Maggie's Farm

One quote:

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

The whole thing here.

We linked this piece at Reason earlier this week, but it's worth highlighting. Class War - How public servants became our masters. One quote:

The United States had 2.3 state and local government employees per 100 citizens in 1946 and has 6.5 state and local government employees per 100 citizens now. In 1947, Hodges writes, 78 percent of the national income went to the private sector, 16 percent to the federal sector, and 6 percent to the state and local government sector. Now 54 percent of the economy is private, 28 percent goes to the feds, and 18 percent goes to state and local governments. The trend lines are ominous.

The trend line leads to 100%. Then what?

We would never, even for personal use, advise violating the incomprehensible American ban on Cuban tobacco by using Top Cubans.com. However, we do find their latest rankings interesting, if mundane:

VDH at NRO (this is his entire post):

When Obama gives the usual review of all the programs, stimulus efforts, and new entitlements he's overseeing, almost no one seems to conclude that he is simply detailing how he is going to redistribute nearly $2 trillion a year in annual borrowing. When we cut through all the soaring Great Society rhetoric, we are left with a "Gorge the Beast" strategy in which money is borrowed and given to favored constituencies before being paid back by less popular groups through higher taxes.

Given the aggregate $7-10 trillion in additional debt envisioned over the next four years, Obama may well become the greatest redistributor in U.S. history, at last addressing his 2001 lamentation about the absence of meaningful "redistributive change" in America. The only question at this point is whether Obama's gargantuan deficits are aimed primarily at lavishing constituencies with cash, or rather at making it necessary to raise taxes in a way that serves to reduce income inequality.

In addition to growing government, I think VDH gets right to the core of the underlying Dem agenda. When you think about it that way, they are being fairly successful.

One heck of a rant from Lewis in Am Thinker about affirmative action: The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President

From Peter Wehner on the SOTU:

What we are seeing play out on a very large stage, it seems, is a man of extraordinary self-regard having to deal with punishing political set-backs, with the fact that his high hopes have come crashing down around him. The nation has turned against his agenda. They are turning against his party. And they are tiring of him as well. This is something he cannot seem to process. So the president marches ahead, pretending up is down and east is west, embracing an agenda the country has rejected and that is doing terrible damage to his own party.

It was quite a thing to witness.

You have to drink one shot of Tequila every time the O says "I." See 132.

Have ambulance on duty.

The MSM meme is that the middle class wants more care and attention from the O. More goodies, more empathy, etc.

That is BS. What the middle class wants is less taxes, fewer government jobs, less government - and to be left alone to do what they can do best with less government getting in the way of our lives and stifling the economy.

As Insty posts today:

MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Real State Of The Union: Fear. “This fear is extremely broad-based. It is not limited to social class nor to domestic or foreign policies. Banks are not lending, companies are not hiring, because they are afraid of what Obama will do next. Both are afraid of onerous taxes, including new health care burdens, and the banks fear new regulations and the consequences of the recently declared war on evil bankers by the president. Seniors are afraid they will be deprived of medical treatment. Juniors are afraid they are going to be forced to buy health insurance they don’t think they need. Across the board, Americans are afraid they’re not going to find work, and won’t be able to afford a house. And, as the Massachusetts vote showed, Americans are worried about threats from abroad, worried about Iran, afraid of terrorist attacks, and afraid the Obama Administration doesn’t take all this seriously enough.”

Related: “The drop in individual income tax revenue in fiscal 2009 was the steepest since 1939. As the chart shows revenue continues to plummet in fiscal 2010.” John Galt was unavailable for comment.

Yes, President O. If you really want to do something for the middle class, shut up with the programs and destimulate.

Also related, Arthur Laffer says we are headed for a train wreck. That is not good for the middle class.

I agree with The Englishman:

...the hijacking of the environmental movement by climate change campaigners is the worse thing that ever happened to it. All decent people want to see a clean environment, cuddly bunnies bouncing in verdant pastures breathing pure air and drinking safe water. How we safeguard, clean up, maintain and utilise the environment has been overshadowed by strident political statements, the sooner they are dismissed the better it is for real environmentalists.

Yes, the movement was indeed co-opted by politics - by Lefties who never took a serious basic science course, and world-government types. Maybe now we can get back to good old conservation.

Unlike grand luxe cruising, freighter cruising isn't for everybody. Still, I know people who would not voyage any other way. Photo is from a 'round the world 124-day trip from the site below, which offers many long and short trips.

Freighter Cuises.

Superb, from Dr. Zero at Hot Air:

The middle class is the great enemy of collectivist politics, under any of its names: progressivism, communism, fascism, or “liberalism.” As far back as Karl Marx, the apostles of collectivism have understood that they must subjugate the middle class before they can claim total victory.

The upper class isn’t a big problem – they don’t have the votes to block a collectivist agenda in a democracy, and they generally find ways to maintain, or increase, their power and wealth under a total State. The power of the State can be extremely valuable to them, for manipulating markets and thwarting upstart competitors. Many of them are willing to trade a little wealth for power, or find moral nourishment in supporting a collective agenda.

The members of the lower class are generally seen as the clients of a collectivist movement, the recipients of the social benefits it promises. Their desperation and anger become fuel for the movement, providing both righteousness and voting power. The collectivist only needs to conceal any hope of finding prosperity beyond the generosity of the State, and keep the lower class convinced that government is the only moral actor in the economy. Review the speeches of Barack Obama, and search for anything that suggests the poor should look anywhere beyond the government and its social programs for salvation.

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism...

At the Telegraph. So much for settled science.

