Friday, November 5. 2010
The Lib Zuckerman doesn't have my politics, but he's always interesting. America's Love Affair With Obama Is Over:
He came across as a young man in a grown-up's game—impressive but not presidential. A politician but not a leader, managing American policy at home and American power abroad with disturbing amateurishness. Indeed, there was a growing perception of the inability to run the machinery of government and to find the right people to manage it. A man who was once seen as a talented and even charismatic rhetorician is now seen as lacking real experience or even the ability to stop America's decline. "Yes we can," he once said, but now America asks, "Can he?"
And
The open purchasing of votes through the provision of special exemptions for five states and for unions, and concessions to many of the special interests in the Democratic Party, especially trial lawyers, symbolized the corruption of our politics. The 2009 omnibus spending bill alone contained 8,570 special earmarks like those that had so enraged the American public in the past. When lawmakers had no time to even read the bills, it gave the impression that what was important was passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. Obama had promised he would change "politics as usual." He changed it all right, but for the worse. The list of his additional programs only provoked the public's distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits.
Yeah, read the whole thing.
"When we win, it's a mandate. When they win, it's some sort of complicated message about bipartisanship and the tricky optics of modern governance."
Prof B
Image above from post at Watts.
All sane people hope for globalistical warmening. It's too darn cold.
Litotes? Litotes.
FOF: Avoiding and Ending an Affair
Nobody listens to those bozos.
Maybe not so evil, but I hate change of any kind.
Insty:
ROBERT GIBBS: Efforts to repeal ObamaCare won’t get past the Senate. That’s okay. Make ‘em vote for it again.
What a loss for the ignorant peasants.
That's a good thing.
It could be—it seems just possible—that the “truth and science and facts†that these Democrats talk about are really only schoolhouse theories that have no bearing on reality; that they are tried-and-failed progressive fairy tales that could only continue to be believed by people who have spent most of their adult lives glued face-first to the public tit. It’s possible that the best-informed populace in history has risen up in a truly spontaneous grassroots movement deeply connected to the nation’s founding principles and prudently given the heave-ho to a bunch of spendthrift, incompetent, supercilious, and self-deceived buffoons who mistook their college degrees for wisdom.
Somebody is crazy angry: Tim Wise at Daily Kos (h/t. Q&O)
I think this guy wants to have me shot. Make my day, weenie. He cannot wait for the demise of the USA - and says so. Where does this sort of anger come from?
For a moment, I thought somebody photoshopped Obama into this Drudge pic:
Readers will be happy to know that we replaced our old server today:
 A reader reminded me that David Horowitz really liked Kenyon College.
If David likes something, I like it.
Two competing programs are proposed to Congress from the left and from America�s manufacturers. One protects domestic unions while further burdening US manufacturers and consumers. The other grows US competitiveness.
The Nation, in its inimical leftward way, analyzes the problems with �free trade globalization.� Its National Affairs correspondent, William Greider, longtime journalist, describes �a huge hole in the world�a massive loss of demand. Think of the trade wars as the largest producers fighting over an abrupt shortage of buyers.
The situation, as Greider sees it: A Wall Street Journal poll found that 53 percent (including 61 percent of Tea Party adherents) think free-trade globalization has hurt the US economy. Only 17 percent think it has helped. But the trouble with Americans claiming injured innocence is that it blinds them to the complexities of the predicament. The fact is, the United States and China, motivated by different but mutually reinforcing reasons, collaborated to create the unbalanced trading system. American multinationals eagerly sought access to China's market. The Chinese wanted factories and the modern technologies needed to develop a first-class industrial base. American companies agreed to the basic trade-off: China would let them in to make and sell stuff, and they would share technology and teach Chinese partners how it's done. Not coincidentally, US corporations also gained enormous bargaining power over workers back home by threatening to go abroad for cheaper labor if unions didn't give wage concessions.
Greider points out, correctly, that multinational corporations, clever devils, have profited from US subsidies but, anyways, shipped production overseas for less costly labor and regulation.
Greider�s prescription is to impose more regulation and taxes upon multinationals that ship production elsewhere. Greider does not even suggest that unions negotiate less costly labor contracts or that our government reduce its regulatory burdens upon domestic manufacturers.
Greider, finally, does admit that his recommendation �would raise prices for Americans.� US manufacturing unions, however, would � though still likely to hemorrhage jobs � keep high wages and benefits for their remaining members, and dues flowing for contributions to Democrat political campaigns.
By contrast, the National Association of Manufacturers just issued its Manufacturing Strategy for Jobs and a Competitive America. Some recommendations are clearly self-serving, like not taxing foreign earnings, but most make much more sense than Greider�s � get ready for this euphemism � �national loyalty program.�
Continue reading "US Consumers Vs Unions: Which Program For Congress?"
