Maggie's Farm

Counterfeit Cubans, from JR. Nicaraguan. Mine just arrived today, and I just smoked one. Cheap, legal in the US, and plenty tasty as a medium-strength everyday smoke with a hearty earthy tanginess. I am told that those Sumatran wrappers were grown from Connecticut seed. I can't say they are as good as a good Habanos, but quite enjoyable for the price. Perfect for this Obama economy.

Why does the O smoke cigarettes instead of cigars, anyway? Who does he think he is? FDR?

Via View from 1776:

I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions.  They are always trying to make things better.  In doing so, they victimize many.  When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low.  Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control.  All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock.  The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc.  All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”.  Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.

Redstate:

The country is not in danger of ObamaCare passing via reconciliation.

The country is, however, in danger from politically desperate and irrational leaders who are intent on the political equivalent of self-immolation.

From Krauthammer's Excuses for Obama:

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

I, for one, am just as happy that leadership skills are lacking in the White House right now. Many are unhappy about it, such as this guy - a Rabbi no less - who is disappointed in his Messiah. Good grief.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde

Dining manners and styles, Euro and American:

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

Oscar Wilde

From today's WSJ: Another failure of liberal governance:

For the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House. Republicans haven't had such large majorities since the 1920s. Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.

Democrats failed in the latter half of the 1960s, as the twin burdens of the Great Society and Vietnam ended the Kennedy boom and split their party. They failed again after Watergate, as Congress dragged Jimmy Carter to the left and liberals had no answer for stagflation. They failed a third time in the first two Bill Clinton years, as tax increases and HillaryCare led to the Gingrich Congress before Mr. Clinton salvaged his Presidency by tacking to the center.

A fourth crackup is already well underway and is even more remarkable considering how Democrats were set up for success.

and

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.

You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can't pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama's agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.

Few Americans, outside the universities, wish to end up like Europe.

Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Democratic party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country — that’s not going to work too well.

Sen. Evan Bayh

A bit of a rant, Get Rid of the Holy Crap, From Mead. One quote:

...let me post a provocative thesis on the wall:  If virtually the entire regional and national staff of every mainline denomination were to be called home to heaven overnight in a mainline version of the Rapture, leaving only the equivalent of Bishop Baker and his secretary in their place, I am sure that someone somewhere would notice a difference, but the effect on either the spiritual state of American Christians or the health and well being of local congregations throughout the United States would be hard to detect with the naked eye.

Just the sort of thing our friend Sippican loves: Spray-on glass.

Is glass really technically a liquid? No, it's best classified as an amorphous solid, but Nature doesn't always follow our human categories very well. Why would it?

The Fable of Market Meritocracy 

"Markets don't reward smart people. They reward value." Yes, that is what markets are for. Markets are ultimately about human psychology; the only way to determine value and price, given human nature, fiat currency, and the annoying limitations of reality.

From Glucksman at City Journal's The Velvet Philosophical Revolution -Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battle for political freedom goes on.

During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.

As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate.

Where is the MSM with this story?

We never doubted it for a minute: Moonbattery. Manchurian Candidate, thanks to the MSM's homo- or hetero- or Lefto- or whatever-eroticism.

I wouldn't mind if he had changed his view of the world since then, but I haven't heard that road-to-Damascus story yet.

Steyn. A quote re the USA:

...the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar porkathons. This isn't karaoke. These guys are singing "I'll do it my way" for real.

Somehow, this post got Farked! Just realized it. Hey, Fark friends - check out our site while visiting. You might enjoy knowing us and our free-thinking Yankee site -

It's Valentine's Day weekend, so go out and buy your hubby some really good smokes. Get some for your kids, too. Maybe beloved hubby will get a good one for you, too: a pretty lady looks sexy with a cigar. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Why our pro-smoking campaign this week? It's a companion-piece to Michelle O's anti-obesity campaign. A good cigar, which lasts at least quadruple the time of a Wendy's burger (450 calories), has zero calories and quadruple the enjoyment.

(By the way, I do not know what the fuss is about childhood obesity. I drive past our local high school all the time, and I have yet to see a fat kid. They all look kinda scrawny to me except for the muscular athletes.) I always told my kids "Do not eat vegetables. They are for grown-ups." That was the truth and it worked well. Still having trouble getting them to enjoy the mystic Indian miracle of organic tobacco, though. They are brainwashed.

I plan to light up a tasty, sweet, well-aged and fragrant Dominican Bolivar this afternoon. Bolivar builds a heck of a strong, solid cigar, like a piece of wood. They have become my favorites for the moment. It's fun to rustle through ye olde Yankee humidors to see what you have, and what you forgot you bought online a year or three ago. It is sort of like a wine cellar, filled with interesting, anti-obesity suprises.

Remembering Lincoln at Powerline. 

I hate to correct Scott, but Lincoln was not the unanimous choice of the brand new Republican Party - he was the relatively-unknown compromise choice when a contentious convention could not agree on the front-runners - most of whom he put in his Cabinet.

Also interesting: Lincoln v. Obama or Liberty and Justice v. "Fairness" and Power

William Zinsser at American Scholar. A classic essay. 

Now he has a new one: Writing English as a Second Language. One quote:

The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.

How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in -ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in -ent—like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”

Two assessments of the O:

Pajamas: Academically approved. A quote:

If only someone as gifted and righteous as The One were able to work freely on behalf of the common good, all would be well. After all, how could America go wrong pinning its destiny to a man that uses the word “elegant” and the phrase “academically approved” in the same sentence? You certainly weren’t going to get that from George Bush.

God save us from "academically-approved."

Noonan: The Off-center President. She asks "How did the president lose the room? How did he lose popularity?"

We think "global warming" is a political movement with quasi-religious overtones. Video via Moonbattery, who comments: "Is the global warming hoax a totalitarian plot? In a word: yes."

In The Examiner:

...Obama was faced with a fundamental choice. He could either chart a bipartisan course in response to the economic emergency, or he could try to expand government to Western European magnitude as Democratic congressional leaders, elected for years in monopartisan districts, had long wished to do.

The former community organizer and Chicago pol chose the latter course.

To the surprise of many who watched previous presidents present specific administration policies to Congress, he allowed Democratic leaders to design the stimulus package they rushed into law in six weeks.

One-third of the money went to state and local governments -- an obvious payoff to the public employee unions that contributed so much money to Democrats -- and much of it went to permanently increase the baseline spending of discretionary programs, a longtime goal of Democratic congressional leaders.

Is Greece too big to fail? I doubt it. Also, at Cato, let them go bankrupt.

They obviously need a fresh start. Like California.