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Stephen Colbert is tanking and he's doing it because he is not funny.
Before he came to CBS, The Colbert Report on Comedy Central was little more than an extended bit of performance art that did little but caricature conservatives and did so in a way that wasn't nearly as clever as the New York Times's newsroom thought. Where Rutenberg talks of Colbert's "integrity, grace and wicked intelligence," he's glossing over the fact that much of his potential audience saw what he was doing as unbridled sanctimony in the service of a narrow political agenda.And Colbert did as well as he did there for that reason--that and his show's proximity to Daily Show, another staple in the prog-lib media diet.
Stephen Colbert got where he is by being Archie Bunker 2.0; his caricature of conservatism resonated with a different audience than Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker did in the 1970s, and for a different reason, but nonetheless the popularity of the two shows rests squarely on the fact that both actors were presenting caricatures of conservatism.
Thus I am not surprised that Colbert is bombing on late night TV. He's not funny, and shorn of his faux-conservative schtick he hasn't got anything to draw people into watching his show.
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TSA queues miss the point: terrorism is the object, not getting hands on aircraft. Sure, you can screen everyone entering the terminal right down to their skivvies and make sure no one brings bombs or rockets or guns or grenades inside the concourse...but of course now you have a mass of people outside the secure perimeter, all bunched up, and it only takes one or two ragheads with suicide vests to rack up a huge body count. (Warning, link to NYT.)
Look at that first picture. One person in a nail-studded suicide vest could kill or maim everyone in that picture if he detonated it at the right time. Close to the center of that picture is a woman in a red coat. Imagine if there was a vest made of C-4 under it--maybe with a layer of nails and screws atop the explosive--and shortly after the photo was snapped she set it off. How many people in that picture would be dead?
What we're doing now--what we've been doing since 9/11/01--is security theater. It doesn't make anyone safer; it merely moves the focus of the next attack. Hell, a couple of guys with machine guns could stroll in there and shoot a lot of the (guaranteed to be disarmed!) people standing in that line before they were taken out by airport security...if they were.
Either method would put a huge damper on air travel for months afterwards, if not longer.
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Gas keeps going up, oil keeps hanging around $45 a barrel. One commentor gets it right: "It's not rising because of demand......and that should bring out the pitchforks and AR-15s."
Demand has not changed and neither have the other fundamentals of the oil market. There's still just as much of a glut now as there was in February. So why is gas costing nearly a dollar more per gallon than it did then?
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Coming soon to a Democrat stronghold near you! Detroit is broke--past broke--and its educational "system" is out of money, having squandered a $48 million emergency bailout from Michigan.
The part I like, though, is the moving goalposts. The school board having secured enough funding to pay salaries through "the end of the school year", now the union is pushing to get more emergency funding to pay salaries through the end of the calendar year.
Michigan, to its credit, seems reluctant to continue to dump money down the hole. Like many metropolitan school boards, the Detroit board underfunded pension funds and spent money on a bunch of stupid crap, leaving them with a shortfall--to the tune of some $515 million--and now they want to stick the bill to the Michigan taxpayer. The union in particular wants the Michigan legislature to pass a bailout bill totaling three quarters of a billion dollars.
Chicago is heading this way.
I desperately want to see the voters of Illinois say, "Uh, no," to this kind of crap...but it's likely that they won't. *sigh*
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Notice how this Hack-a-Day column neatly avoids talking about who commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to develop the Volkswagen Type 1.
Built by Ferdinand Porsche in 1930’s Germany, the Beetle was designed to be a car for anyone and everyone. Its leader at the time wanted a true "people’s car" (i.e. "Volkswagen") that was affordable for a German family, could reliably travel at sustained highway speeds on the new German autobahns, and easily be repaired by its owners.Emphasis mine.
The fact that Adolf Hitler asked Porsche to do this does not taint the Type 1 "Beetle" as a "nazi-mobile". Why dance around the history? It's true, we have the Beetle because Hitler asked Porsche to build it; but we have interstate highways because Hitler had the Autobahn system built and Eisenhower saw how useful such roads are. All Hitler did was say, "Build a car!" Porsche did all the heavy lifting.
Oh well.
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Yesterday was not really a bad day, all told. Today I've got some errands to run, little things, and then I'm going to see what can be done about the water heater. One of my errands to to Harbor Freight, where I'm going to pick up an electric impact wrench and see if that can do anything about the anode. It's a thrill a minute!
Got to get the grass cut--at least the front yard, as I suspect the back is a swamp after five days of rainy/drizzly/wet weather. Especially Sunday evening, when we had torrential rains which (fortunately) did not last long. On I-80 Between LaGrange and I-57 traffic was moving under 40 MPH for most of the way, that's how hard it rained Sunday evening. Dang.
Anyway, I'm going to check, and see what can be done, and do it. Fortuitously it is a nice day out, sunny and in the 60s, so at least I won't be freezing while I do it. And if I can finally get the damned water heater anode dealt with, that would also be very, very good. I am sick of the hot water smelling like rotten eggs.
But of course, "miles to go" and so forth. No time for Q.E.D. right now.