House of Eratosthenes

Archive for September, 2009

“Hide the Ball”

Monday, September 14th, 2009

John Nolte, writing in Big Hollywood (hat tip to Rick):

In recent days and weeks three major news stories have broke here online, at Fox News or the Washington Times; everywhere but the mainstream media. Worse still, as the stories unfolded, the media willfully ignored them until, much to their embarrassment, they were forced to give grudging coverage only after official action — in the form of a resignation (Van Jones), reassignment (the NEA) or dismissal (ACORN) — occurred that could no longer be ignored.

Mainstream news outlets have been caught off guard before, but they used to play catch up. Today they play “hide the ball.”

It’s a problem decades in the making.

If you spend those decades bringing people information, there’s no problem. But the mainstream media hasn’t really been doing that; they’ve been instead spending those years stopping anyone from talking about this-or-that, by refusing to run the story. When an alternative form of media comes up that runs these stories you don’t want talked-about, then, what do you do? That’s the problem.

Deciding to run this, and not-run that, has been the one refuge of corrupt editorialist thought and action. It is all entirely subjective. We saw this with the Chandra Levy thing eight years ago, as Dan Rather came under scrutiny for his refusal to discuss the story — he started coming up with all kinds of reasons to avoid it, illustrating plainly that the talent he was showing was one honed from years and years of the same tortured argument. One cannot help but wonder about all the things we weren’t told in the twentieth century, pre-blogs and pre-innerwebs.

But it’s entirely a matter of personal discretion and taste. If you want democrats to win and Republicans to lose, you can green-light this and red-light that all day long all month long…and when people come to question you about it you can just toss up your silly arguments like Dan Rather did. Some may not like it, but the arguments will, in their own way, be legit.

So now it’s a different world. We’re watching a whole species of dinosaur grapple with a brand new climate, and lumber onward toward extinction. Some days the dinosaur does something smart that helps to postpone the inevitable. Some days the dinosaur does something unforgivably dumb.

What Nolte’s writing about, here, is the latter of those two.

Fascinating stuff. Everyone loves to watch a train wreck.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM | 2 Comments »

Why Does Fatherhood Make Men More Conservative?

Monday, September 14th, 2009

If you’re like me, you hear that question and a whole bunch of ideas start bubbling up in your cranium and you’re all ready to volunteer them.

And then you see what the author has to say about it, the background to his question, what he thinks about it, what holes are left in the arrangement that he’d like someone to fill in…and then you decide, based on that, this is not productive. It’s just a whole lot of liberal bitching and belly-aching about the usual targeted and deplored demographics, the hated straight-white-men, I’m just going to watch until right before the part where I start vomiting, then go off to another part of the party and start participating in some other conversation. Hey! What do you call this wine? White Zinfandel? It is tasty, yessiree!

This guy would never, ever agree to my Ten Commandments For Liberals Who Want To Argue About Politics; he isn’t nearly as curious about things as he pretends to be. Just let him stew in his juices. It is what he wants to do.

…we learn that “Parenthood makes moms more liberal, dads more conservative.”
:
The mom part is obvious. Since even in these supposedly progressive times, moms end up doing m[o]st of the child-rearing, they have an instant, intuitive grasp of the necessity of a strong welfare state. They naturally appreciate the advantages provided by state-funded day care and education, because without government, they’d be doing all of it…They also know that leaving kids alone to organize their own anarcho-syndicalist communes where they can do whatever they want is a recipe for smashed crockery and peanut butter stains on the Persian carpets…

But dads? Why do dads get more conservative?

This is something of a puzzler. But I have a couple of theories.

* Parenthood forces men to stop being children. They resent this, and project their resentment onto anything or anyone that tells them what to do. Therefore, they resent activist government.
* Since, as noted earlier, moms still do most of the child-rearing, dads don’t understand why government needs to step in to help people who can’t take care of themselves. Don’t those people have their own moms?
* Dads learn pretty quickly that kids often don’t do what you tell them to. Therefore they feel justified in adopting that same attitude of truculence towards the overbearing state.

What else?

I think the most damning part of Andrew Leonard’s screed is that it typifies all the reasons why I cast a jaundiced eye toward Salon lately. It isn’t just the obnoxious pop-up ads, although yes they have a lot to do with it. It’s the New-York-Times-ish-ness of the whole thing. It’s as if nobody in the marketing arm of Salon has bothered to crack open a Salon article in a very long time. Time comes for Salon to say what Salon is all about, and you get all this fantasy stuff about educating yourself on what’s going on in the world, making yourself more well-rounded, appreciating things, and enjoying the benefits of an elucidated, richer life.

And then you actually read the contents and it’s all just a shitload of anger, resentment and bile, coated with a paper-thin veneer of pretending to be curious about something.

Kind of like a lot of colleges.

This is not to say I dislike Mr. Leonard’s candor, though. I appreciate it very, very much. I think it would be much healthier to run the next couple of elections on what he has to say, as opposed to a couple of buzzwords and “John McCain is uncool because he can’t type.”

So get the word out.

Liberals think people have absolutely no potential, and governing them is all about cleaning up after their messes and bringing them things. And if you happen to be a male, they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about you that’s good.

It’s the message Andrew Leonard, himself, wants to get out. Look at all the effort he’s putting in to pretending to be curious about something, just so he can talk about it.

Update: On the other hand, if Mr. Leonard really wants to know, he might want to take a glimmer at a post put up by The Western Chauvinist, about a week prior to his own. Strongly recommended to you, Mr. Leonard, if you plan to have sons later on but don’t have them yet.

If you do already have them though, boy do I ever feel sorry for them. I’m hoping you learn a whole lot, and learn it quick.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Strength, Poisoning Western Civilization | 4 Comments »

“White People With an Eighth Grade Education”

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

That’s the name for the Washington DC tea party yesterday, given by Daily KOS commenter darthstar.

If you think that’s hateful, get a load of the overall subject of the thread on which s/he comments. Spend a few minutes on it. I can’t tell you to read it all the way from top to bottom, since I gave up halfway through myself. But these are deranged, deranged people…and the government we have right now, is catering to them. How concerned should we be.

Malkin sets them straight.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 2 Comments »

“Is Morgan Freeberg Slipping?”

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Some folks stopping by to read The Blog That Nobody Reads, might be toying with starting one of their own, and are now engaged in that frenzied gathering of bits of evidence of the benefits & liabilities of doing so.

If in doubt, I think you should proceed…but if you are feeling queasy about the liabilities and feeling less than confident about your comprehension of what they are, I suppose you could take note of things like this —

And as much of a tragedy as I think it might be when someone decides to bite down on a thought that (agree or disagree) is well-thought-out and worthy of being expressed, I would have to agree: If you’re not prepared for the experience of seeing your name up in lights like that, you probably shouldn’t get started.

Smitty’s gripes — make what sense out of them as you can — are linked behind the pic. And I must ‘fess up: I’ll be needing to hear from you about it, if you can spare a moment or two. I’m not sure I see what the beef is…

~~Sitting on a couch in your undies typing shit about stuff through the innerw~~ Blogging. It ain’t for the timid.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, My Blogger Friends | 7 Comments »

Shame and Guilt

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Me, proffering my wisdom at Rick’s place:

And so, in my opinion, our culture would generally benefit from a whole lot more shame and a whole lot less guilt. But that’s because I’m attaching a far different meaning to the terms from what the Dr. is attaching to them…

“The Dr.” is Dr. Bob at The Doctor Is In, who has penned a brilliant piece about nailing down the precise meaning of such words, and the ultimate effect of the forces these words are supposed to describe. It’s the first part of a two-part series, and I for one am looking forward to the next.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

The Obama Administration, Explained

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities… [emphasis mine]

— Sarah Palin, during her acceptance speech last summer.

After all that hubbub, and all the chatter since then about community-organizing, you might very well be wondering what exactly a “community organizer” is. You might also rightfully wonder what it is that community organizers do to/for the communities they organize.

Read and learn. Gene Schwimmer, writing in the American Thinker:

Imagine a large city, such as my home town, Detroit used to be, before liberalism destroyed it. Imagine that, in this city, a developer offers to buy a plot of land on which to build a multi-story office building. The upper floors will provide space for visionary entrepreneurs to start new businesses and to expand existing ones, create new products, new services and above all, new jobs. The ground floor will be retail space, providing much-needed products and services to the people who work in the offices above and to the rest of the city, too. And of course, for the people who work in them, the new stores will provide jobs.

