Peter Falk, 1927-2011. R.I.P.

I was just checking out National Review and saw Shannen Coffin's post about the death of actor Peter Falk at the age of 83.

Falk had been ill for some time. But actor Michael McKean summed it up succinctly when he wrote on Twitter, "Peter Falk was a dear man and great actor. This one hurts. RIP. sir."

To read the rest of this obituary, please check out The American Spectator.

Obama Isn't Serious About Syria

When President Obama gave a speech before the State Department on May 19th concerning the Middle East and North Africa, he made the following remarks about the unrest in Syria:

The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way. The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests.

Predictably, Assad has ignored and his regime has continued to shoot demonstrators.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Riggleman Resigns as Nats Manager

Jim Riggleman has suddenly resigned as manager of the Washington Nationals. The team will name an interim manager tomorrow.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Two Muslim Converts Arrested for Bomb Plot at Military Recruitment Center in Seattle

Last night, two Muslim converts were arrested for plotting to blow up a military recruitment center in Seattle. The facility also houses a day care center.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

"Whitey" Bulger Arrested

I woke up this morning to the news that Boston's most notorious mobster, James "Whitey" Bulger had been captured in Santa Monica, California last night along with his girlfriend, Catherine Grieg.

To read the rest of the post, please check out The American Spectator.

Glen Campbell: I Have Alzheimer's

Legendary country music singer Glen Campbell has revealed that he has Alzheimer's Disease. He was informed of his condition about six months ago.

Yet despite the diagnosis, the 75-year-old Campbell plans to release one more album in August and then go on a final tour.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Miracle grow has been linked to pot cultivation. So will consumers be required to have their photo ID's verified to purchase the chemical the way we are in regards to nasal decongestants?

Cigarette cartons are to be decorated with graphic images of this habit’s impact upon the body. So will depictions of genetalia covered in oozing festers be plastered all over packs of condoms in order to promote abstinence?

If McCain had displayed the backbone during the election he has displayed with the claim that illegals are starting the wildfires, perhaps he'd now be President and likely a fairly good one at that if he applied that degree of conservatism to most other issues.

The Zero Seconds initiative insists that is how long a child should be left alone in a car. While this sounds enlightened, given the way other kinds of zero tolerance policies are implemented such as those banning plastic utensils in school cafeterias, are cops & bureaucrats on powertrips going to charge parents as negligent if the trip from the front of the car to the back takes more than 1 second?

Is it that kiddy pools represent a threat to the youth of America or is this about creating a panic to justify a new revenue sourse when the permits required for large pools are extended to shackle Mr. Turtle?

RightOnline ahead of Netroots when it comes to video

One interesting thing I learned at the RightOnline convention in Minneapolis this past weekend is that the right is ahead of the left with investigative videos. The left may have been generally ahead in technology the last few years, but we've now surpassed them on the video side of it. This is mainly due to the efforts of Andrew Breitbart and videographer James O'Keefe, known for their investigative live videos exposing ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and NPR. I found this out talking to an independent reporter who was attending both conventions. I asked her what she thought were the main differences between the two and she mentioned the lack of equivalent investigative videos on the left. Breitbart advised RightOnline attendees to always film anything you see that may remotely end up being relevant. Pull out your cell phone and tape that dorky confrontation between a leftist and someone else.

However the reporter did say that Netroots offered fewer technology training courses at their convention than RightOnline, reflective of their superior overall technological knowledge. Considering one elderly man at the conference asked me to stop using my laptop because it was "bothering" him, I worry there is a grain of truth in what she said (I just went and sat somewhere else).

The other coolest thing I learned at RightOnline from Facebook representative Katie Harbath is that Facebook is now allowing you to have more than 5000 friends, fixing a limitation that has greatly hampered those of us political activists who use it for a tool. It does this by letting you convert your personal account to a (business) "page," where your friends will be converted to "likes" and future friends will need to "like" your page. You will lose all of the content you've posted up until now, and you will no longer be able to add friends the previous way, but otherwise it will still operate like a personal account. Click here for the FAQ.

Yelena Bonner, 1923-2011. R.I.P.

Yelena Bonner, best remembered along with her husband, Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov, as the first couple of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s, died yesterday in Boston after a lengthy illness. She was 88.

To read the rest of this obituary, please check out The American Spectator.

Could McKeon Manage the Marlins Again?

Earlier today, Edwin Rodriguez resigned as manager of the Florida Marlins. During the month of June, the Marlins have a 1-17 record and have fallen to the cellar in the NL East. Currently, they are twelve and a half games back of the Philadelphia Phillies.

To continue reading this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Clarence Clemons, 1942-2011. R.I.P.

Clarence Clemons, the big man who stood by Bruce Springsteen's side on stage for nearly forty years, has died of complications of a stroke he suffered less than a week ago. He was 69.

To continue reading this obituary, please check out The American Spectator.

Thoughts on Bruins Parade

Today, my roomie Christopher and I went to Copley Square to view the Boston Bruins Victory Parade.

