Vote Democrat

Because the Stupid Party is too, well, stupid:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is sending its lawyer to Alaska to assist Lisa Murkowski who is trailing conservative Joe Miller in the senate primary.

The Fix reported:

Sean Cairncross, the general counsel of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is headed to Alaska at the request of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) to help provide guidance to the GOP incumbent who finds herself trailing attorney Joe Miller (R) by roughly 1,600 votes.

Cairncross will spend several days on the ground in Alaska as Murkowski and her campaign prepare for the counting of as many as 16,000 absentee ballots — a process expected to start next Tuesday and continue through early September.

Too stupid to be allowed to live. Vote 'em all out. The problem isn't the Democrats, and the solution isn't the Republicans.

Morons.

Blue States don't need all those dirty factory jobs anyway

After all, they support "clean", high tech, high paying industries. Oh, wait:

Adobe Systems, maker of a suite of graphics programs such as Adobe PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, have announced that they are building a $100 million facility in either Salt Lake City or in nearby Utah County, Utah. The facility will bring thousands of jobs to Utah over the next few decades.

In May the Internet auction company ebay also announced a major new facility to be built in Salt Lake City. The $287 million data center will also bring hundreds of new jobs to the Bee Hive State.

Not to be forgotten, games maker Electronic Arts opened its new facility in July in Salt Lake City where around 100 employees are already at work.

Smartest move I ever didn't make was to California in 1989. Will the last (employed) California resident please turn out the lights on your way out?

Via Unc.

Your Global Warming Quote Of The Month

From Jennifer, in re: celebrities who think they're Climate Scientists:

Dear Hollywood celebrities,

You exist for my entertainment. Some of you are great eye candy.

...

I’ll crank the organ grinder; you dance.

...

And you? Really? I’m supposed to care what the director of fluffy tripe made for gullible people thinks of those who realize global warming is a scam? Get back into your bubble. I’ll let you know when I’m in the mood for something blue and shiny.

This is the most Righteous smackdown of over-stuffed Hollywood shirts that I've seen in a long time. RTWT.

I think that I have a little (platonic, Climate Science-ish) crush on Miss Jennifer. This hits center mass.

Via Law Dog.

What do you get when you cross a car with a computer?

A computer with wheels.

As software becomes more important to how cars work, the question is how much thought went into security? The answer is, as you'd expect, "none". Security wasn't an afterthought, it wasn't thought of at all.

Well, researchers are now turning their attention to the problem, and what they're finding is pretty horrifying. Like Computer worms that could hop from car to car, shutting off the engine and causing traffic jams from hell:

The idea would be to launch a worm that would spread on the Internet (in any of a number of well explored ways) looking for vulnerable smart phones. Smart phones have GPS devices in, so the worm, having infected the phone, could ensure it was only operating in some geographic area of interest (eg the US, or a particular city). The worm could then check if it was on a smart phone that happened to be plugged into a car, and if so compromise the car. It could then use whatever wireless opportunities were available to compromise any other cars within the attack range. It could also disable the car (eg by locking up the brakes, stopping the engine, etc).

The idea would be that the worm would seed itself into the small minority of cars that are Internet vulnerable and from there spread into the larger majority that are not.

If this worked correctly, the end result would be a city with all its major freeways and surface streets full of disabled cars, a situation that would paralyze almost all commerce. It would probably take weeks to straighten out the mess.

For extra credit, examine the effect of adding "Smart" electric power meter attacks to the rolling TEOTWAWKI. For maximum effect, make sure the code includes a 7 day delay, to allow the maximum spread, both to cars and homes. Then the logic bomb goes off.

This is the sort of scare scenario that gets security a bad name. We're a bunch of Cassandras, always looking at the downside - arguing about who killed who ...



"Plausible", as the MythBusters might say. The reason is well known:

Usually, when the security community comes across some new domain whose practictioners lack any understanding of security, it turns out that there are very large numbers of vulnerabilities of all kinds that are pervasive throughout the system.

Development teams are penalized for their feature not being ready for the new model year. Teams are not penalized if there's a huge, gaping security hole in their architecture (say, user devices like phones able to be attached to the network that accesses the engine and brakes).

Another reason to get that sweet GTO.

Why the economy is screwed, and will be for ten years

TJIC lays it out. I wish I could be more optimistic than he, but it sure looks like he has it analyzed. We also are looking at eliminating debt, which is one of the drivers behind us leaving the People's Republic of Massachusetts and moving to Atlanta.

To amplify TJIC, let me say that the Tech Bubble is (in some ways) still being worked out, and the Fed.Gov made things a lot worse with Sarbanes-Oxley. Specifically, the startup/IPO market has been depressed for 8 years, and so a bunch of startups that would have been successful were never started. Now that unemployment is bumping 10%, that's an example where our Government Masters are screwing things up.

Housing prices are "sticky", not just because people hesitate to accept a loss, but because when they only have maybe 10% equity in the house, they can't sell if the price drops 11%. "Buy more house than you can afford" is great when home prices are going up up up, but turns the house into a prison when prices drop. The Fed.Gov is doing many things here, all of them wrong - meaning they will make the problem last longer.

The Higher Education industry has done a simply outstanding job of teaching Marxist philosophy while simultaneously milking its customers for every penny of the surplus that the degree will generate. They've lobbied our Government Masters to make student loans one of the two types of debt that are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Way to go, Marxists! From each according to his ability, to you!

Combine this with the Entitlement collapse, and I fear not that my children will be less well off than I, but that they will be substantially less well off. Quite frankly, it's Big Government that is making all of these drivers much, much worse.

Man, all those Ivy League Technocrats sure did a good job, didn't they? Philosopher Kings.

The wolves are silent

There are nights when the wolves are silent, and the moon howls.

- George Carlin

There are nights when I wish I didn't know about PSA, and Taxotere. Those nights, the moon howls.

Every day is a gift, if we're wise enough to realize it.


Like tomorrow was a gift,
And you got eternity,
To think about what you’d do with it.
An' what did you do with it?

I'm not sure if this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing

Gay-Test.com - How gay are you?

I'm still not sure if that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, but hey - don't ask, don't tell!  I did know where Barolo comes from. Pretty pricey for my tastes, though.

