Have You Seen 'STFU, Tea Baggers!'??

Seriously, a whole tumblelog dedicated to telling tea partiers to STFU!

This is one of those blogs that confirms the central thesis of Melanie Phillips' work, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. If you get frustrated with the upside down world of the left, where lies are truth and truth is "hate speech," return to Phillips book to reclaim your moral sense.

HAT TIP: Super Patriot.

Conservatism and the Spirit of Reform

Peter Berkowitz, at WSJ:

Conservative reform is particularly necessary today. Revolutions in telecommunications and transportation continue to transform business, the family and the environment. The threat of transnational terrorists employing biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber weapons demands greater resourcefulness and agility at all levels of government, as well as greater cooperation among federal, state and municipal officials. And the vast expansion of the federal government undertaken by President Barack Obama and the Democrats has focused the electorate on government's cost and role in a way not seen since Ronald Reagan ran for president.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, conservatism in America has squandered the reputation for reform that it earned in the 1980s and 1990s. President Reagan led the way with his signature tax cuts, which launched two decades of stunning economic growth. Gov. John Engler in Michigan (1991–2003) and Gov. Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin (1987-2001) gained national prominence for the benefits they brought to their states by cutting taxes, promoting school choice and renovating welfare. The 1994 Republican congressional campaign's Contract with America, which drew on President Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address to propose concrete legislation to make the federal government more transparent and accountable, promised a new era of conservative reform.

The promise was not fulfilled. Congressional Republicans grew complacent and in some cases corrupt. While he ran as a reformer in 2000—remember "compassionate conservatism"—President George W. Bush was soon consumed with two wars and never regained his footing after Hurricane Katrina.

RTWT at the link.

And see Berkowitz's piece at Policy Review, "Constitutional Conservatism."

On a purely intellectual level, I'm most partial to Berkowitz's conservative program. But I need to qualify that in light of my actual activism on the ground: Berkowitz is a bit too moderate for the tea partiers, and I don't know if he's been on the ground in places like L.A. and Phoenix to experience the extremism of the hard left "progressives" looking to destroy everything. After you been around that shit for a while, it's easy to wind up even more to the right as a reaction to the left's revolutionary program. I wonder what Edmund Burke would say today?

Young Loving May Be ... Oh So Mean...

From Roxy Music, "Same Old Scene" (Wikipedia entry here):

Congressman Mike Pence: 'Mr. President, Whose Side Are You On?'

Via Founding Bloggers:

Before Heidi Klum and Sarah Brandner: The Incomparable Claudia Schiffer

Marlene Dietrich was a little before my time, but more recently, before the fame and glamor of Heidi Klum and the Sports Illustrated hotness of Sarah Brandner, we were graced with the loveliness of Claudia Schiffer:

See also Proof Positive, "Friday Night Babe: Claudia Schiffer."

And don't miss Sir Smitty's "Rule 5 Sunday" for a huge roundup of hotness, a post that makes up for last weekend's babalicious hiatus.

Police Video: Mob Torches Taxicab After Lakers NBA Championship Game

At LAT, "Lakers Violence: Authorities Release Raw Video of Mob Attacking Cab, Seek Public's Help." And at Blogmocracy, "Identify These Bastards":

RELATED: "Raw Video: Lakers Fans Riot After NBA Victory."

Happy Father's Day 2010

Happy Father's Day friends and readers. Look for some hot Sunday blogging a little later this morning!

And for a warm-up for the day's reading, see Vincent Cannato's review of James T. Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle over Black Family Life--from LBJ to Obama.

And check Amazon's home page for some Father's Day deals. I'm planning on S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.

Kate Beckinsale OMG!!

Looking forward to The Other McCain's Rule 5 Sunday, and Kate Beckinsale is putting up some competition to hot Sarah Brandner. And no, I haven't stopped blogging about politics, LOL!

And be sure to visit some of my Rule 5-ing friends:

* Another Black Conservative.

* Astute Bloggers (Honorary).

* Blazing Cat Fur.

* Bob Belvedere.

* Classical Liberal.

* Daley Gator.

* Left Coast Rebel.

* POWIP.

* The Other McCain.

* Reaganite Republican (Honorary).

* Right Klik (Honorary).

* Saberpoint (Honorary).

