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.
With such an important event coming up in a few months, I figured we should install a countdown clock here on Maggie's, since so many of us are eagerly anticipating having the Democrats kicked right out of Washington, if not right off the planet.
You have to admit — if the world disappears into an alternate dimension, at least it'll take care of runaway inflation. And those pesky Democrats.
While I don't think you'll particularly learn anything new here, it's still interesting watching an official JPL guy cover the bases.
And if he's wrong?
Just do as we learned to do back in the 60's when Russia was about ready to launch 25,000 nukes at us.
Just crawl under your school desk. You'll be fine.
The honest reflections of the more thoughtful voices on the American left confirm that Romney and Ryan are, in effect, leading the country. First there was William Saletan of Slate, who wrote--without irony: "A wonderful thing has happened for this country. Paul Ryan will be the Republican nominee for vice president." He added that Republicans like Ryan were the perfect antidote to Democratic excesses: "Maybe, like me, you were raised in a liberal household. You don’t agree with conservative ideas on social or foreign policy. But this is why God made Republicans: to force a reality check when Democrats overpromise and overspend."
Larry Bailey unleashed a prepared Democrat chorus to discredit former military special operators who oppose President Obama’s re-election.
"I have to admit that I'm a Birther," said SOS founder Larry Bailey, a retired 27-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, in an interview. "If there were a jury of 12 good men and women and the evidence were placed before them, there would be absolutely no question Barack Obama was not born where he said he was and is not who he says he is."
Larry Bailey and I are friends. Larry is absolutely not a speaker who minds his PR Ps & Qs, nor ever tried to be a diplomat. He is a devout patriot who has devoted his life to the security of the United States. I am not a birther, nor are those I know who supported his first efforts, the first of several independent other organizations of former military special operators, to raise attention to the concerns – also expressed by several leading politicians, including some Democrats -- that President Obama and his minions exposed national security secrets in order to bolster Obama’s re-election.
The usual Obama apologists and partisans quickly expressed their distaste for birtherism, understandable, but used Bailey’s words to attack all the other leaders of other organizations of special operators opposed to President Obama’s re-election. (Here's the leader of one of the other organizations of former special operators.)
Omigosh, Obama For America website reveals that there are Republicans among the leaders of the four independent groups of special operators. Obama For America was an internet-based campaign organization for Obama in 2008, re-named Organizing For America after the election for his permanent campaign, and now Obama For America is back.Guess what Obama For America, there are far more Republicans than Democrats among the military, and especially so among special operators in the various military branches
James Joyner, who sways with Democrat memes inside the beltway at his blog Outside the Beltway, with regard to one of the organizations of special operators, OPSEC (operations security), chimes in with “the fact that the group’s key spokesmen are all Republican operatives certainly changes the lens through which their charges should be viewed.” Oh, does it? Only for those looking for an excuse to look the other way.
Failed Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry – who trumped up his Vietnam veteran status, as usual, rolls out his attack on the over 60 of fellow Swift Boat veterans who exposed his lies or exaggerations about his service in Vietnam, and Kerry’s certain betrayal of Vietnam veterans after in likening us to the army of Genghis Khan. Paul Mirengoff notes: " Kerry never explains why he finds the criticism of Obama “outrageous.” Doing so would have required a defense of the administration’s serial disclosure of sensitive national security information."
I’m not defending Larry Bailey’s words, by any means. But, the effort by those supporting Obama’s re-election to avoid and broadbrush besmirch the valid concerns of special operators is typical of the Obama re-election campaign.Patriots, to the Obama folk, are those who support him. The special operators from the military and national security experts, whose lives are actually on the line and endangered by loose self-serving lips in the Obama administration, are denigrated by the Obama minions. In 2004, veterans and their families and friends saw right through John Kerry and, I confidently predict, will see through Obama like a soggy thin tissue too.
I know that we have a few Chinese readers. We would welcome more.
A reader in China asked me to post this shout-out. I believe that many in the Middle Kingdom might enjoy a refreshing dose of freedom-oriented Americana - if only to practice their reading!
