Feb
15
I’ve had a spotty, unreliable, damned near nonexistent internet connection the last few days around here, hence my absence from this joint and just about everywhere else on the Intarwebs. Hope to have it all fixed up again sometime tomorrow. Fingers crossed on that one…
Feb
13
Palin electrified ‘em yet again, bless her little heart, and there’s much discussion of it out there, both hither and yon.
Palin will not accept that future because it is an un-exceptional one. An un-American one, to say the least.
“We are the heirs of patriots who cast off the chains of tyranny, of immigrants who braved the seas, of pioneers who pushed into the great unknown, of soldiers who stormed foreign shores, of farmers and workers laboring in field and in factories from dusk to dawn,” Palin said. “They toiled so their children would have a better life. That is America. And that is freedom. And that is why we are exceptional.”
Palin repeatedly said the door was open for a conservative victory, but the door that seemed to be open the widest was the one to her political future as the leader of the conservative movement and as heiress to the Reagan legacy.
It was her Party on Saturday, and it could be for the foreseeable future.
If only. More:
No one in their right mind would go on-stage after Palin’s political palaver. People who dislike or fear her are incapable of seeing or admitting it. But that doesn’t diminish the reality that Palin is a rare political celebrity and, therefore, an unharnessed power to be reckoned with within the GOP for the foreseeable future.
We’re not talking about her running for any office. We’re talking about her influence, her enduring proven ability to attract and then ignite a crowd — even before anyone sees her. The CPAC buzz was electric all-day. Impatient “Sar-ah! Sar-ah!” chants broke out during preceding speakers.
She has the ability to speak about issues that profoundly bother the audience in common ways and words that listeners instantly recognize and wish they had thought to say just that way. Watch in the video below of her full CPAC speech for how this church-going mother of five mocks Obama’s Winning the Future program with an almost off-color aside. And prompts shared laughter, not shock.
She gets immense unspoken credit for withstanding an amazing amount of abuse and keeping on ticking. Palin punches have power, like her elbows beneath the basket in high school athletic days. One supporter said to me, as if it was the highest contemporary compliment possible, ”She fights like a girl!”
Most politicians these days talk to their audiences or, worse, at them. Even the Real Good Talker, who made his name on a 2004 convention speech and has been giving too many ever since. Governing is hard work. Campaigning is tiring, but much easier. So, he has been and will be campaigning, blaming others as usual.
Instead, instinctively Palin doesn’t speak at or to audiences. She speaks for them.
Well, she damned sure does for me, I’ll say that much. Given how the GOP nomination process has descended into tired, enervating farce–with a dishonest phony having come all too close to securing the nomination (with the obnoxiously presumptuous support of a lot of folks who should know better, along with plenty who will never get it), and a hold-your-nose field of also-rans nipping at his heels, thereby dispiriting just about everybody in a year that should have seen the slam-dunk denouement to the Tea Party shellacking of 2010–it’s actually, literally tragic that she didn’t run. But JE Dyer has an explanation for that that makes sense to me:
Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet. Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think. After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.
But in the process, the voters have been changing. That’s what Palin saw before others did. Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention? No. There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.” She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling. (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)
But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have. There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t. The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.
If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle. We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives. What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination. We have to see with better eyes. We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative. We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.
We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would. That’s not an option. What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality. I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.
Like I said, makes a lot of sense to me. And not only does this analysis strike me as pretty wise, it also speaks volumes about Palin’s own natural, instinctive wisdom–a crucial part of her almost preternatural appeal. Could be she’s been misunderestimated yet again.
No wonder all the right people hate her so viciously.
Feb
13
And catches some big ones.
Sweetened beverages, or so-called “sugary sodas,” have acquired a nasty reputation as major contributors to child — and adult — obesity. But the damage they cause is not confined to that alone. Sugary sodas, experts warn, also play a significant role in climate change, pollution and in income distribution inequity.
Be sure to read the comments, wherein it will all start to make sense–and wherein Nemo is called not only a “douche” but a far more insulting slur: “journalist.” This will explain things in full.
Well played, sir. Well played indeed.
Feb
13
President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign announced early Monday that it is launching a new site to enable supporters to promote Obama’s successes and “hold Republicans accountable.”
The new site incorporates the AttackWatch brand, which was met by ridicule from the GOP when it was announced last year, and encourages Obama supporters to “report” attacks from Republicans.
“The goal is to ensure that when Republicans attack President Obama’s record, grassroots supporters can take ownership of the campaign and share the facts with the undecided voters in their lives,” said Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter in a release.
They’re also setting up Truthiness Teams of Imperial Stormtroopers–a/k/a union goons–to make sure that any Enemies of the State caught telling the truth about His Royal Majesty understand the penalties for lèse majesté. See you in the camps, folks!