Via Weer'd Beard.

Army to discontinue bayonet training in Basic?

Isegoria alerts us to what will be an enormous disappointment to JayG - the Army will stop bayonet training at their summer camps. The reason? Recruits are fat and lazy:

I mentioned a few months ago that the Army was dropping bayonet training from its boot camp — or Basic Combat Training. That’s not the only change, of course, and the Army’s own story sounds a bit defensive:

“A lot of these Soldiers come in and haven’t been in physical activities in high school so we start out with a preparation drill to warm up the muscles and go on from there,” said Sgt. 1st Class Zachary Parrish, who is a Fort Sill drill sergeant. “It used to be you take a Soldier and without the progression you may be putting too much on that Soldier. They’re going to inevitably get hurt.”

He said he’s seen less injuries so far with the new crawl, walk, run methodology. Even in the beginning if some of the Soldiers are more physically fit, he said they all progress to the end state where a rigorous workout is safe for everyone.

The Army is also taking a more holistic approach focusing on nutrition as well to keep Soldiers healthy and resilient.

“We talk nutrition from day one. The health of the Soldier is the bottom line. They’re going to be ineffective if they’re in sick call, so we make sure they get time to eat and that the food they’re eating is good for them,” said Parrish.

He also has a very interesting post about how the Mumbai Police don't know how to set their combat sights. It's not clear if this had an impact on the terrorist raid or not, but you'd think it would be hard to hit the Tango if you haven't been trained on how to set the sights on your battle rifle.

Automobile want

Seen on Top Gear, it's the Morgan Aero 8. Zero to sixty in 4.5 seconds, and said to handle like a Porche 911. That's what you need if you're going to charge $120,000 for a car.


I hear it comes with a factory installed cop on your ass, though. And you could put both #1 Son and #2 Son through college for the price.

Sigh.

Can't tell him nuthin'

Via Theo.

For those who don't catch the reference, it's a comparison to George W. Bush:



This video still appalls leftists, which makes it even better.

Marketing types say that once a person has formed an impression of a product, it's very hard to get them to change it. This is why people don't like to change brands (say, toothpaste) - they've already made up their minds, and you're asking them to reopen that mental analysis. This is why new brand introductions are so hideously expensive, because you have - for a brief moment - a blank slate, with no pre-conceptions. Brand re-launches (e.g. New Coke) are almost always a disaster.

Obama's brand looks to be solidifying as arrogant, out of touch, and unwilling to not be out of touch. There's a country song for that:

Wikipedia to ban Global Warming editor?

Back in December, I posted about the shenanigans of a Wikipedia editor. It seems one William M. Connolley had rewritten thousands of articles to censor anything that might cause skepticism of Global Warming. He more or less dissappeared the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA), and removed all note of controversy about Mike Mann's hockey stick graph.

The ClimateGate emails have exposed Wikipedia as being entirely unreliable regarding climate change. Entirely. Anthony Watts has been all over this for a while, but the situation is essentially a politically motivated editor at Wikipedia rewrote history via thousands of Wikipedia articles. The Wikipedia "system" broke down, as corrections to these articles were blocked, and the people correcting them were banned from Wikipedia.

Computer Security folks look at "Resource Poisoning" attacks as some of the most interesting - if you can convince a critical mass of users that something is untrustworthy, it will collapse.

Well, it seems that Wikipedia is fixin' to ban him:

3.1) User:William M. Connolley is banned from the English Wikipedia for six months for long-term violations of WP:OWN, WP:CIVIL, and WP:BLP.

...

3.2) User:William M. Connolley is banned from all Climate Change articles, broadly construed, for one year. He may edit their talk pages. This editing restriction specifically includes modification of talk page edits made by any other user, on any talk page; in the case of posts to William M. Connolley's user talk page, he is free to remove posts without response.

...

4) User:William M. Connolley is banned from editing any article that is substantially the biography of a living person, where the person's notability or the subject of the edit relates to the topic area of global warming or climate change.

...

5) User:William M. Connolley is subject to an editing restriction for one year. Should he make any edits which are judged by an uninvolved administrator to be uncivil remarks, personal attacks, assumptions of bad faith, or violations of WP:BLP, he may be briefly blocked, up to a week in the event of repeated violations. After 3 blocks, the maximum block shall increase to one month. This editing restriction specifically includes modification of talk page edits made by any other user, on any talk page; in the case of posts to William M. Connolley's user talk page, he is free to remove posts without response.

So not a permanent ban, other than 4). I guess it's a start.

The problem remains the impression of Resource Poisoning. The Wikipedia articles on MWP and LIA are better now than they were two years ago, but (a) that's not saying much, and (b) there's still a ways to go. Take Wikipedia with a very large grain of salt on Climate Change issues.

Our political invective is in sad decline

Oh, for a more vigorous and spirited debate, like we had in the early days of the Republic. John Randolph said of opponent Edward Livingstone that "he shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel at midnight."

Lord knows that we have targets aplenty, and some of them hope to win their party's primary today.


Vote 'em out. Every rotten mackerel.


Remember, the problem isn't the Democrats, and the solution isn't the Republicans.

Not so smart after all

Penn Jillette nails it, with a (ahem) liberal sprinkling of F-Bombs:



You can almost hear the guy saying But I'm so smart, I must be able to figure it out. Yeah, it's something I have no experience with, and someone is actively trying to keep me from figuring it out, but it bothers me that I can't figure it out.

Yeah, it bothers us that you can't figure it out, too. Actually, that doesn't bother us; the fact that you think you can figure everything out - despite repeated examples of Epic Figure Out Fail - that bothers us.

Hat Tip: A Large Regular.

Linky links

Older Brother Borepatch is in town, and so we're getting together with them. While I hate to put up an "All Linky, No Thinky" sort of post, err, that's exactly what I'm doing.

Things that make you go "hmmmm":

The Obama administration is bullish on High Speed Rail, and is planning hundreds of billions in subsidies to create a partial nation-wide network. The Antiplanner looks at this, and runs the numbers:

By comparison, Obama’s 12,500-mile rail network won’t directly connect the Midwest with the East Coast or anywhere in the West with anywhere else. A report published by the ardently pro-rail Center for Clean Air Policy estimates that Obama’s network will carry about 20 billion passenger miles per year (not counting the Northeast Corridor, which is already in place and not a part of Obama’s plan), which (accounting for population growth) will average to less than 60 miles per person. Even accounting for the 3,000 or so route miles added to Obama’s plan since that report was written, even boosting speeds up to 200 or more mph, per-capita ridership is never going to amount to more than 400 miles, which is about what it is in France and Japan.

