Wednesday, February 24. 2010
Hurricane-Like Snowstorm Aims for Northeast...
Looks like another big dump for New England. This will please the News Junkie, who I believe suffers from a serious case of Skiing Addiction. (He loves the cold fresh powder and the fine wintry weather this global warming is bringing us.)
 I do not know the history of how government unions came to be, but I deplore them. Who are they defending those employees from? Their evil neighbors who pay their salaries and their benefits?
The days of fat-cat evil Capitalists oppressing workers are long gone. Private sector unionization is in the dusk of its history, but government unionization is growing by leaps and bounds. Can anyone imagine a unionized military?
In my view, public employee unionization should be illegal because their opponent, in effect, is the public. But there is the basic right to free assembly. At the very least, public employee unions should be prohibited from politics and political contributions: that seems corrupt by definition but, again, there are logical consistency and freedom issues here.
People have been thinking about the topic lately:
From Declining unions, increasing stranglehold:
As the latest BLS statistics reveal, more union members – 7.9 million – now work for the government than the 7.4 million union members working for companies in the private economy, which has five times more workers. This imbalance has profound consequences for all workers, and for democracy itself.
From Rick Moran's WHAT DO WE OWE PUBLIC EMPLOYEES?
We have allowed public employees to ascend to a privileged place - a pedestal that they were never intended to occupy by the Founders - to the point where their influence over politicians, especially at the state and local level, have made them a force unto themselves in growing the size of government. More public employees means more union members, which means more dues money, which translates into more political contributions to friendly politicians who will gladly repeat the cycle.
This vicious circle must be ended. The biggest reason is that it is bankrupting us.
At Reason, Class War: How public servants became our masters:
People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses.
It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders.
Nearly 25% of all mortgages are underwater. What's the big deal? Is a home an investment, or a home? What is truly remarkable in life is to buy something - and to have it appreciate in value. That rarely happens.
100% of auto loans are underwater, and so is the vacation you took last year and put on the credit card. That new leather sofa too, the TV and the boat. And probably your life savings, compared to a few years ago.
For those headed for trouble because of job or income loss, however, I have nothing but sympathy... while I blame Washington: We need tax cuts instead of ever-higher taxes.
 Prager via Lizards:
For the right, the primary moral authority is God (or, for secular conservatives, Judeo-Christian values), followed by parents. Of course, government must also play a role, but it is ultimately accountable to God and it should do nothing to undermine parental authority.
For the left, the state and its government are the supreme authorities, while parental and divine authority are seen as impediments to state authority.
Can the Euro survive?
Cuba is great because...no MacDonalds
How crappy was Haiti before the earthquake?
Driscoll:
...from Walter Duranty to Pinch Sulzberger, Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich, the Times has a long history of being dazzled by the abstractions of totalitarianism, and thus being blinded from the workaday world of actually reporting the news.
How Stupid Do the Elites Think We Are?
How stupid do Swedish elites think the people are?
Climategate Meets the Law: Senator Inhofe To Ask for DOJ Investigation
Krauthammer video: Krauthammer: Obama's Health Plan "Is Really A Travesty Masquerading As An Outreach To The Republicans"
It's my health, it's my choice.
McCotter: The Crisis of Consent: Republicans Must NOT Abet Obama’s ShamWoW! Summit
Like we said: Will the White House demand that every business “justify” its price increases?
FAIL… White House Can’t Find GOP Health Care Bill That’s On Their Website
Brilliant analysis from Vandy:
Obamacare takes a long and detailed look at the current state of American health care and identifies those areas in which it is not yet fucked-up and closes all those unfucked-up loopholes in only 2,000 pages. Given the problem of having to fuck up still functioning elements of the health care system in all 50 states, Obamacare is a masterpiece of concision.
Tuesday, February 23. 2010
 "Contemporary mainline churches have confused the Blue social model with the Kingdom of God." Bingo.
One way to drive them out of business: Obama to Urge Oversight of Insurers’ Rate Increases. Hey, why not do the same with the cost of cars, and tuition...and the cost of government?
