New posts will be here until the migration is done.

Rick Santorum had a helluva night.

I'm a man of my word.

If Norm Coleman's prediction comes true, kiss the Republican Party goodbye.

Norm Coleman – the former senator from Minnesota and a prominent advisor for Mitt Romney – suggested over the weekend in an interview that no matter who the Republican nominee is, they are unlikely to fully repeal Obamacare.

The conservative base of the GOP did not bust its butt to return Republicans to control in the House because we like pragmatism, bipartisanship, and tinkering around with Obamacare in an effort to "fix" it. The majority of Americans want it repealed. Obamacare is a malignant tumor on the Republic. If the GOP proves unwilling or unable to cut out that tumor before 2014 -- when it goes into full effect -- then we conservatives will eviscerate the GOP as a political entity and start over. The party cannot survive without us Google the sad fate of the Whig Party; it can happen again.

If the GOP doesn't bleed to get Obamacare repealed, we'll bleed the party dry. Bank on it.

As you watch President Obama's class-warfare-soaked State of The Union address tonight, keep two things in mind.

1. He's a liar and a demagogue.
2. Taxation is only half of the story at best.

You have to watch spending too. The poorest Americans got back $8.21 for each $1.00 paid in taxes. The middle class got back $1.30 for every $1.00 paid in taxes. The rich got back $0.41 for every $1.00 paid in taxes. Yes, really.

We do do not have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.

If this idea (see #HotAirDebate on Twitter) gets the OK from Romney, Gingrich, & Santorum, I'll actually be eager to watch a GOP debate for once. Ed Morrissey from Hot Air would be an excellent moderator.

If crazy ol' Ron Paul shows up too, it'll be must-see TV.

Somebody went to the trouble of creating an iPhone app that allows you to add and edit posts on a blog running Movable Type. It's called Movable Manager and I'm using it to type this post.

It looks extremely bare-bones basic at first blush, but I could be wrong. Frankly, finding it in the App Store was the only thing that stopped me from dumping Movable Type completely and switching over to Wordpress.

MT has gotten more code-intensive since I started this blog in 2004, while Wordpress has gotten more user-friendly. Since Six Apart sold the MT software rights to a Japanese company a year or so back, tech support for English-speaking users has gone downhill fast. Six Apart couldn't be bothered to create a smart phone app for their software, but perhaps they were focusing their efforts on unloading the rights to MT and its shrinking market share before it became worthless. The new company hasn't indicated any interest in an app for English-speaking smart phone users, so the "opportunity" fell to the free market.

That only one company made the effort (and that the app's been in v1.0 since November 16th with minimal features) speaks volumes. Movable Manager gets one week to convince me that I'm mistaken.

Story here (and details about shutting down Main Street USA here). Offer your suggestions below.

Here are two ways to compare unemployment during all recessions after World War II. The first graphic aligns all recessions at their beginnings, while the second aligns them at their deepest points. Click either one for the full-size image.

The document below the fold is purportedly John McCain's opposition research report on Mitt Romney from the 2008 presidential campaign.

I was just checking the latest posts over at Ace of Spades HQ and saw the following. Click it to zoom in:

My own senior U.S. Senator, the radically left-wing utopian Sherrod Brown, apparently thinks it's a smart move to spend campaign funds on ads at conservative blogs. This genius has already shown that he's supremely confident in his ability to spend your money better than you can, since he's delighted to grow every conceivable government program or entitlement you can dream up (except for national defense, which he'd like to gut). Is it any surprise that he's equally profligate when it comes to spreading around that sweet, sweet union cash?

Let me know when his challenger Josh Mandel starts buying ads on Democratic Underground, won't you? I'll try my best not to hold my breath while I wait.

This post by Steve McCann has fouled my mood much more than the clouds and rain could ever do.

There now appears to be an inevitability surrounding Mitt Romney and the Republican nomination for president.   Are the American people prepared to sit through another term of George H.W. Bush?   The chances are that Romney would be the last Republican president, as the Party may fly apart under his rule.  The country would then have to face another round of the Left-dominated Democratic Party in charge and the inevitable collapse that would bring about.

...

At no time in the past 150 years has the nation needed a bold and decisive leader that could not only initiate change but be honest with the American people.

