Nightly Ramble: The “More Tea, Vicar?” Edition

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “More Tea, Vicar?” Edition

• The face of Socialism: I’ll bet you didn’t know that Crazy Uncle Hugo decided that it’d be a good idea to use the military to take over oil service companies in the country… including a couple of US natural gas firms.  Interestingly, the White House has been pretty much silent in the affair.  They could, I suppose feign shock or disbelief, but who would believe it? See, here’s the thing as Rich Galen, looking at all of this, points out:
  

  If the Obama administration can put the United Auto Workers on Chrysler’s board of directors, negotiate the terms of its bankruptcy, give a third of the company to Fiat and can even decide how much marketing it should do … does anyone see a functional difference between Hugo Chavez’ and Barrack Obama’s views of private companies?

  Not I. Which is perhaps why Obama isn’t moving to protect the investments of those companies. But as Reynolds notes about Chavez‘ move over the weekend:

  “The move is the latest sign of the deepening cashflow crisis that has bedeviled the state oil company for at least two years as it has become overburdened with responsibilities far removed from its core business – in particular funding and running the massive social programmes that have become the bedrock of Mr Chávez’s support.” And capital is being scared away, because of “regime uncertainty.” .

  Gee, no similarity there, either, is there? Tell me again about the Recovery, Barry. And the rabbits.  

• Whither National Review?  They seem to have been suffering under an Internet connection issue that had all the markings of a Denial Of Service attack… a co-ordinated one. I’ll be interested to see the forensics on this one.
•  Mrs Edwards hid the truth from herself. But are we doing the same thing?  The really big story here is the press and their distortion of the election by covering for Edwards, says Mickey Kaus. He’s right, of course. It’s a given that Edwards was busy with an affair on the side, while his cancer suffering wife supposedly didn’t know. OK, the People magazines of the world are making a lot of money on those points just now, and tugging  at all the correct emotional strings to sell magazines.  But maybe we should expend just a little effort finding out how Edwards managed to keep this under wraps for so long, and who in the press was helping him do so, and why.
• Cutting the Mustard:  Of course, Edwards isn’t the only place such hiding by the press has been happening. We’ve all seen the Mustard Muck-up. (Thank you, David)  Stacy McCain points out that this kind of press cover up for Democrats is still happening.
• I’m with Cheney By now, you will have heard that Dick Cheney says he’s take the judgments of Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell. The leftards are in an uproar over that, of course.   Of course the reason they’re upset is, he’s right. As I said over the weekend, people, the left will always go after the person that is most effectively arguing for conservative values.
• The ‘Global Warming” gig is up:  Turns out that the Arctic ice is in fact “twice as thick” as scientists estimated.  So, Polar bears aren’t drowning because of your SUV, after all. Maybe now we better understand why Obama let stand a Bush era ruling about excluding the Polar bear from global warming statutes, huh? Maybe this is what Obama meant when he said he’d be transparent? You can read through all the scam attempts.
• Tea Parties remain: There were more of them over the weekend. 
• Double Standard? No….  Reynolds points out that the reason the tea parties weren’t around under Bush and his deficit spending, is the under Obama there’s four times more deficit .
• Say what you will about Gingrich….  He’s got Queen Nancy pegged. Meanwhile, some speculation about the CIA vs Pelosi from Billy Beck:
  

  “The interesting thing for me here is not that a politician might choose to dissemble over an embarrassing revelation, but that an arm of the federal bureaucracy would so deliberately impeach one of the most powerful (and vindictive) members of the political branch. CIA could have chosen to let sleeping dogs lie and give Pelosi a pass, but instead the spooks chose to publicly confront her with inconvenient facts.”

  Yes. This whole thing has felt to me like old-timey Sovietology and watching the shadows on the wall in order to figure out what’s really going on. It is quite rather curious to me that Leon Panetta’s house has gotten involved in this fight like this.

  It almost feels like someone is trying to put her in her place.

  Not to me, it doesn’t.  You’re correct, Billy it’s a curious thing… and unusual at least. Fact is, the CIA never does anything in the public eye it doesn’t have to. Particularly unusual given Panetta’s Democrat history… he’s unlikley to target another Democrat without a damn good reason.  this whole thing sounds like someone who is trying to repel an attack with a preemtive move.  There is, though, something that would explain all of this…. or most of it, anyway… My take is that even a cursory investigation would have revealed that Pelosi was lying… there were already a number of clues being mentioned in the Dinosaur Media. All the CIA did was confirm what would have come out under direct examination, either by the press of by Congress.  I suspect that the CIA released what they needed to release to quell the problem, while making sure that nothing additional got released (or brought out in a show hearing, which would certainly follow if the CIA hadn’t acted)  that would have actually embarrassed the CIA. What that particular is, I’ve no idea. Clearly, though they consider it more important than sielnce on Pelosi.

• Air Farce One:  Ann Althouse points out that the photo released from the panic inducing flyover of Manhattan are awful. I mean bad to the point of making one wonder if photography was the reason for the flight.  Yeah, I’m with Ann on this one. There’s a fish in the pickle barrel somewhere.