The Reality of Modern Politics, We Go After Each Other

An outstanding essay from Kathleen McKinley, at Right Wing News:

I am about fed up with all of politics. I’ve never been as SICK of it in my life as I am now, and I have been in it ALL my life.

This is the time we should be focused on our families. We should be focused on our country getting through this terrible economic time, and terribly sad time.

Focus on what matters. Don’t focus on anger, pettiness, and self righteousness.

The media needs to decide what it is going to be in the future. Is it going to be what it is supposed to be? Reporting fairly both sides? Or is it going to continue to promote a liberal agenda? Because as long as it does the latter, then other news organizations will pop up, like Fox News, that reports on the conservative side, and we have no unbiased reporting whatsoever.

So, decide media. It’s up to you.

If the liberals current political fight continues as “divide and conquer,” then I congratulate them. They are winning. They won the Presidency that way, and they continue to win that way.

But what a price America is paying for that. Neighbor against neighbor. Friend against friend. Brother against brother.

RTWT.

Personal Computers On the Way Out

If the PC isn't on the way out economy-wide, it's certainly on the way out in my household. Not only have we not had a PC for a few years, we're now almost all on Apple mobile devices. I bought my wife an iPad for Christmas. Both my sons are fully on Apple. I got an iPhone 5 a couple months back and I'll be purchasing an Apple laptop sometime early next year. The part, at the clip, about taking your computing devices with you really says it all. I need a laptop to blog, but other than that I can do just whatever I want on handheld devices. The changes in technology are endlessly fascinating. I'm just wondering when we'll get some real robust economic growth amid all the innovation, like we had during the 1990s' Internet boom.

Bruno Mars 'Unorthodox Jukebox'

I gave my wife the CD for Christmas.

I liked him on SNL.

And see the Los Angeles Times, "Bruno Mars gladly loses his cool on 'Unorthodox Jukebox'."

Jennifer Johnson: 'I Am Too Young...'

At London's Daily Mail, "Terminally ill mother-of-two records heartbreaking YouTube video before she died just days before Christmas."

And watch the video, "A Heart Worth Saving."

Ms. Johnson died of complications following open heart surgery. Join me in a prayer for her survivors.

Weight Watchers Extends Endorsement Deal With Jessica Simpson

Weight Watchers executives were furious when they first learned that Jessica Simpson was having a second baby, becoming pregnant just months after her first child was born. But the company is continuing its business relationship with the star. Simpson lost over 50 pounds while using the company's products (although that wasn't as dramatic a weight loss executives were looking for). But things have apparently cooled down a bit on the business end and Ms. Simpson can focus on family before returning as the spokeswoman. The Los Angeles Times reports, "Jessica Simpson won't follow Weight Watchers diet while pregnant."

I say good for her. More at London's Daily Mail, "Baby on board! Blooming Jessica Simpson's romantic Hawaiian getaway as she puts Weight Watchers diet on hold."

Thanks Democrats: Sluggish Economic Growth Locked-In for 2013

At IBD, "Economy 2013: Mediocre Growth Will Be the New Good":

Next year may be when Americans stop waiting for faster economic growth to make everything better again and finally learn to accept the current modest pace as good enough now and good enough later.

Even if lawmakers reach a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff's full impact, tax rates will still go up for many Americans, and government spending will go down.

Incomes, which have seen little growth during the recovery, are unlikely to start shooting higher. Aging consumers haven't regained their lost net worth and aren't ready to load up on new debt.

"It's a very different economy than what we've seen in the last 20 to 30 years," said Steve Blitz, chief economist at ITG Investment Research.

Gross domestic product has expanded at an average rate of just over 2% a year since the recession ended, and many economists expect more of the same in 2013.

That assumes a fiscal cliff deal. But the chances of a pact before year-end are now looking increasingly bleak, and a prolonged standoff could deal another blow to the fragile economy. The U.S. could fall back into recession, the Congressional Budget Office has said.