* Serr8d (Honorary).

* Snooper's Report (Honorary).

* Stormbringer.

* Theo Spark.

* Washington Rebel.

* WyBlog.

BONUS: Don't forget Instapundit.

Melanie Phillips Interview at National Review

From last month. See, "Melanie Phillips on a World Gone Mad":

Melanie Phillips, the British journalist, is author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. As the title suggests, the book covers a lot of ground. Phillips touches on much of it in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s notable about the current “apparent mass departure from rationality”?

MELANIE PHILLIPS: What I have found so striking is that, in this supposed age of reason, there is such an implacable refusal, over a wide and disparate range of issues, to acknowledge the authority of factual evidence over opinion, or distinguish truth from propaganda and lies, or differentiate between justice and injustice, victim and victimizer. More than that, this phenomenon is confined to the supposed custodians of reason, the intelligentsia; and some of the most prominent of these often-militant “rationalists” propound assertions that are demonstrably irrational.

Even more striking is that this repudiation of reason is associated with the most fashionable and progressive causes — anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, environmentalism, moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, scientism. Yet they promote not just irrationality but a return to primitivism, pre-modern levels of social disorder, and the persecution of dissenters.

LOPEZ: What does a self-described “agnostic” care about God?

PHILLIPS: You don’t have to be a religious believer to understand that if religion — more specifically, the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that built upon it — underpins Western civilization and the codes of right and wrong — putting others above yourself, freedom and equality, and belief in reason — that form the bedrock of that civilization, then eroding or destroying that religion will erode or destroy those virtues and the civilization they distinguish.

LOPEZ: You write that progressives, Islamists, environmentalists, fascists, militant atheists, and religious fanatics are “united by a common desire to bring about through human agency the perfection of the world.” Is this becoming more apparent?

PHILLIPS: It may seem strange to lump all these ideologies together since they are all so different. But, when you look at them, it is immediately apparent that they are all at root utopian, millenarian visions of the perfection of the world through human agency — the age-old recipe for totalitarian terror. The idea that fascism is in a wholly different place from the Left is in my view quite misplaced: Although conventionally one is described as “right” and the other as “left,” this is historically and philosophically inaccurate; they share common roots in the repudiation of individual reason and liberty.

One of the mysteries of the age is the way “progressives” who fetishize sexual freedom, gay rights, female equality, and the like march shoulder to shoulder with Islamists who stone adulterers, kill gays, and subjugate women. They share a common desire to destroy the cultural traditions and normative values of the West — all in the cause of creating the perfect society, which creates in turn a totalitarian mindset, which links religious fanatics and the political tyrannies of both Communism and fascism.

To some of us, this is very apparent — but many who are in the grip of these delusions are frighteningly incapable of understanding what it is that they don’t understand.

RTWT.

Is 'Nuclear Option' Last Resort on Gulf Spill?

At the viddy, Matthew Simmons of the Ocean Energy Institute argues that detonating a "small-bore nuclear device" may be our last chance to stop the devastation in the Gulf of Mexico. This guy Simmons is apparently a questionable source. He recently resigned from Simmons & Co. International, an investment bank he founded, after predicting that British Petroleum would go belly up. (I've said the same thing, but I guess at that level of international finance stream of concsiousness thinking is a no-no.) Mediaite had a piece on this a couple of weeks ago, in any case: "In Light Of BP’s Failures, Russian ‘Nuclear Option’ For Stopping Leak Gaining Traction."

Something big needs to happen ASAP, that's for sure. Check out this piece from Alan Caruba, "BP and the Unmitigated Disaster":

Suffice it to say that everything that could go wrong following the Deepwater Horizon explosion has gone wrong. The oil industry has never been faced with an engineering failure of this magnitude.

For the creatures of the Gulf, it is an ecological disaster of biblical proportions. For the coastal states affected, it is an economic disaster that will rapidly eat through the $20 billion BP has pledged to set aside for remediation over the next five years. The losses to the nation as a whole are probably incalculable at this point.

But see Steven F. Hayward, at Weekly Standard, "How to Think About Oil Spills The Perils of Overreaction."

