This isn’t writing, it’s typing.

That Was Then, This Is Now Dept.

Shirley Jones to pose nude in Playboy at 75?

I feel the same way about this as I do about that new Andy Samberg-Justin Timberlake video.

Eeeeww.

HT: Ace of Spades

From the Chicago Tribune, 1934

You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.

—Leon Trotsky

Hat tip: John Bensink

What's wrong with this picture?

According to news reports, President Obama sent letters to each of the families of the police officers who died in the April 4th shootout with gunman Richard Poplawski. Only one, however, was read at the memorial service for the fallen heroes. 

Was it because, as Pittsburgh Police spokeswoman Diane Richard implies in the video, Officer Eric Kelly was the most senior of the three? Or might someone infer another reason?

As they say on FOXnews, we report. You decide.

UPDATE: Obviously, I wasn't the only one to find the singling out of Officer Kelly a little odd.

From KDKA.com:

Police Clear Up Confusion About Obama Letters
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―

President Obama had letters of condolences hand-delivered to all three families at the service yesterday. 

But confusion over the letters arose because the police spokeswoman only had time to read one of those letters. 

And, today, she stepped forward to make sure that everyone knew the president was not singling out any of the three officers. 

It was quiet at Pittsburgh Police headquarters this Good Friday -- with flowers standing tribute to the three slain officers -- whose memorial service on Thursday touched the hearts of so many. 

"My emotions are still very high. When I get alone, I think about it and I may weep a little, but there's still work to do," says Diane Richard, the spokeswoman for the city police. 

Richard played an important role in Thursday's memorial service, reading letters of condolences, including one from President Obama. 

Her words on Thursday: "A letter from our commander in chief, President Barack Obama. I will read it for our most senior officer, Officer Kelly." 

Richard says she did not mean to suggest in any way that the president only sent a letter to Officer Kelly's family. 

"If it was misunderstood what I said, please allow me the time to clarify what I said. The president of the United States sent three letters to all three families, and I chose to read the letter of the most senior officer." 

Richard showed KDKA's Jon Delano copies of the President's letters to all three families of officers Kelly, Mayhle, and Sciullo -- although the contents of only the Kelly letter was made public because it was read at the service. 

She hopes the public understands the president was not slighting any of the officers. 

"They have a personal touch in each letter, but they're basically the same but with a little different twist," she adds. 

Reading one of the letters was a last minute decision by Richard when she learned that David Agnew, the White House Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, had brought letters from the president to the families. 

"When I was introduced to him and he showed me the letters, he happened to have copies of them in his valise. And I said, 'Oh I would love to read one of these letters.'"

And to save time Richard decided to read just one of the letters, not intending to create any impression the president was ignoring the others. 

"In the time allotment we had for the program that we had for the program, it wasn't conducive for me to stand there and read all three letters." 

"I chose to read the letter of the most senior officer and that's it. End of story. He acknowledged all three families. All three families got a letter from the President of the United States."
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

The best kept secret in fitness training?

I'm hardly the first person to discover the TRX Suspension Trainer from Fitness Anywhere, but the more I work with it—and learn about it—the more I wonder why it isn't better known.

Yes, it's been featured on The Biggest Loser. And yes, the Super Bowl-winning Pittsburgh Steelers train with it. (See what Steeler trainer Marcel Pastoor has to say about it above.)

But you won't TRX gear in your local sporting goods store (at least not here in Pittsburgh). Fortunately, they have an excellent web store (and very prompt service). And the quality of the instructional materials that accompany the equipment is second to none.

I love the fact that you can throw the whole thing into an overnight bag and never have to worry about whether or not your hotel has a fitness center. And you can enjoy exercising outside when the weather's nice (try doing that with your Bowflex).

If you're looking to get or stay in shape, I think it's one of the best investments you can make.

Have a look.

Barack Obama, international man of mystery

What we don't know about our President-elect could fill volumes: What he had to say at the Rashid Khalidi bash. What he did during his years at Columbia. Whether he's a moderate or a Marxist.

But here are 51 things we now know about him, courtesy of London's Telegraph newspaper:

