sisu

Nature red in tooth and jaws

Little Kitteh had us in the emergency room over a little misunderstanding on Sunday. She was trying to clear the property of "vermin" — the concept, Tuck explains, that our feline companions use to categorize birds, small mammals, insects, spiders, slugs and other cats — with the exception of Earl Grey, of course — who would invade their territory. Lover of all things bright and beautiful that we are, we were trying to rescue a precious baby Gray Catbird from the jaws. But our timing and hand-eye coordination were off. In a violent face-off complicated by the dense undergrowth of the lilac out front, we lost the fledgling — or was it a pre-fledgling that had fallen from the nest? — and a lot of our own blood: Final score: LK=2, Sissy=0.

The parents were frantic. Their calls and fruitless attempts to misdirect Little Kitteh's attention away from their helpless offspring will haunt our dreams. We can't hear them now without remembering the horror. Puncture wounds on back of right hand and left thumb. Profuse bleeding. Chelsea Mass General emergency room across town delivered. We accepted a tetanus shot but asked for no antibiotics if not absolutely necessary, remembering the havoc they can wreak on the digestive system when they kill your body's beneficial micro-organisms together with the bad stuff. Next morning we regretted not having gone with the antibiotics, though: Angry red, painful and swollen hand and thumb made it almost impossible to surf the internet, let alone blog or tweet! It's those darned germs in cats' mouths and the deadly delivery system of their canines:

A cat has small sharp teeth, so when it bites the puncture wound can be quite deep. There are some infections a person may get as a result of bacteria commonly found in a cat's mouth, like pasteurella. Then there are other diseases that come from a cat's being infected by other pests, such as fleas.

Little Kitteh didn't hold our attempt to thwart fulfillment of her turf-defending duties against us, and how could we be angry with her for following her nature? On the good side, the antibiotics are doing their work — swelling and pain subsiding by the day — plus the doc turned us on to a "wonder drug" we'd never heard of: Probiotics. With "20 billion active cultures per capsule" (according to the package description), they help "maintain and modulate your body's natural microflora."

Palin Undefeated: "A story of empowerment for modern women and their daughters"

Stephen K. Bannon, Director of the epic Palin documentary "The Undefeated" — "a story of empowerment for modern women and their daughters" — talked with Stacy McCain about "the gap between the reality of Sarah Palin and the perception created by the media" at the Right Online conference in Minneapolis last weekend, where the film was previewed before what Bannon calls "the vanguard of this revolution, the bloggers."

"Sarah Palin Reportedly Quits Bus Tour Halfway Through," snarked the headline at Talking Points Memo this morning, seamlessly spinning a speculative Real Clear Politics story about "one of the most unpredictable political figures in America" into their Palin's-a-Quitter narrative of choice:

Former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin has reportedly packed in her bus tour… halfway through.

Oh, and lest we forget how stupid she is, a bit of shopworn, gratuitous boilerplate thrown in to keep the natives happy:

The bus tour was launched over Memorial Day weekend, and was particularly scrutinized after one event in Boston where Palin badly flubbed the story behind Paul Revere's ride.

The card-carrying commenters piled on with glee, signalling their membership in the tribe. Our favorite:

"the quitta from wasilla" or the "Iquitarod queen" which discribes [sic] Palin the best?

We couldn't resist and posted a guest comment of our own with links vindicating Palin — The Boston Herald's recent "Old North Church vicar defends Palin on Revere" and John Fund's July 2009 WSJ column "Why Palin Quit: Death by a Thousand FOIAs." It was too much for TPM, who promptly removed our comment without ceremony, but not before a rabid pack of regulars — irregulars? — had had a chance to pile on:

Get lost troll. Go collect your money for posting here at TPM.

Great sources. hahahaha!!!!!! America is such a great country, everyone is free to choose from which direction they take a spin [Oh, the irony!]

Two papers owned by Rupert Murdoch,* who just happens to be Palin's employer?* Is that your idea of objectivity? *I wouldn't be surprised if he was yours as well.

If only. But moving along, as we mentioned in a follow-up comment, had TPM been doing their homework, they would have discovered this bit of inconvenient truth from a June 1 ABC News report:

Palin confirmed that she's going to Boston after New York and that after the northeast, she'll go back to Alaska before re-launching the tour - called the "One Nation Tour," after all - on the West Coast.

"Sigh. Reports of Tour Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated," the deftly disintermediating Palin twittered, not without a bit of snark of her own:

I wouldn’t think it to be such a slow news day that, what with numerous wars and serious economic woes concerning Americans, a bus is driving news stories today. The next leg of the tour continues when the time comes. In the meantime, no one should jump to conclusions – certainly not the media with their long track record of getting things wrong or just making things up.