Feb
13
We have met him, and he is us. Well, some of us.
We often hear the Democrats cited as the reason we’re in this mess today, but that’s a cop out. The right in the guise of the Republican party are just as guilty as the Democrats. In fact, I’d argue they’re more guilty. The reason we’re in this mess today is because over the years the Republicans have accommodated the Democrats by compromising their principles.
The most recent examples are Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind – two huge government programs one of which put a new entitlement in place and the other which increased federal control of education (at an equally huge cost).
This wasn’t a program supported just by the left, folks. This was negotiated, passed and signed into law with the blessing of a Republican President.
THIS is why we’re in the mess we’re in. THIS is where the precedent for ObamaCare was set.
As much as the other candidates want to hit Mitt Romney on RomneyCare (and they should), one should remember that Rick Santorum voted for Part D (although he now says that was a “mistake”) and Newt Gingrich lobbied for it.
It is those sorts of compromises and accommodations which have put us in the mess we’re in today. The party of smaller government has consistently caved in to larger government programs all the while hollering about the left.
This is one reason there’s so much disgust on the right with the party, at least among activists and Tea Party types.
If ObamaCare becomes law, we’re sunk.
It HAS become law already, it IS law. And even now, bureaucracies are being built, rules are being established, drones are being hired, and programs are being developed that will prove all but impossible to root out, no matter who is elected in the fall. The answer is, as Steyn has argued, not to put our faith in this or that part of it being thrown out by a Supreme Court previously proven to be all too capricious, and quite damned sanguine about seeing “rights” where they don’t actually exist, floating about like will o’ the wisps among the fog of emanations and penumbras. The only possible answer is to repeal the thing entirely, as Gingrich promised to do (NOTE: I should make clear that of course I know Gingrich can’t repeal it himself; see this for clarification).
Tinkering around the edges of one of the Superstate’s programs, as the GOP is wont to do, just won’t cut it with this one. But as long as the GOP remains the GOP, that hapless, ineffectual tinkering is exactly what we’re going to get.
Good and hard.
Feb
13
Of honest journalism, of Constitutionally-limited government, of liberty, of truth and integrity itself.
Extensive interviews with a number of Brock’s current and former colleagues at Media Matters, as well as with leaders from across the spectrum of Democratic politics, reveal an organization roiled by its leader’s volatile and erratic behavior and struggles with mental illness, and an office where Brock’s executive assistant carried a handgun to public events in order to defend his boss from unseen threats.
Yet those same interviews, as well as a detailed organizational planning memo obtained by The Daily Caller, also suggest that Media Matters has to a great extent achieved its central goal of influencing the national media.
Founded by Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics. The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country. Brock, who collected over $250,000 in salary from Media Matters in 2010, has himself become a major fundraiser on the left. According to an internal memo obtained by TheDC, Media Matters intends to spend nearly $20 million in 2012 to influence news coverage.
Donors have every reason to expect success, as the group’s effect on many news organizations has already been profound. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
You’re going to see this one linked all over the place the next couple of days, and you need to read it all. Media Matters is an integral part of the Leftist propaganda machine, one the usurper in the Oval Office has used to great effect to advance his tyrannical machinations. They are a clear and present danger to everything America is supposed to stand for.
Feb
13
And we face one of the many costs of defeat every time we gas up.
The Obama administration has been tightening the grip around the collective necks of the fossil fuel industry. The goal is of course to kill it and nowhere is this more self evident than with oil exploration.
The most recent example is the studying to death of the Keystone pipeline. Allegedly, the Obama administration needs more time to determine the feasibility of such an undertaking. It is not as if we do not have tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in this nation, this one needs to be studied over and over. As we know, the review is an attempt to kill the project through delay.
In battling the fossil fuel industry, the Obama administration is employing a tactic that is usually used by unions in disputes with their employers – the rule book slowdown. The concept of a rule book slowdown is simple; follow the rules as exactly written, down to the last detail, and by doing so one’s work cannot be performed in a timely and efficient manner. It is in the nature of bureaucracies to micromanage every detail of work and if you literally follow the rules as written, you cannot perform your job; thus using the rules as a weapon. That following rules can be used as a job action is an indictment of our society in general but it is nothing new on the labor front. What is new is our government adopting this tactic as a weapon against a segment of our economy, which in the end will not only destroy the industry but hurt us all. The assault on the Keystone pipeline is just building upon the template employed against deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Deep water drilling was stopped by the Obama administration in the wake of the BP oil disaster. A moratorium was declared which was subsequently challenged in court. Although the courts rescinded the ban, the Obama administration in response instituted a rule book slowdown. A six month moratorium has turned into nearly two years, with no end in sight.
Prior to the BP disaster, the government approved approximately seven deep water permits a month. Now, it is down to two and just getting a permit does not guarantee that a platform will be up and running any time soon as more rules must be complied with. Our bureaucracy is being used as a weapon. Byzantium has nothing on us.
