Maggie's Farm

1. Dems seek to control executive pay

2. How and why to stop the nationalization of medical care. Related, if medical insurance is a right (how can it be?), then how can it be forced on you? They don't force us to buy guns.

3. What's on the Dems' nationalization agenda after medical care? Education. Yes, they want to run K-12 education next. Heck, they are so good at running things, aren't they?

4. Your tax dollars to pay for lawyers for Jihadists

5. Taking global warming hysteria seriously

Crack, coke, or LSD? You tell me.

Ed note: Great minds think alike. I see neoneo on this same theme today.

Promo heard on the radio this morning for the Imus show:

"This radio show may not be appropriate for mature audiences."

It is loony. Everybody will need to bring a lawyer to a fight instead of one of these cool machines:

What's the difference between Obama and God?

Obama gets better press.

Rush, on the radio today 

If anyone deserves it, he does. From his speech:

... there should be a special award for Fox News. Fox has done a great service to the American polity -- single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.

I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting -- half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.

What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.

A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.

What left me slack-jawed was the fact that she, like the cohort of mainstream journalists she represented so perfectly, was so ideologically blinkered that she could not fathom the plain fact that the liberal media were presenting the news and the world through a particular lens. The idea that it was particular, and that there might be competing ones, perhaps even superior ones, was beyond her ken.

That's why Fox News is so resented.

The ethical case for boycotting GM and Chrysler. A quote:

The UAW was a major reason why the companies hit the wall, and now the UAW will be rewarded with major control and ownership. It is as if a rape victim were forced to marry her rapist. The result makes the crony capitalism we saw in Russia look clean by comparison; it, at least, was a kind of capitalism.

This situation is ethically repugnant form every perspective.

I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous, by Harry Stein.

It's about time. 

A Connecticut moral crusader and the YMCA.

I guess the Y has seen some changes over the years. A quote from the essay:

He might be grimly amused to see twenty-first-century social conservatives making their last stand over the odd issue of “same-sex marriage.”

And he would certainly conclude that he now stood in a very different country.

Tomorrow is (obviously) Sunday, so we thought you might want to know before you go to church that Newsweek has declared Obama to be God. Silly me to imagine Newsweek to be a secular humanist rag, when they are seeking a god like everybody else.

I doubt that the O is God: he seems too ignorant to be God but, on the other hand, he does resemble a dark Narcissus. He might be a naiad or one of those Greek metrosexual things that skitter through the forest.

Auster discusses: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013362.html

The O tries to sell hopey-changey to the Middle East. Good luck.

I think the sales trick would be to give them some fresh new target for the hatred. Maybe the infidel Eskimos? Or maybe those crazy Aussie Aborigines who don't give a dang about Mohammed (pbuh)?

But hey, what's with that little mustache? Is that to look more Moslem or something? Good grief. That seems strange.

NYT:

Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.

Orphaned at 11, Koko -- a nickname she earned because of an early love of chocolate -- at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.

Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At night and on weekends, she and her husband frequented Chicago's clubs, where many the artists heard on the radio performed.

"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."

Never a place to be outdone in the PC department, Harvard begins a Chair in Sexual Perversion Studies. But they don't call it that.

My only question is why it isn't in the Medical School, where such things could actually be seriously studied. After all, I have never met a gay or whatever person who really wanted to be like that if given the choice.

Re our post on Blueberries today, I found a source for the wild type, non-hybridized highbush blueberry.

I would suspect that these would naturalize well, given the right damp, acidic and sunny location. (The cultivated blueberrys do not seem to naturalize.) In fact, I have a spot that might work well for them, but whether the soil there is acidic enough I do not know.

Come to think of it, if it were just right for them, they would probably be there already.

From a fine review of a new book about God and Lou John Rawls:

Persons flourish in community. A community is not an “aggregate of individuals,” but rather the special form of association through which individuals, in and through relations to others and to God, become persons. In becoming a person one recognizes that other human beings are, like oneself, created in God’s image. “The Imago Dei,” Rawls declares, is “that which in man makes him capable of entering into community by virtue of likeness to God, who is in Himself community, being the Triune God.”

