Does Obama have other children? Well, none to speak of

President Obama’s got sons? - In the Loop - The Washington Post:
What do you make of this, asks the Post:

President Obama, speaking last night in Chicago at a fundraiser at a private home, unloaded this bombshell:

Obama, according to the White House transcript, talked about “The first bill I signed — a bill that said that we’re going to have equal pay for equal work because I want my daughters treated the same way as my sons.”

Sons? What sons? How many? Where? Names? Do the girls know? (More importantly, does Michelle?)

Obama has sons? Who knew?

Reminds me of the old joke of a man boasting about his two kids with his wife standing nearby. He's asked whether he has any other kids. Flustered for a moment, he turns red in the face and leans to his interlocutor and replies, "Well, none to speak of."

When seconds count, the cops are only a half-hour away

Woman Bound, Robbed When 911 Call Drops - Louisville News Story - WLKY Louisville

NEW ALBANY, Ind. -- A woman called 911 as her residence was broken into, but police didn't arrive at the house for more than a half-hour.

Police said the incident was a case of human error. It wasn't until a second call came in that the operator realized the mistake and immediately sent officers to the house.

"She was hysterical, saying that somebody was in the house, had a gun, was going to kill her. Then we lost our cell phone call," said Charles Conner.

Police said the New Albany house was broken into while a 23-year-old woman was home alone.

She needs to read this.

How Solyndra would have worked, if it had worked

As you recall, Solyndra was a "green energy," Obama-led boondoggle that put the taxpayers in hock for more than $550 billion dollars. The company folded because it had no business plan worth the name, relied heavily (well, almost totally) on federal subsidies to begin with and, most importantly, did not have a marketable product (thin-film solar cells). That the failed companies were managed by Obama cronies - and they made millions no matter that the company flopped - is not beside the point. It is the point.

But let us suppose as a thought experiment that Solyndra had actually produced a useful product. How would it have gained a revenue stream? There is a real-world answer and it is provided by examining another famous government project, Goverment General Motors and its abortive attempt to produce a commercially viable hybrid auto, the Chevy Volt.

Commercial flop = government success

The Chevy Volt flops—Patrick Michaels - NYPOST.com:

By most accounts, “Government Motors” has stuck with the Volt mainly to please the Obama administration, which still owns a third of its stock in the wake of the 2009 government “rescue” of the company. But just how badly is the effort faring? Well, consider the 1,529 sold in December.

More than a third of those were fleet sales to corporations. None of these were the traditional large-fleet purchasers, i.e. Hertz, Avis and the other big rental companies. They were more like Verizon and General Electric — with GE having committed to buying 12,000 and having already purchased unspecified “hundreds,” with continued “daily” deliveries, as The Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Then there are the direct taxpayer buys. Fifty to New York City. The city of Deland, Fla., brags about buying five with an Energy Department grant. The federal General Services Administration has bought 101 so far, but President Obama has ordered it to procure only hybrid or high-mileage vehicles by 2015. (The taxpayers buy about 60,000 cars a year for GSA.

This is a textbook example of crony capitalism:

A. General Electric, of course, is Obama's pet corporation because its head, Jeffrey Immelt, is Obama's croniest of crony capitalists. So no wonder GE has "committed" to buying 12,000 Volts. They won't of course, but they'll find another way to scratch the backs of the robber barons in Washington.

B. "Then there are the direct taxpayer buys." I am sure you saw that municipal governments get federal money to buy Volts. Understand what this means: the government owns a third of GM, which makes it a truly major shareholder if not the largest shareholder. The government takes money (taxes) from you and me and then gives it to, say, Deland, Fla., so it can buy cars from a company the government controls. And Obama has ordered the GSA basically to buy nothing else until the end of his presumptive second term.

"Why didn't I think of that?"

Well, Obama said he wanted to spread the wealth around. The Mafia could not do it better.

But the whole "green" car racket is a scam, a gigantic corporate-welfare machine.

See also, "Buy A Honda, Kill a Polar Bear."

And today, this: "Bankrupt Solyndra seeking to pay bonuses."

Now seems an unlikely time for handing out bonuses at bankrupt Solyndra LLC, but that’s the plan of company attorneys intending to dole out up to a half-million dollars to persuade key employees to stay put.

Nearly two dozen Solyndra employees could receive bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 each under a proposal filed by Solyndra’s attorneys in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

That means that you and I are paying those bonuses. The looting continues.

Related: "Detroit unsure over the future of green cars." "But the economics are not attractive yet for the average consumer." What?

Answering the questions Glenn Reynolds won't!