Let’s say 12,500 miles of 220-mph trains will move 140 billion passenger miles per year. We still have one system that paid for itself and moves well over a trillion passenger miles per year vs. another system that requires 100 percent capital subsidies and moves less than one-eighth that many passenger miles per year (and virtually no freight). In what universe could anyone think high-speed rail makes sense? Only one that has an extra $500 billion lying around collecting dust, which means not here.

So even using hopelessly unrealistic projections (Americans will travel by rail as much as French or Japanese), the HSR system will be six times as expensive as flying, and at least twice as expensive as driving. But it will, Big Dig style, give ample opportunity to dish out favorable contracts on a government Vanity project. RTWT.

The legal exposure of the Wikileaks gang may be much worse than you think, and much, much worse than is being reported:

Whatever notions you have absorbed by virtue of spending your formative years watching LA Law or The Practice, be rid of them. Not only do courts have no patience for cute, technically correct but highly disruptive legal theories involving technologies they barely understand, but the ultimate arbiter of whether the facts suggest that the defendant violated Title X Section Y of this or that statute is probably going to be a group of twelve people who lack the wherewithal to get out of jury duty.

This is a long post, by someone who sounds to me at least like he's a lawyer, who carefully goes through the law step by step - from the statutes protecting classified documents, to the Espionage Act, to Press Immunity, to how Prosecutors are likely to view this case, to how Wikileaks' MSM "partners" are distancing themselves from it, to the Classified Information Protection Act of 1980 (and the "Valerie Plame" case) - all leading to the conclusion that Wikileaks has screwed themselves:

Given the literal riot of theories of liability that seem to attach to the conduct of Wikileaks (not to mention the fact that Wikileaks appears to be under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement along with the U.S. Army investigators have begun to make it a habit of detaining at the border certain associates of Mr. Assange, searching their laptops and asking if such associates happen to know where Mr. Assanage is just now)40 future leakers might well want to consider not just the demonstrated ineptitude of the Wikileaks crowd in protecting its sources, but the fact that, should Wikileaks or Assange find themselves indicted or searched at the border, any material, logs, chat sessions, IP records or testimony from cooperating witnesses as they bend to prosecutorial pressure one by one, are all likely to make Wikileak sources a bit more popular than they expected to be.

This is the most interesting thing I've read about the whole situation. Long, but worth it.

A Primer on the IPCC Global Warming Claims. Too much to excerpt, but if you want to know the weakness of the "consensus" argument (and very weak it is indeed), then this is a great starting point. I'm thinking about updating my "Should you be a Global Warming Skeptic" post, and if I do, I'll be stealing incorporating much from this. And don't neglect the comments, which contain a wealth of Smart.

UPDATE 23 August 2010 15:41: Dang, even my linky posts are long. I also forgot this one, Global Warming Skepticism For Dummies, from Dr. Roy Spencer. Q&A format, very accessible.

Visual impact

OJ Simpson's defense attorneys knew something that the prosecution didn't - that wet leather shrinks when it dries. You'd think that this would make the prosecution's case even stronger: the blood-soaked gloves shouldn't fit, because they had been blood soaked.But they used this knowledge to make a courtroom display that burned through the masses of data, and lodged squarely in the jury's mind. Johnny Cochran captured this is a phrase that advertising people must admire for its memorability: It the glove does not fit, you must acquit.

This visually striking moment was when the trial was basically over. People remembered the image, not the data.

Here's another image that captured the public's imagination just a few years after OJ's trial.

It's the "Hockey Stick" temperature graph from the cover of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - specifically, the Third Assessment Report (AR3) in 2001. The graph itself was from Michael Mann et al, in a 1998 paper. There's background on this paper here, but the point is that this graph had a similar impact to OJ's glove: it captured the imagination of the public. It is reasonable to argue that this graph led directly to the Kyoto Protocols, and ultimately to today's proposals like Cap And Trade.

Just like OJ's glove, it gets interesting when you look into the data itself. We don't have temperature records going back a thousand years, so Mann et al used proxies - things that seem to work sort of like thermometers, but which aren't. They used tree rings, because trees grow faster in warmer years and slower in colder ones. No problem so far - this is pretty standard in the field.

What Mann did that has been the source of controversy is use a pretty unusual statistical analysis method. It's been shown that his method generates hockey stick shaped graphs when even random data is used as the input - say, the list of telephone numbers in your town. So far, the debate about this has had more than a bit of the playground did too/did not to it. This means that the hockey stick graph has won, because it is so visually striking.

That may be ending. There's a new paper out, written by professional statisticians, that pretty well breaks Mann's approach (including his revised 2008 method). You can find overviews here and here, but in my mind the most interesting commentary comes from William Briggs (himself a statistician), concerning another striking graph:

The jaggy red line is their prediction, over which they lay bands of uncertainty due to various factors. Just look at that envelope of possible temperatures!—the dull gray window. The straight yellow line is mine: notice how it slides right through the envelope, never poking out through it at any point. This suggests that a flat-line, i.e. unchanging, temperature fits just as well as the boys’ sophisticated model. At least, the unchanging “null” model cannot be rejected with any great certainty.

This is just as beautiful as a shorthanded goal. It means we cannot tell—using these data and this model—with any reasonable certainty if temperatures have changed plus or minus 1^oC over the last thousand years.

What this is trying to visually represent is that the uncertainties are huge - plus or minus 5° or more, at least until we get to the modern age with the thermometer record. Mann's "there was no Medieval Warm Period" reconstruction is no more valid - mathematically speaking - than "there has not been a climate change in 1000 years".

Scientifically, this is enormous - certainly the biggest news in climate science since ClimateGate last autumn. One of the harshest criticisms leveled against scientists postulating rapid warming is that they underestimate/under report the uncertainties in their calculations. This paper quantifies that.

