TigerHawk

Yesterday's previously advertised anti-tax "tea party" in Morristown was apparently a big success. I'm sorry that I was out of driving range. Glenn Reynolds has a big round-up of tea party demonstrations around the country.

Asked by a Russian reporter what he does not like about himself, Barack Obama offers up his "golf swing." Everybody say at the same time, "can you imagine if George Bush had said that?" Yes, we can. It will be interesting to see whether Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert pick up on this little unguarded "let them eat cake" moment. What about all those unemployed Americans who have had to give up golf because they cannot afford the greens fees, Mr. President?

The question, of course, is whether Barack Obama really dislikes his golf swing more than any other trait, or whether he was deploying the traditional politician's white lie to avoid confessing a substantive shortcoming. If the former, then it is safe to say that our president does not understand himself, or even try to, which is always dangerous. If the latter, then, well, so be it, but let us hear from all the journalists out there who were so eager for George W. Bush to admit his failings.

The second man to walk on the moon still says and does interesting things. Among other things, he takes issue with the climate alarmists, but read it all.

CWCID: Watts Up With That.

I hope everybody out there had a relaxing Fourth of July. Mine was filled with wine and song -- no women, other than the TH Daughter, who accompanied me up to our place in the Adirondacks. I spent the last two days hiking, drinking and shooting the breeze with various of my many cousins (of different degrees of consanguinity), and the TH Daughter did the same, but without the drinking part. That accounts for my absence yesterday.

Back to Sunday morning inbox items. My company sells instruments for surgery, so I have a passing interest in surgical instrument arcana (for instance). Check out this fascinating gallery of "old school" surgical instruments, if for no other reason than to learn the origin of the expression "to blow smoke up one's ass."

Friendly observation that one of the data sets used to measure average global temperature reports an anomaly for June 2009 of... zero (meaning that in June, at least, average global temperature was not above the baseline used to measure warming). The long term trend line remains intact at 0.13C per decade (one degree Celsius every 70 years or so), a small fraction of the rate required to produce the catastrophic outcomes forecast by the alarmists.

A reader emails a farookin' brilliant idea that the Christie campaign ought to adopt immediately:

[T]he Christie campaign should book some NJ stadium for a Christie rally and invite Palin on the day Obama is scheduled to show up in the state for Corzine. Hire a hard rock bands get a NJ repulican rally going.

Sarah Palin is apparently stepping down from her perch atop America's largest state. We do not yet know what she will do, other than to "focus on her presidential run"; speculation over same will undoubtedly consume both sides of the political blogosphere for the next Memeorandum cycle at least.

I, for one, hope she is going to use the extra time to bone up, as it were. If she is going to do anything for the Republican party, she simply has to get a lot more agile in a pinch. No amount of practice will get her there without a lot of book learning to back it up. Superficiality does not cut the mustard.

MORE: John Hawkins adds his reasons to the mix, generally concluding that it does not make political sense for Palin to resign before the end of her term. I dunno. People forget how far away Alaska is; the distance from Seattle to Anchorage is 1,500 miles, or half again the width of the lower 48. It would not be easy for Palin both to do her job in the state and go on the stump for other Republicans, especially with the neanderfeminists on the left attacking her judgment as a mother.

Instant Instapundit round-up here.

Allegedly, this hilarious Dutch fireworks safety PSA was banned on account of being "controversial." If true, a shame. If you cannot mock your enemies, who can you mock? Spike Jones must be rolling in his grave.

CWCID: JammieWearingFool.

An advertising agency has taken it upon itself to use the power of crowds to help rebrand the Republican party:

Our eight week (more or less) mission: To help the Republican Party find its way in these troubled times. For the record, we're not Republicans OR Democrats, and the G.O.P. is NOT a client of ours.

We're Story Worldwide, the world's first Post-Advertising agency, and we do this kind of thing for major brands all the time. The difference: This time we're asking YOU to help us because, hey, it's your country.

We intend this to be a fun social experiment. Just be thoughtful and helpful: No bashing, no flaming. Comment often, come back to see progress, tell your friends. Together, we can heal the elephant.

Cassandra is right, this is wrong. Very, very, wrong. And maybe it is a gender thing, but I'm going to say that the python trick is even more wrong than the squirrel cleavage.

I'm off to the Adirondacks for the weekend. No fear, I have a raft of scheduled posts that should keep the front page fresh at least through today. Tomorrow and Sunday will be catch as catch can, unless the spirit moves me. Have a great Fourth!

With any luck, I'll wake up tomorrow morning to a view like this...

