Daily Right 2/5/10
*The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010, by Charles Krauthammer.
“This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?
Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.”
RELATED: They Forgot These People Vote, by Jennifer Rubin.
“One cannot consider the electorate to be a bunch of rubes and get away with it for very long. One can’t pursue an agenda that the public disdains and get re-elected.”
*Hollywood Has Seen the Enemy…by Jonah Goldberg.
*Credibility is What’s Really Melting, by Mark Steyn.
““Climate change” is not a story of climate change, which has been a fact of life throughout our planet’s history. It is a far more contemporary story about the corruption of science and “peer review” by hucksters, opportunists and global-government control-freaks.”
RELATED: Save the Planet by Outlawing Lampshades, by Theodore Dalrymple.
*Dems Haunted by Revived Stereotypes, by David Paul Kuhn.
*The United States of Fiscal Folly, by George Will.
“America’s destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable, which makes the nation’s fiscal mismanagement, by both parties, especially shocking.”
RELATED: A Federal Budget That Insults All Budgets, by Bill Flax.
“Politicians used to be hamstrung by the rule of law, but our Constitution has been consistently ignored for most of the last century. Now it serves but a quaint remainder from where the fortunes we now waste sprang. We’ve endured these trends for decades thanks to the colossal accumulation of capital bequeathed to us by more prudent ancestors.”
Daily Left 2-5-10
Unemployment drops below 10% for the first time in four months, but economists are still nervous.
Scott Brown is seated a week early, pissing Patrick Kennedy right off. I’ll let him say it for himself;
“Seven out of ten of Brown’s voters were labor households and he stressed that he was independent. And while he was originally scheduled to be sworn in next week, they moved it up to today so he could cast his first vote, the most anti-labor, the most anti-what his constituents thought they were voting for when they voted for him.”
Brown is claiming the statement to be nothing more then partisan politics, and of course there’s validity to that. Two months ago any Democrat taking pot shots at Brown would be looked at as bullying a small timer with no chance. Now, Scott Brown is enemy number one (I bet Joe Lieberman was overjoyed he got elected). These seating’s are a big deal, people. Right now they operate on a two man panel, when five are needed to keep up the bi-laws. Anyone working in labor should be terrified right now, and with the rights history of being anti union, people should remember what jobs went away in the recession. These seating’s could be a litmus test of where Brown stands, and if he has any intention of keeping obligations to his base in Massachusetts. If the party of No goes ahead as it has, NOTHING is going to change, and right now, we need a lot of change.
In other party line bickering, after a month of work Richard Shelby won’t go along on financial overhaul. The big threat possibly keeping the bill stalled? A new consumer advocacy branch. No details yet on what it will cost or how far it would reach.
More on Richard Shelby- He’s blocking 70 of President Obama’s nominations. 70. 70 positions that need filling. Why, you ask? Over $40 Billion dollars in earmarks the White House doesn’t want to sign off on. When Ben Nelson did the same thing, but with health care reform, even NPR is on the guy. My mistake, though. The GOP is the little guy, so playing politics is what they have to do to compete.
The next person to blame on health care? President Obama, via David Axlerod. Al Franken, both in public and in private, has blasted White House leadership for urging them to finish health care, then giving no direction as to how.
The National Tea Party Convention was held last night, to a crowd of some 600 (who paid $549 each, making some $329,000!), and I heard a fun fact. Tom Tancredo says Obama could not have won without illiterates voting for him. Lets do the math on this. I know lots of conservatives are big on issuing a civics test before allowing people to vote. Same thing as the Voter ID card, which has always cracked me up how the conservative party is by it’s nature cautious of anyone getting information about them, but very for another ID card. I personally could go either way on it. I don’t mind a civics test before i vote. If i had to get a card, I of course would. It would just be one more thing to do when I’m registering voters, which I do a lot.
After reading the statement’s made, the implications of Tancredo are three fold; first, there is an illiteracy problem. Second, there is in immigration problem. Third, these two factors are what got Obama in office. So take that retroactively. Eight of the top ten states with the most immigration Voted McCain, , and six of those states are in the top ten for illiteracy. That said, the states with the highest immigrant populations, only four voted McCain. This is interesting to look at, because while the south does not have the highest population of immigrants, it does have the highest percentage, and they dominate illiteracy. What this means is yes, there is a strong chance that an illiterate person can vote for Obama, but by percentage of the state, he was more likely to vote McCain.