Now imagine that someone else has a different idea. This person views people who buy land, put buildings on them, facilitate the creation of new products, services and jobs, but who have the gall to enrich themselves in the process, as evil, bloodsucking capitalists. This person believes that “the community” would be better served by turning the plot into a children’s playground. Or he may believe, grudgingly, that an office building might be okay — but only if the construction workers come from “the community.” (The many jobs that would be created for the people who would work in the building is, of course, irrelevant.)

Imagine further that this person has a lot of friends and associates in “the community.” When he talks, they listen, even when he tries to create an issue where no issue has existed before. (If “the community” needed a children’s playground on this particular patch of vacant land so badly, why did no one demand one before?)

Detroit Blight Ever been to Detroit, during or after the Coleman Young days? Then you will join me in shuddering at the thought of Detroit being held aloft, with no shortage of legitimacy, as a harbinger for where the country’s headed. Not good at all, dear reader. We can only hope the country as a whole shows some “bounce,” some determination to head out of the lint-trap of liberalism-created blight once it’s been ensconced there…some bounce that so many of our localities have failed over the generations to show.

How do we get from building childrens’ playgrounds, to a cesspool of blight? It has to do with manufacturing an incendiary regional passion, where one did not necessarily exist before. Schwimmer continues…

The community organizer’s job is to speak to groups within “the community;” write letters to sympathetic newspaper editors; bring in outside experts and professional rabble-rousers (who often come with their own professional rabble) and, most important, get the media to cover the demonstrations — all with the object of assembling the critical mass of humanity needed to embarrass and/or pressure the private parties and/or government into doing what “the community” wants. Or, sometimes more accurately, what the community organizer has told them they want.

That’s the community organizer’s job. That’s all he does and it’s not rocket science. Any anti-Semitic, loudmouthed racial demagogue can do it (and, incidentally, become as rich as a real estate developer in the process). Community organizers are a dime a dozen.

Need a shot of optimism? Then head on over here.

Hat tip, for both links, to Maggie’s Farm.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

“Mr. Sullivan is Being Treated Differently From Others…”

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

PowerLine brings us (along with many, many other sources) the sordid tale of Andrew Sullivan’s non-troubles with the long arm of the law…

Sullivan was caught smoking marijuana in a National Park and was prosecuted, consistent with the usual policy of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. But Sullivan’s pull with the Obama administration got him a sweetheart deal: the U.S. Attorney decided to drop the charges, even though there evidently is no doubt about Sullivan’s guilt. The issue here isn’t whether marijuana possession should be illegal, or should be prosecuted. It is illegal, and the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts does routinely prosecute such cases. But not Sullivan: Barack Obama and Eric Holder paid him off for his slavish devotion.

The U.S. Attorney’s action in dismissing the case against Sullivan was so extraordinary that it prompted this stinging rebuke by United States Magistrate Judge Robert Collings, who presided over the case:

When the case was called, the Court expressed its concern that a dismissal would result in persons in similar situations being treated unequally before the law…
:
In the Court’s view, in seeking leave to dismiss the charge against Mr. Sullivan, the United States Attorney is not being faithful to a cardinal principle of our legal system, i.e., that all persons stand equal before the law and are to be treated equally in a court of justice once judicial processes are invoked. It is quite apparent that Mr. Sullivan is being treated differently from others who have been charged with the same crime in similar circumstances. …

In short, the Court sees no legitimate reason why Mr. Sullivan should be treated differently, or why the Violation Notice issued to him should be dismissed. The only reasons given for the dismissal flout the bedrock principle of our legal system that all persons stand equal before the law.

I’ll just re-state my marijuana position one more time right now, because I know there are better-than-even odds that I’ll have to say it before we move on. The longest threads at The Blog That Nobody Reads, after all, by far-and-away are the ones that extend beneath the pot posts. And I just don’t get that. It’s a law about controlled substances, one that arguably doesn’t make much sense…but which controlled-substance laws are immune from such an argument? There’s a law. Some folks like the law, some folks don’t, but if you break it then everything’s cool. Until you get caught. Then not.

Some folks think the fact that marijuana is illegal, is some kind of special issue, some notable encroachment upon our freedoms…outside of the blatant violation against the Tenth Amendment. They seem to think there’s some iron-clad human right to smoke whatever you want. I think they’re evolving into liberals and don’t realize they’re evolving into liberals — they’ve tumbled down to the fifth terrace of liberalism. True conservative principles say, if you think you should have a right to do something and your locality prohibits you from doing it — you move. You don’t riot, you don’t claim some “human right” you just pulled out of your ass, you don’t go claiming the Founding Fathers had this vision that you should be entitled to do what you want but they were so distracted by the lack of air conditioning in August of 1787 that they forgot to scribble it down.

Having said all that, my position is this: The federal government has absolutely no authority whatsoever to be prosecuting these cases. None. In fact, the Constitution clearly says they are prohibited from having anything whatsoever to do with drug laws, except for cases in which a drug-related crime was committed across state lines.

Within the states, the local populace can do whatever it wants. I don’t care. Force people to smoke pot every day. Cut off hands if people are caught smoking it. Discriminate. Let Catholics smoke pot but prohibit Protestants and Muslims from partaking in the evil weed…or vice-versa. Let men smoke pot, but not women, unless the women are topless while they’re smoking it, but not if they’re wearing tassles, unless it’s a Tuesday. Pass out free joints with the welfare checks twice a month. I. Don’t. Care.

Of course if the punishment was stocks in the town square, I’d be thrilled. Not because I want to see pot smoking punished. I just want to see the stocks brought back; I think they would represent a huge step forward in implementing my vision of what a civilized society really is. But pot? In my little village, I’d vote to keep it illegal. The next town down the road can do whatever it wants. It’s a local issue, and there’s absolutely no reason in the world to make it anything other than a local issue.

If there’s a court decision somewhere that finds differently, that decision is wrong.

Regarding the special treatment of Mr. Sullivan? Let us presume, perhaps recklessly, that this stops somewhere short of the top. Some US/DOJ lackey wanted to please his superiors, Holder and Obama knew nothing about it. Presume that, then investigate. Vigorously.

If “mistakes were made,” then heads should roll. The day has come to go spend some more time with your family. This administration, quite frankly, should be looking for some ways to renew its commitment to us that it will be running a transparent, ethical, and equitable form of government. It has been providing lots of compelling evidence lately to indicate this is not the case, and if the administration cannot take the initiative to figure that out for itself then it has fallen woefully short of possessing the intellectual acumen we were promised last fall it would be bringing.

Posted in Incumbent Scandals, Marijuana | 5 Comments »

D’JEver Notice? XL

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

Some Saturday evening Fox talky-news panel was sitting around a big table, and someone noticed exactly what I’d been noticing. Are we the only two who’ve seen this? Here, I’ll just condense the conversation…

Sarah Palin: Obama’s health plan has “death panels!”

Mainstream Media “Fact Checkers”: Stupid lipstick fish-breath hockey-mom tundra dimbulb hussy! That’s a myth!

Liberals: Yeah, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Uh…excuse us while we make some quick edits to this legislation…

Obama: Folks have been bearing false witness, saying the new health care bill will require coverage for illegal immigrants. This is NOT TRUE.

Congressman Joe Wilson: You lie!!!

Liberals: OMGWTF! Blah blah blah sacred decorum blah blah blah fractured the solemn atmosphere of the blah blah blah formal proceeding blah blah blah Republicans acting immature blah blah over the line.

Mainstream Fact Checkers: Obama told the truth! Wilson is the liar!

Liberals: Yeah! Uh…that eraser we returned to you? We need to borrow it again…

I suppose this could be characterized as democracy in action — the left-wingers who are in charge right now, are figuring out what is not acceptable to the public. Their ability to anticipate this has been vastly overstated, and to their credit, they understand this and are compensating for it.