We'd love to see Maggie's go viral in China, but it ain't gonna happen. Politicians would shut us down.
We would like it if our Chinese readers would forward our site around to their email list. I do not believe that we are censored by your government.
Not yet, at least, despite our dangerously-subversive attitudes towards state power.
On July 11, 2011, two high-speed 'bullet' trains collided in Wenzhou, China, killing 40 people and injuring over 190. It was the second-worst high-speed train wreck in history.
As a disaster documentary buff, I've occasionally dashed over to YouTube to see if some company like the people who produce the 'Seconds From Disaster' or 'Mayday' series have done a special on it.
But I've left disappointed. No one's ever produced a comprehensive documentary covering the entire sad event.
“Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure—that is, permission to practice. They’ll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.”
Were you thinking of setting out a shingle in Massachusetts as a GP/Cardiologist/Obstetrician/Gastroenterologist/etc.? Bet you’ll think twice about that.
The Journal appropriately invokes Jeremy Bentham’s totalitarian idea of the all-seeing pantopticon here:
* “Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter.”
Got that? Your doctor is actively discouraged from spending too much on you lest that extra test that might save your life add too much red ink to the bottom line.
RomneyCare is a disaster unfolding before our eyes. I’ll leave it to others to apportion the appropriate quantum of blame to its eponymous architect or sponsor or whatever role Mitt Romney played in the creation of misbegotten piece of legislation. We all make mistakes. The important thing is that Mitt Romney has recognized his mistake and has credibly outline a plan to make amends by repealing and replacing ObamaCare. Meanwhile, team Obama continue to tout the most unpopular piece of legislation since prohibition. And people wonder why I predict Romney/Ryan will win by a landslide.
It's ironic that 'R&R' usually stands for Rest & Relaxation — when resting on our current policies and relaxing our stance against government proliferation is the very opposite of what our own R&R — Romney & Ryan — intend to do. Such are the whims of fate.
Personally, I'm quite pleased with the pick. I originally thought that Romney & camp would go the low-key route — especially after the VP candidate in the last election outshone the guy running for the P slot — so picking a firebrand like Ryan showed they do, indeed, have a message for America. That they are, indeed, going to give it a choice.
My one regret is that I didn't start saving all of the "Why The Ryan Selection Is Great News For Obama!" links that suddenly popped up. It would have made for a fun post. Seriously, how insane do you have to be to make such a claim? Palin, sure. Newt, Perry, Bachmann, Christie, Pawlenty, Jindal, Portman, sure. I'd agree. All possible good news for Obama.
But not Ryan. Not the one guy even Democrats will tip their hat to for knowing his stuff.
And these loopy articles weren't on some backwater blog sites. Slate, Politico, Daily Beast, Puffington Host, Boston Globe, Washington Post, NY Times; all have spit out the "This is great news for Obama!" meme since the selection.
One wonders, if their immediate reaction to the announcement is gross hyperbole — what's it going to be like from here on out? I'd look for some real zaniness coming out of these sites in the near future. I'll collect some of the better ones for our mutual amusement.
The first official piece of zaniness is below the fold, and I'll also expound on why I think Palin not speaking at the convention is a good thing. Long-time readers know I'm a devout Palinite, so it's not an issue I take lightly.
John C. Goodman: Why the Doctor Can't See You - The demand for health care under ObamaCare will increase dramatically. The supply of physicians won't. Get ready for a two-tier system of medical care.
Doctor Pay and Social Priorities - Med-school grads make less than business-school grads, and take on far more risk. Is this model sustainable?
"This is an election in which we should be talking about the path ahead, but you don't hear any answers coming from President Obama’s reelection campaign. That’s because he's intellectually exhausted, out of ideas and out of energy. And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others. This is an old game in politics; what’s different this year is that the president is taking things to a new low."
In 2008, Candidate Obama said, “if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters.” He said, “if you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” And that, he told us, is how, “You make a big election about small things.”