Which is why the Founders included protections against the building of such bureaucracies throughout the Constitution. The real problem is, as always, that we’ve allowed the Constitution to be tossed aside, if not outright trampled underfoot.
Feb
13
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, they’ve decided to fight the wrong battle.
Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November. Okay, then what? You’ll roll it back — like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel ’n’ dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus: “Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health-care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a mid-term timeout.
The whole contraception-mandate dustup–call it the Great Condom Crisis–is a sideshow. The real offense against the Constitution and freedom of every kind is Obamacare itself. And the Church was all for it at the time. They, like many others, just refused to take notice of the gun aimed at their own heads, since the King granted them all temporary exemptions and promised them he wouldn’t pull the trigger in exchange for their support in ramming it through. Now they’ve learned what the promise of a despot is really worth.
As Steyn says, Obamacare was never about health care at all; it’s about government. And now the Church is finding out that special dispensations from an all-powerful Superstate can be revoked at the tyrant’s whim, and that getting in bed with him in the first place will inevitably leave one soiled and humiliated in the morning. The battle must be joined for principles’ sake by all of us who still care about the Constitution, but none of us should have any illusions about the Whore-of-Babylon nature of some of our faithless and collaborationist allies.
Update! The Prof notices something a little funny about all this: “It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.” Not with Progressivists. Ain’t no such thing.
Updated update! Great line from Jeff: “when is a coincidence not a coincidence? When a journalist isn’t a journalist.”
Feb
13
He fights. Forget the conservative movement, they’re fine; better send a few pallet-loads to the GOP “leadership.” Or a couple of shipping containers’ worth.
Aww, never mind. Whatever it may be that Breitbart’s drinking, there ain’t enough of it in the world to stiffen spines that aren’t there in the first place. You gotta build ‘em from scratch.
(Via Insty)
Feb
10
Well on the way to being refuted, as always, by science. This is a longish and in-depth sort of article, so I’ll content myself with one brief excerpt, involving a lamer-than-usual “debunking” by a global-warmening shaman:
I don’t know what I find more amusing about this quote: the fact that he is directing scientists not to draw conclusions from data, or the fact that he then proceeds to assert his own interpretation of the data, that “cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” Well, no, if Svensmark’s theory is right, it is not “only one of many,” it is the central factor, far more important than human emissions of carbon dioxide. But thanks for telling us all ahead of time what we’re supposed to think.
Go ye and read of it, and the next time some AGW dimwit starts running the blockhead catechism on ya, just laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
Feb
10
I do indeed, and it’s Teh Funny: Obama/Volt 2012!
He damned well ought to have to run with it. If not as a running mate, then as a millstone around his scrawny neck. Or, say, a weight tied to his ankles before he’s chunked into the Potomac.
(Via Ace)
Feb
10
The usually on-target John Hinderaker lobs a stinkbomb; the Prof tosses it back.
John Hinderaker at Power Line lays the blame for an eventual loss to Obama primarily at the feet of Newt:
Nevertheless, if you are a Republican, the vibes are very bad. The presidential primary season has turned into a disaster, in my view. Mitt Romney has shown a discouraging inability to appeal to the party’s base, while the race has damaged both Romney and the party. Newt Gingrich, in particular, sacrificed the party to his own ego by launching left-wing attacks against Romney. Gingrich is gone as a Republican contender, but we will see more of him in the fall, in Obama ads. What a swan song for someone who once led the conservative movement!
This narrative has it backwards.
Newt started out positive, and tried to stay positive as Romney, his SuperPAC and his supporters in the conservative media savaged Newt in Iowa (and later Florida) with what David Limbaugh appropriately called “relentless, unmeasured scorched-earth savagery.”
None of the people engaged in Romney’s strategy of crazy cared a bit about how the attacks would hurt Newt if Newt became the nominee. Now they complain that Newt hurt the party by attacking Romney’s Bain record; and by so doing they have conflated capitalism, free markets, and the Party with the Bain model, which will do far more damage than anything Newt ever did.
Look for Romney’s lies about Santorum, now that he’s supplanted Newt as the viable conservative in the race, to be even worse.
Feb
10
To the great Leontyne Price. I’m not all that big on opera generally and opera-style singing specifically, but if you haven’t heard her do Schubert’s Ave Maria, you don’t know what “beautiful” really means.
Update! Gotta include this quote from the Wikipedia page:
Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a “chauvinistic American.” She summed up her philosophy thus: “If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don’t think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you.”
Indeed. Sad that it’s so unusual to hear someone with a powerful voice say such sensible things.
Feb
10
A couple of good points to remember, both amounting to the same thing: it’s too little, too late to start squealing about tyranny when you’ve passively sat back for years and years while the ever-metastasizing government slurped up one liberty after another simply because it didn’t directly affect you.
