A few things I’d like to bring to your attention

Starting in an hour or two, my access to the computer will be hit-and-miss.  I don’t know if there will be computers where I’m heading on vacation, and iPhone blogging is surprisingly tiring.  Seeing only that little screen and typing only with my thumbs seems to suck up a lot of mental energy.  This, therefore, will be my last chance to bring some interesting things to your attention:

J.E. Dyer is always an interesting writing, and her ruminations about the bloodshed at the Israel/Lebanon border provides some very unnerving food for thought.

Ed Morrissey and I are on the same wavelength about state involvement in marriage.  I have in the past written exactly the same thing.  If you read him, you’re reading me.  None of which, of course, forgives Judge Walker’s execrable foray into judicial activism.  By the way, B. Daniel Blatt thinks the decision will be struck down on legal grounds.  I think that’s true if judges were interested in law.  But the judicial activists on the 9th Circuit and the Kennedy swing vote on the Supreme Court mean law will not matter.  And this isn’t about gay marriage; it’s about judicial activism — and that’s just wrong, because then you have what should be legislative rules, coming from elected representatives or voters themselves, made by a small judicial elite.)

Since this blog has been the site of heated debate about the Ground Zero mosque, I thought you might find William Kristol of interest on the subject.

I was in a Goodwill store the other day trolling the book shelves (Goodwill, incidentally, is a great place to find books if you’re willing to take potluck), and I must have seen eight books written during the Bush years, and published by major publishing houses, that savage Bush.  Several were faux-funny.  That is, I didn’t find them amusing, but they were published as satiric rants.  It occurred to me that not a single major publish house has offered a book that challenges Obama, either seriously or satirically.  Ace has noticed something similar about the travails of politicians’ children on both sides of the spectrum.

I’ve long thought the Obama marriage a sham.  I have no basis for thinking this.  It’s a gut feeling that there’s simply no love lost there.  From her side, she’s married to an arch narcissist, and they are difficult to love.  On his side, he’s married to an angry woman who clearly feels life has shafted her despite her extraordinary trajectory to the most prestigious address in America.  The fact that Michelle “dumped” Obama for his birthday is telling.  Roger Simon also thinks the Michelle boondoggle is also telling as a sign that Obama is in this presidential thing for the short run.  I think so too.  He really only needs four years:  two years to get the balls in play (health care, EPA overreach, immigration “reform,” union voting, etc.), and then two years to veto everything a barely Republican Congress does to try to reverse things.  After four years, he will indeed have transformed America.  His work here will be done.

I frequently bemoan the fact to anyone who will listen that, while yesteryear’s stars were men (Clark Gable, John Wayne, Bill Holden, etc.), today’s stars are chipmunk faced boys (Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Zac Efron, etc.).  The only men left are in action movies — and there is, apparently, a very good manly one out there.  I plan to see it eventually, since my MMA training has left me actually knowing who some of the non-Hollywood dudes staring in the film are.

Some group in Missouri is working hard to end California’s stringent (and economy killing) greenhouse emission laws.  I offer this as a “hmmmm” article.

Somewhere out there, Darwin is saying “I told you so.”  Or in other words, too dumb to live.

Marin County may be one of the most liberal places in America, but there are still vets here, and there are still pockets of deep patriotism.  This story is just a squiblet, but I liked it so much, I wanted to share it with you.  (This is a reminder, incidentally, that until about the 1970s, Marin was a conservative bastion of California!)

As you know, I think the Atomic Bomb was a good thing.  Aside from bringing a bloody war to a swift conclusion, thereby saving millions of both American and Japanese lives, I have a very personal interest in it, since it saved my Mom’s life.  She was languishing in a concentration camp in Java, and was on the verge of death when the war stopped abruptly.  I owe my existence to Fat Man and Little Boy.  Obama’s planned semi-apology to the Japanese, is therefore a revolting and inappropriate act, especially considering the Japanese refusal to acknowledge what they did in China, Korea, and the Malaysian peninsula.  My Mom never got a penny in reparations, money that would be especially helpful now as she deals with the physical consequences of her long internment.  Bruce Walker gets it.