Let’s turn to CNN for the latest breaking story:
I’m not sure what is worse, exploiting schoolchildren for political purposes or the fact the 4th Estate is so obviously in the tank for this administration.
Have they no shame?
I’ve got a great idea for a deficit reduction program. It would work similarly to the “cash for clunkers” program. Except this time instead of the government paying for your clunker vehicle, taxpayers could pay to have clunker politicians removed from office. If given this opportunity I am quite confident we would have entirely new leadership and a budget surplus in next to no time.
A classic win-win, don’t ya think?
The idea came to me after reading this article in the WSJ:
Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”
If that’s true, heaven help the other programs.
Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.
The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.
The joke’s on us folks…
Time for another “dart bars of Itaewon” review. This week: Pub Scrooge.
The Pub is located in the alley behind Hamilton Hotel, across the street from 3 Alley Pub/Sam Ryan’s.
I’ve not eaten here, but as you can see they have a nice menu. This is basically your full service pub. I guess its niche is they televise all those bizarre European/Aussie sports like soccer and Rugby.
It sports 3 well lighted dart boards.
A somewhat small bar…
But more than ample table seating.
And of course a regulation size pool table.
And they have a rather impressive trophy case. I assume Scrooge sponsors a rugby team or two in addition to their dart teams.
Here’s the old Walrus keeping track of the score during our more than a little disappointing match against the Scrooge Dartoholics last night.
So, although I rarely frequent Pub Scrooge unless I’m playing darts I think it is a very pleasant environment; clean, modern, and comfortable.
But this is a dart bar review, so let’s talk about the play at Scrooge. The boards we used were in good condition and the lighting is good. The third board was in poor shape, but I expect they would put up a new should it be required for league or tournament play.
It gets a tad crowded with both boards in play, but its not really an issue, you just need to maintain situational awareness so you don’t bump a shooter. What I didn’t like is the chalking (scoreboards) being BEHIND the oche. Technically speaking, the shooter should be able to see the scoreboard at all times. For this reason, most bars have the chalker set up next to the board. Obviously, not room for that at Scrooge and I found myself constantly stepping off the line to check the board, which is at best an unnecessary distraction and at worst takes you out of your throwing rhythm.
The other thing I don’t like is that the wall on which the boards are mounted is not perpendicular–it slants about 5 degrees right to left. Which means the oche line is slanted (as it must be). Now, I guess if you played here on a regular basis you’d get used to it, but I found it somewhat disconcerting for most of the night as I lined up for my shots.
Therefore, although I find Scrooge a pleasant enough pub it is not amongst my favorite venues for darts. Certainly fine for chucking darts with friends while quaffing some brews, but not great for competitive play. I’m going to rate Pub Scrooge a B- overall.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Dartoholics put an ass whuppin’ on us last night, 23-14. We actually pretty much matched them mark for mark, but they were getting the the out dart and we were not.
Three of their four players are in the top ten and it was tough sledding in some of our matchups. I had a pathetic 3-9 performance despite throwing some decent darts. Oh yeah, those three guys are Korean and play the “point whether we need to or not” game. They are pretty good at it too. In one of the legs I played we both finished with over 600 points (I won).
Anyway, a disappointing night but I still like our chances in the playoffs…
Apparently my blog was hanging up, at least for IE users (I recently switched to Firefox). My last post was apparently the culprit, so I deleted it and things seem back to normal. Or at least as normal as things get here at LTG.
Anyway, I’m off to the the Monday night league match against Dartohlics at Scrooge Pub.
Ok, so The One told us without the stimulus pork recovery plan unemployment would exceed 9%. So, we spend billions on worthless projects and now have unemployment at 9.7%. A truly scary number is that when you count folks who have taken part time work and those who have just given up, the rate is at 17%. Well, Barry did promise us CHANGE, and we sure are getting it. Let’s HOPE he doesn’t have any other tricks up his sleeve.
Er, well. Then there’s this:
GM’s sales are down 45% from last September (when sales were already bad enough to drive the company into banrkuptcy). Chrysler is down 42%. Ford is only down 5%. Car buyers are clearly punishing the two bailout recipients brutally. Robert Farago of Truth About Cars–who has been right before–predicts that GM and Chrysler will both “go down by the end of next year” without a second, new federal bailout. The only question, he says, is whether the two manufacturers will need the cash before the 2010 midterm elections.
I’m really not all that surprised. I for one would never purchase a vehicle from GM (government motors) and although I have been a near lifelong customer of Chrysler (Dodge trucks and Jeeps) I don’t think I could bring myself to buy a Fiat (whatever the name on the car).
Sad to say, but the country might be a helleva lot better off if little Barry would confine himself to Olympic bids. At least there his failures only impact one city at a time.
