Content by Tennyson
Posted at 8:26pm on Jun. 20, 2008 Obama Presidential Seal Caption Contest
By Tennyson
So.. I guess I've seen it all now:
My favorites:
"The change we have been waiting for since 1880"
"Finally, after one hundred and twenty eight years, I am proud of my country."
Posted in 2008 — Comments (23) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 9:24pm on Jan. 9, 2008 Fred's Last Chance (Updated...)
By Tennyson
This is a post I had hoped I would never have to write.
I write this as someone who:
-
worked as a teenager in the original 1994 Thompson campaign for Senate in Tennessee;
wrote a letter to Senator Thompson to try to pursuade him to run;
was one of the original Friends of Fred Thompson donors (I've been maxed out since the day after the committee was set up);
attended his first trip as a potential candidate to the Curb house in Nashville and brought back part of his inspired message to Redstate readers
I am the last person I thought would be writing a pre-post mortem on the Thompson Campaign. But here I am. And here is Fred's last chance...
Posted in 2008 — Comments (66) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 12:37am on Nov. 13, 2007 A Real American Victory
By Tennyson
Something occurred to me this Veteran's day. Amidst all of the appropriate honoring of those that have fought and served to protect our freedom for the past few generations, I was struck with the contrast between the America of today and the America which rose to the challenge of past wars. Particularly, the difference between the resolve of America here at home in the Iraq War and the resolve of America in past wars like World War II.
Of course all of those past conflicts were not models of unity. Vietnam stands out as a time when America's resolve and political leadership collapsed - leading to poor prosecution of a war and the disastrous consequences of expediency when we fled from our mistakes.
This present struggle in Iraq is something unique and unprecedented in American History. The domestic climate was on a vector to Vietnam-like catastrophe- aided by an out of power political party which was more concerned with regaining political power than victory for our nation. All of this has been potentially turned around by the resolve of a political minority not to abandon the mission of our sons and daughters who fight, and not to abandon the innocents that don't look like us and don't talk like us and don't worship like us. Iraq is a war like no other...
Posted in War — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:41am on Jun. 27, 2007 What Fred Said LATER in Nashville Tonight
By Tennyson
Earlier this evening Fred Thompson and a few hundred supporters had the opportunity to get a sneak peek at the "stump speech" for his upcoming campaign. While he may still be "testing the waters", its clear that not only is the water warm, if it were much hotter, it would be boiling. I'm going to dispense with any pretense that Fred Thompson isn't going to run for President. I'm just happy to be able to see if from the beginning...
Posted in Breaking News — Comments (45) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 9:40pm on Apr. 17, 2007 A Time to Leave It Alone
By Tennyson
"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways," he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of "violence."
There's the "verbal violence" of Imus.
There's "the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country."
- Barack Obama on the abstract equivalence of psychopathic 23 year old murderers and has been radio shock jocks.
Has it not become trite and noxious the way that anything and everything in the twenty-four hour news cycle is turned into political fodder? There is not an event in modern America that is not a latent allegory of some political cause. This is disproportionately so with the American Left.
Why is this? What is about that worldview that allows callous usury of the misery of others to make abstract points? Is it simply the desire to seize power in a situation using whatever means necessary? If this had originated from a Clinton, that might have been a valid assumption, but what about the "statesmen" of the Left that say things like the quote above?
Unfortunately, I think that Obama is as sincere as he is wrong.
Posted in Breaking News — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:36pm on Jul. 15, 2006 Net Neutrality and the Flat Tax for Google
By Tennyson
The logic of the Net Neutrality issue is that content providers or information/web service providers should not be charged different rates based on their scale. Under current law, the ability to price service from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) differently to specific companies is highly dubious. What is the concern of some, however, is that Telecoms who also market content (think Comcast's On Demand capability in most major markets) will reserve insufficient bandwidth or price certain scales of bandwidth or services at rates that are too high for most content/web service providers.
Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, puts it this way:
My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it. Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity. Allowing broadband providers to segment their IP offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need.
The rest can be found here.
It sounds like a clear matter of having a level playing field, right?
A lot of irony lies beneath the surface, however, when the argument is put into perspective and you take notice of who is backing this issue and why. Specifically, how is pricing according to tiers of service not a kind of progressive taxation? What is wrong with making Google pay their "fair share" to those on whose back they have made their money - the ISPs?
Posted in User Blogs — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 9:45am on Mar. 20, 2006 A Tale of Two Wars
By Tennyson
Promoted from Diaries by Thomas
In the past week, two major offensives in the Global War on Terror were planned and have begun to be unfold. The first, heralded and then denigrated in the press is Operation Swarmer. I'll leave analysis of that effort as merited to more qualified parties like streiff and Matt Wretchard.
The second, and ultimately far more important offensive, is Operation "Pusillanimy." This daring Democratic campaign is meant to use key American strengths - unified support for first responders, respect for veterans, and free assemblies to directly and substantially undercut the morale for the ongoing operations in Iraq for the purpose of increasing their political traction before the 2006 elections. Make no mistake, it is not the fighting on the ground in Iraq, near the Punjab border in Afghanistan, or the positioning going on around Iran and Syria that will determine the outcome of the Global War on Terror. Despite the difficulties and challenges they represent, the American Allies and the Coalition of the "Still" Willing are more than sufficient to deal with all of those threats. The War Abroad - the first war - will be won if it is fully joined.
It is the second war, the "War At Home", that represents the Great Battle of Our Time. I lament that it is so. In some ways, I wake up every morning wondering how it could have gotten this far and how it all went so wrong. I wonder how so many Americans could accept, even cheer, American defeat and ignore the resultant slaughter of innocents by those we fight just to achieve their own myopic political victory. Whatever the reason and purpose of Providence, things are as they are.
Three years into the Iraq Campaign and four and half years into the GWOT, the fortitude of the home front "stands on the edge of a knife." "Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all." And those that would not have their children grow up in a world where an Islamist scimitar of Damocles hangs by a thread above their futures have to set aside our idealistic indulgence and fight to win. The War at Home is an Information War and we have no choice but victory.
Below the fold is an uncompromising strategy for that victory...