*Dare we say the D word?

“The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.

The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era.”

*Read this job chart and weep:

*Democrat’s Jobs Problem: Their Own, by Jennifer Rubin.

“The new New Deal has worked as poorly as the original, and the barrage of tax increases, mandates, and uber-regulation has left the private sector reeling.”

Oil Spill

*Heartache: Twenty Photo’s That Obama Doesn’t Want You to See, by DIRECTORBLUE.

*The BP/Government Police State, by Glenn Greenwald.

“The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating.  Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest — preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts — but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable.”

“Police state behavior.”   This is from Salon, as liberal a publication as you can get.

NASA: A Muslim Affair

First, take a look at this video of Charles Bolden, the newly appointed head of NASA discussing the Obama administrations new tasks for the agency:
If you can’t watch the video, here is a transcript of the relevant portion:

“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”

You read that right, NASA is no longer concerned with manned space flight, but has been re-tasked to make the Muslim world feel good about itself.  Unbelievable.  At this rate, the Jihadi’s won’t have anything left to destroy, we’ll have done all the work for them.

*The Distance NASA Travelled Over 48 Years, by Jim Prevor.

*Is It NASA’s Job? By Elliot Abrams.

“A more serious task might be to make them feel terrible about the present level of education in Muslim lands, not least for women and girls, in the hope that we could spur them to reform and improvement.”

*It Cannot Be That NASA Has Nothing Better to Do, by Victor Davis Hanson.

Misc.

*An Afternoon at the Willard, by Matt Patterson.

*The New Frontier: ‘Covering’ Conservatives, by Jonah Goldberg.

“And just what is the conservative beat?

Well, according to many of the nation’s leading editors, it’s that shadowy, often-sinister world where carbon based-life forms of a generally humanoid appearance say and do things relating to, and supportive of, conservative causes and the Republican Party. These strange creatures have been observed using complex tools, caring and nurturing their young and even participating in complex social rituals. Most worship an unseen sky god that traces its roots back to the ancient Middle East. Even more astounding, these creatures are having a noticeable impact on American politics.

And that is why many of our leading journalistic enterprises have found it worthwhile to assign full-time reporters to the task of spelunking through the dark caves of conservatism to better understand these fascinating, if vaguely worrisome, beings.” ]]> http://quantumconservative.com/2010/07/07/daily-right-7710/feed/ 0 http://quantumconservative.com/2010/06/21/daily-right-62110/ http://quantumconservative.com/2010/06/21/daily-right-62110/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:24:14 +0000 Quantum Conservative http://quantumconservative.com/?p=3577 *Tea Partiers Late to the Party, by Matt Patterson.

“The painful truth is this: To give them the kind of government that the Tea Partiers they would like, the new and virtuous Republicans we are promised would have to abolish whole swaths of the federal government as it is currently constituted, including extremely popular programs, entitlements, and bureaucracies (Department of Education, anyone?). You may rest assured that that will not happen.”

Read the whole thing.

*Energy Pipedreams, by Robert Samuelson.

*Israel and the Surrender of the West, by Shelby Steele.

“This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas’s remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn’t they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel’s legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world’s oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.”

*The Paranoid Delusions of the Expert Class, by E. D. Kain

*Gulf War Three, by Mark Steyn.

“Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?”

*Running on Empty, by Fred Barnes.

*Obama’s Straws and Our Tired Backs, by Victor Davis Hanson.

“There is another problem for the Democrats: I don’t think Obama cares much about a midterm correction for reasons other than his own narcissism. One, he already is a laureate and post-presidential historical figure. If Bill Clinton or Al Gore is any guide, he can make a billion or two sermonizing and philosophizing for the next forty years. If Jimmy Carter can create an empire of self-absorption, any president can.”

*Obama is in Over His Head, by Hugh Hewitt.