Are all narratives untrue? Jawa
Senators do not want Obamacare restrictions. Says Legal Insurr:
Obama's plan (and so too the House and Senate versions) is the worst of all worlds. It is a replica of the housing bubble, thrill for the first few years, and then the bill becomes due without any way to pay for it.
The trap. Q&O via Blue Crab:
Obama gets his moment recorded by the TV cameras no less. And mournfully he pronounces the Republicans as obstructionists who refused to negotiate in good faith as the great and wonderful Democrats have offered to do. And because of that, it is with a heavy heart and reluctantly he is forced to agree with the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that reconciliation is the only route left open to them to do “what is right” for the American people.
Insty:
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT when U.N. “climate change” commissars are meeting on Bali — again. “Yet again, we are asked to believe the UN deserves special exemptions from its own preachings. Its conferees are jetting to Bali for the greater good of all the little folk, whose job is merely to pay the bills for such pleasures, and live with any resulting rationing and regulation. According to the Jakarta Post, some 1,500 people from 192 countries are expected to attend this shindig — where UNEP claims that envoys of some 140 governments will be present.” Somebody tell these people about Skype.
Getting rich off climate, Via Hot Air:
“According to Mr Schapiro, carbon trading is now the fastest growing commodities market on earth. Since Kyoto signatories bought in to the cap and trade concept in 2005, there have been more than $300bn carbon transactions, prompting several investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Barclays, to set up their own carbon trading desks. But that’s just the start. If President Obama and his supporters can institute a cap-and-trade system in the United States – and that’s a big if for this increasingly marooned presidency – demand could explode into a $2 to $3 trillion market…
“‘Carbon developers’, many of them employed by large multinationals, travel the world in search of carbon reduction projects to sell, while firms of carbon accountants have been established to verify on the United Nations’ behalf that those reductions are real. The whole thing, though well intentioned, looks wide open to abuse and scams. Mr Schapiro’s account of the carbon trading market is obviously a sceptical one, and no doubt there are others that take a less cynical view. But I wonder what all the wide eyed climate change campaigners are going to say when the first scandals begin to break, still more what they’ll make of it when the whole thing turns out to be another giant asset bubble – if indeed the non production of carbon can be described as an asset.”
Monday, February 22. 2010
Related to our previous post, From Drudge:
Boehner: New Obama Plan Doubles Down on Failure, Puts Summit in Peril...
SWALLOW: White House Warns Republicans: We'll Pass It With 51 VOTES...
PROPOSAL SUMMARY USES WORD 'TAX' 35 TIMES...
'Increase in Fees on Brand Name Pharmaceuticals'...
Broaden 'Tax Base for High-Income Taxpayers'...
Orders 'Comprehensive Database' On Health Claims...
FORCED: 'Raises percent of income assessment that individuals pay if they choose not to become insured'...
BACKDOOR FIX: Healthcare 'Funds will be transferred to the Social Security Trust' if necessary...
White House Endorses Sen. Landrieu's 'Louisiana Purchase'...
President Obama’s proposals for health care legislation fiddles and fizzles, hardens disputes with opponents, excludes bridges to agreements, and ignores the root cause of overwhelming public unease. Rather than “change” he continues and exacerbates failure.
Summaries, inadequate, are available from the New York Times and Washington Post. The Washington Post, also, offers – more usefully -- the White House provided sketch of details. All leave out in-depth analysis.
Essentially, Obama’s proposals are compromises between the entirely Democrat House and Senate legislation. It actually increases some taxpayer and industry garnishments to pay for enlarged entitlements, adjusting or delaying some. Similarly, the imposed mandate on the states to fund enlarged Medicaid eligibility is delayed a few years but remains a fiscal time-bomb impacting all other state services and driving tax increases. The penalty on large employers who do not provide medical insurance is slightly eased, for the first 30 employees, but the penalty increased, and it is still a sub rosa “mandate” and economic and competitive burden. Some additional database measures are added to perhaps and marginally combat Medicare fraud.
