Archive for the ‘Good Reads’ Category:
I’m calling B.S. Maybe the media won’t, but they are populist, anyway. Keep in mind that shortly after the Flames burned out in the first round of the playoffs (one could say they burned out toward the end of the regular season, when they were befallen to injury), it was the fans who were the voice of reason. It was the fans that pointed out that Darryl Sutter was the real issue here, putting his team behind the 8-ball when it came to the salary cap. It was Darryl Sutter grabbing another high-priced forward at the deadline instead of shoring up the defense he so loves to complain about well after the fact. It was Darryl Sutter who ignored that he had an entirely unproven backup goaltender on an otherwise (as he believes) Stanley Cup caliber hockey club, yet it’s the same Darryl Sutter who is now complaining that Mikka Kiprusoff played too much (as if Darryl couldn’t have made a “suggestion” to the coach for whom he was the boss). The fans — yes, the fans have been the ones to point this out. All the while the media simply worked and worked and worked at getting Mike Keenan fired. It didn’t work…
…that is until, AHA, very convenient, Brent Sutter went waaaaaaaaaa, waaaaaaaaaaa, crying like a baby and saying he was homesick and missed his family. Then all of a sudden Keenan (who Darryl was quoted as saying only a year previous, “Mike’s an elite coach. There are only a handful of them in the league. Mike’s not going anywhere”) was expendable as a guy who “didn’t get enough” from his star players, played Kiprusoff “way too much,” and didn’t bring about a “defensive philosophy” (when in the world has Mike Keenan ever been the defensive answer to a team’s woes??????).
Darryl and Brent are both full of, quite frankly, B.S. Yes, with a capital “B” and a capital “S.” This had nothing to do with Mike Keenan, and everything to do with a) deflecting the blame that Darryl was getting from the fans, yet the media had overlooked to that point and b) a chance to take one last crack at this Flames experiment with their brother. I can only hope that Calgary will be decimated with injuries come playoff time again so that Darryl can make excuses for his brother. I can only hope that their lack of a backup goalie kills them so that Kiprusoff has to play the last 40 games just to try to slip into the playoffs. I can only hope they try to tackle the upcoming season with the poor defensive corps they had (other than Regehr and Phaneuf) so that Darryl and Brent can scratch their heads at their golden defensive philosophy gone wrong. Lastly, I can only hope that some other team realizes the job Keenan did in Calgary and gives him another chance. Surely it’ll be someone who realizes that Keenan is not known for his sytematic teaching of the game, nor for his innovative defensive philosophy, but because he’s a winner and because even though the media likes to hint otherwise, just about every one of Keenan’s stops has been as successful or moreso than the person he succeeded as well as the one who succeeded him.
Something stinks…and I know it’s the Sutter brothers and their B.S.
Update: The Bleacher Report is as cynical as I am.
Keep in mind that the Devils’ season ended on April 28th. It took Brent over 40 days to consider his resignation, but only three to jump back in. His deliberation reached a relatively quick end when Mike Keenan was fired on May 23rd.
The dates just don’t add up. He took a very long time to decide about his future (understandable, even though it put the Devils in a very difficult position right before the draft and free agency), then reconsidered only three days later.
Update 2: I am not always a huge fan of Scott Burnside, but I give him credit for being one of the few mainstreamers who gets it:
Last time we checked, the Flames had to play 82 regular-season games, the same as Brent’s old team, the New Jersey Devils. And last time we checked, half of the Flames’ games were on the road, the same number of games away from home as the Devils. And last time we checked our trusty map (not to mention calling colleagues in Calgary), Red Deer, where Brent farms and owns a much-loved junior team, is still about a 90-minute drive from Calgary.
All of which makes us more than a little suspicious of Brent’s motives given that the main reason he waffled on returning to coach the Devils in 2009-10 was that he missed being home and looking after his junior team.
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Scalzi.com has a nice gameplan for achieving all of your entertainment needs for less than $100/mo. This includes movies, books, video games, television, and a fairly decent internet connection.
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A couple days ago I bemoaned the Douglas Kmiec article insinuating that Obama wasn’t, in fact, pro-choice and that he created an opening for pro-life Catholics to vote for him by throwing out the cliche about promoting adoption and sex ed as a remedy for all of the unplanned abortions (nevermind the 30-somethings that are having them at an alarming rate). In any case, I should have just held on for a couple days: I should have known George Weigel would quickly come out with something far superior.
