Cassy rounds them up at NewsRealBlog:

As more and more is known about the murderer, it becomes clear that Jared Lee Loughner was a psychotic nut unmotivated by politics either on the Left or the Right. The Left, however, still wasted no time exploiting this tragedy to smear Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and conservatives in general. If you needed an example of how unhinged they have become, you need look no further than their reaction to the Tucson shootings.

Tragedy -> Strategy.

What cracks me up, is these are the people calling for more civility in our discourse. They lead by example until something remarkable and unfortunate happens, and then here comes the tortured logic to somehow blame it on…

…on…how did Our Holy Leader put it? “People who don’t think like them” or something?

See, here’s the thing. A civil discussion, like a truce that halts a war, is a mutual decision or else it is nothing at all. I’ve said this before (somewhere) — if I say one and one make three, and you say one and one make two, we can have a civil discussion about that. You just go “Hey, I can call Morgan a dumbass who doesn’t know how to add…or I can refrain from doing that…and so I shall refrain.” Simple as that. But! If my position is: One and one are three, and anybody who says anything different is a sexist and a bigot, a mutually respectful conversation is no longer possible.

That’s where they are. What they are doing, is name-calling; but they do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like name calling because they work according to the opt-out. “Agree with me on this, and maybe you aren’t prejudiced.”

And, maybe the Tucson incident is not all your fault. But if you don’t go along…all bets are off.

Tragedies big, tragedies small, they’ll do it every time. As long as it’s a tragedy that most of us will be talking about for awhile, the “blame value” is there and they’ll keep zeroing back in to this point like a homing pigeon.

Gagdad Bob at One Cosmos:

Senior Raccoons will remember a time, not too long ago, that abnormal people in our culture actually felt abnormal. They were aware of their deviancy, and how this deviancy contributed to an unhappiness that no government has the power to eliminate.

But under the guise of “tolerance” and multiculturalism, we have deprived these poor souls of the feedback they need in order to know that they are not normal. This is not empathy, but cruelty — like shielding someone from a cancer diagnosis on the grounds that it will make them feel bad, but depriving them of the chance to fight it.

In order to allow such people to feel normal in their abnormalcy, we have had to develop a deviant culture for them to live in, to such an extent that the normal are now made to feel abnormal.

This is one of the hidden influences of the Tea Party movement, and more generally the effort to take our country back from the deviant. Not surprisingly, this is enraging the abnormals of the left, as witnessed, for example, by the weird attempt to suggest that normal people somehow caused the patently abnormal Jared Loughner to open fire on a bunch of normal people.

If multiculturalism were true, it would mean that all cultures are of equal value. But this is equivalent to saying that there is no reality to which culture is an adaptation. As a result, culture devolves to a mere fantasy world. Which, of course, it is for the left. They are, by their own lights, not oriented to reality, since reality is just an oppressive white European male construct.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Thanks to Mike…

Related: Freedom is on the decline worldwide:

Global freedom declined for a fifth straight year in 2010 as authoritarian regimes dug in worldwide and crime and unrest plagued democracies like Mexico, a US watchdog said Thursday.

In “Freedom in the World 2011” the Washington-based Freedom House said it had documented the longest continuous period of decline since it began compiling the annual index nearly 40 years ago.

“A total of 25 countries showed significant declines in 2010, more than double the 11 countries exhibiting noteworthy gains,” the group said.

“Authoritarian regimes like those in China, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela continued to step up repressive measures with little significant resistance from the democratic world,” it said.

The recent decline “threatens gains dating to the post-Cold War era in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the former Soviet bloc.”

The nations are evaluated in whole, one at a time, the national score being one of three possible values. It seems America is & was evaluated as “free.”