Overall, does it matter? The hockey stick is still a powerful visual image, and because of that it's not likely to go away. But it doesn't seem to be working - the public doesn't seem to be buying the scare (and note that this was before the ClimateGate scandal broke). Ultimately, this isn't a scientific issue, it's is a political one. The public doesn't believe that there's a need to act, just like the public believes that OJ killed his wife.

Hockey stick or not, the public has the image of corrupt scientists and politicians lodged in its mind. That image isn't going away.

Gun safe bleg

I'd be interested in any experiences any of y'all have had with gun safes. Fireproof or not? Digital combination or not? Store ammunition in it or not?

It seems that the sky's the limit on what you can spend. I'd like not to spend towards the no$ebleed end of the spectrum, but want something that I won't regret later.

I'll be looking at one big enough for both rifles and pistols.

The dangers of Local Warming

We hear the never ending drumbeat of doom concerning Global Warming. A more immediate - and serious - problem is local warming. Especially for men who blog.



Oh, foo.

But it's not on the Massachusetts "Approved Bible" Roster

Via Kevin, The Onion on a new edition of the Bible:

A new translation of the Bible released this week directly mentions the Second Amendment on eight occasions, and includes a version of Psalm 23 that begins, "The Lord is my shepherd, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." ... Deuteronomy 23:14 reads. "Your camp shall be holy, and if that means exercising your constitutional right to purchase a firearm, then that's your own damn business." The leather-bound book also comes with a handsomely crafted carrying case and a fully loaded, custom-monogrammed Glock 17 9mm.

Can't sell it in Massachusetts, then. "Banned in Boston" is back!

R.I.P. Vicki Weaver

Shot down by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi on this day 18 years ago. Remember her, and him.

To their shame, H-S Precision signed Horiuchi as a spokesman a couple years ago. Remember them, too.

What do our military folks think of games where you play as the Taliban?

Gamrfeed has a very interesting interview with a bunch of current military members, asking what they think of the upcoming Medal Of Honor game where you can play as the Taliban. Interesting reading.

I more or less agree with the idea expressed by several that this isn't really much different than other games where you play as the Bad Guy. I also agree with a couple of The Guys that yeah - some people could see this as a big middle finger to Our Guys.

And I'd like to say a couple things to Pvt. Steier, in reply to her comment:

When a conflict has been going on for as long as this one has, people tend to get complacent and forget what exactly is going on. I mean, look at what happened right after 9/11... People were STEALING American flags from their neighbors to hang in their own yards! How many people fly the flag on a daily basis now? People forget, it's easy to do since we're so separated from it all. A game like this reopens our eyes to the point where we go "oh, hey, look, this is still happening!"

1. Yes, I fly the flag every day out front of my house. It's a small flagpole, attached to the house. When we move, I hope to have a large, free standing flag pole where I can fly not only the flag, but the Marine Corps flag that nephew Daniel brought home to me from Fallujah.

2. Thank you for your service, and for the service of your brothers and sisters in arms.

3. Every day I pray for you to come home safe, and soon, and victorious.

Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law. But this is where we stand.

Blogroll updates

I haven't done this is a while, so there's a backlog.

Cranky Chicks with Guns are pretty self-explanatory. And they also remind us that manners cost us nothing:

These ICP worshipers turned into crap-flinging primates for some reason or another. In what setting is it considered acceptable to throw excrement? I’ve been in some weird situations, folks, but I’ve never been tempted to grab a handful of feces – human or not – and fling it in any direction.

So very true.

Dragonblasts not only blogs, but is the home of Dragon Leather Works, makers of sweet, sweet holsters like this Python skin one for an XD.

[Wayne's World] Some day, you will be mine. Oh yes. [/Waynes World]

And this recent post of his deserves your attention. It's about a tattoo artist who tattoos identification onto our soldier's body, in case an IED blows off the soldier's dog tags. It's about his relationship to the soldiers, which goes far beyond "customers".

Desert Defender seems to be blogging from a new place, Eyes Never Shut. You'll want to update your bookmarks accordingly.

Welcome to the Borepatch blogroll! And a note to anyone else who might have blogrolled me. If I haven't added you here, leave a comment or email me: borepatch at gmail dot com.

Miranda Lambert - The House That Built Me

They say that you can't go home again. You can, but maybe only in your mind.

We're moving, from really the only house that #2 Son has ever known. This is the house that he will look back on - thirty years from now - as his childhood home.

Miranda Lambert is an artist we've seen here before - she's one of the gifted singer/songwriters that brings the best of times to the current Country music best of times/worst of times. This is her new single, and while it's the first one that she didn't write, it's a real cracker.

This song speaks to us here Chez Borepatch, in many different ways. The house is as old as I, and I'm only the third owner. I'm the third owner who has built onto the house. Our old cats - old when #2 Son was born - are buried by the Burning Bush in the back yard. I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am. I'm lucky that I had my family to help me find myself again.

You can't go home again. You leave home and you move on, and you do the best you can. Life goes on, and the past is a land that we can only visit in our dreams, or our memories. #2 Son is coping with the idea of moving, but some day he may come back to see this House that Built him.



The House That Built Me (Songwriters: Tom Douglan, Allen Shamblin):

I know they say you can’t go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these handprints on the front steps are mine

Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar
I bet you didn’t know under that live oak
My favorite dog is buried in the yard

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

Mama cut out pictures of houses for years
From Better Homes and Gardens magazine
Plans were drawn and concrete poured
Nail by nail and board by board
Daddy gave life to mama’s dream

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can
I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I walk around I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

This is the House That Built Me, in Ravenna, Ohio. #2 Son took this picture when we came back to see it. We didn't take nothin' but a memory.

"The Pittsburg Pirates of broadcast news"

Bill O'Reilly is at Fenway Park, and it's Jimmy Fund telethon week, so he stopped by the NESN booth to chat on camera with Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo. In the source of the conversation, referring to his ten years on TV and prospects for more, he said it was because of CNN's implosion.

They're the Pittsburg Pirates of Broadcast News.

Ouch. That'll leave a mark.

I have been remiss

In not pointing out that ASM826 over at Random Acts of Patriotism is simply on fire lately.