In short, there is very little, if anything, in Senator Obama’s public record to suggest that he agrees with Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec that abortion is a “tragic moral choice.” On the contrary, the 2008 Democratic platform removed language that described abortion as “regrettable” from the relevant plank. Do Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec imagine that they have a better grasp of Senator Obama’s views on the life issues than, say, the National Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL], or other pro-choice Obama supporters?
Weigel goes on to concede that McCain, while not perfect, is clearly the preferable of the two choices.
Is John McCain—for whom, I might add, I have never served as an adviser, formally or informally—a perfect pro-life candidate? Of course not. But Barack Obama is a perfect pro-life nightmare. President McCain would not work to repeal the pro-life legislative advances of the past 35 years; knowledgeable and sober-minded Catholic legal and political observers who have worked on these issues for decades are convinced that an Obama administration and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would eviscerate those modest advances within a year. As for the Supreme Court, the hard facts of our national history teach us that, while the country can survive the court’s getting it wrong on some things, we are in very deep trouble when the court gets it wrong on the big human rights questions.
[Emphasis mine.]
Quite simply, I couldn’t have stated it any better. If you are pro-life and have even dreamt of voting for Obama, prayerfully consider George Weigel’s words.
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Filed under Commentary, Five Non-Negotiables, General, Good Reads, Politics, Religion
Tags:Cafardi, George Weigel, Kaveny, Kmiec, mccain, obama, Pro-life, vote
With low interest rates allowing more young adults to buy property in recent years, many inexperienced homeowners are desperate for advice when the furnace goes out, the roof leaks or when a home project that seemed like a no-brainer goes terribly wrong.
They are talking about me. There’s no doubt about it. I’m a complete home-repair zero. I’m so fortunate to have a father-in-law that can do anything (and I do mean anything). He’s done everything from electrical work to carpeting to dryer repair to plumbing to things I can’t even remember right now. This is just on our house. Right now he’s re-roofing his own house, and that comes after a kitchen overhaul.
That doesn’t begin to describe the work he’s done on my car and my wife’s car. He’s done the radiator, several coolant leaks, head gasket, brakes as well as the routine stuff like oil changes. I remember walking into his garage when he was working on the head gasket issue I had. I’ve never seen the whole front end of a car on a garage floor. Even more amazing is that, when put back together, it works (and there were no extra parts!).
Michel Hanet, who owns a door replacement business called IDRC in Scottsdale, Ariz., has arrived at homes to find doors hung upside down. He’s also discovered more than one sliding pocket door that won’t open because someone nailed a picture on the wall and into the door.
Fortunately, besides my father-in-law, my mom and wife are both pretty handy, too.
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Joe Soucheray ain’t buyin’ global warming, yet he states, correctly enough, that in a lot of ways his “make-sense” approach to living is actually doing more than the tree-huggers:
I captured the spirit of recycling. That is, once I got over the resentment of the politburo delivering, presumptuously, the blue bin, I got into it. I became a can crusher and bottle scavenger. I was the one who stood at the sink and wasted precious water rinsing out mayonnaise jars that I retrieved from the wastebasket because the lefties in the house weren’t walking the walk. I came to think of recycling the same way I have always thought about turning off lights.
Can’t hurt.
Keeping in mind that I don’t for one minute buy the glop called global warming — it can be statistically demonstrated that the Earth warms and cools, warms and cools naturally over the ages, always has, always will, with little regard to the presence of inconsequential humans — my little operation in St. Paul is a microcosm of the alleged problem.
Too many of the sky-is-falling screechers don’t turn off lights.
Am I an example of environmental or ecological or whatever you want to call it responsibility? Absolutely. I am a practitioner of the makes-sense factor. For example, it makes sense to turn off lights. Rooms stay cooler. The electrical meter doesn’t spin as rapidly. I won’t need to buy bulbs as often. I might get to sleep in a cooler room.
Today, he defends the make-sense factor and says that by employing it, you can’t go wrong.
Look, if you live in a yurt and you don’t use electricity, gasoline, energy of any fossil kind, you don’t make phone calls or send e-mails or wear clothing or eat anything you haven’t grown yourself, then, by all means, you have every right in the world to chant your religion at every opportunity.