Mr. Question

Seems Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has become the shrinking violet of the blogosphere. Maybe it's because he's pork-barreling around the Cayman Islands ("giving a speech" - hahaha, Glenn, good one!), or maybe it's because he's just gotten old and lazy like me, but he sure seems to ask or repeat a lot of questions while leaving the answer dangling. So here we go with his questions-without-answers, followed by the answers supplied by me:

Glenn's Q: Which successes were those?
My Answer: Obama got to more than 90 rounds of golf played.

Q: They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?
A: Of course they will. Sheese.

Q: Johnny Depp-Gate: What Did the Mainstream Media Know and When Did They Know It?
A: They knew everything from the beginning, natch.

And same place:

Q: Hmmmm…“Why don’t White House visitor logs report Hollywood Halloween guests?
A: Because they are Democrats and they don't have to. Who's going to call them on it? The press? See just above.

Q: What Does Keith Olbermann Have Against Bald People?
A: Same thing he has against everyone else: he hates them.

Same post:

Q: I wonder what his boss thinks of Olbermann’s tweets attacking the follicly challenged?
A: This assumes his boss even thinks much of Olberman at all.

Q: Why can’t their candidate do this?
A: Because. He. Is. Mitt. Romney.

Q: THE DRUG WAR — WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON AGAIN? (This, being is all-caps, is therefore REALLY URGENT!)
A: The drug lords, of course.

Q: Can Qatar bail out France’s banlieues?
A: And all the rest of France, too.

Q: POLITICAL WIVES: Do They Hold All The Power?
A: Why would political wives be any different?

Q: IS POP CULTURE IN PARALYSIS?
A: No, it's in rigor mortis.

Actually answered this one:
WANT TO SEE YOUR PREEMIES IN THE NICU? Not if Jay-Z and Beyonce Are In the House.

It won't do any good to point out that some of these unanswered Qs were actually posted my temp blogger Ed Driscoll. It's Glenn's site and the buck stops there.

Answers! We demand answers! And thanks to me, not Glenn, you got 'em!

The future of aerial drones

Japan's ministry of defense has developed a spherical flying machine that can hover like a helicopter, fly forward like an airplane and can even roll along the ground.



Conceptually, this machine is similar to circular-winged aircraft that were developed decades ago. Aerodynamicists have long known that circular wings can be extremely efficient. They are part of the class of design known as non-planar wings.

The aerodynamics of nonplanar wing systems that form closed loops are very interesting. Such configurations include box-planes, ring wings, joined wings, and "spiroid-tip" devices. Wings that form closed loops, such as the ring-wing illustrated below, do not eliminate the "tip vortices" or trailing vortex wakes even though the wing has no tips. Still, the vortex drag of the circular ring wing is just 50% that of a planar wing with the same span and total lift and the concept has been studied at several organizations, including early aviation pioneers, a major aircraft manufacturer, as well as several toy companies.

Israel and the "land for peace" fiction

Caroline Glick :: The land-for-peace hoax:

Indeed the land-for-peace formula will be exposed as a twofold fiction. First, it is based on the false proposition that the peace process is a two-way street. Israel gives land, the Arabs give peace. But the inevitable death of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord under an Egyptian jihadist regime makes clear that the land-for-peace formula is a one-way street. Israeli land giveaways are permanent. Arab commitments to peace can be revoked at any time.

The conflict is not about land. 

The plain fact is that Hamas, Fatah/Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah are united in one goal: the elimination of Israel as an independent, Jewish state. This has also been Syria's goal since modern Israel was founded in 1948. Syria is an Iranian client and I am sure no pixels need be expended to explain Iran's hostility to the Jewish nation. Israel's enemies want to destroy the country as a political entity. Hamas has said bluntly, over and again, that all Jews must be expelled or killed.

The conflict is over Israel's very existence, not its "borders."

Read the rest.

The Left's only question: Who is to rule, that is all

The New Authoritarianism by Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin - City Journal

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

"Progressives" have no absolute belief but in themselves. Their purpose is power. Political power is their bread and meat. It is their religion, their overriding quest. As I explained in, "The Po-Mo Deconstructed Presidency,"

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak.

As Orwell put it in 1984, "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

Lewis Carroll understood this quite well in Through the looking Glass.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

And that is the only question the Left is interested in. This explains why George W. Bush's policies were bad when he was president, but are good when continued by Barack Obama. Statements about policies are not really about the policies, but about getting or keeping power. That's all.

Update: The SF Chronicle's Deb Saunders explains how this has worked in the last few weeks, another example of when the Republicans did something, it was bad, but when the Democrats do it, it's good.