1. He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics
2. He was known as "O'Bomber" at high school for his skill at basketball
3. His name means "one who is blessed" in Swahili
4. His favourite meal is wife Michelle's shrimp linguini
5. He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father
6. He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed
7. He has read every Harry Potter book
8. He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali
9. He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can't stand ice cream
10.  His favourite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars
11. He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in Indonesia
12. He can speak Spanish
13. While on the campaign trail he refused to watch CNN and had sports channels on instead.
14. His favourite drink is black forest berry iced tea
15. He promised Michelle he would quit smoking before running for president – he didn't
16. He kept a pet ape called Tata while in Indonesia
17. He can bench press an impressive 200lbs
18. He was known as Barry until university when he asked to be addressed by his full name
19. His favourite book is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
20. He visited Wokingham, Berks, in 1996 for the stag party of his half-sister's fiancé, but left when a stripper arrived
21. His desk in his Senate office once belonged to Robert Kennedy
22. He and Michelle made $4.2 million (£2.7 million) last year, with much coming from sales of his books
23. His favourite films are Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
24. He carries a tiny Madonna and child statue and a bracelet belonging to a soldier in Iraq for good luck
25. He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee.
26. His favourite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees
27. He took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date
28. He enjoys playing Scrabble and poker
29. He doesn't drink coffee and rarely drinks alcohol
30. He would have liked to have been an architect if he were not a politician
31. As a teenager he took drugs including marijuana and cocaine
32. His daughters' ambitions are to go to Yale before becoming an actress (Malia, 10) and to sing and dance (Sasha, 7)
33. He hates the youth trend for trousers which sag beneath the backside
34. He repaid his student loan only four years ago after signing his book deal
35. His house in Chicago has four fire places
36. Daughter Malia's godmother is Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita
37. He says his worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry
38. He uses an Apple Mac laptop
39. He drives a Ford Escape Hybrid, having ditched his gas-guzzling Chrysler 300
40. He wears $1,500 (£952) Hart Schaffner Marx suits
41. He owns four identical pairs of black size 11 shoes
42. He has his hair cut once a week by his Chicago barber, Zariff, who charges $21 (£13)
43. His favourite fictional television programmes are Mash and The Wire
44. He was given the code name "Renegade" by his Secret Service handlers
45. He was nicknamed "Bar" by his late grandmother
46. He plans to install a basketball court in the White House grounds
47. His favourite artist is Pablo Picasso
48. His speciality as a cook is chilli
49. He has said many of his friends in Indonesia were "street urchins"
50. He keeps on his desk a carving of a wooden hand holding an egg, a Kenyan symbol of the fragility of life
51. His late father was a senior economist for the Kenyan government

Just in case you were wondering (which you probably weren't).

Come on in my kitchen

From a story on the ABC News web site:

The governor's home in Wasilla, Alaska, has been a flurry of media activity in the last few days as reporters and producers from Fox News, the Anchorage Daily News and NBC have crowded into the Palin family kitchen, where the governor has whipped up specialties like moose stew, moose dogs with cheese and halibut-salmon casserole.

Yum. I'm smelling a Sarah Palin cookbook in here somewhere.

Maybe it can compete with this.

Hank Paulson's Day Off

Ben Stein on Hank Paulson:

Mr. Paulson is the worst Treasury secretary that has ever been. On one hand he's a contemptuous rich schmuck, on the other hand he's socializing American finance. Everything he touches he does wrong. He was the worst possible choice and really a disgrace to the office. This whole thing, the day he decided not to rescue Lehman Brothers, I don't know why he didn't, but it was a blunder on an enormous scale. Paulson is not taking anywhere near the beating he deserves. He deserves a beheading.

"The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone?

"Paulson? … Paulson? … Paulson?"

Restraint or overreach? You decide …

The leadership of the Democratic Congress has wasted no time outlining its legislative agenda.

Unfortunately, the MSM can't quite get its story straight: Crow about liberals' newfound clout on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue? Or pretend the Dems will actually behave with restraint and that their new majorities in both houses will actually lead to "more bipartisanship"?

Two headlines in today's papers — the first from the Associated Press, the second from the New York Times — illustrate the conundrum: "Democrats in Congress Wary of Overreaching" and "Democrats Vow to Pursue an Aggressive Agenda."

Here's the start of the AP story by Andrew Taylor:

President-elect Barack Obama is facing a Congress with bulked-up Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate to put much of his agenda into law.

Obama will inherit a Congress with Democratic House and Senate majorities comparable to those enjoyed by President Clinton when the party last controlled both Congress and the White House in 1992. While Democrats are eager to churn out the new president's legislative programs, they're also anxious to avoid the electoral wipeout that swept them from power in the 1994 congressional elections.

That's one reason top leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promise not to lurch to the left and give in to pent-up demands from party liberals.

"The country must be governed from the middle," Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Wednesday. "You have to bring people together to reach consensus on solutions that are sustainable and acceptable to the American people."

Here's the same Pelosi news conference as covered by David Herszenhorn and Carl Hulse:

Flush with victory built on incursions in the South and West, Congressional Democratic leaders promised to use their new power to join President-elect Barack Obama in pursuing an aggressive agenda that puts top priority on the economy, health care, energy and ending the Iraq war.