What, you expected me to discuss the civil liberties angle of law enforcement agencies flying drones?
Look, they’re already up there in manned helicopters thermal imaging your house, looking for the grow lights; sampling the air to find the residue from your meth lab; taking hi-res photos of your pea patch to find the dope plants, and now you expect me to get all shocked that they’ll be doing this by remote control?
You asked for this, Mr. & Mrs. Patriotic American, and you deserve to get it good and hard.
UPDATE: People are still talking about what fed.gov is going to do with drones. Forget fed.gov; they’re the least of your worries. What’s your city.gov going to do when a year-’round remote-control eye in the sky is cheaper than a day’s rental for a Bell Jet Ranger? Remember: Government at every level is strapped for cash and looking for cows to milk. Got a building permit for that shed? Is your woodpile up to code?
As I’ve said many times, sooner or later, Leviathan will get around to encroaching on something you do care about. Thus:
So the angry webmaster asked us if we had any thoughts on the Stuttering Clusterfuck of a Miserable Failure trying to force Catholic employers to provide coverage for infanticide. Surely we do. We think it’s about the single most brilliant idea since the French chivalry decided not to care about those pesky longbows on October 25 of 1415. And Ogabe and the NSDWP will be just as pleased with the results as the French were, unless somebody takes a ClueBat to him and convinces him of the error of his ways.
Before we get to that, however, we’ll be perfectly honest and admit that we did enjoy the idiotic “but, but”ing from some members of the Catholic clergy who’d been backing OgabeCare to the hilt back prior to its “passage.”
“But…He promised!”
We’re sure that he did, he has a record of promising just about anything to get his way, but we’re a bit surprised that members of the clergy have so little knowledge of the pitfalls of making deals with the Adversary, chief among which is the fact that HE LIES! Obviously modern Catholic teachings leave a bit to be desired if they skip over that bit. You might want to Scotch Tape that page back into the catechism. We’re pretty sure it was included there initially for a reason.
The Anchoress says “It’s war“, but it isn’t even now; it’s a long, long way from it, actually. And it’s a bit late in the game to start declaring it now, unless you’re among those of us who have recognized it as such for a very long time–and who know it didn’t by any means start with King Ogabe. We’re slowly, incrementally arriving at the inevitable destination of a road we’ve been on all too long, and it’s going to take a lot more than a mere declaration of war to turn around. A useful first step, maybe, but no more.
Update! Walsh says it’s pathetic, and it is.
Is the American clergy this naive? Are their moral detectors so deficient that they would trust a man of Obama’s moral track record? “Sincere assurances” and “high hopes” mean nothing to an Alinskyite practitioner of American taqiyya, for whom subterfuge, dissimulation, misdirection, and bald-faced lying are a way of life, but it’s obvious that the Cardinal-designate is utterly clueless about these things.
I mean, really: “Can’t figure it out”? “Seems to be at odds”? Your Eminence, it is at odds, which should lead you only to one conclusion about the president’s sincerely and veracity. As Sherlock Holmes liked to say, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
No one wants to believe the president of the United States or any other high governmental official would deliberately lie to the Archbishop of New York. But what other conclusion can a reasonable person reach? That Valerie Jarrett and Kathleen Sebelius made him do it?
One of the problems the Right consistently has in dealing with the Left is its touching credulity in their stated motives, instead of assessing their genuine objectives. Like the Archbishop, we’re constantly taken by surprise when the entirely predictable happens.
Mike, buddy, you certainly said a mouthful there. A reference to Dagger John and an excerpt from Paradise Lost are included in the post. Naturally, and quite aptly. It’s “war,” you say? Then whatcha gonna do about it, pray tell? From Walsh’s earlier Dagger John post:
It’s good to see the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops making noises about suing the government, but it would be even better to see Archbishop (and Cardinal-designate) Timothy Dolan get out front on this issue in a very public way. “Conscientious objectors” and “civil disobedience” were all the rage on the left during the Vietnam War and the draft,” and it’s high time we tried the same tactic on them: Catholic institutions should simply ignore the law, refuse to implement it, and refuse to pay the Obamacare fines — and dare the Left utter a peep about “higher morality.” There are 77 million Catholics in the U.S., and an awful lot of them vote.
In other words, Archbishop Dolan and his confreres ought to ask themselves, What Would Dagger John Do?
No foolin’. Living under a tyrannical totalitarian state presents people who love liberty with some tough choices, with no good outcome guaranteed. But the choice between knuckling under, working to undermine the system from within, or outright defiance is one we’ll all be forced to confront sooner or later, in one way or another. That’s the price of decades of complacency and denial, and it is pretty danged steep.
