Friday, April 23. 2010
Editor's note: I dropped this Sen. Feinstein post since nobody could find any confirmation of the quote -
I am not kidding. A Dad explains Obamacare to a little kid.
 Well, no problem. I am not "offended." Maybe a bit hurt, but that's OK too.
Christians are used to this sort of thing. Worldly powers are never too comfortable with the Christian message.
I like Franklin Graham very much.
Hunters sue guide over bad trip. h/t, Overlawyered
No Surprise: Times Readership Easily Most Liberal of Any 'Objective' News Outlet
Update: Last Atlantic Yards Property Owner Agrees to Sell His Land Under Threat of Condemnation
VDH: Obama and the New Civility
Derbyshire:
The dirty little secret of Wall Street is that investing isn’t a whole lot different from speculating. In the end, it’s all a casino. If you can’t handle that, get a savings account.
About that GM debt repayment
"Raise My Taxes! Raise My Taxes! Raise My Taxes!"
England the least patriotic country
Who drinks the most booze, England or Ireland? Hey, who's the designated drunk tonite?
Pajamas: Bigots to the Left of Me, Dingbats on the Right
Britbart quoted at Class Val:
the greatest thing that the left does, and it uses the the media to do it, is that it accuses you of what they're doing to you.
Thursday, April 22. 2010
We have recently commented, several times, about our admiration for the brains and savvy of the Goldman Sachs crew. Here's more evidence of it.
Yes, I do own shares. Foolish not to.
Am Thinker: San Francisco Tea Party Out-Alinskys the Left
Maybe Chris Christie has learned from Alinsky too. Quote:
In the state that has the nation’s fourth-highest percentage (66) of public employees who are unionized, he has joined the struggle that will dominate the nation’s domestic policymaking in this decade — to break the ruinous collaboration between elected officials and unionized state and local workers whose affections the officials purchase with taxpayers’ money.
No wonder labor leaders are going berserk.
Christie is doing what Arnold never had the cojones to do - to go after the unholy alliance of pols and government unions.
 Do something brainless, useless, and ignorant today to make yourself feel good! Like this gal.
After all, appreciating ourselves and finding our own redeeming "meaning" for our pointless lives are the most important things, aren't they?
 Cut the ‘medical’ marijuana BS
Afghanistan's "Dancing Boys"
The False Religion of Mideast Peace
Why teachers are losing respect
Michelle: All the president’s Goldman Sachs men
Obamacare: Impact on the Uninsured
Related, at Marginal:
Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.
Thus begins the intentional and planned destruction of private medicine in America. But don't worry - there will always be small private clinics and hospitals for the wealthy and for the politicians. Same as they have in Cuba.
Reason: Down the Health Care Wormhole - How ObamaPelosiCare will saddle future generations with a public policy disaster
Steyn: Tomorrow belongs to Mo
Too scared to listen to Rush
Millions face tax increases under Dems budget plan
Wednesday, April 21. 2010
 - First, the salt story. As people say, No, it's not from The Onion. Government has gone insane. CO2, transfats - and now salt? One does not know whether to laugh or cry. Or to just dump some more salt on one's fries, and call it a Boston Salt Party.
- "Those who think they can control their destinies are happier." That's from an old story about why Repubs and Conservatives are happier people. People with some faith in themselves - and God - feel better about life, regardless of income. It's the psychology, stupid. Feeling weak or like a victim makes life miserable, but that is up to each one of us.
- Did the Dem stimulus cost us 4 million jobs?
- Our friend Roger: Humor vs. Contempt: Obama and the Question of Character
- The man said "I'm a Democrat, but I'm not a Communist." As Ferrara notes, many Dems could not quite say that:
Obama is not the only one. Ultraleft San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi, a nice lady whose feet are not firmly planted in the real world, serves as House Speaker. Far Left Henry Waxman, the Congressman from Hollywood, serves as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Uberliberal Barney Frank, the Congressman from Boston, serves as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Leftover '60s liberal David Obey, a self-described Robert La Follette Progressive from Wisconsin, serves as Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Charley Rangel, the Congressman from Harlem, serves as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. John Conyers, the Congressman from Detroit, with his own past Communist Party ties, serves as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Until recently, ultraliberal Howard Dean from Vermont served as Democrat party national Chairman. Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont, as liberal/left as they come, serves as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
 Toon via Powerline's The Pen Is Mightier Than the Teleprompter
1/3rd of IPCC claims were not peer-reviewed
Obesity as a social inequity? Uncle Sam, stop me before I eat again.
Does the Supposedly Superior Expertise of Regulators Justify Libertarian Paternalism? Um, no.
Where do your Oxfam dollars go?
Cape Wind update. I think these giant fans are insane. Plus they rarely mention that we pay for these dumb bird-slicing eyesores.
Wrong narrative: The New Orleans Beating: Real Violence, Real Evidence, No Media
"That was Bill Clinton, blaming me for the Oklahoma City bombing..."
Am Thinker: A 'perfect storm' for socialism
Taranto: 'Populism of the Privileged' - The latest laughable attempt to discredit the tea-party movement.
Goldman is a heck of a good bank. Smart, hard-working people with good social skills. One example of their genius: Regulate Us--Please! One quote:
Goldman Sachs executives and employees contributed more money to Obama's 2008 campaign than a single company has raised for any politician since the dawn of campaign finance reform.
I don't know if it means much, but Obama's fifth-quarter Gallup approval slips, among worst 3 of modern presidents
I generally disapprove of armchair psychologizing because it usually consists of veiled ad hominems, but here's The President Who Won't Grow Up
Pew: Shocker: Public Fed Up With Government, Banks, Corporations, Unions, Hollywood, the Media
Another Obamacare tax nobody mentioned: Tax the sick. Great idea. They are probably too sick to complain.
Tuesday, April 20. 2010
Lowry's Cynicism and Change: How did Democrats fall so fast, and take perceptions of government down with them? begins thus:
Barack Obama used to call himself a “hopemonger,” mocking skeptics who thought the young presidential candidate was entirely too hopeful. No one would accuse him of that anymore. President Obama has done more than anyone else during the past two years to destroy trust in Washington.
Related from Murchison's The Democrats' Big Disconnect:
If Democrats hope to tamp down the anger Clinton perceives in public discourse, they have an odd strategy -- that of enlarging government, and government costs, and government regulation, rather than diminishing those factors in the lives of the people.
There's a geometric/mathematical dimension to this business. The heftier government grows, the more people it affects and touches; the more such people who feel the touch of government, the larger the chances grow for offense and resentment and anger.
A government the size of Calvin Coolidge's, or even Dwight Eisenhower's -- you couldn't get unduly furious over its pastimes. There weren't enough pastimes. The government let you alone, comparatively speaking. A government -- ours, say -- about to start sopping up in taxes a quarter of the national wealth, yet unable to figure out how to pay for all its programs, is a government that it's all but compulsory to dislike.
The point escapes most in the White House and in the Democratic leadership. They want a bigger government still -- one that decides what kind of energy we use, and what size autos we drive, and what kinds of medical services best fulfill public needs. All this with nearly 10 percent of American workers still unemployed.
Today, modern Israel’s 62nd birthday, is a good time to ask the question, “What if there wasn’t an Israel, would things be different in the Middle East?”
The world would still be dealing with and suffering from MidEast extremists: First of the Soviet proxies, but without Israeli intelligence penetrating them and its military defeating them, exposing the Soviet Union as an unworthy sponsor; Then of the Islamist haters suppressing its peoples and fighting each other while harboring attackers of the West, but without Israel’s development and democracy serving as an unavoidable contrast to the potentials of freedom and sanity and its military and technology exposing the fundamental weakness of their self-created backwardness.
No one in the Middle East takes seriously that the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are the primary, secondary, tertiary or lesser cause of MidEast instability or its threats to the West.
Outside the Middle East, however, we have the core delusion among many of those raised on the puerile pap created by the Left that the modernity and successes of Western civilization somehow oppress the natural decency and advancement of Third World countries.
President Obama is the poster boy. But he is not the cause. He is merely the product. He and those who follow him, thus, fall back on the false premise that Israel is the problem.
No, the problem is their core delusion that we can escape history by denying it, even reversing it, though that still would leave the real root cause of MidEast instability, regional petty satraps, backward hatefulness, and those outside powers – from the EU to Russia to China – who benefit from retaining rule or access to oil.
If the initial thrust of President Bush’s strategy of spurring democratization in the Middle East proved hollow, then our subsequent neutralization of Iraq’s WMD potential and funding of terrorists and our struggling effort to retrieve Afghanistan from being ruled by as much a threat is at best a holding action. We, as Secretary of Defense Gates admitted, lack a strategy toward even containing Iran, its imminent nuclear armaments, its support for those who kill our soldiers and Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s and their peoples.
The exaggeration by Saddam Hussein of his own WMDs was to counter Iran. The US and initial allies entering Iraq missed the proper focus then as we do now.
Weakening Israel is not a strategy for peace in the Middle East but another abdication of what could reduce the dangers of the Middle East. The US administration and apologists are blaming the “salamis” for the failure to ice the botulism.
President Obama and followers are not the root cause of Israel’s current dilemma. They are the natural extension of the escapism that infects Western thought, that undermined President Bush’s brash, perhaps fruitless, but correct focus that peace can only come from shattering Middle East excuses and delusions and providing more fertile ground for the emergence of rulers more concerned with the betterment of their own peoples’ lots.
Israel shows the way, not the barrier. The barrier is the purposeful misfocus, the dangerous inanity, of the avoiders of truths. Isn't 62 years enough time to prove that if modern Israel didn't exist the catering to Middle East tyrants would still be the core cause of dire oppression there and threats to the West's security and prosperity?
Re climate, from our commenter here:
After aeons of huge changes and cycles, the earth has suddenly developed an instability, and at the precise moment in time when the means of cheap computation to issue urgent warnings about that same instability became available.
An incredible stroke of luck that these two improbable things not only happened, but happened at the same time.
 I heard the funniest thing back when ClimateGate hit the scene. I actually heard someone say "global warming is dead."
I had to laugh.
Obviously someone didn't get the memo.
So I started collecting headlines on my daily rounds.
All of these are since ClimateGate:
Panel Will Review U.N. Climate Work
"Let me be clear, he said. "The threat of climate change is real." (NY Times)
Despite Climategate, IPCC Mostly Underestimates Climate Change
James McCarthy of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment noted that the IPCC usually errs on the conservative side. (Scientific American)
Climate Scientists Plan To Hit Back At Skeptics
Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics. (Fox News)
Study: Human Impact On Climate Now Clearer
Scientists say the research shows greater evidence for human impact on the climate now than the data available when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its much-maligned report in 2007, warning of "unequivocal" proof of warming. (CBS News)
EPA, Countering Critics Of Greenhouse Gas Findings, Says 'Science Is Settled'
The EPA says it is going forward with "common sense measures that are helping to protect Americans from this threat" and said its critics are trying to "stall progress." (Fox News)
World Warming Unhindered By Cold Spells: Scientists
The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards. (Reuters)
Meteorologists: Last Month Warmest January On Record by Far
It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month. (Fox News)
Peru Glacier Breaks Up, Causes Tsunami
It was one of the most concrete signs yet that glaciers are disappearing in Peru, home to 70 percent of the world's tropical icefields. Scientists say warmer temperatures will cause them to melt away altogether. (MSNBC)
Study: Stronger Hurricanes Loom
Top researchers now agree that the world is likely to get stronger but fewer hurricanes in the future because of global warming, seeming to settle a scientific debate on the subject. (MSNBC)
Earthquakes And Tsunamis Just The Tip Of The Iceberg, Say Experts
In papers published by the Royal Society, researchers warned that melting ice, sea level rises and even increasingly heavy storms and rainfall -- predicted consequences of rising temperatures -- could affect the Earth's crust. Even small changes in the environment could trigger activity such as earthquakes and tsunamis. (The Scotsman)
Undersea Arctic Methane Could Wreak Havoc on Climate
Why is the permafrost failing? According to the study, the process occurs naturally over thousands of years but is being accelerated by man-made climate warming. (USA Today)
Climate Change Will Impact Infectious Diseases Worldwide
But as Thompson noted, despite its challenges, climate change can be a relatively solid rock on which to moor infectious disease planning. Many functions of human populations, from geographical displacement to lifestyle changes, that influence disease transmission can be exceedingly hard to track, she said. "Climate is one thing you can actually measure." (Scientific American)
Climate Change May Extend Allergy Season
Sneezing, congestion, and runny noses from hay fever may be lasting longer because climate change may be extending pollen seasons, doctors in Italy said on Monday. (MSNBC)
Darwin Foes Add Warming To Targets
For mainstream scientists, there is no credible challenge to evolutionary theory. They oppose the teaching of alternative views like intelligent design, the proposition that life is so complex that it must be the design of an intelligent being. And there is wide agreement among scientists that global warming is occurring and that human activities are probably driving it. (NY Times)
Coast Guard Sees Increasing Need For Icebreakers
Allen sidestepped a question on whether he believes in climate change, though he said "certain things are undeniable," including a smaller ice cap and changes in ocean temperature and chemistry. (CBS News)
Report: March Was Earth's Warmest On Record
In addition, climate researchers have been reporting rising global temperatures for several years as a result of the Greenhouse Effect, in which rising levels of carbon dioxide and others gases in the atmosphere trap heat instead of allowing it to escape out into space. (USA Today)
Winter Was Fifth Warmest On Record
However, worldwide temperatures have also been climbing in recent years, a warming attributed by most atmospheric scientists to chemicals added to the air by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution. (CBS News)
On Global Warming, The Science Is Solid
While aspects of climate change impacts have been overstated, none of the errors or allegations of misbehavior undermine the science behind any of the statements made above. In particular, they do not alter the conclusions that humans have taken over from nature as the dominant influence on our climate. (Houston Chronicle)
US Senate Climate Bill To Be Unveiled April 26
WASHINGTON, April 15 (Reuters) - A long-awaited compromise bill to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming will be unveiled by a group of senators on April 26, sources said on Thursday. (Reuters)
To quote Samuel Clemens,
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Monday, April 19. 2010
 White Lefties go nuts when black Americans leave the plantation. They act like Simon Legree. h/t to Driscoll's Frank Rich Covers All The Bases
Related: Taranto's Why the Left Needs Racism - It serves a political purpose.
Also, at Tiger: Race as a political weapon against the right
Image is Tom's Final Beating, from the 1853 Illustrated Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Tom has been a hero of mine since I first read the book in junior high school. How "Uncle Tom" became a pejorative is beyond me. His infraction, if you recall, was to refuse to whip the other blacks to "keep them down."
A book by Randy Barnett: Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty
Dubious Grousing over the Percentage of African-American Players in Major League Baseball
Dalrymple: In Britain, compulsory virtue stifles individual liberty. "Compulsory virtue" is an oxymoron.
Goldberg:
So, how many more Priuses will the world have to buy to offset this Icelandic volcano?
The UK: Up to 75% of births to be outside marriage
John at Powerline:
Government medicine is bad medicine. Why anyone would want to dismantle our health care system and replace it with the disaster that is socialized medicine is beyond me.
Was Jesus a Marxist? Am Thinker
Is the party over for China's Communist Party?
53% of Americans are now an "aggrieved elite"
More leftist hatred and violence. Related, via Driscoll:
On the West Coast, it’s the Clash of the Poseur Totalitarians! On the East Coast, more leftwing totalitarians seek to inflict violence. Glenn Reynolds suggests alerting the Southern Poverty Law Center, but their myopia causes a distinct blindness in their left eye.
Who is this mystery man Obama?
History and Ideology in Textbooks. h/t, Weasel Watchers. A quote:
...fully 60% believe that "most school textbooks are more focused on being politically correct than ensuring accuracy."
Prof Liu:
Speaking of the nomination of now Chief Justice John Roberts, Mr. Liu opined that words like "'free enterprise,' 'private ownership of property,' and 'limited government'" are "code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections."
"Code words" for freedom, in my view.
Sunday, April 18. 2010
Iceland photo via Thompson, who links to more photos
AVI on parachurches
It's in the top ten most dangerous cities on the planet. h/t, Tiger.
Palin: “Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?”
Obama mocks me. That is not a respectful thing to do. IBD: Thanks for what?
The Limited-Government Big Tent
VDH: How Could We Be So Stupid?
How the Left views Conservatives
Bill Clinton to America: Shut up and lie down
Afghanistan round up: Jules
Still impressed by Gov. Christie
Like we often say:
...I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government. The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work.
Photo below via Vanderleun -
Saturday, April 17. 2010
Dark blue is +10 or above, dark red is -10 or below. Details at Ace:
Excellent essay from Fred Siegel at Commentary, The Anti-American Fallacy. (h/t, Insty). It is about "Down with the people!"
Adam Bellow's disenchantment with the Zabar's Left
Is it kiddie pron if the exhibitionist kids photo themselves?
JC Phillips: God in Our Classrooms
Church bells are insensitive. h/t, Moonbattery
The 50 most stressful colleges. If they think college is stressful, they should try real life.
Gay or not? Who cares? She looks slightly butch, tho. Politics is amusing.
It is Small Business Vs. Big Government
Seattle Tea-Party Lukewarm
What's wrong with Sousa? Everybody loves Sousa.
Steyn is hilarious about Canada. (the post on the left side of his page)
Can't wait for climate change legislation. These jerks want us to freeze.
When you tax a business, who pays?
"Economics is not always intuitive – and that is what makes it such a fascinating and important discipline. Take what economists call “incidence” – the study of who actually bears the burden of a particular tax. It is obvious enough that employees pay income tax. But it is much harder to actually work out who really ends up paying for other taxes; voters are often fooled into thinking that somebody else, usually big business, is being hit by higher taxes while in fact it is them who are picking up the tab, albeit in a way that is impossible to detect."
Who pays taxes on business? The shareholders and the consumers. As of 2002, 49% of Americans owned equities.
Friday, April 16. 2010
From Rick Moran's Tea Partiers Epitomize the Tension Between the Individual and the State:
The importance of their advocacy becomes apparent when you consider that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have adopted the even more problematic “communitarian” ideal as their template for government. Where the principle of utility is part of the historic, classical liberal definition of government, communitarianism is a more radical ideal that denies individual rights in almost all cases while making forced altruism the dominant force for change.
And from Shiver:
Having spent a good deal of time with tea partying patriots, I do not see them as easily fooled, however. A very wise group they appear to be. Whether highly educated or not so much, tea partiers on the whole have the one thing so many on the left, and especially in this particular administration, lack: real-world experience.
Barack Obama and his minions have unleashed and called to rhetorical arms a veritable legion of the kind of folks they probably didn’t even know existed a year ago. These are Americans who prefer liberty over the luxury of a government-guaranteed life of mooching off the labors of others.
Silent majority? Well, not any more.
Dumb rednecks? Now, there’s a laugh.
The only reason this far-left administration and its media mouthpieces don’t respect the tea partiers is that they hold the partiers’ all-American virtues in such virulent disdain.
Call me a dumb redneck if you want. I don't care.
Congressman Henry Waxman, who never met a federal tax or mandate he didn't like to ram down Americans' throats, even when he discovers that the law he backed actually requires corporations to quickly report the negative financial impacts of ObamaCare, has decided to focus his attention on Americans' throats.
The Hill reports: Waxman calls on Major League Baseball to ban chewing tobacco.
 From the Comments:
"On behalf of the American people, I would like to submit an earmark for the next major piece of legislation, called "Bubble gum for Bubbas." This is to request $75 billion to buy smokeless tobacco from MLB athletes and to exchange it with bubble gum, just like we buy guns from people in inner cities to get those guns off the street. This legislation includes a rider for their third-party medical insurance plan that pays for any additional dental expenses that may in the course of this contract and for any reasonable time after the completion thereof be incurred by replacing said chewing tobacco with chewing gum."
And:
"The nanny state marches on. Since the government is now responsible for your healthcare, and can't afford the expense, be prepared for a rash of new restrictions. Obesity will be outlawed, alcohol consumption and lack of exercise will be next. Do you have any risky habits? Ride a motorcycle, sky dive, fly a light aircraft or hang glider? Dangerous and society should not be responsible to take care of you if you take these risks, so the government will say. Auntie Sam will take care of us all. Let's all take our morning "happy pill" and drone on like slaves."
There's another law he backed that Waxman forgets: Such a ban would have to be negotiated with the Players Union.
Can't wait to see the LA Dodgers and other teams send bottles of warm brown spit to Waxman's office.
There is a dearth of good links out there today. This one is interesting, though: Contract With America.
I tend to agree with Spruiell's take on it.
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Iran, Islam & Cyrus the Great