Yet the current governing class and in particular the Republican establishment is treating this election cycle as if it were no different from any other during the past sixty years.   Their reaction to the Tea Party movement is indicative of this mindset, as they choose to denigrate and dismiss this grassroots uprising as just another passing crusade by conservative ideologues.   They fail to understand that the appeal of Ron Paul is that he is willing to stick it to the ruling class.  The primary concern of the establishment, either Republican or Democrat, is to retain power through the control of the purse strings, and to put off any difficult decisions while "compromising" with the opposition.

The campaign strategy of Mitt Romney mirrors that of all the past moderate nominees chosen by the Party.   The formula: speak the language of the conservative majority in the Party, claim only a moderate can get elected, divide the vote among the conservatives running for the nomination, mobilize the media to destroy any real conservative challenger, and overwhelm these same challengers with money from the deep-pocket establishment contributors.

...

If Romney were to lose the election, there will be a grass-roots revolt against the Republican Party which will spell its demise.   If he wins and the nation, through the mis-directed policies of Romney and the Republicans in the Congress, continues on its current path of compromising and nibbling around the edges of the nation's problems, then Romney will be the last Republican president and the specter of the Democrats re-assuming power will be a reality.

This is not only the most important election for the nation in over a century but also one that will determine the fate of a political party founded in 1854 in opposition to slavery and the corruption in the Democratic Party.

But hey, maybe I'm just a Romney Denialist or a Bitter Clinger or some such.

Thankfully, my copy of Mark Levin's newest monster bestseller Ameritopia arrives today. I'm going to read it with my highlighter in hand, just as I did with Liberty And Tyranny.

There are many things I don't get. Here's one.

Mitt Romney is Obama's dream opponent. He's a moderate, a squish, a watered-down statist, a Democrat Lite™. So why would voters elect an imitation leftist when they can have an authentic Marxist who'd like four more years to destroy the republic? If we're all forced to choose between driving off a cliff with the cruise control set, or launching into the abyss at top speed, the people egging on the drivers will choose the daredevil. Those of us who want to hit the brakes aren't going to work very hard for the wuss who wants us all to sit politely as we coast into oblivion.

We're not interested in playing by someone else's rigged rules. If the Republican Party establishment sticks us with Romney, we'll change the rules to our advantage. They should remember one word, and tremble.

Whigs.

Miss Smith & Mrs. Jones get pregnant on the same date.

Miss Smith is unmarried, uneducated, & poor. 24 weeks into Miss Smith's pregnancy (the result of an incestuous rape), she delivers early due to complications. Baby Smith survives, but has lifelong physical & mental handicaps.

Mrs. Jones is wealthy, educated, and successful in her career. 36 weeks into Mrs. Jones' pregnancy, she chooses to abort Baby Jones, who is neither handicapped, the product of rape, nor the product of incest. Mrs. Jones simply decides that she no longer wants to give birth because she misses fitting into her Size 2 dresses.

Veronique de Rugy points out a study just released by economists at the European Central Bank:

Basically, an increase in government spending (whether financed by taxes or by borrowing) reduces economic growth. This is consistent with a paper from a few years ago by Harvard Business School's Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloy. To their surprise, those authors found that federal spending in states caused local businesses to cut back rather than grow.

But ... but ... what about the multiplier effect of government stimulus spending?

Bummer, dude.

The effort involved in coding this MT-based blog has become too labor-intensive, and the support available from Movable Type since its acquisition by the Japanese company Infocom has gotten borderline unintelligible.

The blogging platform produced by WordPress is much easier to use and maintain, and its community of code geeks and site designers is much bigger and actually speaks English. Using their work and plugging it into a web site running WordPress is ridiculously easy, and eliminates the need to reinvent the wheel.

The main obstacle holding me back is my inability to figure out how to export all of my data from Movable Type v5.12 into whatever format will allow me to import it into WordPress v3.2.1 (the current "new" version of the software). This is getting to be as aggravating as deciphering the instructions on a circa-1987 Sony VCR.

If someone out there has figured out a way to do this, please point me in the right direction.

What's different? At first glance, not much.

2008: The Guardian Ethos I am America's Maritime Guardian. I serve the citizens of the United States. I will protect them. I will defend them. I will save them. I am their Shield. For them I am Semper Paratus. I live the Coast Guard Core Values. I am a Guardian. We are the United States Coast Guard.