I’m not sure this is reasonable, and it certainly isn’t a suitable method for showing freedom slippage within a nation on a micro-, as opposed to a macro-, level. Were I to design such a system it would almost certainly use percentages and it would carry a palpable red-state bias. Can I go to Hooters. Can I take my kid to a Hooters. Can I go to a Hooters on swimsuit contest night. Can I eat fatty foods with salt at Hooters. Can I drink a pitcher of beer all by myself at Hooters. Can I carry a gun into Hooters. Can I work at Hooters. Can Hooters, since I’m a dude, tell me “no way in hell are you working here.” Can I build a mosque near a Hooters. Can I build a Hooters near a mosque. Can I open a Hooters near a school. Can I open a Hooters near a bunch of busybody parents who happen to sit on the PTA.

My point is, yes human rights are important. But just because you had ’em last year and still have ’em this year, doesn’t mean freedom hasn’t slipped a notch or two. The tyrants don’t start there anyway. They finish there.

Hmm, maybe if there’s time left this weekend I’ll fire up my Microsoft Word and put together this survey the way it should’ve been done. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin would approve, I’m sure.

Herald Sun, Australia:

The couple, who have three sons and still grieve for a daughter they lost soon after birth, are going to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to win the right to select sex by IVF treatment.

They say they want the opportunity to have the baby daughter they were tragically denied.

An independent panel, known as the Patient Review Panel, recently rejected the couple’s bid to choose the sex of their next child using IVF.

They have gone to VCAT in a bid to have that decision overturned.

VCAT recently ruled that it has the power to review the Patient Review Panel decision. It will hear the couple’s case in March.

So determined are the couple to have a girl that they recently terminated twin boys conceived through IVF.
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Victoria’s Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 bans sex selection unless it is necessary to avoid the risk of transmission of a genetic abnormality or genetic disease to a child.

All IVF clinics in Australia must stay within National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines that say sex selection should not be done except to reduce the transmission of a serious genetic condition.

Australian IVF pioneer Gab Kovacs – not involved in the case – said he could not understand why the couple should be banned from having a girl.

“I can’t see how it could harm anyone,” he said.

“Who is this going to harm if this couple have their desire fulfilled?”

Other than the plain fact that it diminishes all of humanity when babies are served up in a made-to-order smorgasbord, I guess yeah it’s completely harmless.

How absurd. You have the parents and the pencil-pushing busy-body bureaucrats in their little yelling match, and here’s God way off in the corner of a room, murmuring “is it all right if I get a vote in this?”

Yeah, yeah…I know…sky fairy, doesn’t really exist, you’re stupid if you think He does, yadda yadda yadda. Well, isn’t there something jacked up about it when, if you want to think it’s really a decision between the parents and the bureaucrats because there’s no such thing as God — you must necessarily believe in the “mass of cells” mythology, that fetuses don’t count until such time as they get squeezed out and turn into babies?

How about if you believe that children are their own people, and they’re not property, and some great wrong is being done any time they’re treated like belongings owned by the parents. Isn’t there a terrible problem being posed for that mindset if the kids are made-to-order, by process of elimination in this way? Reminds me of a “thought for the day” I saw somewhere: If a gay gene is ever discovered, would our progressives support the “choice” by parents who aborted a gay baby?

There is one other aspect to this story that needs to be pointed out; easy enough to pick up on this on a subconscious level, but very few people will stoop to the low level of pointing it out. Well as usual, I’m hear for ya:

The “Replacement Clergy” thing. IVF is to be allowed, abortion is to be allowed…we need progressive societies that are open, tolerant, permissive, respectful of choice. The framework has been cobbled together, the mindset diligently pursued and where does it all end up? These parents that have been-through-so-much that need to have their choices respected, and so forth — are left to quibble endlessly with government bureaucrats. “Keep your laws off my body and get your government out of my uterus” indeed. Oh, the irony.

Thanks to Cassy for snagging this.

Yay for us! We are awesome!

However, in the interest of full disclosure, we are fans of Goldeneye, Contract With America and Darth Maul.