Monkeying Around With the Site
As I’m sure you’ve discovered by now, we are making some changes to the site. We’ll be up all weekend, but each time you load the site it might look different. Please bear with us, I think you’ll be happy with the new look.
Daily Right 2/4/10
*A Message From Congress: No one questions our authority, at CNS News.
*You know what’s hilarious? Unsustainable debt:
*The President’s GOP Outreach Comes to Late, by Karl Rove.
*Government Creates Wealth? By Jennifer Rubin.
“Looking around the world and at our own recent past, there’s plenty of evidence that the liberal formula simply doesn’t work. We can become more like our Western European allies, but then we can expect employment, growth, and wealth creation to approximate those countries.”
*In case you needed a reminder that federal power is backed by a monopoly on the use of force: IRS to buy shotguns.
*Europeans Shattered By Obama’s Indifference, by Erik at No Parasan!
“How many times did we tell you — how many times did conservatives, Republicans — tell you, “No, it is not about Bush and, that, you will soon find out!”
Well, here we go. Remember the number of articles bemoaning the fact that Europeans are stupefied by Bush’s arrogance, or whatever (or words to that effect)? Well, now we get a huge front-page headline in Le Monde saying Europeans Shattered by Obama’s Indifference (Les Européens ébranlés par l’indifférence d’Obama.”
*America Rides Off Into the Sunset, by Victor Davis Hanson.
“Right now the world’s bad actors confidently see “hope” for a vast “change” in the old world order — but not the kind Obama once so boldly promised.”
*Some more thoughts on America’s favorite a-historian Howard Zinn.
Howard Zinn’s Legacy: Religious fanaticism and illegal indoctrination of your children, by Ben Shapiro.
“Our public schools can’t get kids to read, write or do math. But they can teach them to be victims, to hate religion, and to despise America’s history.”
RELATED I: Instructing Teachers to Disobey Education Codes, by Adam Baldwin.
RELATED II: In His Own Words, by Larry O’Connor.
*May Cooler Heads Prevail, by A. Kam Napier.
“Because of manmade global warming, I warned in 1996, that “sea levels could rise as much as three feet by the year 2100 … warming can lead to hotter and more frequent heat waves … stronger and more frequent hurricanes to Hawai‘i … endanger native plants species [and] coral reefs.” These dire predictions came from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia provide much of the IPCC’s analysis and predictions. In November 2009, hackers released thousands of e-mails from the CRU, going back years, and it is these e-mails that reveal the very unscientific, unethical activities I described above.
I feel I’ve been had.”
The wages of ClimateGate.
Daily Left 2-4-10
The pull to the right by the right is beginning with John McCain. McCain is being attacked on “soft” stances on immigration and spending. If McCain looses the primary, what does that say for the GOP? That the difference between the GOP and Conservative movement is widening, or the the Conservatives are just as disinterested in “populist rage” and centrism as the far left?
The Baptist church suspected of child kidnapping are charged today, with a closed door trial to begin soon. It’s now believed that only one of the ten charged had any idea of the actual intent, the remaining nine were actual charity workers there on good faith.
It happens on our side too; An AP writer has debunked the Huffington Post’s staffer, Luis Carlos Montalván, looking into his claims of PTSD and how he earned his decorations, and finding a very different story.
Big Brother phobia? If you’re reading this from your BlackBerry, I’d sit down for this. Google and the NSA are teaming together to figure out how they were hacked in China. Google is saying that any shared information with the NSA will not violate the site’s conditions or privacy agreements, but for some reason I can still see a lot of people being nervous about this.
State Farm to pull coverage from 125 thousand homes, just in time for hurricane season.
This is just weird. Remember recently when the Swiss voted to Ban Minarets? Well, now they’ve offered to take two of the most difficult to place Gitmo detainees. The two Chinese Uighur brothers will shortly be on their way to a new home, where they are expected to look for new jobs and homes as soon as possible.
Keynesian Economics: Bad economics, worse policy.
Keynesian Economics is the worst thing to have ever been invented and implemented.
The Fed is to blame for every bubble and every bust. Manipulating interest rates feeds this cycle; keeping them artificially low for long periods of time floods the system with “cheap money,” which leads to over inflated asset bubbles, which invariably burst. Inflated government “fiscal stimulus” on top of this only adds fuel to the fire. All of this in the interest of reducing or avoiding economic pain.
