The Siena New York Poll has him behind John McCain by 12 points in New York State.
The Freddie Thompson Clown Show may be on its way out, but Rudy is doing a good job to pick up the pathetic humor in the presidential campaign.
After all, Rudy showed up to a NASCAR race, and begged to be allowed to drive the pace car, after making a circuit in his bus, but wasn’t allowed.
He’s a good substitute source of my minimum RDA of Schadenfreude.
Well, now Obama is declaring himself to be a “committed Christian”.
I understand that he is trying to answer a disgraceful internet rumor about his being a crypto-Muslim. I’m not exactly sure what the best response is, but this is is the worst response.
He is essentially responding to a demand of an oath of Christianity to qualify for public office. You shouldn’t capitulate to that, you should fight that.
You need to show the people who make this request are un-American, and they need to be removed from mainstream political discussion through ridicule and justified outrage.
Pandering is not the solution.
Honestly, I think that this is a sham bid, and Norway intends to use this request to Sweden as leverage to get a better deal on the JSF.
That is what Eurofighter decided, when they withdrew from the competition.
Norway is arguably as hip deep in the JSF as any countries except for the UK, and (possibly) Italy.
Then again, if they are serious, Norway saves a lot of money, both on the initial purchase,the Gripen is the cheapest of the current generation, and over the life of the aircraft, since costs are roughly proportional to weight.
Well, I mentioned that Fitch had cut its rating on Ambac from AAA to AA, and now, as a result, it has downgraded 420 classes of asset based securities (ABS). Basically, since the bond insurer is near insolvency, the bonds are riskier.
This is a house of cards, and it is in the process of coming down.
H/T Calculated Risk
I really did not have a dog in the hunt in either NFL conference championship, though my wife is a Pats fan, but I came across the story about Packer fans, I was impressed. It seems that the Packers asked for help cleaning the snow off the seats in Lambeau field, and over 800 showed up.
True, they got paid $8/hour, but in Green Bay in January, I’d need a lot more than that to shovel someone else’s snow.
H/T Group News Blog
Sony is now offering a $400 rebate on the purchase of a LCD TV/Blu-ray player package, which makes the Blu-Ray player essentially free, and El Reg is reporting that US HD DVD sales are falling off a cliff.
I’d still wait, to see if the new DVD standards catch on, or if it all loses out to downloads, but I think that HD-DVD is done.
[on edit]
The lead off news is that the head of the IMF. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is calling the global economic situation “serious”.
As to what he’s considering, Strauss-Kahn, a Frenchman is meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy to see what a the French response must be.
It just feels so good to be rescued by the French, huh?
Well, we don’t have US quotes, because it is a holiday, but there was a lot of blood in the foreign markets, with the FTSE-100 fallint 5.5 percent, the CAC-40 6.8%, and the DAX 30 plummeting 7.2 percent in Europe, and in Asia, the Shanghai Composite fell 5.8%, the (Singapore) Straits Times Index fell 6% (15.8% for the year), and India fell 7.4%.
The “markets” don’t think that the stimulus package, which is to say GW Bush’s “no money for the working poor” package, which tanked the US markets on Friday, Sucks.
For what it’s worth, the US meltdown is beginning to hit Europe, where there is increasing pressure for the ECB to lower interest rates. (My guess is not right now. The ECB is charged with keeping inflation down only, no requirement on employment)
European banks are tightening up lending standards in response to the meltdown, so short term liquidity problems may be coming to Europe too.
We also have the Bank of China, the 2nd largest lender in that country, share price dropping by over 6% because of concerns over their subprime exposure. There are rumors that they will show a net loss in 2007 as a result.
Oil, however seems not to be spiking lately. Recession fears have a way of doing that.
While I understand that the protests of the Vermont congressional delegation (see also here) is largely an issue of local pride and economics for them, the idea that we are outsourcing this to a government that routinely imprisons dissidents, suppresses free speech, and aggressively uses the death penalty boggles the mind.
This isn’t from The Onion. This is a real story.
Happy Martin Luther King Birthday Holiday everyone.
Well, it appears that the Canadian Foreign Ministry will rewrite its training manual so that the United States will no longer be listed as a nation that tortures.
“We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries such as Iran and China. Quite frankly it’s absurd,” U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins told The Associated Press on Friday.
More absurd is that the United States does routinely torture people in its custody, and routinely sends people to other nations to be tortured.
I want my country back.
Well, last night I discussed how the USAF is screwing the proverbial pooch in its efforts to get more F-22s, and this weeks issue of Aviation Week confirms this assessment. (paid subscription required)
In this case, they are discussing the capabilities of the F-35 in what the US military likes to call “battle space”, and they reveal something about the F-22.
Specifically, the F-22 is the roach motel of data. Data checks in, but it doesn’t check out.
