We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
...the New York Daily News editorializes: Congressional Democrats’ bonus witch hunt will sink N.Y. “The tax plan approved by the House as revenge against a handful of obscenely greedy AIG executives would slam tens of thousands in the financial industry, many of them New Yorkers, who have nothing to do with AIG or any other wrongdoing. And that would be just start of the collateral damage. The levies are so draconian that major banks that took bailout money are threatening to give it back - defeating the purpose of jump-starting the economy with an influx of cash.”
The Tea Party in CT was 7 times larger than the ACORN busload of (probably paid)protesters from Hartford. Who got the MSM coverage?
As I mentioned during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.
All his life, from childhood through university through "community organizing" and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.
He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as "avant-garde." His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, "Middle America" is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today.
It is at this point that the phenomenon known as "too clever by half" sets in.
How can being a Lefty be avant garde in 2009? It's so passe now.
...there is a risk to the U.S. system with more people relying on entitlements. "Well, they become an interest group," Mr. Becker says. "The more you have dependence on the government, the stronger the interest group of people who want to maintain it. That's one reason why it is so hard to get any major reform in reducing government spending in Scandinavia and it is increasingly so in the United States. The government is spending -- at the federal, state and local level -- a third of GDP, and that share will go up now. The higher it is the more people who are directly or indirectly dependent on the government. I am worried about that. The basic theory of interest-group politics says that they will have more influence and their influence will be to try to maintain this, and it will be hard to go back."
No kidding. Everybody loves a free all-you-can-eat buffet.
“I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention.
“His aim seems to be to reduce us to government dependents. His inattention to rehabilitation of the financial system in lieu of vastly expanding the size and scope of the government is a dead giveaway, as is his lack of concern over the vast destruction of wealth his policies are working (and will continue to work).
“Perhaps most depressing to me is the manifestation of his adolescent grandiosity in his stewardship of foreign policy and national security. He doesn't understand that the government of Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons it can put to evil purposes. He thinks he can sweet-talk them out of achieving this objective.”
“Why are Americans hesitant, bewildered after the arrival of the Messiah?
“Not for the reason our President attests about high unemployment or shaky GDP or the lack of national health care. We simply are ashamed of our profligacy; we don’t trust those who should be trusted; we put up with the crass and honor the mediocre and ugly; and we fight and bicker over the distribution, never over a share in the creation.
Hope and change, indeed.”
Both Johnson and Hanson, in effect, point at frustration at both external events and at our own behaviors.They are correct.And, for me, they are incorrect.Depression comes from frustration with non-attainment of unrealistic objectives and inadequate actions to overcome.
I’m not depressed.Mostly because I’m a glass-half-full type, with the life experience that with difficulty and pain has seen and been shown that it is.
Depression implies a fixation upon the perceived negative forces at work, with a tendency toward paralysis of action to change them or our self.These are unconstructive and self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.
Avoidance of or ending depressed feelings and behavior comes from attitudinal resilience and from engaging in efficacious actions.
No doubt, we’re in a mess, both of our own making and by others, and many in our political and societal elite are making it worse, with potential dire consequences.Still, one must recognize the resilient strengths we have.Forty-eight percent did not vote for Obama, despite a perfect-storm in his favor, and current polling shows him losing support, and even his allied media are having to take some notice of his excesses and lackings.The US is emerging from this economic calamity relatively stronger than other countries.The positive trend-line in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that was hard-earned under Bush has not been abandoned by Obama, though it may become weakened.Ordinary Americans are buckling down in their personal affairs and continuing to achieve for themselves, society, and our futures.
Scott Johnson, however, seems to recognize the negative feedback felt by being ignored and powerless to be efficacious.Those who’ve argued long and hard for greater sanity do not feel recognized with success or able to measurably change that.Are they heading to a new version of tuning out?I don’t think so. But, what is needed instead is even more diligence and exertion, particularly in new ways – sane ways -- of engaging themselves and others.
Many are working at that.Real change takes a while, in fits and starts, through trial and error, but relies ultimately upon faith in oneself, in one’s beliefs, in the decency and sanity of others, and thus in outcomes.
I’m not Pollyanna, but even prefer that to a depressed hole.So I’m not depressed, but energized. I know it works.
