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What If Lucas Bought Disney????

Thank GOD Disney bought Lucasfilm and not the other way around!…. We could have seen re-edits like this, but on Disney movies! Can you imagine what it would be like when Bambi’s mother gets offed…. Oops…. Spoiler.

Prepair For The Storm After The Storm.

Republicans…. Get ready for an onslaught of Romney quotes saying he wants to do away with FEMA… That it’s “immoral”. Here is an exchange from one of the debates:

John King: “FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role,” Mr. King said. “How do you deal with something like that?”

Romney’s response: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

“Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut – we should ask ourselves the opposite question,” Romney continued. “What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot …”

King interjected: “Including disaster relief, though?”

Romney replied: “We cannot – we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Yes, I know the Dems are already pushing a version of the quote that has Romney saying FEMA is immoral, and that is not what Romney said. But what he and the party endorses, the cutting of FEMA to help balance the budget, is going to look pretty foolish in light of the tremendous damage we’re already seeing. And some in the party, along with TV and radio squawking heads, HAVE demanded that FEMA be completely abolished because of the cost and it’s not Constitutional. This one is coming back to bite you in a big big way!

U.S.S. Titanic Update!

So…. How was your Tuesday?

Yesterday was one of those hectic days.

Work was backed up due to Monday’s rain. I installed a heat exchanger on a heater, and that took longer than I thought it would. got home with just enough time to string the Taylor… Oh, if only I had only strung it!

While the strings were off, I decided to polish the thing. The fret board was very dull, so I spent some time polishing it several times…

Which then made me late for Acoustic highway practice! But, since the Taylor was so shiny and bright sounding, I was forgiven my tardiness.

So we had a great band practice, including the audition of a new member. We’re moving Chris from drums to guitar and becoming a five piece once again.

Then went to Spokeasy to join the mate for a beer, then played the Audies open mic.

Yes, the U.S.S. Titanic launched yet again! Thankfully, the time spent on guitar, though not as much as I’d like, is paying off. The more I play these scary open mics, the more confident I have become steering my ship and the better I am at avoiding massive guitaring mistakes, i.e. icebergs! Yeah, I still scrape the hull from time to time, but I still do that on bass, and I’ve been playing that for, what, 26 years!

First, and apology to those who read my facebook pledge to play a new original song or two. I didn’t play the intended original songs that I had in mind because, well, I never did have the time to arrange them yesterday. But I did play a couple of new songs, Paul Carrack’s “How Long” and the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger”, both of which are very new to me on guitar. Except for going outside the venue for a couple of minutes to doodle and try and remember the chords to both song, both were unrehearsed shots in the dark Remember, no time to practice yesterday. I also played “Blackbird”, which came out much better than the last time I tried it. “don’t Dream It’s Over” was really cool, because a sax player joined me on stage for some killer accompaniment. That was SOOOO cool!!!! And then I let some other people play my guitar. I love to hear what a more skilled player sounds like on that instrument!

Then when I got home, I spent another hour looking at possible songs to learn that can give the sax player an even better opportunity to jam. I ended up stumbling upon a really cool acoustic version of Phil Collins’ “One More Night”, which has a tremendous sax solo at the end. Needless to say, I was up until l too late in the morning! But it was a heck of a night.

Is the tiredness today worth it?

You betcha!!!! I’m getting ever closer to being able to do a one hour show all by my lonesome! It’s my goal to be able to do that by the time March goosesteps into our lives and I turn 48. It’ll be kind of a birthday present to myself.

Now, for today. More work. A nap. And win the lottery… PLEASE!

PS. Here is the version of “One More Night” I plan to learn.

PPS. I’ve decided that the new working title of my solo album is going to be “Jealous Rage And icebergs!”, if only because I don’t think anyone has named an album that before.

Small Gaffe Allert.

Said by Jim Graves, the Democrat trying to unseat Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann:

“She’s spending millions on ridiculous attacks ads saying I am somehow responsible for TARP, the stimulus bill, the Affordable Care Act,” he says with a laugh. “But I wasn’t in Congress then—I was busy trying to keep my company afloat and make payroll. She was the one in Congress at the time. She’s attacking me as being a big spender, despite the fact that’s the opposite of what I am. I’m a business guy. I’m a spendthrift.”

Um… Yer doing it wrong. A “spendthrift” is someone who wastes money and spends it out of control. Let’s face it though, how can a word with thrift on the end of it not be about being thrifty. Stupid English language!

Unforced Errors Part 2… Hello Critics… Where Are You…..

Lets me get this straight. According to many in the media, and beyond, the attacks on 9/11 were Bush’s fault because there was some intelligence that something big was going to happen, and even thought there was no specificity at all about the attacks on the WTC, this is Bush’s failings. Bush and his team failed to connect the dots, as it were. Given the lack of actionable evidence concerning a specific target for the 9/11 attacks, one has to ask exactly what could have been done. That said, it’s not beyond the scope of things to say, in retrospect, it could have been handled better.