As Big Hollywood editor John Nolte twittered in awe at this latest Facebook coup:

"Sarah Palin lets the MSM climb way out on a limb before sawing it off. It's called fighting like a girl.

*Update: Twitter buddy irishspy explains:

They invoke the name [Murdoch] to banish the hated facts. :)

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update III: Victory Film Group links with "Sissy Willis Goes Into The Bowels Of TPM To Defend Palin:

Yes, it's messy there. Go read the whole thing.

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

On the road again

Being Little Kitteh

Palin for the defense: A judge can look at a kingmaker

"What I would like to see is a little bit more of the GOP contenders' not hesitating to call one another out on their records," Sarah Palin told Judge Napolitano on his Fox Business show "Freedom Watch" yesterday, adding "We condemn the Democrats … for not having vetted their own candidate. Obama wasn't vetted by the press, but he also wasn't vetted by his own party." What a novel idea. Using primary debates to inform the public rather than conceal what the candidates are really up to. See Palin Promotions' "Gov. Palin on Freedom Watch: 'Love to Give White House Fits" for an excellent summary with quotes, and watch the interview here. Props to twitter buddy Brian of The Right Scoop for putting up the vid.

Her fierce determination and authentic American voice won our heart and mind that fateful day in late August of 2008 when she burst into the national consciousness as John McCain's pick for vice presidential running mate. For nearly three years now all things Sarah Palin have been relentlessy savaged by a "lamestream media" hard-wired to reject any member of the fair sex who isn't buying — or selling — the postmodern feminist party line of woman as victim and identity politics as savior. Palin's agile mind and servant's heart eluded not only the usual suspects on the left but — more revealingly — many among America's "Ruling Class," members of the Northeast Corridor Conservative fuddy-duddy community for whom being a member of the tribe trumped any interest in the conservative cause. But now some of those former fuddy-duddies are peeling off, taking a fresh look at Palin and liking what they see. As Dan Morgan, aka danthebarbaian, twittered last night, referencing Fox News personality Judge Napolitano's engaging and informative Palin interview pictured above:

"If @judgenap and @DennisDMZ can change their minds so can a lot of Americans!"

After all, it wasn't that long ago the Judge was just another voice in the Palin-Is-Stupid chorus:

Judge Napolitano Attacks Palin; Calls Her a "Goofball" Without the "Mental Capacity to be President" - Audio 11/17/09

Now he's laughing with her, not at her, and eliciting serious answers to serious questions.

Update: "She has proven that you CAN, in fact, win a fight against the media," writes Haystack at Andrew Breitbart's Big Government:

If you believe everything you read, Sarah Palin is the worst thing that has ever happened to America. She has proven that women aren’t, in fact, victimized by a male-dominated society to the extent that organizations such as N.O.W. and Planned Parenthood would have you believe …

I love this woman, and whether she’s the right person to be our next President or not, she ought to be America’s SoulKeeper™ for what she endures and what she gives back in the abject lessons she’s helping us learn about how evil people really CAN be when someone comes along that doesn’t fit into their tidy little mold of how people should think and act. God bless her for that.

Update II: Joy McCann, aka Little Miss Attila, links!

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

"Most Harvard grads tend to believe in such things as evolution and global warming"

We think it is fair to assume that the Little Kitteh that came to dinner — above staring at things we don't see in the early morning light — is of above average intelligence and education in the school of hard knocks.

"I think it is fair to assume that most Harvard graduates are of above average intelligence and education and tend to believe in such things as evolution and global warming. It seems most Republicans do not," sniffs warmenist Edward G. Shufro, M.B.A. ’58 in a letter to the editor of the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine. Darwin's theory of evolution, yes. That's science. AGW? That's an article of faith. We were gratified to discover that Mr. Shufro — principle of a "targeted investment management" partnership co-founded by his father in 1938 — has generously supported, among other Democrat shining stars, three of our personal favorites, Joe Sestak (PA-7), Ed Markey (MA-7) and Carol Shea-Porter. Oh, and let us not forget Shufro's $2,300 gift to the Al Franken Recount Fund. Talk about above average intelligence.

Shufro's letter was only one of a number of spluttering tribal responses to an earlier letter from that rare thing, a Harvard alum who hadn't bought the narrative. Responding to an article in the previous edition of Harvard Mag that reported 90 percent or more of Harvard graduates in Congress are Democrats, Peter McKinney '56 had had this to say:

The development of independent and critical thinking in undergraduates should be a major goal of an education; otherwise the process is indoctrination. The statistics on the political affiliations of the incoming Congress suggest that this is not happening at Harvard College. Could this be a reflection of the ideological imbalance of the faculty?