I would humbly suggest that as they engage in this necessary alignment with the public’s expectations and desires, they cease and desist from calling people liars and ignoramuses who are, in fact, not lying and do, in fact, know more about the subjects that have captured their passions than we are being at first told. Erase and modify at the eleventh hour to your heart’s content, but put a damper on the false accusations. Just a friendly tip.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 1 Comment »

He Will Not Read Your F*cking Script

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

If I have to pick just one snippet of text that will demonstrate Josh Olson just might deserve to benefit from the livelihood he has as a scriptwriter, I think these two paragraphs just might do it. I’m looking for the occasion upon which I might shamelessly steal them, and thinking back on some situations in which I could have stolen them had I been aware of them.

At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I’m a dick. But if you’re interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that it is, in fact, you who is the dick in this situation, please read on.

Yes. That’s right. I called you a dick. Because you created this situation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acquiesce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very definition of a dick move.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Obama Inspires Me to Put in 120%

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

The President made a whole lot of comments regarding truth and falsehood in His speech to a joint session of Congress this week. However, after He “corrected” the record and the fact-checkers got done fact-checking His corrections, it seems the “rumors” that He was “correcting” were not regarding anything that exists on this plane of reality, but rather in some kind of vision that exists in His Holy Head (hat tip to blogsister Cassy). And He may not even have been telling the truth about that.

This has inspired me to reach into the permanent-page that holds ten ideas on ways to motivate large numbers of people to do a dumb thing without anyone associating the dumb thing with your name later on, and tack on two more to the end. After all, this tactic being used by our President (#12) is good enough to fool even really tall teevee leprechauns.

Reality and truth are under an unprecedented assault lately; if we cannot fight it, the next best thing we can do is document how it is being done, for the benefit of future generations. Dealing out this assault is Obama’s primary talent. It is not a talent that has to do with communicating with people, or exciting people, or inspiring people; the adoration He earns from His fans, has to do with His strengths in taking something and presenting it in such a way that it looks like something it’s not. And when we watch Him go about doing it, presenting each thing, desirable or otherwise, as its polar opposite — we are truly in the presence of greatness. As popular of a livelihood/pastime/chosen-craft this is lately, nobody is better at it than He is.

He is worth watching, no question about it, especially if you’re hard at work putting together a list like mine.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Nine/Twelve Mentality

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

We know precisely what a nine/ten mentality is. Precisely. Let anyone forget, Senator Kerry in the week just past was kind enough to remind us. As James Taranto observed in his Best of the Web online column, the headline said it all:

Kerry Marks Eve of 9/11 Anniversary With Push for Climate Legislation

The nine/eleven mentality would be one of the family-comedy cold-war-era movies; you know the type. Earth is threatened by an environmental catastrophe or by murderous little green men with laser cannons, and overnight the United States and the Soviet Union forget their differences. Republicans and democrats joining hands, singing “God Bless America” on the steps of the capitol building. Put aside our differences! Come together! Hope and change!

The nine/twelve mentality opposes both of those. It pays attention and a decent inimical respect to both the malevolent entity that labors to do us harm, and the lazy doves among us who wish to ignore the viper in hopes it’ll slither away. And it is named not for any date in 2001, but rather for President George W. Bush’s speech in front of the United Nations on September 12, 2002:

Events can turn in one of two ways.

If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully, dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The region will remain unstable, with little hope of freedom and isolated from the progress of our times. With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.

If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very different future. The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond. And we will show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time.

Neither of these outcomes is certain. Both have been set before us. We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress. We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. Delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand as well. [emphasis mine]

Deep down, we’re really all nine/twelve people. The real difference is about political efforts: Is it permissible to acknowledge the simple reality that motivated enemies exist, only when one is running a campaign for a political office? Must one take the “ostrich approach” toward all who would do him harm, in all other walks of life? That’s the real divide.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Justification for Invasion, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Bill O’Reilly Doesn’t Know When to Argue About Laws

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

I could see both sides of this thing right up until about two-thirds of the way through when Bill and Annie have this dust-up about when it is & isn’t fair to toss something out about the President being a liar. At that point…words fail me. I’m just completely shocked. Not Captain-Renault-shocked, either. Shocked, like finding out an air traffic controller has always believed it’s perfectly possible for two objects to exist in the same space at the same time — you can’t do what you do for a living, thinking such a thing. “If He lies, He loses, if He lies, He loses…If it’s in the bill, He’s a liar! You jump too far ahead!”

Chrissakes, Bill.

I see now that my list of ways to motivate large numbers of people to do a dumb thing without anyone associating the dumb thing with your name later on is incomplete. It’s missing one tactic here…and our President is using that tactic with great aplomb.

It's About Power I would word it this way: While planting a vision of an object in your audience’s collective head, convince them that their perception of this object trumps truth. I need to work on that wording a little bit. “Convince” doesn’t fit, because what’s being done here is kind of a Judo move, one of encouraging that audience to believe what they’re inclined to believe already. We get these descriptions of what the speaker says he desires the object to be, and from that we become unreasonably hostile toward any other claim about what the object really is.

It works pretty well, even on somewhat intelligent people who consider it their jobs to know exactly what’s going on. Clearly, it even works on 6’4″ leprechauns.

O’Reilly protests calling Obama a liar under this set of circumstances? I see O’Reilly’s point…kinda. Obama is the President, and if the bill doesn’t meet Obama’s expectations when it reaches His desk, He can jolly well reach for His veto pen — and if He doesn’t, The Great One becomes a liar. I get it.

O’Reilly should go back and watch some speeches from Ronald Reagan. Any one from a whole number of speeches, specifically about threatening the said veto. President Reagan never once used this method of deception Obama is using now. Reagan never once came close. He said “When that bill reaches my desk, it better not have…” or “I will veto any bill that reaches my desk, if it doesn’t contain…”

Obama could do that now. It’s a perfect description of what the job of President is. Instead, Obama’s choosing to go the route He is going, while, as Ann Coulter pointed out, these bills are going through the House. And there’s only one reason to do that.

Hat tip to fellow Right Wing News contributor Sharon Soon.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Universal Healthcare | 5 Comments »

Sceb the Outer Space Chicken Reviews Quantum of Solace

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Yeah, this is pretty much how I saw it.

As regular readers may already know.

“If you’re gonna name your movie something that people have to look up in the dictionary what it means, THAT ISN’T A GOOD NAME FOR YOUR MOVIE.” Hehehe. He’s right, that was a rather opprobrious, obdurate and obsequious title.

Posted in Movies | No Comments »

9/11 Plus Eight

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Image from here.

Dale Challener Roe, together with the other participants of Project 2996, remembers.

Names.

Rick’s story.

Perhaps that will inspire you to tell yours. Where were you?

Posted in Eulogies | 6 Comments »

“The Soup is Terrible and the Portions Are Too Small”

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Much of the “governing” that took place in our country throughout the twentieth century, has consisted of a) identifying a problematic social program that had been put in place in some past generation to redistribute money — what in God’s name were we thinking when we put that turkey in?? — and b) putting together yet another one to give our children the same nightmares our parents gave us. We seem to possess a regrettable ability to fail to recognize a Faustian arrangement, right up to the last phases of it, the moment our nose-hairs are tickled by the sulfuric fumes.

Regarding the President’s speech Wednesday evening, I got five things out of them:

No one single plan is finalized yet, so nobody else can criticize it but I can “dispel rumors” by fantasizing about what I’d like to see in the final draft;

I get to call my opponents liars, but when they say I’m a liar it’s a breach of some kind of sacred code of civility;

If my opponents point out something won’t work, you should pretend nothing of value has been said at all, until such time as they can come up with a solution to it — but when I say something that makes no sense whatsoever but sounds good, go ahead and get as excited as you want;

Medicare is broke because it promises things we cannot afford to pay, so the solution is to promise more;

My plans all make it harder for any person or company to make a profit providing the services we say we want & need, thereby making it much less likely that it will happen — but don’t call it that, call it “holding them accountable.”

All in all, a fine and stylish re-hash of all twentieth-century left-wing proposals to “fix” our social-engineering and gimme-gimme programs handed down to us by our parents and grandparents. There’s nothing new added, but all the old stuff has been meticulously covered.

The editors of Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook have gone over the President’s remarks to see what else they can get out of it:

Mr. Obama began by depicting a crisis in the entitlement state, noting that “our health-care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers,” especially Medicare. Unless we find a way to cauterize this fiscal hemorrhage, “we will eventually be spending more on Medicare than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health-care program is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close.”