Be that as it may, of all the decades in which one may get oneself stuck, this one doesn’t rank too high does it? There was kind of an undertone of “if we just get rid of anything that’s manly we’ll be all right”…that’s what I get out of it, anyway. Bill Clinton, Thelma & Louise, oh and let us not forget that Country Music and Pop got together and had some bastard love-child that’s still hanging around like a bad smell…

We did have some “masculinity” in the nineties that was on a popularity crescendo, but it was all gritty, urban, narcissistic, self-centered, ungentlemanly, loutish. No chivalry, all thuggery. Useful for one thing: Appealing to the female libido, in females who happen to be immature and stupid.

As far as the feminine mystique…this decade completely sucks ass. Sorry, there’s no other way to put it. When it began, the big-hair look was still in vogue. When it went out, all the women were trying to cut their hair like Hillary Clinton. That, right there, is a flunk. I’d say that even if I thought Clinton’s politics were completely wonderful. That hair style, that “rodent with a bowl cut,” is not appealing because it isn’t supposed to be. It is inherently negative. It’s an I-don’t-do-anything-to-make-men-happy haircut. It imbues all of the anarchy in an open rebellion but none of the balls. It is the hair equivalent of a petulant child, maybe a slightly mentally impaired one, sitting in a corner and grumbling about something. Let’s not even get into the pant suits.

And I have long maintained that from 1997 to 1998, not a single decent movie came out except LA Confidential.

My income doubled, almost. But that’s the way it should be.

All in all, not a good decade. And yeah, the web page bells-and-whistles are rancid, some of them should be punishable.

Does this site use tables?
Does this site use frames?
Does this site use inline formatting?
What about .gifs?
Does this site auto play music?
Does this site use marquees?
What about blinking text?
What about a hit counter?
A guestbook?
A “make this your home page” button?

No to all of the above, and that is the correct answer.

Thanks to Daniel for the link.

From Boortz.

Of course, keep in mind every year in late June, as the fireworks stands start to go up in the mall parking lots, “climate” and “weather” magically go back to being exactly the same thing again. Cyclical, like all things in nature.

Severian entered a comment that, in Arsenio Hall fashion, makes you go “hmmmmmm…”

It’s either 100% pure awesome or 100% concentrated evil to those guys. Every speech Dear Leader has ever given is the best one in the history of human utterance…until the next one; meanwhile, I honestly think you’d have trouble getting a liberal to agree that the sun rises in the east if Sarah Palin was on record claiming so (typical responses would probably include “only somebody as stupid as her would need to say so” or “what is ‘east’ but a convention of language anyway?”, depending on the context and the pretentiousness of the liberal).

Made me think of a status update I placed on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, soon after The Left went back into their 2009 orgasms of “OMG Was That Not The Bestest Speech Evar!?!?!”:

Observations: Every stupid thing Palin says is the stupidest thing she has ever said. Every wonderful speech Obama gives is the greatest speech Obama has ever given. Conclusion: People who love Obama and hate Palin are like that guy in “Memento”; they have absolutely no working long-term memory.

Yep, can’t be a good leftist unless history is in a perpetually infantile state, and always began yesterday morning.

The Online Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit suggests that “anterograde” may not be an entirely perfect fit for this…

Anterograde amnesia is a loss of the ability to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. Anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia, where memories created prior to the event are lost, can occur together in the same patient. To a large degree, anterograde amnesia remains a mysterious ailment because the precise mechanism of storing memories is not yet well understood…

Among those who are constantly insisting every single speech Obama has given is the BEST SPEECH EVAR, which is classic anterograde, it is a common failing to audibly articulate that George W. Bush was the WORSTEST PRESIDENT EVAR, leaving entirely unaddressed the question of acknowledging Carter, Harding, Nixon or the two Johnsons…which is a symptom of retrograde. So most seem to have both.

