A nasty, right wing thing to say? Not exactly. That is paraphrasing the words of Screamin' Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic National Committee. In an interview with the Financial Times, he expressed those feelings about the rank and file.
The Democratic party’s “superdelegates” have every right to overturn the popular vote and choose the candidate they believe would be best equipped to defeat John McCain in a general election, according to Howard Dean, chairman of the US Democratic National Committee……
….."It is not just the extra campaigning time – although that is an issue,” he said. “It is the healing time that is important. I know this because I went through it myself. [Your supporters] go to Iowa and knock on doors and spend their weekends in Pennsylvania. These are real investments and when your candidate doesn’t win it’s incredibly painful. It takes time to get over that.”
Mr Dean appeared confident that the uncommitted superdelegates would know what to do in early June even if he could not specify which yardstick they would use to select the winner. “Politics is a herd mentality,” he said. “There is a gestalt in politics when suddenly people see things in a synchronous way. Politically there will be some feeling at the end of this process that somebody is better than the other person in terms of taking on John McCain.” (Emphasis added)
Lovely sentiments from the head of the party, no? At this point, it is hard to hide the contempt the Democratic party leaders hold for the rank and file. It practically oozes out. Whether it is Obama and his slams on small town voters or the "people's choice" head of the DNC, the elitism is out there on full display.
You'd better hope your "herd" doesn't stampede right over you, Howie.
Note: I found this FT article via Hot Air who linked it as an "oh, by the way" to another point about Obama's penchant for revisionist history.
Mark Steyn has rather a lot to say about Time Magazines "Iwo Tree-ma" photo that I posted about yesterday. But the only thing the tree is good for is to block the view of the starving peasants.
Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most-likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that, to date, the "carbon debt" created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized:
"The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world's environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of it?"
You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here's the self-same Independent in November 2005:
"At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a 'biofuel obligation' on oil companies … . This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol."
Etc. It's not the environmental movement's chickenfeedhawks who'll have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where to place the blame – on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders and weather-vane politicians who insist that the "science" is "settled" and that those who question whether there's any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly nonemaciated Al Gore) "denialists."
Green is the new red. As always, read the whole thing, Steyn is in rare form over this one. The media might want to rethink their biased cheer-leading. The first victim of totalitarianism is freedom of the press.
The Wall Street Journal reports on Arizona governor Janet Napolitano's not-so-secret plan to deal with the falling real estate values and mortgage problems in that state: raise property taxes even more. Napolitano is not alone, many states are doing the same thing. While crying to Washington for money for struggling homeowners, state politicians are cheerfully planting a tax boot on the necks of those same homeowners.
Arizona has been hit hard hit by the real-estate bust, with the average home value down 17% in a year and a record number of foreclosures. So Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano has devised a clever way to revive the housing market: Raise property taxes.
Last week Ms. Napolitano vetoed a bill that would have made a two-year suspension of the state property tax permanent. "It's untimely. It's untenable. It's unwise," she said of her untimely and unwise veto. So as housing values slide, Arizonans next year will get walloped with an extra $250 million property tax bill.
Arizona is one of a growing list of states and big cities looking to raise taxes on homes to close budget gaps in 2008 and 2009. Housing values are expected to decline by $1.2 trillion this year, according to Global Insight Inc., an economic consulting firm, and that means tens of billions of dollars in lost taxes.
In recent weeks, Fairfax County in northern Virginia, Washington state, Chicago and Memphis have announced proposals to increase residential property tax rates to offset declining revenues. So at the very time that states and cities are begging for money from Washington to help distressed homeowners pay their mortgages, property tax hikes could push hundreds of thousands of homeowners under water.
So the states are choking their residents with tax hike after tax hike. Both Democrats running for their party nomination for President are promising huge spending which will require higher taxes. And Charlie Rangel has already laid out his plan to raise Federal taxes by one trillion dollars. And the economy is already shaky.
Anyone beginning to see the problem here, yet?
A British man has been acquitted of all charges in a landmark case. 25-year old Stuart Kennedy will not have to display a floppy truncheon when he next delivers a strip-o-gram.
Three judges have ruled that a male stripper who dresses as a policeman can use a real truncheon in his act.
Stuart Kennedy, a student whose stage name is Sgt Eros, was arrested on his way to an engagement in Aberdeen by two female police officers.
