Maggie's Farm

From 1989's Oh Mercy album (lyrics here):

Always late. Busy with what? We all know that being a Senator is not like a real job, but they all like to feel important, and chronic lateness tends to be an effort to convey that message. Whether or not you like Obama, this is entertaining:

Koshiro, 1954. From the Modern Japanese Print show at the Art Institute of Chicago:

Is Rick right or wrong about this? I have no idea. I think this is Rick's best, and perhaps most optimistic guess. A quote:

Obama does not seek to overturn America as much as he wants to alter the parameters of the social contract between the people and the government. He doesn’t want to do away with this compact and replace it with something else. He wants to nibble around the edges and “reform” the way that the American people interact with their government. This means more dependence, less freedom of action for the individual, an imposed sense of “community,” more strictures on the economy, and a war against “greed.”

This may seem radical enough to many. And indeed, with a Democratic Congress more ideologically in tune with the radicals, it is possible that they will push him further to the left than he wishes to go. But whatever occurs, there is little doubt that if he wins, it will be a triumph for the New Left and a reward for their patient undermining of the American experiment for more than 40 years.

I think Rick is saying that Obama probably wants to extend the Roosevelt statist, 1930s-style revolution. That's what Hillary had in mind too, with her "politics of meaning" which she fantasized might replace religion - but she knew a thing or two about economics because she really liked money, and this fellow appears to know nothing about economics. On the other hand, for a guy who has never had a real job he's got lots of cash in the bank...funny how wealthy the Lefty pols always seem to be, but "they care" - especially after they get theirs.

Read the whole thing. I'd be interested in our readers' reactions.

h/t, Theo:

From Mark Steyn's The Dog is about to Catch the Car:

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the "Now what?" questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and U.N. foreign policy.

Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a "point of no return," the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don't want it, vote accordingly.

Yes, it's an appeal to our weakest, most cowardly and pitiful instincts.

One quote from Obama on the Constitution:

(It )"says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”

The community organizing? Are you joking? More at Surber. I do not think that he understands the concept of freedom at all. That concerns me. I think the Constitution is quite clear about the role, and mainly the limits of the Federal government. They knew all about power-seeking. It's one of the things that makes us unique.

From Glenn Beck, via And Rightly So:

The North Canaan, CT Congregational Church

Psalm 16

Quoted from a Megan McArdle piece:

This brings me to a pet peeve that has been increasingly irritating me as the crisis wears on: people with little or no understanding of markets confidently opining on the causes of the crisis.  Funnily enough, the cause of the crisis is always exactly what they happened to be against before the crisis happened, and the solution is for the people they disagree with to be banned from polite society and exiled from the political process.

What is most infuriating is that the people who know the least are the most confident about their appraisals.  Anyone with any sort of expertise in the field knows that no one understands this crisis very well.  Economists all over the ideological spectrum are rethinking the lessons we thought we had learned from the Great Depression and the Japanese experience.  As it unfolds, we will no doubt be seriously rethinking our model of the relationship between the financial markets and the real economy.

The problem is, ignorant people who have somehow gotten hold of one or two precious facts, and brandish those facts like a mighty Sword of Truth, are superficially convincing.  They are convincing because they misunderstand the situation in, well, the way that ignorant people misunderstand it.  The stories they concoct are therefore very convincing to the ignorant, except those who have an ideological predisposition to doubt their story.  Those ignorant people are busy listening to some other huckster peddling financial snake oil.

No one who did not know what a CDO was before the crisis should be opining as to the causes or the possible solutions.  And anyone who tells you that they understand exactly why this happened, why we got this crisis instead of the dollar crisis we were expecting, and what kind of regulations will unquestionably fix it, is definitionally too ignorant to be opening their mouth.

I would like to go, unless Dem taxes prevent me from ever going anywhere again. These islands were Scandinavian until relatively recently.

Photo by Will Self of the Brough of Mousa, a remarkably well-preserved Iron Age dwelling. More like a fortress. I'd guess it had a thatched roof on top.

It is especially interesting to me because I am halfway through Francis Pryor's Britain BC. Do not read Pryor's book unless you want a ton of detail about prehistoric Britain. My sense is that pre-Neolithic, ie pre-agricultural man lived pretty much the same way everywhere on the planet, digging roots and picking nuts and killing stuff - including each other. Likely eating each other too.

During most of that late-glacial history, Britain was connected to the Continent, with what is now the southern part of the North Sea being a giant marshy plain full of reindeer, elk, horses, pig, auroch, moose, beaver, and deer. (There are tons of prehistoric artifacts sitting in the now-undersea peat.)

The Neolithic history is more interesting, and everything post-Neolithic isn't too much different from today except technologically.

This ad is not from the McCain campaign (h/t, Gateway, who thinks it needs to be sent around.) I pretty much agree with it. Yes, it is Christian - and so am I:

From the WSJ, another bubble bursts. A good thing for all, but only in the long run. Nasty in the short run. If you want stocks to only go up and up and up, you should not buy them. (link fixed)

The upside is that good things are relatively cheap, now. But the "Are you better off..." thing doesn't work right now politically, when bubbles are finally popping.

Newt says it all, re Palin (h/t, Gateway):

Here's the world's most remarkable yacht, The Maltese Falcon, in San Francisco Bay with Angel Island on fire in the background.

We tracked down the photographer: he is George Dapsevicius. Kudos to him.

A low-down blues from Love and Theft (2001). Was it really that long ago? Audio:

I am told that Krauthammer made the interesting point on TV last night that the intensity of the hatred for Sarah Palin from women has little or nothing to do with her personality.

He said it's because she, as a lovely and feminine mid-40s woman with a litter of kids including one with Down, a cool masculine Eskimo hubby, and a stunningly-successful Governorship, stands as a reproach to the complaining and whining class of American  women: a reproach to the cult of victimology and a reproach to the abortion fetishists. (Plus she's just too happy about life and her country, and intelligent, sophisticated folks aren't supposed to be happy about things.)

A reasonable person might have expected her candidacy to be a source of pride and pleasure for those women. I promise you that, if she had a "D" after her name, she would be a MSM heroine. Colorful and exotic. The Dems would find a way to make her "Josephine Sixpack" - "The fresh voice of the American worker from the American Frontier." Anybody who criticized her would be slammed as "classist" or "intellectual snob" or "an elitist out of touch with real Americans." And they would, no doubt, remind you that she runs a $6 billion budget and 26,000 employees and plays hardball with the oil companies. Nobody else running has ever done anything like that.

Something similar applies to Obama. Clearly his race (What is his race? I guess I mean his skin color) is a source of fascination to the MSM, Leftists, and black voters. However, black Repubs have had little success in elections with black voters, including Repub stars like Michael Steele in Maryland. That is why Obama is not detested by black Americans as a reproach to their victimology and resentment (although he was seen that way at first, most notably by Jesse Jackson who expressed the tolerant opinion that Obama "was too white" implying that his success served to discredit, and to alienate him from, grievance-seeking blacks).

Had Obama been a celebrity "R" preaching freedom and opportunity, how far would he have gotten? Would he have given Chris Matthews a thrill up his thing thigh?

I suppose my point is that, for the MSM and the left, race and gender are only a big deal when they are combined with that magic "D."