Even without a "cliff" shock, the National Association for Business Economics, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Monetary Fund all see 2013 growth at or just above 2%.

ITG's Blitz also thinks the U.S. will expand by about 2%, with some positive momentum in housing but not much improvement in consumer spending.

"What the economy is not going to do is accelerate toward the trend path where we were pre-recession," he said. "We're not going to make up that lost ground."

More at that top link.

While I think both parties suck, it's definitely the Democrats who're by design seeking to hold the economy back by punishing wealthy high-achievers in the name of social justice. Even far-left hack Jamelle Bouie admits it, "Why Democrats insist on upper-income tax hikes."

Fiscal Cliff Dive Would Impose Steadily Increasing Pain and Hardship

At the New York Times, "Fiscal Cutoff Gradually Morphs Into Horizon":

Negotiations are set to resume in the coming days, following a break for Christmas, although hopes for a so-called grand bargain have faded. Instead, President Obama is pushing for a scaled-back plan that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts on incomes below $250,000, while suspending the automatic spending cuts and extending unemployment benefits.

Michelle Meyer, senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said there is a 40 percent chance of what she calls a “bungee-jump over the fiscal cliff,” with Congress failing to act until after Jan. 1 but eventually averting the full package of tax increases and spending cuts by mid-January. If that were to happen, she predicts a steep sell-off on Wall Street, which would quickly force political leaders to compromise.

Over all, Ms. Meyer estimates that the economy will grow by just 1 percent in the first quarter of 2013, well below the 3.1 percent pace recorded in the third quarter of 2012.

What’s worrisome, she added, is that consumer anxiety about the fiscal impasse has begun to mount, catching up with business leaders who have been warning of economic danger since summer. “What’s been missing in this recovery has been confidence,” she said. “We’d see a healthy recovery if it weren’t for this uncertainty and the potential shock from Washington.”

Indeed, the economy has been showing signs of life recently. Unemployment in November sank to 7.7 percent, a four-year low. Consumer spending has been picking up, and the housing market has continued to recover in many parts of the country. Overseas worries like slowing growth in China and recession in Europe have also faded.

Those trends have encouraged some observers, like Steve Blitz, chief economist at ITG Investment Research. He estimates that the economy will grow by nearly 2.5 percent in the first quarter if Washington comes up with even a modest compromise. In the absence of a deal, the pace of growth would be more like 1 percent, he said.

“I don’t think that not having a deal going into the new year is all that critical,” Mr. Blitz said. “It doesn’t mean you will immediately go into a recession.”

RTWT at the link.

And that's Maria Bartiromo at the clip, mercilessly hammering the befuddled Democrat Senator Ben Cardin, via Eliana Johnson at National Review, "Maria Bartiromo Lays the Smackdown on Ben Cardin, Trading Floor Erupts in Cheers."

And see Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "Democrats Can’t Avoid Fiscal Cliff Blame."

Just a Bunch of Bloggers Get NBC's David Gregory in Whole Heap o' Trouble

Here's the background with video, "NBC's David Gregory Under Investigation by Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police."

And here's William Jacobson, "D.C. Police — NBC requested and was denied permission to use high capacity magazine in news segment." (Via Memeorandum, where just a whole lot more bloggers are also reporting.)

Laws are for little people, I guess. But I wonder, is that really a "planned vacation" for Gregory next Sunday? He won't be hosting "Meet the Press." Arrest the f-ker, I say. He and his producers should be prosecuted.

