Author: VD

A quartet of Minnesota men with a radio show of their own, the Fraters Libertas, pronounce Alice’s show “an unqualified disaster: As an example, take the Strom Thurmond impression Franken did about 30 minutes ago. After taking about 5 minutes to outline the premise with his side kick (Cacklin’ Katherine Lanpher), it consisted of these words, in a gravel voiced, LOUD, angry, southern drawl:

“I screwed colored girls! I screwed Puerto Rican girls! I screwed them all! The pecker don’t know no color!”

And he said it over and over and over again. I actually had a shudder of embarrassment run down my spine and I considered crawling under the car seat to somehow distance myself from what was coming out of my speakers. The bit didn’t contain even a rumor of humor, just a guy shouting hateful nonsense in an attempt to be irreverent and edgy. Even Cacklin’ Katherine could only manage a few bursts of uncomfortable, embarrassed courtesy laughter. Which is more than she wanted to give, I’m sure. Can you imagine her reaction to someone saying those words on her old MPR program? Or imagine her and Franken’s reaction if Rush Limbaugh had said those words (even under the guise of it being satire)?

I think we need a new Toxic Pool, only this one measuring the lifespan of Alice’s show. I’m just not sure if we should do it in days or weeks. I expected a disaster, but not one of dinosaur-eradicating proportions. “The pecker don’t know no color!” That should serve nicely for Alice’s epitaph. I was going to ignore the show, honestly I was, but holy cats! This is like trying to ignore a semi colliding head-on with bus one lane over.

UPDATE: Even worse, that was planned and prescripted. According to Saint Paul of the Fraters, that hysterical little bit was in the works two weeks ago: [Franken] and his team of writers have been compiling files on a range of topics that is utterly Frankenesque. The Bush tax policy will be ”a huge story for us,” says Ben Wikler, Franken’s producer. Then, too, Franken unleashes a hilarious, X-rated Strom Thurmond impersonation that has been playing in his head and that he desperately wants to make work….

I’m not sure dinosaur-eradicating will suffice. Alice, you might want to stop listening to the voices in your head. They aren’t funny.

PM writes: Vox, if I remember correctly, Chuck D. mentioned that “rhetoric” as referring to the idea that Americans have a sense of superiority (which is confused with patriotism) and that they travel all over the world with complete disregard for anybody they meet. This wasn’t mentioned in a collective sense. He then immediately discussed how he goes all over the world with his music and finds that the people he meets are just as much people as Americans.

No, in that context, I quite agree with you. And had I understood that was the context, which was not clear from the Atlanta newspaper account, I would not have written that post in that manner. I’m quite pleased to know that the Rhyme Animal is not an ein Welt, ein Reich globalist. As you may recall, I was so disturbed by the notion that I was forced to turn to quoting Les Miserables to express the depth of my shock, horror and dismay.

It just goes to show that it’s a mistake to comment on things known secondhand, which is why I’ve just been recalculating my own debt-to-GDP numbers for next week’s column. It turns out Mogambo was off by half a percent, but then, he always says he’s bad with a calculator. Unbelievably, he turns out to be too optimistic for a change! I guess I’ll go back to ignoring Alice’s show; I’m certainly not going to bother listening to it.

However, I think it would be difficult to deny that the mindset I described is rather common among the globalist set, which equates both charity and loving one’s neighbor with extortion, fraud and judicial force. I still stand by my statements, although I am happy to retract them where Chuck D, and apparently PM are concerned. My apologies. As far as the points about arguing like a libertarian goes, I’ll confess to being guilty of going off half-cocked in openly stated ignorance, but I don’t see that any of the rest of it applies to me.

I have not traveled as extensively as the Time-Bomb Ticking, but I speak more languages than he does and have probably immersed myself more thoroughly in at least two more cultures than he has. Because of this, I would disagree slightly with the notion that people are just people everywhere you go. They are all human beings, all children of God, to be sure, but I can state with some authority that different cultures do, indeed, cause noticeable and significant differences in the way individuals raised in them think, act and behave.

If you talk to the average stockbroker, or even regular office guy with a 401k, they’ll tell you how stocks always go up over time; just look at the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Forget the effects of inflation, what they also neglect to factor into their stunningly ignorant equation is that the Dow is not the Dow of yore. It’s barely even the Dow of yesterday.

The century-old Dow Jones Industrial Average was reshuffled yesterday in a way that reflects the strains from the recent recession, globalization and information-technology revolution on American businesses. Three venerable but declining companies — AT&T Corp., International Paper and Eastman Kodak — were replaced by three recent winners in today’s globe-spanning competition: insurance giant American International Group Inc.; the largest local U.S. phone company, Verizon Communications; and the world’s biggest drug company, Pfizer Inc.