Feb
10
Now this is what I’d call treating the subject with all the gravity it properly merits:
When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong…
Too bad it didn’t pass:
The amendment — intended satirically, one should hasten to add –”passed with a unanimous Senate vote” but was removed from its bill before consideration by the state house and never became law.
I can think of a lot of other classes of “expert” that ought to be required to self-identify like this–and not just in court, either.
(Via Maetenloch)
Feb
09
What I personally find most offensive about the HHS mandate is the shock with which it has been met. Why? This is who Barack Obama is. There is no reason to be surprised by this. He is not being pulled to extremes by his base — he is the one doing the pulling.
Obama’s abortion extremism is such that, as a state legislator, he opposed protection for — I’ll use his words here — “that fetus, or child — however way you want to say describe it” when, contrary to the wishes of the women involved and their abortionists, there was “movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.” Babies were inconveniently being born alive, self-styled health-care providers carted them off to utility rooms where they would be left to die. That is infanticide, plain and simple. In Illinois, people tried to stop this barbarism by supporting “born alive” legislation. Barack Obama fought them all the way.
That is not a secret. The Obamedia, of course, refused to cover it while they were running down Sarah Palin’s third-grade report card. The clueless John McCain failed to bring any attention to it. But it was far from unknown.
Again, this is not new news. The transcript is from ten years ago. He has done nothing since but confirm — by his positions, speeches, associations, and presidential appointments — that he is still exactly the same guy. Obama’s horrifying stance in favor not only of abortion but of infanticide was known when 54 percent of Catholics and 53 percent of Protestants supported him for election in 2008, and when such leading Catholic institutions as Notre Dame and Georgetown welcomed him with open arms.
That is what we ought to find shocking. Obama, by contrast, should no longer shock anyone. Obama is simply doing what he came to do; what he said he was going to do when he promised to “fundamentally transform the United States”; and what anyone with a shred of common sense would have predicted he’d do upon scrutinizing his record.
Just don’t call him a socialist, or an extremist, or an ideologue, or a despot. That would be impolite, and merely intensify the vapors suffered by the gentry GOP and its poodle pundits over such gauche behavior. Might frighten off the “independents,” too.
Straight update! Avik Roy just says it: “The Obama Administration is truly an anti-religion tyranny (and I say that as a non-religious non-Christian) with no understanding of or respect for fundamental American principles.” Bingo.
Feb
09
Well, he’s got big brass ones, you gotta give him that.
“Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich, they are the very Republicans who acted like Democrats, and when Republicans act like Democrats, they lose,” said Mitt Romney today in Atlanta, according to a statement e-mailed by his campaign.
I’m speechless. That the smarmy shitweasel could even say it with a straight face is nothing short of astounding.
Feb
09
What caused the Obama Depression? Gas prices, says Santorum. Y’know, those pesky little things that, as Glenn says, are forecast to go up by another 60 cents by May? Yeah. Those.
Get ready for “Recovery” Summer v 3.0.
In 2009, economist James Hamilton published a paper that retroactively forecast what an oil shock, like the one we experienced in 2007-08, would do to GDP. And guess what? His model accurately predicated much of the collapse in GDP that resulted from the Great Recession — as if there had been no housing bubble or financial crisis! The oil spike was that bad.
Still, there was a housing bubble. And there was a financial crisis. How do we account for them and still hold onto the gas story? Here’s a one-paragraph theory of the Great Recession that begins with gasoline. Cheap gas ruled in the 1990s. This encouraged families to settle down farther from the cities where they worked. In the 2000s, super-low interest rates, declining lending standards, and an appetite for mortgages on Wall Street (among other factors) further encouraged sprawl and residential development in the ‘burbs. As the price of gas went up, families stopped buying homes 30 minutes from the city. For folks shacking up in the exurbs, higher gas bills ate into mortgage money. For companies, higher energy bills shocked productivity. Classic oil-shock + housing development arrested + financial crisis = Great Recession.
Santorum’s mistake isn’t in thinking higher gas prices mattered. Of course energy prices matter. Low energy prices contributed to the housing boom, just as $4 gas probably pricked the housing bubble. But his mistake is in thinking it was the only factor.
Maybe not. But t’is enough, t’will suffice.
Update! Via Jazz Shaw: great news. But not for us.
BEIJING — China and Canada declared Thursday that bilateral relations have reached “a new level” following a series of multibillion-dollar trade and business agreements to ship additional Canadian petroleum, uranium and other products to the Asian superpower.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Chinese leadership said Thursday their new energy and economic co-operation agreements — as well as billions of dollars of private-sector deals — signed by the two countries over the past few days are unprecedented and will only open the door to additional trade and investment.
If only there were some way to thank our muttonheaded, Left-wing-extremist pretend pResident properly. But I understand summarily heaving blithering, America-hating idiots into the Potomac is kinda frowned upon these days.
