners
• Enshrine the right to housing in the law; introduce rent controls; boost mortgage relief
• Stop further privatization of things such as health facilities
• Provide free education for all from the age of three months
• Raise the minimum wage to 50 percent of the average wage

I believe the common word for this sort of behavior is extortion.

Update (11 August).  Theodore Dalrymple sums it up, and Wretchard puts a name to it: human capital debt.

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

Back in Philly: Winnie Mandela had a soccer club, Oprah has a charter school.

Update (13 August):  Some folks are getting a bit sarcastic about all this.  American Digest posted this one:

and John Cook spotted this video of a Swiss riot:

Time to panic?

One of the Instapundit’s readers has a frightening question about the current debt ceiling negotiations:

And so maybe, just maybe, Republican strategy (what little there is of it) has badly misread the opposition. Obama tried to add 400 billion in taxes to a deal he had already agreed with Boehner at the last minute. Boehner walks out cause Obama is negotiating in bad faith and has been all along, but what if Obama is actually incapable of good faith negotiation? I think right now that it’s actually possible we won’t see a deal at all. Because the Republicans are looking at the math and at reality and saying “Okay, Democrat demands can’t be serious because they can’t possibly work” and Democrats are looking at politics and how it works and saying “We don’t have to give in cause that’s not how you win these things. You pin it on the other guy politically and then reap the political dividends.” I wasn’t around for the start of WWI, but I get the feeling I understand Kennedy’s fascination with Tuchman’s Guns of August. I’m not talking about a shooting war, but about leaders overestimating and underestimating and just plain misjudging each other in a brinksmanship scenario. In short, it could be too late to do anything when people finally wake up. The crisis may have already arrived with an economic and fiscal momentum all it’s own that no amount of dealing or compromise or statesmanship can stop..

If this is the case, the Democrats won’t have to worry about re-election in 2012. Let the US get its credit rating downgraded from AAA, and the Democrats best have a good supply of tar-and-feather remover.

Getting punchy?

This seems to be the weekend for Democrats to get punch-drunk, at least in Wisconsin and New Jersey.  I hope it’s just talk, ’cause if they start throwing those punches, they’re going to be whining about needing socialized dental care.

Tips from the Instapundit.