Wilderness trips to Yellowstone in 1921, Commodore Dewey's flagship from the 1890s about to be scrapped, a 19 year old hero who saved a 6 year old girl trapped in a rip tide because "I just couldn’t leave the little girl out there by herself. It was dark, the tide was going out and the water was rough." A 14 year old hero in 1928 who pulled a man from a frozen lake; the man went on to found a successful business and became a great religious philanthropist.

Just go read.

The search for the Principled Left

Occasionally turns up a Principled Left. I Want A New Left compares and contrasts Rich People's Leftism to Poor People's Leftism. It's as righteous a can of Whoop Ass opened up there as I've seen in a long, long time:

RPL [Rich Peoples Leftism] thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL [Poor People's Leftism] thinks that RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get great jobs.

RPL favors equality and so rejects upward mobility. PPL favors upward mobility via capitalism, since it sees that “egalitarian” schemes never work and are really disguised hierarchies with wealthy leftists at the top.

RPL respects wealthy liberals for wanting to help the poor. PPL observes that these wealthy liberals ensure that they are well paid for what they do and prefers to support wealthy conservatives, who at least are honest about where they are coming from.

The one gentle suggestion I might add is that PPL looks an awful lot like classical populism. Viewing the post through that lens makes this look pretty reasonable:

RPL is enraged at Sarah Palin, while PPL likes her because she seems to favor PPL over RPL.

RTWT. Twice. And then read the comments, where a leftie shows up and accuses him of being a wingnut troll. His reply is another can of whoop ass.

If the Left were all like this guy, I'd call myself a leftist. This is required reading, folks, and I don't say that very often.

Via Aretae.

Feds: No laws broken in school-administrators-spy-on-students-in-their-bedrooms scandal

Well OK then:

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday closed their investigation into Lower Merion School District's secret use of software to track student laptops, saying they found no evidence that anyone intentionally committed a crime.

The decision, announced by U.S. Attorney Zane Memeger, ended a six-month probe by the FBI into allegations that district employees might have spied on students through webcams on their school-issued laptops.

"Might"? How about "Took 55,000 pictures with the laptops' cameras"? Multiple lawsuits working their way towards the impoverishment of the school district taxpayers. But no jail time.

Not that this is a surprise. After all, these were government employees. Can't jail them. As I said almost 6 months ago:

The Wheels of Justice are fully engaged, I see. That will put government bureaucrats on notice that engaging in the creation of potential child pornography will be met with the sternest measures available to the school district.

You and me: Felony charges, jail until we make extortionate bail.

Them: Paid leave and "no comment" from the government PR Flack.

John Edwards was right after all. There really are two Americas. One is inhabited by you and me. The other is inhabited by government bureaucrats who seem to be able to commit felonies that would have you and me in jail facing 20 years, and looking at a million dollars for bail.

The Federales are on the case, although the over/under on a serious prosecution is probably 5:1 against.

Maybe some of the folks who are so in love with activist government would like to explain what you do to government employees who take pictures of your children in their bedrooms. Oh well, I'm sure it will be totally different when they're running our health care.

Totally.

Needs more cowbell

Seen at Guitar Center. Man, that's a lot of cowbell ...

Your daily dose of misanthropy

Regarding Paul Krugman, who hated George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and John McCain, who are all Evil Incarnate™, and who thinks that Barack Obama is "less progressive than people thought":

While it is regrettable that Obama doesn't completely agree with Kruginator, he shares his party affiliation so he's a good man. He drops the good bombs. He tortures the good torture. He assassinates the good assassinations. He's the good kind of murdering sell out.

This is why I hate everyone now instead of just the right wing. Looking back, I have no fucking idea how it took me this long.

Not sure that I entirely like the site, but if you're looking for misanthropic snark sharp as the finest English cheddar, this is the place.

Your daily LOL

Via Insty, it seems some Liberal Journalist (redundancy alert) is writing a book on gun owners. It seems that he went to AR15.com and posted a request to talk to gun owners who are "caching" weapons. Hilarity ensues:


As you'd imagine, he was properly thrashed by the commenters (it really starts getting fun about 1:34 PM). He even - in a plea for civility, no less - calls the commenters d**kheads. Srlsy. Bug gun owners are nothing if not helpful, as this poster offered up:

Several years ago I stopped purchasing US Savings Bonds, to stop feeding the beast. I switched over to an auto deduction that is sent to my local FFL. Every two months he sells me a new AR-7 because of this entry in wikipedia:

The ArmaLite AR-7 Explorer, designed by Eugene Stoner, is the civilian-commercial version of a rifle developed for the US Air Force as a pilot and aircrew survival weapon. Its intended markets are backpackers and other recreational users as a knockabout utility rifle. AR-7 is often recommended by outdoor users of recreational vehicles (automobile, airplane or boat) who might have need for a weapon for foraging or defense in a wilderness emergency.

I then put it in a 6" PVC tube, with a threaded plug on one and and a glued cap on the other. I use a soldering iron and write, "Property of USGS - Do not disturb" on the capped end. I pour in some dessicant, stuff or roll in some poly tarp, add 50' of paracord, one Mountain House 2-serving Chicken Polynesian and a freeze-dried neopolitan ice cream, three us quarters, a $5 bill, and the previous two months of Playboy then bury them using a posthole digger under Interstate overpasses or in the exact center under high-voltage transmission lines. I am always very careful to save the plug of vegetation and put the dirt on a tarp, then replace the plug as neatly as possible.

I then return to my basement and log the location in the margin of a Bible.

Hope this helps.

Of course, people dig up his anti-gun background and put it on prominent display. If you need a laugh, from a proper, good old fashioned ass-whooping, this is your ticket.

Pass along some good wishes

BobG posts about his 37th (!) anniversary, as well as the results of his surgery. You might want to stop by and leave your best wishes.

Mea Culpa

With all the house brouhaha lately, I'm slacking off in my climate change blogging. Fortunately, Mr. B is there with all your the-data-is-astonishingly-lousy updates. From Satellites, and the data is all screwed up. It's not like they're Rocket Scientists, or something.

Well, actually they are Rocket Scientists, and the data is still screwed up. Wonder how that happened?

Your daily WTF

Is a 200' personal luxury diesel-electric submarine. I remember hearing about these guys back in the tech bubble days, and it looks like they're still there. It also looks like their meat and potatoes is commercial sight seeing subs.