Well, I have news for you. Pain is good. It teaches us. It makes us stronger. Children who touch hot stoves only do it once. The pain tells them that “it isn’t good to touch hot stoves.” Now imagine if they never learned that lesson, the pain having been removed by the application of a topical anesthetic. That kid is going to burn his hand off and never know it.
This is the exact thing that is happening in front of our own eyes, except we are going one step further. We are actually rewarding the kid for touching the stove, and encouraging him to do it again!
There is no pain felt by AIG for a lack of due diligence in investigating the likelihood of default on mortgages backed by credit default swaps. They are paying their people $100 million in previously negotiated bonuses, thanks to the Government putting taxpayer money on the line to bail them out.
There is no pain felt by Banks who were allowed to write bad loans to mortgage brokers and then turnaround to unload significant portions of their bad assets onto the Federal Government, Fanny and Freddie.
There is no pain felt by the mortgage brokers who told poor Americans that they could afford houses they had no business buying in the first place. They got their commissions and ran.
And the above 3 examples only cover the mortgage bubble/bust that most recently threw the global economy into a tailspin. Nevermind the telecom bubble and bust of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s – also brought to you by the federal government in the form of low interest rates and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Nevermind the S&L bubble and bust of the late 80’s – thank you Mr. Greenspan for your great policy of cheap money (read – sarcasm).
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that markets are efficient at “turning the faucet on and off.” Government is not. Why? Because it is easy to get greedy. If some fiscal stimulus is good to get us out of the rough patch, surely more is better (read – sarcasm)!
If markets set interest rates, not the Fed, then rates would automatically go up before too many people use the cheap money to inflate the market. Economic growth, if charted, would look like a steady climb up and to the right as technology, education, standard of living, and population factors all have net positive effects on economic output.
I dare anyone to look at a chart of the Dow Jones and tell me it looks like what I described above. Keep in mind both the time scale and the logarithmic scale of this chart. Vast fortunes were wiped out in these seemingly minuscule pull-backs.
http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/djia1900.html
What is in store for us in the future is hard to say, but for the NOW we are certainly paying for the excesses of the past. The solution is not more fiscal stimulus gasoline on the fire, but less (and a balanced budget to boot). The solution is not rewarding “too big to fail” companies for poor decision making, but to let them fail. The solution is not to keep interest rates so low that we inflate another asset class to bubble proportions, but to get rid of the Fed and their “experts” that got us into this mess.
The solution is a little bit of pain.
Daily Right 2/3/10
*Please, No More “Half-As-Much” Republicans, by J. Robert Smith.
“What’s a half-as-much Republican? One who’s willing to do half as much as liberals on big government initiatives.”
*Book’im, Dan-o, by Stephen Green.
“I love my local funky used bookstore. But, dude, you’re hosed. Totally. Maybe you can borrow some Kleenex from the guy who used to own the local used record store.”
RELATED: Amazon vs. Apple: What should the price of E-books be? By Virginia Postrel.
*Best Headline of the Day: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs, by Christopher Hitchens.
“Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult.”
*Next in Line for a Bailout: Social Security, by Allan Sloan.
*Obama Appears Blinded by His Own Ideological Biases, by Jonah Goldberg.
*Professor of Contempt: The legacy of Howard Zinn, by Roger Kimball.
“The one indisputably valuable thing about A People’s History of the United States is the way it illustrates a melancholy fact about the place of reasoned argument in human affairs. In brief, it occupies a lamentably attenuated place. Placed in opposition to a wish driven by the Zeitgeist (that’s German for “what the New York Times preaches”), reasoned argument doesn’t stand a chance.”
*Is Obama Ready to be President? By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
*What Obama Isn’t Saying, by Harvey Mansfield.
“He understands that his principle prospers best when it is not enunciated. His politics is apolitical; it wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.”
RELATED: Mr. President, Words Matter. By Victor Davis Hanson.
“One cannot spend two years blaming America under Bush, and then suddenly claim, “That was then, this is now,” and expect the world to rally to the godhead of Barack Obama and his new, improved America.
How odd that Obama, the rhetorician, forgot that words matter — and that the truth is not a trifle, a mere construct predicated on the particular situation at the moment it is voiced.”
*A $2 Trillion Tax Hike, at the New York Post.