I’ve come to doubt these people have any long term memory that could be handicapped. I don’t hear them say things like “I remember the first time I saw my wife, wearing that dress…” Now and then they might mention their hometown, but I don’t hear them say anything about the little hill where [insert name here] started a dirt clod fight with ’em, or anything of the sort. I don’t even very often hear mention of where they were on 9/11/01. Or, if they’re old enough, when Kennedy was shot or when Lennon was shot. Which is oddly paradoxical, because you’d think someone so committed to living life for the emotional highs would have at least a mediocre level of sentimentality.

I think the constant adrenaline rush burns out the long-term memory entirely, I really do. Strips the cogs clean off the gears.

Now, while we’re on the subject of that Nolan movie, I see the wiki entry for it includes a chart that wasn’t there last time I looked. Hey, nice. Could-a used that…

The barking moonbat brain, on the other hand, I’m just going to have to continue figuring out as I go along…

I think the long-term memory doesn’t quite so much burn out, as wither and atrophy from lack of use. The superlative, from what I have noticed, doesn’t mean the same thing to a left-winger as it means to an ordinary person; superlatives are de-linked from history. “Best speech ever” sounds like a comparison between the speech just given, and each selection within an archive of earlier speeches — that is precisely what it is supposed to mean. Well, I don’t think it does.

I think these are people so committed to prerational thinking that they’re just grasping for a more bubbly and exuberant way of saying “that was a good speech and I approve of it.” In the classic prerational mold, they have hyper-individualized their motives and their thoughts. Whenever we labor to create a new culture in which the individual is diminished, and subordinated to the priorities and needs of the group, paradoxically people will start to act out according to the individual priorities they’re supposed to be neglecting. As they attend to the group membership in order to do their group thinking, they say things out of service to their individual interests.

Put in much simpler terms: When they gather in a group to discuss how good Barack Obama’s latest speech was, they end up in a competition to find the most enthusiastic expression of what a good speech it was, like sharks at a feeding frenzy. The superlative is the natural conclusion of this journey, the zenith from which one can proceed no higher. Even if it means comparing today’s Obama to yesterday’s Obama and finding the historical Obama to be wanting.

But of course, Obama cannot be found to be lacking in anything, at any time. So yesterday’s Obama becomes a sort of made-up Obama. Through this exercise, they not only ignore history, but consciously reject it. It didn’t happen. The brain cells that store and retrieve long term memory rot away just a little bit more…and then, they go back and do it a few hundred more times.

They, essentially, do with their memory-related brain lobes what I do with my stomach muscles when I sit around and blog. The natural result is atrophy. Lack of definition and lack of capability through lack of use.

Gotta hand it to that Barack Obama. He can really deliver a speech! He’s better than anybody, and will always emerge as the all-time champion of speech delivery…

…provided His competition is an Alaska housewife holding no elective office whatsoever. Who holds a special reputation for being a dimwit. The word “special” meaning, of course, that it’s a reputation carved in stone, and whatever evidence has to be shunted aside to keep it going will be, and whatever fiction has to be written to prove it, also will be.

Neal Boortz is falling for it. Making a special point of assessing the speeches in terms of how they adapt to & help shape the emotional tone of the moment — after also making a special point of mentioning he isn’t qualified to do this.

I didn’t watch. If I had watched the speech last night any appreciation I might have had for the words spoken would have been clouded by the contempt I have for the man speaking them. I did, though, read the transcript this morning, and I’ll say this. It was a wonderfully crafted and expertly delivered address. President Obama – and you won’t hear me put those words together too often – delivered the exact right speech at the exact right moment in the exact right tone. I actually found myself getting all weepy-like this morning as I read the transcript.
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Oh … and about Sarah Palin. Yesterday we saw why the Republicans just cannot even flirt with the idea of making her the GOP candidate for president in 2012. Compare her statement to Obama’s last night. Obama will eat her alive on the stump. Recognize that now to avoid carnage in the future.

Mmmm, hmmm. Well, if the argument begins & ends on the point that “majority viewpoint must prevail, be it right or be it wrong!” — then, it becomes something worth noticing that Boortz is being absolutely eaten alive in the comment section.

