Fausta’s Blog

Toy Story, with music from the Gypsy Kings, via kimsch,

First they had to find students to fill in the seats and drag them out of the basement, and then he flubbed his lines,

Video via DrewM

Imam Rauf is back in town:

Rauf presents his planned edifice as a sort of crossroads among Islam, Christianity and Judaism. And he’s a sensitive kind of guy: “I am very sensitive to the feelings of the families of victims of 9/11, as are my fellow leaders of many faiths. We will accordingly seek the support of those families, and the support of our vibrant neighborhood, as we consider the ultimate plans for the community center. Our objective has always been to make this a center for unification and healing.”

But in Rauf’s absence we have largely unified around the proposition that the mosque doesn’t belong there. And the healing will begin when Rauf abandons the project. Looking on the bright side, Daniel Pipes thinks that Rauf may have roused us from our slumbers

Andy McCarthy:
This Is Where We Begin to Say No
On the Ground Zero mosque, Americans reject the opinion elites that empower the Islamists.

The reformers’ slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people’s will to say “no” to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say “no.”

As of last Friday, 67% of NYC Residents Oppose Ground Zero Mosque According to NYT Poll.

UPDATE:
Most Americans object to planned Islamic center near Ground Zero, poll finds

Ladies and gentlemen, we may have stumbled into the only way to profit and make money in the Obama economy.

How idiocy innovation killed the lights

IN WINCHESTER, VA. The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

Guess where those jobs are going?

China?

Hell yeah!

Now think about this:

• the fluorescents are more expensive,

• last very little time (I’ve had to change the fluorescents here at casa de Fausta twice, even when they are supposed to last “as long as seven years”)

• they make you look like death warmed over

• they are legislated in the cause of global warming, which is a scam to begin with

• and it’s costing thousands of American jobs here in the USA.

What is there not to love? It’s the perfect setup for a black market! Go forth and find yourself some incandescents to peddle.

And then,
Watch For It – The Mexican Incandescent Light Bulb Cartel. Nah, I say it’s a home-grown black market opportunity.

The Jewish High Holy Days start today, and out of the blue the nearly-restored Caudillo comes out, gives an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, and says,
Fidel to Ahmadinejad: ‘Stop Slandering the Jews’

The kindness of Fidel’s heart made him say that?

Hardly.

As Goldberg himself notes,

Castro opened our initial meeting by telling me that he read the recent Atlantic article carefully, and that it confirmed his view that Israel and America were moving precipitously and gratuitously toward confrontation with Iran. This interpretation was not surprising, of course: Castro is the grandfather of global anti-Americanism, and he has been a severe critic of Israel. His message to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, he said, was simple: Israel will only have security if it gives up its nuclear arsenal, and the rest of the world’s nuclear powers will only have security if they, too, give up their weapons.

Note how it’s Israel and America who Castro says are “moving precipitously and gratuitously toward confrontation with Iran”, as if Iran was just sitting there growing fields of lavender to make sachets for little old ladies to put in their dressers.

Fidel, playing the wise sage for a credulous world audience, came out and criticized Iran,

He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.

And so did Goldberg.

Why this new Fidel? Castro apologist Julia Sweig explained it all to Jeff,

After this first meeting, I asked Julia to explain the meaning of Castro’s invitation to me, and of his message to Ahmadinejad. “Fidel is at an early stage of reinventing himself as a senior statesman, not as head of state, on the domestic stage, but primarily on the international stage, which has always been a priority for him,” she said. “Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he’s really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn’t expect to have. And he’s revisiting history, and revisiting his own history.”

Revising history, is more like it.

And if it brings US tourists to spend money in the island-prison, why not?

Trust me on this: this new and improved Fidel will sell well all over. After all, isn’t Cuba on the UN Human Rights Council already?

I’m talking about this in today’s podcast at 11:30AM.

Related:
Today’s “WTF? moment” goes to Fidel Castro VIDEO, with special thanks to commenter ryukyu for the link.

The Obama Economy
How trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus produced a 1.6% recovery.

never before has government spent so much and intervened so directly in credit allocation to spur growth, yet the results have been mediocre at best. In return for adding nearly $3 trillion in federal debt in two years, we still have 14.9 million unemployed.

Obama is now proposing another stimulus in the form of an “infrastructure bank”. Jennifer Rubin:

The assertion that a $50B program, after multiple stimulus plans, will improve our economic fortunes will strike some as nearly comic.

Only if you laugh so you don’t cry.

