We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
What is unusual in the human record is not men stepping out on their wives. What is unusual is the model of faithful monogamy, a model that takes for granted the importance of women’s experience, not just men’s. Before the 18th century and outside of Western Europe, marriage was a social and economic as well as sexual arrangement; it had little to do with love and companionship, and no one much cared about whether women were fulfilled or not. But with the emergence of what sociologists and historians refer to as companionate marriage, intimacy became the marital ideal. Instead of arranged unions, the young made their own choice of mate based on shared interests and deep affection rather than on social requirements. Fidelity followed naturally, or so it was hoped, and it meant that, yes, people gave a merde.
While giving all your power to unelected and unaccountable leaders is one of those ideas so profoundly stupid that only the very well educated and conventionally intelligent could believe in it, many accepted the root idea that all which stood between Portugal and competitiveness was its lack of size. If Portugal joined with the other countries of Europe, all of Europe would show America a thing or two.
If my family and friends became a stone-age tribe, would the government leave us alone? I'd be willing to grow my hair down to my knees so strange, I'd look like a walking mountain range...
Remember when Hillary said that the government shouldn't be concerned with "every undercapitalized business"? These people are not aware that the majority of Americans work in or for small businesses, and that, in this economy, they are all undercapitalized to the point that higher taxes can destroy them.
They need to get out of the EU and be free to destroy their lovely country's marginal economy however they chose to do. The German Empire's rules do not suit them, and they don't care much about their economy. "Free the Greeks!" (I can't decide whether to nickname the EU the German Empire or the Holy Roman Empire ll.)
“But liberalism, Mamet thinks, is dismantling culture. The problem is that “the Left today is essentially an elitist movement, and it has invested a lot of time and money in the idea that they know better.” Elites have been led to think “by getting the grades, and getting into good schools and think-tanks and government positions that they are fit” to reorder society more rationally. But this requires first demolishing the order produced by the organic processes of tradition, democracy, and markets — the culture. Why are some so susceptible to this fatal conceit? “They get out of elite schools being told nothing but, ‘You’re the best.’” Hubris — a dramatist’s area of expertise. (The liberalism of his own elite group, the literati, he blames on “devotion to fantasy — this sort of Manichean view.”)
Left or right, the elites always know what's best for you - and what's best for themselves.
An attempted palinization of Michelle Bachmann, by Taibbi
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.
It doesn't matter who you are: if you raise your head up over the trenches, they do this to you. And they are rougher on Conservative women than on the men - although Taibbi would have written a similar hit piece on Reagan - "ignorant and batshit crazy" - I'm sure.
Anti-Semitism is an escape from reality, misdirecting attention to real problems by inventing another cause as coming from Jews or Israel. We’re familiar with this behavior in the Middle East but it is also evident elsewhere, as in Greece. When history isn’t known, constructive futures cannot be built as the old hatreds and sins are blithely repeated.
A memorial to one of the major heroes of Greece’s victory against the Italian invasion in 1940 – Jewish Colonel Mordechai Frizis -- stands outside the National Military Museum in Athens. Many leaders and members of the Greek resistance during World War II were Jews.
Today, except for scant history writing (see Jewish Resistance In Wartime Greece), they are forgotten. A few weeks ago I corresponded with a knowledgeable gentile Greek-American friend who was surprised at the extent of Greek Jews’ involvement in the WWII resistance. This isn’t unusual. As Andrew Apostolou, a Senior Program Manager for Freedom House, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year:
Instead of the Holocaust being treated as a moment for moral and historical reflection, it is portrayed as an opportunity for national self-congratulation because of the rescue of a small number of Greek Jews. The genuine heroism of Greek Christians who saved Greek Jews from the Nazis in such places as Zakynthos and Athens is used to obscure the collaboration and indifference that helped condemn tens of thousands of Greek Jews to death in Salonika and northern Greece.
Instead, today’s Jews in Greece are scapegoats (a person or group made to bear the blame and suffering for others’ actions) among many Greeks for the economic implosion of their welfare state. Remaining synagogues or newer memorials are vandalized and swastikas painted on them. (Latest instance.)
Boskin: Five Lessons for Deficit Busters - A recent study of successful deficit reductions found they averaged more than $5 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes.
If you saw a dozen al-Qaeda terrorists approaching your location, who would you rather have by your side? A squad of lawyers like me (even with my sidearm and M4 that I carried downrange) or one of Fox Troop (2/3 ACR)’s Bradley Fighting Vehicles, chain gun at the ready?
Note the surrealism of the European unrest: who are the “they” who “stole” the money that is now no longer there to fund socialism? Did not the socialists at last get what they wanted? The “they” who used to fund it by expanding the economy disappeared a long time ago and now are in the graveyards of Europe.
Don't Know Much About History- The popular historian David McCullough says textbooks have become 'so politically correct as to be comic.' Meanwhile, the likes of Thomas Edison get little attention.
Mrs. BD reminds you, if near Boston, to visit the spectacular WAFA Flower Show this week. Over 600 flower creations from people all over the world, with probably 30,000 visitors also from all over the world. First time this has been held in the US.