In essence, the Obama proposals continue on the path of grossly enlarged federal government intrusion into and control of individual choices and states’ variations that fit their circumstances and resources.
Indeed, it goes further than before in adding wholesale federal control over insurance premiums, imposing rates, exploiting ignorant furor at large increases in individual coverage premiums by Wellpoint (Blue Cross) in California. The Associated Press provides, however, some of the facts: the individuals segment is deep in the red; it is unfair for the employer segment or other states’ insured to subsidize it; overall profits are 35th out of 53 industries in the Fortune 500 list. Obama’s proposal only deepens the cost pit for 90+% of insured, while driving private insurers out of business which impels a default to more government-provided and dictated, taxpayer-paid medical plans.
The Obama proposals are meant to bridge differences among Democrats in control of the House and Senate, so they can turn the small procedural loophole of “reconciliation” into an override of all other procedures and precedents, not to mention public opposition. Further, Obama does not mention elements of the House and Senate legislation like wholesale cuts to Medicare spending (primarily of provider reimbursements, already low, which would drive more to not take Medicare patients) thus leaving the cuts included as a false way to mask the enormous budgetary costs because such drastic cuts are politically unlikely to actually occur. Meanwhile, taxes on high earners are increased even further than in the House and Senate bills.
“Reconciliation”, purportedly, allows the House to accept the Senate’s bill. There’s reasonable vote-count doubt about that, as well as legal challenges. President Obama’s proposals are, in effect, a new bill to be agreed by the House and Senate that fiddles with a “reconciliation” ram-through. If the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides an estimate of the Obama adjustment proposals together with the remainders of the House and Senate bills, it should be evident that the costs will be much larger, especially if unrealistic ploys are identified and full implementation time periods are included. (See footnote, added)
Obama fails to address the fundamental opposition to vastly increased federal control over 1/6th of the US economy and the lives of 100% of Americans, while deepening the race to national bankruptcy.
Obama fails to address the cost-driver of excess defensive-medicine, by various measures 10-30% of medical spending, that providers use to avoid excessive tort liability. Democrats’ largest contributors and supporters, tort attorneys, are left immunized from impact. Similarly, the impact on rich union benefits – unions being the other largest Democrat contributor base -- is delayed and reduced.
Reductions in the ability to save pretax dollars for health care remain, via health savings accounts and cafeteria plans, reducing individual choice, rather than maintaining or spreading them to more. Taxpayers or insureds who don’t use or support it are still likely to fund abortions. Sponsors of legal immigrants are still able to avoid their promised financial responsibility for legal immigrants’ medical care. Insureds are still unable to choose benefit plans allowed by other states that better fit their needs and budgets.
Obama’s proposals are nothing more than a campaign ploy to appear reasonable but they actually emphasize and enlarge the distance between Democrats’ floundering take-overs and the alternatives or discreet incremental measures that are widely supported.
Obama’s proposals are a transparent and hole-filled veil over what most already recognize as ugly and unacceptable. And, it isn’t closing time, when vision is blurred or judgment desperate. The public isn’t befuddled, and imperiled Congressional Democrats recognize that.
Rather than score, Obama again demonstrates himself as a crassly partisan loser, “arrogant” in the words of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, when it comes to accomplishing anything beyond words, his words no longer masking his ideologic inability to be practical.
House Republican Leader John Boehner sums Obama’s proposals as an “infomercial,” to be tuned out:
The President has crippled the credibility of this week's summit by proposing the same massive government takeover of health care based on a partisan bill the American people have already rejected. This new Democrats-only backroom deal doubles down on the same failed approach that will drive up premiums, destroy jobs, raise taxes, and slash Medicare benefits.
* The CBO just wrote that President Obama's proposals lack sufficient details to "score" (i.e., cost) it, and even if it did that scoring would take longer than this week, past the so-called TV infomercial "summit." How convenient for hollow proposals to have no relaible numbers. More "ramming" with hidden horns.
