Aug 15 2011

Boo hoo!!!! Waaahhhhh!!!!

Category: election 2012,media — harmonicminer @ 10:57 am

Michele Bachmann’s bodyguards developing reputation for bullying reporters

CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon says that Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, and two members of her campaign staff pushed him into a golf cart during a campaign stop at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines before Bachmann’s victory in Saturday’s straw poll.

I find myself liking Bachmann more and more.

The incident comes less than a month after a similar scene at a campaign stop in Aiken, South Carolina, where ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross said he was “manhandled” by two of Bachmann’s bodyguards.

Look, Messrs. Lemon and Ross.  Either something illegal occurred (like an actual assault) or it didn’t.  If it did, file a police report…  since you’re in public, you should have plenty of witnesses.  If nothing illegal occurred, i.e., you were NOT actually assaulted, then shut up, grow up, and move on.  I very, very strongly suspect that absolutely NOTHING of note occurred, for the very simple reason that if it had you would have witnesses lined up and you would be prosecuting, since reporters are mostly inherently publicity hounds, and since we all know either of you would do anything to get to be the one who destroyed Bachmann’s candidacy.  After all, she is becoming a Palin-size target in this election cycle.

Either way, whining about something that isn’t actually illegal is just another way of claiming personal privilege because you’re a bigshot reporter. 

Get over it.

Aug 04 2011

Money Madness!!

Category: Congress,economy,election 2012,freedom,government,Group-think,humor,left,legislation,liberty,politics,socialism — harmonicminer @ 6:49 pm

Tum da de tum, here is another entry in the Powerline Prize contest. This one didn’t win anything, but it has the singular distinction of having been a project of my family, with my son, “A. Shack,” composing the rap and performing the song, my wife (Mrs. Miner) performing some pseudo “baby voices,” with some music production and amateur video editing from me, Harmonicminer.

You can see many more entries in the Powerline Blog YouTube Channel, along with Money Madness.

Dec 08 2010

The headline I thought I’d never read, in this administration

Category: economy,election 2012 — harmonicminer @ 10:46 pm

WH warns tax defeat could trigger new recession

Raising the direst alarm yet, the Obama administration warned fellow Democrats on Wednesday that if they defeat the big tax-cut compromise detested by many liberals, they could jolt the nation back into recession.

President Barack Obama appealed anew for Congress to “get this done” and insisted that more congressional Democrats would climb aboard as they studied details of the $900 billion year-end measure. Several did announce support on Wednesday, but at least one said there still was “a mood to resist.”

This looks like a headline we’d have seen in the Bush administration when he was pushing for tax cuts.

For this to come out of the Obama White House is a bit surreal.

Does this mean that Obama has finally agreed that low taxes stimulate the economy more than deficit-based stimulus spending?

Maybe it just means that he is beginning, belatedly, his campaign to be re-elected in 2012.

Dec 01 2010

Elections, ID cards, and third world nations

Category: election 2012 — harmonicminer @ 10:08 am

Haiti Election, Set for Sunday, Marred by ID Card Problems

With some candidates already crying fraud, and the delivery of voter identification cards mired in delays and confusion on Saturday, Haiti braced for one of its most pivotal presidential elections in decades.

Official public campaigning ended Friday, but hours before the first ballots were to be cast Sunday, many of the 19 candidates and their representatives took to social media and old-fashioned news conferences to question the election’s fairness.

The United States ambassador, while expressing cautious optimism that balloting would be fair and orderly, raised concern that many people, especially the more than one million who have been living in tent encampments scattered across this capital city since January’s earthquake, may not be aware of basic information like the location of the island nation’s 11,000 polling places.

“You have people who are registered to vote in their old neighborhoods but living somewhere else,” the ambassador, Kenneth H. Merten, said in an interview on Saturday. “I’m not sure that all of them know where they have to go. We will see tomorrow.”

“They have been doing what they can, but I am not sure that it is enough,” Mr. Merten said of the government.

With so many candidates, it appeared unlikely that any one would capture the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a runoff, which is set for Jan. 16.

The winner will confront a spreading cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,500 people since mid-October, and the complex question of how Haiti can most effectively recover from the earthquake and best spend several billion dollars of foreign aid due in the coming years.

Basic services in this, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, remain in disarray, including those related to the election, and worries abound that the succession of calamities here has sapped the will of the 4.7 million registered voters to turn out.

For many potential voters, the challenges have been steep. Less than half of the more than 400,000 new and replacement national identification cards necessary for voting are thought to have been distributed, leading to intense frustration.

People waited in long lines on Saturday to pick up new or replacement identification cards, and many people said they had already endured a confusing odyssey to apply for them.

Even Haiti requires an ID card, proving national citizenship, to vote.  If there is another nation that is as careless as the USA about who is allowed to vote, I’d be interested in knowing about it.

Exit question:  do you think it’s as easy for gringos on permanent vacation in Mexico to vote in Mexican national elections as it is for Mexican nationals, legal or illegal, to vote in the USA?

Nov 29 2010

Dark energy, expansion, and 2012

Category: election 2012,government — harmonicminer @ 10:28 am

Galactic illusion helps refine dark energy abundance

AN OPTICAL illusion has enabled the most precise measurement yet of the abundance of the mysterious dark energy, which is thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion.

The more dark energy there is, the faster the expansion should be, so measuring the universe’s expansion provides an estimate of the abundance of dark energy.

An optical illusion has enabled the most precise measurement yet of the abundance of the mysterious dark energy, which is thought to be accelerating the expansion of the federal government.

The more dark energy there is, the faster government expands, so measuring the federal government’s rate of expansion provides an estimate of the natural tendency in nature to socialistic dark energy.  Very dark energy.

Dark energy is the force the keeps the universe expanding…  that is, dark energy is literally blowing up the universe.  It is the opposite of gravity, which holds things together. 

Recent measurements indicate that socialistic dark energy (which, unchecked, always blows things up) may not be as powerful as originally thought.  Despite 2008 predictions widely heard in the media that socialistic dark energy would triumph (leading to the eventual destruction of everything, although that wasn’t widely announced), new measurements made in 2010 seem to indicate that perhaps gravity is somewhat stronger in relation to dark energy than once thought. 

Gravity, of course, is another word for capitalism, which tends to aggregate resources in large enough chunks to do something useful with them, to the benefit of everyone, rather like gravity clumping together mass in large enough concentrations (planets) to allow the existence of life. 

It just may be that gravity will prove stronger than dark energy.  We won’t know for sure until 2012, when a new measurement is planned that will confirm whether or not gravity is sufficiently strong to keep society, and our economy, from flying apart completely.

Maybe the Mayans were wrong.

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