Maggie's Farm

"A dark hour for the Netherlands." You may insult Christianity all you want, but don't hurt the tender, sensitive and delicate Islamic feelings. Allah supposedly hates that, and would like your head separated from the rest of your body to emphasize his holy, sacred point. 

h/t to Moonbattery for this excellent bit by Pat Condell re Geert Wilders' insane and frightening  persecution. Yes, we are all sick and tired of Islam and the multicultural Mafia - and also of the Dutch-style suicidal idiocy. What's in their water? If a religious belief cannot handle a little multicultural criticism, what good is it?

Our version of Godwin's Law: This is like the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 

Deeply related: Never be rude to an Arab

Come and get us, you Dutch moonbats. You are a disgrace to your heritage and your history.

The politics of campaigning are so simple: I’m going to beat you and leave you dead in a snowbank in New Hampshire and never look back.

Lawrence O'Donnell, via our Caroline link this morning. He goes on to say in the New Yorker piece:

But in the Senate you can be trying to prevail over another senator on Tuesday afternoon whose vote you know you’re going to need on Wednesday afternoon for something else. The ordinary work of the Senate never involves fighting. Virtually all the people who run for Senate seats lie and say they’re going to fight, but what they’re actually going to do—which they may not know when they go to Washington for the first time—is beg. And beg people like me, whom they’ve never heard of, the staff director of this or that committee, before they ever get to meet the chairman. So the personal qualities necessary for Senate work are politeness and charm and graciousness and generosity, which New York tabloids have no comprehension of. Why should they? The press is never allowed in the rooms where governance actually takes place.

Our reader advises "don't read this" unless you want to feel depressed all day - or longer. It's Dick Morris' Here Comes Socialism. He begins:

2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.

Do not read the whole thing at the link above.

Glenn Lowry looks at the future of identity politics and tribalism, in Boston Review. Here he discusses his childhood friend Woody:

Everyone, on first meeting him, assumed as much. I did too when we had begun to play together a decade earlier, just after I had moved into the middle-class neighborhood called Park Manor where Woody’s family had been living for some time. There were a number of white families on our block when we first arrived; within a couple of years they had all been replaced by aspiring black families like our own. Yet, Woody’s parents never moved, which puzzled me. Then one day I overheard his mother declare to one of her new neighbors, “We just wouldn’t run from our own kind.” Somewhat later, while watching the film Imitation of Life on TV, my mother explained how someone could be “black,” even though they looked “white.” She told me about people like that in our own family—second cousins who lived in a fashionable suburb, and on whom one would never dare drop in unannounced because they were passing for white. This was my earliest glimpse of the truth that racial identity in America is inherently a social and cultural, not simply a biological, construct—that it necessarily involves an irreducible element of personal choice.

and

...to the extent that we blacks see ourselves primarily through a racial lens, we may end up sacrificing possibilities for the kind of personal development that would ultimately further our collective racial interests. We cannot be truly free men and women while laboring under a definition of self derived from the perceptual view of our oppressor, confined to the contingent facts of our oppression.

Read the whole thing. I certainly agree with his point that reducing the notion of identity to skin color is a darn thin reed to hold on to. Being white tells me nothing about myself.

Bruce Kesler's excellent health care post yesterday has this PS from him:

This survey also suggests that as in the past early support for a number of reform proposals could fade in the face of arguments that opponents might raise in a public debate. For example, seven in ten Americans (71%) say they favor the idea of employer mandates. But when given the argument often made by critics that this may cause some employers to lay off some workers support falls dramatically, to just under three in ten (29%). The same pattern holds on the topic of individual mandates. Roughly two in three (67%) favor requiring all Americans to have health insurance with help for those who could not afford it. When given the criticism that some people may be required to buy health insurance they find too expensive or do not want, support falls to two in ten (19%).

Americans seem most concerned that any health care plan not raise their costs or involve government limiting or dictating their choices. According to the survey, nearly two-thirds (65%) say they would be less likely to support a plan that would get the government get too involved in personal health care decisions, more than six in ten (61%) would be less likely to support a plan that increases people’s insurance premiums or out-of-pocket costs, and more than half (56%) would be less supportive of a plan that limits an individual’s choice in doctors.

“As we have learned from past debates, public support looms for health reform largest at the beginning of the debate, but it's relatively easy to chip away at that support with arguments about tradeoffs,” said Mollyann Brodie, Kaiser vice president and director for Public Opinion and Survey Research.

Some reheated links at Thompson highlighted Vanessa Eagle's documentary series Lefties, which is about the effort to create a Leninist Sunday tabloid in London, and their quixotic effort to topple the great Maggie Thatcher.

If you have a few spare minutes, give the video a look. It's about newspapers, sort of.

Nothing will surprise you about their failure to recognize the realities of life and the demands of high functioning and accomplishment, but it's still a fascinating record. It's sort of like "We're All Bozos On This Bus," or a Monty Python skit. The bits about "caring about the environment" are especially poignant from folks who have probably never hoed a garden, mucked out a stall, or gotten lost in the Maine woods or spent a week camping in the Montana wilderness.

These bozos should have started a blog. That might have worked, but this was the pre-blog era.

Quoted from The Limits of Reaganism at Debatable Land (we need to add this site to our Anglosphere category)

...the Cult of Reagan actually helps explain the mess the Republican movement finds itself in. It used to be that it was the left that specialised in writing dissenters out of the movement; these days, in America at least, that's become a conservative trait. The RNC debate was illuminating in this respect: in addition to passing the Reagan litmus tests candidates were asked how many guns they own. And that was more or less it. Tick those boxes and you're a proper Republican; waver on either question and you're subject to suspicion.