On this score he’s right. Medicare’s unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It’s like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: “The soup is terrible and the portions are too small.”

As astonishing, Mr. Obama claimed he can finance universal health care without adding “one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period,” in large part by pumping money out of Medicare. The $880 billion Senate plan he all but blessed this week would cut Medicare by as much as $500 billion, mainly by cutting what Mr. Obama called “waste and abuse.” Perhaps this is related to the “waste and abuse” that Congresses of both parties have targeted dozens of times without ever cutting it.

Apparently this time Mr. Obama means it, though he said this doesn’t mean seniors should listen to “demagoguery and distortion” about Medicare cuts. That’s because Medicare is a “sacred trust,” and the President swore to “ensure that you—America’s seniors—get the benefits you’ve been promised.”
:
Mr. Obama also called for “civility” in debate even as he calls the arguments of his critics “lies.” So in the spirit of civility, we won’t accuse the President of lying about Medicare. We’ll just say his claims bear little relation to anything true.

We’re gerbils on a treadmill, the way we hear these promises about how budgets will be met without cuts being made anywhere. We act like we can look back on some track record that promises accuracy in these rosy prophecies — or at least provides some way to determine accuracy, accurately.

That’s probably the biggest lie that’s been told or implied in this whole issue. These programs don’t cost what we’ve been told they’ll cost; they cost orders of magnitude more. There isn’t even a mathematical formula available to predict how much exploding they’ll do. The only one that’s worked out over the generations has been “>1”. Beyond that — the programs cost every single bit as much money as they want to cost, and when it happens, we’re powerless to stop it. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Except of course for one thing: Make more programs, provided the guy trying to get us to make them, is a really good speech-maker.

Update: John Hawkins interviews Congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson. You shouldn’t miss it. You know, that whole thing we talk about from time to time…hearing the other guy’s side of the story. Turns out there is one.

I was looking at all of the amendments and I knew that the Democrats had defeated the enforcement amendments about illegal aliens and these would be the amendments that would provide for verification of citizenship. That’s the wording and I’ve actually read the 1,000 page bill. The references to the illegal aliens in the bill didn’t have any enforcement. It was simply fluff.

So in other words, they say illegal aliens aren’t covered at all in the bill all they want, but if they deliberately leave out any enforcement provisions, it doesn’t mean anything because they can still…

It doesn’t mean anything. The verification, as proposed by the Republican amendments, was defeated in committee. I knew that and so I just felt like what I was hearing was not accurate. …So I was just really appalled at this.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in His Blank Slate, Nanny State Crap, Universal Healthcare | 3 Comments »

The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Computerworld…

I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: “Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z.”

X, Y and Z are variable and usually contradictory between one expert and the next, but the patronizing stereotypes remain constant. I’m not entirely sure that is helpful. So, using the familiar brush, allow me to paint a different picture of those IT pros buried somewhere in your organization.
:
It’s all about respect

Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn’t directly related to the work. The amount of respect an IT pro pays someone is a measure of how tolerable that person is when it comes to getting things done, including the elegance and practicality of his solutions and suggestions. IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.

There’s certainly something to this, although I have to question the “always and without fail” part of it. All in all, on balance it’s one of the most accurate and dead-on articles I’ve ever seen about management in the technology field, if not the most.

If you’ve booked the conference room for an hour, and forty-six minutes into it the business is all settled — adjourn. Adjourn now.

If you tell the guy you’ll have his discs back to him by three, get them back to him by one-thirty.

Give credit to the guy who came up with the idea, by all means. But also give credit to the unsung hero who ironed the bugs out of it.

If the guy works all night and leaves things a small disaster, but if he didn’t work all night it would have been a huge disaster, make sure the big boss knows all about the huge disaster that might’ve been. Don’t assume people know about this stuff.

If the guy does something positive for your project he didn’t have to do, you do something positive for his career you didn’t have to do. No exceptions.

Everywhere “a bunch of work” exists, there needs to be a list saying what it is. If there’s a bunch of work somewhere with no list saying what it is, the work will be tripled…and talented dedicated people will be paid for about one hour out of every two. See to it the list gets made. Do it yourself if you have to. Make sure people know when they can stop working something over, and move on to the next thing…just like you want a firefighter to know when a fire’s out, and he can turn his hose on to the next thing. That’s really what these guys are. Firefighters. Make sure they have water, and they know where to spray it.

Every minute your technical dude has to spend talking to a pissed-off customer about why the pissed-off customer’s demands played second-fiddle to something else, costs your organization four times. The pissed-off customer is losing time thinking he’s talking to someone who can do something for him, when this is not the case; the technical guy is losing time he should be spending working on whatever took the greater priority, instead listening to a pissed-off customer; the thing the pissed-off customer wants worked over, is lying around in limbo, gathering dust, rather than sitting in a stack in the second slot from the top which would be a much better place for it; and I’ll be willing to bet there are a few more technical people working under the technical guy who’s talking to the pissed-off customer, waiting for him to tell them what to do, which he can’t, because he’s busy…you know the drill. Stop the insanity. There’s customer-relations stuff and there is technical stuff. YOU talk to the customers so the technical guy can do what he’s there to do.

Oh, one other thing. You need to jump in if the same people are always asking the same questions, about the same things, of the same people.

Thing I Know #148. Reassurance is a funny thing. People crave it. The more they get, the more they want. Eventually, it becomes impossible for anyone to get anything they want or need, without making one or several bogus reassurances to someone about something. I have noticed when the same people are summoned to provide the same reassurances to the same people over and over again, the next thing that happens is never good.

It’s a fire-fighting business. Learn to smell the smoke.

Posted in Technical | 5 Comments »

“No Enemies to the Left”

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Michael Barone, writing in the Washington Examiner about our President’s “convenient fantasies”:

Legislation to restrict carbon emissions that is supported by the administration would undoubtedly kill a large number of jobs by increasing the cost of energy, and so you can see why its advocates might want to argue that there will be a compensating number of “green jobs” created — at least if the government spends a lot of money on them.

But this sounds like fantasy. If there were money to be made in green jobs, private investors would be creating them already. In fact big corporations like General Electric are scrambling to position themselves as green companies, gaming legislation and regulations so they can make profits by doing so. Big business is ready to create green jobs — if government subsidizes them. But the idea that green jobs will replace all the lost carbon-emitting jobs is magical thinking.

Obama’s approach to health care legislation, unless he makes a major course correction in his speech to the joint session of Congress tonight, is of a piece with his hiring of Van Jones. By ceding the task of writing legislation to congressional Democratic leaders and committee chairmen, he has been following a “no enemies to the left” strategy.

One of the reasons The Left stays so strongly unified whereas The Right does not…bonded together and emulsified, almost in a surreal sort of way, like a demonic force is at work…is that The Right is motivated by a desire to avoid engaging in bad ideas, ideas that have been shown in the past to be wrong ideas, but that are nevertheless seductive. The Right therefore must be engaged in a schism regarding how forcefully to reject these wrong ideas, since we are all surrounded by well-intentioned but naive and inexperienced folks who want to go for the wrong ideas, and feel personally alienated when the wrong ideas are labeled as the wrong ideas they really are. And so any time it is necessary to drum up support that is represented through a count-of-noses, The Right becomes instantly fractured, if not vaporized.

The Left, on the other hand, is motivated by simple jealousy: If that guy over there has something I don’t have, something somewhere must have gone wrong, there’ve been some shenanigans going down, and I should get some of what he has. Obama says “no enemies to the left,” He is not the first leftist to work this way, because there’s no division in place until after the dog has caught the car, the spoils have been seized, and it’s time to divvy ’em up. Then leftists turn on other leftists. But during the paper-chase there is no primal force to divide them. They’re not trying to stop a bad idea from becoming the law of the land, they’re trying to make it happen.

It’s interesting that they’re running into problems now with staying together on this “public option” business. That’s because now is one of the rare times in which there is a price to be paid for reaching too far in implementing too much of the bad idea within too narrow of a timeframe; and, we’re starting to wake up to what they’re doing, so there is also an opposing danger to not implementing enough of it. A window of opportunity may be closing on them. Next year, our country just might be too wise and cynical to be slapped by this stupid-stick of wrong ideas — it may very well be now-or-never. So now, for once, it is The Left that is sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. That gets ’em fighting with each other.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, ManBearPig, Nanny State Crap, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization | 3 Comments »

Holdren on “Exceptionalism”

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

“You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.” — Abraham Lincoln

John Holdren, the Science Czar, on American “Exceptionalism”:

Like having a fox in charge of the chicken coop.