Our own blog-comment-poster friend Physics Geek speaks for me:

“Compare her statement to Obama’s last night.”

I can’t. For some reason, Obama didn’t have to respond to people calling him responsible for mass murder. If they had, you could probably have compared his response to Palin’s.

There is one criterion that is sufficiently general in nature, that they can be compared side-by-side though, and compared fairly. Believability. As Boortz pointed out, when you noodle this through with the left side of your brain, the hemisphere that is concerned with facts, hard sciences, what it all really means, etc. there are some real problems that surface in listening to Obama’s speech. Oh sure the emotion-driven right-side-lobe is having an awesome time of it, as is always the case when His Eminence intones. Wheeee!

But Obama just isn’t believable.

The hillbilly housewife from Alaska who isn’t running for anything, on the other hand, is.

Advantage Palin. Again.

Yet another reminder of why we aren’t supposed to be watching or reading Fox News. It seems you’re not supposed to be holding the powerful accountable unless you’re doing it the same way some other powerful people are also holding the powerful accountable.

“Violence has no place in our democracy,” [Congressman Pete] Stark said in a statement shortly after the shooting that killed six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 14 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.

“While the details of the shooting are still coming to light, we can all agree that political rhetoric and imagery that condones or encourages violence — whether from activists, party organizations, or politicians — is unacceptable. We can have differences of opinion on policy and still treat each other with humanity,” Stark said.

But Stark’s own record of vitriol goes back a long way. In 2007, he infamously condemned Republicans for not supporting a Democratic-backed bill to expand health care for children from low-income families.

“You don’t have money to fund the (Iraq) war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people – if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

The column goes on with three other examples, all democrats.

We recall the blog comment of the day for January 10, noted that way by Instapundit. Comment-poster mesquito, posting at Althouse’s:

Anyone else find it creepy that new standard what me may and may not say is: How will it affect the behavior of an [o]bviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?

Everybody hates the politician who tries to figure out which way the crowd is moving, and then runs to the front of it so he can pretend to be a “leader.”

Why we work so hard to keep that figure around, and obnoxious as he can possibly be, is a real mystery.

Henninger, WSJ Review & Outlook:

There has been a great effort this week to come to grips with the American left’s reaction to the Tucson shooting. Paul Krugman of the New York Times and its editorial page, George Packer of the New Yorker, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and others, in varying degrees, have linked the murders to the intensity of opposition to the policies and presidency of Barack Obama. As Mr. Krugman asked in his Monday commentary: “Were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?”

The “you” would be his audience, and the answer is yes, they thought that in these times “something like this” could happen in the United States. Other media commentators, without a microbe of conservatism in their bloodstreams, have rejected this suggestion.

So what was the point? Why attempt the gymnastic logic of asserting that the act of a deranged personality was linked to the tea parties and the American right? Two reasons: Political calculation and personal belief.
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The divide between this strain of the American left and its conservative opponents is about more than politics and policy. It goes back a long way, it is deep, and it will never be bridged. It is cultural, and it explains more than anything the “intensity” that exists now between these two competing camps. (The independent laments: “Can’t we all just get along?” Answer: No.)

The Rosetta Stone that explains this tribal divide is Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter’s piece for Harper’s may be unfamiliar to many now, but each writer at the opening of this column knows by rote what Hofstadter’s essay taught generations of young, left-wing intellectuals about conservatism and the right.

After Hofstadter, the American right wasn’t just wrong on policy. Its people were psychologically dangerous and undeserving of holding authority for any public purpose. By this mental geography, the John Birch Society and the tea party are cut from the same backwoods cloth.

Viewed from a simpler perspective, the events of last week were all about Expectation Bias, in which a subject expects a certain event or situation and then systematically discards any evidence that would pose a problem for the narrative, perhaps placing inordinate emphasis on the evidence that fits it better.

