Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Birthday Blogging Tuesday Edition
• President Obama’s Foreign Policy: In the Rear with the Gear
• A Little Monday Music, Russian-Style
• John Hawkins’ New Web Page, TrendingRight, is Live

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Birthday Blogging Tuesday Edition Posted: 26 Apr 2011 03:10 AM PDT Today is the seventh birthday of The Sundries Shack. Yep, I’ve been at this blogging thing since 2004, which puts me among such estimable company as Ed Morrissey and Rick Moran. Since that first post, which was pretty much the blogging equivalent of “Hello world!”, I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of folks I would never have if not for this silly little site on the web. I’m proud to call some of those folks friends. I’m eternally grateful for that. I’m also grateful for those of you who come here every day to see what I have to say. It’s your encouragement and gentle criticism that keeps me in the writing game and I think you for sharing part of your day with me. If you’re new, do take a minute or two to look around and read a bit into the archives. There’s a lot to see and read and I like to think that you’ll find something there you’ll want to share with someone else. One last thing. The fundraiser for my podcast, The Delivery, is still in high gear. If you have it to give, I’d greatly appreciate your support. If you can’t give, give a nudge to someone who will. I’d be grateful for that as well. And now, links. I’m pretty sure that if Paul Ryan had released his budget plan in December, the MSM would have killed itself to work his name into as many Grinch references as they could. If Europe has turned sour on the welfare state, surely we’ll see what a terribly bad idea it is to turn ourselves into Europe, won’t we? When the public sector unions have lost California… Somehow I don’t think the President will be making a civility speech about this incident at a left-wing Ivy league school that resulted in a suicide. Anyone want to guess what percentage of stories about high gasoline prices run since the Gulf oil spill mention the President’s anti-drilling policies as a possible cause? I’ll give you a hint: if your guess was in the double-figures, you were way off. Politico turns up the bias. The Governor of South Carolina is not at all amused that the Obama administration is using its power to bully a company that wants to create jobs in her state. Kevin Williamson wrote a very good profile of Texas Governor Rick Perry for NRO that deserves your attention. Perry’s state is actually doing very well in the weak Obama economy. He is a very large reason why. Had you ever heard of The Great Moon Hoax? I admit I hadn’t, and I’m a bit of a sucker for fantastic tales.

President Obama’s Foreign Policy: In the Rear with the Gear Posted: 25 Apr 2011 07:03 PM PDT Both Mollie Hemingway and Paula Gardner noticed something very curious about a description of President Obama’s leadership style in a recent New Yorker article. Obama's reluctance to articulate a grand synthesis "has alienated both realists and idealists," Lizza writes. However, he "may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine." One of Obama's advisers describes his actions as "leading from behind," which, Lizza writes, does actually describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. "It's so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world," the adviser says, "but it's necessary for shepherding us through this phase." Okay, so maybe it’s not all that curious. You’d have to have lived under a rock not to notice that Barack Obama does not approve of a world in which the United States of America is a strong and confident leader. He’d much prefer America to settle somewhere in the back and offer the occasional helpful suggestion while other countries, we’re not exactly sure which ones, lead. Of course, he can’t actually come out and say that. The voting public would abandon him even more quickly that it is now, so he has to be a little twisty with his language. As Paula put it: Of course, "leading from behind" is nonsensical as a linguistic construction as long as words have clear meanings; however, as Obama is increasingly revealed as a weak and ineffectual leader, the concept of leadership itself must be redefined. As George Orwell so aptly noted, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." That’s not the worst problem with the strategy, though. The worst problem is that the White House honestly believes this is what the rest of the world wants us to do. I don’t doubt that leaders in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, and the rest of the motley crew of tyrants want us on the decline. I do doubt that the rest of the world is ready for the United States to become the annoying kid in class who sits in the back and barks out helpful hints to the kids doing the hard work on the chalkboard. See, we hate that kid — and by “we” I mean pretty much everyone except adults who grew up as that kid. In fact, my military friends have a term for that sort of person, and it’s not a very flattering one at all: REMF (NSF most workplaces definition here). Barack Obama might be fine with a foreign policy that puts the United States “in the rear with the gear”, but I’ll bet that most American’s won’t be. See, we know that’s not where we belong. We aren’t the carping little weasel in the back row. We can get our hands dirty without shame. It’s a pity our President doesn’t think we’re fit to do that any longer.

A Little Monday Music, Russian-Style Posted: 25 Apr 2011 12:13 PM PDT Once upon a time, I did a occasional post on Monday nights called, appropriately enough, Monday Night Music.  I never made a regular feature of it (though I did consider doing so, briefly) but I do like to return to it once in a while. And so I shall today! Over the weekend, while looking for a completely unrelated video, I came across a couple wonderful pieces directed by the Russian legend Valery Gergiev. Gergiev has spent quite a bit of time recently recording all the Mahler syumphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra. I’d love to get my hands on a complete set of those recordings, though I fear it would be a bit outside my price range. One of the knocks on Gergiev is that his tempi are way too fast. I’m inclined to agree, especially in the first video of Modest Moussorgski’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I do like the way he brings the bombast at the end, though. Few directors have been able to bring the sheer orchestral power like Gergiev.

John Hawkins’ New Web Page, TrendingRight, is Live Posted: 25 Apr 2011 11:20 AM PDT John Hawkins, who is very good at launching new conservative-leaning web sites, has a new site that might prove useful to you. It’s called TrendingRight and it appears to be an automated news aggregation site — meaning that it collects stories from various other sites and brings them to one place. From what I can tell, it’s more or less an RSS reader with a much wider scope than you’re likely to get yourself unless you put a great deal of effort into it. The site ranks posts from a number of other web sites based on “buzz”, though I can’t immediately tell you what that means. As of now, there is no explanation on the site for how it gets its stories, how it ranks them, or what “buzz” means — a problem I hope he corrects quickly. It would be helpful to know exactly what’s going on so the average web surfer has some idea how to use what is essentially a table of numbers and random blog post titles. Still, it’s a new internet toy and it’s John Hawkins’ baby, so it’s probably worth your time to give TrendingRight a look. Maybe it’ll be something you can use.

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