It's this sort of blinkered thinking, this elevation of ideology above the messy business of winning elections that has helped condemn the GOP to minority status. A two party system in a nation of 300m people demands that each party be a broad church. Reagan recognised this; his successors seem to have forgotten it.

Read the whole thoughtful thing. You can get the other side of the argument from an emotional Michelle today. Debate is good. Certainty is never good.

Related: Could Obama's centrism drive the GOP out of business?

Earth on brink of new Ice Age.

We are all screwed.

From Surber:

Let’s all sing.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful/ But the fire is delightful/ And since we’ve no place to go/ Let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability, let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability, let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability.

Related, Zoroastrologicalclimatology. Everything explained.

Fact is, Baby, it's cold outside. Let's go skiing.

Amusing (h/t And Rightly So):

It's a "best essay" because it is thought-provoking. The Claremont Institute has reposted Charles Kesler's 2005 The Crisis of American Identity in memory of Harvard's Samuel Huntington. One quote:

Huntington outlines two sources of national identity, a set of universal principles that (he argues) cannot serve to define a particular society; and a culture that can, but that is under withering attack from within and without. His account of culture is peculiar, narrowly focused on the English language and Anglo-Protestant religious traits, among which he counts "Christianity; religious commitment;…and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a 'city on a hill.'" Leave aside the fact that John Winthrop hardly thought that he and his fellow Puritans were creating "heaven on earth." Is Huntington calling for the revival of all those regulations that sustained Winthrop's merely earthly city, including the strictures memorably detailed in The Scarlet Letter? Obviously not, but when fishing in the murky waters of Anglo-Protestant values, it is hard to tell what antediluvian monsters might emerge. If his object is to revive, or to call for the revival of, this culture, how will he distinguish its worthy from its unworthy parts?

another:

Modern liberalism, beginning in the Progressive era, has done its best to strip natural rights and the Constitution out of the American creed. By emptying it of its proper moral content, thinkers and politicians like Woodrow Wilson prepared the creed to be filled by subsequent generations, who could pour their contemporary values into it and thus keep it in tune with the times. The "living constitution," as the new view of things came to be called, transformed the creed, once based on timeless or universal principles, into an evolving doctrine; turned it, in effect, into culture, which could be adjusted and reinterpreted in accordance with history's imperatives. Alternatively, one could say that 20th-century liberals turned their open-ended form of culturalism into a new American creed, the multicultural creed, which they have few scruples now about imposing on republican America, diversity be damned.

To his credit, Huntington abhors this development. Unfortunately, his Anglo-Protestant culturalism, like any merely cultural conservatism, is no match for its liberal opponents. He persists in thinking of liberals as devotees of the old American creed who push its universal principles too far, who rely on reason to the exclusion of a strong national culture. When they abjured individualism and natural rights decades ago, however, liberals broke with that creed, and did so proudly. When they abandoned nature as the ground of right, liberals broke as well with reason, understood as a natural capacity for seeking truth, in favor of reason as a servant of culture, history, fate, power, and finally nothingness. In short, Huntington fails to grasp that latter-day liberals attack American culture because they reject the American creed, around which that culture has formed and developed from the very beginning.

Alinsky is the best-known American Gramscian. The Chicago community organizer who was an inspiration to Hillary Clinton (and maybe indirectly to Obama) wrote a deeply cynical handbook for radicals who seek power.

His rules for power tactics are here. We can see those rules followed and enacted every day, mainly in Left-wing in politics.

Kimball reacts to Thomas Franks' WSJ article on the need to "return" to government economic regulation. I think this laissez-faire vs. govt regulation debate is pure politics and boob bait for the economically-uninformed. Kimball agrees. One quote:

The next time someone bemoans the evil of “laissez-faire capitalism” to you, utter the number 69,428. That’s the number of pages in the 2006 edition of the Federal Register, the official government compendium of rules and regulations, the handy-dandy list of things you must do, and not do, if you want to do . . . well, just about anything. “Laissez faire” is the bogey man unhappy leftists use to frighten the credulous. Capitalism was never completely unregulated, and it certainly isn’t unregulated now. In fact, we have much more to fear from the ethic of “défendre faire”–the nanny-state ethic whose ultimate goal is to turn us all into wards of the state. Thomas Frank criticizes  rating agencies like Moody’s and banks like Washington Mutual for being insufficiently regulated. But the real problem was not lack of regulation but unintelligent and overbearing regulation. Mr. Frank derides those who believe that “all sin originates with the Community Reinvestment Act” (on which see here), but really he should pause to consider the disatrous effects of that piece of government regulation which, by intruding into the orderly operation of the market in order to further a utopian social goal, helped to precipitate the global credit crisis of 2008.

Read the whole thing. As we repeatedly note here, any crisis, real or manufactured, is used by the power-hungry as an opportunity to grab more. And, unfortunately, this process only ratchets in one direction.

Furthermore, booms and busts have forever been part of human economics - even in command-and-control economies. No-one should ever be surprised that they occur. Like hurricanes, they blow through and knock down the weak trees and blow away the poorly-built structures, leaving space for new opportunities and ventures. People get hurt in the process, which is why we have safety nets.