“Democrats expect voters not to notice, or care if they do notice, that legislators have not passed a budget for next year’s federal spending…

…Thus do the Democrats steel themselves to face a furious electorate: “What deficit? We don’t have no stinking deficit. We haven’t even passed a budget yet.”

RELATED: Dereliction of Duty, by Stephen Hayes.

*World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur, by Mort Zuckerman.

“Would that the workers who lost their lives receive as much attention as the large-scale — but temporary — environmental damage caused by oil washing over the Gulf Coast.  We would do well to remember that oil is a natural as water, and regularly seeps into the oceans naturally in quantities many times the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill.  The ocean can handle the oil, but Aaron Dale Burkeen will still be gone when years from now when beachgoers are once again swimming in the pristine waters of the Gulf.

Burkeen and the others died ensuring that the rest of us have the energy we need to go about our business and pleasure, and risked their lives to bring forth the lubricant that greases the gears of our civilization. They should not be forgotten.”

Read the whole thing.

“There’s a reason why Democrats were desperate to ram this through at any cost — once enacted, such things are all but perpetual. Former freedom-loving peoples begin to tell themselves that it’s really not so bad. Sure, government is forcing you to eat state-approved gruel, but hey, at least they hold the spoon, and they even pour a little sugar on top when you’re good.

The worst part of watching the proceedings unfold on Sunday was the endless stream of commentators and pundits calmly discussing this bill as if it were just one more piece of bad legislation that we will have to live under. In fact, what has transpired is nothing less than an overthrow of the old Constitutional order.”

This article got a shout out from Sean Hannity on the radio yesterday.  I urge you to read the whole thing.

*A Victory for Obama’s Agenda of Dependency, by George Will.

*Oops: Children with pre-existing conditions not covered by ObamaCare.

*The Mugging of Personal Freedom, by David Harsanyi.

“As a layman, I have little business wading into the intricacies of constitutional law — though, in my limited understanding of this nation’s founding tenets, forcing patriots to buy something in the private market seems to undermine the entire point of the project. Judging from the celebratory mood of the Democrats, who shrug off questions of constitutionality and individual rights, my reading of history is obviously way off the mark.

Surely it is inarguable that the debate over a national mandate epitomizes the central ideological divide in the country today.

In broad terms, there is one side that believes liberty can be subverted for the collective good because government often makes more efficient and more moral choices.

Then there is the other side, which believes that people who believe such twaddle are seditious pinkos.”

I know which side the bulk of our readership is on. 

*Rep. John Dingell (D-MI):

“…it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

It. Was. Never. About. Healthcare.

*Shocker: Multiple videos show NO hurling of racial epitaphs towards black representatives.

RELATED: Anatomy of a Racial Slur, by Jack Cashill.

*A little over 4 years ago…by Jeff G.

“Never before in my lifetime did I find it even remotely possible that our country could fight another civil war. But I’m beginning to think that a (non-violent) civil war is coming—and that, frankly, it needs to happen. How it transpires, I have no idea—though I suspect migration patterns and a strong move to re-affirm federalist principles could provide the groundwork.

Philosophically, we have lost our way. And we’d better find our way back to our founding principles, or—as powerful as we are—we are doomed to slip into nannystate socialism, while a feckless foreign policy permits radical Islam to spread across the globe like the cancer it is.”

Can we be frank? We are worse than dead broke. We are bankrupt. And yet, the Democrats claim they can compel, expand and subsidize health coverage to 30 million more Americans and not make things worse. Does anybody in Washington really believe this? Perhaps, but in the rest of the country, this is seen for precisely what it is: insanity.

If the Democrats are willing to ignore the public, their own political futures, the Constitution and the nation’s empty coffers in pursuit of their health care chimera, my question is this: What won’t they ignore? What legal, moral and political stricture won’t they bend, break or disregard? In short: What won’t they do?

A ruling party willing to ignore these things can conceivably ignore anything. The thought sends chills down my spine, for from such seeds are the flowers of tyranny often sown.