I have no idea how much this would cost, but I'm guessing eight figures. Seems a lot to spend for something that doesn't have torpedo tubes ...

In re: Advertising

Blogger has a hilarious feature called "Monetize4" (or it used to be called that - they change things around all the time). It's basically there to make it easy to turn on Google Blog Ads.

Now I don't run ads, because it might annoy some of y'all, and also because Blogger won't say how much it's worth. They're quite fishy here - you kind of have to turn it on and see what happens. No thanks.

But out of the blue comes an email asking me if I'd like to have an ad or link to The Sportsman's Guide. As I told them, I don't run ads. But their marketing department is clearly hitting center mass (err, or missing the target entirely) if they're pinging me - kind of cool, right there.

So those of you who live in the United States of America (as opposed to the People's Republic of Massachusetts) might want to check them out.


Full disclosure (for you, not for the FTC, who can kiss my tail end): I've never shopped with them, I haven't received any consideration for this, and I won't be changing my "no advertisements" policy. I just think it's cool that someone asked.

Today's must-read

Comes courtesy of Al Fin. For a while I've been saying that the states are the logical source for checks on Federal overreach. He brings another play on this idea, and it's a doozy:

The author then suggests going the route of state legislatures to create a constitutional amendment which would hold the US Congress' feet to the fire, and enforce fiscal discipline and fairness. That is where a truly monumental battle of ideas could play out, if the anti-statist forces are disciplined and ingenious enough.

For it is abundantly clear that the US Congress, the US Executive, and probably the US Supreme Court along with the Federal Judiciary, are all corrupted beyond redemption -- without radical triage. Without an iron-clad constitutional guarantee of Congressional discipline, transparency, and fairness in budgeting, the truly grisly job of radical triage passes beyond the government into the nation at large.

Tax code too complex because Congress loves handing out favors to cronies deserving parties? Pass a constitutional amendment stripping congress of that power ("Congress shall make no law ..."). Entrenched politicians abuse their power, becoming a ruling class rather than public servants? Enact a constitutional amendment for term limits.

Devolution of power - we've seen it in the economy for 40 years. The only reason to think that government will always continue to centralize is because the thinker is locked in his own intellectual box.

The beauty of this is that that the incentives plausibly work: both political parties are despised by the voters. This effort would be done by state politicians who have a lot to gain from a massive culling of the current members of congress. There are political careers to be built on giving the People what they want.

But it's in a baaaaaaad neighborhood

It seems that the sheep like the old Hobbiton set in New Zealand:

The rolling green pastures that provided the backdrop for director Peter Jackson’s trilogy were originally going to be converted into hobbit theme park, to attract tourists to the town of Matamata on the country's North Island.

But the plans were shelved, and the land is now home to 12,000 sheep and 250 cattle.

I guess I should hasten to add that there are no sheep inside the Chez Borepatch secure perimeter ...

Tired

We are implementing our drang nach suden strategy, gearing up to move from Yankeeland back south. Chez Borepatch goes on the market tomorrow (the sign is already out front, at the edge of the secure perimeter).

The place looks pretty dang good. That's because we've more or less killed ourselves making repairs, painting, polishing, getting rid of junk, and everything that goes along with staging our invasion return.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, we'll sell it before the first snow. Wish us luck.

Today's must-read

Come from ASM826, who tells an almost forgotten story of the early days of World War II. Of how a private fishing boat signed up to patrol for U-Boats. Of civilians answering the call, when their country needed them:

With an immediate need was to find a way to fight the Germans and protect the shipping along the Atlantic coast, the Navy turned to the Coast Guard, and then to civilians in yachts, pleasure boats and fishing vessels, to watch for and report enemy submarine activity. It was officially called the Coastal Picket Patrol, but it became known as the Hooligan Navy. The civilian boats didn't have any meaningful offensive weapons, and often the reports they made didn't lead to anything because the subs either had moved on or weren't there in the first place. But America needed them and they responded. Here's the story of one of them.

Of the lives they saved, but you'll have to read the whole thing for the story.

There's so much that we've forgotten, that we shouldn't.

Let the Hatin' begin

What's the greatest Country song?

Feel free to leave your favorite in the comments. Even if it's Shania. But please please please no Rascal Flatts.

If you need mine, I need to think for a week for the absolute best. But these are some personal favorites:







And these are classics:







Only song to ever win two Grammies, right there. And yes, that's Steve Martin.



And these were huge commercial successes:

Shania - If you're not in it for love really isn't Country, but it sure sold a lot of records.

Garth Brooks - just about anything recorded in the 1990s, but Thunder Rolls is a favorite.

Dixie Chicks - They blew their career out because Natalie couldn't shut up, but they were huge - selling maybe as many albums as all other country artists in 2000.



Me, I prefer SheDaisy.

And this one is for Dad:



What's interesting looking back on this is that Country music's women are way over-represented here.

Hat tip: Theo Spark.

Courage

Offered up to you in 55 gallon drums.

Rearguard

On this day in 778, the army of Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne to you francophones) was crossing the Pyrenees back into Francia, when his rearguard was ambushed by a band of Basques. The rearguard fought hard to save the supply train, including the great king's personal possessions.


Many of them fell, including their leader Roland. The chronicles of Einhard tell the tale:

While he was vigorously pursuing the Saxon war, almost without a break, and after he had placed garrisons at selected points along the border, [Charles] marched into Spain [in 778] with as large a force as he could mount. His army passed through the Pyrenees and [Charles] received the surrender of all the towns and fortified places he encountered. He was returning [to Francia] with his army safe and intact, but high in the Pyrenees on that return trip he briefly experienced the Basques. That place is so thoroughly covered with thick forest that it is the perfect spot for an ambush. [Charles's] army was forced by the narrow terrain to proceed in a long line and [it was at that spot], high on the mountain, that the Basques set their ambush. [...] The Basques had the advantage in this skirmish because of the lightness of their weapons and the nature of the terrain, whereas the Franks were disadvantaged by the heaviness of their arms and the unevenness of the land. Eggihard, the overseer of the king's table, Anselm, the count of the palace, and Roland, the lord of the Breton March, along with many others died in that skirmish. But this deed could not be avenged at that time, because the enemy had so dispersed after the attack that there was no indication as to where they could be found.