Our family doctor, who lives in Princeton but practices in a more politically normal town to the north, is a vocal conservative and delighted to make his views known to his patients. Last fall, at least one of his examination rooms had a McCain/Palin sign on the door. Talk about your captive audience.

Anyway, I had occasion to visit his office yesterday afternoon, and on my way out noticed that he had given over valuable counter space to a flier for a "tea party" in Morristown on the Fourth. I will be in the Adirondacks and therefore unable to attend, but here's the information in case you are within driving range and want to make yourself heard. If any of you go, email me pictures and I'll put them up.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson received a letter in a cipher that has only just been broken (by, as it happens, a cryptographer in a government facility not a mile from my house). Turned out it was a joke, albeit a respectful one.

CWCID: Volokh.

Foreign Policy has published its 2009 "failed states index." Sort of the geopolitical "epic fail" hall of shame.

A really spectacular gallery of photographs of American soldiers in Afghanistan, from earlier today.

CWCID: Good Sh!t (main page decidedly NSFW).

Wikio seems to have leaked its latest rankings of political blogs, and this very blog -- yes, the eponymous TigerHawk -- is 77th on its list. That's higher than I would have expected by, well, an order of magnitude, what with the great many political blogs loose in the world. We blush, and wonder if the algorithm is not in some way cocked up.

Congressional junketeering has surged by 50% since the voters bestowed control of the Congress on the Donks. Blog reax here. Righty bloggers seem to assume this is just par for the course, another moment for snark, and that it is. I wonder, though, whether there is not also a cultural aspect in this. Democrats, in general, care a lot more about foreign countries and foreigners than Republicans do. Democrats care especially what foreigners think of them. That is why Barack Obama's promise, now sounding a bit hollow, to rebuild the popularity of the United States abroad resonated with lefty voters more than righty ones: Lefty voters actually feel the need to explain themselves to foreign friends. Righty voters much less frequently have foreign friends, and when they do they certainly do not feel the need to explain themselves.

Generalizing here, but in your heart your know I'm right.

If you want honest advice from your generals, it is best not have your minions tell them that you will be irritated if you get it.

If there are any reporters out there with both testicular imperative and access to the White House, Andy McCarthy has a question:

Will no one ask about why we have released an Iran-backed terrorist who is responsible for the 2007 abduction/murder of our troops (five murdered, four of them after being kidnapped) in Karbala?

The unemployment rate is at 9.5%, the highest it has been since August 1983, the summer after I graduated from college. I was between Princeton and law school, and found a job selling something called The International Directory of Software over the telephone to "data processing centers" around the country. My classmates who were looking for real jobs that year generally got slaughtered, unless they were engineers. We've been running scared ever since, especially compared to people who graduated during the boom that followed.

I wonder what effect this economy will have on today's graduating seniors? I bet they learn to be very competitive and aggressive and that those habits stick with them for the rest of their careers. The college class of 2009 is going to have it rough, but that will make them tough.

Every politician stacks the audience at his rallies with friends prepped with planted questions -- remember when Hillary thought Iowans would fall for that? -- but this seems like an unusually cynical example. One is forced to wonder when people are going to suspect they're being had. Perhaps the eruption of Helen Thomas yesterday -- and, seriously, I cannot believe I'm citing her for anything -- is evidence that the state media organizations are getting restive.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

A friend of mine just came back from a cruise in Alaska and sent me this photo of an eagle on a glacier with cliffs in the background. More a glacier picture than an eagle picture, but still something. And you can see why people who go to Alaska come back agog.

A few years ago my total cholesterol got a bit high, and my doctor (a TigerHawk reader, in fact) put me on a statin (Vytorin, the combination of Zetia and Zocor). I did not, in my heart of hearts, believe that I needed it, because my HDL number was a high proportion of the total (a trait that runs in my family) and, besides, I do not really have cardiovascular problems in my background. In my family, we get cancer young or live to a ripe old age.

That said, I went on Vytorin anyway because I had read that statins were thought to confer protective benefits beyond the mere reduction in the production or absorption of cholesterol. It increasingly appears that was the right decision.

Any physicians out there who want to take the other side?

Over the last generation or so American courts have been increasingly unwilling to recognize the defense of "assumption of the risk" in torts cases, at least where the assumption is implicit rather than explicit. Presumably, however, the defense would still apply if a passenger got injured on this cruise. Because, you know, the risk is fairly obvious.

I can state with no equivocation that if the nanny state bans NyQuil my personal productivity will decline enough to damage GDP. NyQuil is a great product, and without it I would not have been able to sleep through last night, for example (seized as I am of a fairly intense and intractible summer cold).

