Headline:

Jail for man who attacked police with toy light sabers

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon judge is using his force to order a 45-day jail sentence and mental health evaluation for a would-be Jedi who attacked toy store customers with light sabers last December.

…Portland police say (David Allen) Canterbury had a Star Wars light saber in each hand as he swung at three customers last Dec. 14 at a Toys R Us store…

…they shouldn’t have been standing so close to the toy fighter pilots…

… He carried the light sabers outside the store and swung at police.

Officers eventually wrestled him to the ground.

…after he was disarmed due to the lack of wrist straps on his lightsabers – a danger I’ve been warning people about for several years. But never fear, shoppers:

Canterbury has been banned from the toy store.

Phew.

Jonah Goldberg posted that at NRO. He writes:

Every now and then I love watching this (and things like it) to remind me that we’ve seen all this nonsense before. Note the year: 1979, the tail-end of another president’s single term.

I wish Friedman had thrown a little Margaret Thatcher in there, but who the hell am I to argue with him?

Something else that stands out about this video: notice how Donahue listens respectfully? How many talking head shows exist today which let the guest talk for more than a few seconds at a time?

Previously:

• Don’t get cocky, Tea Partiers: we’ve been here before.

If you had to pick the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee today, which of the following candidates would you select?
4) Ron Paul: 11.6% (8 votes)
3) Rick Santorum: 21.7% (15 votes)
2) Mitt Romney: 31.9% (22 votes)
1) Newt Gingrich: 34.8% (24 votes)

These are tough questions, given the remaining field. Go read them all.

Step 1: start a twitter account.
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: buy a new yacht!

Except, we already know what Step 2 is:

The weirdest thing about the rumor that Kim Kardashian gets paid $10,000 for a Twitter endorsement is that it’s true.

No, Step 2 is not “have a relatively famous lawyer daddy and a sex tape.” Read on:

The pay rate for endorsing companies like Old Navy, Toyota, Best Buy, and American Airlines is determined by the size of a celeb’s following and how that group responds to his tweets with shares and retweets.

On that sliding scale, Snoop Dogg (6.3 million followers) is in the top tier of payments, on the upside of $8,000 apiece, while Paula Abdul (2.2 million followers) falls somewhere in the middle, in the $5,000-each range, and Whitney Port (800,000 followers) falls in the bottom tier, making around $2,500 per tweet.

Whitney Port was on MTV or something (yeah, that still exists. Who knew, right?), so she’s kind of borderline-famous.

But there are outliers. When Ad.ly introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for Internships.com generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to Internships.com.

Step 2: be ridiculously famous; or infamous; or maybe crazy; or …could you just have lots and lots of followers, even if none of them know who you are?

Because I could use a new yacht. Follow me, dammit!

Hat tip Ann Althouse.

Ha. I kid. A nice long rest might be just what McCain needs. In a nearly unheard-of (I kid again) bout of told-you-so-ism, McCain writes:

Just ask yourselves, Perrybots, what might have been possible if some other candidate — any other candidate, perhaps one who could remember how to count to three – had an extra $20 million to spend here in Florida.

I may or may not meet his standard for a “Perrybot.” I was on the Perry bandwagon. Then I got off. Then I ran alongside it, ready to grab hold and swing back aboard. I never quite gave up on him until he officially dropped out.

So regardless of his definition, I think I qualify, and will therefore respond.

One need not be a “Perrybot” to see the logical fallacy McCain is making. To wit: “if Rick Perry hadn’t entered the race, somebody else would have gotten that $20 million.”

I dunno what’s in that pile, but it smells.

Short answer: no, neither Rick Santorum, nor Herman Cain, nor Michelle Bachmann, nor Thaddeus McCotter would have received that $20 million. A small proportion of it, perhaps. I’m speculating, but it seems likely that other candidates would also have received some of it. Therefore whatever financial impact this fictional Perrylessness might have had would be distributive in nature, and thus zero.

No impact.