Polish Historians and Nazi Germany's Final Solution

An outstanding review article from Timothy Snyder, at the New York Review, "Hitler’s Logical Holocaust." The Polish historians cited offer a fascinating --- and sometimes surprising, considering how much has been written --- interpretation of the fate of European Jewry:

To attempt to realize the program of Mein Kampf, Hitler needed to win power in Germany, to destroy Germany as a republic, and to fight a war against the USSR. As Edouard Husson notes in his book on Heinrich Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, the Great Depression made it possible for Hitler to win elections and begin his transformation of Germany and the world. In Hitler’s Germany after 1933, the state was no longer a monopolist of violence, in Max Weber’s well-known definition. It became instead an entrepreneur of violence, using violence abroad—terror in the Soviet Union, assassinations of German officials by Jews—to justify the violence at home that was in fact organized by German institutions. Hitler then used the alleged threat of domestic instability to justify the creation of ever more repressive institutions.

For most of the 1930s Hitler maintained the pose that his foreign policy was nothing more than the classic Balkan one, the gathering in of fellow nationals along with their land. This was the justification given for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria in 1938. But in fact, as Husson shows, the takeover of these countries and destruction of their governments was a trial run for a much larger program of racial colonization further east.

Husson’s method is to follow the career of Heydrich, the director of the internal intelligence service of the SS, and the ideal statesman of this new kind of state.2 The SS, an organ of the Nazi party, was meant to alter the character of the state. It penetrated central institutions, such as the police, imposing a social worldview on their legal functions. The remaking of Germany from within took years. Heydrich understood, as Husson shows, that the destruction of neighboring states permitted a much more rapid transformation. If all political institutions were destroyed and the previous legal order simply obliterated, Heydrich’s organizations could operate much more effectively.

In particular, the destruction of states permitted a much more radical approach to what the Nazis regarded as the Jewish “problem,” a policy that Heydrich was eager to claim as his own. In Germany, Jews were stripped of civil rights and put under pressure to emigrate. After Germany seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, its Jews fled or were expelled. When Austria was incorporated into Germany, Heydrich’s subordinate Adolf Eichmann created there an office of “emigration” that quickly stripped Jews of their property as they fled anti-Semitic violence.

Historians tend to see World War II from two perspectives: one as the battlefield history of the campaigns by, and against, Germany; the other as the destruction of European Jews. As Hannah Arendt suggested long ago, these two stories are in fact one. Part of Hitler’s success lay in denigrating international institutions such as the League of Nations and persuading the other powers to allow his aggression in Czechoslovakia and Austria. As Bloxham stresses, the weakness of the Western powers meant that the fate of citizens, above all Jewish citizens, depended upon the actions (and existence) of states. The Evian Conference of 1938 demonstrated that no important state wanted to take Europe’s Jews.

Hitler, as Husson observes, apparently believed that, in the absence of American willingness to accept European Jews, European powers should ship them to Madagascar. The island was being considered as a place for Jews by Polish authorities at the time, though as a possible site for a voluntary rather than involuntary emigration. Husson writes that Hitler seemed to believe until early 1939 that Germany and Poland could cooperate in some sort of forced deportation to the island. Poland lay between Germany and the Soviet Union, and was home to three million Jews, more than ten times as many as Germany. Hitler, who wished to recruit Poland into a common anti-Communist crusade, presumably imagined that this deportation would take place during a joint German and Polish invasion of the Soviet Union.

Because Poland refused any alliance with Nazi Germany in the spring of 1939, Hitler made a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union against Poland. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 sealed the fate of the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish nation-states, and it was particularly significant for their Jewish citizens. The joint invasion of Poland by both German and Soviet forces in September 1939 meant that Poland, rather than becoming some sort of junior partner to Nazi Germany, was destroyed as a political entity. Unlike Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland fought the Germans, but it was defeated. Poland therefore offered a new opportunity for Heydrich, because its armed resistance created the possibility to initiate mass murder under cover of war.

Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were ordered to destroy the educated Polish population. Poland was now to be removed from the map, its society politically decapitated. The destruction of the Polish state and the murder of tens of thousands of Polish elites in 1939 did not destroy Polish political life or end Polish resistance. Auschwitz, established in 1940 as a concentration camp for Poles, also failed in this regard. The Germans murdered at least one million non-Jewish Poles during the occupation, but Polish resistance continued and in fact grew.