Feb
08
The hypocrisy is strong with these ones. Overwhelmingly so, in fact.
Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors — each the size of a garage door — are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California’s eastern border.
BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater processing facility and a gas-fired power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert tortoises, a move that some experts say could kill up to a third of them.
Despite its behemoth footprint, the Ivanpah project has slipped easily into place, unencumbered by lasting legal opposition or public outcry from California’s boisterous environmental community.
The public got its chance to comment at scores of open houses, but the real political horse trading took place in meetings involving solar developers, federal regulators and leaders of some of the nation’s top environmental organizations.
Away from public scrutiny, they crafted a united front in favor of utility-scale solar development, often making difficult compromises.
Amazing how little all the usual left-wing Very Important Crucial Things matter when they conflict with other Very Important Crucial Things, innit?
(Via McQ)
Feb
08
His analysis of the Clint Eastwood ad dustup is, at any rate.
Yeah, there’s been plenty of roaring, alright. I don’t really share the outrage, though. The only thing about the ad that’s really bugging me? The mixed metaphors. It’s halftime, so when we get punched, we just get back up and rev our engines. Really, Clint?
As for cheerleading the bailout after he spoke out against it — from “If a CEO can’t figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn’t be the CEO” to “We all pulled together” — I guess Clint deserves the hits he’s taking. I don’t really see it as somehow pro-Obama, although I guess these days everything either is or isn’t.
There’s one other thing that bugs me about the whole mess. Clint says his paycheck went to charity. Guess what? So did yours and mine. Difference is, Clint got to choose his.
Yeah, well, that’s the way things work in the sort of half-assed, crony-communist, backwater banditocracy we’ve become. As for the ad being little more than a campaign commercial for the Ogabe junta, well, umm…yeah. Clint may not be an Ogabe fellator himself, but everyone else associated with this propaganda missive certainly is.
Feb
08
I never did understand why anyone took such an obvious dolt as Matthew Yglesias seriously. Might as well concede that his fellow Juice Box Mafia consigliere Ezra Klein is a Constitutional scholar too and call it a day.
Here’s Matthew Yglesias with a quick history of American news media:
The Grand Old Days of American journalism were characterized first and foremost by severely curtailed competition. There were three television networks, and outside of New York each city had basically one newspaper.
At first I thought this couldn’t be serious. I understand that the days when there were only three broadcast networks are before Yglesias’s time–but it isn’t exactly ancient history. There are lots of people who were around then. Some of them even work at Slate. You would think that, if he couldn’t be bothered to research the period, Yglesias might have queried one of them.
For instance, when I was a kid growing up outside Philadelphia, we had: the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Daily News, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and the Philadelphia Journal. That is, in addition to the two local dailies, the Gloucester County Times and the Courier-Post.
Without thinking too hard, Boston had the Herald and the Globe (that’s off the top of my head, they may have had more); Seattle had the Seattle Times, the News-Tribune, and the Post Intelligencer; St. Louis had the Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch.
You get the idea. Back in the Grand Old Days most cities had at least two newspapers. (And that’s just counting the major papers–there were tons of smaller ethnic and alternative papers.) I know it’s hard to believe, but once upon a time the major American cities actually had morning and afternoon newspapers. And many of these cities had papers competing even within those time slots!
I know. It sounds crazy. And really, who can be expected to know about stuff that happened way back in the age of rotary dials. I don’t blame Yglesias. It would have taken him 30, maybe even 45 minutes of research to find this out because since most of these papers disappeared before the digital age it’s hard to find them mentioned on the internet.
And really, you can’t blame a journalist for not knowing something if it isn’t in Wikipedia or on Google’s first three results pages. I mean what–do you want journalists to have to read books just so they understand stupid details about what the world was like before iPhones and Twitter?
Perish the thought. Liberal idiots like Yglesias don’t have to actually know anything at all to know they’re smarter than you and me, duuuh. Jonathan kindly throws in a couple of other links to previous posts demonstrating the absolute superiority of this paragon of Lefty erudition’s mental process. Follow the links and snicker away, folks; you don’t get self-beclownment this toothsome every day, you know.
Well, okay, you do. But still.
Duhpdate! Shut up and dance, fluffmuffin.
Feb
08
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It is not written in the stars that young black males must have astronomical rates of unemployment. It is written implicitly in the minimum wage laws.
We have gotten so used to seeing unemployment rates of 30 or 40 percent for black teenage males that it might come as a shock to many people to learn that the unemployment rate for sixteen- and seventeen-year-old black males was just under 10 percent back in 1948. Moreover, it was slightly lower than the unemployment rate for white males of the same age.
How could this be?
The economic reason is quite plain. The inflation of the 1940s had pushed money wages for even unskilled, entry-level labor above the level specified in the minimum wage law passed ten years earlier. In other words, there was in practical effect no national minimum wage law in the late 1940s.