From Weasel Zippers, via Boortz.

One among many reasons why the How The World Works Guy says — Holdren needs to go. Now.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Twilight of Honeymoon VIII

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Ewww…as accustomed as we are by now to His Most Exaltedness’ downward slide, it’s still kind of a slap seeing His wonderful speechmaking sliced and diced by — the Associated Press?? Who in the world do they think He is, some midwestern-accented tundra dimwit housewife or something? This just isn’t supposed to happen!

But happen it did. There’s just no getting around it, Mister Wonderful told some whoppers.

OBAMA: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period.”

THE FACTS: …The long-term prognosis for costs of the health care legislation has not been good.

OBAMA: “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.”

THE FACTS: …The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it…

OBAMA: “Don’t pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut. … That will never happen on my watch. I will protect Medicare.”

THE FACTS: Obama and congressional Democrats want to pay for their health care plans in part by reducing Medicare payments to providers by more than $500 billion over 10 years…

From Gateway Pundit, which found a few more howlers the AP missed. Hat tip to Linkiest — where, as an aside, The Blog That Nobody Reads is the blog-of-the-day.

Posted in Obamamania, Universal Healthcare | No Comments »

E and F

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I’m sick to death of talking about health care. Time to get back to the alphabet-tournament:

Erica Durance, flush with victory after smacking down Daniella Sarahyba last week, today is confronted by Famke Janssen. Finding a bikini-picture of Famke, while it can be done, is no easy task. Rather like finding an example of President Obama making government smaller. So surely Erica will just press on through will she not? Like a hot knife through butter?

Can an actress who despises her own size eleven feet, who’s constantly prancing around fully clothed, possibly compete with the goddess who brought a whole new layer of sexy to the ages-old icon of Lois Lane?

Can she compete with the curves of a WB temptress? On my desktop?

Hell yeah, I say. Compete — and win. It’s the face. I’m a sucker for one that’s well-put-together.

Posted in Women in Skimpy Clothes | 6 Comments »

How Many Jaydens

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

I’m happy to see the “blogosphere burning up” with posts about Jayden Capewell. President Obama just got done taking His pot shots at Sarah Palin for her “death panels” comment, all-but-naming her in His address to Congress. Foon Rhee of the Boston Globe tried to peel back the armor in advance of the President’s salvo, asserting that Palin’s insinuation, now made twice, has been “rather thoroughly debunked.”

You’re a fool, Foon. Nothing’s been debunked, except with the (quite correct) idea that there’s no one single plan to argue about just yet. But nationalized health care leads to life-and-death decisions being made by bureaucrats who are worried first-and-foremost about their lunch breaks, and how many little stacks of Post-It notes are left in the supply cabinet. That’s just what happens. It’s like heat-plus-fuel-plus-oxygen-equals-fire.

Enter the Jayden situation (hat tip to Rick):

A young British mother has criticized medical guidelines that, she said, resulted in doctors refusing treatment and leaving her newborn premature son to die. 23 year-old Sarah Capewell told media that her son Jayden, born at 21 weeks and five days gestation, was refused intensive care because he was two days under the limit set by the British government’s National Health Service (NHS) rationing guidelines.

Capewell said that her son Jayden cried and lived for two hours before dying in her arms. During that time, his mother took photos of him and pleaded with doctors that he be admitted to the special baby unit at James Paget University Hospital (JPH). Staff at the hospital, in Gorleston, Norfolk, told her that had Jayden been born two days later they would have helped him.

Blogsister Cassy adds:

In Britain, where socialized health care is firmly in place, doing everything you can to save a life is not important. What is important is following regulations put in place to save the government time and money.
:
Now, many of you may wonder what this story has to do with us here in the United States. Well, thanks to Obama’s government run health care bill that Democrats are trying to force on us, it’s entirely possible that horror stories like this one could start occuring here. Consider the fact that Obama voted not once, not twice, but three times against a bill requiring doctors to provide treatment to babies who survive abortions. What kind of compassion do you honestly think he would have for babies like Jayden, especially if he’s successful in implementing his government run health care reform? Babies like Jayden would be just like the elderly to him — too expensive, a waste of time, and a drain on the system. It’s one more reason why we need to keep the pressure on lawmakers in Washington to, for once in their feeble, pathetic lives, actually grow a spine, listen to their constituents, and do the right thing.

Blogger brother Rick adds:

Bureaucrats enforcing cost saving measures as to who should be cared for… all in the name of nationalized health care.

Obama will make the upteenth attempt tonight to convince you that this is what America needs to embrace.

Bullsh*t.

Bullshit indeed. All of His slobbering toadies are climbing all over themselves to color and characterize Palin’s now-notorious “death panels” comment as some kind of made-up fable, a fiction, a fantasy, a myth, an urban legend.

And every single time they do that — without exception! — they prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that they simply don’t know what they’re talking about. That, or they’re talking to other people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Update: Sarah Palin knows what she’s talking about, much as that may irk some folks. And of all the possible lead-ins to her op-ed piece, I think Dr. Melissa Clouthier has put together the very best one:

The press alternately calls Sarah Palin stupid or irrelevant. However, both in political instinct and policy substance, it’s clear that she is neither.

Today, her Op-Ed appears in the Wall Street Journal. It’s good. Cogent, clear, and well-written. She’s got a ghost-writer, say lib operatives. Let’s hope! Does Barack Obama write all his own stuff? Surely, libs jest. His college thesis can’t even be found. Why would anyone quibble that Sarah Palin would have a ghost writer? Probably because she makes sense:

Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.

Democrats have never seriously considered such ideas, instead rushing through their own controversial proposals. After all, they don’t need Republicans to sign on: Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency. But if passed, the Democrats’ proposals will significantly alter a large sector of our economy. They will not improve our health care. They will not save us money. And, despite what the president says, they will not “provide more stability and security to every American.”

Posted in Poisoning Western Civilization, Universal Healthcare, VPILF | 2 Comments »

He Gave Himself Away #7

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

The President is giving His speech.

He just spoke of a tax cut as something that “costs” money.

That’s Item Number 7 on my list of things that give everyday people away as clueless idiots.

This President is not a clueless idiot. That can mean only one thing: That His speech is customized for an audience of people who are.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

D’JEver Notice? XXXIX

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

If you wanted to “reform” America’s medical system out of a genuine concern for the welfare of the people being treated, you would care a great deal about the content of whatever legislation is being passed, and not care too much about the timeline.

If you wanted to “reform” America’s medical system in order to change the way America works, to change its monetary system, to fundamentally alter how people exchange goods and services, to shatter its structure, to demolish the marketplace, to transform the country into just another filthy socialist mudpuddle, but you didn’t care too much about the welfare of the people being treated, your priorities would be the exact reverse. You’d care a lot about the timeline but you wouldn’t care too much about the content of the legislation. It would just be the “camel’s nose” to you. Break the ice first, put the “right people” in charge, then get things working exactly the way you want later.

The American Medical Association seems to be much more concerned about timeline than about content:

The same day as President Barack Obama’s healthcare address before a joint session of Congress, the American Medical Association on Wednesday urged lawmakers to pass a reform bill this year. The group had declared support for the administration as early as May, but its letter still gives Obama’s agenda a much-needed lift ahead of a crucial speech.

“You have an historic opportunity to improve the health and well-being of the American public,” the AMA wrote. “On behalf of America’s physicians and their patients, we strongly urge you to reach agreement this year.”

The group said legislation should have essential elements, including provisions that ensure “health care decisions are made by patients and their physicians, not by insurance companies or government officials,” eliminate policies for pre-existing conditions, and reform medical liability as well as insurance claims processing requirements to reduce costs.

It made no mention of a public option but said reform should “expand choice of affordable coverage.” The group previously expressed qualified support for a public option plan, specifically the one passed by the House Energy Committee that allows doctors to negotiate payment rates, thereby “guarantee[ing] voluntary physician participation.”