 Bag of uncounted ballots discovered in Bridgeport.
Sounds like Bridgeport. They always have bags of stuff, when needed.
Powerline: Annals of the welfare state
E-mail shows illegal activity in Reid's campaign
What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas.
Bishop Tutu and "Israeli Apartheid"
Krauthammer's take at NRO. Electric cars?
Somebody told me yesterday that electric cars will save the human race from extinction because they have no emissions. What can you say to people like that? I am not kidding: She said electricity comes from the wall outlets. College-educated.
Democrats have to be more competitive in states that don’t touch an ocean if they want to bounce back.
Must be the toxic ozone from the salt water. Ban the oceans, along with the Happy Meals.
Driscoll: How the Gray Lady Became Margaret Dumont
Nancy Pelosi Seriously Considers Staying as Democratic Leader
Goody.
More good links later today, when I find the time to post them.
Our antique server broke down. Nothing a little duct tape and baling wire couldn't fix. Sorry.
This from Dick Morris on Why Triangulation Won't Work This Time:
Obama's programs have been so far-reaching and fundamental that any compromise would leave the nation far to the left of where it's always been and wants to be. When he took office, government (federal, state and local combined) controlled 35 percent of the US economy -- 15th among the two-dozen advanced countries. Now, it controls 44.7 percent, ranking us 7th, ahead of Germany and Britain. So where's the compromise -- leave government in control of, say, 40 percent?
Thursday, November 4. 2010
 The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, - The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
- Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
- Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
- Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
- Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
- And seeing that it was a soft October night,
- Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
-
- And indeed there will be time
- For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
- Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
- There will be time, there will be time
- To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
- There will be time to murder and create,
- And time for all the works and days of hands
- That lift and drop a question on your plate;
- Time for you and time for me,
- And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
- And for a hundred visions and revisions,
- Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Toast and tea, we used to figger, was the final Communion - Brit-style.
When I was in high school, we all memorized Prufrock. Not because we had to, but because we liked to. As I always say, I define poetry as any writing which contains an inevitability of versification, with some coherence of imagery. Poetry is song-writing. I wish we had recordings of Kipling singing his poems. It would be a hoot, I am sure.
(We memorized things competitively when I was in high school. Shakespeare sonnets and soliloquies, lists of Chem equations and math theorems, Civil War dates and other historical dates. From all that I use 1569 today as one of my main ID codes (Shakespeare's birth year). Sophocles. Ozymandius. Kipling. Le Bateau Ivre. Paradise Lost. We had an official annual school tournament to see who could memorize the most lines of the opening of the Iliad, and another with the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in the original good Old English. Many folks would do 100-200 lines without faltering. The kids taking Latin, of course, had their famous and traditional speed declension contests. I even remember memorizing Babi Yar in Russian for kicks - and I spoke no Russian. It just sounded cool, imitating Yevtushenko's voice. Our hockey team specialized in the Iliad contest - somebody on the team always won. Our hockey coach also taught Ancient Greek. It was a point of honor for the team. A good high school, good fun. I hope high school kids still do amusing things like this. God knows what kids learn in college.)
From an excellent piece on Eliot at Commentary, T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture:
Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot�s career strikes one today, at time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.
The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on �The Function of Criticism� in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people.
Read the whole thing. Eliot was a bank teller, of course - and a rock star. Still is a rock star, in my book. His stuff sticks like Velcro. Christ was his rock.
 Big lies, small lies, creative and manipulative "narratives," etc. are what much of politics is all about. We know that politics is a more humane substitute for war.
(We also know that, as virtuous souls, Conservatives always hold the high moral ground. Always.)
That aside, I am still puzzled by the shorthand of "Left" and "Right." It makes no real sense, as Wiki explains well.
If today people use those words nowadays to signify collectivism vs. individualism and freedom, why don't we use those words instead?
Jonah Goldberg notably dealt with these issues in his Liberal Fascism.
OK, but what about Adolf Hitler? Left or Right? This via Doug Ross:
"I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun...I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order." -- Hitler to Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, pg. 186
I found another one, too:
"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." Adolph Hitler, 1933.
Yes, he was just another messianic Leftist dictator with a zealous faith in governmental benevolence and altruism - at gunpoint. Just one amongst the number of Socialist mass-murderers of the 20th Century. I think Hitler would have argued against being part of any "Right."
Statist, collectivist people should be called that - or just called Socialist. People like me can be termed Constitutional-Conservatives-with-a-broad-Libertarian-streak. I guess it's no wonder people look for a shorthand for that, but "Right" doesn't fit.