It takes a tough man to be in the rear guard. You have to collect stragglers, deal with all the heavy supply wagons, and you're a magnet for raiders looking to score some quick booty.

On this same day 1200 years later, a different leader had to deal with a different fanatical follower. Emperor Hirohito had decided that surrender to the Americans was the best way to preserve his people, after a terrible bombing campaign culminating in the two atomic bombs. He made a radio address to the Japanese people, and address that was very nearly thwarted by his most fanatical followers led by War Minister Korechika Anami. During the struggle, the head of the Imperial Guard was killed, but brave government officials hid the recording, which went off as scheduled.

Afterwards, Anami killed himself, his attempt to protect the Emperor (as he saw it) a failure. Another rearguard casualty.

It's very interesting to see how today a lot of people who have always thought of themselves as the Vanguard are fighting a desperate rearguard action, trying to "protect" people who neither need nor want that "protection", any more than Hirohito did.

To the EU Ambassador: don't call us, we'll call you

The new EU Ambassador to the US says that we should talk to him, rather than to the member nation's Ambassadors:

Joao Vale de Almeida was this week formally installed as the EU's ambassador to the US, and suggested that American officials should regard him as their first point of contact for transatlantic discussions.

He is the first EU ambassador to be appointed after the controversial Lisbon Treaty gave the EU sweeping new powers.

The new ambassador claimed to now be "leading the show" among European representatives in Washington.

Riiiight.

How to make this clear to Ambassador Vale de Almeida? The member nations are actually, you know, nations. With real governments, which exercise real powers, which power was (mostly) granted to them by the people in (mostly) free and fair elections.

As opposed to the EU, which has ignored multiple "No" vote referenda, and whose power resides in an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy. Get those fixed, and maybe we'll talk.

What's that? "Unelected" and "Unaccountable" are the point? Thanks, we'll call the member nations.

Prediction: ur doin it wrong

Hat tip: #1 Son.

Dolly Parton - Little Sparrow

She's called the "Iron Butterfly" for her tough business negotiation, having turned down Elvis' (Elvis!) request to cover I will Always Love You. He wanted too much money - half of all royalties in perpetuity. She said no. Entertainer of the Year - one of only seven women who have ever been given this award. 45 Grammy nominations, 7 awards (she wuz robbed). Two Academy Award nominations. Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. Country Music Hall of Fame, and Songwriter's Hall of Fame. A 2003 tribute album to her featured covers of her songs by Melissa Etheridge, Allison Kraus, Shania Twain, Norah Jones, and Sinead O'Connor. Yowzer.

Yet she says that the greatest honor she's received is a bronze statue on the Courthouse lawn in her hometown. She is, of course, Dolly Parton. Actually, that's Dr. Dolly Parton - she received an honorary degree for her decades of work to increase literacy. Eastern Tennessee had a real problem with that when she was born in 1946.

Through it all, she's kept her sense of humor. Famous (or infamous) for her showy outfits and huge wigs (among - ahem - other things), she has been known to say "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."

Needless to say, I'm a huge Dolly Parton fan.

Dolly Parton is, in some ways, the tap root of Country Music. Not a few of her 6000 (!) songs reach way, way back to Country's Scotch-Irish/Celtic foundation. While some of her songs are much more famous (9 to 5, I Will Always Love You), Her 2001 album Little Sparrow moved away from the heavily produced pop of the middle of her career. This is perhaps as close as we can get to a modern version of the Ur-Song; it's not hard to imagine something like this sung at Revivals or Mountain Medicine Shows, or around the fireplace a century or more ago.



Little Sparrow (Songwriter: Dolly Parton)

Little sparrow, little sparrow
Precious fragile little thing
Little sparrow, little sparrow
Flies so high and feels no pain
All ye maidens hede my warning
Never trust the hearts of men
They will crush you like a sparrow
Leaving you to never mend
They will vow to always love you
Swear no love but yours will do
Then they'll leave you for another
Break your little heart in two

Chorus:
Little sparrow, little sparrow
Precious fragile little thing
Little sparrow, little sparrow
Flies so high and feels no pain

If I were a little sparrow
O'er these mountains I would fly
I would find him, I would find him
Look into his lying eyes
I would flutter all around him
On my little sparrow wings
I would ask him, I would ask him
Why he let me love in vain

I am not a little sparrow
I am just the broken dream
Of a cold false-hearted lover
And his evil cunning scheme

Chorus
All ye maidens fair and tender
Never trust the hearts of men
They will crush you like a sparrow
Leaving you to never mend

Little sparrow, little sparrow
Oh the sorrow never ends

American Idol had a "Song of Dolly Parton" night, with this performance of today's song:



Different, and more modern, but which still feels old. The tap root is still present.

But the sense of humor is always there. When Dolly was originally on the UK TV's Graham Norton Show, Graham was wearing quite a loud suit, for which he apologized. Without batting an eye, Dolly said Don't you worry yourself, my aunt had a sofa just like it. It was instant chemestry, and Norton and Parton became great friends, to the point where he recorded a version of Islands In The Stream with her at her theme park, Dollywood:



Bootnote: She's been married for almost fifty years to the same man - one who shuns the limelight, focusing his energies on her and his construction company. Well done, sir. So very, very well done.

Bill Whittle has a new post up

You know the drill, go RTWT. Here's a teaser:

Let’s start at the top: with Barack Obama. Is he:

A. A Muslim-sympathizing, neo-Marxist true believer, who sees America and Capitalism as the principle barrier to fairness and world peace?

Or B, is he merely an empty suit, an unwitting pawn of much larger, hidden forces?

Or C, simply a self-obsessed, incompetent narcissist who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

I’ve given this a lot of careful thought, and I think the real answer is yes.

That's just the beginning, and then he's off to compare current politics to ancient Rome's. Dang. I thought I had that covered. Go read anyway.

Hat tip: Mark Alger.

