Congrats to the Champs

 

I'm really, really glad Indy didn't win, but it would have been nicer if they didn't win to the Vikings.

Is Jon Stewart the next Dennis Miller?

Unused to harsh treatment in the press, liberals are starting to wonder if Jon Stewart is turning on them:

Stewart's barbs are generating partisan buzz. In a tweet, Americablog's John Aravosis invoked Martha Coakley's Massachusetts loss in trashing the prompter joke: "So is this the new post-coakley Jon Stewart, picking on Dems for insignificant BS to burnish his indie credentials. Third time in 7 days." The conservative Fox Nation site, by contrast, ran the video under the gleeful header "Jon Stewart Mocks Obama's Teleprompter Dependence." ...

Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and an occasional guest, sees a glimmer of hope. "Jon has always been a crypto-neocon," he e-mails. "Could he be coming out of the closet? . . . A neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality."

I think Kristol is either engaged in wishful thinking or has been hitting the medical marijuana establishments a little too frequently, because there's actually a very simple reason Obama has become Stewart's target of choice: he's the president now. El Presidente Pasado is not there to kick around anymore, and there are no Republicans in real leadership positions* in either of the "funny" branches of government. The President is a Democrat, the Speaker of the House is a Democrat, the senate leadership and the chairmen of every committee in Washington DC are Democrats. For the last year they could have done anything they wished - up to and including invading Iceland or making the minimum wage $100/hr - and they would not have needed a single Republican vote to do so.  The Republicans as a party are as close to irrelevant as a modern political party can get, not unlike the Dems 6 years ago. Even now they can only stop legislation, they cannot assure a single idea ever makes it into or out of law. Who in the world is Stewart supposed to talk about**?

Now I suppose liberals never really thought about what would happen to late-night comedy once there was no one else to talk about but them. Chalk it up as another of those "unintended consequences" of them winning elections***. And true to form, they are surprised, amazed, and outraged by what they should have seen coming as a result of their own actions but did not.

* No, I don't consider "minority leader" a real leadership position; it's a consolation prize.
** And it's pure win for Stewart that the Democrats are a live-action Island of Misfit Toys.  I mean seriously, if you had to make fun of people for a living, could you do better than the doofus trifecta of Pelosi, Reed, and Obama?  And Joe Biden has been comedy gold for decades.
*** like national bankruptcy, only faster.

And now for the good news

The aforementioned dollar bounce is here and in full force. Gold is off $40 today (and 10% from the high), oil is down, and the dollar looks like it may pass back to the good side of 80 on the NDX (79.93 and climbing). This is very good news for Americas who enjoy such luxuries as eating food and heating their homes during the winter. If you're looking to buy stocks, the good news for you is that they are going to be significantly cheaper very soon. 

How long it lasts I have no idea*, but I for one intend to enjoy it while it does.

* but probably not as long as we should all hope it does, for reasons that you are doubtless sick of hearing.

What Visas are for

I'm amazed we need a change in law for this:

[New York Rep. Anthony] Weiner is sponsoring a bill that gives models “of distinguished merit and ability” their own visa classification (P-4 status) which would group them with entertainers and athletes.

...models coming to work in the U.S. compete with high-tech workers for the same type of H1-B visa. The problem is that there are only 85,000 available visas and typically 165,000 applicants. In other words, each visa given to Gisele Bundchen, Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell means that one fewer biotech researcher or computer technician can enter the country.

As the competition for visas has gotten tougher in recent years, the number of models granted permission to enter the country has waned...

Now I'm not sure how one objectively measures the merit or ability of a fashion model. In fact, I know so little about the "industry" that I've only heard of two of the three mentioned above*. But any rule that keeps a) rich people, b) smart people, or c) beautiful women out of the US is bad policy.

We have about a million legal immigrants and another million in illegal ones every year, but we can only carve out room for 85,000 H1-B workers? That's crazy. It ought to be 5x that. We ought to be making brain drain, money drain, and beauty drain national policies.