In light of this article in this morning's Wall Street Journal, this seems like a very poorly timed book.

For your lunch time consideration, the "top 10 manly movie deaths." May I respectfully suggest that any list that includes Optimus Prime from the original Transformers ought also to have included Mufasa from The Lion King. And how do you miss Russell Crowe's Maximus? Post your nominees in the comments.

CWCID: Conservative Grapevine, which always has lots of fun stuff.

A professor at Case Western has data -- graphs with trend lines -- that purport to show that Americans are starting fewer businesses than they used to do. He attributes it to the greater efficiency and competitiveness of massive organizations such as Wal-Mart.

Maybe. Or perhaps Americans are starting fewer businesses because our local, state and federal governments, in a thousand little steps, have increased the risks and lowered the rewards. When (to pick one obvious example) you massively increase the financial and managerial cost of simply being a public company, you have effectively lowered the exit returns for start-up investors and therefore raised the hurdle necessary to attract the financing to found the business in the first place.

The only way we are going to turn the American economy around and pay off all this debt is to make it systematically easier to start and run businesses. There is no other option. Unfortunately, most American governments, including virtually all the larger ones, are doing precisely the opposite.

Hope is not a strategy:

In the weeks just before President Obama took office, his economic advisers made a mistake. They got a little carried away with hope.

To make the case for a big stimulus package, they released their economic forecast for the next few years. Without the stimulus, they saw the unemployment rate — then 7.2 percent — rising above 8 percent in 2009 and peaking at 9 percent next year. With the stimulus, the advisers said, unemployment would probably peak at 8 percent late this year.

We now know that this forecast was terribly optimistic. The jobless rate has already reached 9.4 percent. On Thursday, the Labor Department will announce the latest number, for June, and forecasters are expecting it to rise further. In concrete terms, the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice.

If you live between an ocean and the mountains or maybe on a Great Lake, there is a very good chance that your state government is a freakshow. But is it worse than New York's? There's your acid test:

The latest attempt to break the State Senate’s three-week-old stalemate began with a quest for caffeine.

Shortly before noon on Tuesday, as Democrats prepared to convene what they expected to be another fruitless one-party session, they saw Frank Padavan, a Queens Republican, walk through the rear of the chamber.

Mr. Padavan would later say he had simply been taking a shortcut to the members’ lounge to grab a cup of coffee. But to the 31 Democrats in the chamber, that did not matter. Claiming that Mr. Padavan’s brief presence gave them the 32-member quorum required to gavel the Senate into session, Democrats began ramming through dozens of measures, including sales tax extensions and bond authorizations that were set to expire at midnight.

By the time the Democrats adjourned, Mr. Padavan’s coffee run had thrust the Capitol into a new round of recriminations and legal debate. Democrats insisted that the bills had been lawfully passed, Republicans denounced the session as fraudulent and inappropriate, and Gov. David A. Paterson suggested that he would not sign the bills into law.

Ralph Peters' column on victory in Iraq is a balm for those of us who did and do support the American effort there, and it has some great red meat besides:

We all recall the delighted leftist claims that Iraq had entered a hopeless civil war. Wrong. That Iraqis preferred al Qaeda to us. Wrong. That Shia militias represented the people. Wrong. And that Iran would seize control. Wrong again.

Looking back over six years of good intentions, tragic errors, generosity, arrogance, partisan vituperation, painful deaths and ultimate vindication, two things strike me: the ever-resisted lesson that human affairs are more complex than academic theories claim, and the simple truth that most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to immeasurable repression.

Perhaps it is because I was raised in Iowa, or maybe it is the old school WASP in me. Either way, I open doors for people, regardless of their gender, age, physical capacity, or sexual orientation, if I get to the door first. Sometimes people smile and say thank you, sometimes not. I do not resent it when people do not thank me, however, because I do it as much out of habit as to relieve them of the door-opening burden.

That said, my opening of the door for you does not explicitly or implicitly authorize you to enter the line in front of me and order six differently mixed lattes and an assortment of pastries for the gang at your morning meeting. Protocol in most parts of the country -- not the greater New York area, perhaps, but just about everywhere else -- calls for you to invite me to order my grande non-fat no-whip mocha ahead of you. Capiche?

Notwithstanding my own poor talents, I do not want to ignore those many TigerHawk readers who are handy around the house and garage. Behold, Amazon's massive sale on air-powered tools. A bit arcane, to be sure, but deals to be had nonetheless.

A photographic history of the bikini, with explanatory notes.