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.
Irene might be headed to New England. No problem - we can deal with it. It's always a smaller deal than they make it sound. I call it "Weather Porn." And if Yankees can't deal with bad weather, who can? Heck, we enjoy bad weather.
Muslim immigrants to America seem to get with the program - that's why they came. I wonder why they form dangerous and socially-hostile ghettoes in Europe. Might it be because they are given too much? The workers in my Dunkin Donuts used to be all Hispanic women - now it's half Hispanic women and half Muslim men.
What an absurdity. Had Obama not shattered investor and employer confidence with massive intervention after massive intervention in the markets, had he practiced any fiscal discipline or simply not imposed the enormous burdens of Obamacare on employers, then the country would not be struggling to get unemployment under 9%. If he just called off the NLRB there would be more jobs in South Carolina, and that is one of thousands of destructive regulatory decisions, perhaps tens of thousands of such decisions.
I think the debt ceiling debate this year has done for future debt ceiling thresholds what the Bork nomination did for judicial politics in 1987—changed the political rules of the game forever.
If the moral arc of the universe truly bent toward justice, Theodore Parker's line wouldn't be inscribed in the Martin Luther King monument and ascribed to King as one of his most famous sayings.
For that, Mr. Gore himself has a lot of blame to carry. His own “sputtering righteousness” and his adolescent barks of “bulls–t” to his critics may be a reverse of the Obama declaration. Gore’s meltdown might just be the moment when the people of the planet saw the carney show for what it was.
How do they get 40 black government SUVs to the Vineyard? Do they charter a ferry? Or two? And where does this entourage sleep at night? In tents? Space on MV ain't cheap at all.
Related: Steyn: The Imperial Presidency- European royals make do with a less lavish lifestyle than the supposed citizen-executive of a so-called republic.
Christians are used to their generosities doing no good at all. We rather expect that will be the case many times. It is ours to give, and then the matter is out of our control. We even accept, more reluctantly, that our gift may go to wrong purposes, that in the free will of the recipient are many of the evils common to mankind, and our nickel may go to the devil.
When we know that the gift will harm, however, does the picture change?
While the evidence (both from polling and observational data) strongly indicates Romney has the best chance to beat the Obama candidacy the Republicans are most likely to face in 2012, his biggest problem appears to be that while the base claims electability is the most important quality it is looking for, it doesn't yet understand that he may be the only person with a real shot.
It is also possible that, much like a young woman on the dating scene, what the Republican base says it wants and what it really desires are two very different things. They have already discarded the "nice" guy who would have been best for them in the long run (Pawlenty) and are now enamored with the latest "bad boy" (Perry) who is exciting but who has very little "marriage" potential.
In short, Romney is in great danger of being left at the alter (sic) by a base which wrongly thinks that Obama's weakness has left them free to follow their hearts instead of their brains.
He might be right. I don't know. I do know that Palin can't win a national election
Those leftists who spend their days spinning apology for this sort of thing (and for worse) might like to think about how they could contribute instead to forming a more appealing vision of ways to challenge the extremes of capitalist inequality, and social injustice more generally.
Yeah - they could start a business and hire some people. That would make a real difference in some lives. And pay themselves the same as they pay their employees...
REX MURPHY: Global Warming Runs Out Of Gas.“In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the high profile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this ‘science’ as they pretend to be. “
Seems to me people vary enormously in their determination to make wise decisions - and in their willingness to take responsibility for their bad decisions
That's a big "Duh" from me, because, in cloud-cuckoo land, money just grows on trees and all you have to do is to harvest the excess from the undeserving lucky. This only goes to confirm the shrewd post from Powerline the other day.
Problem is, the numbers of those undeserving lucky are shrinking rapidly in this Obama economy. So who pays? And who hires?
Honey, while you're up, get me a Laphroaig please, while I contemplate the Dems' plans to go after assets - before death - instead of only income.
Not from The Onion - from NASA (correction - not exactly NASA itself but NASA-affiliated scientists): Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report.
So now we have the boy who cried "Aliens!" You really just have to laugh and, anyhow, I kinda like aliens. Bring 'em on!