In encourage you to read the whole thing, and keep praying for the republic my friends, because this is only the beginning of the tyranny our self-appointed ruling class has in store for us.

“I cannot bring myself to believe that any president would manipulate the economy in such a manner for his own political purposes. But I do know this:  while Obama continues to fiddle his atonal health care tune, the flames of war and recession and fiscal collapse rage all around him.

Does he care? Does he even understand the precipice upon which we stand?”

ALSO by Patterson: Obama Plays High Stakes Poker on Health-Care

“The summit and subsequent events have revealed two distinct philosophies that are like oil and water, and are likely to mix just about as well. Democrats obsess over the uninsured; the Republicans over cost. Democrats believe it’s the business of the government to dictate coverage; the Republicans that government’s role must be limited and encourage competition. What we’re talking about here is two vastly different views of the nature and rationale of federal authority in our lives, a difference between top down and bottom up, between centralized or diffused power, between government that knows best and liberty that comes first.”

ALSO by Patterson: Fix Medicare First

*Veganism joins Environmentalism as a protected religious group in the UK.

“The legislation also covers “any religious belief or philosophical belief” and even “a lack of belief”.

*Sean Penn believes in jailing people who call Hugo Chavez a dictator. 

*SURPRISE!  National debt to be higher than The White House predicted.

*Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, ObamaCare, at the WSJ.

“Last week President Obama sanctioned “reconciliation,” a complex tactic that would jam ObamaCare into law on sheer power politics. But what if this gambit is really a false-flag operation, meant to lure House Democrats into voting for a bill that they would otherwise oppose? That’s the question many rank-and-file Members are now asking themselves, and they’re right to be worried.”

*New Rasmussen poll shows that 10% of the American people are insane:

“Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job…

…Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.”

*Too Many Apologies, by Thomas Sowell.

*Better Here Than There, by Jonah Goldberg.

“Tom Friedman has gone so far as to wish America could be “China for a day” and to suggest that its “enlightened” regime is preferable to our own. It’s not that Friedman wants to abolish democracy, jail dissidents, or force abortions. He’s more like a drunk looking for his car keys where the light is good. He sees a nation doing things he thinks America should be doing, but doesn’t look for what he doesn’t want to see: the pollution, the cruelty, the lies and basic evil that are just as central to China’s methods as its “enlightened” investments in this or that.”

*Fearing Obama Agenda, States Push to Loosen Gun Laws, by Ian Urbina.

*My Gift to the Obama Presidency, by John Yoo.

“Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.”

*The “I Am Not George Bush” Policy, by Victor Davis Hanson.

*The Silence of the Lamb, by Rick Richman.

“Obama’s obsessive “reaching out to the Iranian leadership,” starting in his inauguration speech and continuing month after month in spite of no Iranian response, sent an unmistakable signal — one confirmed when he stood mute after the fraudulent Iranian election; confirmed again after he offered a muffled response to the secret nuclear facility in Qom; confirmed yet again when he remained silent as each of his “deadlines” passed; and confirmed even now by his continuing silence on the subject as he devotes his speeches and attention to ObamaCare. Lions know a lamb when they see one.”

“A Bolshevik is an early 20th century Russian revolutionary; a plot is a plan hatched in secret. Obama is not the former and has not engaged in the latter. However, the President and his allies have openly strived to socialize significant aspects of American society through health care reform. By fabricating a bogus “Bolshevik” charge, Obama cleverly avoided addressing the actual – and legitimate – charge of socialism.”

Read the whole thing.

*Statist RINO upset that CPAC “becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years.”  Yes, how dare CPAC become big-tent in time for 2010.

*Obama Lacks One Crucial Ingredient: Intuition, by Michael Barone.

“Obama too may develop better intuition than he has shown so far. But first he has to acknowledge that a successful presidency requires more than the confidence conferred by a high IQ and fancy degrees.”