God help us.
It’s always fascinating to me to read the viewpoints and observations of folks outside the USA on the sorry state of our nation and the apparent incompetence of our President. Such is the case in an article entitled “Lament for a nation” by David Warren in The Ottawa Citizen. Mr. Warren compares Obama to Gorbachev in presiding over the decline of the USA and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I think that comparison is a bit strained, but I think it is hard to argue with this:
There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.
A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.
Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.
With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.
And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.
Speaking of Canadians, lately this Neil Young song has been ringing in my ears:
Its awful hard to find a job
On one side the government, the other the mob
Hey, hey ain’t that right
The workin’ man’s in for a hell of a fight.
Oh, this country sure looks good to me
But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail.
Way up on the old dew line
Some of the boys were feelin’ fine
A big light flashed across the sky
But somethin’ else went slippin’ by
Meanwhile at the Pentagon
The brass was a wonderin’ what went wrong.
Oh, this country sure looks good to me
But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail.
Hey hey, ain’t that right
The workin’ man’s in for a hell of a fight.
Oh, this country sure looks good to me
But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail.
Polanski in his own words:
“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
I need to go take a shower.
Commenter Kevin recently posted a video on Facebook in which our friends in Hollywood (you know, those folks who also support child rape) really explained why those of us opposed to Obamacare are ignorant of what the debate is all about. You know, that corporate greed thing. In an effort to be evenhanded I will share it with my faithful LTG readers.
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As they say, every coin has two sides. So, here are some “real” people responding:
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Ok, now we can all choose sides.
You know, there is nothing much to be said about the media frenzy over the Polanski arrest. That the Hollywood elites would come to the defense of a child rapist is sadly not too surprising. What has been gratifying is that they are being called out for it, even amongst their liberal counterparts. Isn’t it great that libs and conservatives can find common ground on this issue?
But what prompted me to post on this disgusting matter was this report from France. It seems that the “regular” folks there are not pleased that their intellectual betters have offered unqualified support for a man who drugged and then vaginally and anally raped a 13 year old girl.
Marie-Louise Fort, a French lawmaker in the Assembly who has sponsored anti-incest legislation, said in an interview that she was shocked that Mr. Polanski was attracting support from the political and artistic elite. “I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,” she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.”
The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.
That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities — nicknamed Les People — who are part of Mr. Polanski’s rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the “crypto-intelligentsia of our country” who deliver “eloquent phrases that defy common sense.”
You know, it is refreshing to see everyday American and French people on the same page. It’s been a long time since that happened*.
Oh, and for the record, Polanski was 44 years old when he raped the girl, so it was not some “youthful indescretion”.
*I am aware that France to did not formally join with the Continentals until 1778 after the American success at Saratoga. However, France was secretly supporting the revolutionaries even before war actually broke out. That they did so more from hatred of the British than love of our cause is irrelevant to my point about my new found respect for the French. Wow. Respect for the French. Who would have believed I’d ever type those words?
Next up in the Dart Bars of Itaewon series is Friends Bar.
Friends is located about halfway up Hooker Hill on the right hand side above Old Town.
What can I say about this place besides it being just about my least favorite bar in Itaewon? Well, the owner JJ and manager Jonas are both good guys. And the walk up the hill can be shall we say interesting at times, in a Paul Simon kinds of way “just a come on from the whores on 7th Ave”. Other than that, there’s nothing good I can think of.
The bar is dark and dingy. Overwhelmed the flash on my camera dark. I actually lightened each of these photos, otherwise there would be nothing to see. I’m not kidding, when I had a couple of bounceouts I could not see my frickin’ dart on the floor right in front of me.
Anyway, the bar sports 4 dart boards. These two are in the back alongside the bar and we play our “A” division games here. The boards were in decent shape on Monday, but that has not always been the case. The boards themselves have adequate lighting, but otherwise it’s like being in a cave.
These are the two front boards which also looked to be in good playing condition. The problem here is the traffic as folks make the way to the toilet (unisex) and pool tables. As you might be able to see, Friends has one of the few soft tip darts machines left in Itaewon. Koreans are big on the soft tip, but it just never took off in Itaewon for some reason. Fine with me as I really don’t like the game.
Here’s the backside of the bar. Yeah, the bargirls were pretty cute so there’s that. Then again, they don’t serve draft beer which I prefer. You can get your favorite Korean brew in a large sized bottle for Won 5000 however.
Friends does have two pool tables which is pretty unusual. Of course, that means nothing to me but I suppose the pool players of the world appreciate it.