Why? Well, according to the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal: “Evolutionary trends in the economy and the stock market — in particular, the rise of financial and health care stocks and “the diminishing relative weight of basic materials stocks” But apparently no one told the traders that they were supposed to explain it in terms that make the average guy’s eyes glaze over: “They’re putting in much larger companies that have had better results over the last couple of years,” said Owen Fitzpatrick, a portfolio manager at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management.” Yeah, I thought that might have something to do with it.

The 1999 makeover also heralded the ascendance of “new economy” technology bellwethers such as SBC, Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., over the “old economy” icons they replaced: Sears, Roebuck & Co., Union Carbide Corp., Chevron Corp. and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Home Depot Inc., a hardware chain store whose meteoric rise has mirrored record growth in home sales and the remodeling industry, also was added to the Dow at that time.

So, if you get rid of the worst-performing ten percent of the index and replace them with fast-growing new companies every five years, you can keep things moving onward and upward forever. It’s almost the opposite of the management of the Consumer Price Index, which excludes, through hedonics interpretation, “substitution” or simple exclusion, all the prices that are going up. Are you noticing a pattern here?

Mutating metrics. Interesting times.

PM comments: Ah, yes…new chief evildoer al Franqen and the exploited, brainwashed blackman commit the cardinal sin of advocating our being good neighbors in the world. That would certainly seem to indicate that they’re denying the new supreme commandment: that an American by birth is vastly superior to any other creature on earth and has an obligation to assert his dominion. (Having actually listened to the show, I don’t recall either of them mentioning the UN here)

Right, there’s no connection between world citizenship and the only institution with serious ambitions to become the government that will hand out the global ID cards. And Chuck D would be the first to tell you that he’s exploited, after all, he’s only recorded about 100 songs on just that very subject. Man, you sad little lefties can’t even do sarcasm right, much less recognize the unconscious irony in a statement that the best Americans don’t recognize their own national sovereignty.



It’s truly a shame there’s all that nonsense in the Bible about being a peacemaker and meek and loving your neighbor as yourself. I’m beginning to think that Jesus must have also been shilling for the UN.

If you can’t tell the difference between instruction on interpersonal relations and advocating the seizure of private property by extortion, fraud and force in order to further globalist designs around the world, your reading comprehension is abysmal indeed. And if the Bible is any guide to the future, Jesus is far more likely to be gunning for the UN than he is to be shilling for it. He is the opposite of March, first Lamb, then Lion.

Property rights champion Hernando de Soto wins Friedman Prize for Liberty. WASHINGTON–The Cato Institute today announced that the winner of the second biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is internationally recognized economist and property rights activist Hernando de Soto. The prize and its accompanying $500,000 cash award will be presented to de Soto May 6 in San Francisco. Named after Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, the prize is awarded every other year to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the advancement of human freedom….

Beginning in his native Peru, de Soto has focused on a revolutionary concept that is having repercussions throughout the world’s poor countries: the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries. His decades of pioneering work, before presidents and in the streets on behalf of property rights for the poor, have led to global acclaim. As de Soto explained in his 1986 book The Other Path, these de facto owners were locked out of the formal, legal economy–and that was the root of the problem. “They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation,” he wrote.

I don’t know how keen I am on the notion of awards and whatnot, but at least one is going to the good guys for a change. De Soto’s work was truly pioneering, and certainly had an effect on my understanding of poverty, even if I recall him being a little debt-friendlier than I would generally approve. As usual, note that it’s the State causing problems – although I don’t see why it’s necessary to turn to the state in order to fix them.

Chuck D said, on Alice’s show: “The Right will dip into the old-style American rhetoric. The best Americans think of themselves as citizens of the world.”

I’ve never been able to understand how someone could see problems so clearly, and advocate even worse solutions. I love Public Enemy – my columns are sprinkled with P.E. quotes, as some of you well know – but is he a UN lover now? I am agog, I am aghast! This should also make it clear that the entire American left, even the black radical left, is now ready to bow down and worship the global government. What an incredibly stupid, stupid group of people. Come on, Chuck! You’re blind to the facts on who they are cause you’re watching that nonsense. You’re blind, baby.