*Anti-Semitic Incidents Reach Highest Level Since WWI, by Nir Hassan (H/T Gateway Pundit).

RELATED: Jews Leave Swedish City After Rise in Hate Crimes.

“This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now.”

*Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam, at the Washington Examiner.

*Vindicating John Yoo: Bush lawyer’s are found to have acted ethically, unlike their accusers, at the WSJ.

*The System is Working Exactly as Planned, by Jennifer Rubin.

“The failure then is not of the “system,” but rather of the Obami and of the congressional Democrats — in eschewing the center and trying to push through a far-reaching agenda with no popular consensus, and, indeed, in the face of a great deal of opposition.”

RELATED: The Glory of Gridlock, by Will Collier.

*Bill Bennett has problems with Glen Beck’s CPAC speech.

RELATED: Bennett vs. Beck, by Jonah Goldberg.

*Summit of Spin, at NRO.

“All the evidence of the last year suggests that this type of bipartisanship — a Republican surrender — is the only kind in which he (Obama) is interested.”

ClimateGate

*About those rising sea levels…

“Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.”

*The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere But Here, by Charlie Martin.

*How Al Gore Wrecked Planet Earth, by Walter Russel Mead.

“If the skeptics are right and the world isn’t warming — or if natural causes are responsible for climate change –  it doesn’t matter much.  But if Al Gore and the climate change people are even half right about what is happening to our world, the cost of Mr. Gore’s failures are incalculably great. He was the one world leader who had the standing inside the climate change movement to lead it onto a more sustainable path and, as far as we can tell from the facts now before us, he didn’t really try.”

“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.”

“Under wraps. Behind closed doors. Backroom deals. These phrases crop up again and again in reports of the Democrats’ health care legislation.

Would you go along with any plan that had these sinister signs swirling ’round it? Would you even go on a weekend ski trip if the details were kept under wraps, negotiated with backroom deals behind closed doors?”

ALSO by Matt Patterson: Studio Knuckle-Heads Endanger Spider-Man 4.

*Liberalism is What is Killing California, by George Will.

RELATED: Red Ink Tsunami, by Stephen Goldsmith.

“Government at all levels now faces an inescapable reality – the promises of public services exceed our ability to pay for them – and will do so regardless of when the recession ends. The steady increase in the quantity and cost of public services, coupled with the needs of an aging population and public pension costs have produced a long term, structural deficit.”

RELATED II: America slides deeper into depression while Wall Street revels, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

*The Logic of Liberty: Whose responsibility is your health? By William M. Briggs.

RELATED: ObamaCare: Act II, by Ramesh Ponnuru & Yuval Levin

*De-Stimulate, by Larry Kudlow.

*But We’re Still Gonna Kill You, by Mark Steyn.

“This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious — that this “war” is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.”

*Pillage Idiot Guide to Offensive Statements

*Ruled by Legalistic Minds, by David Warren.

“In a sense, our entire society has been criminalized, by lawyers adding to myriad laws that impinge not only on criminals, but on everybody. And by increments, we must find some way to reverse that parasitical growth, which threatens to choke even our humanity.”

*The Way Our World Works, by Victor Davis Hanson.

*Game Over: The Clinton’s Stand Alone, by Ben Smith.

*Democracy’s Wane: The world is in a “freedom recession,” at the WSJ.

*Beware Our Rousseauian Imaginer in Chief, by Kim R. Holmes.
“It all starts with a fundamental intellectual error — namely, that one’s notion of an ideal society as created by government somehow encompasses mankind’s most inner and precious purpose. Once you assume, as philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once did with his idea of the “general will,” that you have discovered the ultimate end-all of social life, you naturally become less concerned about limiting your means in trying to reach this ideal. All that messy business about checks and balances on government from Montesquieu and James Madison gets thrown out the window because, after all, you have embarked on a path much loftier and nobler than merely preserving freedom.”