By reaching deep into traditionally Republican turf, the Democrats in Tuesday’s elections expanded their majorities in both the House and the Senate. They picked up at least five Senate seats, in Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia. And they picked up at least 19 House seats, with new Democrats coming from Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia.

The full extent of the new Democratic majorities remained unknown, with tight Senate races still undecided in Alaska, Minnesota and Oregon and a runoff scheduled on Dec. 2 in Georgia. At least six House races remained too close to call.

Still, the promise of strong control of Congress also left Democratic leaders grappling with challenges of balancing a wider spectrum of views within their own party while confronting a diminished House Republican conference now decidedly more conservative.

The exuberance of Tuesday night’s victories was also tempered by unease over the public’s high expectations for a party in control of both Congress and the White House amid economic turmoil, two wars overseas and a yawning budget gap.

On the day after the election, leadership battles were breaking out across Capitol Hill as lawmakers contemplated the prospects of new power and opportunity. The quick start to the skirmishing signaled that some of the more bitter fights in the next Congress could be internal battles among Democrats ….

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who spoke with Mr. Obama by phone on Wednesday morning, said that they had made plans to discuss coordinated efforts for the transition and the new Congress, but that a more ambitious agenda would unfold next year.

“Our priorities have tracked the Obama campaign priorities for a very long time,” Ms. Pelosi said at a news conference where she cited the economy, health care, energy and the Iraq war as topping the agenda.

She said Democrats were talking with the Bush White House about a potential $61 billion economic stimulus that could be approved in a lame-duck session.

But Ms. Pelosi said Democrats could open the 111th Congress in January with efforts to adopt measures blocked by President Bush, including ones to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and embryonic stem cell research. She said Democrats had no choice but to chart a centrist course. “The country must be governed from the middle,” she said. But Democrats on both sides of the Capitol were just beginning to digest the new faces in their expanded caucuses.

As the Wall Street Journal emphasizes on this morning's editorial page, "While many voters may think they've voted for 'change' in Mr. Obama, they also handed power to the oldest forces in the Old Democratic Party."

Will a 46-year-old President with less than a full term in Congress be able to restrain the powerful ambitions of our permanent government on Capitol Hill?

Can Superboy stop the speeding Congressional locomotive before it smashes into the oncoming Deficit Express? Or will he just hop in the cab and shovel more (clean) coal?

Tune in in January as the exciting saga begins.

Holy cow, what hit the Dow?

Wall Street seems to be having second thoughts about President-elect Obama:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A case of postelection nerves sent Wall Street plunging Wednesday as investors, looking past Barack Obama's presidential victory, returned to their fears of a deep and protracted recession. Volatility swept over the market again, with the Dow Jones industrials falling nearly 500 points and all the major indexes tumbling more than 5 percent.

The market was widely expected to give back some gains after a runup that lifted the Standard & Poor's 500 index more than 18 percent and that gave the Dow its best weekly advance in 34 years; moreover, many analysts had warned that Wall Street faced more turbulence after two months of devastating losses.

But investors lost their recent confidence about the economy and began dumping stocks again.

"The market has really gotten ahead of itself, and falsely priced in that this recession wasn't going to be as prolonged as thought," said Ryan Larson, head of equity trading at Voyageur Asset Management, a subsidiary of RBC Dain Rauscher. "Regardless of who won the White House, these problems are not going away."

"We're in a really bad recession, period," he said. "People are locking in profits and realizing we're not out of the woods."

Beyond broad economic concerns, worries about the financial sector intensified after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. began to notify about 3,200 employees globally that they have been lost their jobs as part of a broader plan to slash 10 percent of the investment bank's work force, a person familiar with the situation said. The cuts were first reported last month. Goldman fell 8 percent, while other financial names also fell; Citigroup Inc. dropped 14 percent.

Commodities stocks also fell after steelmaker ArcelorMittal said it would slash production because of weakening demand. Its stock plunged 21.5 percent.

Although the market expected Obama to win the election, as the session wore on investors were clearly worrying about the weakness of the economy and pondered what the Obama administration might do. Analysts said the market is already anxious about who Obama selects as the next Treasury Secretary, as well as who he picks for other Cabinet positions.

"The celebration is over. Today we saw a bit of reality," said Al Goldman, chief market strategist at Wachovia Securities in St. Louis. "President-elect Obama is coming into a situation with limited experience, having to handle an economy in serious trouble, a couple of wars and terrorism. It's an extremely tough job."

You'd think all those smart guys on Wall Street would have figured that out before November 4.

Guess Wendy Button isn't the only one with a case of buyer's remorse.

Honeymoon's over

At least, in Moscow.

From The Times (London):

President Dmitri Medvedev took advantage of the euphoria in America today to order the deployment of missiles inside Europe as a response to US plans for a missile defence shield.