2011: The Coast Guard Ethos I am a Coast Guardsman. I serve the people of the United States. I will protect them. I will defend them. I will save them. I am their Shield. For them I am Semper Paratus. I live the Coast Guard Core Values. I am proud to be a Coast Guardsman. We are the United States Coast Guard.

Wait a minute. Whom do they serve?

The hyper-skilled tradesmen who build nuclear aircraft carriers possess a level of expertise that requires steady use to maintain. Just as professional athletes must constantly train to maintain their abilities, shipbuilders must steadily build to keep their own proficiency at the required peak level. If you run Newport News Shipbuilding and your guys are forced to sit on their butts for years between builds, they're going to lose their skills (if not go into different lines of work just to keep food on the table). The ripples from that kind of splash would be very big and would last a very long time.

USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is under construction as you read this, but guess what the geniuses at Barack Obama's Office of Management and Budget are planning to do to the gap between the construction of USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) and CVN-80?

Brilliant move, guys:

The navy has proposed an additional 2-year schedule slip to its newest carrier, CVN79, which would extend the funding profile from the original 8 yrs to 12 yrs.

...

This schedule change almost insures the cost of CVN-79 is going to be enormous due to loss of trade skill at the yard, which means CVN-80 is also going to be a whole lot more expensive. By 2020 aircraft carriers are going to have such an enormous cost that there is no way the nation will build CVNs after CVN-80.

I see only two ways this doesn't happen. Either Obama loses in 2012 and the new President addresses this issue directly, immediately following election, or in some future 2016-2020 time frame the nation funds and builds 2 carriers of the Ford Class just like Reagan built 2 with the Nimitz class as a way of getting long term costs for the CVN as a strategic entity under control.

Otherwise, there will be 3 Ford class carriers, and by around 2025 the nation will have decided that based on cost alone a new way to project airpower from the sea will be necessary in the future. If you don't believe this move will end the big deck aircraft carrier, then you are in denial how the industrial reality will be seen in a political context once the costs go up.

...

This is a bigger deal than the politics and economics and budgets will ever reflect in conversation. What is the true value of 50 years of projecting airpower from sea? A big deck nuclear powered aircraft carrier today is a strategic investment that the US really can't afford get wrong. Making the wrong choice would be a strategic and political blunder of incalculable magnitude; one history would record as our nation casually tossing aside the aircraft carriers strategic advantages without a clear understanding of the consequences, but doing so knowing full well that once you lose the big deck production line - there is no going back.

That bold-faced emphasis is mine.

An argument can be made that big-deck carriers in this decade might be as relevant as battleships on December 7, 1941. I'm not sure I buy it, but it seems colossally foolish to abandon the big-deck carrier not because of a hard-nosed assessment of their value, but to lose them instead because a bunch of pencil-necked peacenik accountants in Washington don't understand shipbuilding.

The Brits recently abandoned fixed-wing carrier aviation (see HMS Illustrious for details), and their failure to think ahead continues to bite them in the rear. To add insult to injury, it looks like Argentina once again intends to test the proposition that Britannia rules the waves.

But hey, who needs aircraft carriers when you've got universal healthcare, right? In the Age of Obamacare, the whole world loves us. Let's just redirect those sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars away from that icky war stuff to something more in line with our newly socialist tastes. We'll never be attacked.

What do you get when these two songs go out to dinner, drink way too much, and end up going home together?

You tell me, progressives.

Next foolish campaign slogan, please.

Let's take a quick look at §1031, §1032, and §1033 of S.1867 (official text here). These are the three sections of the Senate's version of the 2012 Defense Authorization Act that deal with military detention of terrorists. This bill is causing the ACLU to blow a gasket, and their wild-eyed predictions of Constitution-shredding doom have ignited e-mail inboxes nationwide.

This is the proposed text as it stands today. All highlighting is mine. The parts that sound scary (at first) are in yellow. The parts that should calm you down are in green. The parts that the ACLU and its radical friends are actually upset about are in blue.

Watch this ...

... then read this.

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilisation.

The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time.

The research has caused a storm of controversy and divided scientists, with some saying it should never have been carried out.

...

Both papers are now being reviewed by the U.S National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).

NSABB does not have the power to prevent the publication but it could ask journals not to publish.