At the New Atlantis. Isn't ordinary nuclear good enough as a free lunch?

At the OC Register. One quote:

At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Gov. Palin was "unqualified" then surely he was, too, Obama pointed to as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.

That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy! Wouldn't it be great to have him ...as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each "job" to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace.

If you live in a Royal Barry Wills (1895-1962) house in New England, you are lucky.

Wills was a Boston architect who specialized in accurate reproductions of Capes, Saltboxes, and Colonial houses - the sorts of homes which might be bungalows, ranches, split-levels or God-knows-what elsewhere in the country.

This site discusses his architecture.

I was interested to learn that the firm Royal Barry Wills Associates is still in business.

Story here, with the Supremes' decision.

I agree with a commenter there who said "The scary part is that four justices think that this does NOT violate the First Amendment." What are those justices reading that I am missing?

From Roger Kimball's excellent Obama Gets It Right on the core political issues:

What are those issues? One concerns the proper role of government in American life.  The Constitution was primarily an effort to define, to set limits, to the power of the state. The Founders understood both the need for  federalism and the dangers of statism. In their effort to “form a more perfect Union” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty  to ourselves and our Posterity,” they were everywhere at pains to circumscribe the reach of state power. Having tasted tyranny first hand, and having pondered the melancholy lessons of history, they understood the awful metabolism of servitude. President Obama was quite right when, way back in 2001,  he described the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties.”  What he did not understand then — and what he clearly still cannot get his mind around — is that fact that this “negative,” “merely formal” quality of the Constitution is one of its great strengths, not a weakness. In 2001, Senator Obama complained that the Constitution only told you what the state and federal government “can’t do to you,” not what it must do for you. As I noted at the time,

For a couple thousand years, people were desperately eager to frame constraints that would apply to their governments, that would limit, for example, the government’s ability to expropriate their property, to force them to educate their children in a certain way, or subscribe to certain government-mandated beliefs.

That sort of traditional political freedom is not enough for left-wingers. Ever since Marx decried bourgeois freedom as merely “formal,” the left has set out not to preserve freedom but to remake society according to a utopian scheme.

This is exactly what Obama wants to do. The “tragedy” of the civil-rights movement, he said, is that in focusing on “negative” freedom, it tended to “lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Bringing about “redistributive change” is what the Obama administration is all about.

Above via Chicago Boyz -

From Red State, which begins:

When the left starts talking about nations becoming ungovernable, stock up on guns and ammo, because that usually means they’ll start forcefully agitating for a more governable country according to their definition of governability.

In many ways, I hope that America is relatively ungovernable. I have no particular respect for anybody who wants to be governed other than by their own internal governor, and I detest anybody who wishes to govern me and my life. I neither want nor need very much governing.

Gridlock is good.

I saw this: Obama to take “combative” approach to Brown victory. "Combative" against me, a hard-working, honest, fellow taxpaying citizen? Why?

Because I'm a Tea Party sort of gap-toothed brain-damaged gun- and Bible-totin' neanderthal Ivy Leaguer? Why me? I planned my life, played by the rules, worked hard, and have been moderately successful. What did I do wrong that I deserve to be combatted for?

From The Tea Party Spirit Of Scott Brown’s Supporters:

First, the Tea Party folks are not the fringe. They enjoy more approval than either the Republican or Democrat party. Second, on what planet do the media live? All Americans, of all political persuasions, are sick of the government. One only has to look at Nancy Pelosi’s approval ratings to know that she’s pretty universally reviled. Ditto Harry Reid. Do the delusional press think that only Tea Partiers are fed up and skewing these approval numbers?

Re Brooks' The Pragmatic Leviathan today, I very much disagree with his view that the O admin is pragmatic and non-ideological, but I do think he is right about this:

The American people are not always right, but their basic sense of equilibrium is worthy of the profoundest respect. President Obama has shown himself to be a fine administrator, but he erred in trying to make himself the irreplaceable man in nearly ever sphere of public life. He erred in not sensing that even a pragmatic government could seem imperious and alarming.

If I were President Obama, I would spend the next year showing how government can serve a humble, helpful and supportive role to the central institutions of American life. Even in blue states like Massachusetts, voters want a government that is energetic but limited — a servant, not a leviathan.

From Insty on that topic:

We’ve controlled Haiti before, didn’t like it, and gave it back. Haiti’s best defense against invasion is that if you seize Haiti . . . then you have Haiti. I mean, if this were St. Bart’s or Bonaire you’d have something, maybe, but . . .

Related, The Englishman appropriately quotes from Kipling's 1899 The White Man's Burden - a poem variously viewed as ironic or sarcastic or literal - or an ambiguous mixture of all (which I suspect). One verse:

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Related: Extreme moral preening at SDA. An EMS guy I know left for Haiti on Monday. He is a Godly guy who has the skills to do something that matters.

Maggie's Farm has the reputation of being a dog-friendly - if not dog-written - website.

How about dog-friendly hotels? There are tons of them, and I am not sure that everyone knows how easy they are to find.

I decided just to check those on the I-95 corridor.

There is a Pet Friendly Hotels site.

Photo is my favorite breed. Friendly? They will knock down strangers just to kiss and lick their faces.

The history of cranes and tower cranes here.

h/t, Samizdata

A quote from Yuval Levin's Capitalism at NRO:

Part of the problem I have with some versions of the libertarian case is that they take capitalism (if not classical liberalism more generally) to be an argument against the need for restraints on our appetites and passions, rather than an argument for the possibility of such restraints — to be an argument for libertinism rather than liberty. I’m with Edmund Burke, who said that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”