Faith, sin, and grace, Rawls maintains, revolve around personality and community. Faith is “the inner state of a person who is properly integrated and related to community.” Sin is the destruction and repudiation of community. It receives expression in egotism, or pride, self-love, and vanity; egoism, or exclusive attention to the satisfaction of natural desire; and despair, or the nihilistic escape from the world. Grace is “the activity on God’s part which seeks to restore the person to community.” It overcomes sin and accomplishes conversion. Since ethics is bound up with community and personality, and community and personality are bound up with God, “there can be no separation between religion and ethics.”

Photo of John Rawls

Re our link today to John Bogle's talk about Wall Street, a young fixed-income friend (the one who warned everybody to get out of both debt and equities in Spring 08), emails me this:

You know what is ironic about the Bogle piece? It's that I spend all day every day working for the public sector coming up with really smart ideas to save states and local governments money to lower tax rates, fix their deficits, find ways that they can actually afford their capital plans and if they can't - we tell them that. We don't convince them to do fancy structures they don't understand (although they don't understand much) and we don't wait until we are paid to offer advice or analysis either. Half my time is spent working on unsolicited stuff. You know what usually happens? They pick a worse firm and a not as good a proposal because of probably some political or golf relationship or pay-to-play scheme, and they end up wasting taxpayer money. Some smart govt people get it and do the right thing, but not many.  One thing I have learned over my years in fixed income is that 99% of the people in government are idiots.

I didn't know this (from Armed and Dangerous):

Punctuation marks originated from notations used to mark pauses for breath in oral recitations, but 17-to-19th-century grammarians tied them ever more tightly to grammar. There remains a minority position that language pedants call “elocutionary” - that punctuation is properly viewed as markers of speech cadence and intonation. Top-flight copy editors know this: the best one I ever worked with was a syntactic punctuationist on her own hook who noted that I’m an elocutionary punctuationist and then copy-edited in my preferred style rather than hers. (That, my friends, is real professionalism.)

I think our blog punctuation style is elocutionary.

PJ O'Rourke on the end of America's love affair with automobiles. (h/t, Env. Repub). One quote:

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Read it (link above). Apparently making money from making cars was never an easy thing to do.

"[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."
.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 81, 1788. Hmmm. I guess they meant what they said.

How to be a child forever under a benevolent tyranny. Excellent and brief: Why are Conservatives so mean?, by Klavan at PJ TV.

(BTW, 43 degrees F here this morning. My tomato plants will not be pleased.)

The Constitution in Exile.

It is truly Orwellian, and it creeps me out. All these people want is more government power over me. Why anybody would want that is utterly beyond me.

Photo: George Washington, who never sought power, who accepted it with reluctance, and who finally renounced it.

You cannot be too cynical to understand politics. How the Dems killed Estrada's judicial nomination. A quote:

Moonbattery notes that the photo above makes it clear that some forms of "freedom" may be preferred over others.

A look at Cuba before the socialists destroyed it and turned it into a third-world country

The O admin attempts to stifle criticism of stimulus

Related: Betsy on the Chicago Rules

Looks like a true thriller. Yikes.

The Lituus:

Bach's motet (a choral musical composition) "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.

The unreliability of eyewitnesses. h/t, Dr X

Are the O and the Dems playing a deep game or, as our Roger said on Friday, a simple game?

Makes sense to me: 82 year-old strangles 71 year-old girlfriend for loading the dishwasher wrong.

Biggest mystery in American history. A quote:

The U.S. spends a huge amount on education; more per student than anyone else; more and more every year. Simultaneously, over the last 70 years, literacy has fallen, SAT scores have fallen, American competitiveness has fallen, and the general knowledge of ordinary citizens has fallen. Teenagers graduate from high school who can't read their diplomas; the country now has 50,000,000 functional illiterates. I recently saw on television that the wealthiest, most successful country in the world--that would be us--hovers around 18th internationally on reading, and 25th in science.

I submit that all of these facts taken together are paradoxical; one might say, impossible. It's as if I told you that an ordinary man consumed 5000 calories a day and lost weight. So this, I submit, is the greatest mystery in our history.

I am past the point of doubting that the climate change hysteria is anything more than the latest excuse to grab power.

School Choice: the new civil rights struggle

The Denny's Octomom Special

Just as Lincoln buried his rivals Seward, Chase and Stanton in the Cabinet and then on the Supreme Court, and Wilson buried Bryan at the State Department, so Obama has hidden his predecessor and his rival in plain sight at the upper reaches of the government.

Strong breeze and thus a very fine sail this morning. We passed this handsome old cruiser moored outside a CT harbor: