Friday, December 06, 2013

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - Obamacare - Hoover Dam; Golden Gate Bridge; Apollo 11.

Obamacare is as close to a Hoover Dam as latter-day Big Government gets. Which is why its catastrophic launch is sobering even for those of us who've been saying for five years it would be a disaster. It's as if at the ribbon-cutting the Hoover Dam cracked open and washed away the dignitaries; as if the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to traffic with its central span missing; as if Apollo 11 had taken off for the moon but landed on Newfoundland. Obama didn't have to build a dam or a bridge or a spaceship, just a database and a website. This is his world, the guys he hangs with, the zeitgeist he surfs so dazzlingly, Apple and Google, apps and downloads. But his website's a sclerotic dump, and the database is a hacker's heaven, and all that's left is the remorseless snail mail of millions and millions of cancellation letters.

Mark Steyn - 12-4-2013

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Sunday, June 09, 2013

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

It may be that the strange synchronicity between the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party and state. Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won’t end well.


Mark Steyn - June 7, 2013


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Saturday, October 29, 2011

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

This country's broke. As I said last week, it has to pay back $15 trillion just to get back to having nothing at all. And that's more money than anyone ever has had to pay back.

Mark Steyn - 10-28-11

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Saturday, May 01, 2010

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

The same day that Mayor Newsom [of San Francisco] took his bold stand [against Arizona], I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop – black body armor, helmets and visors – as they marched down the street. Naturally I assumed they were Arizona State Troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Ill, facing down a group of genial Tea Party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts.

Mark Steyn 4-30-2010

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - Greek crisis; Obamacare

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

Mark Steyn - 2-27-10

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Sunday, December 27, 2009

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

After you’ve turned citizens into junkies, with government as the pusher, it’s very hard to turn them back again, and even harder to get them to quit (if you’ll forgive the expression) cold turkey. It’s all but impossible in the present Continental political culture. Europe has a psychological investment in longer holidays: the fact that they spell national suicide is less important than that they distinguish Europe from the less enlightened Americans.

Mark Steyn - 12-27-04

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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Obama plays the race card; Professor Henry Louis Gates; Tavis Smiley; Mark Steyn; The big picture

The nation has become embroiled in another racial controversy this week, as President Obama lashed out at local police officers who arrested a black Harvard professor. Conservatives who attack the President by getting bogged down in the minutiae of the arrest are missing the point.

The same story repeats itself every time.

(1) Some racial incident occurs.
(2) The left predictably cries "racism."
(3) The left predictably links the incident to the entire US history.
(4) President Obama either (a) attacks America for its racist past or (b) flies to a foreign country and apologizes to terrorists for America's racist past.

There is no point in arguing about what some Harvard professor said to the police or whether the police should have arrested him. The real point is that the election of the nation's first black president has accomplished nothing. The sequence of events listed above has been repeating itself for decades [except for the part about Obama making it worse.]

We elected a black president, yet white America receives no credit for this fact. We are still accused of racism at every opportunity. Overpaid taxpayer funded PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley has stated that Obama's election was only a "down payment" on what white America owes to African Americans.

Barack Hussein Obama, the candidate, held out the promise of ending bitterness in American politics. Obama was elected with the help of a few moderate swing voters that abandoned the Republican party in favor of "change" and the promise of an end to divisive politics. Those who thought they were voting for Ghandi or the Dalai Lama or Jesus Christ are now surprised to learn that they ended up with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson with a better haircut and less jewelry. There is little that Obama said in speaking out against the police officers that would not have been said by Jackson or Sharpton.

In fact, it seems that the Obamedia owes an apology to Bill Clinton. In 2008, Clinton was denounced after he discounted the South Carolina primary (in which Obama beat Hillary) by comparing that primary to previous South Carolina primaries in which Jesse Jackson emerged victorious. It turns out that Clinton's comparison was closer to the truth than the Obamedia would have had us believe at that time. As president, Obama has played the race card just as clumsily and dishonestly as Jackson ever did during his heyday.

Mark Steyn is among the few that have placed the incident in its proper context:
A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the "post-racial America" will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.

In a fairly typical "he said/VIP said" incident, the VIP was the author of his own misfortune but, with characteristic arrogance, chose to ascribe it to systemic racism, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Klan, slavery, Jefferson impregnating Sally Hemmings, etc. And so it goes, now and forever.

As long as one white person in America is not penniless or holds a job or owns anything that might be taxed by the government or taken by force, the race-baiting establishment MSM/DNC will cry "racism." Black on white racism does not stop merely because the blacks have seized power. In fact, with more power in the hands of the reverse racists, we can expect race card usage to intensify.

Somewhere in the United States there is another innocent policemen or local official or average homeowner or financially strapped employer that will be the next victim of the race card. As Mark Steyn wrote, "[a]nd so it goes, now and forever."

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Monday, July 20, 2009

Mark Steyn on the decline of Western and Japanese populations

Mark Steyn's post in The Corner on Saturday paints a grim picture of the future of Western Civilization:
The transformation of developed societies — either into old folks' homes (like Japan) or semi-Islamized dystopias (like Amsterdam, Brussels, etc) — will lead, in fact, to emigration. A young German or Japanese circa 2040 will have no reason whatsoever to stay in his native land and have most of his income confiscated in a vain attempt to prop up an unsustainable geriatric welfare system. So many will leave. Where will they go? At one time the obvious answer would have been America — but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west.

For much of the developed world, the "credit crunch," the debt burden, and the rest are not part of a cyclical economic downturn but the first manifestations of an existential crisis.

What is most tragic is that we now have the opportunity to receive the best and the brightest from the declining countries in Europe and Asia. But the present administration (with a little help from FDR, LBJ and 75 years of the welfare state) is ruining this opportunity by plunging us toward bankruptcy as fast as the other developed nations.

In this case, the "existential crisis" of which Steyn speaks does not refer to some subtle interpretation of Sartre or Nietzsche, but the very existence of our nation.

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Sunday, July 19, 2009

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - paying for socialism

There aren't enough of us to pay for all this – for government health care, government banks, government mortgages, government automobiles, government horses, government burros, for cap-and-trade, for stimulating phony-baloney nonjobs like Deputy Executive Associated Assistant Stimulus Resources Manager on the Stimulus Co-ordination & Compliance Commission.

Mark Steyn - July 17, 2009

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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

"Obama can't use the words 'single payer.' What he can do is take steps that will make private sector health care shrivel and wither and leave you with a de facto government domination of health care."

Mark Steyn - July 9, 2009

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - Madrid bombings anniversary

The only fighting that there is going to be in Europe in the foreseeable future is civil war, and when that happens American infantrymen will want to be somewhere safer. Like Iraq.

Mark Steyn - 3-16-2004

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Monday, March 02, 2009

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

If the United States government got out of the way, things might get worse before they get better. With the government in the way, we have only the certainty of worse. Washington is engaged in the doomed project of attempting to re-inflate a credit bubble. Can't be done. But, in attempting it, they're massively expanding government spending and further distorting the rules of the market in the same ways that worked out so well for American home owners.

Mark Steyn [emphasis added] March 2, 2009

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Saturday, February 07, 2009

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - Obama porkulus bill

Jesus took a handful of loaves and two fish and fed 5,000 people. Barack wants to take a trillion pieces of pork and feed it to a handful of Democratic Party interest groups.

Mark Steyn - February 6, 2009

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Saturday, January 31, 2009

Ahmadinejad proves Mark Steyn's point; Gholam Hossein Elham; Barack Hussein Obama

On December 30, 2008, Mark Steyn wrote the following:
The electors have made a bet that we can return to that happy capering playground at the Summit of the Americas where all the great questions have been settled and indulgent governments can subsidize their own anarchists. If 9/11 ultimately revealed America’s self-imposed constraints, November 4th [2008] is already understood as a comprehensive repudiation even of that qualified resolve. Like I said: for America's enemies, that’s useful to know.