Rasmussen said on TV last night that 71% of Americans view government as a special interest group.
Who said Americans were stupid?
 George Washington: The man, the myth, the legend.
How to kill Cane Toads
Sol Stern: The Ramparts I Watched -Our storied radical magazine did transform the nation—for the worse.
Faux nostalgia for American manufacturing
Climategate: The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere but Here
Related: Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels. Another "Woops, we goofed".
Pajamas: The glory of gridlock
Bolton: The O "not qualified" to be Pres
Beware the health care reform zombiecrats. Related, from Jules: 50 Votes In 60 Days! ROTFLMAO!
How the O has lost voters like me: Althouse. She quotes Chris Rock: "'He speaks so well' is some sh*t you say about ret**ded people that can talk." I think Ann A. was duped by her own wishes. Quite related: Was Chris Matthews born yesterday?
We have met the enemy, and it is the Anglo-Saxon media
If I had a nickel every time a conservative said "limited government" and didn't mean it, I'd be a very rich man.
Back from the dead? The John birch Society
An interesting legal challenge to the EPA
100 years of shale gas. That is plenty of time to get a lot of nuke plants up and running.
Der Spiegel takes a look at the Nazis
Stolen from Jungleman:
A DC-130H Hercules drone control aircraft banks to the left while passing over the guided missile cruiser USS Chosin (CG-65).
U.S. Air Force photo by Michael Haggarty
Saturday, February 20. 2010
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.
MIT Prof. Lindzen on the failure of computer models. Models aren't reality. That's why they are called models.
If you aren't familiar with Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) - most of our readers seem to be - here's his CPAC speech this week:
Reshaping the Guggenheim. Not a bad idea.
Climate exile speaks out. I wonder whether Maggie's Farm would be legal in the Netherlands.
Our favorite Congressman, Thad McCotter, on love and sex.
More NASA climate corruption reports at Pajamas. A blockbuster NASA story which the MSM avoids. The NY Post: The crackup of the climate 'consensus', a quote:
...the climate campaign's most ludicrous contortion is its response to the recent record snowfalls across the eastern United States. Ordinary citizens, repeatedly shoveling snow from their sidewalk, see global warming as a farce.
In answer, the climate campaigners note that "weather is not climate" and that localized weather events are consistent with climate "change." They may be right -- yet these are the same folks who jumped up and down claiming that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, even though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that narrative.
The ruckus exposes the greatest problem of Al Gore & Co.: They've pointed to any weather anomaly -- cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters -- as proof of climate change. That is, they can't name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory.
Not again! Dems with new government medical plan. I thought it was dead and buried. But we have some States Rights rebels. I love it.
Related: Trial lawyers threaten the O. Related: John Edwards, Mesothelioma Man, and Health Care Reform
Newspapers: Atlanta paper rejects objective reality. Reality is, no doubt, an evil, reactionary concept. See the NYT's Zernicke, who also will not permit facts to get in the way of the narrative.
American households, from Will:
Friday, February 19. 2010
 I hear the snow is good at Jay Peak.
Tofu: Bad for the earth. h/t, Englishman. In my view, it is poison.
Every grandma knows, to her dismay, that personality traits are inherited: The Genetics of Job Choice
Gotta like Mike Pence
Via Insty, A Monstrous Vision For Media Reform. These totalitarians want government to run media - and the internet. Good luck, jerks. We'll die first, with Maggie's Farm in our cold dead hands.
News to me: Farming discrimination. Seeds discriminate?
Dalai Lama literally out with the trash. What? No recycling?
Not another one? Czechgate: Climate scientists dump world’s second oldest ‘cold’ climate record. This is called "science"? h/t, SDA:
The latest independent analysis of world climate data by acclaimed skeptic blogger ‘Chiefio’ (aka E. M. Smith) and his blog contributors confirm that the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) has cynically dumped the world’s second oldest and reliable climate record at Prague in the Czech Republic for no scientific reason.