The F-35, for example, it, “Already offers some capabilities that are not available on the F-22,” which, “for example, has no other way, other than verbally, to send the detailed electronic surveillance data it collects to other types of aircraft or to ground-intelligence facilities.”
The F-22 is designed for the end of the world scenario, with the Soviets attacking through the Fulda Gap. It was designed to operate while the rest of the military infrastructure around it was destroyed, though why the Soviets would not go after the air fields is beyond me.
The Raptor is an expensive anachronism…Though the F-35 is not likely to be much cheaper to buy at the end of the day, it will be more flexible and cheaper to operate, though neither are required for the most likely scenarios.
There are a couple of interesting articles (here and Portable Network Generates EW Attack Weapons in Aviation week(paid subscription required)about the increasing use of civilian tech in military electronic warfare equipment.
“The Chinese, like many countries without billions to spend on defense, are figuring out how to leverage all that commercial technology into their military capabilities,” says Rance Walleston, BAE Systems’ director of information operations initiative and information warfare. “We’ve spent a lot of time looking at Chinese technologies. They’re not building many unique devices. Their integrated air defense system [IADS] uses commercial standards,” such as GSM and voice over Internet protocols (VOIP).
The Syrian raid—which involved air-to-ground and network-to-network electronic invasion of a Russian-built IADS—is convincing some that custom-built, highly specialized and expensive air defenses with long development times are decreasing in deterrent value. In fact, they have become victims of their own uniqueness. Because they were hard to develop and field, they aren’t often modified. That gives electronic warriors the time to conduct analysis and build countermeasures.
We also discover that:
“The government historically procured single-use systems to go after signal X or Y,” Sinkiewicz says. “Now that’s unaffordable, and what they want is a multifunction capability with the same architecture and hardware that can go after many types of signals.”
I’m sure that some of the free market types would like to use this as an argument for the inherent superiority of the free market over government funded systems, but I would argue that the defense procurement infrastructure is among the most incompetent and corrupt segments of our governments, and that using this will not get good policy.
In fact, the Privatization of essential government services in the military (KBR/Halliburton, Blackwater, Triple Canopy, etc.) has proved to be an unmitigated disaster too.
The solution is to put adults in charge of the Military Industrial Complex, because we are currently reaping the consequences of not doing so for the past 60 years.
Chuck Norris is saying that John McCain is too old to be president.
I thank you, as do all good Democrats, because you raised the issue, so we don’t have to.
Seriously though, that is a potential issue, for good or ill.
Then again, maybe his veep would get us out of Iraq.
Warning, somewhat profane, if intensely funny, particularly if you recall the original ads.
The real estate collapse is moving from the bottom up, and here we have good evidence that it has begun to hit the McMansion set.
We have people in houses well north of $500K at risk of losing their homes,
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England wants to use GWOT money to to keep the F-22 line open.
With no meaningful difference in stealth, and the F-35 being smaller, supposedly cheaper, more flexible (adapting it to electronic attack is easier) and capable of carrying a better bomb load, the only thing you get for the F-22 is that it flys higher and supercruises, neither of which have any meaning in the strategic context of any potential opponent we can see.
Read the article. It’s fairly clear that this is the result of mindless USAF lobbying over the past dozen years or so, and this is a case where the adults in the DoD, by which I mean the JCS and the civilian leadership, have been far too passive in reigning the flyboys in.
Two games, absolutely no entertainment value. They need to add Barbara Gordon as a Librarian.
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/etc/game1/game1.swf
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/etc/game2/game2.swf
Corrected so as not to destroy your sanity with that damn music.
When you read, “Moron Arrested After Driving Truck Into House“, normally, you would think that the editor who chose the hed is a pretty awful guy to ridicule someone that way.
But he didn’t….His parents did.
A 20-year-old Burleson man was arrested Friday night after police say he drove a pickup truck into a home while intoxicated.
Bryan Scott Moron was taken into custody after he lost control of a white Chevrolet truck and struck a mailbox on Parkridge Blvd., then continued ahead and drove into a home.
Ummm…Name change dude…
An then, hopefully, a few dozen trials at The Hague.
First and foremost, Mitt Romney, who already had over half the total delegates selected, has further extended his delegate lead, by winning more convincingly in a larger state.
Second, I agree with Atrios:
I think McCain is easy to beat as a candidate, but I don’t think my mental health will survive the press fluffing of him for all these months.
I would also add that I will be missing the Freddie Thompson clown show. That stuff wrote itself.
On the Democratic side, I think that this was a significant victory for Clinton in a number of ways:
Obviously, we have South Carolina, where Obama is favored, but I think that these, and the generally superior organization of Clinton, will mean that she seals the deal on February 5.
Of cours, my predictive powers only marginally exceed Alan Keyes sanity, so don’t put any money down on my predictions.
Beating Huckabee by about 33% to 30%.
It appears that Republican turnout is significantly down from 2000.