Speaking within hours of Barack Obama's election as the new US President, Mr Medvedev announced that Russia would base Iskander missiles in its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad next to the border with Poland.

He did not say whether the short-range missiles would carry nuclear warheads. Mr Medvedev also cancelled earlier plans to withdraw three intercontinental ballistic missile regiments from western Russia.

"An Iskander missile system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad region to neutralise if necessary the anti-ballistic missile system in Europe," Mr Medvedev said in his first state-of-the-nation address.

He added that Russia was also ready to deploy its navy and to install electronic jamming devices to interfere with the US shield, which involves the deployment of a radar station in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland.

His announcement prompted a burst of applause from government ministers and parliamentary deputies assembled in the Kremlin. The President failed to congratulate Mr Obama or even to mention him by name during his 85-minute state of the nation address televised live across Russia.

Instead, in a criticism directed at the US, Mr Medvedev declared: "Mechanisms must be created to block mistaken, egoistical and sometimes simply dangerous decisions of certain members of the international community."

He accused the West of seeking to encircle Russia and blamed the US for encouraging Georgia's "barbaric aggression" in the war over South Ossetia in August. He issued a warning that Russia would "not back down in the Caucasus"….

In his only reference to the US election, he said that he hoped the new administration would work to repair its relationship with Moscow. He said: "I stress that we have no problem with the American people, no inborn anti-Americanism. And we hope that our partners, the US administration, will make a choice in favour of full-fledged relations with Russia."

Looks like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton may have been more right than they knew.

Congratulations, President-elect Obama

 And good luck. You're going to need it.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

—Ronald Reagan

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Whether or not John McCain pulls off an upset today, it's obvious that the GOP is in for some rough sledding over the next few years. Fred Barnes has an excellent op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal that explains why our center-right nation is headed for a sharp left turn.

But what may be less evident, even after eight years of eroding Republican political capital, is that the strategy of bipartisanship — championed not only by John McCain but also by George W. Bush — is a failed strategy. Why? Because, simply put, every time a Republican reaches his hand across the aisle, some nasty little Democrat bites it.

The GOP's myopia began after 9/11, when, in the warm glow of seeming national unity, Democrats supported the early phases of the President's Global War on Terror and were rewarded with an unexpected gift: Big Government Republicanism. The No Child Left Behind Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Medicare Part D plan gave a huge boost to Federal spending, vitiating a decades-old record of Republican fiscal restraint. Throw in the cost of financing a necessary but expensive war, and the red-state party of limited government suddenly morphed into the K Street Party of Earmarks and Red Ink.

President Bush compounded this bipartisan folly by allowing two key Clinton-era holdovers — George Tenet at the CIA and Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve — to linger well past their freshness dates. For this largesse, he was rewarded with faulty intelligence going into Iraq ("WMDs are a slam dunk, Mr. President") and the low-interest-rate policies at the Fed that helped bring on the current financial crisis. Tenet and Greenspan made the mistakes, but Democrats saw to it that the George Bush and his fellow Republicans took the political fall. Had the chimerical WMDs in Iraq been ignored and the financial WMDs on Wall Street been recognized, No. 43 might be leaving office with near-Reaganesque popularity ratings.

Still, if Bush embraced bipartisanship only after 9/11, John McCain made it the hallmark of his two decades in the Senate. McCain's criticism of the Iraq war made him the Toast of the Beltway, every Democrat's favorite — that is, right up to the moment he won his party's Presidential nomination.

Then, abruptly, the Dom Pérignon stopped flowing.

The drubbing McCain has taken in the media for failing to accede to the inevitable coronation of Barack Obama (especially the effrontery of choosing an "unvetted" running mate like Sarah Palin) should be an object lesson for Republicans who fondly imagine that acting in good faith toward the liberal establishment will yield anything but scorn and derision. In the immortal words of Otter in Animal House, "You f***ed up. You trusted us."

But if you're going to be vilified as a fear-monger, a race-baiter and a Bush-wannabe anyway, why bother pitching woo to editorial boards, network talk-show hosts and other A-listers on the Georgetown cocktail circuit? Why not hang out instead with the pajamas media, with talk radio listeners or with sportsmen, NASCAR fans, veterans groups, entrepreneurs, chain-restaurant diners and Wal-Mart shoppers? The conversation's bound to be livelier (and definitely more intelligent).

Let's stop fooling ourselves: We're not welcome at the National Press Club. And bipartisanship's a sucker's game. The Democrats kneel behind our knees, and the MSM gives us a push. Yet we get back up and fall for it, over and over.

It's time Republicans stopped being such easy marks. Time we played our own game, by our own rules.

And this time around, no more Mr. Nice Guy.