As for the rest of you, there is always room for another hypocrite. We have a serious cultural problem in the United States with a do-as-I-say mentality. The best local example I have seen recently was a cheery feature story in the Enemy Paper the other day celebrating the discovery by the young and hip crowd of smoking hookah pipes at trendy outdoor cafes. The very same paper that beats the drum for smoking bans thinks nothing of putting some mom and pop bar on Rice Street out of business but manages to look the other way on hookah smoking because the clients are obviously enlightened types who appreciate the affectations of Middle Eastern customs.
But what did pointing all of this out get Mr. Soucheray? He was labeled as a “crunchy conservative.” Oh no!
I guess the crunchy part comes from an identification with granola, which in and of itself suggests some kind of clinging to countercultural roots while also appreciating the social and economic principles of the Republican party, except that I think Republicans spend too much money and I have never lost any sleep about gays having rights. I think gay marriage is an oxymoron, but I still haven’t lost any sleep.
In any event, yes, I am more crunchy conservative than anything else because anything else just sets you up for the hypocrisy of the cranky left.
Go get ‘em, Joe.
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Thomas Sowell says that there are too many organizations — even those that are supposed to be depending on facts — that won’t let the facts get in the way of a good story:
People who have made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts are a danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread.
Even institutions that are set up to pass on facts — the media, schools, academia — too often treat facts as expendable and use their strategic positions to filter out facts which go against their own preconceptions.
This is true whether you are discussing the war, intelligent design, or the merits of Barry Bonds. (The fact that there is overwhelming evidence that Barry Bonds took steroids isn’t reason enough for an investigation — clearly the investigation is either based on dislike for him or, more likely, racism. Nevermind the fact that the guy baseball is trying to protect by investigating Bonds is, if I recall correctly, black — Henry Aaron.)
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Scott Elliott, over at electionprojection.com has his first major post on Minnesota in the current election cycle.
On the Senate race (for Mark Dayton’s seat):
The Blogging Caesar originally had this race going ever so slightly to the GOP. However, a major factor in that pick was a primary battle I thought would damage the eventual Democratic nominee. That expectation arose from a mistaken list of Dems in the running. I had previously included two other candidates which are not actually running, and their absence clears the way for Klobuchar to emerge from the primary without much of a battle. So, I’m changing my call on this one. I’m making it a weak Dem hold for Klobuchar.
Check out the rest of the post for a good synopsis of the upcoming situation in Minnesota.
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Steven Chapman:
Samuel Alito Jr. wrote a memo in 1985 arguing there is no constitutional right to abortion, and pro-choice groups are alarmed by that document. They say it proves he’s a right-wing extremist with a “long history of hostility to reproductive freedom,” in the words of the National Abortion Federation.
Maybe Alito is secretly plotting to make pregnancy mandatory for all fertile females, as the NAF sugests. But for those of us who are inclined to be charitable, there’s another possible explanation for why he said the Constitution doesn’t protection abortion rights: because it doesn’t. (emphasis mine)
Read the rest.
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Thomas Sowell writes this column after finding out that his offices would be shut down for “winter closure”:
The ACLU invokes that famous phrase about a “wall of separation between church and state” — a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution but somehow considered to be part of Constitutional law.
The Constitution forbad Congress from creating “an establishment of religion” but this was no mysterious concept known only to deep thinking legal scholars.
The people who wrote the Constitution all knew exactly what an establishment of religion was because they had all lived under one — the established Church of England.
It’s fairly common that when something has gone too far there is a backlash against it. I know go out of my way to wish people a Merry Christmas. Not those who I know to be Jewish or non-religious, but I don’t go out of my way to find that out before wishing them a Merry Christmas, either.
Read the rest of the article.
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George Karl was wearing a personalized retro basketball jersey last night and Patrick Rhuby says this has to stop.
I’ve never been a jersey person. I have a Jay Bouwmeester/Florida Panthers jersey that I wore for Halloween two years ago and I never seem to find another occasion to wear it (I wasn’t about to stuff the $180 jersey into my suitcase). I have a Quebec Nordiques jersey, too (no name on it).
The one exception I make is my Frank Viola Minnesota Twins jersey. I will wear that to games and I know that makes me a bit of a rube. Shelly and I also did splurge for a bunch of Panthers gear while at the game on our honeymoon and wore it at the game, but that was a one-time special circumstance. The most I can typically stomach is a baseball cap for the home team and perhaps a windbreaker.
I always love the 350 lbs. guy at the Minnesota State Fair with the Spud Webb jersey on, but other than that, I generally agree that the jersey thing is a bit much. It pales in comparison to the guy with no shirt and his face painted green and black at the Eagles game, though.
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