While in attendance, there were two things which caught my attention.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Watch RightOnline livestream today with Malkin, Bachmann and Pawlenty

Then They Came For The DVR's.....

Since the average American is no longer able to go much of anywhere because of gas prices, environmentalists are now set to declare against home entertainment devices.

It is claimed that these machines use too much electricity.

In light of this mandatory asceticism, before it's all over with they will probably summarily execute those of us wearing eye glasses and march everyone else out to toil in the rice paddies.

All of this will likely fall under Frau Obama's "Let's Move" campaign.

The Obama Administration provided Mexican drug cartels with high-powered assault weapons. However, the Secret Service confiscated the silverware at a banquet where Frau Obama was scheduled to speak.

Stimulus plan jobs might not have been shovel ready, but what is constantly pouring out of Obama's mouth is as shovel ready as it has always been.

Bill Nye the Science Guy says you are unpatriotic if you deny global warming. Bill Nye is such a has-been that for him to be called 1999 would be such an advance in his time stream for him that the temporal shockwave might cause him to shatter into a million chronotons.

Highlights from day one of RightOnline 2011

by Rachel Alexander

RightOnline Executive Director Erik Telford

The RightOnline annual conference is being held in Minneapolis at the same time and in the same city again as the liberal Netroots Nation conference, in fact they are even sharing some of the same hotels. Probably the only thing they both have in common is unhappiness with Obama. Over 1500 are in attendance at RightOnline. Reportedly 2500 are attending Netroots, but the difference is likely due to various special interest groups paying the way of most of the Netroots attendees (sort of how they pay protesters).

Andrew Breitbart has been the hit of the conference so far, getting into heated confrontations with the Netroots bloggers.

Not all interactions between the two factions have been so heated. There was a left meets right, right meets left happy hour last night and no one appears to be feuding in the video.

The Mayor of Minneapolis, Democrat R.T. Rybak, dared to show up and speak a few words, telling us we could be conservative but to "spend liberally" in Minneapolis. He had guts considering he'd told Netroots earlier that he welcomed Netroots to Minneapolis but only "tolerated" RightOnline. And he expects us to reward his city now with our money? #Fail

Melissa Tweets--er I mean Melissa Clouthier, one of the most prominent Twitterers/bloggers on the right, surprised everyone by presenting her own award to RightOnline's executive director Erik Telford. This was pretty cool for those of us who have been involved heavily in social media on the right over the past few years, especially those like myself who got involved in it due to RightOnline/AFP.

Melissa Clouthier aka Melissa Tweets

So far Ann McElhinney from the movie "Not Evil Just Wrong" has been a big surprise as the best speaker. She began her speech, "I am a recovering European." She pointed out the immense hypocrisies of the left, such as accusing conservatives of invading people's privacy in the bedroom, while they invade our privacy in every room in our house, from our bathrooms to our lightbulbs. She had some choice words for feminists, including, "The pill didn't liberate women, the washing machine liberated women." She went off on how women are worse off in Africa because a few feminists at Harvard would rather make sure they have the pill instead of washing machines.

The breakout session on influencing the court of opinion, taught by Bob Ewing from the Institute for Justice, had some great tips on how to get the media to pay attention to your viewpoint and how to get the general public interested. Ask a reporter two things, 1) are you on deadline, and 2) do you have 30 seconds to listen to my pitch on something you might be really interested in? Ewing said that the right needs to do a better job at personalizing our arguments - showcase someone who is being hurt by government regulations.

The panel on public employee pension corruption and scandal was outstanding. Bob Williams from State Budget Solutions and Frank Keegan from the Franklin Center told us that even leftist Willie Brown is complaining that public employee pensions are bankrupting California. There are great websites that expose the cost of employee pensions and local spending like sunshinereview.org and buckeyeinstitute.org.

Andrew Breitbart with Jon Fleischman from FlashReport (left).
Breitbart is  viewing some photos of myself that I tweeted him.

I'm learning all kinds of interesting things. I met one of the writers for my website for the first time, who informed me that the Mormon Church told him that his article shows up as the ninth result for "Mormon" in a google image search. It's all about the SEO and if you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to attend RightOnline.

E.J. Dionne Pines for Bush

Well, now that the GOP presidential race is on, I guess the liberal media has now begun the process of "rehabilitating" George W. Bush.

How else can you explain E.J. Dionne's latest offering? Dionne writes, "Yet compared with the New Hampshire Seven - and with today's Republican majority in the House of Representatives - Bush was the reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt."

So Bush the Cowboy now walks softly?

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Zingales: Ryan Over Romney

Luigi Zingales, the respected economics professor at the University of Chicago who has argued so persuasively that government should be pro-market, not pro-business, now weighs in on the Republican presidential race. It comes as no surprise that Zingales prefers Paul Ryan over Mitt Romney.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.

Is Obama More Like Dukakis Than Carter?

Over at The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost makes the case that President Obama's support amongst Democrats is more like tha tof Michael Dukakis than Jimmy Carter.

To read the rest of this post, please check out The American Spectator.