Why 70% Tax Rates Won't Work - Memo to Robert Reich: The income tax brought in less revenue when the highest rate was 70% to 91% than it did when the highest rate was 28%.
Coburn's bill would have been just a modest first step. As he has put it, ethanol enjoys "a triple crown of government intervention: its use is mandated by law, it is protected by tariffs, and companies are paid by the federal government to use it."
Connecticut finished 47th among states in net jobs created by existing businesses over a 15 year period, according to the National Establishment Times Series database, which tracks job dynamics from 1993 through 2008. On jobs generated by new businesses over the same time, the state ranked 46th, according to NETS. In fact, it's misleading even to use the term ‘job dynamics' in discussing Connecticut. The state has fewer private sector jobs today than it had in 1990.
Malloy and his fellow Democrats now in charge seem to believe that the state's only problem was that it just wasn't doing enough taxing and spending and borrowing.
Lovely state, insane politics. Economically, it could be another Texas if it wanted to be. From an income standpoint, it's the richest state in the US (but that mostly comes from the comfortable NYC suburb of Fairfield County). Instead, it keeps trying to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs to buy votes in its forlorn dying cities from which industry has fled.
That's a long-term death spiral, just like the one New Jersey was in.
As I have twice before (here in June 2010 and here in September 2010), I asked my friend Gerald Robbins, the Turkish-speaking expert and a Senior Fellow at Philadelphia’s Foreign Policy Research Institute, to comment on this past weekend’s parliamentary elections in Turkey.
In brief recap of prior posts:
Turkey’s AKP political party and its leader Prime Minister Recep Erdogan have held parliamentary power since 2002. Their program has been a combination of several elements: successfully encouraging economic development in the interior which has also benefited the usual coastal economic centers, and pursuing a gradual turning from the secularist path set almost a century ago for modern Turkey by Kemal Attarturk. AKP’s Turkey turned to a more Islamist focus aligned with Ottoman-like pretensions of influence throughout the Middle East. Turkey’s former closeness with the West via NATO membership has become an empty promise, as shown in its refusal to allow Western forces to enter Iraq via its territory in 2003 and subsequent footsy with radical states in the Middle East and support for anti-Israel propaganda and actions. Facing strongly entrenched business, secular and military interests, like a frog in slowly warming water, these interests have had their power sapped (coopted in the case of many traditional business interests, whose social-democratic/statist linkages make them particularly susceptible to AKP blandishments and programs).
Fifteen summers ago, America's news media informed us that black churches throughout the South were being torched by white racists. The purported wave of arsons dominated the airwaves and generated thousands of newspaper articles. Pundits, politicians and preachers decried the terrorism and the hate it represented.
“It turns out that one of the women Congressman Anthony Weiner was communicating with was a porn star. When asked how it was possible to get involved with someone in such a sleazy business, the porn star said, ‘I don’t know.’” – Conan O’Brien
Superb Chris Muir toon below the fold (totally SFW)
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
Both Hollywood and politics have been called “high school with money,” to reflect their petty, puerile nature. But it’s rare to see a politician — especially one with such powerful connections as Weiner — wish so overtly to infantilize himself. Particularly at what will likely be looked back at as being the peak of his career in politics
Imagine a newspaper in 2008 asking readers' help in perusing Barack Obama's emails as U.S. senator and Illinois state senator. Or for that matter, help in unearthing his college records. The howls from "mainstream" journalists and Democratic politicians would have been deafening.
Prison Math - What are the costs and benefits of leading the world in locking up human beings?
We lock up too many people for non-violent crimes. In the end, it's the taxpayers who pay for it. Let them pay for their errors with money or work instead of residing on my nickel.
It's indecent on the face of it, for heaven's sake. Even Bill Clinton left the charming high school girls alone. Adults just aren't supposed to do that, Humbert Humbert: it's not "sick" - it's plain old bad. The guy has a pattern of bad, of all sorts.
Darn uptight Christian Conservatives don't think guys should be hitting on high school girls. It's somebody's daughter. Sheesh. I guess it is not unseemly, in the view of like really hip dudes like Matthews. Is "unseemly" obsolete?
The real problem for Europe’s peripheral countries is that the very large economic imbalances that they are now experiencing are extraordinarily difficult to correct within the straitjacket of EU membership. No longer having their own currency to manage, these countries cannot resort to currency devaluation to boost exports. Instead, they now have to earn competitiveness through the painful process of wage and price deflation. And a big boost in exports is exactly what these countries now need to withstand the many years of public sector belt-tightening that they will have to endure to put their public finances on sustainable paths.
Strauss-Kahn should have recognized that Greece, Ireland, and Portugal were all essentially bankrupt. In particular, he should have accepted that, without a meaningful write down of their government debt, there was no way that these countries could restore order to their public finances without provoking the deepest of economic recessions. Instead, Strauss-Kahn chose to believe that all that was required to tide these countries over their economic crises was the usual IMF recipe of draconian budget belt-tightening backed by very large public-sector bailout lending from the IMF and the European Union.
One Cosmos: 
Kentucky Bourbon Distilleries 
The 