Even if the Deepwater Horizon spill lasts into the fall, it will still not even be the largest offshore spill in the Gulf of Mexico. That dubious achievement belongs to the Ixtoc 1, a Mexican platform near Yucatán that blew out in 1979 in circumstances similar to the Deepwater Horizon (the blowout preventer failed after a gas surge from the well). It took Mexico’s famously inept Pemex almost 10 months to stop the leak, by which time 460,000 tons of oil had leaked—still the largest accidental spill in world history (Saddam Hussein deliberately fouled the Persian Gulf at the end of the first Gulf War with 1.2 million tons).

The Ixtoc 1 spill started in June 1979. Oil began washing up on 125 miles of Texas coastline by early August. It is estimated that only 4,000 tons of oil made it to U.S. shores, which was about 1 percent of the total amount of oil spilled. About 30,000 tons was estimated to have reached Mexican shorelines. Pemex, by the way, refused to pay damages to the United States, citing sovereign immunity—an important contrast to the stance taken in the Deepwater spill by BP, which is assuming full responsibility (as it should).

The ecological effects of the Ixtoc 1 disaster should be borne in mind when we hear claims that the Deepwater spill will inflict large and long-lasting effects. According to a 1981 study by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, about half of the Ixtoc 1 oil evaporated, and another 25 percent sank to the bottom of the ocean, much of it broken up by wave action and chemical dispersants. The Swedish Academy study estimated that oil from the Ixtoc 1 poisoned a 5,800 square mile area, devastating crab, shrimp, and fish stocks, and leading to large oxygen-killing plankton blooms. Overall fish landings fell by up to 70 percent in Mexican and Texan coastal waters. On the other hand, the 5,800 square mile area represented about 2.5 percent of Mexican Gulf Coast waters. Finally and most ironically, Hurricane Frederick struck the Texas coast in September 1979, and washed away 95 percent of the oil that had reached shoreline beaches and marshes. The current fears of the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes in the midst of the Deepwater spill might be misplaced.

It will be some time before we have a precise idea of the nature and extent of environmental damage from the Deepwater spill. It should be borne in mind, however, that ocean ecosystems tend to have faster recovery times than ecosystems on land, owing to the area available for the dilution and dispersal of the oil droplets, the constant aerating turbulence of ocean waters, and the ease of repopulation from adjacent areas once the anoxia (lack of oxygen) has passed.

HAT TIP: Reaganite Republican gave me the idea for this post.

'California Gurls'

Embedding's disabled, so click the screencap to listen. And check Theo's for additional screencaps:

I've been posting Lady Gaga quite a bit, so some equal time is the least I could do. See, "Katy Perry Slams Lady Gaga's 'Alejandro' as Cheap Blasphemy."

The FCC Shouldn't Touch the Internet

Lots of folks are posting on this, for example, Instapundit:

And here's another (related) reason to keep the FCC (er, government) out of the Internet regulation business. From Mark Tapscott, "Meet the Neo-Marxist Behind Obama FTC's Campaign for 'Reinventing Journalism'."

BP Oil Spill is 'Ecological Armageddon'

Seriously.

It's the end of the world, at Pam's House Blend:

Even if the well were capped today and its outflow brought to zero, and even if the integrity of the rock is not further weakened and there is no sinkhole, oil and methane will continue to seep out through the sea bed for a very long time. This is bad, people, very bad. And there is nothing we can do at this point to stop it.

It is starting to look more and more like my use of "ecological armageddon" is not hyperbole after all.

Well, it's all about "climate change," isn't it?

And it's "6 Minutes to Midnight," so maybe these people have a point. And nice to see something besides gay marriage blogging for once, LOL!

Figures: Obama Attacks GOP Obstructionism!

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled weekend blog-programming to bring you this hilarious update on President Barack Jimmy Carter Obama. That's right, the dude's looking to be a one-termer. See, "U.S. Voters Split on Obama Re-Election in 2012." No surprise then that Republicans are just laughing at the president, who long ago abandoned bipartisanship to ram through the most unpopular legislative agenda in decades. I mean, if his congressional program was even a percentage as good as he claims, RINOs like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe would be helping the Dems avoid a filibuster. So this is what you get instead:

See also Gateway Pundit, "Obama Says He “Won’t Rest Until Leak Is Stopped”… Then Attends Nationals Baseball Game." (Via Memeorandum.) But see Doug Mataconis for a contrary take, "President Obama Attends Baseball Game, Conservative Blogger Freaks Out."