Your Daily Dose of Awesome: Iowahawk
If Music Be The Food of Love, Maestro Obama, Play On, by T. Coddington Van Vorhees VII
This unforeseeable turn of events has culminated in the recent coup in Massachusetts, where the House of Kennedy was unceremoniously deposed from its ancestral Senate estate by some ill-bred populist pickup trucker. The better journalistic organs have published soothing reassurances that this latest insult to American birthright was a fluke, having more to do with Mr. Brown’s erotic appeal to the Bay State’s famously nymphomaniacal womenfolk than any significant disagreement with the President’s legislative agenda.
Read the whole thing. Better yet, bookmark Iowahawk.
Daily Right 2/2/10: Budget Edition
*An Obama-Sized Budget, at NRO.
“Between 1789 and 2008, the U.S. government borrowed a total of $5.8 trillion. But in just the first three years of the Obama administration, the government is set borrow $4.4 trillion more.”
Ego-Sized, certainly.
RELATED: $1 Trillion Obama Will Never See, by William A. Jacobson.
“Obama is raising taxes on people making over $250k by over $1 trillion (yes, with a “t”) over ten years.”
That includes small business, by the way.
RELATED II: President Obama’s budget seeks an end to tax breaks for the middle class, by Walter Alarkon.
RELATED III: Obama’s Budget: First Read, by Jamie Dupree.
“Further down the page, you will note a line that says “Health Insurance Reform” – it says that this budget counts on $743 billion in cost savings from health care reform.
Yes, that would be the same health care bill that is currently stuck in the Congress.”
RELATED IV: Obama Can Blame Bush All He Wants, But His Budget Is Even Worse, by Tad DeHaven.
“Just like Bush, the president proposes minuscule savings through a small number of program terminations and reductions. But overall spending continues to rise, and in a $3.8 trillion budget the president’s disingenuous attempt to “cut” anything amounts to little more than a rounding error.”
RELATED V: The Budget Poseur, by Rich Lowry.
“In his “question time” exchange with Republican House members, Obama proved for anyone who might have forgotten that he’s whip-smart, unflappable, and glib; it’s the facts that are his undoing.
Anyone listening to him describe his budget would stock extra foodstuffs in the pantry for the lean times ahead — and would be shocked to learn that Obama was speaking of the most extravagant budget in American history. It’s a Keynesian blowout wrapped in an Eisenhower-era-sensible-Republican cloth coat.
National debt will exceed GDP in 2012, a staggering fact.”
Emphasis mine.
*Related VI: The President’s Priorities: One of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history, at the WSJ.
“If this budget is Mr. Obama’s first clear demonstration of his long-term governing priorities, then it’s hard not conclude that this spending boom is deliberate. It is an effort to put in place programs and spending commitments that will require vast new tax increases and give the political class a claim on far more private American wealth.”
RELATED VII: Politicians in Wonderland, by Thomas Sowell.
“It is of course no secret that there is no free lunch. That fact is just an inconvenient distraction that gets left out of political rhetoric.”
RELATED VIII: In a Weak Economy: Tax hikes as far as the eye can see, by Jennifer Rubin.
“This is not a recipe for economic recovery. It is a formula to retard growth, investment, and job creation. It is also, I think, a political fiasco, the exemplification of tax-and-spend policies to which the public is forcefully averse.”
The statist must destroy the middle-class to achieve “social justice.” This budget proposes to do just that.
Daily Right 2/1/10
*Rhetoric of Fear Behind Health-Care Agenda, by Matt Patterson.
“So how do you convince people who are happy with what they have to go along with radical change? Convince them that what they are happy with can be lost at any time, and through no fault of their own.
In other words, scare them.”
ALSO by Matt Patterson: 2010 Dawned With Record Cold Gripping the Earth
*Troubling Democratic Tremors, by Donald Lambro.
*Our Obama Saga: Part One, by Victor Davis Hanson.
“The hypocrisy of left-wing redistribution politics and the enjoyment of the high-life, brought about by the fruits of capitalism, is a heavy anchor for Obama. Tim Geithner does not like to pay high taxes. Nancy Pelosi does like nice jets. Barack Obama likes junkets. So does Harry Reid. Charles Rangel likes hiding income on resort property. John “two nations” Edwards likes “John’s Room” in his mansion, and Green Al Gore enjoys his most ungreen estate. In other words, “progressivism” is easily identified as cynicism, as a condescending plaything of the well-off, who are exempt, either by government largess or private capital, from the very strictures they would impose on less knowledgeable others.”
