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.
Give us more power because we understand the world better than you do, was the message. We are so smart, so well-credentialed, so careful to read all the best papers by all the certified experts that the recommendations we make and the regulations we write, however outlandish and burdensome they look to all you non-experts out there, are certain to work. Trust us because we are always right, and only fools and charlatans would be so stupid as to disagree.
My Dad, who has had a few surgeries, feels the same way. The point is, I think, that the US doesn't have a planned system. No PhD planner is smart enough to know, understand, or meet, every person's needs and wants. Plans and models never work out according to plan, in real life.
In his first two years, the president convinced many millions of Americans that he wants to make the U.S. more like European welfare states. The American people hate the very idea, and they simply rebelled.
The co-chairmen of President Barack Obama’s debt-reduction commission will propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, as well as reductions in income tax rates in exchange for curbing tax breaks, according to a Republican aide who attended the meeting.
With protection, the Griz populations of Yellowstone and parts of the Front Range have slowly grown, naturally leading to more encounters with humans.
Nobody in the 1800s would go out playing in Griz Country without a firearm.
Grizzlies are not predatory carnivores, but they are mainly opportunistic carnivores, meaning that, if they find a dead, injured, weak or newborn mammal, they will be happy to eat it. Their main foods are grasses, sedges, roots, berries, fish, ants and bugs, etc. They aren't hunters.
Generally, Grizzlies try to stay away from people - unless the people are camping with bacon on the griddle or have other tasty food - bear bait - around the camp.
In Yellowstone, there have been recent incidents of Griz maulings of people. Perhaps many visitors to Yellowstone have a romantic and edenic vision of nature. I have been in Griz Country, and I would never camp in it. I figure that, to a Griz, a human is not much different from a helpless newborn Moose or Elk.
Furthermore, I'd be more comfortable either on a horse or well-armed - preferably both.
Unlike this commenter, I do not think we should kill all the bears. I think we should simply teach people who want to explore wilderness to be prepared for it and to understand the risks. Woodcraft. Same thing with rattlesnake country. Same thing as mountain-climbing. People die.
Considering that the traditional system of near-lifetime employment, degree- and salary-based pay scales and seniority privileges have done little to improve the nation's woeful public schools or attract talented people into teaching, the NEA and AFT will have difficulty defending the status quo.
Unionization is an insidious thing. It trades security for spirit and heart, changes opportunity and a sense of service into time-serving drudgery. In a rougher era, they were needed. They are obsolete now, and dying a slow death - except for the government employee unions. I blame the supposedly-sainted JFK for that dumb move.
New study says sex is complicated. (h/t, Hot Air). Seems to me that it is, and it isn't. Eating is complicated too, if you want to think of it as complicated.
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?
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.
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.
...the sheer ferocity of the campaign suggests that all sides see it as a Rubicon, which once crossed means that more is to follow. Perhaps nobody sees 2010 as an end, only as the beginning of a very fundamental struggle.
The proximate cause of the conflict, even though he is ultimately not its basic antecedent, is the president. The Washington Post calls Barack Obama the divider-in-chief. He didn’t create the fence; he simply made it impossible to straddle it. The president has made it necessary to choose political sides. In a way, Barack Obama has done more than any recent president to cast the issues starkly.
It has been made clear as day to voters that a vote for a national Dem is a vote for a Leftist agenda.
Not only is Krugman’s article one of the most ridiculous pieces of scare-mongering in the history of modern American journalism, but it is the pathetic whimper of a decaying liberal Ancien Regime that is spectacularly crumbling.
Rather than paring down what they owe, millions of consumers have simply stopped paying the bills, forcing banks to write off hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages and credit card debts as uncollectible.
People aren't paying down their debt: they are running way from it. A bad idea, if yu care about your credit rating.
Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
...the Democrats have the support of more, and more active, billionaires. Of the 20 richest ZIP codes in America, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of their money to Democrats in the last election, in most cases the vast bulk - 86 percent in 10024 on the Upper West Side. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of non-high-school educated white males are happy with the direction the country is going in. The Democrats' overlap with elites leaves each party with a distinctive liability. The Democrats appear sincerely deluded about whom they actually represent. Democrats - who would have no trouble discerning elite solidarity in the datum that, say, in the 1930s the upper ranks of Britain's media, church, business and political institutions were dominated by Tories - somehow think their own predominance in similar precincts is ... what? Coincidence? Irony?
Nancy Pelosi may lose her gavel, and Harry Reid might well lose his Senate seat, but the damage is done: The entitlement state progresses sometimes by fits, and other times by bounds. But the appetite to spend other peoples’ money on well-intentioned schemes is never sated, and the “progress” thus engendered never seems to unwind.
I think everybody knew that, but the Dems refused to admit it until now. I think Obamacare needs to be destroyed, and re-thought. Reforms are needed:
1. tort reform (half of what docs and hospitals do these days is to avoid lawsuits) 2. some sort of coverage reforms for the uninsurable 3. legalizing interstate sales of medical insurance: free markets and free choice of plans and options 4. expansion of medical savings plans 5. some sort of support for the return of Major Medical insurance instead of insurances that cover every flu and bug bite 6. portability of insurance plans 7. adjust Medicare reimbursement by income and assets
...isn't the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn't the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama's ethos of bad faith? Aren't tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn't racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn't this just more bad faith�characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?
Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government.
Reason: The Eternal Return of Overpopulation. Well, I believe that there are too many people on the planet. Too many for what? That's a long answer, but let's just say for now that they are putting mini-mansions on some of the grouse coverts I grew up hunting.
Culture of entitlement: French strike to save 'birthright' of privileges. How are hand-outs "privileges"? These people have no work ethic, and are still acting like disgruntled peasants instead of free people.
Here Obama has spent two years bestowing upon the peasantry the "New Foundation" of a more regulated, socially engineered and therefore more humane society, and they repay him with recalcitrance and outright opposition. Here he gave them Obamacare, the stimulus, financial regulation and a shot at cap-and-trade -- and the electorate remains not just unmoved but ungrateful.
Faced with this truly puzzling conundrum, Dr. Obama diagnoses a heretofore undiscovered psychological derangement: anxiety-induced Obama Underappreciation Syndrome, wherein an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the "facts and science" undergirding Obamacare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high.
OK, Obama thinks that I am mentally disturbed. Of course I am. At least he didn't call me racist.
With protection, the Griz populations of Yellowstone and parts of the Front Range have slowly grown, naturally leading to more encounters with humans. 
My greatest disappointment was Barney Frank's easy defeat of Sean Bielat. I don't get it. I do notice, however, that 