Okay, now back to our more invigorating weekend blogging, LOL!

In Defense of Koman Coulibaly?

No harm no foul?

Well, not if NYT's got something to say about it:

Since our justice system grants even the most incorrigible defendants the right to an attorney, consider me his [Koman Coulibaly's] public defender. Ladies and gentlemen, may I direct your attention to the photograph below:

Actually, R.S. McCain's having none of it, "U.S. Robbed of Winning Goal in World Cup Soccer Game vs. Slovenia."

PREVIOUSLY: "Referee Koman Coulibaly Blamed for United States' 2-2 Draw With Slovenia ... UPDATE! Coulibaly Could Face Expulsion!"

Weekend Gulfapalooza Cartoon Roundup!

More cartoons at Theo Spark's.

Also from across the pond, "BP Chief at UK Yacht Race as Oil Spews in Gulf of Mexico."

RELATED: At Flopping Aces, "The Greatest Ecological Disaster in the History of the United States and Obama Tells Us We Need Windmills," and from Mort Zuckerman, "World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur" (via Memeorandum).

New Ads Try to Shock Men Into Going to the Doctor's Office

Well, if more physicians looked like Dr. Cynara Coomer there'd be no need for these ads!

Of course, conservative guys stay in shape with hot weekend Rule 5 blogging! So give it up for Washington Rebel's, "Saturday Rebel 5 Festgate."

Saturday Morning Workout With Alisyn Camerota!

Hot women. The real reason folks watch Fox News:

RELATED: Wonderful conservative Opus 6 has been a great sport with my Rule 5 hotness blogging. She left a friendly comment on last night's post, "Sarah Brandner Body Painting (Probably NSFW)." I'm still trying to get her to give it up for the team with some boob-quake action, but to no avail. She makes up for it with smokin' hot blogging on the issues of the day. See, "Santa Ana, CA ICE Raids Put Damper on Illegal Participation In Census."

Israel is Endangered Today Like Never Before

From Caroline Glick at JPost and RCP:

Israel is endangered today as it has never been before. The Turkish-Hamas flotilla two weeks ago precipitated a number of dangerous developments. Rather than attend to all of them, Israel's leadership is devoting itself almost exclusively to contending with the least dangerous among them while ignoring the emerging threats with the potential to lead us to great calamities.

Since the Navy's lethal takeover of the Mavi Marmara, Israel has been stood before an international diplomatic firing squad led by the UN and Europe and supported by the Obama administration. Firmly backed by European and largely unopposed by Washington, the UN is moving swiftly towards setting up a new Goldstone- style anti-Israel kangaroo court. That canned tribunal will rule that Israel has no right to defend itself and attempt to force Israel to end its lawful naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Fearing this outcome, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu bowed to US President Barack Obama's demand that Israel set up an Israeli inquest of the Mavi Marmara takeover and permit foreigners to oversee its proceedings.

Netanyahu also agreed to scale back Israel's blockade significantly, and allow international bodies to have a role in its far more lax enforcement. Netanyahu has made these concessions with the full knowledge that they will strengthen Hamas in the hopes that they would weaken the international onslaught against Israel.

Unfortunately, it took no time at all to see that his hopes were misplaced. Even before Netanyahu announced these concessions, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon already announced that they make no difference to him or to his friends in Washington and Brussels.

They will move ahead with their plans to appoint a new kangaroo court charged with asserting that Israel has no right to defend itself.

AS BAD as all of this is, in truth, it is unimportant relative to the other consequences of the flotilla incident. The impact of the diplomatic campaign now being waged against Israel will be felt in the medium and long term. In the immediate term, Israel is facing two threats that dwarf what it faces from the UN.

More at the link.

Sarah Brandner Body Painting (Probably NSFW)

Let me recommend once more Sarah Brandner's pictorial at Sports Illustrated. She's a very beautiful woman, and more than worthy for a leading turn in the weekend's Rule 5 postings.

Related goodness at Bob Belvedere's, "They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore: Gaye Rennie," and earlier from TrogloPundit, "Pure Hotness Shania Twain Single Again and Back on the Market."

BONUS: At Blazing Cat Fur, "Because it's Friday... and it's Audrey Hepburn."