*Simple 5 Step Process for Understanding the Deficit and Peoples Reaction to It, at The Daily Caller.
Change you can believe in.
*The Obama Spell Is Broken, by Fouad Ajami.
*Condescender in Chief, by Kathryn Jean Lopez.
*A Republic, If You Want It: The left’s overreach invites the Founder’s return, by Mathew Spalding.
“The American people are poised to make the right decision. The strength and clarity of the Founders’ argument, if given contemporary expression and brought to a decision, might well establish a governing conservative consensus and undermine the very foundation of the unlimited administrative state. It would be a monumental step on the long path back to republican self-government.”
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
*I suppose it’s been long enough to post this now: Spitting on Howard Zinn’s Grave, by David Horowitz.
“Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain. Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.”
The SoTU
The Union is afraid, and deeply uncertain about its future, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to President Obama last night. No, our “union is strong,” and the great and building anger of the body politic is nothing but the mewling of spoiled children. And like all parents of misbehaving children, Obama seems disgusted that he even has to deal with us.
He smiled as he chastised the American people for their anxieties and the Republicans for their opposition, even as he tried to claim Scott Brown’s victory for his own. His calling out of the Supreme Court was unseemly and unpresidential, and representative of the entire speech. His manner was careless to the point of callous, an attitude the American people are getting sick of.
The Bulls Run analogy was especially clever, and conveniently buried in the lead. In case you missed it, it’s in paragraph three: “It’s tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable – that America was always destined to succeed. But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt.” So the President moving forward with an agenda the republic doesn’t want is comparable to the Union under Lincoln and the Allies on D-Day. Which makes his opponents what? Confederate Nazis? Disgusting.
Aside from his usual cheerleaders at MSDNC and Time Magazine, the speech impressed no one. It wasn’t even as lyrical or pseudo-uplifting as his other trope. This was a bitter address by a man who is unused to personal and professional setbacks, a man who is lashing out in anger at the civil society that has rejected his agenda.
Amongst all of the lies and obfuscation, President Obama has managed to keep one campaign promise, and for that I salute him. He pledged to unite the red and blue states, until we were once again a United States, and as the good people of Massachusetts demonstrated, he has done exactly that. United against his agenda, certainly, but united just the same.
I say bring on 2010. Let this election be a clear choice between the progressive statist agenda and the enlightenment values of classic liberalism. Obama and his party will lose such an open contest handily.
Daily Right 1/28/10: SOTU Edition
*The complete transcript of the speech can be read here.
*Statist Quo, at National Review.
“Everything changes except President Obama. His agenda doesn’t change. He has had no second thoughts about the wisdom of his health-care policies, or any of his policies; resistance is always and only a reason for redoubling. Also unchanging is the condescension with which he articulates his agenda: He faulted himself for not explaining health care well enough to the easily confused American public. The same familiar strawmen dot the landscape of his rhetoric. (Republicans want to “maintain the status quo” on health care. This president is willing to listen to Republican ideas, just so long as he can then forget that he has ever done so.) Narcissism, too, is a constant companion. The opening of the speech, and the end, invited us to regard Obama as the embodiment of the nation. But it is not the country’s future that has suddenly come under doubt. It is his administration’s. It is not the country’s spirit that is in danger of breaking. It is contemporary liberalism’s.”
*Justice Alito mouths “not true” when Obama said the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC opens the door for foreign contributions to campaigns. The left is predictably up in arms, but there is just one problem; Obama’s statement wasn’t true. Obama was either ignorant of the facts or lying his ass off. Which one, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
RELATED: How’d He Do? By Randy Barnett.
“In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen?”
RELATED II: Surprises, by Jennifer Rubin.
“Obama proceeded to minimize a serious debate over the centrality of the First Amendment to the robust operation of our political system by resorting to a silly argument, from which serious citizens should surely turn away. He conveys not merely a lack of respect for a co-equal branch of government (and ignorance about the ruling he was vilifying) but for the Constitution itself, which he is sworn to uphold. For a lawyer, his conduct is embarrassing; for a president, it is inexcusable.”
*Obama Perpetuates the Myth of Bush as Free-Marketeer, by Ilya Somin.
*The Usual Straw-Men, by Victor Davis Hanson.
*A President Who Says No, by Jeff Anderson.
“The takeaway from President Obama’s State of the Union address is that the disconnect between the president and the American people has never been clearer.”
*Ten Whoppers, from the AP.
*Obama’s Reality Problem, by Michael Gerson.
“After a series of political humiliations, Obama called on Republicans to change their course. Facing a general revolt against Washington, he proudly took credit for posting the names of White House visitors online. Promising to change the tone in Washington, he managed to be petty, backward looking, defiant and self-justifying.”
Daily Left 1-28-10
Ben Bernanke gets a second term, by a vote of 70-30.
Immigration reform to return to the national forefront? If it does, California is back in the middle, with a “proud racist” in the line of fire. At least someone is being honest.
State of the Union drama erupts, as Justice Alito’s little nonverbal retort overruns the internet today. A brief rundown, provided by Newser.
* Shannen Coffin, National Review: “That Justice Alito betrayed his feelings in a minor way is understandable. … In his preening, Obama flatly misrepresented the ruling” and showed an “utter lack of tact.”
* Glenn Greenwald, Salon: The judge made “a serious and substantive breach of protocol that reflects very poorly on Alito and only further undermines the credibility of the court. It has nothing to do with etiquette. … (The court) must remain apolitical, separate, and detached from partisan wars.”
* Sarah Palin, Fox News: Obama is “embarrassing our Supreme Court and not respecting the separation of powers. … I think that this is going to be a huge take-away moment.”
* Doug Kendall, Huffington Post: If Alito feels this way, he should have written a concurring opinion and explained how the ruling “doesn’t change course on over a century of campaign finance law … and showed us that the court’s formalistic approach to the First Amendment and corporations won’t lead to foreign corporate spending in US elections. But muttering at the State of the Union clarifies nothing.”
Looks like Hillary Clinton is a one term wonder, explaining that the 24/7 job isn’t something she can do twice. Or maybe she’s smarter then the rest of the current Democrats and is leaving herself outs. And no, her missing the State of the Union has nothing to do with it.
Yet another show in conservative protest tactics, this time by taking over several house websites. The flavor text to all this?
“F— OBAMA!! Red Eye CREW !!!!! O RESTO E HACKER !!! by HADES; m4V3RiCk; T4ph0d4 — FROM BRASIL.”
RELATED- The entire conservative party turns it’s back on O’Keefe.
Man, this is just a day of great quotes. Chris Matthews take on the state of the unionChris Matthews take on the state of the union- “I Forgot Obama Was Black”.
As Prop 8 goes to a judge, President Obama actually answers questions on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and mentions the congressional bill to give equal rights to at least federal employees. Wow. All it took was a guy from Tampa to put him on the spot.
Abortion Doctor killers claims his confessed killing was not a murder.
LATE EDITION!- Think you know Scott Brown? Think again. Follow the original link to cross check the references. Here’s the short list.
1. Scott Brown suggested on television that President Obama was born out of wedlock, then tried to claim that Martha Coakley was making things up when her campaign called attention to it.
2. Scott Brown voted against aid to 9/11 recovery workers because it was too expensive, while at the same time he was trying to fund a golf course in his district and give tax subsidies to corporations.
3. Scott Brown tried to deny emergency contraception to rape victims. When he was called on it, he tried to deny the truth, then hid behind his daughters.
4. Scott Brown claimed he didn’t know anything about any Tea Parties, even though he’d appeared at their rallies and publicized fundraisers they threw for him.
5. Scott Brown opposes a fee to get back bailout money from the biggest banks.
6. Scott Brown supports a constitutional ban on gay marriage and thinks two women raising a child is “just not normal.
Daily Right 1/27/10
*As Predictable as Clockwork: The Obama Three-step, by Victor Davis Hanson.
“Instead, we’ve come full circle from the idealistic-sounding, centrist candidate Obama, to the Carter-McGovern President Obama, back to the wannabe Clinton triangulator. The only constant — no real identity, no firm belief, no core convictions from which to make the argument that his left-wing vision is good for the country. You see, Mr. Obama never had to: left-wing dogma was always a state religion in the circles Obama thrived, and once Obama the nightingale started in his song, few of the hypnotized worried about inane message that followed.”
ALSO by Hanson: Obama vs. Obama
*The Real State of the Union: Fear, by Michael Ledeen.