Climate skeptics claim the censoring of the Czech’s raw data has been perpetrated by climate scientists because the Prague records prove there has been no warming in Europe for over two hundred years.
John H:
In my view, there is something a bit sinister about the petulance with which Democratic leaders bewail their inability to compel their own members to vote for legislation that is massively unpopular with the American people. This is, after all, a democracy.
Truth is no defence? Condell tells it like it is about the Wilders travesty. The Dutch should execute him for speaking out! h/t, Vandy.
I hope our three Dutch readers spread this around.
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.
From Had Enough Therapy? with a post on narrative vs. reality:
Amazingly, led by the self-appointed arbiters of truth, no one seemed to care that Obama lacked a record of achievement, either legislative or executive. It doesn't stop there. Obama never released his medical records. We know nothing of his grade point averages. We have never seen his SAT or LSAT scores.
For the therapy culture, your narrative is the meaning of your life. The therapy culture is about teaching us all to construct our life stories. As a reactionary movement it has pointed us to our past, encouraged us to regress, and imagined that we would find meaning once we discovered which myth we were playing out.
...this may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for right thinking people to confront a specific, widespread mental disorder that has long driven us crazy: what I call Airhead Liberalism Political Disorder or ALPD for short. This is not a coherent ideology like Socialism or Marxism. Rather, it is a style of political engagement whose purpose is psychological satisfaction independent of actual of costs or benefits. In a nutshell: if advocating a policy makes me feel good about myself, it’s a good policy.
The WellPoint Mugging: The brawl over rate increases is a preview of ObamaCare.
Robin's life in Berkeley. The group-think there is creepy. One would like to imagine that a college town would have free-thinkers.
Interesting idea: Grad from HS when you pass the exam
The state and municipal pension scam
Bill Maher: People are too stupid to understand. I guess he means me.
Afghan Offensive May Take a Month, U.K. General Says. Reminds me of Fallujah. Jules wonders where the anti-war movement went.
How do so many pols end up so rich?
Rosen: The Tea Partiers vs. "progressive" leftists and statists. EJ Dionne and the like are going crazy, it seems:
Dionne dismisses anti-statism by narrowly associating it with 18th century anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution. In fact, most of our founders mistrusted a powerful central government, which is why the Constitution enumerated and restricted federal powers, safeguarded the independence of states, and reserved ultimate power to the people. "Progressive" leftists like Dionne are inherent statists with unbounded faith in the virtue and wisdom of elite bureaucrats who share their ideology to run our government, our economy and our lives.
This is the great divide between left and right in our country and the real root of opposition from Tea Partiers and, as the polls reveal, from most Americans to Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their statist agenda.
What gridlock? The O decries government spending:
When calculated by the average annual percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that he will spend during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the biggest-spending president since 1930, the earliest year reported on the OMB’s historical chart of spending as a percentage of GDP. When calculated by the average annual percentage of GDP he will borrow during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the greatest debter president since Franklin Roosevelt.
Thursday, February 18. 2010
Sea levels have been slowly rising since the end of the Little Ice Age. Some people seem to imagine that the world never changes, and never should change. Yet it always has changed.
From The Madness of Prince Charles, this basic inter-glacial temperature graph is always worth bearing in mind:
We tend to feel, here on the Farm, that AGW is a hyped-up, trumped-up carnival designed by people with their own economic, political, pagan-religious, or etc. agendas. Real science-minded people are always skeptics about the science du jour, and know full well that all speculative theories fail in time. The tell, with the Warmists, is how ardently they desire to believe in the projective computer models, regardless of the facts.
We believe that good stewardship of the earth means humbly respecting nature and its power, and preserving natural land as best we can during our brief time here.
Here's what we think, specifically:
1. Warming would be net a good thing for humanity. It always has been, in the past.
2. It's certainly not happening in any catastrophic way - if it is in any way that makes much difference. Climates always change, and the one thing we know for certain is that another Ice Age is coming down the pike eventually. Now that will be a real challenge to humanity. We are due another, and the last Ice Age did no favors for the human species.