This seems to dovetail with the President’s sense of priorities as well:

President Obama plans to argue Wednesday night in a high-stakes address to Congress that the country’s health care system is at a “breaking point,” as he urges lawmakers to stop “bickering” and pass comprehensive reform.

“The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action,” Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery before a joint session of Congress. “Now is the time to deliver on health care.”

Obama is stressing his resolve to bring lawmakers together and clear away hurdles to passing an overhaul package.

“I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last,” Obama said in the prepared remarks, released in excerpts.

James Taranto had a swell time dredging up some humor out of this situation today:

Are you as excited as we are? Can you feel the electricity in the air? Tonight’s the big night! President Obama is giving an address to a joint session of Congress, in an effort to rally support for . . . well, we’re not sure what exactly.

The Hill quotes “a Democratic leadership aide who sat in on an administration briefing Tuesday” and who “said that while Obama will offer support Wednesday for a public option, the president will not insist on it”:

“He’s going to say it’s the best tool for reducing costs,” the aide said. “I think he’s going to be a bit noncommittal.”

The Associated Press reports that the president himself told ABC’s “Good Morning America”: “We do intend to get something done this year.” Politico puts it this way:

Obama will give a STRONG ENDORSEMENT to a public option–or government health-insurance plan–as a route to choice and competition, using phrases similar to his Labor Day speech in Cincinnati. But aides are sticking to their longtime plan: He will NOT draw a line in the sand, and will NOT say that a bill wouldn’t be real reform without it. Obama thinks it would be hard to get to true choice and competition without a public option or a fallback to a public option (the so-called trigger, which would kick in based on the insurance market). But his remarks will leave WIGGLE ROOM FOR HORSETRADING as the bill moves through Congress.

So he’s making a STRONG ENDORSEMENT, albeit a noncommittal one that leaves WIGGLE ROOM FOR HORSETRADING, because he intends to get “something” done.

Remember during the campaign when Obama’s critics faulted him for having voted “present” so often as a legislator? In retrospect, it’s clear that this line of attack was totally unfair. Voting “present” was bold and decisive leadership compared with this.

My, he had fun writing that.

I have a proposal. A proposal for the nation, for the legislators who represent it, for the Republicans who aren’t running it.

Let’s make real sure this gets done right. Let’s do what we should have done with the bailouts. Let’s wait. If that means nothing happens this year, there’s always next year.

Whoever gets angry and upset about that, probably doesn’t have the interests of the country at heart, or of the people who live in the country who occasionally get sick.

And whoever that is, fuck ’em. Fuck ’em right in the ear. Let ’em get as mad as they want.

I’m only calling for what our incumbent representatives should be demanding anyway. It should be intuitively obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, that this is a good opportunity for someone to get fired. We, the citizens, obviously care about this. A lot. Our representatives, obviously, don’t know too much about what it is we want. Certainly not as much as they thought they did. They need to take time to learn. We need to take time to be heard.

So let’s wait. This thing needs some definition. And I’m not saying that to help Republicans or hurt democrats — it’s just plain TRUE.

Besides, last time I heard “status quo is unacceptable, better to do something than nothing” was that damn stimulus. The time before that, it was those damn auto bailouts. The time before that, it was the damn S&Ls. Not a single one of those has turned out terribly well. Come to think of it, not a single one of them have worked out as well as doin’ nothin’. All three did more harm than good.

So let’s apply the lesson we learned. God knows we paid enough money for it.

Posted in Obamamania, Poisoning Capitalism, Universal Healthcare | 3 Comments »

Good Ideas at a Town Hall Meeting

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Two of ’em, by my count: Open up the marketplace, and tort reform. And listening to your constituents like you’re supposed to, by implication, that’s a third good idea.

Why, naturally that’s all just crazy talk.

Hat tip to Noisy Room, by way of blogger friend Rick.

Posted in Poisoning Capitalism, Universal Healthcare | 3 Comments »

What We Need, is All Obama, All the Time

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

I don’t know where Van der Leun gets this artwork, I really don’t. Wish I did. I’d like to have a large tee shirt made of the above. No caption, no comment. Just let the viewers make of it what they will.

Our blogger friend is having some fun resorting to sarcasm (I think), having determined it is the only method available to deal with a certain mindset, said mindset currently writing under the name of Phil Plait. If Gerard is not being sarcastic, perhaps then he could explain the mindset to me because I’m completely freaking lost as I try to follow it.

It goes like this: The one thing we need, is to hear what President Obama has to say.

Seems perfectly reasonable, until you stop to ponder the fundamentals upon which it rests, namely:

The one thing we’re missing, is that we have not yet availed ourselves of an opportunity to hear what Obama has to say.

Which means…

After an unprecedented two-year-long presidential campaign, during which an unprecedented 700 million dollars was spent getting messages to us about what Barack Obama thought about things, after the assemblage of the winningest campaign team in all of United States electoral history, and with an equally unprecedented accumulation of “tech-savvy” computer talent and a boss-man just so loaded with charisma that birds sing and unicorns hump when He walks by, two autobiographies from a guy who hadn’t really done much of anything when He wrote them, “hardball” moderators getting tingles up their legs when He speaks, and then after He’s elected, about the only thing He’s managed to do in eight months besides spend record-setting amounts of borrowed money is to give speech after speech after speech after speech after speech — it’s almost like He doesn’t know how to do anything else, ya know? — you know why we still suck so much? The number one reason? The one thing that, if fixed, would set everything all straight? The one thing that would defeat the Sith and bring balance to The Force?

We gotta give Barry a fair hearing. He hasn’t had one just yet.

If you think I had fun jotting that one down (I did, actually, thanks for asking), wait’ll you see Gerard’s turn at bat. At the sarcasm-bat. I think. That’s a sign that a master is at work ever there was one — I honestly can’t tell.

Phil, I imagine, would still say that the sanctity of the Presidency trumps all unless your first name begins with a G.

But even if that is not the case, I think those that oppose the president speaking to the children have gotten it all wrong. (Yes, I have changed my position on this.) Upon reflecting on Phil’s position and others here as well, I have changed my mind.

I have come to realize that what is deeply wrong with this country is that so far we have not heard and seen enough of President Obama.

I now think we need to see more. Much more. We need to have a morning message from the President every day on all cable news channel. Indeed, we need to have it broadcast on all TV channels, especially ESPN and other places where citizens dodge their need to know the truth. We need to see his message in the lead in to Good Morning America and Fox and Friends both without fear or favoritism.

Weather Channel too.

We need to have Barack Obama’s message, whatever it might be on whatever day, delivered to all of us on the front page of whatever newspaper we are still reading.

We need to have it as the lead-in to NPR’s Morning Edition. We need to have his message replace the bumper music at the top of Rush Limbaugh’s show.

In short, we cannot have enough of listening to the President tell us what he’s thinking and what the right way to think about what he’s thinking is.

We need to hear his words and see his face every day. Every single day.

I am in ernest about this. I will even pay higher taxes to make this so. We need, in the most urgent and important way, to see and him him All. The. Time.

I hope the address to Congress and a grateful nation is only the beginning of this program of all Obama all the time.

Here’s a non-partisan wish I think we can all support…or we all should be able to support it. Can’t wait to drop it into a conversation in which nobody knows what my politics are.

I hope your chosen deities see fit to endow President Obama with the wisdom to enact some policies that work so amazingly well, it doesn’t matter how much exposure He gets.

Because watching that Adams-apple bob up and down in a liberals’ throat while his face turns red, is fun.

One thing that might be less fun — especially if you live at 1600 Pennsylvania and your initials are B.O. — would be to read Victor Davis Hanson’s ideas on the dilemma. The dilemma defined above. How come it is, that having had a greater opportunity to get His word-in-edgewise than arguably any homo sapiens that has ever walked the ground, ever, living or dead, within recorded history or before…Barry still requires another shot at it? How come the godlike Svengali who has so much to teach all the rest of us about communication skills and getting messages across, just can’t seem to get ‘er done when it counts?

When Obama said he would be fiscally prudent, we got near $2 trillion deficits. When he said the debt would grow to $7 trillion over his tenure, you should nearly double that estimate. When he said Bush shredded the Constitution, he adopted most of the Bush plan from rendition to tribunals. When he said that he wished to move on, we got investigations of the CIA and the previous administration. When he said we’d have all combat brigades out by March 2008, we knew we could not. When he said anything about health care — it would save money, would not alter private plans, would not go to illegal aliens, etc — we already assumed all that was mendacious. When he says anything, we know now that it is either not true or will not be true or at best will only be partially true.

