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By Gregory Taggart, August 12, 2011 10:55 am

Stephen Colbert has a little fun

with presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, and this:

He does a pretty good and fair job, though I’d stay inside when the thunder clouds gather if I were him.

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By Gregory Taggart, June 6, 2011 12:14 pm

Yeah, right.

In any case, this is galling. And so New York centric as to be self-parody. No wonder this rag sold for $1.00 — that’s the entire rag, including building, desks, copiers, and kool-aid stand.

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By Gregory Taggart, June 4, 2011 12:18 pm

They’re at it again. Palin’s critics. They’re beclowning themselves even as they attempt to turn her into one. It began with this video:

Her garbled comment set the Leftosphere afire. That dumb Palin got her history wrong again! How can conservatives be soooo stupid!

Then Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection rode to her defense (many links at this link). Among other things, he posted Paul Revere’s personal account of his adventure. In the relevant part, it reads (spelling in original, bolding mine):

I observed a Wood at a Small distance, & made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back,and orderd me to dismount;-one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from,& what my Name Was? I told him. it was Revere, he asked if it was Paul? I told him yes He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up. He imediately rode towards those who stoppd us, when all five of them came down upon a full gallop; one of them, whom I afterwards found to be Major Mitchel, of the 5th Regiment, Clapped his pistol to my head, called me by name, & told me he was going to ask me some questions, & if I did not give him true answers, he would blow my brains out. He then asked me similar questions to those above. He then orderd me to mount my Horse, after searching me for arms

Jacobson also links to David Hackett Fischer’s book, Paul Revere’s Ride at Google Books. If you’re interested, read pages 140-143, but here’s a snippet to save you the trouble:

[Revere] rode directly to the house of Captain Isaac Hall, commander of Medford’s minutemen, who instantly triggered the town’s alarm system. A townsman remembered that ‘repeated gunshots, the beating of drums and the ringing of bells filled the air’ . . . Along the North Shore of Massachusetts, church bells began to toll and the heavy beat of drums could be heard for many miles in the night air. Some towns responded to these warnings before a courier reached them. North Reading was awakened by alarm guns before sunrise. The first messenger appeared a little later (140). . . . [Another] express rider delivered the alarm to a Whig leader who went to an outcropping called Bell Rick, and rang the town bell. That prearranged signal summoned the men of Malden with their weapons . . . (141) . . . Along Paul Revere’s northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm system . . . (142).

So did Paul Revere ring bells, beat drums, and shoot guns to warn his compatriots? Probably not, but who really knows. What we do know is that he and his fellow express riders were certainly the “triggers” that set off the warning system of bells, drums, and gunshots.

Yes, Palin could have been more clear, but what she said was spot on. Revere did warn the British that they were in for a fight, and he “triggered” a pre-arranged warning system.

Meanwhile, her bitter critics on the left cling to their copies of Longfellow’s poem.

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By Gregory Taggart, May 23, 2011 4:09 pm

I remembered reading this from The Village Voice in 2008 while I was reading this in The Weekly Standard from last week about David Mamet’s conversion of the left to the right, liberal to conservative. The first article, an essay actually, by Mamet himself, had the better title: “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” The second is the story of what’s happened since.

Read both. Maybe–if you find yourself on the left bank–you’ll be persuaded to convert too. After all, his family looks happy.

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By Gregory Taggart, May 8, 2011 1:55 pm

Peter Vidmar resigns as chief of mission for the 2012 U.S. Olympic team.

Why? you ask.

In a story on the Chicago Tribune’s website Thursday, openly gay figure skater and two-time Olympian Johnny Weir called Vidmar’s selection “disgraceful” because of Vidmar’s opposition to gay marriage.

Vidmar, a Mormon, was a public supporter of Proposition 8, the voter-approved law passed in 2008 that restricted marriage in California to one man and one woman. The Mormon church believes all sexual relations outside of marriage are wrong, and defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Fits a pattern.

Kind of turns “do unto others” on its head.

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By Gregory Taggart, May 2, 2011 4:20 pm

Birthers are skeptical. The press, at least when it came to Obama’s birth and education credentials, were not. And that’s a tragedy.

Just sayin’.

And thus it hurt to watch the following as the President acted unpresidential, and the press howled with no apparent self-awareness.

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By Gregory Taggart, April 27, 2011 8:41 am

Obama finally releases his long-form birth certificate (here’s the short form).

We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said. “We’ve got better stuff to do.”

Like releasing your college transcripts?

Save your breath. I’m not a birther. I am someone who wants to know why the man who leads this country is so unwilling to let his followers know who he is. I also want to know why the press has let him get away with it for so long. His stonewalling and their enabling–now that’s silliness.

UPDATE: The “silliness” continues as The Smoking Gun kicks the ball back into play. What Obama could have learned from the Nixon White House.

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By Gregory Taggart, April 25, 2011 11:22 am

Paul Clement 1, King & Spaulding 0.

Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do.

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By Gregory Taggart, March 2, 2011 12:34 pm

Elites. Can’t help themselves. Mark Bittman is at it again. If the government gets something wrong–defined as, something Bittman doesn’t like–well give ’em another bite at the organically grown apple:

Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills.

Yet — like so many government programs — what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.

I really don’t have time to Fisk the entire article, so here is one more clip, and I’m off:

Thus even House Speaker Boehner calls the bill a “slush fund”; the powerful Iowa Farm Bureau suggests that direct payments end; and Glenn Beck is on the bandwagon. (This last should make you suspicious.) Not surprisingly, many Tea Partiers happily accept subsidies, including Vicky Hartzler (R-MO, $775,000), Stephen Fincher (R-TN, $2.5 million) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN $250,000). No hypocrisy there.

Left and right can perhaps agree that these are payments we don’t need to make. But suppose we use this money to steer our agriculture — and our health — in the right direction. A Gallup poll indicates that most Americans oppose cutting aid to farmers, and presumably they’re not including David Rockefeller or Michele Bachmann in that protected group; we still think of farmers as stewards of the land, and the closer that sentiment is to reality the better off we’ll be.

By making the program more sensible the money could benefit us all.

Apparently playing to his audience, Bittman takes unrelated cheap shots at the usual right-wing suspects, appears to agree that farm subsidies are subsidies we should end, but then makes one final pitch–if we just make the program more sensible.

Yeah, like that will happen. As Bittman reported about New Deal farm programs a few paragaphs above the last quote,

That wasn’t the plan, of course. In the 1930s, prices were fixed on a variety of commodities, and some farmers were paid to reduce their crop yields. The program was supported by a tax on processors of food — now there’s a precedent! — and was intended to be temporary. It worked, sort of: prices rose and more farmers survived. But land became concentrated in the hands of fewer farmers, and agribusiness was born, and along with it the sad joke that the government paid farmers for not growing crops.

And this time it will be better because a new, smarter group of elites is in charge? Of course.

Bittman should take up selling the Brooklyn Bridge.