My first full-time job, as a black teenage high-school dropout in 1946, was as a lowly messenger delivering telegrams. But my starting pay was more than 50 percent above the level specified in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Liberals were of course appalled that the federal minimum wage law had lagged so far behind inflation — and, in 1950, they began a series of escalations of the minimum wage level over the years.
It was in the wake of these escalations that black teenage unemployment rose to levels that were three or four times the level in 1948. Even in the most prosperous years of later times, the unemployment rate for black teenage males was some multiple of what it was even in the recession year of 1949. And now it was often double the unemployment rate for white males of the same ages.
This was not the first or the last time that liberals did something that made them feel good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake, especially among the poor whom they were supposedly helping.
Some things never change. And never will, either. The next line is funny:
For those for whom “racism” is the explanation of all racial differences, let me assure them, from personal experience, that there was not less racism in the 1940s.
Progressivists ought to be forced to swear to something along the lines of the most famous part of the Hippocratic Oath.
Feb
08
I still like Jeff’s version, but this one–a forced castration by God only knows who–works too.
I don’t have firsthand knowledge that she was kidnapped by RINO Team Six and taken to an offshore medical facility where she was forced to undergo a gruesome surgical procedure, but many of her recent columns suggest that something of the sort must have occurred. What else could explain her endorsement of Mitt Romney? Once immutable where her core convictions were concerned, she has executed a vertigo-inducing volte-face in order to promote a brazen opportunist whose positions on the big issues were the opposite of hers before he began running for President. She relentlessly trashes Republican “moderates” like McCain, yet now supports a candidate who makes the Arizona Senator look like Barry Goldwater by comparison.
It first became apparent that something awful had happened to Coulter last November, when she wrote a column asking “If Not Romney, Who? If Not Now, When?” In this surreal effusion, she claimed that the media were “pushing Newt Gingrich” and other alternatives to Romney “because they are terrified of running against him.” This, as many pointed out at the time, was preposterous. The only thing that terrifies the media about Romney is that he might not get the GOP nomination. This is the man they want to run against.
Yet Coulter, once the scourge of such malleable “moderates,” has gone through some sort of transformation that has rendered her blind to Romney’s cheap opportunism. And if the primary voters are foolish enough to follow her advice, they will rue the day they listened to her and the establishment Republicans with whom she has now made common cause. As Coulter herself pointed out last year when she spoke at CPAC, Barack Obama will be reelected in 2012 if the Republican Party nominates Mitt Romney for President.
Even some at NRO seem to be seeing the writing on the wall after last night’s three-fer ass-whupping for their Golden Boy:
Mitt Romney’s campaign will have lots of explanations for their man’s poor showing tonight. Yes, Colorado and Minnesota were caucus states — the turnout is skewed in such contests toward a more conservative electorate. Yes, Missouri’s primary was a “beauty contest” and didn’t award any delegates.
But what Romney won’t be able to explain away is just how much more poorly he did tonight in those three states than in his 2008 showing — when he lost the GOP nomination for president.
In 2008, Romney crushed John McCain in the Minnesota caucuses by nearly two to one. Tonight, he was sent into a humiliating third-place finish, trailing both Rick Santroum and Ron Paul. In Missouri, McCain held John McCain and Mike Huckabee to something close to a three-way tie, winning 29 percent of the vote. This year, with fewer opponents, he won only 25 percent. In Colorado, Romney outperformed John McCain by three to one in 2008. This year, albeit with only early returns in, he is trailing Santorum. Results from Denver caucus sites will likely boost Romney’s overall showing, but it’s tough to see him winning the state with Santorum performing as well as he is in Colorado Springs and the rural areas.
It just wouldn’t be NRO, though, without a sad little attempt at bucking up their boy:
Romney would help himself and his party if he realized that he will have a much higher chance of winning the general election if he reaches out to conservatives and convinces them to be enthusiastic.
Can’t be done. You’d need to be a, y’know, conservative to pull that off. Poor old Charlotte Hays is all but openly weeping:
If you think Rick Santorum can get independents, go for it, folks. SenatorSantorum, who enjoyed a magnificent triumph in three states last night, deserves a lot of credit, as he would no doubt be the first to tell you, for hanging in there. He has been impressive in recent debates. And a grateful nation thanks Mr. Santorum for seemingly having dispatched Newt Gingrich back under his bridge, at least for the time being. But last night was not good for the Republican party. I think the voters last night were acting like my favorite Cousin Harry, who yearns for a “real conservative” and refers to Mitt Romney as McCain (a McCain presidency is looking pretty good right now; it was during the campaign, not a presidency, that McCain lost his nerve). Mitt Romney speaks conservatism like a second language — that is because it is a second language for him. Is that such a bad thing?