They watched his performance in a city pub to confirm his explanation for wearing a police uniform before he was charged with carrying an offensive weapon.
A sheriff threw out the charge at a lower court amid widespread criticism of the Crown for pursuing the case, but prosecutors decided to appeal against the ruling.
They told the Appeal Court in Edinburgh at an earlier hearing that Mr Kennedy, 25, a genetics student and part-time strippagram, would not have been detained if his truncheon had been "floppy".
Men everywhere will be relieved that floppy truncheons are not required by British law.
The late Robert A. Heinlein's vision of powered armor is rapidly approaching reality. A company in Utah has an operational powered exoskeleton and a contract with the US military to develop it even further.
Rex Jameson, one of his test engineers, has been trying out Jacobsen's 150lb XOS exoskeleton, a mechanised suit that shadows his every motion to give him the kind of strength and endurance usually reserved for Marvel comics.
The real life version does not have a flame thrower, like the one in Iron Man. But, thanks to its mechanical muscles, it is strong and moves seamlessly to mirror Jameson's every motion.
To show off his superhuman endurance, Jameson can lift a bar loaded with 200lb for hundreds of times. "As far as software engineering goes, this job is about as good as it gets," he says.
"We get to write programs and we see them working on actual robots, that's very exciting. I've had a lot of software jobs before this. This one is definitely the most fun."
Jameson works at Sarcos, a robotics company that was recently purchased by the defence giant Raytheon. Although the military is most interested in using this mechanical shadow to boost the strength and endurance of soldiers, others are too, from firemen to the wheelchair-bound.
The basic idea is simple. As Jameson moves his hand a sensor in exoskeleton's handle detects a force and the computer - on the back of his suit - calculates how to move the exoskeleton to minimise the strain on his hand as a series of valves controls the flow of high-pressure hydraulic fluid that act like tendons to drive the joints.
What is crucial is that, given a few points of contact - the feet and hands, in this case - the smart machine is able to interpret the intended movements of the person strapped into it and react accordingly, turning a nifty piece of robotics into a superhero suit. It has taken three prototypes to get the blend of speed, power and sensitivity just right.
They have a video of the exoskeleton at the link. It's fascinating and eerily like what Heinlein predicted back when he wrote Starship Troopers almost a half century ago now.
Bill Thomas writes an article for the Washington Post today about an unusual hobby that he and A. L. Freed have been practicing for the last decade or so. That would be following old railroad right of ways in their travels. They have done this all across the country, the most recent outing in Texas.
My friend A.L. Freed is behind the wheel. I've been speaking at his public policy seminars since the early 1990s, and for the past decade have navigated our occasional out-of-town business trips, although "business" may be the wrong word, because the trips themselves are purely for fun, an excuse to forget about work for a few days and hit the road. On the first one, we drove a Land Rover from Omaha through the Sand Hills of northern Nebraska to a seminar in Denver, following railroad tracks the whole time. After that, whenever a program is scheduled outside of Washington, we fly part of the way then drive the rest along whatever train tracks we can find, some of which haven't seen a train in years.
Normally the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line, but dotted lines are what we always look for. On railroad maps, dotted lines indicate abandoned tracks, often just mounds of overgrown dirt where tracks used to be, and those can lead to some fairly incredible places.
A.L. and I had been talking about the Texas trip for weeks. Our ultimate destination is a Capitol Hill workshop for government scientists in Las Cruces, N.M., roughly a five-hour plane trip from Washington. But getting there in a hurry — or even knowing how to get there — isn't the idea.
IT'S EARLY FEBRUARY, and we're tooling along Fort Worth & Western tracks going to Brownwood, Tex., 150 miles southwest of Dallas. A.L., a former pro on the North American rally circuit, likes to drive, which is fine with me. In 10 years of traveling together, he's compiled an impressive record: no wrecks; only one speeding ticket; and we've never been stuck in the mud. After a recent trip through the Mississippi Delta, fishtailing over rain-soaked farm roads, we returned our car caked with dirt and debris.
"Where've you all been with this?" asked the rental agent.
"A White House seminar," A.L. said.
Many of the old right of ways have disappeared in recent years, some turned into bike trails, some used for other purposes. But Thomas and Freed have found enough still there to travel some unusual paths to places few people go these days.
Politics | Gaius Saturday, 26 April , 2008 | 
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