Nor did the destruction of the Polish state provide an obvious way to resolve what Hitler and Heydrich saw as the Jewish “problem.” At first Heydrich wanted a “Jewish reservation” established in occupied Poland, but this would have done no more than move Jews from some parts of the German empire to others. In early 1940 Heydrich’s subordinate Eichmann asked the Soviets—still German allies—if they would take two million Polish Jews; this was predictably refused. In the summer of 1940, after Germany had defeated France, Hitler, the German Foreign Office, and Heydrich returned to the idea of a deportation to Madagascar, a French colonial possession. Hitler wrongly assumed that Great Britain would make peace, and allow the Germans to carry out maritime deportations of Jews.

The Final Solution as applied to Poland’s Jews would thus take place in Poland, but it was still not clear, as 1940 came to an end, just what it would be. As Andrea Löw and Markus Roth remind us in their fine study of Jewish life and death in Kraków, Polish Jews were not simply impersonal objects of an evolving German policy of destruction. Kraków’s Jews, like those of Poland generally, had been organized under Polish law into a local commune (kehilla or gmina) that enjoyed collective rights. It was this institution that the Germans perverted by the establishment of the Judenräte, or Jewish councils responsible for carrying out German orders. Despite a few anti-Semitic laws in the late 1930s, Poland’s Jews were equal citizens of the republic.

When the republic was destroyed, German anti-Semitic legislation could immediately be imposed. German expulsions of Jews from their homes, which would have been an unthinkable violation of property rights in Poland, demonstrated that Jewish property was for the taking. The Germans themselves seized bank accounts, automobiles, and even bicycles. Pending some future deportation, the Jews of Kraków were held in a ghetto where they suffered from lawlessness, exploitation, misery, and death from disease and hunger. But this was not yet a Holocaust.

Continue reading.

PHOTO: "Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reich Protektor of Bohemia and Moravia, who was responsible, according to an order signed by Hermann Göring in July 1941, for organizing ‘a general solution of the Jewish question throughout the German sphere of influence in Europe’."

NFL Cheerleaders Celebrate Christmas

At Gunaxin.

Cool clickable slideshows at that link.

"This is about what you can expect on NFL sidelines this weekend. Enjoy."

For sure.

More at Proof Positive.

'It was really awkward because he kept telling me that I was the perfect girl for him, but that a low credit score was his deal-breaker...'

Times have changed, I guess. My credit was shot when I met my future wife. And I was working minimum wage and driving a beaten down Toyota 2x4 pickup. I had a smokin' hot physique back in the day, so I guess that explains it.

In any case, a great piece at the New York Times, "Perfect 10? Never Mind That. Ask Her for Her Credit Score":

As she nibbled on strawberry shortcake, Jessica LaShawn, a flight attendant from Chicago, tried not to get ahead of herself and imagine this first date turning into another and another, and maybe, at some point, a glimmering diamond ring and happily ever after.

She simply couldn’t help it, though. After all, he was tall, from a religious family, raised by his grandparents just as she was, worked in finance and even had great teeth.

Her musings were suddenly interrupted when her date asked a decidedly unromantic question: “What’s your credit score?”

“It was as if the music stopped,” Ms. LaShawn, 31, said, recalling how the date this year went so wrong so quickly after she tried to answer his question honestly. “It was really awkward because he kept telling me that I was the perfect girl for him, but that a low credit score was his deal-breaker.”

The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates.

It’s so widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared interests and physical chemistry. That’s according to interviews with more than 50 daters across the country, all under the age of 40.

“Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”

Actually, Ms. LaShawn has some pretty great teeth --- and then some.

RTWT at that top link.

Added: I can't resist adding this passage:

Lauren Dollard, a 26-year-old assistant at a nonprofit in Houston, said her low credit score had helped to stall her romantic plans. Her boyfriend is wary of marrying her until she can significantly pay down the more than $150,000 she owes in student loans and bolster her credit score, she said.