For "centrists" who are still struggling to understand that quote, I will give you the bottom line. By electing Obama, we voted to repudiate even the half-hearted wartime actions of the Bush administration. America's enemies, smarter than the average Obama voter, understand this point and will take advantage of our renewed weakness.

Today, as if to prove this point, Iran and Ahmadinejad renewed their verbal hostility:
After nearly three decades of severed ties, Obama said shortly after taking office this month that he is willing to extend a diplomatic hand to Tehran if the Islamic republic is ready to "unclench its fist".

In response, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh tirade against the United States, demanding an apology for its "crimes" against Iran and saying he expected "deep and fundamental" change from Obama.

"This request [Obama's request for talks] means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed," Gholam Hossein Elham [Iranian spokesman] was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

Obama is not offended by these attacks, as leftists view foreign enemies as allies against their real enemy.

Previous - Obama: Iran IS NOT a threat, Iran IS a threat.

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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

The electors have made a bet that we can return to that happy capering playground at the Summit of the Americas where all the great questions have been settled and indulgent governments can subsidize their own anarchists. If 9/11 ultimately revealed America’s self-imposed constraints, November 4th [2008] is already understood as a comprehensive repudiation even of that qualified resolve. Like I said: for America's enemies, that’s useful to know.

Mark Steyn 12-30-08

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Sunday, October 05, 2008

Mark Steyn; How Barney Frank's gay lover caused the Fannie Mae collapse; Herb Moses

Mark Steyn comments on another aspect of the financial crisis for which taxpayers must now suffer:

Last week in this space, I made a jocular reference to a global economy "so
vulnerable that only the stalwart action of Barney Frank stands between it and
ten years of soup kitchens". I tittered too soon. It turns out the
entire planetary meltdown is due to Congressman Frank's sex life:

. . . . . . . .
Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home
improvement lending programs."
Critics say such programs led to the mortgage
meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its
financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad
mortgages throughout the private financial sector...
. . . . . . . . .

while the old Moses parted the red sea, the new Moses drowned us in one.


See also this.

So it appears that taxpayers will now pay $700,000,000,000 for Barney Frank's failed gay relationship. The Moses/Frank partnership will turn out to be the most expensive gay marriage in history.

- In the 1970's (and before), gay bathhouses were responsible for the spread of aids throughout the western world (although the left undoubtedly blames George W. Bush (and, by extension, John McCain (and Sarah Palin's downs syndrome baby))).

- In the 1990's, Fannie Mae became a financial gay bathhouse, spreading the financial equivalent of aids throughout the economy of the western world.

Fannie Mae


[See the analysis of how even this was made possible only by the Federal Reserve policy of credit expansion during the credit boom of the 1990's.]

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Saturday, September 13, 2008

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

Mark Steyn - 9-11-2008

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Sunday, August 17, 2008

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa'eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they'll follow. And Americans will die - in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.

Mark Steyn - 11-22-05

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Sunday, July 20, 2008

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

It's one thing to dislike Bush, it's one thing to hate America. But it's quite another to hate America so much you reflexively take the side of any genocidal psycho who comes along.


In their terminal irrelevance, the depraved left has now adopted the old slogan of Cold War realpolitik: like Osama and Mullah Omar, Saddam may be a sonofabitch, but he's their sonofabitch.


Mark Steyn

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn [Obama, change]

As for coming together "to remake this great nation," if it's so great, why do we have to remake it? A few months back, just after the New Hampshire primary, a Canadian reader of mine – John Gross of Quebec – sent me an all-purpose stump speech for the 2008 campaign:

"My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it."

I thought this was so cute, I posted it on the Web at National Review. Whereupon one of those Internetty-type things happened, and three links and a Google search later the line was being attributed not to my correspondent but to Sen. Obama, and a few weeks after that I started getting e-mails from reporters from Florida to Oregon, asking if I could recall at which campaign stop the senator, in fact, uttered these words. And I'd patiently write back and explain that they're John Gross' words, and that not even Barack would be dumb enough to say such a thing in public. Yet last week his demand in his victory speech that we "come together to remake this great nation" came awful close.

Mark Steyn - 6-7-08

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