Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook:
Democrats seeking to boost voter turnout this fall are beginning to sound like the late comedian Chris Farley’s portrayal of a “motivational speaker” on Saturday Night Live. Farley’s character sought to inspire young people by announcing that they wouldn’t amount to “jack squat” and would someday be “living in a van down by the river.”
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who prefers sailing vessels to vans by the river, recently tried out the Farley method. Said Mr. Kerry, “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.” Bay State voters are surely thrilled to be represented by a man so respectful of their concerns.
This week President Obama chimed in with another uplifting message about the American electorate. Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that the tea party movement is financed and directed by “powerful, special-interest lobbies.” But this doesn’t mean that tea party groups are composed entirely of corporate puppets. Mr. Obama graciously implied that a small subset of the movement is simply motivated by bigotry.
:
Making the case for left-wing voters to show up in November, Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that he is presiding over “the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward.”We’d agree, but his problem is that most Americans don’t like that agenda and millions of voters in both parties wanted him to oversee an economic expansion instead. Blaming the voters is not unheard of among politicians, but usually they wait until after an election.
Yeah. Well, usually we don’t have such a palpable feeling in the air that the time for socially experimenting with their policies must be at an end, because usually there’s some doubt left as to whether we can afford more. So before the election, they get to brag about how they’re going to cream the other guy if their approval is anywhere north of fifty percent…or for that matter forty. If any one poll comes out saying they’ll net less than that, the left-wing politicians can just smear that one poll as an outlier.
This year, voters are directly confronting three things: The cost involved in said social experimentation; the consistent track record of complete failure with the history of such experimentation; and this nervous-tic “accuse the accuser” habit pervasive among anyone on the left, aroused any time they’re cornered.
If you have an academic idea that has never been tested in reality before — or, even worse: If it’s been tested over and over again, and failed each time — you should be the first one to want to gather data. You should be the first to want to do some “tweaking,” to put some quality thought into cause-and-effect situations.
To do your detective-work and figure out what it takes to fix the idea.
That would be rational. But liberal politicians are being prerational; the balance of the “thinking” they’re doing about their ideas, amounts to denigrating the character of anyone who isn’t putridly biased in favor of them. They continue to steer the discussion away from the ideas they want to implement, and toward that comfortable security-blanket bulls-eye of discourse, comparing the relative merits of individuals & figuring out who’s wonderful, and who should be sent down to the river to live in a van.
They keep going right back to that. Every time.
That’s a good way of telling whose idea sucks.
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Said Mr. Kerry, “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.”
This is the sort of codswallop that we see whenever we come ’round to that point in the cycle where the voters have either vented their displeasure with the Democrats or are about to. Though Morgan, you are correct in pointing out that this usually comes AFTER the ballot box has smacked them over the head, not before.
The voters are having “a tantrum.” They’re pitching a fit. It’s always some kind of insulting characterization from the Left’s politicians when they’re due for a drubbing at the polls.
Do you notice that when the Republicans were driven from power in 2006 or 2008, there was little or none of this kind of talk? Oh sure, a lot of us said that they’d regret it or should have asked more questions about Jug Ears and exactly what sort of “change” he had in mind, but the worst charge I heard from conservatives was that people had gotten caught-up in this hopey-changey stuff and “wanted to be part of something historic.” And when our guys did lose, we said that it was because they’d betrayed the principles they’d run on when first elected…not because the American people were too stupid or inattentive to understand our message.
For that matter, I seldom hear Republicans blame their defeats on some inability to get that message out. Our voters (unlike theirs) seem to have enough sense to pre-empt that kind of nonsense by saying, “No, we heard you loud and clear. It is YOU who did not hear US.”
- cylarz | 09/29/2010 @ 23:59