So claims Ruffini. It makes sense to me. We're a center-right country, overall (except in my corner of it). A quote:
The act of yelling "realignment" after an election is getting tired and farcical after an unprecedented third wave in a row, so I'll resist doing it here. In the House, there was a tactical realignment, as seats Democrats held for personal reasons now give way to natural conservative Republican-held strongholds we'll hold for a long time. Attitudinally, the pendulum simply swung from the far left to the center. The President will be a Democrat, the Senate will be narrowly Democratic, and the House Republican, and the overall result will be all sides canceling each other out, e.g. centrism.
While not conservative per se, it is in one important sense: very little will get done. And that's a good thing.
Yep. The less they do to us, the better.
This one of my Sugar Maples is always bright orange in the autumn. Most of my others are always yellow, and some are in between. It's a mystery.
A spanking is what was administered to the Dems on Tuesday, minus (or not) the fun sado-masochistic eroticism. (Don't ever try to tell me that you've never had kinky thoughts.) Pic is from Vintage Spanking.
Still strange in CT - who won?
First they came for my Happy Meals...
"Soft tyranny"
TNR: The Gates Foundation's Delusional Techno-Messianism
GOP sweeps FL, wins Maine (!) governorship
Wins keep coming in
Harsanyi:
No matter what happens, for now, we can look forward to two glorious years of hyper-partisan acrimonious gridlock: Washington's most moral and productive state.
Gridlock is good.
Wherein Ace gets a taste of Politics 101
Opinion: Why Are Voters Only 'Angry' When They're Tossing Dems Out?
Well, who says it?
SDA: Bits you might have missed
Including Alabama
North Carolina: The strangest beast in all of politics
NRO: New York Wrap
As hopeless as CA
How did Harry Reid do it?
He won ugly.
Podhoretz: No time to celebrate- GOP remarkably sober at win
Us, too.
VDH on the O's press conf:
Obama was elected largely because of public furor over Bush/Iraq. The fawning media hid his socialist background. He ran as a centrist. The Wall Street meltdown wiped away the small McCain/Palin lead. Obama in his hubris took that flukish set of events and reinvented them into proof that he could deliver to the left a once-in-a-century EU-style socialist makeover of America. That effort polarized the country, stalled the recovery, and terrified the private sector into stasis. Obama, who was always himself given something (take your pick—Harvard admission, Harvard Law Review billet, Chicago Law School tenure offer, Noble Peace Prize, etc.) without requisite achievement, is thus stunned that the economy is not an animate Law dean whom he can hope and change into compliance. So naturally he is angry and has turned to almost everything in the past that worked: the race card, the get-out-the-minority vote card, the enemy Republican bad actors, the greedy rich takers, etc.. But now none of the old “them” bogeymen work; the more that tactic is tried, the more the economy stalls and the people get angry. It’s that simple. He can talk all he wishes, but until he offers fiscal responsibility, private sector encouragement, reassurance of adhering to singular American capitalism, and pro-jobs tax policies, he will continue more of these Orwellian, thinking-out-loud press conferences.
Wednesday, November 3. 2010
I love this stuff, testing your boat-handling skills against serious seas. I always loved to take my 23' cuddy cabin Sea Ox out after storms and hurricanes, for practice. The big following seas are the ones that frighten me. (h/t, Theo):
Image above stolen from Surber
Fred Barnes: The Republican Landslide
Wehner: Obama after the fall
Strange.
China's Christians: China could not silence 200 empty chairs in Capetown
Summary of governor's races.
CT's Tom Foley lost, by a Bridgeport.
Some Liberals Still Head Over Heels In Love With Obama
Being in love with a politician is a perversion.
Krauthammer: 'Obama Agenda is Dead,' 'He Tried a 2-Year Experiment in Hyper-Liberalism and the Country Has said No'. (Here's the good video)
Powerline: The trouble with California
Hopeless.
More attacks in Bagdad: Sunni vs. Shiite
Yes, they are mad about Gitmo and American Imperialism. Gotta bomb somebody, for Pete's sake, or your life will have no meaning.
Michelle: Moonbeam wins weirdest victory speech award
Sure sounds stoned. California is in good hands.
The Wrong Sort of Scepticism is a Crime against Humanity Says Penn State Prof
Sheesh. I'm a criminal against humanity. Shame on me.
Here. It affects the Congressional race and the Governor's race.
It's lawyer time.
My two cents are to echo Marco Rubio:
"We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party," said incoming Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. A rising GOP star, Rubio seized his new role as a party leader and potential presidential candidate, casting the results as "a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago."
Similar from Jay Cost:
This is not an endorsement of the Republican party, but much more of a rejection of the Democratic party, specifically the claims the Democrats have made since 1996 to be broad in its appeal and moderate in its policies.
Democrats built a congressional majority in 2006 and 2008 by persuading Bush voters to cross the aisle to support them, with an implicit promise of bipartisanship and moderation. The party under Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi did not deliver on that promise -- and thus they lost the support of these Republican-leaning districts.
Related, how does somebody please all the independent voters?