But even so, those sans-Perry contributions wouldn’t have added up to $20 million. Much of it was contributed only because Perry was the candidate. For McCain to speculate that this $20 million existed and was in play regardless of Perry’s candidacy, and that this $20 million would have made Rick Santorum competitive pre-Florida (or, perhaps, kept Herman Cain competitive post-scandal) is ridiculous.

Without Perry, that $20 million doesn’t enter the race in the first place. And even if it does, it doesn’t coalesce around a second- or third-tier candidate.

That’s like my 12-year-old thinking he gets a second piece of cake because his older brother isn’t home for dinner.

I think what McCain is trying to say is: if only one real conservative could have run from Day 1, then that real conservative could have cornered the real conservative vote, and we wouldn’t be stuck looking at Obamacare’s ancestor maybe getting the GOP nod.

Well, okay. Like I needed another reason to be happy that Paul Ryan never got in the race. Or Bobby Jindahl. Or Mitch Daniels. Or Scott Walker. Or Chris Christie. Or Sarah Palin, I suppose. Because those guys would have just mucked it up and split the conservative vote even worse for the one real conservative who was supposed to slap Mitt Romney down.

Feh. Oh, one more thing. McCain also wrote:

And you still refuse to admit that you were misled…

Because I wasn’t.

…and helped mislead others…

Because I didn’t.

…into jumping aboard that hopeless Bandwagon to Loserville. And who warned you, huh?

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.”

Wrote that August 9. Perry’s failure was entirely predictable.

So was Rick Santorum’s. And Herman Cain’s. And…oh, who the hell ran under the Libertarian ticket last time? You know, the lifelong GOPer who jumped parties after he couldn’t hack it in the primary and was going to Teach Those RINOs a Lesson?

Him too.

Everyone should go to Starbucks on Valentines Day!

I plan to, and here is why. A group that advocates gun control…is boycotting Starbucks on that day.

Here’s the story:

(CNSNews.com)— The National Gun Victims Action Council (NGAC) will lead a national boycott of Starbucks Coffee products on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, to try to change the company’s “open carry” gun policy at its locations. Starbucks currently allows guns to be openly carried by patrons in its stores in the states where it is legal to do so.

First of all: wow, counter-intuitive. I just assumed Starbucks would be liberal (modern-day American sense) in all its politics. Shame on me, I guess.

Second: surely they have some product that I’ll enjoy.

Third: I guess I’ll find that out on February 14. It’s on the calendar!

‘Inexcusable’ language on immigration alienating Latino voters, Republicans told

Florida senator Marco Rubio and former governor Jeb Bush warn party’s frontrunners not to use ‘harsh and intolerable’ language

Huh. I wonder what those “frontrunners” said? Surely we’ll have some specifics?

“We must admit there are those among us that have used rhetoric that is harsh and intolerable and inexcusable,” Rubio said in a speech at the Hispanic Leadership Network in Miami on Friday.

“And we must admit, myself included, that sometimes we’ve been too slow to condemn that language for what it is.”

Nope. No specifics.

In case you couldn’t tell from the above quotes, Sen. Rubio is a Republican. I’d understand if you were confused. He’s talking like a race-baiting liberal.

I’m just wondering, Sen. Rubio: could you possibly give us an example? Point to somebody’s specific statement?

Why is that statement “harsh and intolerable and inexcusable?” And are those words just placeholders for “racist?”

Hey, I’m not exactly a hardliner on illegal immigration issues. But I know the difference between legal and illegal. Immigration laws apply to all foreigners, regardless of race or ethnicity. So if Senator Rubio wants to condemn “harsh and intolerable and inexcusable” rhetoric, great. I’m with you, Marco!

You want to “condemn that language for what it is?” Groovy. Speak truth to power!

But fer cry-eye. As it is, you sound like a race-baiting Liberal. Just so you know.

The last available choice is: “I plan to vote for Walker.” As of right now:

…Walker is winning with 51%.

Maybe that’s not such a big deal. After all, the Democrat vote is split up.

But maybe it is a big deal. Like I said, the Cap Times is an incredibly liberal publication. The only reason Republicans and conservatives ever read it is if they’re mentioned by name, or if they suffer from low blood pressure.