That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is the now the heart of his campaign.
If the Obama labeling campaign is successful, voting for Romney will mean becoming socially unacceptable; it will be tantamount to embracing a Neanderthal sort of mindset that opposes Obama not on his disastrous economic policies but simply because of his race.
By constantly moving to the left, the left is exerting control of the political space, defining the Overton Window in terms of its own political leanings. Moderates become slow leftists and conservatives become slower leftists. The entire spectrum comes to be defined by the positions of the left. Everyone in the spectrum becomes a leftist of radical, moderate or conservative temperament.
Leftist Planet - Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators?
Almost completely cut off from the maw of McDonald's, Madonna and other global corporate-cultural influences, Cuba retains a refreshing preserved quality. It's a space and place that serves as a beacon for the future -- universal education, health care and housing are rights people the world over want, need and deserve.
I'll say it again: government is a special interest group, and one of the few growth industries left in the US right now. Washington DC is a boom town: people go where the money is.
Democrats have never tried, much less managed, to convince voters that the Democratic domestic agenda is so beneficial that ordinary Americans — not just the CEOs of the companies they work for, or the stars of the TV shows they watch, but their own friends, neighbors, and co-workers — should pay significantly higher taxes for government endeavors.
Democrats hate Paul Ryan because he has taken the measure of their cowardice and made public the logical, humiliating conclusions of their disingenuousness.
Taxes are going to rise much further on the middle class. My simple theory is that the Left wants to take the money we all earn in the private sector, take their cut, decide what we need because we are too foolish and feckless to run our own lives, and then expect us to thank them with our votes for the service. They imagine we need care, like sheep, but we just want freedom from them. The Welfare State Industry underestimates the human spirit, and then shackles or cripples people to make their idea come true.
Try saving the money to open a corner pizza joint when you're paying a 50% tax rate. Then, try getting a license to sell beer there. Then, consider your employee cost of Obamacare. At some point, people say The Heck With It and you have an empty storefront. That's the way to end up like Euroland, where nobody tries to do anything except to hold on to their safe crappy job, and everybody just waits to retire on the dole to complete their entire safe, spiritless, crappy life while their government betters live it up. Serfdom.
It is a mistake for people to ignore the political appeal of the security of serfdom or slavery to the State or the Lord of the Manor, or dependency on the State, as long as those words are not used.
Re the photo, I find the entire US Capitol revolting in its grandiosity. What are we - the Roman Empire? Possibly many disagree about that, but, as a New England Yankee with a long pre-revolutionary heritage here, I strongly object to the notion of an imperial city. Those idiots should be meeting in a church basement where they might acquire a little humilty.
We have a President in charge right now, who writes to me several times a week begging for three dollars.
But He cannot explain why He should win His re-election. He cannot form a list of bullet points, or even a single bullet point, to explain how that helps anyone but Him, and, I suppose, the people who directly benefit from His victory. He’s in charge of America but He cannot explain why He is good for America.
The truth is that no one can preserve Medicare as we know it. There isn’t a prayer that your father’s Medicare will be around in 10 years. There is a legitimate policy debate going on about the direction we will have to go with it.
There is just plain going to be less money to spend on senior health care than there would have been if we let the program continue on its present unsustainable track. Health care providers and patients are going to have less money.
As a small aside, I want to draw your attention to an important post I made last Saturday, A new age in viruses dawns, because when a computer virus can actually lock up your machine — which means you can't download and run some handy fix-it program — the rules change. There remains an easy solution, but you'll have to be ready beforehand.
So, here's how last Thursday went:
I hated selling my stocks for the tumor operation, because they're one of the few things my dad left me, but they obviously had to go. The last time I talked to the broker, a few years ago, I was told they were worth around five grand.
Or $3,284 on today's market. That's all I got for them, after the fees were paid and the dust settled. Welcome to the New Economy, Doc.
I talk to the broker on the phone, he delivers the bad news, I hop into my car to do some errands and the battery's flat as a pancake. $523 worth of diagnostic fees, labor, and a new alternator later, I'm back on the road.