Paul Keim, chairman of NSABB, said: "I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one. I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."

More here.

Click on the banner and ponder what you find.

You might be surprised.

You've no doubt heard the well-known story of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts. But did you know that what you've heard is drastically inaccurate?

According to the writings of William Bradford, the colony's first governor, the hardships and near-starvation of the entire population occurred because the colonists turned their backs on capitalism. They believed the old lie that an economy based on the concept of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" can actually work. They instituted a socialist system, and found out that socialism causes disaster:

The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, "instead of famine now God gave them plenty," Bradford wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." Thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

What happened?

After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop." They began to question their form of economic organization.

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

For more on the lessons the pilgrims learned, see this piece by Rick Williams, Jr.

This is too simplistic:

Here's one that's much more accurate (click it to zoom in):

You tell me:

In every category necessary for the endurance of direct ground combat, women are behind men. They rank behind men in every category by large margins except in lower body strength, where they are the least behind.

...

Combat involves physical strength, proper mindset, physical skills, aerobic capability, sharp vision and a killer instinct. ... I personally just want the Feminists to agree that they value women as much as they say they do, because putting them in places that they are even more likely to be violently killed, subject to capture, torture, rape by our enemies, or mostly for not thinking that women are above the day to day drudgery of life not only in an infantry unit in extended ground combat, but the drudgery of the job while not deployed seems to me to be a bit in conflict with the idea of honoring them and their abilities. The idea that women belong in units in the military that participate in direct ground combat makes about as much sense as allowing me into the Feminist Studies Program at Bryn Mawr.

Think. Don't emote. The military exists to kill America's enemies and break their stuff. It does not exist to provide you a career, enhance women's rights, improve society, achieve social justice, counteract sexist stereotypes, pay for your college tuition, or any of a million other progressive pipe dreams. The military's reason for being is to violently kill people. It's an ugly fact, but it's no less true because it's ugly.

Men and women are inherently different physically, mentally, and emotionally. In every relevant respect men are better suited for combat, and especially so for ground combat. If that offends you, I don't care. Don't cry to me. Facts are often unpleasant and unyielding things, so cry to God (or if you're an atheist, cry to nature) to assuage your emotional pain. I am not out to offend you or anyone else. I am out to ensure America's military remains the most powerful and respected force on Earth, the force that gives you the protection and comfort you enjoy (and take for granted) today.

Without America's military, you'd have no leisure time to ponder the social justice implications of banning women from combat. You'd be a slave to a totalitarian government not of your choosing, a government utterly contemptuous of your needs and wants, much less your easily-bruised ego.

Save your social experimentation for arenas that don't revolve around violent death. Go fiddle with the diversity statistics at your local community college, and stop undermining the only shield between you and the barbarians. Construct whatever mental delusion or flimsy rationalization you must, but find a way to cocoon your delicate ego and find any other part of society to tinker with.

A nation that weakens its military by removing all barriers to women serving in combat is asking to be attacked an defeated.

P.S. -- If you want me to entertain your foolish ideas about women in ground combat without laughing in your face, do something first: change the law so that all young women are subject to the military draft just like all men. Once women bear equal responsibility and duty with men, then they can begin to talk about their alleged entitlement to equal goodies.

Easier asked than answered. There are a bajillion of them floating in limbo in the Congressional Record, including the most recent casualty, which failed to pass the House today (thank Heaven).

If you want to see a proposed BBA that harnesses human greed for productive use and restrains lawyers' attempts to twist the plain meaning of words, then I've got what you need.

I don't know if this is legit, or whether some smart aleck hacked the Wisconsin Democrats' web site. Click on the image to see the screen shot at full size.

Not surprisingly, the Dems have yanked the page from their site. Here's the cached page on Google. Who knows how long it'll exist?

Just how much does the federal government owe? Here's a visualization of the national debt as a stack of $100 bills (click to see it at full size):

That's right, folks. Our national debt just shot past $15 trillion today. We do not have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.

I just discovered a ton of legitimate e-mail messages caught in the spam filters for my two domains, brainshavings.com and cga94.com, which I've now dialed back to a less draconian setting. I've also added a bunch of people to the e-mail whitelists. I'll do my best to get caught up soon, but if you've been wondering if I've been ignoring you, I haven't.

Sorry, everyone.