So what the hell? Ann Althouse considers that question:

It’s possible that some pro-Walker site has already linked to this poll, and that’s why Walker is getting 54% of the vote. (I assume my linking now will have an effect.) But it’s startling to see the Cap Timesters going big for Walker like this.

In second place, with 33%, is Russ Feingold…

That was then. So they have changed, but Walker’s still got a clear majority.

I’m making two assumptions, here:

1. There aren’t enough Republicans and conservatives reading the Cap Times to give Walker those numbers; and
2. There’s no way in hell enough regular Cap Times readers would honestly click the Walker option. Not as a joke. Not as an attempt at misdirection. They hate him too much.

So somebody linked it, and drove voters there. Wish I knew who. More importantly, I wish I’d been informed. Now I have to go dig the consequences out of the closet. If I can remember which closet I put them in.

Democrats have seized on Republicans as the party of unlimited secret money.

The only problem: so are Democrats.

Hoist!

In recent days, Obama released an ad blasting “secretive oil billionaires” for attacks on him, Nancy Pelosi unveiled a campaign slogan, calling for “a new politics free of special interest influence,” and the Democratic National Committee released a Web ad accusing Mitt Romney of lying about his ties to a super PAC that’s spent millions supporting him.

…But this year, Democrats are playing the same game. Obama’s team has blessed a network of super PACs trying to raise the same seven-figure checks as Romney’s. And Obama’s allies have gone even further than Romney’s, setting up nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors at all.

In fact, top Democrats are so ardent about the need to raise unlimited — and sometimes secret — cash this year that some operatives aren’t pleased about the recent attacks, grumbling that it makes it a whole lot tougher to get wealthy liberals to fork over mega-checks when the politicians who’d benefit are ripping Republicans for taking the same types of contributions…

… the Obama campaign’s juggernaut fundraising makes the president an especially poor messenger for the attacks, reasoned one Democratic operative familiar with the party’s outside money operation.

“When you’ve been talking about raising $1 billion, you really shouldn’t be talking about money in the political process,” the operative said.

We here at The Trog have noted several times (here and here) the number of incredibly rich individuals giving millions to liberal organizations in order to – a la those evil, manipulative Koch brothers – influence the political arena.

Those millionaires, of course, go unnoted by the liberal establishment, because they’re having too much fun saying “Kochsucker.”

This is so well established, in fact, it’s hardly worth writing another blog post about it. As juicy and tempting as the above story is, we all already know that Democrats and liberals are complete hypocrites when it comes to political money. Why even bother pointing it out again? Why waste another blog post?

I’m not. I’m writing a post about the phrase “hoist with your own petard.”

Did you think it was “on” your own petard? Me, too. Did you think “petard” was some weird euphemism for “ass?” Me, too.

But, no:

A petard was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications.

…The word remains in modern usage in the phrase hoist with one’s own petard, which means “to be harmed by one’s own plan to harm someone else” or “to fall into one’s own trap,” literally implying that one could be lifted up (hoist, or blown upward) by one’s own bomb.

A bomb. Like this (skip ahead to about the :35 mark if you’re impatient):

That’s a petard!

Or, conversely:

Etymology:

The word petard comes from the Middle French peter, to break wind, from pet expulsion of intestinal gas, from Latin peditum, from neuter of peditus, past participle of pedere, to break wind; akin to Greek bdein to break wind.

Um…sorry, no video example of that.

Point being, I learned something today. The phrase “hoist with one’s own petard” means to blow yourself up with your own bomb, a la Wile E. Coyote. So to use that phrase in a political context is incredibly violent, akin to wishing someone else dead.

We here at The Trog shrug our shoulders and don’t really regret any times in the past when we might have used this phrase.

Link: Temple of Mut.

Link: HuffPo.

Link: Trog.

Link: Megan McArdle.

Link: Mediaite.

Link: Trog.

Link: Sister Toldja.

Previously:

• This Week in Automotivators, January 9-15

• This Week in Automotivators, January 16-22

• Make your own automotivators.