Only In America

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#121

Here’s one for all Sarah Palin fans :

Sarah Palin Goes to Opryland and We Can’t Stop Talking About It

By Jeff Woods in Politics, Woods
Sun., Feb. 7 2010 @ 8:42AM

Scandal of the evening: the scribbling on Sarah Palin’s palm. ​
The chattering class truly does love to chatter about Sarah Palin. She was the life of the tea party Saturday night, and all the blogging and tweeting about her big Opryland appearance is making Pith’s head spin.
She’s lost weight, hasn’t she? Maybe she’s chopping wood to stay in shape. Did you see her fabulous strands of pearls? And that small pin in her lapel? It had two flags–could you tell?–one for Israel and one for the USA.
But what was that scribbled on the palm of her hand? And you thought she was so clever and off the cuff during the Q&A after her speech. Hah! Some eagle-eyed tweeter discovered she was reading little notes she had written on her hand. Blow up the picture and you can make out the words “Energy”, “Budget [crossed out] (Cuts)”, “Tax” and “Lift American Spirits.” Pith thinks it’s endearingly folksy, but this HuffPo blogger is outraged:
Crib Notes? This potential presidential candidate and “movement” leader was using crib notes to answer basic questions? This would mean: A) That she knew the questions beforehand and the whole thing was a farce. (Likely.)
and
B) That she still couldn’t answer the previously agreed-upon questions without a little extra help.
If true, this is supremely rich coming immediately after a speech in which Palin took a shot at President Obama for using a teleprompter to read his prepared speeches.

As for the ultimate meaning of the speech itself, which included many memorable new lines and a lot of the same conservative pablum, there’s much disagreement. Is she running for president or not? That’s all we need to know. [i]Newsweek[/i]'s Daniel Stone thinks Sarah was so polarizing that this looks like the beginning of the end of her presidential ambitions.
Elections are won and lost in the middle, not on the extremes. And Palin’s fiery rebuke of Washington may have firmed her base, but it did little to widen her appeal to moderates and independents, two groups without which she’d have a real tough time passing the threshold of electoral votes. (At one point, she even mocked the majority of voters who voted for President Obama, asking them “How’s that hopey changey thing working for you now?”) Which is to say that electorally speaking, tonight’s speech may have been a self-inflicted wound for Palin, offering ammo to opponents to argue that she’s simply too far right and too niche to win widespread support for national office. Speeches like this make the people who love Palin love her even more, and the people who don’t ever more certain why they don’t. In other words, Palin further polarized herself to the American public.
Is that hope? Nope. For that, we must go to the [i]Atlantic[/i]'s Marc Ambinder, who’s pretty sure Sarah’s going for it. “Sarah Palin gave a campaign speech,” he writes. “And that’s pretty much all you need to know. So much of a campaign speech was it that I am revising upward my estimate of the chances she runs for president in 2012.”

It looks like Ambinder is right on. Sarah tells Fox News she “would be willing” to challenge Obama in 2012.

#122

RS Quote: (My wife faced a loony with a concealed weapon and a dozen magazines in America some years ago, but he exposed his weapon and then a dozen porn magazines fell out of his overcoat. The police charged him with indecent exposure and littering.)

After which arrest, they dutifully confiscated the magazines, and burned them . (indelibly into their minds). Yep, you may encounter such troubles in the US, but most of the police are pretty good guys…:mrgreen:

#123

Armored bulldozer blitzkrieg, a good reason to carry and antitank rifle in your car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlZh9-NQEyI&feature=fvw

#124

I was kinda wishing I had been in the area then…(as long as they buy the ammo…) Though the best way would have been to make, and use a “daisy chain” linking several small bombs together on a cable, then pull the chain across the road just in front of the dozer from a safe position. Dozer tracks while robust, are not designed to deal with explosive devices, so should be broken if a 5 to 8 pd. charge is used. Thermite is also useful for this job, placed in a trench, and ignited, it will melt enough material to break the track, and halt the machine. As for the man inside, don’t know if he was a dangerous loony, or a contemporary Guy Fawkes .

#125

No, it doesn’t. The Luddites, as you are probably aware, were not really rebelling against the political system, but rather the increase in mechanisation which took production away from the traditional ‘Cottage-industry’ to the factories of the large conurbations creating a migration from the countyside to the large towns and cities where factories were growing up and creating the dynamics which led to the birth of the British, Industrial Revolution.

The chapters of The Proud Tower are:

The Patricians - England: 1895 to 1902;

The Idea and the Deed - The Anarchists: 1890 - 1914;

End of a Dream - USA: 1890 - 1903;

Give Me Combat - France: 1894-9;

The Steady Drummer - The Hague: 1899 - 1907;

Neroism is in the Air - Germany: 1890 - 1914;

Transfer of Power - England : 1902 - 11
and
The Death of Jaure’s - The Socialists: 1890 - 1914.

This book is a fabulous prequil to The Guns of August, which deals with the run up to and the breakout of the war in August 1914, which is an absolute must read for anybody interested in the history of WW1.