It's ACORN that is running those AIG bus tours in CT - meaning that this is being done on our nickel (ACORN was given $2 billion in the stimulus). Remarkably, Conyers plans probe of ACORN.
The Global Warming Three are on thin ice. This was pure publicity stunt posing as "science." Amusingly, it was too cold for them. Gotta love this quote:
The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”.
The video to Iran is the latest catastrophe. Mr. Obama simply does not understand how his "olive branch" will be received, not only by the mullahs in Iran itself, but wherever else on the surface of the planet the United States has enemies. It "reads" -- to people who do not share anything like America's aspirations -- as an unambiguous confession of weakness. He has moved the American position towards Iran from offensive to defensive, for no defensible reason.
I have a special needs child. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he throws a ball. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he catches a ball. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he runs. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he bowls. He rode the short bus for a while.
Sounds hilarious doesn’t it? You know, running, throwing, bowling awkwardly because of muscle imbalances and fear of falling and fear of being hit by the ball. What’s amazing is that his Little League teammates haven’t laughed or poked fun. Not. Once. They have managed to show more class, patience, empathy and charity than the President of the United States, but that’s turning out to be no big feat.
Some banks took the bailout money as a favor to the Feds to put more capital out there. Luskin:
No one seems to care that the 90% tax will apply to all banks that have accepted federal money, not just to AIG. That includes banks like Wells Fargo, who told Treasury secretary Henry Paulson that they didn't even want the money when the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted last October. Reluctantly, Wells took the money at Paulson's urging, as did other healthy banks such as JPMorgan. Now virtually every employee of every one of them faces a 90% tax on their bonuses.
This administration really is Clown Central. You thought last month’s grotesque budget was bad. It turns out that the projected deficits are now $2.3 trillion worse than the estimate made just last month. Incredible.
3:14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
3:15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
3:17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
3:18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
3:19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
3:20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.
3:21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God."
America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets.
The average American these days would have trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the tongue of native speakers. Think, for instance, of the old Anabaptist congregations—how a residual memory of America’s social geography still lingers in the words: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, set here and there on the checkerboard of the nation’s farmland. The Quakers in their quiet meetinghouses, the Shakers in their tiny communes, and the Pentecostals, born in the Azusa Street revivals, like blooms forced in the hothouse of the inner city.
And yet, even while we may remember the names of the old denominations, we tend to forget that it all made a kind of sense, back in the day, and it came with a kind of order. The genteel Episcopalians, high on the hill, and the all-over Baptists, down by the river. Oh, and the innumerable independent Bible churches, tangled out across the prairie like brambles: Through most of the nation’s history, these endless divisions and revisions of Protestantism renounced one another and sermonized against one another. They squabbled, sneered, and fought. But they had something in common, for all that. Together they formed a vague but vast unity. Together they formed America.
and
...somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.
And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.
Our MSM has already been a voluntary mouthpiece for the Left and an apologist for the Dem party for many years. How much more so would it be if they were financially beholden to the givernment?
Reform of health care, environmental policy, education, energy, banking, regulation — every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy has been put on alert for major change. Expansion of government spending, plunging the U.S. into unprecedented deficits, is without parallel. In economic policy, through regulation and control of energy output, financial services and monetary expansion, the U.S. government has embarked on a fundamental reshaping of America. It is designed, in short, to bring on the end of America.
Seems to me that many people are more worried about what's going on in the Federal gummint than about the economy.
This week's shameful display by politicians in Washington to beat their breasts and demonize AIG has revealed even more clearly why we shouldn't want those very same politicians to be running our economy, health care industry, education system, and energy policy. Michael Gerson perfectly captures that display of self-satisfied hypocrisy.
In turbulent times, it's good to know some things never change. After a week in which President Obama thanked himself for inviting him to the White House, compared AIG executives to suicide bombers, and did the first Presidential retard joke on national TV, I was impressed to find that Slate is bravely keeping up its Bushism Of The Day feature.
Smith is a member of Montana's Flathead Nation. Like so many artists, as long as she steers clear of politics she makes nifty pictures to look at. Here are some of her works.