I understand this bar caters to a younger crowd and gets very busy on weekends. They generally play rap at loud volume and have music videos on the big screen, although the mix on Monday night wasn’t bad (after some friendly hints to the bar staff).
As a darts venue, I just don’t like this place. I think the general consensus of SIDL members is similar to mine. They do support two “A” teams and at least one lower division team as well. Frankly, this bar is just stuck in the past and has been far surpassed by the Dolce and Sam Ryan’s venues, which are newer, cleaner, and well-lit. Hemingway would hate this place and I grade it a “D” for darts.
Still to come: Scrooge Pub, 3 Alley Pub, and Manila Bar.
For an intelligent guy, The One sure seems ignorant sometimes. Or maybe he was stoned during U.S. history 101…
On another front, asked to “define victory in Afghanistan,” Barack Obama famously said:
I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.
(Emperor Hirohito came down?)
Via Althouse
Our progressive neighbors to the north (Canada, not the DPRK) are light years ahead of the USA in the health care arena. But The One is single-mindedly driving us to catch up quick. So, let’s dispense with all the political bickering and hear from a genuine Canadian on what we have to look forward to one day soon:
When the pain in Christina Woodkey’s legs became so severe that she could no long hike or cross-country ski, she went to her local health clinic. The Calgary, Canada, resident was told she’d need to see a hip specialist. Because the problem was not life-threatening, however, she’d have to wait about a year.
So wait she did.
In January, the hip doctor told her that a narrowing of the spine was compressing her nerves and causing the pain. She needed a back specialist. The appointment was set for Sept. 30. “When I was given that date, I asked when could I expect to have surgery,” said Woodkey, 72. “They said it would be a year and a half after I had seen this doctor.”
So this month, she drove across the border into Montana and got the $50,000 surgery done in two days.
“I don’t have insurance. We’re not allowed to have private health insurance in Canada,” Woodkey said. “It’s not going to be easy to come up with the money. But I’m happy to say the pain is almost all gone.”
Alrighty then. Sign me up. Besides, there’s always Mexico.
Well, who woulda thunk the French would ever be in a position to lecture the USA on showing some backbone in the face of threats from tyrants. Claudia Rosett reports:
The setting was the special, summit-level Security Council meeting Thursday morning, chaired by Obama, in which the official topics were nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament for the entire world — but with no focus on any specific country. The meeting was advertised by the White House as “historic,” if for no other reason than that no U.S. President has ever before stooped to chair the often feckless and at times just plain sleazy UN Security Council — where the 15 members currently include Vietnam and Libya. For this particular occasion, Libya’s foreign minister attended (thus sparing the Council the risk of a replay of Qaddadi’s 96 minute performance the previous day on the General Assembly stage). The rest of the table was filled with presidents and prime ministers.
They began with Obama’s pre-packaged deal of unanimously adopting a “historic” resolution, which Obama said “enshrines our shared commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons,” etc, etc. etc (All very nice, but what does this have to do with the real world?). Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon kicked off the ensuing round of official self-congratulatory huffing and puffing (”…a historic moment…a fresh start towards a new future”). The canned diplo-speak continued, as each member spoke in turn – Costa Rica, Croatia, Russia, Spain, Austria, Vietnam, Uganda, China … and then it was the turn of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Here’s his wakeup call, in the UN’s translation from the French (boldface mine):
“We are here to guarantee peace. We are right to talk about the future. But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises. The peoples of the entire world are listening to what we are saying, including our promises, commitments and speeches. But we live in the real world, not in a virtual one.
We say that we must reduce. President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions. [Ed note: Sarkozy then listed international proposals for dialogue with Iran attempted in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.] I support America’s extended hand. But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusion are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to take decisions.
… Secondly, there is North Korea — and there it is even more striking. It has violated every Security Council decision since 1993. It pays absolutely no attention to what the international community says. Even more, it continues ballistic missile testing. How can we accept that? What conclusions should we draw? …”
Let the record show that from this day forward I have retired “surrender monkeys” from my vocabulary.
Lefty Howard Fineman in the leftist newsrag Newsweek has this to say about The One:
If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He’s a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked “done.” This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he’s not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.
The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.
There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.
He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.
Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.
Will someone stick a fork in this guy? Once he loses the press, what’s he got left of the left?
And the walls come tumblin’ down…
Well, we faced off with the league leading gents from XOX at Friends Bar last night. It was a bit of a grudge match for us as they had destroyed us 28-9 earlier this season. We came out with a 20-17 victory which satisfied our thirst for revenge.
I contributed a 6-6 effort, which although middling, I feel pretty good about. I drew YK, their top ranked player, in both of my singles matches and came out 2-4. For the most part I threw strong darts, but YK is tough to beat when he is on his game, and he was pretty much on his game last night.
