No Blogging Today

Or maybe even tomorrow. It's Thanksgiving. Get a life. Go now, git!

Minnesota Conservatives Wishes You A Happy Thanksgiving

Enjoy this short clip of Ronald Reagan. And enjoy this holiday however you like to celebrate it. MC is thankful for liberty and the men and women in uniform who safeguard it for us. MC is also thankful for the Gang of Five and others over the last 18 months we have met. You are terrific and you know who you are!

Hat tip: Jimmy Choo

Liberals Starting To Jump Ship Obama?

Probably not in any numbers and at the end of the day MC knows liberals go down with the ship because there is nowhere else for them to go. Still, Roger Cohen, in an article titled "Obama In His Labyrinth" (cutesy headline taking off from Garcia Marquez's "The General In His Labyrinth") says a remarkable number of things that will strike MC readers as obvious but not to most liberals. Hence the remarkableness of the piece, plus it is printed in the New York "What Global Climate Email Data Fraud Scam?" Times.

Says Cohen: "As an Obama admirer, I’m worried. He feels over-managed, over-scripted to me, to the point where he’s not showing the guts that prevailed at various difficult moments in the campaign. The ideas are good, but the warmth, cajoling and craft that make ideas more than that are lacking."

Says MC: We're glad Cohen's worried; we border daily on controlled panic or despair. He is everything Cohen's second sentence says and then some. The ideas are manifestly not good (to a liberal perhaps) and Obama is the opposite of warm and possess no craft. In. Over. His. Head.

Click on the title of the post to read the whining of a liberal (the same fool, it should be noted, who earlier in the year wrote that Jews in Iran don't have it so bad; fortunately, even other liberals couldn't take nonsense and he was widely mocked).

Der Spiegel: Obama Gets Nowhere On World Stage

MC didn't expect Der Spiegel to have a clear-eyed assessment of Obama's manifest failure on the world stage but here it is. Click on the title of this post to read it. What MC found interesting is that nothing in Obama's background or experience should have lead any moderately intelligent observer to think he could achieve a sliver of what his overreaching rhetoric claimed. We also thought the following to be eye-brow raising:

"The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences."

Bush compared favorably to Obama by Der Spiegel? Passing strange but not, we think, the last of its kind.

The EU Elects Non-Entities As Leaders

The European Union has elected Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium (above left) as first president of the European Council and Baroness Ashton of Upholland (from the United Kingdom) (above right) as its first foreign minister. The commentariat in Europe, at least in "Old Europe" as Donald Rumsfeld would say (and won't his memoirs be delicious?) is uniformly disheartened. Non-entities is the word being use by them, not MC, though it seems hard to argue with the term. Herman (you know how informal we Americans are) is known best for his haikus. Wow! We knew Belgium was boring but ripping off another culture's poem form? The Baroness, fittingly enough, has no foreign policy experience. And Europe wonders why the Islamists see it as low hanging fruit?

Click on the title of this post to read Charles Bremner's take in the TimesOnline.

How Could We Improve On This?

Harper Collins: Print Run Now 2.5 Million

MC would like to swear. It will in private but not on this blog. Eat it, you Palin haters. Just eat it.

Click on the title of this post to make sure, unlike Algore, we're not lying.

RIP: Jeanne Claude 1935-2009

Jeanne Claude was wife and artistic partner of Christo. Together they became famous for artworks involving wrapped items. Nonsense you say? Then you haven't been paying attention to what passes for modern art, e.g., Jeff Koons. MC is a fan: take objects and make them new. That's one operating definition of art we can live with.

Worthy of special applause is the couple's refusal to take corporate or other sponsors of their art, installations or exhibitions. They funded themselves because they did not want to be compromised. How very refreshing. Jeanne Claude once said: "Our art has absolutely no purpose, except to be a work of art. We do not give messages."

Click on the title of this post to read her obituary in The Telegraph (UK).

Images from bottom to top: Surrounded Islands, The Gates, Running Fence and Wrapped Reichstag (MC's personal favorite)

Your Friday Day Brightener

Has MC told you what we think of "call me" Senator Barbara Boxer? No, we haven't because we have a strict policy against swearing on this blog. Enjoy the clip.

Hat tip: Drudge Report

"A Special Form Of Disrespect"

So says the British Spectator:

'The Afghan issue has made clear the astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain . As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan – a decision which will fundamentally affect the scope of the mission – Britain is reduced to taking a guess. The White House does not even pretend to portray this as a joint decision. It is a diplomatic cold-shouldering that stands in contrast not just to the Blair-Bush era, but to the togetherness of the soldiers on the ground.'

MC likes, if that's the right word, the play in the title of the piece: the UK was always said to have had a special relationship with the US. Not under the Vapid One, however. Looking around at home and abroad, 2009 under Obama has uniformly been a disaster.

Click on the title of this post to read The Spectator article.

Hat tip: Weekly Standard via The Corner