Well, if you truly believe that the founding principles to which the Republican Statist Party pays lip service are the proper and only way to pull the country back from the socialist abyss, yeah, it’s a very bad thing. This part is particularly hilarious:
I hate it when others beat me to ideas that I’ve been playing with, but William Tucker did the other day, proposing that Romney, with his temperament, could be another Ronald Reagan. With a conservative Congress, the sky is the limit.
Another Reagan. Uh huh. I suppose he could…if he hadn’t been staunchly opposed to Reagan–and conservative ideology itself–for years; sought to distance himself from them repeatedly; outright denounced Reagan back when he was more open about his big-government liberalism; and governed during his single term as anything but a Reagan conservative. He doesn’t believe in conservatism, passionately or otherwise; he merely puts it on and takes it off like a cloak, as and when it’s useful for his ambitions.
Other than that, along with, as Jeff notes, his support for “Obama’s stimulus, TARP, federal minimum wage increases, cap and trade, the individual mandate, government-run health care, gun control, and the bureaucratic suppression of religious conscience laws,” Romney is exactly like Reagan.
Sheesh. Vote for the liberal, folks; he’ll magically become a conservative once he wins and takes office, when there’s absolutely no reason for him to. Hey, trust us; it’s all about WINNING, and that’s something we know a lot more about than you do, having achieved such a stellar record of it for the last, oh, sixty years or more.
The market for that kind of unalloyed balderdash is pretty thin on the ground these days, looks like. Maybe one of these days the establishment will figure it out.
Coulter naked update! Dan Riehl sees it, and shares his, umm, view:
Is it naked hypocrisy, naked dishonesty, naked opportunism, perhaps all of the above – or something else? Whatever it is, it’s unsightly as hell and not worth looking at.
Sad but true.
Feb
08
Well. Wellwellwellwellwellwellwell.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum snagged a political lifeline Tuesday with victories in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses and the Missouri primary.
Santorum’s win put a roadblock in front of Mitt Romney’s two-state victory streak and underscores the former Massachusetts governor’s continued failure to resonate with the Republican party’s most conservative voting bloc.
Santorum’s victory in Missouri was particularly commanding. He had 55 percent of the vote in unofficial returns, compared with 25 percent for Romney, 12 percent for Ron Paul and 4 percent were uncommitted.
“Conservatism is alive and well in Missouri and Minnesota,” a jubilant Santorum told a crowd in St. Charles, Mo.
Despite his victories, Santorum gained no convention delegates Tuesday. All three states will assign delegates in coming weeks. But Santorum’s twin wins banish the argument made by Newt Gingrich that the Republican bid for the nomination is a two-man race between Romney and himself.
Knocked Mister 25% back on his heels pretty good, didn’t he? I have no real problem with Santorum myself, but boy, he’d better brace himself; the Romney machine will be in full Mudslinging Liar mode now, something Santorum has yet to experience. Romney will have poor old Tim Pawlenty going through his garbage like a scum-sucking “journalist” on a Wasilla junket in a trice. And if T-Paw can’t come up with anything, the Romney RINO-goon squad will be making things up out of whole cloth. Gird your loins, Rick, because that’s how he rolls.
Feb
06
Just getting ready for the election season, making sure the propaganda machine is well-oiled and ready to hum in support of their guy.
The Washington Post and ABC News has a new national poll out today. It purports to show that Barack Obama has a 50% approval rating and that he would beat Mitt Romney in a head-to-head matchup. And heck, that might even be true, except for a couple of problems. First, this is a poll of general population adults rather than registered or likely voters, so it’s not even a proper polling type for the predictive outcome they claim.
More importantly, though, the poll series has dropped its reporting of partisan identification within their samples. It’s the second time that the poll has not included the D/R/I split in its sample report, and now it looks as though this will be policy from this point forward. Since this is a poll series that has handed double-digit partisan advantages to Democrats in the past (for instance, this poll from April 2011 where the sample only had 22% Republicans), it’s not enough to just hear “trust us” on sample integrity from the Washington Post or ABC.
Essentially, the overall poll is worthless, and given the track record of this poll series, it’s easy to assume that the reason that the Post has ended its sample transparency is because they have something to hide.
And aren’t in the least concerned about the ethics and appearance of hiding it. They have a job to do here, and it has nothing to do with being honest brokers of news and information and everything to do with re-electing a disastrous and unpopular pretend pResident. Ed concludes with this:
And once again, why anyone is polling adults in the middle of an ongoing primary is a complete mystery. That should be likely voters.
No mystery at all, once you dispense with the inexplicable folly of giving them the benefit of the doubt–or having any integrity at all. What’s truly mysterious is why anyone on our side, after all we’ve seen from the lickspittle Obamedia, would deem it necessary to do so.
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