Instapundit is posting on bedbugs, which are now a plague thanks to the geniuses who banned DDT in the 1970s,

LOOKING FOR new weapons to kill bedbugs. “A common household pest for centuries, bedbugs were virtually eradicated in the 1940s and ’50s by the widespread use of DDT. That insecticide was banned in the 1970s, and the bugs developed resistance to chemicals that replaced it. . . . Getting rid of them, experts say, has become a complex political and social problem, not only because of modern concerns about pesticide use but also because of Americans’ mobile lifestyle.”

It’s not just the Americans who are mobile. The whole world travels (legally and illegally).

It turns out there’s a bedbug registry, where you can find at least a partial answer to the question, does your hotel have bedbugs? Or at least, which hotels have had them.

I wonder if there’s a bedbug registry for movie theaters, too.

{{shudder}}

Today is the first day in which a majority of union members work for the government, which means bigger government and higher taxes:

This Labor Day marks a milestone in the history of the U.S. union movement. It is the first Labor Day on which a majority of union members in United States work for the government. In January the Department of Labor reported that union membership in government has overtaken that in the private sector. Three times as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry. The face of the union movement is not a worker on the assembly line but a clerk at the DMV.

This is a dramatic shift for the union movement. The early trade unionists did not believe that unions had a place in government. They believed the purpose of unions was to redistribute business profits from owners to workers … and the government makes no profits.  Not until the 1960s did unionizing government employees become widespread. Now government employees make up 52 percent of all union members.

So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t.

Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart the labor movement’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. But if a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much of the profits, then that firm will be unable to reinvest those resources and will lose out to competitors. But when a union extracts a generous contract from a government, there is no check on that spending. Instead of being forced out by more efficient competitors, the government just raises taxes.

The shift from private to public sector has fundamentally changed organized labor’s priorities. Unions used to support policies that would help their private sector employers grow. But now that they are largely dependent on the government, the only growth that unions are interested in is the growth of government. So unions push for tax increases across the country.

What is the true cost of the union label?

Here’s a Labor Day factoid: The total economic loss we’d feel from labor bosses’ and environmental activists’ joint “cap-and-trade” tax scheme – $10 trillion from 2012 to 2035 – is roughly the same as all of America deciding to completely cease all economic activity from New Year’s Day to, well, Labor Day next year.

There is also protectionism:

Now the Department of Commerce is set to decide the fate of protectionist policies being requested by the United Steelworkers, its newly acquired allies in the environmentalist movement, and a couple corporate cronies who seeking tariffs on paper products.

All that might not sound like much, but it could mean massive new tariffs on foreign products, which means domestic companies will also raise their prices. An Australian think tank found earlier this year that similar collusion by labor, green groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and industry groups had consumers flushing 42 percent more money on toilet paper costs.
…
Trade barriers and tariffs help labor officials and their members, and environmentalists would just as soon we all play with hemp dolls, but they have very little care for the real hardships of others less fortunate. Yet the colluding groups fight against free-trade agreements, which are one of the easiest methods of liberalizing trade and starting the long process of lifting the world’s poor out of poverty.

Labor day now means you labor for the unions’ benefit.

At Rolling Stone:
Inside ‘Mad Men’: On Set and Behind the Scenes of the Emmy- Winning Show

The caption for the above photo?

Flying Low
“I fly very low on the radar,” says Hamm. “Mark Twain said it: ‘I’d rather say nothing and be thought an idiot than open my mouth and remove all doubt.’ Another Missouri boy, Mark Twain. The petulant, shitty movie-star mentality – that burns out pretty quick.”

Amen!

I was at the supermarket the other day and Vanity Fair has Hamm on the cover surrounded by the gorgeous ladies of Mad Men, but so far the Vanity Fair website is not showing it.

I’m liking how the ads are tying-in with the show; here’s a Behind the Scenes of Unilever’s Retro ‘Mad Men’ Ads

Here’s one of their ads (which was preceded by a Purdue Chicken ad. Young Mr. Purdue’s looking more like Old Mr. Purdue every day.),

Recap of last week’s episode at the Wall Street Journal,
‘Mad Men,’ Season 4, Episode 6, ‘Waldorf Stories’: TV Recap

Preview of tonight’s episode,

This season’s question:

The more concrete Draper becomes—and the more he asserts himself as a character, the more problematic he becomes for the audience. Can we continue to be enthralled if Draper is no longer our hero/anti-hero?

Staying tuned…

UPDATE, Monday September 6,
After watching last night’s episode, and pondering the above question, I have yet one more question,
Should we also be thankful that the writers didn’t show us Don actually throwing up at the toilet, but only did sound effects and his legs sticking out of the stall?

Day By Day poses a question today,

Click to enlarge.