Character matters?? Oh no! Sounds like something boring your parents might’ve said!

Well, hopefully Hanson is wrong. Hopefully Mister Wonderful doesn’t have to start telling the truth…and He is just one speech away from achieving this message-communicating excellence which is supposed to come so naturally to Him, with His gifts and talent and all. And then, once we get our heads pulled out of our butts and finally absorb what Mister-Amazing-Communicator-Guy has been trying to tell us for three years now…life…will be amazing…and wonderful…

Any day now.

Or, VDH might have a point. Respect, genuine respect, the kind of respect that comes from trust — means something. It means something now, because it always did. Quantity is powerless to make up for quality. Oh dear, what a scary thought.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Obamamania | 4 Comments »

To TPM, It’s All About the Comeback

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

I can promise you one thing right here and now about the “take my $20” lady, Keli Carender. I can promise you that if I went into a crowded room anywhere and got the microphone, and my speech started with “this is all about two competing philosophies” or something like that — which is a good intro to about ninety percent of all the things I’d like to say — there is no way I’ll have the crowd cheering for me, twenty dollar bill or no twenty dollar bill. Typically, I start speeches out that way just before people get tired of listening to them.

Like my uncle used to tell me: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those who want to divide everyone into groups of people, and those who don’t.”

He was right about that, but perhaps not for the reasons he thought. Once people start to make a living off their weaknesses, once “need is the coin of the realm” as Ayn Rand put it — those who are well-stocked in that coin are the first to balk at any such exercise in taxonomy. They want everyone to be the same. It’s how they make their living. Beats the hell out of working.

Well, TPM Muckraker is having none of it. By which I mean…they came up with a meaningful difference between taxing the bejeezus out of us, and just walking up and taking our twenty dollar bills out of our hands, thereby credibly accusing Ms. Carender of engaging in a deceptive and invalid straw-man argument?

No. They just took note of how the democrat congressman smacked down Ms. Carender with his snappy comeback, “winning” the argument. Or how he would’ve, rather, if only their fantasy had come true.

To [Washington State Congressman Norm] Dicks’ credit, he did have the beginnings of a good response in turning down the money: “I can’t accept a contribution like that.” The problem was that his delivery, perhaps thrown off by the cheering Tea Party types, was too weak and apologetic. If he’d been a little more sarcastic, it would have been a great snappy comeback.

So this all-important health care debate, about how to manage a seventh or a sixth of our nation’s economy, some $2 or $3 trillion worth of transactions of goods and services…comes down to snappy comebacks. Guess that’s what we get for putting the kids in charge. This is a fate that naturally awaits us when people walk into voting booths with iPod buds in their ears.

*Sigh*. Some “muckraker.”

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Universal Healthcare | No Comments »

One Hundred Must-See Man Movies

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

From The Art of Manliness. Everyone knows the real fun of these lists is picking away at them and criticizing them for what they left out. Well, this one didn’t leave anything out, it covered every single movie a real man would want to watch.

1. The Great Escape
2. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
3. Dirty Harry
4. The Endless Summer
5. Bull Durham
6. The Apartment
7. The Shootist
8. Hoosiers
9. Last of the Mohicans
10. The Bicycle Thief
11. Field of Dreams
12. North by Northwest
13. The Outsiders
14. First Blood (Rambo)
15. The Manchurian Candidate
16. In the Heat of the Night
17. Shane
18. Double Indemnity
19. Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside)
20. The Maltese Falcon
21. Das Boot
22. Star Wars (The Original Trilogy)
23. Rudy
24. High Noon
25. Gandhi
26. Rebel Without a Cause
27. The French Connection
28. Casablanca
29. Unforgiven
30. The Iron Giant
31. Gladiator
32. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
33. The Hustler
34. The Untouchables
35. The Grapes of Wrath
36. Bullitt
37. The Best Years of Our Lives
38. Die Hard
39. Enter the Dragon
40. Malcolm X
41. Cinderella Man
42. The Right Stuff
43. True Grit
44. A Streetcar Named Desire
45. Vertigo
46. All Quiet on the Western Front
47. The Shawshank Redemption
48. Cool Hand Luke
49. Spartacus
50. Mississippi Burning
51. Chinatown
52. Remember the Titans
53. Braveheart
54. Citizen Kane
55. On the Waterfront
56. The Bourne Identity (The Series)
57. Rocky
58. Apollo 13
59. Glory
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. The Karate Kid
62. The African Queen
63. The Sting
64. Chariots of Fire
65. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
66. Schindler’s List
67. All the President’s Men
68. Zulu
69. Patton
70. Lawrence of Arabia
71. The Godfather (I and II)
72. 12 Angry Men
73. Lord of the Rings (The Series)
74. Gangs of New York
75. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
76. Dead Poets Society
77. The Searchers
78. Pride of the Yankees
79. Saving Private Ryan
80. American Beauty
81. Seven Samurai
82. From Here to Eternity
83. Old Yeller
84. To Kill a Mockingbird
85. Dr. No
86. Jeremiah Johnson
87. A River Runs Through It
88. Bridge On the River Kwai
89. Gentleman’s Agreement
90. Fight Club
91. Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade)
92. It’s a Wonderful Life
93. A Raisin in the Sun
94. The Natural
95. Ghostbusters
96. Ben Hur
97. Groundhog Day
98. Top Gun
99. Swingers
100. The Longest Day

With just a few minor exceptions…which I wrote down…

1. Robocop
2. Judgment at Nuremberg
3. The Patriot
4. Bad Day at Black Rock
5. Fargo
6. The Cowboys
7. The Incredibles
8. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
9. The Man From Snowy River
10. How To Murder Your Wife
11. Airplane I & II
12. Jaws
13. Beowulf
14. Troy
15. 1776
16. 300
17. Robin Hood
18. Zorro
19. The Mask of Zorro
20. Batman
21. Superman I & II
22. A Bridge Too Far
23. Casino Royale
24. The Hunter
25. Billy Bathgate
26. Blade Runner
27. The Terminator
28. No Country For Old Men
29. Blue Thunder
30. Goldeneye
31. Office Space
32. Blazing Saddles
33. The Russians Are Coming
34. Outland
35. Team America: World Police
36. Rob Roy
37. Rear Window
38. Shenandoah
39. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
40. Death Wish I & II
41. Escape From Alcatraz
42. The Three Musketeers
43. The Towering Inferno
44. Chato’s Land
45. Full Metal Jacket
46. The African Queen
47. A Few Good Men
48. The Fugitive
49. Beau Geste
50. Lawrence of Arabia
51. The Bucket List
52. Easy Rider
53. The Wind and the Lion
54. Planet of the Apes
55. Soylent Green
56. Tom Horn
57. The Poseidon Adventure
58. Duel
59. Harry’s War
60. Saving Private Ryan
61. The Green Mile
62. Pulp Fiction
63. Reservoir Dogs
64. The Gauntlet
65. Centennial (TV)
66. American Pie
67. The Fountainhead
68. Payback
69. The Princess Bride
70. Gran Torino
71. Peter The Great (TV)
72. Heartland
73. Fright Night
74. The Graduate
75. Breaking Away
76. Breaker Mourant
77. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
78. The Sons of Katie Elder
79. Roots (TV)
80. The Winds of War (TV)
81. Tombstone
82. A Man Called Horse
83. Road House
84. Commando
85. Highlander
86. Watchmen
87. True Lies
88. Raging Bull
89. Fitzcarraldo
90. Network
91. Harold and Maude
92. Deliverance
93. Psycho
94. The Lion in Winter
95. Rashomon
96. The Fighting Sullivans
97. The Scarlet Pimpernel
98. The Mummy
99. Marathon Man
100. The Great Santini

Other than those few things left out, it’s a perfect list.

Posted in Is It Really a Man's World?, Movies | 9 Comments »

Seven Reasons Why You Can’t Build a Political Party Around Moderates

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Hawkins explores each one; but my favorites are #2 and #4.

