Maggie's Farm

The O, via Biased BBC:

"The Middle East is a problem that has plagued the region for centuries."

First, from Dan Luskin:

New York Times, March 29, 2005:

...the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer. We can't count on restraint from people like Mr. DeLay...

New York Times, February 8, 2010:

Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

The second from Q&O, from the NYT in 2005:

Mr. Bush has reacted by railing against Democrats for obstruction — as if Democrats are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party.

Something Much Darker: Andrew Sullivan has a serious problem.

The TRN piece is really about the mystery of the Trinity and other topics, not just about Sullivan's disorder - whatever it is. I used to admire, but not usually agree with, Sullivan, back in the day before he ran off the road.

The Trinity? It is no more a mystery to me than the math of the 90 degree angle. It just is. Reality just is.

Jay Cost at RCP with America is not Ungovernable. A quote:

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.

The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.

Yes, it is a good thing. And, in general, government doing nothing is a good thing.

h/t, Theo -

I love this quote from Reagan (if you didn't hear, this weekend would have been his 99th birthday). Borrowed from Moonbattery:

Right now ... I'm looking down on a busy city at rush hour. The streets below are twin ribbons of sparkling red and white.

I wonder about the people in those cars, who they are, what they do, what they are thinking about as they head for the warmth of home and family. Come to think of it, I've met them - oh, maybe not those particular individuals, but still I feel I know them. Some of our social planners refer to them as "the masses" which only proves they don't know them. I've been privileged to meet people all over this land in the special kind of way you meet them when you are campaigning. They are not "the masses," or as the elitists would have it - "the common man." They are very uncommon. Individuals each with his or her own hopes and dreams, plans and problems, and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth.

January 27, 1978

A quickie for dessert? Restaurant bathroom trysts. 

I guess amore is sometimes just overwhelmingly urgent, like diarrhea. Been there, but never when fully sober. I remember in the 70s when the only thing going on in restaurant bathrooms was people doing lines of coke with rolled-up $100 bills.

It is performed standing up, I assume, like the coke.

From Phi Beta Cons:

My point is that the common notion that a college education is essential to doing most of the work in the economy is mistaken. The ability of individuals to do work seldom depends on anything they studied in college.

True indeed. Nothing wrong with a liberal arts education, though, as life-enrichment for those too lazy to figure out how to obtain it on their own. (It's called "reading.") A rigorous high school education ought to be enough for most practical purposes, and adequate preparation for any job training or apprenticeship which doesn't require advanced math or science.

The story of Germany's SDU is relevant to everyone these days, even though it sounds strange to hear people still talking about "workers" as they still do in Europe - as if it were some permanent condition of serfhood. One quote from the piece at Boston Review:

...social democracy may have settled the issues of industrial society, but it did so just in time for industrial society to give way to a globalized economy, one with its own complicated and pernicious effects on labor and social equality: immigration, fluctuating employment levels, and offshore outsourcing, to name a few.

Like the American Dems, political organizations like the SDU are fighting the last war.

The O admin seems determined to quietly undo Clinton's welfare reforms. We have learned over the years that the Dems and the Lefties want all the people on the government plantation that they can collect. That's what "health care" is was all about, but the people saw through it.

It's what most Dem programs are about: everybody a slave to the Massas in Washington, and relying on their "generosity"  (see Medicare).

Heather MacDonald now reports in Championing Dependency that New York is experiencing attacks on Clinton's welfare reform. Good essay. One quote:

This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.

Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.

Re Ted Kennedy, via Never Yet Melted:

...Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized."

From Front Page's Class War in the Classroom:

“We must encourage students to access the antagonist class positions of texts in order to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in them identify evidence of class struggle,” Christopher Craig writes in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Through this critical process, we can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working class one-sided.”

“For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ruling class ideology that exists in everything from literature to the nightly news.” Craig teaches at Emmanuel College, a Catholic institution of higher learning.

Wow. That's so cool, so advanced, and so deep. And no doubt it's exactly the lesson every $145,000 UAW worker wants his kids to be taught in school...

Thank God for teacher's ed. They do it all for the kiddies.

At City Journal. One quote:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.

Harold Ramis:

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

I am sad to say that The Complete Pogo, Vol. 1, has not yet been released. It's a damn shame.

Rahm Emanuel terms budget doubters and dissenters "f-ing retarded." That would include me, and I'm sure he is correct. Respectful debate on the merits is great, isn't it?

Speaking of f-ing retarded, Punxatawny Phil is. 6 more weeks of winter? Well, duh. Tell me something I don't know, genius.

At most times and places in history, state authorities have had pretty wide discretion to help or hurt folks.  People knew to submit to authorities, and to accept occasional arbitrary applications of authority power.  Thankfully, such applications were limited by the fact that authorities were distracted trying to keep their power via keeping the peace, meeting revenue targets, etc.,

Today folks proudly bask in a glow of higher status by believing that they have more control over their government.  They believe democracy puts them in charge, and that a “rule of law” drastically discourages arbitrary applications of authority power.  They are deluded.

Whole piece at Overcoming Bias.

Government spending on education increases its costs. Of course it does. "Free money" gets spent, plus more.

The Feds have no business tinkering with education, which is properly a local responsibility and for which no responsibility has been given, and over which no power has been granted, by the Constitution.

It is nothing but Fed payoffs to teachers, teacher's unions, and academia. Feeding the Beast.

Guess how many Conservatives are in Congress from New England.

We met Dan Debicella this weekend, and will get behind his campaign in CT-4 to unseat a one-term knee-jerk Pelosi acolyte.

Dan is the son of a police officer, grew up in Bridgeport. Wharton, Harvard MBA, and McKinsey on his resume. An impressive young fellow.

Since his opponent has voted according to Pelosi's commands essentially 100% of the time, I offered him my campaign ad line: This District deserves a guy in Congress to speak for the people of CT, not for the people of San Francisco.

He says on his campaign website: "I am running for Congress to restore the values of free enterprise and individual liberty to Washington."

He sounds like a practical, accomplished, Maggie's sort of guy. Why he, or any other fine person, would want to enter the world of politics is beyond me, though.