Derb writes on NRO’s Corner: The Washington Post also signals its liberal bias by putting Al Franken on the front page AGAIN. Howard Kurtz reports from the battle front: “the signal was elusive in Los Angeles, its San Francisco station didn’t materialize, and its Internet feed kept breaking off.” So how on Earth is this front-page news? (Maybe it’s because this tinhorn network with next to no affiliates has “less than 100 employees.” Losing money hand over fist, eh?) Tom Brokaw did a whole story on his show last night, saying talk radio “of course, is dominated by conservatives.”

I’d be more annoyed about this bent to publicize every liberal effort in order to make them successful, except that it will make the inevitable crash-and-burn that much more enjoyable. Several front page stories in the Post and the NBC Nightly News? Are you kidding me? And as for the “less than 100” employees, I don’t know if WND even has ten. If conservatives are supposed to have all the money, how come all the big businesses seem to line up with the liberals?

Oh wait, but we’ve got Fox, sort of….

Sexual assaults by U.S. military men against their female comrades-in-arms amount to a different kind of “friendly fire” in the Iraqi-Afghan theater, victims’ advocates told members of Congress on Wednesday. “While these friendly fire attacks leave no trail of blood, they leave many damaged souls in their wake,” Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, told a panel of women lawmakers. “They rob our country of the services of many we have trained and nurtured to protect us.” There have been 129 cases of sexual assault reported to the independent Miles Foundation in the current theater of operations — Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Bahrain — but only 27 were reported to military officials, according to foundation chief Christine Hansen.

Women should not be in the military. Period. No doubt some cretinous feminists will argue that the answer is to kick out the aggressive disrespecters of other individual’s bodies and human rights instead. Of course, blowing someone’s head off or incinerating them tends to require a certain disrespect for other’s bodies, not to mention right to life, liberty and happiness, so you’d be sacrificing a lot of good potential killers-of-the-enemy in order to keep militarily useless rear echelon clerks. I don’t know why this sort of thing should come as a surprise to anyone. If you’ve read any history at all, you know that in addition to killing the enemy, soldiers in wartime also tend to be rather more prone to burning things and raping women than the average peacetime civilian. It is far from the only reason, but the inevitability of intra-service rape is a good reason to keep women out of the military.

From the Star Tribune: FRANKEN’S RADIO DEBUT SHY OF PERFECTION. Rush Limbaugh can sleep soundly. For now. Air America, the liberal radio network designed to disturb conservatives, had a shaky launch Wednesday as its flagship show, “The O’Franken Factor,” struggled to find the proper balance among comedy, interviews and political grandstanding.

“The O’Franken Factor” should be of particular interest to Twin Cities listeners because it is hosted by Minnesota native Al Franken and Katherine Lanpher, a former host on Minnesota Public Radio. Their presence is the primary reason WMNN (1330 AM) picked up their three-hour weekday show (11 a.m.-2 p.m.), but not the rest of the network’s 6 a.m.-to-11 p.m. programming. There’s every reason to believe that the investment will eventually pay off. Franken is a well-read, prickly comic who rarely talks down to his audience and Lanpher is a sharp interviewer with a soothing voice, but the two of them together don’t have any immediate chemistry. Lanpher is clearly not content just being Franken’s sidekick. Just throwing to commercial breaks and reminding people what’s coming up next is not her style; there may not be enough room in the booth for two captains.

If the Star and Sickle thought so poorly of Franken’s show – for which it has been cheerleading for months – it must really have been bad. And it amuses me greatly to think that the first attempt at fixing it will probably involve kicking the pretentious air balloon that is Lanpher off the show. This is one dirigible crash that will be rather enjoyable to watch.

Oh, and Alice… I’m waiting….

You may recall that I was looking for a gold dip and then another move upward. It worked out pretty well according to my formula. While it never quite touched my estimated buy price of $385, the London Fix did close at 390.50 on March 3, which at 1.023 was well within my buy range of 1.02 to 1.03. Unfortunately, I had nothing with which to make a buy, but it’s still nice to see things work out according to one’s calculations. With the price rising 9.74 percent since then, I was considering a sale yesterday at $428, but upon looking at the numbers I saw that it was well short of my preferred sell range of 1.15 to 1.17.

Since I’ve already made the mistake once of not holding on during a swift move upward, I’ll wait until we hit that range, which requires a price of approximately $450. The key, as always, is being correct about the general direction of the market. Since we appear to be in the early stages of a long term bull market in commodities, it shouldn’t be too difficult to profit from the inevitable fluctuations But it’s also best to maintain a buy-and-hold core stake during these markets, as completely missing out on the big leaps up will happen from time to time.

I’m still kicking myself for not picking up silver at $5, especially now that it’s threatening to touch $8 less than three months later.