Clipping blog

---

• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Happy Birthday Professor Tolkien Wednesday Edition
• Saudi Arabia Goes Birdbrained over Israeli “Spy Vulture”
• Who Said Raising Debt Limit in 2006 Was “A Sign of Leadership Failure”?

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Happy Birthday Professor Tolkien Wednesday Edition Posted: 05 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST I do not know how this slipped past me, but Monday was the eleventy-ninth birthday of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.I have a special love for Tolkien’s works, since his tales of Hobbits and Middle Earth kindled in me at a fairly young age a love for reading that I’ve never managed to lose. I found a couple little treats: audio clips of Tolkien reading his own work. It’s a shame no one thought to get a recording of him reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I’d shell out a few bucks for those in audiobook form. Here is the scene where Gandalf deciphers the inscription on The One Ring and here is his rendition of “The Road Goes Ever On”. And now, links. What does a second of our national debt look like? Andrew Malcolm has a good set of pictures. Who knew that the left would respond to a simple reading of the Constitution with such scorn and revulsion? It’s almost as if they don’t consider our founding document to be all that important or something. How did our Constitution become little more than a quaint curio to many of our political and judicial leaders? Jeff Goldstein has a little history. The Obamacare fight is on. Republicans introduced a two-page bill to kill the over 2000-page monstrosity and set a vote date for January 12 . That, by the way, is more time that Democrats gave us all to read their bill. Senate Democrats have rattled their sabers (via memeorandum) but soon-to-be Speaker Boehner is not even slightly cowed (via Weasel Zippers).

Saudi Arabia Goes Birdbrained over Israeli “Spy Vulture” Posted: 04 Jan 2011 01:17 PM PST I’m honestly not sure whether this story is funny or depressing. A vulture tagged by scientists at Tel Aviv University has strayed into Saudi Arabian territory, where it was promptly arrested on suspicion of being a Mossad spy, Israeli and Saudi media reported Tuesday. The bird was found in a rural area of the country wearing a transmitter and a leg bracelet bearing the words ‘Tel Aviv University’, according to the reports, which surfaced first in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv. Although these tags indicate that the bird was part of a long-term research project into migration patters, residents and local reporters told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Weeam newspaper that the matter seemed to be a ‘Zionist plot.’ The accusations went viral, with hundreds of posts on Arabic-language websites and forums claiming that the ‘Zionists’ had trained these birds for espionage. This has gone well beyond petty hate into full-blown anti-semitic insanity. We’ve seen this particular mental illness before, though, and we know very well where it leads. It’s very tempting to poke fun at the ignorant Muslims in Saudi Arabia, but their ignorance isn’t their fault and it doesn’t exist by accident. The Saudi government, assisted by hundreds if not thousands of Imams, foster it deliberately and with all malice aforethought. They have a purpose, an end-goal for the hate they stoke until it burns low and hot in the breasts of people who have never even met a Jew. We don’t want to see that end-goal, not ever. So we’d better do what we can to extinguish that hate now, before it flares into something we’ll need our soldiers to put out.

Who Said Raising Debt Limit in 2006 Was “A Sign of Leadership Failure”? Posted: 04 Jan 2011 12:39 PM PST Andrew McCarthy found a very convincing argument Republicans can use in the upcoming debate over whether to increase the debt ceiling to well over $14 trillion. I would like it very much if a smart conservative Senator stood up and read this, from the 2006 push to raise the debt ceiling to what today seems like a paltry $9 trillion: The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that "the buck stops here." Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. Click through to the link to find out who the partisan firebrand who wanted to plunge the country into utter financial ruin was. You’ll be surprised. Or maybe not.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Sundries Shack To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610