Fast forward eleven years. The current President and his Defense Department staff not only failed to provide any security to the embassy in Beghazi after they expressed concerns about a possible attack, but, after the attack actually did happen, resulting in the deaths of four Americans, the administration floats a bogus story about the attacks being the result of unrest over an anti-muslim video, knowingly lying about the real reason for the terrorist attacks on the embassy.

Yet, you don’t hear the same criticism about the current administration concerning this President and his administration.

Exactly how does that work?

Unforced Errors

Ann Althouse has posted a damning collection of information against the administration concerning the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi.  She features  some quotes from  Sen Graham from “Face The Nation”, laying out the case:

The intelligence community on the ground in Libya has told Senator Corker and myself that within twenty-four hours, they communicated up to Washington that this was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya on the same date said it was a terrorist attack. The video of the compound shows that there was nobody at the Benghazi consulate. There was never a group to riot. And the evidence is overwhelming, and the idea that it was spawned by a- a video and a riot would be– hold the administration blameless. They said it was a copycat of Cairo. It wasn’t a copycat. It was a sustained attack that lasted for six or eight hours, using heavy weapons which undercuts the idea that al– al Qaeda has been dismantled and on the run and it certainly undercuts the idea that our policy choices in Libya have not going after the militia, not helping the Libyans training the national army were good choices.”

It’s not just Susan Rice. The President of the United States said that it was the result of a video on David Letterman two days later. And the facts are very clear. There was never a riot. There was never a group of people around the embassy. It was a coordinated terrorist attack that took hours. Patrick Kennedy from the State Department briefed congressional staffers the day after the attack saying it was a terrorist attack. The next day after she was on your show, the– the counterterrorism deputy said it was a terrorist attack and the President after that went on national TV The View and David Letterman talking about we’re not sure if this was inspired by a video, a hateful video.

Some of you might dismiss this because Graham is a Republican. But Bob Woodward is also featured with quotes.

There are lots of unanswered questions. And I love documents, and they released some documents in this, and if you go and look at the original request for more security, they say our policy, our goal here is to shift from an emergency footing to normalize the security relationship.

Now, this is in March, six, seven months ago. Anyone looking at that what say, wait a minute, read the document in which they say, oh, the situation is incredibly unstable. Well, why are you trying to normalize your security in a situation that’s visibly unstable? You even acknowledge that.

So you’ve got a bad policy. And anyone looking at that would say, wait a minute; we are screwed up; we can’t normalize here.
So that’s the first problem. The second problem is, as soon as an ambassador is killed, the president should be more proactive and be out there. He can go, you know, five minutes in the White House briefing room and say this is really serious; we’re going to get to the bottom of it; we don’t have the answers. And all of this could have been nipped in the bud and it was not.

And when Chris Wallace asked about Susan Rice’s insistence that Benghazi was a video induced riot vs a terrorist attack, Woodward says this:

I don’t think we know exactly why she did that or what was going on. But the key… is, two weeks later, the president’s at the U.N. and citing this YouTube video, I guess half a dozen times. That, as we now know, had virtually nothing to do with what happened in Benghazi.

And as we now know, they knew this was not the case the day after the attacks happened.

So why on Earth would the President and his team continue following such a stunningly bad and damaging path on this, even after it became obvious that this was indeed a terrorist initiated attack?

It was indeed an error on Romney’s part to make the statement before the facts were known. By issuing his first statement, he looked very partisan. These are the people who are never shy about reminding us that politics is supposed to stop at the border. He didn’t get it right. But the Obama administration, in their zeal to try and make Romney look bad, ran with the anti-muslim video story and committed the worse error of responding to Romney instead of waiting to comment on the actual events and leaving politics out of the equation.

When it started to become clear that Benghazi was indeed a terrorist attack, the administration continued to run with the “video” story. Why? Because, in their isolated circle of advisers and in some of the media, it looked like that was working. Romeny seemed to be taking a hit from this.  But once the true nature of the attack permeated out into the regular media, they got caught in the trap they originally laid out for Romney. The administration became the Wiley Coyote of this story.

As Andrew Sullivan is so fond of saying….  Meep. Meep.

Climate Scientists Behaiving Badly… Blandely?

Haven’t done a climate post in a while. A couple of things caught my eye.

First, we have the ever entertaining William “The Wiki-Conqueror”  Connolley at it again.  This is a warmist was banned from editing Wikipedia because he was summarily deleting the profiles of people who didn’t tow the line on the alarmist version of climate science. The ban has since been lifted, but there was a stipulation. He was not allowed to make any changed to information on anyone who is still alive.

OK.