... for all the decisiveness of the independents' shift, this election hasn't resolved the most fundamental question facing the country: What should the role of government be in the 21st century?
Instead it has simply set up what figures to be a two-year debate over that question in Washington, and ensures that it will be a focal point of the 2012 election.
Thanks to independents—along with other crucial swing blocs, such as suburban women, blue-collar workers and retirees, all of whom also shifted toward the Republicans—the GOP now has the strength to stop pieces of the Obama agenda and, perhaps in some instances, roll it back.
Iraq and Afghanistan played little roles in the 2010 elections. However, President Obama will likely pay a price in 2012 for the withdrawal of US armed forces from Iraq. The Iraqis are already paying the price. The AP's Robert Burns reports:
The Obama administration could be overstating what U.S. diplomats can do to contain Iraq's ethnic and sectarian tensions without U.S. military forces, a State Department audit concluded Tuesday, raising fresh concerns about the planned pullout of American troops next year.
The auditors also questioned whether American diplomats who remain behind will be adequately protected against insurgent violence, and their report faulted Washington for its planning of the transition from a U.S. military-led mission in Iraq to one run by American civilians in 2011.
The audit's findings echo worries expressed by some U.S. defense analysts and former diplomats. They say hard-won security gains in Iraq could crumble if U.S. forces leave on schedule….
The report said the first six months of 2012 are likely to be "especially dangerous as extremists test U.S. resolve and Iraqi security forces' capabilities." It questioned whether the U.S. can meet President Barack Obama's goal of ensuring a safe work environment for remaining U.S. personnel in Iraq in 2012. "Security risks are expected to increase," the report said.
Brown over Whitman for governor and Boxer over Fiorina for US senator clearly mark the Democrat registration edge in California. To be charitable, it also marks the difficulty of a statewide Republican holding the base while appealing to other less conservative voters. To be less charitable, Whitman and Fiorina failed to connect emotionally with enough California voters, most often mouthing lackluster clichés that didn’t echo while allowing their opponents to paint them as self-serving corporate plutocrats. Also, the legacy of disappointment left by the Quibbleator governor weighed upon many voters trust of more promises from Republicans Whitman and Fiorina.
Continue reading "California Chooses No New Democrat Taxes"
Ohio returned to its Republican roots yesterday. It's the Heartland.
That's a decent excuse to post one more of my Ohio pics from 2 weeks ago - the new Paul Newman Field House at Kenyon College. Fantastic for such a tiny college. Kenyon is strong in swimming.
The story is that alumnus Newman offered Kenyon a blank check for new theater and auditorium facilities. Kenyon said "Thanks - but we're good with the old stuff we have." So Newman asked "Well, then what can I do?"
 Pic is Kristi Noem, gun-totin' Conservative who happily won in South Dakota.
Many races I feel good about (like Allen West and Dan webster in FL, Toomey in PA, etc), many I feel badly about (like Debicella losing in CT with a 50-50 result, and Sean Bielat's spanking by the horrible Barney). Angle was a lousy candidate, and it will be good fun to have Dingy Harry to kick around again. Summary of votes at RCP.
I enjoyed this from Gateway:
Racist, sexist teabaggers have elected Marco Rubio, Susanna Martinez, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Bill Flores, Allen West, and...
Still, Eugene Robinson says it's about race and Obama.
Pitiful.
From Chantrill:
In the end, of course, it doesn't matter whether President Obama is a socialist, a crypto-socialist or a liberal. From the point of view of the ordinary American it's a distinction without a difference. Faced with a problem, President Obama will always opt for a solution that makes government bigger and Americans smaller.
Unfortunately for the president and his grand plan to transform America, the majority of the American people believe that the solution to our problems is to make the American people bigger and the government smaller.
Former President Bill Clinton - who presided over his own first-term electoral catastrophe in 1994 and is thus something of an expert on Republican landslide wins - denied this election is a referendum on the Obama agenda. "It. Is. A. Choice," he said. "A choice between two different sets of ideas." Well, obviously it's a choice; the people are simply choosing to reject the Democrats' ideas. Mr. Obama quipped, "The big difference here and in '94 was you've got me" - a point on which all sides can agree.
More misc. links later if I can find time to clean up my tabs...
My greatest disappointment was Barney Frank's easy defeat of Sean Bielat. I don't get it. I do notice, however, that the Maine legislature has flipped to Repub. That is remarkable.
Otherwise, this important warning at Pajamas - What Republicans Need to Do Now, subtitled If Republicans avoid over-estimating what this victory means and focus on the business of the American people, the gains of 2010 can be the beginning of a conservative resurgence:
Victorious Republicans should enjoy their election victory, but they should also understand it does not mean that the American people have bought wholesale into conservative political philosophy, as is so tempting to believe after a big election.
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