I personally wouldn't marry someone who ran up that much in college debt. The numbers I read about in student loan debt these days are literally obscene. No one should ever take out that much debt for any kind of degree, any kind, including an attorney, doctor, or whatever. You start out your professional life in financial bondage. Talk about a higher education bubble. Oh brother...

And the Biggest Lie of 2012 Is ...

The Benghazi clusterf-k, highlighted by Aaron Klein:

JERUSALEM – Information surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. mission in Benghazi has been so distorted by the Obama administration and so misreported by the news media that the issue was selected as WND’s “Biggest Lie of the Year.”

Immediately following the attacks, President Obama and other White House officials notoriously blamed supposed anti-American sentiment leading to the violent events on an obscure anti-Muhammad video on YouTube they claimed was responsible for supposedly popular civilian protests that they said took place outside the U.S. mission in Benghazi – protests, they claimed, that devolved into a jihadist onslaught.

However, vivid accounts provided by the State Department and intelligence officials later made clear no such popular demonstration took place. Instead, video footage from Benghazi reportedly shows an organized group of armed men attacking the compound, the officials said.

‘Consulate’?

Media coverage of the events has been so dismal that even the most basic understanding of what happened is being distorted. The vast majority of all news media coverage worldwide refer to the U.S. facility that was attacked as a “consulate,” even though the government itself has been careful to call it a “mission.”

WND has filed numerous reports quoting Middle East security sources describing the mission in Benghazi as serving as a meeting place to coordinate aid for the rebel-led insurgencies in the Middle East.

Among the tasks performed inside the building was collaborating with Arab countries on the recruitment of fighters – including jihadists – to target Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the officials said.

Whether the news media report on what was allegedly transpiring at the mission or not, their calling the building a “consulate” is misleading.

A consulate typically refers to the building that officially houses a consul, who is the official representatives of the government of one state in the territory of another. The U.S. consul in Libya, Jenny Cordell, works out of the embassy in Tripoli.

Consulates at times function as junior embassies, providing services related to visas, passports and citizen information.

On Aug. 26, about two weeks before his was killed, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens attended a ceremony marking the opening of consular services at the Tripoli embassy.

The main role of a consulate is to foster trade with the host and care for its own citizens who are traveling or living in the host nation.

Diplomatic missions, on the other hand, maintain a more generalized role. A diplomatic mission is simply a group of people from one state or an international inter-governmental organization present in another state to represent matters of the sending state or organization in the receiving state.

However, according to a State Department report released last week, the U.S. facility in Benghazi did not fit the profile of a diplomatic mission, either.

According to the 39-page report released this week by independent investigators probing the attacks at the diplomatic facility, the U.S. mission in Benghazi was set up without the knowledge of the new Libyan government, as WND reported.

“Another key driver behind the weak security platform in Benghazi was the decision to treat Benghazi as a temporary, residential facility, not officially notified to the host government, even though it was also a full-time office facility,” the report states. “This resulted in the Special Mission compound being excepted from office facility standards and accountability under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999 (SECCA) and the Overseas Security Policy Board (OSPB).”

The report, based on a probe led by former U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering, calls the facility a “Special U.S. Mission.”

The report further refers to the attacked facility as a “U.S. Special Mission,” adding yet another qualifier to the title of the building.

Violated international law?

WND also exclusively reported the facility may have violated the terms of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which governs the establishment of overseas missions.

Like most nations, the U.S. is a signatory to the 1961 United Nations convention.

Article 2 of the convention makes clear the host government must be informed about the establishment of any permanent foreign mission on its soil: “The establishment of diplomatic relations between States, and of permanent diplomatic missions, takes place by mutual consent.”

According to the State report, there was a decision “to treat Benghazi as a temporary, residential facility,” likely disqualifying the building from permanent mission status if the mission was indeed temporary.