But people die. One such person was French Climatologist Marcel Leroux. He wrote a book critical of his peers called “Global Warming — Myth or Reality? : The Erring Ways of Climatology“. Connolley says the person was deleted because the page “just offensive“….

No, he doesn’t actually say that about Leroux’s Wiki page. He says this:

“But sometimes a page exists, about a real person or event, and there is doubt about whether the page is desirable or not”.

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Do you see what I just did there?  I corrected the inaccurate information – I didn’t delete it. But people like Connolley fear and dissent  on the consensus. There can be no evidence that such a thing even exists. Which is why those that can’t get deleted from the web are labeled “deniers”, even if they are not deniers that CO2 has an effect of the atmosphere and can cause warming.

And speaking of consensus,  Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis section at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, is bummed. Apparently the next IPCC report is not going to be nearly as alarmist as the last one.

“There are more people, it’s more diffuse, it’s harder to gain a consensus – quite frankly I find the whole process very depressing. The science is solid, but with a larger group it’s harder to reach a consensus, and updates every six years are just too slow. After the fifth assessment, we should push on with a different format.”

Note that he does say the science is “solid”….  So what is he complaining about?

Translated – Our guys are no in control of the IPCC process this time, so we can’t control what will be considered “consensus”. Information will be included that we don’t like, that doesn’t support our doom and gloom narrative.

The IPCC has always been as much about political control as anything. Other people are at the head of the process, and the old guard doesn’t like it.

He’s also upset that, as a result of “Climategate”, the political world is no longer jumping through hoops, or no longer pretending to really, on issues of climate.  From the last link:

Professor Trenberth believes it had a big impact on public debates about climate science. ”It made an immense difference – the level of vitriol and hate we received,” he said. ”Not only do we have waves of attacks when we publish and it ends up on a denialist website, but it has affected politicians.”

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently had its climate change-related research budget slashed by a fifth, affecting Professor Trenberth’s peers, as a result of online campaigns against climate scientists, he said. He believes uncertainties in climate change models scientists rely upon is being falsely inflated as a general uncertainty about the status of climate science.

”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work,” Professor Trenberth said.

And, one more thing, those who want to link the “crazy weather” to global warming, please note this last sentence from Mr Trenberth:

”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work”.

Translated – There is no proof that firmly establishes a link between any of the so called “unprecedented” weather events we’ve seen in the last few years, there is still only the hypothesis. Thing is, the extreme weather events that we see on the news are, as it turns out, not statistically increasing in number. The mid west drought this year is pretty bad, but, I must remind you, there is a long LONG way to go before it even gets close to the drought that occurred in the 1930’s. And no, I’m not talking about the poor farming practices that led to the dust bowl. I’m talking about the meteorological drought.

There are cycles of drought, but this was one of the worst ever recorded. The decade started with dry years in 1930 and 1931 especially in the East. Then, 1934 recorded extremely dry conditions over almost 80 percent of the United States. Extreme drought conditions returned in 1936, 1939 and 1940.

And The Winner Is…..

I was in and out of the car tonight, and listened to some of the VP debate. Of course, the partisans on both sides are proclaiming victory.

From what I heard, I know who I will say won this one….

Anyone who didn’t bother to watch or listen to the thing!  It was atrocious.

Oh No! Not Windows Viruses!!!!!

Only one problem….

MSNBC = Obama Campaign.

As if their were any doubt. But I’m not saying it… Chris Mathews is!

“Well, this, um… wasn’t an MSNBC debate, was it. It just wasn’t. It had none of the things you mentioned. It didn’t mention all the key fighting points of this campaign…”

Fighting points???? Fighting against whom?????

There is a hot debate going on in this country, and you know where it’s being held… Here! On this network! We have our knives out….”

Yes, but they’re only ever slashing away / cutting at Conservatives.

You don’t need a media translator to hear Mathews admit that debates hosted by his network would skew the debate to help Obama / Democrats win. In the future, I would not be surprised at all if Republican candidates either refuse to appear in a debate hosted by MSNBC, or, if they do appear, bring up portions of this conversation between Mathews and his cohorts when a seemingly biased question or comment from the moderator gets thrown into the mix.

This really is pathetic.

Jennifer Rubin’s critique of the media is spot on here.

“The liberal media, and MSNBC specifically, have no one to blame but themselves, however. They have never given President Obama the sort of scrutiny he got last night. They have mouthed the president’s false talking points (“a $5 trillion tax cut for the rich”), egging the president on. When Mitt Romney debunked these easily, Obama had nowhere to go. He looked lost without the protective blanket of compliant media and over-eager left-wing bloggers.

Jim Lehrer was, comically, the target for many on the left. The complaint was that he didn’t “control” the debate. In fact, what irked them was that he didn’t control Romney. Did he not know his role as media combatant for the president? Ironically, Newt Gingrich was dead right in suggesting un-refereed debates: The president without a structure and without a moderator to help him defend against an opponent is out of his depth.”