Shaun Kenney

$300 billion in taxpayer funded relief for homeowners the banking and lending industry has made it through the House of Representatives.

Patti Solis Doyle has been brought on to Obama’s staff.

So much for the Obama/Clinton ticket.

Nice:

INSPIRED BY the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Company, Portland, Oregon in conjunction with Coudal Partners of Chicago, Illinois bring you “FIELD NOTES” in hopes of offering, “An honest memo book, worth fillin’ up with GOOD INFORMATION.”

I have long sold out to the Moleskine notebook for jotting down notes and writing down information… half notepad, half commonplace book.

These things are awesome. To think they ever went out of style…

Dovetailing into yesterday’s missive is this excellent piece from the Wall Street Journal going after the favorite dead horse of the American left; anti-American sentiment overseas:

The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).

Excellent article, if a bit tilted towards Huffington’s clash-of-civilizations hypothesis.

Not undaunted by its recent fisticuffs with the bloggers of the world, the Associated Press now chooses to manufacture alarm by claiming the American can-do attitude is “under assault.”

Of course, the article goes on to say this is cyclical, that we have nothing to fear, that the 21st century will challenge all previously held assumptions…

…blah blah blah.

I reject this entirely. America is doing just fine, with or without the regurgitated nonsense media spinsters, commercial interests, speculators, and politicians ask us to eat and believe on a near daily basis.

True we have our challenges. The state of the individual liberty in America is being actively challenged by the same aging crowd that trampled it in the latter half of the 20th century. And once again, these same Baby Boomers are looking to dip into the pockets of the future, passing along a $9 trillion dollar national debt in their wake, an unsustainable government-run health care network, thousands of government programs, a teetering dollar, and a legal jurisprudence that will require a Justinian Code to unravel.

If there are faults, if there is a mess, it is because a generation rejected the wisdom of prior years for the sake of “a great unraveling” of things past. I do not credit it the victories of the civil rights movement or the defeat of Soviet Communism — these are the laurels of the Greatest Generation, laurels I am certain Baby Boomers of the 1960s covet, but will never rightfully claim.

There is a simple solution to all of the hype, to the network of 24 hour news and the steady ding of infotainment keeping so many American minds in the chains of consumerism and weak argumentation.

Just. Unplug.

Let’s be honest: There is no possible decision on any policy position of the day that an educated mind cannot make. True, we don’t need to operate in a vacuum. But do we really need the steady diet of misinformation, spin, and bad statistics that passes for news to make decisions about public education, transportation, the environment, social issues, and all the rest?

So just unplug. Come back in two weeks and discover that the news of today has been the same news of the last two months. Come back and discover that the media picks and chooses crises based on what readers plugged-in will instinctively bleat like sheep as relevant. Come back and discover that slogans like “hope” and “experience” are really what you’re voting for president in 2008 — not true policy issues.

Unplug for two weeks. Read some non-fiction books. Go camping this weekend sans blackberry or cell phone. Tear up a four foot by four foot patch of your backyard and plant some corn and potatoes. Ignore the media, and start asking why people are asking you to believe so-called news and information. If the fearmongers at the AP are so damnably right, then take some time away from the media — and stop being told that America is falling apart.

America is your backyard. No need to let anyone live there rent-free.

I’ve been beating this drum for about three months now (though I am not the first to recommend this excellent idea), and it seems that others are picking up the battle standard.

Why Eric Cantor? Forget for a moment that he is a fundraising powerhouse. Forget also that he is from the Mother of Presidents and would be an excellent compliment to Senator McCain. Cantor is about as rock solid a conservative as one is going to find in Washington.

Cantor is young, he is articulate, he has most certainly been leading the charge on energy reform, and best of all Cantor is an excellent compliment to Barack Obama’s utter fantasy land when it comes to terrorism and Middle East policy.

McCain would do well to take on Eric Cantor as a running mate, without question. Every compliment is there, and it would definitively rile up the conservative base.

It’s a comic, but I do have to admit that the artist makes a fairly compelling argument.

I love it.

Sure it’s just Space Invaders mocked up as killing pork (with neat info on Obama vs. McCain on pork barrel spending), but dead pork means bacon… and I loves me some bacon.

In six weeks. Not bad — I might (might) give this a whirl.

…channelling John Rocker:

So I was stranded near Tysons Corner at some ridiculous hotel where cabs apparantly (sic) don’t service.

So I crossed some crazy busy street to ask a few guys at a gas station pumping expensive gas where the metro was. They had no idea.

I asked the guy inside the locked gas station hub where the metro was. No idea.

So then I see a bus with “metro” branded on its side. Asked where/how to get to the metro. No idea but he said “hop in.”

Now sitting on the bus.

I’m definitely the only English-speaking person and perhaps the only citizen given NOVA’s tolerance for illegal aliens.

Get me out of here and back to the District.

Guess the commoners of Northern Virginia weren’t up to par with the Capitol Hill tastes of some folks.

No great loss.