However, the same sentence in the report notes the host government was not notified about the Benghazi mission “even though it was also a full-time office facility.”

Article 12 of the Vienna Convention dictates, “The sending State may not, without the prior express consent of the receiving State, establish offices forming part of the mission in localities other than those in which the mission itself is established.”

If the Benghazi mission was a “full-time office facility,” it may violate Article 12 in that the mission most likely was considered an arm of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, which served as the main U.S. mission to Libya...

Continue reading.

Image Credit: Posted exactly two months ago, via A.F. Branco, "Blockbuster Report Contradicts Panetta's Claim of 'No Real-Time Intel' During Libya Attack."

The Battle of Trenton

I've forgotten how I got going on this, but I was reading all about George Washington's military leadership on Wikipedia the other day, and since it's the anniversary of the battle, it's especially worth your time.

The secret attack started with the crossing of the Delaware River, captured for the ages in the famous painting from Emanuel Leutze's, "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

Is Hate a Liberal Value? Reflections on Newtown

From Glenn Reynolds, at USA Today:

1. When Twenty Minutes Is Forever. According to the CNN timeline for the Sandy Hook tragedy, "Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls." Twenty minutes. Five minutes is forever when violence is underway, but 20 minutes -- a third of an hour -- means that the "first responders" aren't likely to do much more than clean up the mess.

This has led to calls -- in Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, St. Louis -- for armed officers or staff at schools. Some object. But we have people with guns protecting airports, hospitals and politicians. And leading anti-gun crusaders like New York's billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg and press lord Rupert Murdoch are protected by armed security teams that could probably topple some third-world governments. Why are our children less worthy of protection?

Then there are our homes. If police took twenty minutes to respond at a school, how likely are they to get to your house in time? For those of us without "security teams," the answer isn't reassuring.

2. Is Hate A Liberal Value? A 20-year-old lunatic stole some guns and killed people. Who's to blame? According to a lot of our supposedly rational and tolerant opinion leaders, it's . . . the NRA, a civil-rights organization whose only crime was to oppose laws banning guns. (Ironically, it wasn't even successful in Connecticut, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.)

The hatred was intense. One Rhode Island professor issued a call -- later deleted -- for NRA head Wayne LaPierre's "head on a stick." People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a "terrorist organization," and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a "terror baby."

Nor were reporters, who are supposed to be neutral, much better. As The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg commented, "Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever. "

Well, left-wing "tolerance" at work. Continue reading at that top link.

PREVIOUSLY: "Erik Loomis' Twitter Timeline Available Dating Back to June 2012."

Lacey Banghard Tweets Year-End 'Page 3' Group Photo

She tweeted this out on Christmas Eve, perhaps as a nice gift for followers in Twitter: "The girls and I on Page 3."

FLASHBACK: "Lacey Banghard Topless Zoo Photo Outtakes September 2012," and "Lacey Banghard Never-Ending L.A. Summer."

NBC's David Gregory Under Investigation by Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police

Wiilliam Jacobson has been all over this story, "NBC News stonewalls inquiries regarding David Gregory and “active investigation” by D.C. Police":

As previously reported, last Sunday David Gregory held up what he described as high capacity AR-15 ammunition magazine, which would violate the District of Columbia’s gun law if the magazine were real.

My multiple attempts last Sunday to obtain a response from NBC News as to whether the magazine was real were met with stone cold silence. None of the three senior communications executives with responsibility for Meet the Press responded.

Now there is news via Breitbart.com (h/t Drudge) that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is investigating.

I spoke with Officer Alali, the spokesman on duty today at the MPD, who refused any further comment except to confirm that there is an “active investigation.”

It may be even worse for Gregory and NBC News. According to an e-mail received by The Patriots Perspective website, which originally broke the Gregory story, NBC News had inquired whether it was permitted to use the magazine and was told that it was not permitted. The authenticity of the email has not been verified.

More at the link.

