Maggie's Farm

The meaning of Prof. Lewis' resignation from the APS, at Pajamas:

Professor Lewis’s action — resignation from a scientific organization that had counted him among its most respected members, based on the perception that they no longer support “good science” over political expediency — is earth-shaking, even if so far in only a small way. But earthquakes are funny — a few small earthquakes can weaken an edifice, through repeated cracks, as thoroughly as one big earthquake.

Professor Lewis’s resignation is another sign that the foundation of certainty about anthropogenic, carbon-dioxide forced, global warming is showing cracks that suggest the weakness of the whole structure.

Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in the South (I thought ex-Presidents traditionally stayed out of active partisan politics. How come nobody talks about that?):

He warned voters, “You are being played,” and urged people to cast ballots with their economic self interest in mind.

What? Not America's best interests? He's telling us to vote our personal self-interest. Good grief.

I agree with Am Thinker that Emery's Weekly Standard piece about the new American rebellion is clear and to the point. The NYT editorial board ought to read it. It begins thus:

A few years ago, you met a dark, handsome stranger, with a cool, remote manner and a smooth line of talk. You didn’t know him well, but he had a certain je ne sais quoi that you found irresistible. He was yourself, only better; yourself, only cooler; yourself, as you were in your dreams. You were a long-suffering liberal Democrat, and he was your airbrushed fantasy president come to life: FDR without polio, JFK without women, John Kerry with brains, Al Gore with charisma, Bill Clinton without those cringe-making vibes from Hot Springs. You swooned and you sighed, you got him elected, and you settled in to see how great life could be with someone like you in the Oval Office. And then things began to go wrong.

Via Coyote, spoken by a WVa congressman:

“Climate change — to deny it exists, to just put your head in the sand and, ‘oh no, it doesn’t exist, what are you talking about,’ is about like standing on the floor of Macy’s during the month of December and claiming Santa Claus doesn’t exist."

Exactly.

Barone: The Democratic 'D' Now Stands for Demagoguery

If we tried to start The Home Depot today, it's a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground.

Peter Wehner on the discontent in the White House

The Texas Model: Texas created half the news jobs in the US last year. How?

Government Regulation of the Economy Is the ‘Silent Killer’

Neither of these seems too swift to me, but Reid lost the debate to Angle

Private Health Insurance Will Be Dead in 3 Years

People aren't spending  money

Roger Simon: Is California Insane? A quote:

It is a depressed place made up of terrified people, clinging to the solutions of another era. The idea that the electorate could even consider electing Jerry Brown in 2010 attests to that. At least you can understand the union workers — who are desperate to maintain their unsustainable pensions — supporting him, but the rest of the populace? You are dealing with a form of habituation so deep reality has no place in the equation.

California now is the state of the childishly threatened.

It's difficult for anybody to keep up with the most current correct views on homosexuality

The French really do not like to work. It's much more fun to protest, meet chicks, drink wine, etc.

Nanny Bloomberg and the truth about second-hand smoke. (It is harmless.)

Mankiw: Barney Frank, Then and Now

Iowahawk: Beltway Adventure. Wonderful.

From Dick Morris:

The single most amazing thing in this year’s campaigns is that no one is defending President Obama’s legislative accomplishments.

Obama’s impact has been revolutionary: radically changing our health-care system, betting our national solvency on “stimulus,” erasing the line between the public and private sectors. Yet there is an almost total lack of support for his program on the stump.

1. Obama has compiled a remarkable track record.

2. A Vanderleun political rant

Jerry Brown claims we need fewer jobs and more welfare. If jobs are bad, why is he trying to get a job as governor?

Often, these days, reading the news threatens my sense of reality. Consensual reality just is not what it used to be.

Today, jobless benefits applications rise.

I cannot recommend this video interview more highly. It's a real treat and worth your time, via Powerline.

If I were Prez, I'd ask him to be my historical advisor. (Why don't presidents have Historical Advisors?) 

Money quote: "Decline is a choice."

"If the law is against you, bang on the facts. If the facts are against you, bang on the law. If both are against you, bang on the table."

The Chamber of Commerce does seem to be an unlikely demon. Schieffer asks "Is this the best you can do?"

Whose violent words? Not the Tea Party. Not Conservatives (via Gateway).

** Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun”
** Obama to His Followers: “Get in Their Faces!”
** Obama on ACORN Mobs: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!”
** Obama to His Mercenary Army: “Hit Back Twice As Hard”
** Obama on the private sector: “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.“

I have yet to hear anything close to this inciting from the evil Tea Partiers. This Tea Party sympathiser is planning to do some Right Wing violence this weekend though: I am going fishing, up around Montauk. Blood sport, and the freshest Striper sushi.

Slice of cucumber, piece of watercress, slice of wiggling Striper right out of the water, a generous slice of pickled ginger, and some wasabi. Maybe the slightest dip in the Teriyaki, and a few Coronas with lime. We'll be well-fed when we come back to the dock, and will have one filet to grill for supper plus a couple of Bluefish filets. We never keep more than one Striper. That is, of course, if we are lucky to get into fish this weekend.

Otherwise, it's the fish market. This is our final boating of the year.

Alan Greenspan cites fear as the cause for the non-recovery. It's fear mainly of the consequences of government actions. From what I see and hear, that seems right.

Money will sit dormant on the sidelines until people know what is coming next. No new investment means no jobs.

Good ad.

It's the F List. Some Duke fellows are surely profoundly humiliated by this, but if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Drunken frat boys have made these rating lists for many years about gals, so why not a chick? It's good satire, despite being true. I guess she is a modern woman.

My college experience was nothing like that. I had to study too hard and too long to do well, and having two adorable little sisters made it impossible for me to view gals as pieces of meat. (I remember predator guys referring to the new freshman gals as "the freshmeat.")

I think I am more lascivious now than I was then, but I am meeting independent, grown women, not goofy college girls.

From the story:

Cute gals can get it any time they want to study the subject. Not so easy for us guys, despite reports of all the desperately horny women out there. Many of them have standards: there's the rub.

The Left is unhinged by the Tea Party partly because they’ve never seen you before. And this isn’t limited to Leftists who are presently, you know, alive.

He makes a good point about the "de-closeting" of Conservatives. Until the last decade, they have mostly been living in the shadows. Now they are out and they are proud.

What's new about a black market in sperm? Human sperm has been cheerfully donated or sold for a few hundred thousand years, hasn't it? Best way to deliver it is in person, but lawsuits are the problem. I expect at least a nice dinner- and maybe a show - in exchange for my sperm donation. My stuff is in high demand because I am tall, dark, handsome, and smart, I like to have fun, and my sperm injector works fairly well most of the time except when I am nervous.

P. J. O'Rourke: The Virtue of Sharing

Noonan: The Twister of 2010.  Riehl says it's not a twister - it's climate change. I think it's "too late."

Caring: Global Work Party Day on 10/10/2010: come up with your own event. Pretend that you "make a difference." It's easy and fun, it makes you feel good, and you might get a date out of it.

Somebody is buying something: Another Record Week for Intermodal Rail Traffic

Krauthammer: Why Is He Sending Them? President Obama lacks the will to fight in Afghanistan. For the Left, America's only enemies are American Conservatives.

Via Insty, The Khmer Rouge: They Did It Because They Were Communists

Maybe the TARP wasn't such a bad idea: AIG plans asset sale to repay bailout

Hennessey says the Prez gets it re the housing mess

Reason: School Money Math Never Adds Up Quite Right

Business 101 — outsourcing. The government forces it on us, if we want to stay in business.

Norwegian Publisher Cancels Biography of Muhammed. We term that "chickenshit." Plenty of interesting bios of Jesus have been written, and nobody minds. Jesus was the original rebel against PC.

A prediction that the O will make a left turn. He does want to be "transformational." He is a true believer. He will never adjust to reality.

Insty via Reb: THE HORROR: “Is there anything more frightening than seas of grandmothers waving American flags and singing ‘patriotic’ songs? I don’t think so.”  Patriotic grannies really scare me.

Greta Destroys Lib Hack Gloria Allred: “Gloria, This Is Almost Delusional”

From Wkly Std: The Obamacare Follies - Don’t let Obamacare reach its third birthday:

Obamacare is less popular than it was on the day it was born, and it wasn’t popular then, either. Practically the only Democrats who mention the law in campaign ads are those who brag about voting against it. Large numbers of Americans, including a majority of independents, would like to see the law repealed. No wonder the pro-repeal GOP maintains an edge in the congressional generic ballot. As much as the public continues to distrust Republicans, it understands that the first step in undoing this harmful law is giving John Boehner the speaker’s gavel.