The highlight of my night was in the final mixed doubles (501/cricket) match. Dan and I took on HK and Mr. Lee and we beat them at their own game. That is to say we pointed mercilessly in both cricket legs. XOX is a Korean team and their style of play is more aggressive than most. Generally speaking, most players will not continue pointing after they have a “comfortable” lead. For me, that’s one bull (25+ points) for others it’s a two bull lead. The XOX guys will continue pointing until you’ve closed the number. I’m not sure it is a good strategy (although as mentioned, XOX is leading the league), but it can be damned disconcerting if you let it get into your head. So, I think we surprised them a bit last night by giving them a taste of their own medicine.
Anyway, it was a sweet victory indeed.
I said in my earlier post there was a lot of darts on tap this weekend. There was, but not as much as I had anticipated since our Sunday make-up match against Kaibigan was once again postponed (this time at the request of Kaibigan). The cancellation did not occur until game time, and we had been warming up at Gecko’s for over an hour so that kinda sucked. Since the Rubbies were all dressed up and ready to play we played a little 301 game amongst ourselves. DIDO, but with a little twist in that once you were under 100 points you had to double out on one throw. Failure meant going back to 301 and adding another thousand won to the pot. I really hated that game after a couple of hours of frustration.
Saturday’s league doubles tournament was a bit of a disappointment as we only had 8 participants. So, the league leaders decreed that we would shift to a round robin format instead of double elimination. That meant we got to play more darts which is a good thing. Even better, all four teams would finish in the money (1st=120,000, 2nd=80,000, 3rd=60,000 and 4th=40,000). The teams were David and Lonnie, Seung Youb and Chris H., Mike and Ron, and me and Lucky. It turned out to be a very competitive match. Seung Youb and Chris finished with 6 legs won and 1st place, while David and Lonnie and me and Lucky had 5 legs each and a playoff round for second place. Which we won 2-1. Yeah baby!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention we picked up a new player on Rubbies to take the recently departed Dave’s spot on the roster. While Dave was and is irreplaceable, we scored a major coup by picking up a former Rubbie–Billy. He is a great darter and more importantly a good and comfortable fit for our team. We are all feeling and playing with more confidence and have high expectations for success in the playoffs.
And that’s the way it is darts-wise.
Busy darts weekend in store. We have the league doubles tournament today, a make-up game with Kalbigan at Friends Bar on Sunday, and our regular Monday night game against XOX, also at Friends.
Pretty nice night at the Friday Dolce Vita tourney yesterday. A first and a second place showing and some very competitive matches.
I had a rather unusual request from a reader the other day. Seems that in one of the pics in the Wolfhound review included he and a young woman in the background. As he wanted to avoid any potential unpleasantness should this woman’s husband happen upon the photo, he asked that it be deleted. You know, I accommodated his request, but really I couldn’t see anything identifiable in the photo. Plus, although I have a cadre of loyal readers, it’s not like random jealous Korean husbands drop by with any regularity.
And that was about the extent of my excitement this week. Wish me luck today. As always, you can check back here for an update on the outcome.
Well, we have all seen the positive response of “respected” world leaders in Libya, Venezuela and Cuba to the new guy in the White House. Meanwhile, across the pond the Brits aren’t feeling the love. From The Guardian:
The juxtaposition on our front page this morning is striking. We carry a photograph of Acting Sgt Michael Lockett – who was killed in Helmand on Monday – receiving the Military Cross from the Queen in June, 2008. He was the 217th British soldier to die in the Afghan conflict. Alongside the picture, we read that the Prime Minister was forced to dash through the kitchens of the UN in New York to secure a few minutes “face time” with President Obama after five requests for a sit-down meeting were rejected by the White House.
What are we to make of this? This country has proved, through the bravery of men like Acting Sgt Lockett, America’s staunchest ally in Afghanistan. In return, the American President treats the British Prime Minister with casual contempt. The President’s graceless behaviour is unforgivable. As most members of the Cabinet would confirm, it’s not a barrel of laughs having to sit down for a chat with Gordon Brown. But that’s not the point. Mr Obama owes this country a great deal for its unflinching commitment to the American-led war in Afghanistan but seems incapable of acknowledging the fact. You might have thought that after the shambles of Mr Brown’s first visit to the Obama White House – when there was no joint press conference and the President’s “gift” to the Prime Minister was a boxed DVD set – lessons would have been learned. Apparently not. Admittedly, part of the problem was Downing Street’s over-anxiety to secure a face-to-face meeting for domestic political purposes but the White House should still have been more obliging. Mr Obama’s churlishness is fresh evidence that the US/UK special relationship is a one-way street.
Hope and Change.