The Associated Press reports President Obama has figured out what to do about the unemployment problem, and you're going to want to sit down before we tell you. Ready? OK, here goes:
He's going to give a "major speech."
Wait, there's more! The Los Angeles Times reports that he's already "daring Republicans to block" the "job-creation package" he has yet to devise.
"Dare them to block it"? Is this Kindergarten? Everybody knows what things the economy needs to be unleashed, but the Dems will never do them.
A short while ago, Arnold Kling wrote a good piece about the growth industries in Western countries, especially the US. I cannot find that link right now.
They turn out to be Government, Education, and Health Care. I find it illuminating to view these sectors of life as industries: consumer-oriented service industries, largely unproductive, with the first two pandering to and trying to manipulate their customers and the third, well, in flux but it actually does produce things: artificial knees, medicines, treatments, stents for my friends, etc. - things that might help people be productive and independent.
All three have brilliant, expensive marketing machines - and all three are heavily subsidized if not totally paid for by the taxpayer. Who is paying the bills for these subsidies now? The Chinese - the reason we were supposed to eat our spinach as kids. They are paying those bills. We owe them, big time.
Or do they own us? Think about it: Chinese people are paying for our Medicare and our "stimuli"... It is pathetic.
Listening to someone means accepting the idea that there are things you don't know, and things you may be wrong about. That's hard to do when you're working from a philosophy that insists problems can be solved by following a rigid social or economic plan from a tenured academic. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't even have a PhD and is several social classes below you? Instead you smile patiently while he's talking and then explain to him why he's wrong. And it that doesn't work, you pretend to agree with him, while explaining that both of you actually share the same agenda. Your agenda.
The left does this over and over again-- and then doesn't understand why it's reviled for it. Three years ago it sold the same totalitarian rubbish, the bad economics and meaningless slogans by passing it off as a messianic event that would transform all of human history.
Now the failed messiah and his million dollar buses are trying to salvage the disaster. And yet even staring into the face of the economic apocalypse, the misery they inflicted on so many, and the fall of the national economy-- all they can do is mumble about bad luck and pass off the same bad policies as a bold new approach to saving the economy.
People are hurting out there, and it is because the government has gotten in their way. People are fearful of what the government plans to do to them, and to their businesses, next. My take is that the entire US economy is holding its breath until 2013. In the meantime, people will hunker down and try to survive the economic plague.
For a person with New Urbanist (or Old Urbanist) leanings, a visit to Seaside feels a bit like a pilgrimage to a sacred site. Although the merits of the town have been debated for years, its significance in the history of American urban planning is undeniable.
May we take some solace in finally hoping that even hard-line leftists like Mr. Klein have belatedly seen the glaring light? Now he admits that community action programs such as Head Start are "little more than patronage troughs for local Democrat Party honchos ... far more adept at dispensing make-work jobs than mastering the subtle nuances of early education."
Jeff Greenfield is shocked, horrified. Thomas Jefferson would not be: "That government which governs least, governs best." This is The Great American Debate: Freebies vs. Freedom.
Marris argues that the cult of pristine wilderness was created by nature romantics like John Muir. Muir is famous for advocating that the Yosemite Valley be turned into a national park. As Marris notes, wild nature for Muir was a necessity for “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” suffering from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” And for some people it might be—but that is not a scientific claim about ecosystems and their “integrity.”
One thing that those romantic about Midwestern farms and factories tend to forget is that people hated working in those unionized factories, just as the young Harry Truman hated working on his father's farm. That's why the UAW negotiated "30 and out"—retirement after 30 years—with GM in 1970. With workers retiring well before Medicare age, the next union demand was the billions in retiree health-care benefits that more than anything else bankrupted the Big Three.
Michigan is an extreme example of what has afflicted the industrial Midwest. Big corporations were replaced by big government as the leading employer, and public-employee unions replaced industrial unions as the chief financiers of the Democratic Party. In effect, public-employee unions have been a mechanism by which taxpayer money, in the form of union dues, permanently finances a lobby with a vested interest in higher spending and less accountability. It's a lobby that's benefited from the Democratic Party loyalties of black voters, of Latinos in Chicago (the only large Hispanic presence in the Midwest) and of culturally liberal suburbanites.