I got the battery jumped that morning from a neighbor and drove it to the local fix-it shop. One of the guys was making a parts run and gave me a lift home. There's an email waiting for me from the guy I do my bread-and-butter work for (Web site maintenance), informing me that the Powers That Be at corporate headquarters have nixed this season's event and there goes my steady income for the next few months.
I've had better days!
As for my operation, I'm penciled in for Sept 4th. The good news is that I went up to a hospital in Miami a few weeks ago and the tumor hasn't gotten any worse.
The bad news is that I'll have to push back the operation if I don't have the funds. I still have a month and a half to go, but it'll be close. Losing the Web job really hurts. The good news there is that they'll have to do their next event in October, so I'll be able to make some money while I'm healing.
My original post on this worrisome subject is here. I could sure use some help with my donation fund. As I've noted before, if I can repay you by helping you with something online, like setting up a blog or web site, just tell me in the comments to email you and we'll take it from there.
"“INSERT NAME OF REPUBLICAN TO BE DEMONIZED HERE is the worst, vilest, sexist, homophobic, God-worshiping, Second Amendment-supporting, budget cutting, evilest human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Obama was a silver-tongued orator in the campaign, but he lacked a silver bullet in the presidency. He was a darling on the stump, a dud in office. This is not a remarkable view. It is held in the White House itself.
Kids know that weirdos are weirdos. Life is not fair. Never was, never will be. I feel sorry for the outlier kids. Painful, but builds character. My kids generally have been embracing of the outliers.
The Killing - The battle to define Mitt Romney is over—and Romney lost
Too genteel to punch back? Should call them out as liars and as degrading politics. "Your campaign is disgusting and beneath the dignity of American politics. Shame on you."
If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good. But there’s a major flaw in this “progressive’” argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies.
Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s “fatal conceit.” The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom — and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!
The Atlantic has an article this month with the title “Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don’t Realize It).” I am always curious when intellectuals announce that the people (who in the American constitutional system serve as the sovereign power) don’t know what’s good for them (What’s the Matter with Kansas?) or don’t even know what they want.
Implicit in all of these revelations, of course, is the firmest, if never directly expressed, belief of the Left: That the average person is too stupid to run his own life, let alone make public policy decisions. Those few, those happy few, that band of liberal intellectuals, must do that for them.
The author of the Atlantic article, Dan Ariely—a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke—divided the American population into quintiles according to wealth. He then asked a representative sample of more than 5,000 Americans to guess how the country’s wealth was distributed amongst these quintiles.
He doesn’t say exactly how he determined the population’s wealth. Are the hundreds of billions of dollars in union and government pension funds that will fund the retirement of millions of blue-collar and government workers considered an asset of those workers? I’d guess not.
A primitive society confronted with an advanced civilization does not become civilized, it adopts some of the habits and facades of civilization in cargo cult fashion, it uses some of its tools, and hybridizes some of its ideas, but all this is done in pursuit of its existing goals. Everything that the Muslim Middle East has taken in from the civilized world has been used to pursue the same goals that it was pursuing a thousand years ago.
By Election Day, there will be two stories about Mitt Romney. The one, which we have already heard from Team Obama, portrays Romney as a heartless capitalist. The other is a case still to be made, from Team Romney, that he is a pragmatic problem solver who understands the private economy and can fix it.
If a majority of voters think that Romney’s story is closer to the truth than Obama’s, then Mitt Romney will be elected the 45th President of the United States.
Why Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote All Failed to Write the Great American Novel
I know that we have a few Chinese readers. We would welcome more.
It's ironic that 'R&R' usually stands for Rest & Relaxation — when resting on our current policies and relaxing our stance against government proliferation is the very opposite of what our own R&R — Romney & Ryan — intend to do. Such are the whims of fate.
Althouse 
Middle-class taxpayers will pay a
A day late: 
RNC Chair: 
So, here's how last Thursday went:
The Science of How Music Enchants the Brain, Animated
Rhino poachers