3. Even if warming were, somehow, a bad thing (I would need a lot of convincing), nothing meaningful can or will be done about it.
4. Any futile or symbolic effort to do "something" about it will only enrich certain scam-artists, rent-seekers, and grant-seekers, and be exploited by governments to increase their domination of regular people and their tax receipts. Even the big oil companies are hedged and poised to make huge bucks on government legislation internationally in case it ever happens - which I doubt.
Addenda:
- I doubt that the frequently-misguided Tom Friedman has seen the above chart. For stunning Friedman hypocrisy, see here. He won't change his life, but he wants all you little people to change yours. Typical. Just like Al Gore with his private jets and his half-billion he's made on carbon credits, etc.
- If you cannot predict, it isn't science. The non-droughts in the US Southwest. Name one Warmist prediction which has proven accurate over the past 10 years. (Indeed, the Coolists in the Global Cooling frenzy back in the 70's have been better predictors.)
- From Dr. Sanity's Environmental Fantasies:
If the radical environmentalists really wanted to "do something" about global warming, then they would be calling for funding projects that explore countermeasures and methods to adapt to it. What we see instead is the same kind of religious fanaticism and holy fervor that the left so despises in the fundamental right. What they really want is power over people.
Theirs is basically a totalitarian agenda in which they, the "elites", will dictate how people should live on this earth.
- Pajamas: Noble Corruption. I see nothing noble about refusing to be skeptical about scientific theories and computer models. Just ask any hedgie how Nobel-laureate computer models work out as long-term predictors of complex systems.
- Also, How Climate-Change Dance Theory spells the end of a movement. Good grief. All Bozos on that wacky bus.
 Global Cooling kid's book via Vanderleun - who links today's climate scandal: Antarctic sea ice increasing rapidly
They offered us $100 million for Maggie's, but we said no, on principle. Thus this blog deal.
Raccoons in Central Park? Who knew? How did they get there?
If you were a Conservative on the fiscal commission, what would you say?
Rubio rocks
Harsanyi: Who Doesn't Trust Science Now?
Related: Climategate and the NASA Files
Via Surber:
From the New York Times: “The state of Texas and a coalition of free-market and global warming skeptic groups are asking a federal appeals court today to review U.S. EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare… The state argues that EPA’s finding is legally unsupported because it relies heavily on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Sow it, reap it, liars.
Hewitt: Meme Of The Left: "Gridlock" iS The Problem, Not Obama's Policies. Quote:
When the GOP lost control of the House and Senate, the annual budget deficit was $161 billion. President Obama's budget for next year --with no stimulus and no TARP-- calls for $1.6 trillion in red ink.
Thus in three years of democratic control the deficit has swell from 161 billion to 1,600 billion.
That's the opposite of gridlock --that is one party rule by the party of massive spending and unlimited pork.
Sowell: Politicians Taking Away Your Freedom
Barack Obama Mocked at This Year’s Mardi Gras Parade
Insty:
HAYEK’S THE ROAD TO SERFDOM continues to rack up stellar sales. Well, if ever there were a time. . . .
Trial lawyers: Democrats' other money machine
Wednesday, February 17. 2010
Hope and change...Economists Predict Cutbacks, Tax Increases That 'Aren't Even Imaginable'.
VDH has it right: What a Difference a Year Makes. A quote:
...what changed? The Obama administration offered a statist agenda of massive deficits, and it blamed Bush for America's current problems. The people revolted, and even the combined power of large Democratic congressional majorities, a ministry-of-truth media, and an Ivy League technocracy could not push through hope and change — largely due to Democratic legislators' worries that they were walking out on a plank that would soon be sawed off by the next election.
The implosion of the Obama administration is newsworthy, but not as astonishing as this petulant liberal reappraisal of both popular political participation and the structure of American government...
Remember this from Nov., 2008? Republicans still in denial as wilderness years stretch ahead
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.
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