Education or indoctrination? Thomas Sowell's words on the occasion of the railroaded resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summers five years back come to mind:

"His fatal flaws were honesty and a desire to do the right thing. That has ruined more than one academic career" …

Even if every conclusion with which students are indoctrinated were true, unless those students develop their own ability to weigh opposing arguments, these conclusions will become obsolete as new issues arise in the years ahead. These "educated" people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues.

Robert Stafford '86 exemplifies the type. Impervious to facts on the ground, he has holed himself up comfortably in his lamestream-media-facilitated anti-Palin Pauline Kael bubble, preferring not to be confused with the facts. His letter to the editor touches all the tribal hot spots, including class guilt:

In my grandfather’s GOP, a degree from an “elite” university was an asset: it was evidence that a politician was smart, or hard working, or, sadly, that he was at least from the right sort of family. In Sarah Palin’s GOP, “elite” is an insult. What’s more, in Palin’s faith-based GOP, candidates are all but required to espouse the view that the world is 6,000 years old, that the “theory” of evolution is false, and that anthropogenic climate change is a sinister liberal myth.

The poor guy has bought the media spin whole cloth. Joel Z. Eigerman '63, J.D. '67 seals the deal:

The second and greater fallacy is the assumption that because there are two major political tendencies in this country, properly educated people should divide roughly equally between them. This presumes that both are equally possessed of rational arguments, and this is unfortunately not true. Although the Republican Party, within living memory, disposed of leaders and ideas that could be called rational, for the last 30 years to be a Republican has increasingly meant to deny scientific truth, to subscribe to patent fantasies regarding our national history, recent or more distant, to espouse social and economic theories whose bankruptcy was demonstrated 80 years ago, to work for the enrichment of the few and the impoverishment of the many, and generally to substitute magical thinking for reason.

The poor fellow, like so many of our fellow Americans on the left side of the aisle, is projecting again. As we wrote in our post "Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism":

"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism," twittered tahDeetz this afternoon. We'd sent her a link to one of our uber posts from way back in February of 2005, "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open." Take THAT, you leftists claiming to own Darwin even as your core collectivist beliefs fly in the face of the economic logic of nature and human nature that underlie Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Update: Lonely Conservative links:

If only we had all gone to Harvard …

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Rep. Weiner: "You and I have different values"

"I hate that stupid picture of me in the blue. I'm standing in the mirror making a weird face, why would anyone use that?" twittered a sadder-but-wiser Gennette Cordova this morning in a series of 140-or-fewer-character expressions of disgust with media distortions of her image, both physical and psychological, since last Friday, when Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism broke the Big Story that came to be known as Weinergate. Above, Photoshopped "mirror" images of Cordova based upon her Twitter avatar.

"If calling out publications for their inaccurate/shoddy journalism is stirring the pot, so be it," twittered justifiably miffed Seattle journalism student Gennette Cordova this morning, attempting to regain her balance in the aftermath of being mugged by the reality of business-as-usual journalistic spin. It was the left-leaning Politico and the right-leaning New York Post who, she said, had spun her own and her mother's words to sensationalize and distort the facts as she knows them in the Weinergate scandal. Salaciousness sells! In the case of Politico, for example, compare the political journal's headline with Cordova's follow-up tweet:

Politico: "Seattle student: Weiner photo meant for porn star."

Cordova on Twitter: "It wasn't an interview. I spoke candidly with someone posing as a photog assistant. And I never said the picture was meant for a porn star. He [Politico reporter] suggested it and I said maybe. I don't know and don't care."

Update Cordova to Reuven Fenton at New York Post: I clearly remember you suggesting the idea about the porn star, as well as me [sic] being "collateral damage."

Sadder but wiser, indeed. A cautionary tale for young lovelies who "just want to have fun" to be wary of the skeevy allure of little big men like "The Ick-arus of Capitol Hill" prowling the internet. A self-described "progressive," Cordova describes the moment "When Gen met Tony":

Actually I became a fan after I saw him demolish Bachmann on Hannity about 2 months ago. It was great.

"You and I have different values. That's what this fight is about," said Congressman Weiner in a rare moment of truthtelling during a March 16 shouting match debate with Rep Michele Bachmann (MN-6) on Hannity. Oh, the irony.

Can you say eye of the beholder? Here on the Tea Party side of the aisle, of course, we saw Bachmann demolish Weiner.

Note: Hats off to Michelle Malkin for turning us on to SnapBird, an invaluable aid in following Twitter conversations:

As an avid Twitter user myself, I use the SnapBird archive to search old tweets You can search anyone’s public tweets through the service.

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

"Palin uses Twitter to communicate. Romney uses PowerPoint"

"I can see the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown from my front porch!" we twittered early afternoon. Sarah Palin stopped off there this morning on her "One Nation" bus tour of the nation's historical sites to retrace the footsteps of our Founding Fathers along Boston's Freedom Trail (above with daughter Piper and mother Sally Heath at the Old North Church. Steven Senne/AP photo), before heading north to a clambake with "some key NH Republicans" in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Meanwhile in other headline-grabbing news an upstaged Mitt Romney announced his 2012 candidacy at Doug and Stella Scamman's Bittersweet Farm in Stratham, NH, and the Weinergate plot thickened (pardon our pun). See below for more.

"If you recede from the public, you're accused of hiding something. If you face down your accusers, you're accused of being an attention whore," Sarah Palin told the New York Post earlier. Whoops. It wasn't Palin — though it surely could have been, given the lamestream media's relentlessly damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't narrative spin on all things Palin. No. These were the words of Genette Cordoba, the comely 21-year-old from Seattle who'd struck up a dreamy twitter relationship with a famous man — NY Rep. Anthony Weiner of "Mr. Skeevy's* skivvies" fame — and was now being ever so gingerly slipped under the bus by her fantasy lover in a craven attempt to save the great man's arse:

Cordova is one of 198 people, many of them pretty young women, that Weiner follows on Twitter.

She has said she is a fan of Weiner's but has never personally met the pol.

"It's a terrible thing that this poor woman got dragged into it," Weiner said yesterday on MSNBC.

But Weiner hardly oozed sympathy for Cordova, and almost seemed to cast doubt on her role in the drama while clearly concerned with his own damage control.

"She says she knows nothing about it," Weiner said of Cordova.

"And I obviously don't know anything about it."

Obviously. It seems no one but a few diehard postmodern feminists like Slate.com editor Joan Walsh are buying it. Twitterbuddy Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., aka Film Ladd, has the inside dope. As a twitter-savvy reporter just told Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

When a tweet goes bad, it's heard around the world.

More importantly, it's heard around the town, in this case NY's 9th congressional district, including parts of Brooklyn and Queens. The New York Post's editors take no prisoners:

So the man who would be mayor "can't say with certitude" whether or not the world's most famous Twitter crotch shot is of him?

Could Tony Weiner's contempt for the people of New York City be any more, well, certain?

Actually, it looks like this wiener is fully cooked.

Which is fine, because it's now clear that Rep. Anthony Weiner isn't remotely up to the ethical demands of the office he now holds — let alone those of the New York City mayoralty.

Great local political prose. Speaking of which, our own Boston Herald political reporter Joe Battenfeld got the scoop in spades re Palin vs Romney and the Northeast Corridor fuddy duddies:

Palin seems to understand what other candidates don’t right now. The 2012 campaign is going to be driven mostly by Internet buzz and social media, not scripted speeches and the network news.

Palin uses Twitter to communicate. Romney uses PowerPoint. I’m pretty sure Newt Gingrich still uses a slide projector.

The former Alaska governor also isn’t afraid to mix it up with her rivals, and the dreaded mainstream media. This strategy also ensures she will dominate the race, until or unless she gets out

(and I don’t think she will).

*Word Wealth: Skeevy. adj. Sleazy, disgusting, distasteful, shady, gross, creepy, icky. This slang word was popular in Brooklyn, NY, USA in the 1950's and 1960's. It comes from the Italian word Schifo, meaning 'disgust'. Bonus points for local lore from Twitterfriend Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters: "Not just Brooklyn. Skeevy was very popular expression on Long Island in 60s and 70s."

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: Instalanche! Paired with one of our favorite columnists, Byron York:

Amid media circus, Palin lays out policy positions.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Krauthammer's Complaint

"I want to be the one to walk in the sun," Cyndi Lauper explains in "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," a pop cultural artifact that mystically embodies the spirit of Sarah Palin's fierce determination and authentic American voice that captured the hearts and minds of so many of us burgeoning Tea Partiers way back when. Or so we think.