This Midwestern model is unraveling before our eyes. The Midwest has not been hit as hard by foreclosures or unemployment as some other places, with Michigan an exception on both counts, but you have to look hard for green shoots of growth. They may be most evident in North Dakota, where low costs and light regulation have produced booms in energy and high tech.
But amid the recession, Midwestern Obama Democrats and their public-union allies lost their hold on voters in almost every Midwestern state, losing five governorships last year, including Iowa, and winning the Illinois and Minnesota governorships by less than 1% of the vote. A region that voted 54%-45% for Barack Obama in 2008 voted 53%-43% Republican for House candidates in 2010.
The reality is that the "West" has finally reached the point of saturation wherein its economies and societies can no longer afford to guarantee a certain standard of living for the citizens of these countries in exchange for votes.
These nations have two factors in common: 1) they are all either confirmed to be or determined (as in the case of the United States) to become socialist democracies; and 2) they have evolved into overwhelmingly consumption-based societies, greatly diminishing their goods-producing sector (which generates the real wealth of a nation), thus eroding their job-creation ability as well as the nation's wealth and tax base. Yet the governments of all these countries continue to deficit spend, over-tax (chasing wealth and job-creation off-shore) and borrow in an effort to meet the expectations of the people.
The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book — the usual doom 'n' gloom stuff — and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor's went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history.
... liberalism today lies in ruins, not only because it has indulged the cultural bilge that has given the looters their baseless sense of entitlement... but because it has failed, in its sanctimoniousness, to understand the necessary role illiberalism – guidelines, example, authority, boundaries – plays in the governing of society. It should never have happened that parents, teachers, and the police themselves, go in terror of the young, or in terror of the consequence of reining in their wildness. For the young's sake it should never have happened, never mind for ours. But the consequence is they are disinherited and we live in fear. In a society that is afraid to punish because it is afraid to judge, that does not understand the outrage of being offended against, that cannot feel the egregiousness of a crime, and that no longer even gestures at justice, it's no wonder there are people wildly calling for the return of capital punishment.
If the grownups don't provide the guardrails, who will?
"There are people here with nothing," this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
It's about the unintended consequences of undiscerning compassion. Or, to be a bit more cynical, vote-buying. Genuine gratitude is the rarest of human sentiments.
Standing before a backdrop of graffiti, Cameron said Britain's damaged society had for too long been one which "incites laziness, that excuses bad behavior, that erodes self-discipline, that discourages hard work."
Honestly, close your eyes and try to imagine a scenario in which liberals would ever say that enough money has been spent, enough federal government power exerted. You will fail -- because there is just no satisfying liberals.
The Democratic leadership’s top priority isn’t to get America’s fiscal house in order. It is, as one aide candidly told The Hill, “to continue to raise resources to grow and preserve our majority.”
So, the days of leaving college to jump around from half-job to half-job, or to travel and “find yourself,” or to just hang out for awhile before joining the rat race are over.If you do it, there are consequences.
There always were consequences. Adult life is not child's play unless you have a good-sized trust fund. Of course, you can always do liberal arts grad study in England: they are desperate for suckers. Afterwards, you can wait tables or join riots to burn down some entrepreneurial Paki's fruit stand or some struggling family's haberdashery.
The academic bubble is not bursting, but it is a slow, steady leak which will leave many would-be paid scholars unemployed. My best advice, which is worth exactly what you pay for it, is to get a real productive job and to pursue your scholarly interests on your own, as most people have done in the past. It's going to be difficult to get paid for a hobby in the near future. No free ride unless you are a Talmud scholar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, married to a rich wife.
Picked up my car from service today. They charged me $97/per hour for labor. I remember when auto repair was $17/hour, 20/hr if you watched, 25/hour if you helped.
Well, my gunsmith charges $150/hr, and my local electronics repair joint charges $200 now. There definitely is an economic case for learning how to do something that people need.
Image via 
Gun Owners: 
The Angler: 
Photo from 
How responsible are people
Sippican's 
Taranto: The Five Stages of Obama - 
From the admirable Sultan's 
How to Survive 
Image on right from Knish's 
Peter 
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