Powerline:

I would argue that we have carried out a laboratory experiment, and have conclusively proved that more money is not the cure for whatever ails the education system.

Everybody knows that it's not about money. Lots of factors, but that's the least of them.

To me, this graph demonstrates the remarkable success of the teachers' unions in creating a gigantic black hole.

An excerpt from the book, at NRO. Quite entertaining, clever and, I think true. A quote:

Principles are what counts. So stop trying to outdo us by rushing to the microphones with a silly plan to solve every social ill this side of halitosis whenever our pet frogs in the media croak about a new “crisis” in the daily news feed. In fact, forget about programs completely. Just say no! And if we call you out and demand to know — which we will, you can bet on that, it’s part of the playbook — the details of your “plan,” laugh and tell them to shove it and start talking about principles.

To do otherwise is to accept our premises, which means you have already lost. Instead, stick to the big picture: liberty, self- reliance, faith, freedom. Those concepts are to us like a crucifix to a vampire, but heed not our squeals. Instead, keep brandishing your integrity and have the satisfaction of watching us collapse, writhing, on the floor into a puddle of putrescent malefaction, just like Christopher Lee in all those great Hammer movies.

From Charles Kesler's The Stakes of Obamacare:

Judged by his own standards, however, Obama has good reason to take pride in his record. For his presidency already has accomplished a historic transformation of American government. Thanks to his victories on the bailouts, health care, and financial regulation, government's size, cost, and agenda have swelled enormously and are set to expand further over the long term. Obamacare may be controversial, but it's the law now. He's succeeded in what many liberal commentators and politicians, and most conservatives, too, thought impossible—launching a fourth wave of liberal social reform, adding to the storied legislative accomplishments of the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

and

Among its other effects, this act marks a new stage in the decline of constitutional government in America. One sign of this was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's remark, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." After shepherding the equally massive financial regulation bill into law, Senator Christopher Dodd was moved to say something very similar: "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works." In late August, Senator Max Baucus, Finance Committee chairman, chimed in: "I don't think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill....We hire experts." These statements make both an epistemological and a political point. The first is that these bills are so long, complicated, and unreadable that no one who isn't an expert can possibly decipher them. That implies, in turn, that no amount or quality of democratic deliberation can clarify them to citizens, and in most cases to legislators, in advance. Indeed, Pelosi suggests that political debate itself, "controversy," mostly dims public understanding by generating "fog." The second point is that neither she nor Dodd nor Baucus is especially troubled by this breakdown in democratic accountability. With this kind of legislation, they imply, there's no choice but to trust the experts—not merely those who patch the law together, but perhaps more importantly those who implement it. For the truth is that this kind of bill, almost 3,000 pages long, will mean what the bureaucrats say it means.

Or if one wants to be generous, this kind of bill will mean what the bureaucrats, in conjunction or conspiracy with their congressional overseers, say it means. In short, these bills are not so much laws as administrative to-do lists. They are contrivances fit only for the modern liberal state, ambitious to regulate all local and state affairs from the center, which means through a bureaucracy of experts or so-called experts. The result is not a government of laws but of men, albeit men who think themselves wise.

Read the whole thing. It is clear that the Dems were and are willing to risk losing any or all control in Congress in exchange for getting this done. As Kesler says, they are playing the long game, and this version is just a beginning. It's meant to fail, and they will rescue it with their next step. If they had been more clever and had chosen a less circuitous route, they would have simply planned on Medicare For All. People love their Medicare.

It's worth losing a battle or two to win a war. For the Left, it is war and they really don't mind the short-term sacrifice of some pawns and a bishop this November. It's just a predictable bump on the road to utopia, and I do not think they really care too much about it. They already have the golden fleece: our bodies.

This is based on a true story from the Univ of Illinois. h/t, Phi Beta Cons -

The UK's Standpoint on Glenn Beck:

We scoff at America and its media and especially its talk-shows, perhaps rightly so. But can one imagine The Road to Serfdom on Richard and Judy (or on Newsnight, come to that), or A Patriot's History of Britain anywhere? From where I stand, one American "shock jock" is doing as much for public education in politics and history as all the BBC's networks put together.

I would not term Glenn a "shock jock" unless basic, grade-school history is shocking. But maybe it is, and maybe it should be shocking. America was meant to be a shockingly new kind of thing.

A good analysis by Keith Hennessey.

Speaking of unforced errors, Segway inventor drives self off cliff. Sheesh.