(I think I first became aware of her work in Jamake Highwater's The Sweet Grass Lives On; 50 Contemporary North American Indian Artists. Highwater himself has an interesting story. Born Jake Marks, he was a choreographer, critic and writer who worked in San Francisco and NYC and who, like Ward Churchill, wore a ponytail and passed himself off as an Indian. A fraud. In some areas of society, of course, being a member of an "oppressed group" lends mucho cachet and sex appeal. His Indian art book was pretty good, though. Lots of pictures.)
Twenty years ago she was making American Indian/Chagall-type mythic dream stuff. Ghosts and monks and coyotes and firebirds and petroglyphs. Here are two of her pastels:
Most Americans, unlike Europeans, are emotionally mature enought to be willing to see that government is not run by their betters, but by cowardly morons - often by cowardly moronic narcissists who could never handle a real, demanding job in which their added value could be measured.
The widespread recognition of that is one thing that distinguishes America from nations with monarchic, dictatorial, and dependency traditions.
Hope springs eternal from the human breast, though, doesn't it? Even from those who know better.
I have felt disgusted and embarassed by our federal government and the administration over the past few weeks. We posted earlier today that these people could not run a successful candy shop, much less the government. But they have not shown that they can even run their own lives honestly and effectively. That's why I want them as far as possible from my medical care, my investments, my business, and my pocketbook - and from everything else in my life. Please - do me no favors.
Three posts that captured some of my feelings today:
For those who live in the northern parts of the world, just a reminder: unless you live in an area with remarkably fertile soil, your lawns, perennials and some of your shrubs count on some fertilizer because none of them are truly natural (they are all genetically-engineered and hybridized), nor do they receive what nature would otherwise supply them for free (rotten leaf mold, flooding silt, bear, human, and Wooly Mammoth poop, etc).
My point is that it's easy to forget that the roots wake up and begin growing and seeking nourishment long before any buds appear.
Not only that, but it takes a while for your fertilizer to get down to the roots. Time and rain. March and early April is the time to give your precious plants a good head start up here in the north country.
Pedro: If I win, you can be my secretary or something. Napoleon Dynamite: Sweet! Plus I could be your bodyguard, too. Or like, Secret Service Captain, or... whatever...
A sad story. If he had been a candidate for Obama's Cabinet, this would never have happened. Come to think of it, I would have supported him for a Cabinet post, or at least for head of ATF.
I deplore this confiscatory tax aimed at whoever Congress is mad at today. Right now it's AIG and Fannie Mae; later it will be Merrill and Citibank, and eventually it will be defense contractors, profiteering oil executives, or whomever the Congressional Dems single out as their whipping boy du jour.
And of course, rolling this ex post tax out at the same time the Fed and Treasury are trying to encourage private investors to partner up with the government to get the credit markets moving again is insane. What investor needs the likely aggravation to follow? Who needs to be hauled in front of Barney Frank a year from now in order to be blasted as a profiteer who exploited our national crisis for his own profit, which Barney will then tax back? Who will be daft enough to come out of retirement as Liddy did to endure the abuse Liddy took?
Sometimes political movements, as they grow old, become arrogant, insular, and dismissive of criticism. Critics said that the conservative ascendancy of the last few decades succumbed to that disease, and there is more truth in it than conservatives would like to admit. What we are seeing in Washington, D.C., right now is different: President Obama and his supporters are showing early symptoms of this syndrome in the first flush of victory. The liberal ascendancy is already becoming a liberal complacency.
"Responding to the anger about bonuses paid to AIG traders, the House approved a bill Thursday that would impose a punitive 90% tax on bonuses paid by American International Group Inc and other financial companies that receive federal help. The vote was 328-93. The bill would apply to bonuses of people making more than $250,000 a year, and would apply only to payments from companies getting more than $5 billion from the federal government."
From James Madison:
"Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. ... The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community."
Sober people are in short supply nowadays, ain't they?
Obama 
“
It's 
From Joseph Bottum at First Things. A quote:
Battle lines drawn on health care. 
For those who live in the northern parts of the world, just a reminder: unless you live in an area with remarkably fertile soil, your lawns, perennials and some of your shrubs count on some fertilizer because none of them are truly natural (they are all genetically-engineered and hybridized), nor do they receive what nature would otherwise supply them for free (rotten leaf mold, flooding silt, bear, human, and Wooly Mammoth poop, etc). 
Photo: 
From today's 
A Columbia prof teaches a highly diverse class of Columbia's famous and required