Links

The great satisfaction of blogging is the inter-connectedness that grows - links, comments, and people emailing you about posts are much nicer than traffic stats. Early this week, I posted about some color photos from the late 1930s. One of the photos in the exhibit (which I didn't post) was this one:


And then the inter-connectness of the Internet kicked in. I got an email from Dad, who as a history professor knows a thing or two about this subject. Specifically, the subjects in the photo:

The first photo in the batch you emailed me is of Faro and Doris Caudhill. They were the main family photographed by Russell Lee in the Pie Town of 1940. They lived in a combination dug out/log cabin on Hometeaded land. When World War II started, economic opportunities lay in places other than Pie Town. They still do, and Pie Town is truly in the middle of nowhere.

Faro and Doris moved to Albuquerque. Faro, a laborer, became business manager of the laborers union. Doris later said that men like wine, women, and song. She added that Faro didn't drink and he couldn't carry a tune. Guess what was left. Doris divorced him, and remarried. In 1993, she responded to the author of Women of New Mexico Depression Era Images that she had been photographed, too, and had written a memoir. Photographer Joan Myers followed up, interviewed Doris and used her memoir to write Pie Town Woman, the Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader(University of New Mexico Press, 2001). The book accompanied an exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum, but Doris had died of cancer. I went to the opening, got the author to sign my copy of the book, and acted as a fly on the wall overhearing Doris's Albuquerque friends gossiping about Faro.

And so the Internet, working its magic across the miles.

Star Wars, myth, and you

Via Isegoria (you do read him for your daily does of teh smart, don't you), we see the Other Side of The Empire Strikes Back. Gary Kurtz (Star Wars' producer, i.e. "Not George Lucas") talks about the experience. You should RTWT, but I can't think of Star Wars (the first two, not the execrable final four) without thinking "Joseph Campbell".

Campbell had a big impact on my life, starting when my Mother-in-Law sent us some cassette tapes she'd recorded of "Transformations of Myth Through Time", and 1970s lecture series he gave. I used to listen to it in the car. It's deep stuff; you have to think about the concepts, really think about them. I can't say that I agree with everything that he has to say about Christianity in particular - which was influenced by his very Catholic upbringing - but like Aquinas, he brings the tough nuts for you to crack.

If you can.

His greatest work is clearly The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a study of the similarities in the hero myths across cultures and what we can learn from that. I highly recommend it, but only if you take a couple weeks to read it and a couple months to think about it; otherwise, it will just annoy you. This book changed George Lucas' views on things, and made especially the first two of the films into the lasting classics that they are.



The hero, said Campbell, took a common path through a psychological growth progression, whether in ancient Babylon (Gilgamesh), Medieval Europe (King Arthur), or science fiction (Like Skywalker). Lucas wasn't the only one to pick up on this in Hollywood, either - The Matrix had Campbell explicitly in mind.



There's a Youtube channel about Campbell that will give you an introduction to his life and way of thinking. It will take you the better part of an hour, but is well worth your time if you want to get a handle on why Obi-wan rules and Jar Jar drools (and no, it doesn't have anything to do with Light Sabres), why space ship are teh awesome and pod racers are teh suX0rz, or why Luke Skywalker strode a path well known to Orpheus.

You likely won't be convinced, but you will get more than your usual set of stuff to think about.

Hypocrisy

In September, 2007, Time Magazine ran a story titled The Psychology of Hypocrisy. In it, and while discussing the Larry Craig sex scandal, the unnamed author makes a distinction between pity (and even forgiveness) for the flawed man, and the stench of institutionalized hypocrisy from a party:

Hypocrisy is among the most universal and well-studied of psychological phenomena, and the research suggests that Craig, Haggard and the others may be guilty not so much of moral hypocrisy as moral weakness. The distinction may sound trivial at first, but as a society, we tend to forgive the weak and shun the hypocritical. As psychologists Jamie Barden of Howard University, Derek Rucker of Northwestern and Richard Petty of Ohio State have shown, we often use a simple temporal cue to distinguish between the weak and the hypocritical: if you say one thing and then do another, you are much less likely to be forgiven than if you do one thing and then say another.

But however understanding the author was for the individuals (all conservatives in this article), there was none for the GOP:

So who are the real hypocrites? Because their decision making is usually more diffuse, institutions aren't as susceptible to cognitive dissonance. Corporations and political parties routinely say one thing (the GOP is the party of strict values) and do another (the party let Louisiana Senator David Vitter, who unlike Craig holds a swing-state seat, get off with a simple apology after he was linked to a female prostitution ring). The GOP's moralizers deserve some pity. The party itself, not so much.

And actually, you can't really argue with that. You can, though, point out a very selective application of this yardstick by the Dinosaur media. Pistolero looks at Al and Tipper Gore's crusade against Rock n' Roll lyrics in the 1980s:

The whole thing made the members of the PMRC and the groups supporters look extremely hypocritical, really -- especially Tipper Gore. She and Al are both big fans of the Grateful Dead, and from what I understand, way back in their day if you wanted to get yourself into a, shall we say, altered state, there were few better places to do it than at a Grateful Dead concert.

Pistolero pretty well guts the PMRC's (Parent's Music Resource Center, the Gore's institution set up to fight the scourge of "satanic" music) arguments, so I won't comment on that other than to saw RTWT.

What I will comment on, however, is the curious lack of coverage from the same Dinosaur Media on this. It seems to be almost a clone of the Larry Craig scandal: some blue-nose, big-mouth politician makes a lot of noise about the threat to morality by issue X, and then turns around and does a 100% reversal on issue X.

It's not even like the Clinton episode - after all, by the time Monica came around nobody thought for a minute that Bill was the sort of guy you let escort your daughter to the Prom. Bit Al and Tipper did a 180° turn when he ran for vice president, courting the Music Industry's money. Time again:

Corporations and political parties routinely say one thing (the GOP is the party of strict values) and do another (the party let Louisiana Senator David Vitter, who unlike Craig holds a swing-state seat, get off with a simple apology after he was linked to a female prostitution ring).

Let's see about that re-write:

Corporations and political parties routinely say one thing (the Democrats are the party of do-your-own-thing-man) and do another (the party nominates Gore as VP, who in a closely contested election year, gets off with a simple apology after he tried to censor the Music Industry).

There, I fixed it for you.

For extra credit, readers can add their own examples of institutional hypocrisy, for example about a news industry that claims to be unbiased, but who suppress stories in a very interesting and predictable manner.