And following it, here's Warner Todd Huston, at Big Journalism, "DC Police Investigating NBC's Gregory for Brandishing Illegal Magazine." Also at Patriot Perspective, "David Gregory Violated DC Gun Laws After Being Denied By DC Police?"

And here's a kicker, at the Weekly Standard, "W.H. Petition: 'Press Charges Against David Gregory' for Breaking D.C. Gun Laws." (Via Memeorandum.)

'So Depressing and Communist!'

It's Milla Jovovich on Twitter:

Awww! Found this old baby pic if me from Russia in the 70's! So depressing n communist! Too cute! instagr.am/p/TpFRbkTMqd/
— Milla Jovovich (@MillaJovovich) December 25, 2012

And see London's Daily Mail, "Milla Jovovich shares adorable childhood picture from her days in Russia."

Amazing, isn't it?

Beautiful immigrants like Ms. Jovovich move to America to be free of communist oppression. And the damned progressives are doing their absolute best to foster and promote that same communist oppression right here at home.

Sigh...

When the immigrants stop coming, and they will, you'll know it's all over. The American dream will be over.

RELATED: "Stunning Picture of Milla Jovovich."

Netanyahu's Christmas Greeting 2012

Via Linkmaster Smith:

No Room for Seconds

Everything turned out just perfect, via Twitter.

I think we have some pumpkin pie in the fridge, but that's going to wait until later tonight, way later.

Science Gifts

At the New York Times, "Gifts That Keep Giving (if Not Exploding)":

Ask scientists of a certain age about their childhood memories, and odds are they’ll start yarning about the stink bombs and gunpowder they concocted with their chemistry sets. Dangerous? Yes, but fun.

“Admittedly, I have blown some things up in my time,” said William L. Whittaker, 64, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who unearthed his first chemistry set, an A. C. Gilbert, in a junkyard around age 8. By 16, he was dabbling in advanced explosives. “There’s no question that I burned some skin off my face,” he recalled.

Under today’s Christmas tree, girls and boys will unwrap science toys of a very different ilk: slime-making kits and perfume labs, vials of a fluff-making polymer called Insta-Snow, “no-chem” chemistry sets (chemical free!), plus a dazzling array of modern telescopes, microscopes and D.I.Y. volcanoes. Nothing in these gifts will set the curtains on fire.

“Basically, you have to be able to eat everything in the science kit,” said Jim Becker, president of SmartLab Toys, who recalled learning the names of chemicals from his childhood chemistry set, which contained substances that have long since been banned from toys.

Some scientists lament the passing of the trial-and-error days that inspired so many careers. “Science kits are a lot less open-ended these days,” said Kimberly Gerson, a science blogger who lives outside Toronto. “Everything is packaged. It’s either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If you don’t get the right result, you’ve done it wrong and you’re out of chemicals.”

Others, though, say the new crop of science toys — even with their cartoonish packaging and heavy emphasis on neon goo — actually represent progress. More entertaining, educational and accessible than earlier products, which relied heavily on a child’s inner motivation, these toys may actually help democratize the learning of science and introduce children to scientific methods and concepts at an earlier age.

“I grew up in the 1960s, and a lot of the chemistry sets were kind of boring,” said William Gurstelle, a science and technology writer. “You’d go through the book, and at the end of the experiment you’d get some light precipitate at the bottom of the beaker. Maybe at most it changes color or something.”

Mr. Gurstelle’s books, which include “Whoosh Boom Splat” and “Backyard Ballistics,” teach people how to make dangerous projectiles, like a potato cannon that uses hair spray as launching fluid. But he had high praise for commercial science kits, which show children (among other things) how to make slime.

“Well, that’s a pretty cool thing to have when you’re done,” Mr. Gurstelle said. “You’re not going to really learn to be a chemist from a chemistry set when you’re in seventh grade; you’re just going to be inspired. The point is that new chemistry sets and new toys are just better, because the manufacturers have figured out how to make them more fun.”

More at that top link.