“He doesn’t instill fear of punishment. It’s his policies and his weakness that frighten us. The man himself risks inspiring contempt. Which, as Machiavelli says, is the most dangerous thing that can befall any leader.”
RELATED: Obama’s State of “The One” Speech Preview, by Rich Baehr.
*Recognizing Terrorism, by Jonah Goldberg.
ALSO by Goldberg: Definitions and Double Standards
Daily Left 1-27-10
While it’s not exactly the kind of news we normally cover here, it’s the biggest news on the internet. Apple has introduced the iPad. I’m not even totally sure what it does, but I want one.
Remember the guys who pulled the pimp scheme on ACORN? They’re back, and this time they’re looking at jail time. Turns out breaking into an elected officials office can backfire. Who knew.
Next time I think of pizza, I’ll think of Haiti. Why? They just give the stuff away. An eatery in Haiti is serving up literally thousands of customers a day, totally free of charge.
The staff of Quantum Conservative have been green for years, and didn’t even know it! Apparently, the new eco-friendly, pro-recycling move is to drink beer from a growler, something we’ve been doing (and quite honestly, collecting) for years.
Looks like the Democrats are fighting amongst themselves, again.
China bans eating cats and dogs, but kidnapping dissidents is still fine.
Get ready for a lot more Scott Brown for president rambling. By the time Newsweek has a story about it, it’s been looked into for about six months by everyone who actually pays attention.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen(also the Prime Minister of Denmark) comes out with a more conservative estimate then the US on Afghanistan. Interesting talking points include the direct mention of Americas new troops in Afghanistan, but no direct mentioning of America itself. Does this mean even leftist powerhouses in northern Europe could be leaning a bit more to the right? With attempted attacks on political figures in the aforementioned Denmark and a Swiss ban on minarets, it looks like it.
Daily Right 1/26/10
*Tuning Out the State of the Union, by Gene Healy.
“When Obama had to make way for “Lost,” some lamented the fact that many Americans preferred trash TV over presidential enlightenment. But the public’s lack of interest in the SOTU is actually a sign of political health.
When all eyes turn to the president, demanding he cure whatever ails us, the result is a dangerous concentration of federal power. Thus, it’s good that our national talk-show host suffers from declining Nielsens.”
*A Culture of Losers, by David Solway.
“Free and contentious democracies, home to a self-reliant and muscular individualism, are anathema to a vast phalanx of oddly aggressive pietists consecrated to an agenda of self-immolation. The only enemies they recognize are those of their fellow citizens who struggle to maintain the core Western values of liberty of thought, speech, and action and who wish to preserve the spirit of accountability for oneself — in other words, those who refuse to claim special dispensation for their personal present or offer apologies for their historical past.”
*The Populist Addiction, by David Brooks.
*President Obama to Diane Sawyer:
“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”
I’ll stick with Krauthammer and option 3: “A mediocre one-term President.”
*Real Journalism Isn’t About Selling Books, by Don Campbell.
*Great Scott! By Thomas Sowell.
“President Obama’s desire to do something “historic” by succeeding where previous presidents had failed was perfectly consistent for a man consumed with his own ego satisfaction, rather than with the welfare of the country or even that of his own political party.”
*The Democrats Cast Aspersions, by Peter Wehner.
*Obama and the Copenhagen Syndrome, by Bret Stephens.
“The president from Oprah Nation, says Newsweek, suffers from an “inspiration gap”; the prevailing wisdom is that he’s too cool and detached for his own political good. Are they kidding? Should the president now take squealing lessons from Howard Dean?
Mr. Obama’s real problems are of a different stripe. It’s not as if he lacks for charisma. It’s that he believes too much in the power of charisma itself and specifically too much in his own.”
*Just who is responsible for the “unconscious”: meaning, intent, and the use of “false consciousness” in the making of identity politics, by Jeff Goldstein.
“Identity politics wants to “help” us through that learning process by taking us right to the conclusions we “should” be reaching. And to do so, it hopes to force on “culture” and “society” certain ways of thinking and talking that will shape the “proper” associations in children.
In short, it wants to brainwash them. But for their own good.”
Read the whole thing.
H/TDaily Right 1/25/10
*We Should Listen to Massachusetts, by Matt Patterson.