"Krauthammer cannot 'get out more,'" writes blog buddy Gayle Miller of And you thought YOU were Cranky in the comments to our previous post, "Sarah Palin loves New York!" We were going to mention Gayle's observations in an update, but they're so darned insightful and well expressed that we're giving her top billing:

It would shake his complacently settled view of the world! Much as I adore the man — and his brilliant mind — and much as I am of an age with the Northeast Corridor fuddy duddies, what has happened is that mentally I have remained fresh and young! I revel in the uproar and turmoil attendant since Mrs. Palin's arrival on the scene. May it continue long enough to dispose of all of those fusty mental midgets that the "Elite Media" is trying to foist on the right! The so-called frontrunners are nothing more than the people being promoted in the media right now, much as they promoted John McCain in 2008. Once he had the nomination, they crucified him, and that's what they'll do with the new Republican nominee — if they are permitted to do so.

Couldn't have said it better ourselves.

Update: More good thoughts from elaine in the comments:

I usually like Dr. K, too; but when it comes to Palin or the Tea Party, he, like so many of the beltway in-crowd, has a huge blind spot. Remember how he and his fuddy-duddy pals poo-pooed the TPers when the movement got started? And then kept on poo-pooing them even when it became clear they weren't going away any time soon? Dr. K and his pals like to talk about the electorate, as if they know our minds, but they've been behind the curve the whole way. At every step, they've misjudged. And they're the ones ostensibly on OUR side!!! Dr. K can make all the smarty-smart pronouncements that he likes that Palin isn't electable. Just because he said it doesn't make it so. I'm looking forward to the day when I can say, "Told you so!" to fuds like him …

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

Sarah Palin loves New York!

Sarah Palin shone the spotlight on the American Dream in a visit to the Statue of Liberty this morning, the latest stop on her "One Nation" bus tour of the land of the free and the home of the brave. Disintermediating the powers that be, she left "Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust," as Michelle Malkin writes with wit and wisdom in "Chasing Sarah: The Boys Behind the Bus." American exceptionalism resonates under culture warrior Palin's tutelage: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty). Image above of "Immigrants Arriving at Ellis Island (1892-1954). 

"We'll highlight the beauty of legal [!] immigrants' work ethic and love of freedom while visiting Ellis Island & Statue of Liberty today," Sarah Palin twittered her 538,522 followers this morning, shooting "to where it's going, not to where it's been" as she tossed a word bouquet in the direction of the historic port of entry for generations of "huddled masses yearning to breath free":

Thanks for beautiful flowers, NYs Bouquets & Baskets! Man, people are nice around here! Glad immigrants who built USA got to come here first.

"Good morning! It's Fleet Week here in NYC and I've had the honor of meeting many Sailors, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen. Thanks to all for their service. Had a great time in the City. Enjoyed some great NY pizza with Donald Trump and his wife last night in a nice quiet setting, Times Square," quips Palin at her dazzling new website, SarahPac. At Liberty Island this morning, above.

Too bad Ruling Class opinionator Charles Krauthammer isn't following Palin's tweets, let alone the disintermediating logic of her "One Nation" bus tour of "historical sites that were key to the formation, survival, and growth of the United States of America." Brilliant as he may be in his areas of expertise, when it comes to Sarah Palin, Dr. Krauthammer has always been stuck on stupid, from that day back in late August of 2008 when he declared John McCain should have chosen someone "safe," up to last night on The O'Reilly Factor [h/t The Right Scoop], when he once again revealed his contempt for Sarah Palin and people like us who are energized by her fierce determination and authentic American voice: 

The problem with her, I think, is that she is not schooled. I don't mean she didn't go to the right schools. I mean when you get into policy, beyond instinct. I like her political instincts, I like her overall view of the world, but when it comes to policy, she's had two and a half years to school herself, and she hasn't.

How would he know what she has or hasn't been doing in the last two and a half years? He needs to get out more. As we say, stuck on stupid, and while the good doctor and leading member of the Northeast Corridor fuddy-duddy community will never see it, we twitterred him and his fellow Beltway tribesmen a little advice this morning:

Honest and truly, @Krauthammer & fellow #RulingClass fuddy duddies, if you want to know what's up, must follow #Palin in both old & new media.

Update: Making friends and influencing people: New York Daily News reports "Sarah Palin Takes Manhattan (and Jersey City)" (h/t twitter buddy Charles @repub9989):

When she emerged from the statue an hour later, a high school band visiting from Illinois broke into a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, as Palin covered her heart and the waiting news photographers snapped away. “She looks better in person [and] she’s definitely got my vote if she tries to run for President,” said Clayton Tarpley, 19, who snapped a picture with Palin and declared: “It’s going on Facebook.”

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.