So long as people want to come here, we ought to be picking the best ones, and as many of them as we can get. Before we take the poor, huddled, befuddled masses, we ought to be looking for engineers, multi-millionaires, and entrepreneurs. We ought to be seeking out guys like Madieu Williams and Kofi Kingston, the Swedish Bikini Team, or those Chinese who are hard-working and clever enough to accumulate $55,000 apiece in that communist hellhole and want to come here bad enough to risk it all to be smuggled in. Hells yeah, we'll take 'em all.

If we're going to take 2 million people** every year - and it seems we are, one way or another - then we ought to make an effort to take the kind of people we want living here.

* not coincidentally, the two who have been mocked on MXC. If Gerstenbunchen or whoever has, I don't remember it.

** 1,842,570. give or take a few Mexicans who declined to be counted.

Who you calling "we" Kimosabe?

I especially like the line, "showing the labor market was in much worse shape than we knew at the time."  As if no one could see that a) the BLS Birth/Death Adjustment numbers were absolutely incredible and therefore not to be believed*, and b) it is common practice for government to pass off rosy assumptions as data and then revise reality back in when and where no one is looking**.

Anyone who did not know the labor market was in worse shape than the government was saying*** was either not paying attention, is too dumb to have a job, or is a business journalist. For the latter to report numbers as reality when there is every indication they are false is malpractice and a disservice to everything a free press is supposed to represent. But who wants to bet journalists will be just as surprised at next January's "surprise" revisions too?

(hat tip: Mish)

* pretty much by definition, I guess.
** which is how the Stimulus managed to create or save exactly as many jobs as advertised even as the labor market went to hell in a handbasket.
*** And will continue to say; this is an adjustment to the past, not the present.  The labor market will be worse than the government is saying going forward as well, and for the same reasons.

Breasts AND bombs

A few years ago, a bunch of moonbats held a naked march* called "Breasts NOT Bombs," never imagining the two would merge:

Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them...

A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.

Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal.

Count this as one of those theoretical threats that, while it sounds scary, is even less likely to work than hiding C4 in your Fruit of the Looms.  Besides the costs and risks of major surgery, a theoretical female bomber would still have to smuggle a syringe filled with Triacetone Triperoxide on the plane and then stab herself in the boob with it hard enough to puncture the bomb. If you miss the packet, the "suicide" part of "suicide bomber" still works.

But theoretical as it is, it does illustrate one difficulty in trying to create perfect airport safety.  If enough people are willing to have explosives planted in their boobs to blow themselves and me up, some of them are probably going to succeed. On the other hand, I don't see a lot of planes falling out of the sky; it's a whole lot easier to blow up a marketplace in Pakistan than a terminal in Butte.

While this is not a big threat, it is an attention-grabbing one**. The attention-grabbing part will be what determines how much time and money the government throws at the threat. And if you were concerned about about how intrusive searches are presently, now they've got a really good*** reason to give Grandma a mammogram right there in the boarding area. After all, she just might be a boob bomber. 

* Why is it that moonbats always want to march naked?  War marches, gay pride marches, it doesn't matter, you'll see half the marchers with their asses hanging out of leather chaps and the other half wearing nothing but blue body paint. Say what you want about the Tea Parties, at least they manage to keep their clothes on.

** The amount of attention grabbed seems inversely proportional to the actual danger. The silly complaints about a few terrorists being found not guilty in civilian courts is a fine example. And how much press was given to the 200 Americans who didn't die in the Christmas Bombing compared to the 12,992 who accidentally suffocated during the year?

*** theoretical.

Happy Groundhog Day

Carry Nation rolls over

Via email:

You and a guest are invited to a wine tasting for current and retired faculty. Enjoy hors d’oeuvres, learn about and sample a variety of wines and have your questions answered by wine professionals...

I'm not sure what it is with wines and Kansas colleges, but this is the second or third similar tasting  I've seen recently.  Maybe I'm just noticing them more or something, or maybe there's a secret society of wine-tasting consultants who have just come to the conclusion that colleges* still have too much money...

Totally unrelated: Am I the only person who thinks Carry Nation looks a bit like Herbert Hoover?

*Well, people at colleges, anyway.