Redstate

Posted at 8:42am on Jul. 3, 2008 Hunt Oil, Kurdistan, CBS, Waxman and State Dept.

By kowalski

This morning CBS/Politico are running a very tersely worded and rhetorically loaded little story [HT Drudge] about the oil deal between Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government, consummated in 2007.

It look and reads like they're trying to use it to show the President was somehow negligent in his oversight of the deal, and then insinuate that it has caused problems in the Iraqi oil-sharing agreement process. Side note: they say that the deal "complicated negotiations" for an oil-sharing agreement. And...so what...does that mean? Anything can complicate the process of a negotiation as complex as the Iraqi oil-sharing agreement, but that doesn't necessarily mean those complications are intrinsically wrong, or undesirable. But I digress...

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Posted at 5:55pm on Jun. 10, 2008 Thank you to Erick

By kowalski

Thank you to Erick and everyone else at Redstate and The Minority Report for the mention.

Since they've been so generous, I'll keep it short and sweet: Our business is direct mail and printing at the best prices in the country, and we do it here in --- Massachusetts. Astonishing, I know! [Clarification: although we're based in Massachusetts, our clients are nationwide and our largest jobs are nationwide mailings.]

Posted in Economy — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:24am on Jun. 10, 2008 Slate Magazine Celebrates Che Guevara's Birthday

By kowalski

Briefly noted in the media:

[Update: Actually his birthday is June 14. Slate is really building up to the party by celebrating it a few days in advance.]

For those of you who hadn't realized it, today is Che Guevara's birthday. Slate Magazine is celebrating it on their home page and in their "Today's Pictures" section with a big: "Happy Birthday Che!" The pictures are generally flattering to the mass-murdering Communist.

Posted in Endorsements — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:31pm on Jun. 4, 2008 Clinton to Concede on Friday

By kowalski

Drudge is running the teaser from ABC that Clinton is to concede on Friday. Of course, everyone knows this is the time lag between certain defeat and finding a way to make sure that all of her long-bought (with other people's money) friends will still keep feeding at the public trough. Largesse must be maintained. And at this point the Clintons are also looking for good ways to get the $30 million dollars back without offending any of their big supporters. That's why she didn't concede last night.

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Posted at 5:52pm on Jun. 2, 2008 Kennedy's Surgery Successful

By kowalski

Well, the evidence is that prayer doesn't work much in terms of affecting brain tumors, so I'm not surprised that nobody had much to say about prayer in the articles today. But the surgical resection at Duke University apparently went very well and Ted Kennedy is recovering successfully from his brain surgery to remove at least a portion of the aggressive and fatal tumor that is slowly working its way through his nervous system.

Posted in 2008 — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 1:27pm on May 31, 2008 Comrades! Barack Obama People's Graphic Contest!

By kowalski

Comrades!

Thank you all for your participation in General Secretary Absentee's "Obama Gaffes" contest. For those of you who whose creativity was inordinately constrained by the centrally planned theme of that contest, I have created a new thread in which you -- the lifeblood of the Proletariat -- can participate to win prizes that will be awarded (and announced) according to a new meeting of the Central Committee. My offering to the winner will be generous and may include such prizes as a Get-Out-Of-Gulag card, pending Party approval -- and other prizes will be announced as the contest moves forward. The guidelines are essentially the same as these.

Posted in 2008 — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 1:54pm on May 29, 2008 How to Get a Woman

By kowalski

I've been holding off making a serious comment about Scott McClellan's vomitorium of a tell-all, mostly because I've been very busy. But just watching the news about Sex and The City I had a thought about what Mr. McClellan might want to do with the rest of his life.

That movie has made it abundantly clear that the way you get large numbers of women to do anything you want (at least in terms of paying for tickets and $500/oz. popcorn) is to serve them up (quoting the Washington Post) a heapin' helpin' of "romance, melodrama, and fabulous footwear." When Scotty was the Press Secretary, he looked like he was about to pop open and spill his innards all over the White House Press Room on so many occasions that he just became unwatchable to me. The guy looked like he was having serious girl trouble. How nobody in the Administration realized that Scott McClellan gave every outward indication of being a man who was uncomfortable in his job -- actively fighting his own conscience and his own instincts and the often referenced but rarely seen "inner demons" -- completely amazes me. To the extent that gives credence to his allegations about the Administration being out of touch, I'll grant that part in his case. You really, really don't want someone as your Press Secretary who doesn't want the job, someone who telegraphs that as transparently as Scott McClellan did every time the questions got tough.

Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:37pm on May 27, 2008 Landing an Interview at NIF and PPPL

By kowalski

Hi folks:

Most people who have been around on this blog during my time here know that one of my important interests is the development of thermonuclear fusion energy as one of America's true 'alternative' energy sources. I see it as one of the three best, most important sources of central power station energy for the United States and elsewhere in the world in this century, along with conventional fission and exoatmospheric solar power.

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Posted at 8:18pm on May 25, 2008 Phoenix Lands on Mars

By kowalski

The NASA/JPL Phoenix lander has successfully completed EDL (entry, descent and landing) and has landed on the arctic plain of Mars. According to the flight engineers and everyone I'm watching at NASA, the descent went "better than we could have predicted" and the Phoenix touched down with just 1/4th a degree of tilt. As close to a perfect landing as one could imagine after traveling more than 420 million miles, and a thrill to listen to as Phoenix completed each of its "do or die" landing sequence milestones. Big congratulations go out tonight to everyone at NASA JPL, Lockheed Martin, and everywhere else that supported Phoenix.

Read on . . .

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Posted at 4:25pm on May 24, 2008 GM Building Sold to Zuckerman, Qatar, Kuwait

By kowalski

I wish I could put these short things in RedHot because it's just a blurb -- but I think a significant blurb:

The GM Building in Manhattan has been sold by the family that owns it to a group of investors led by Mort Zuckerman (think: New York Daily News) and a group of co-investors from Qatar and Kuwait. At $3.95 billion dollars, it is the highest price ever paid for an American office tower, according to the New York Times.

Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:58am on May 16, 2008 Marx Was Right

By kowalski

Here is the outlook as I see it, folks:

In the 2008 elections, the Republican Party is going to suffer the most sweeping losses in modern history and wind up with a deficit in the House of Representatives of more than 70 seats, and the Senate may be similarly dominated by Democrats.

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Posted at 12:51am on May 13, 2008 I'm naive, so clue me in....

By kowalski

Tonight I'm clicking through and reading about a half-dozen pages on the Internet and one of them was the story about the woman who inadvertently showed up for an Obama rally and after being jilted, ran smack dab into Hillary Clinton: [h/t: Drudge]

Disappointed, she decided instead to go for breakfast - and walked right into Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign stop.

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Posted at 7:43am on May 12, 2008 Congratulations to Jenna Hager and the Family - UPDATED

By kowalski

[Update: I edited this post to reflect the fact that Jenna took Henry's last name, which I had not known for sure when I wrote the post. Obviously I wasn't on the invitation list. So much for the VRWC.]

This is a good time to say congratulations to Jenna Hager and her husband, Henry Hager, and to everyone in the Bush and Hager families for what looks to have been a beautiful and tastefully private wedding yesterday in Texas.

Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:45am on May 7, 2008 The Onion Jumps the Shark

By kowalski

It was bound to happen eventually. The infamous team of depressives over at The Onion (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of MoveOn.Org) has finally produced an offensive parody of the Pope that doesn't really shock anyone, considering the source, and doesn't even make the people who are supposed to get the joke laugh. This comes on the heels of their ONN piece on John McCain and the secret service, the title of which was revised because as originally written, it sounded like McCain was begging for an assassination attempt. For anyone who missed it, the title of that story has changed within the past 36 hours on their website, after what I can only guess was a little afterthought on the part of The Onion's editors. I guess they weren't intersted in a visit from the actual secret service after joking that the Senator was calling for his own assassination.

Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:24pm on May 1, 2008 Wanna see Government in Action (and something sad?)

By kowalski

[Update:I have no doubt that someone is going to tell me in this thread that the way the rules are written, it's better for the government to destroy this kind of valuable equipment and sell it for scrap than it is to take care of it. But to me it is still morally repugnant.]

[Update II: It also occurred to me that some people might insinuate from this particular example that I'm singling out the military. Don't worry about that. The waste is everywhere, and probably the military made better use of these machines than the Department of Health and Human Services would have while they were still operational.]

Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (19) / Email this page » / Read More »