Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Chico Salmon:

News you may have missed, as most US media tried to ignore or bury it: the latest BLS report shows that September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market, and that more than 30 percent of the nation's net worth has been added since the President's 2003 tax cuts. The effect of presidential policies and actions on the economy is almost always overstated (cf the Clinton mythology), but to the degree they do matter President Bush has objectively been a godsend for the US economy.

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High def may be the future, but it still isn’t the present. When an NFL game on CBS, in this case Houston at Atlanta on September 30, is not in HD while at the same time a women’s college soccer game on the Big Ten Network is, you realize this whole thing still isn’t ready for prime time.

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Just when you think you can no longer be shocked…19% of Democrats think that the world would be better off is the US loses in Iraq and another 20% are not sure? Seriously? That’s about an order of magnitude higher than I would have expected even from a group so infested with anti-American sentiment. It is shocking that such a significant group of Americans, perhaps one in ten overall, could be so fundamentally ignorant of the world around us. Our schools must, sadly, have been doing a terrific job of brainwashing young Americans to hate their country in the past couple of decades.

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And lest you think that brainwashing youth is purely an American phenomenon, recall this story from the Great White North:

“First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.”

Sadly for the “educators” involved, even after so many repetitions of this propaganda the message still did not take with young McKenzie. It takes a strong-minded kid to get through school these days and retain the ability to think critically.

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Here’s some footage of Wilt Chamberlain at age 17. Money quote from narrator Marty Glickman: “Remember the name, Wilt Chamberlain - It will probably make big sports copy for years to come."

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Did Barack Obama really say “I’m going to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great”?!? Is he unfamiliar with the first 231+ years of our history? Shouldn’t understanding why this country IS great be a bare minimum prerequisite for presidential candidates?

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James Taranto notes that Paul Krugman stole the exact title to his new book from the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who had in turn stolen it in 2001 from former Connectivut governor Chester Bowles, who had in turn had in 1962 co-opted the idea from Barry Goldwater. The idea of Krugman stealing from, ultimately, Barry Goldwater, would be enough fun for some days but I bring the whole thing up to quote Taranto’s genius introduction:

"Remember Paul Krugman? Once a promising young economist, he ran into hard times in the 1990s, when he served as an adviser to Enron, an ill-fated energy company. Subsequently he was reduced to writing angry op-eds for the New York Times. In 2003 he published a memoir, and two years later he mysteriously disappeared from public view. But last month he resurfaced, still writing his Times column."

Hammernailhead.

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I figured that this week’s matchup of unbeatens between New England and Dallas was unusual, but I had no idea it was this unusual…hope you had the dog and the under in that Buffalo-Akron tussle.

NFL Games in which both teams were unbeaten with 5+ wins:

Date Teams - Result
11/13/21 Buffalo All-Americans (6-0) at Akron Pros (7-0) - BUF 0, AKR 0
11/04/23 Canton Bulldogs (5-0) at Chicago Cardinals (5-0) - CAN 7, CHI 3
10/28/73 Los Angeles Rams (6-0) at Minnesota Vikings (6-0) - MIN 10, LA 9
10/24/04 New York Jets (5-0) at New England Patriots (5-0) - NE 13, NYJ 7
10/14/07 New England Patriots (5-0) vs. Dallas Cowboys (5-0)