2) Because moderates tend to be much less ideological, less knowledgeable about politics, and less informed than liberals and conservatives, it’s entirely possible that even if our candidate’s views are closer to their views, they won’t be capable of figuring it out (That’s exactly how it worked with McCain and Obama, for example).
:
4) Moderates may not know a lot about politics, but they do at least know that they can’t trust the press. So, how do they decide whom to vote for? I would suggest to you that many of them largely base their decisions on anecdotal evidence.

What do I mean by that? Let’s take the current election. What did a moderate voter hear from his liberal friends about Obama? “He’s the greatest hope for America! He’s wonderful! He’ll solve all our problems!” Now, what did that same moderate hear from his conservative friends about McCain? “He’d probably be a lousy President, but he’d still be better than Obama.”

In other words, if conservatives aren’t enthusiastic about their nominee, moderates are going to take cues from that and cast their votes accordingly. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so counter-productive to antagonize conservatives in an effort to draw in moderates.

As I pointed out lately, we suffer from a tragic loss of good judgment when we figure out how to use words like “centrist,” “moderate” and “extremist.” We don’t have a very good picture of what an “extremist conservative” is. Most of us, across all different kinds of ideological regions on the spectrum, think that has something to do with being mean. Lacking compassion. Unpleasant. Stingy. Reactionary. A bit of a dickhole. Exclusionary. You get the picture. A Grade-A1 USDA Prime piece of jackass.

Here’s how I see it:

Human history tells us something important about human nature, and what it tells us is altogether unflattering: The things that are most reliably demonstrated to be bad ideas, are the ones we try the most often. That’s just the way it is.

I mean, overall. Not across the board. Some things work quite well, and we do those things often too. Let’s make murder illegal. When people show they don’t care about breaking the law, let’s lock them up. On those, there really isn’t very much disagreement.

Let’s take money away from people who have it, and give it to those who don’t…

…that’s been tried so many times. It’s supposed to create some kind of wonderful society, one where no one is ever left wanting for anything. It’s had hundreds of years to work out that way. And it hasn’t yet. We’re still waiting on it. And our resolve to keep trying it again and again, has in recent generations become something of an obsession. We’re like the wolf licking at the razor blade, faster and faster as he gets more and more of a taste of blood.

Let’s show compassion to those who kill our wives and children, by letting them out of prison, and when they see our compassion they’ll stop killing. That’s another one.

You know, it really isn’t fair if you just come up with an idea, you get to copyright it and own it, as if you did some “real” work when all you did was think of an idea. Knowledge should belong to the world.

Stop asking her father for permission to marry her. Naive stupid young girls who just want a sexy appealing party-stud, and don’t care about a man’s financial stability, should have the final say in who’s going to knock ’em up.

Businesses lack compassion. Let’s force them to stop business-ing, and when we need the things those businesses make, let’s put the government in the business of doing that business-ing instead. Because anyone knows when it’s compassion you want you should make a bee-line straight to the nearest government bureaucrat who’s thirty seconds late for his lunch break, and there you’ll find all you can handle.

I could add to this list ALL day…don’t tempt me…

So here’s what an “extremist conservative” really is. An extremist conservative looks at all those bad ideas we’ve put into practice many times already, that have never worked out one single time, and does what common sense people do. He says “fuck it.” He dumps it all in an outhouse, then he moves the outhouse building so no one can ever find the dumbass idea he just dumped in, and pours cement in the hole so the dumbass idea can never be used again even if it’s somehow found. If he’s even more extreme than that, he decides to do it even sooner. And if he’s the most extreme conservative you’ll ever know and you’ll ever meet — he uses his intellectual gifts to figure out why this is a dumbass idea that’s never going to work.

What’s a liberal do? He says let’s give it another try.

A moderate liberal says let’s try just a little bit of it.

An extremist liberal says let’s never give up trying no matter what.

And the moderate conservative? Well, the sad, vicious truth of it is these people are just liars. Liars or dupes. History says “the dumbass idea never worked once” and the liberals say “don’t you dare believe that, it’s an ‘urban legend’.” And the moderate conservative says “Alright! You guys know best!”

Meanwhile, the dumbass idea never worked because it’s never gonna work.

And the guys who notice it hasn’t worked and can’t work…we call them “extremist conservatives” so we can give ourselves an excuse to keep trying it.

That’s the truth. Dress it up however you want, but that’s how it is.

Posted in Elections, GOP Schism, History, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 5 Comments »

“Grinning Speechwriters”

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

I gotta agree with Neal on this one. One of the risks of crossing that fourth milestone on the way to complete insanity, is that it’s possible for your crossing to be highly visible to others. And by “possible” what I really mean is “almost certain.”

Yeah, Republicans can do it too.

If nobody on your team can ever make a mistake, and nobody from the other team can ever do or say anything good, you’re riding for a fall.

Having said that, though, the “What Can You Do To Help Barack Obama” thing remains a fact and it remains a viable and legitimate issue. Elected officials are our servants; we are not theirs.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 3 Comments »

Former First Lady Comments

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

…on her husband’s successor.

Linked and embedded without further comment:

Former first lady Laura Bush praised the performance of her husband’s successor Monday, breaking with many Republicans in telling CNN that she thinks President Obama is doing a good job under tough circumstances.

She also criticized Washington’s sharp political divide during an interview covering a range of topics including her thoughts on first lady Michelle Obama, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the situation in Afghanistan and Myanmar, and life after eight tumultuous years in the White House.

Bush sat down with CNN on Monday during a United Nations meeting in Paris, France, where she was promoting global literacy, a cause she trumpeted during her husband’s administration.

The typically reserved former first lady defended Obama’s decision to deliver a back-to-school speech to students, putting her at odds with many conservatives afraid that the president will use the opportunity to advance his political agenda.

“I think he is [doing a good job],” Bush said when asked to assess Obama’s job performance. “I think he has got a lot on his plate, and he has tackled a lot to start with, and that has probably made it more difficult.”

Michelle Obama is also “doing great,” she said, in part by turning the White House into a comfortable home for her family.

Referencing the uproar over Obama’s address to schoolchildren, which will be aired nationwide Tuesday, Laura Bush said it’s “really important for everyone to respect the president of the United States.”

Bush didn’t completely dismiss the concerns of some conservatives but noted that controversial Education Department plans recommending that students draft letters discussing what they can do to help Obama had been changed.

“I think there is a place for the president … to talk to schoolchildren and encourage” them, she said. Parents should follow his example and “encourage their own children to stay in school and to study hard and to try to achieve the dream that they have.”

Bush indicated that she didn’t think it was fair for Obama to be labeled a “socialist” by critics and expressed her disappointment with the intensely polarized nature of contemporary American politics.

Part of the reason for the polarization, she said, was the increase in the number of congressional districts dominated by either strongly conservative or liberal voters.

“We’ve seen that for the last eight years, certainly, and we’re still seeing it,” she said. “That’s just a fact of life.”

Bush conceded that after her husband was elected president, he was unable to replicate his success as governor of Texas in reaching across the aisle to Democrats.

“He was disappointed that that was not the way it worked out in Washington,” she said. “I’m sure President Obama didn’t expect it to be that way [either]. … All of us need to do what we can to come together on issues.”

Posted in GOP Schism | 5 Comments »

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Archive for September, 2009

“Hide the Ball”

Why Does Fatherhood Make Men More Conservative?

“White People With an Eighth Grade Education”

“Is Morgan Freeberg Slipping?”

Shame and Guilt

The Obama Administration, Explained

“Mr. Sullivan is Being Treated Differently From Others…”

D’JEver Notice? XL

He Will Not Read Your F*cking Script

Obama Inspires Me to Put in 120%

Nine/Twelve Mentality

Bill O’Reilly Doesn’t Know When to Argue About Laws

Sceb the Outer Space Chicken Reviews Quantum of Solace

9/11 Plus Eight

“The Soup is Terrible and the Portions Are Too Small”

The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks

“No Enemies to the Left”

Holdren on “Exceptionalism”

Twilight of Honeymoon VIII

E and F

How Many Jaydens

He Gave Himself Away #7

D’JEver Notice? XXXIX

Good Ideas at a Town Hall Meeting

What We Need, is All Obama, All the Time

To TPM, It’s All About the Comeback

One Hundred Must-See Man Movies

Seven Reasons Why You Can’t Build a Political Party Around Moderates

“Grinning Speechwriters”

Former First Lady Comments