“That we could come so close to implementing a new trillion dollar federal program that would actually raise health care spending, and saddle the nation with hundreds of billions in new taxes in a year when our economy hemorrhages jobs at a rate not seen since World War II (over 4 million jobs lost in 2009), is a troubling sign of America’s fundamental economic illiteracy, and bodes well for neither the administration nor the country.”
ALSO by Matt Patterson: Is ObamaCare Really Dead?
RELATED: End of O’s Cowardly Lyin’, by Michael Goodwin.
“Obama’s crisis is personal. The inner hollowness and facile talent that propelled his rise gave him none of the grit necessary to meet the challenges. Where would he begin?”
*Turning Point: Obama must change course, or he’s sunk, by Conrad Black.
RELATED: Does He Feel Your Pain? By John Judis.
*The 1994 Nightmare, by Rich Lowry.
“In short, the push on health care has made the Democrats seem out of touch, imperious and gross — a corrupt establishment ripe for the toppling after all of four years in power. An unemployment rate of 10 percent, well above the 5.6 percent rate of November 1994, only exacerbates their vulnerability.
All the key conditions are there for a debacle:”
*From Disgusting to Odd, by Abe Greenwald.
*STOP! The size and power of the state is growing, and discontent is on the rise, at The Economist.
*Obama and Campaign Financing, by Victor Davis Hanson.
*The Power of Me, by Kathryn Jean Lopez.
“Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., fears that these midterm elections are going to go the way of the 1994 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the House after a failed health care reform effort.
But, Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the White House does not share his concerns.
“They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”
*The Democrats Five Stages of Grief Over Healthcare, by Peter Suderman.
Your Daily Dose of Awesome
President Obama prepares to speak to a 6th grade class.
"Let me be clear..."
Best. Teleprompter. Evah. And no, this is not photoshopped.
H/T. Ace of Spades
Daily Right 1/22/10
*The Supreme Court has finally overturned the most odious portions of McCain-Feingold, ruling that corporate entities have the same free speech protections as individuals. Just to give you a taste of how obnoxiously unconstitutional this bill was, the Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart actually argued that the government had the right to “prohibit the publication” of any book that took sides in political races. Just to reiterate, the government argued to deny the publication of any book deemed out of bounds. Scary stuff, and past time that it was defeated.
And really, any court decision that has the New York Times, the President, Ralph Nader, Chuck Shumer, and Keith Olbermann in such a tizzy has my wholehearted support.
RELATED: A Death Blow to McCain-Feingold, by Clarice Feldman.
“To those for whom MoveOn.org and the countless left-wing 527 operations are the forces of truth and justice, and corporations the font of rich evil men of the 1930’s plutocratic cartoons, this case is a disaster for the commonweal.
But for those of us who think free speech is inviolate, and more important in the context of elections than it is in flag burnings or obscenity cases, this decision is a long overdue righting of a preposterous error of legislative judgment.”
RELATED II: Government Can’t Squelch Free Speech, by Matt Welsh.
“Citizens United, a conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit that has funded a dozen political documentaries over the years, produced a critical documentary about Hillary Clinton in 2008 entitled “Hillary: The Movie.” By a decision of the federal government, which was enforcing the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (known more broadly as McCain-Feingold), this piece of political speech was banned from television.
Let’s boil it down to the essential words: Political documentary, banned, government.”
RELATED III: A Free Speech Landmark, at the WSJ.
“Liberalism’s bullying tendencies are never more on display than when its denizens are at war with the speech rights of its opponents.”
*What Scott Brown’s Win Means for the Democrats, by Charles Krauthammer.
RELATED: The New Political Rumbling, by Peggy Noonan.
*Feeling the Heat, Obama Pours the Kool-Aid, by Jonah Goldberg.
*Great news for Indie writers: Amazon to offer 70% royalties for self-published work on the Kindle (which is the greatest invention ever).
*The New Progressivism, Same as the Old? By Peter Berkowitz.
RELATED: Progressives and Their Fallacies, by Chuck Roger.
Best Week Ever?
Well, maybe for politically minded conservatives. Scott Brown wins in Mass., killing ObamaCare, the Supreme Court strikes a blow for the 1st Amendment by ruling against free speech restrictions on corporations, the Copenhagen Accord is collapsing under the weight of its own stupidity, and Air America finally breathes its last.
I’m sorry, but as a conservative I’m just not used to this many political victories in a year, much less a week. I think I need to lie down for a spell.
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