The recollection of The Paranoid Style in American Politics puts an interesting light on all this. This is an epistle that was written up by a communist who felt all bullied and persecuted by the McCarthy hearings, and used the classic communist tactic of “accuse the accuser” right before the election between Goldwater and LBJ. Yeah, good ol’ LBJ…how’d that work out.

The effort to keep the “paranoid style” out of our politics by means of calling it to our attention, since 1964, has been a colossal failure by any reckoning. As we see this past week, The Left has been as paranoid as anybody else. But Hofstadter’s essay is recalled as “one of the most important and most influential articles published in the 155 year history of [Harper’s].” How can that be? From following the link, one can see the answer easily: Certain people are awash in Expectation Bias, convinced nobody can ever be paranoid about anything unless they’re conservatives.

But there is another reason that deals with a fundamental misunderstanding of the tract’s purpose. Hofstadter’s essay was not supposed to excise paranoia from American politics.

A few days ago, I pointed out how effective it can be to audibly accuse someone of doing something, in the very moment in which you yourself are doing that exact same thing. People will forget all about who’s doing what, rather instantaneously. If their senses pick it up they’ll immediately block it off. This is what the Hofstadter essay was really all about: It’s a communist jotting down a big dissertation about “they’re all out to get me,” while simultaneously saying it’s those other guys who are running around all paranoid and worried about people who are out to get them.

And so The Left has its narrative. They are the “reality based community,” and they must be perfectly sane because look how often they make fun of people. See all the jokes they tell without any real humor or good will, that’s a mark of sanity if ever there was one. And everyone else is just nuts.

And so, when a member of Congress who happens to have a “D” after her name is stalked and then gravely wounded by a deranged gunman, of course he must be one of those paranoid, schizophrenic conservative tea party people. It fits the narrative. And so it feels “right.”

A grown-up will change his beliefs over time to fit the evidence. An intellectual child who resists growing up, will tailor the evidence to fit the beliefs.

Oh my…this is after backing up, what, I’ve lost count I think. One desktop, four laptops, and some movies & television episodes I happen to like.

After spending a day on that, look at all the lovely purple that’s still there.

Think we can get used to this…

November 12. Of next year.

Isn’t it interesting that whenever James Bond has a long snooze, the world just generally withers and dies a little bit? It’s like all the world’s testicles shrivel up and fall to the ground, like leaves on the trees as a winter rolls in that is going to be particularly harsh, dry and dead-looking.

I have a theory about this. My theory is, if people look at men and don’t see anything impressive, they don’t see anything of value in all of humankind either. They’ll never admit it, but once they get that nasty feminist patina, that “Rueben Reuben I’ve been thinking what a fine world it would be” thing, they just naturally see the entire human race as a sort of infestation. Like lice. Good for nothing but an apology.

That’s pretty much what the James Bond struggle is all about, isn’t it? The villain wants to zap the entire planet with his moon laser, and it’s all up to Bond to short circuit the thing. Screw everything that looks good in a skirt, humiliate the bad guy in a contest of golf or skeet shooting or backgammon or downhill skiing or baccarat or whatever, sleep with some more women…just generally make men feel good about being men. And then the happiness and hope of everybody else, just naturally follows.

I think we’re about due. All over the world, people are generally unhappy with other people…with themselves…with the way things are going. The cure is more Bond.

Okay, here’s my wish list:

1. Moneypenny should be someone just slightly older than me, someone who’s been famous before but is now far less so. Miranda Richardson would be good. Phoebe Cates too. She doesn’t have to have any particular look, she just has to work extremely well with Craig. But put her in, by all means.
2. Q too. Since there will never ever be another Desmond Llewellyn, John Cleese is just as good as anybody else.
3. We really need to get this thing back to the five basic Bond chapters. Briefing with M; flying to the location, following the clues, surviving assassination attempts & meeting the oddball characters; confrontation with the bad guy who then monologues & recites his biography; ingenious and daring escape; final assault on the fortress.
4. The camera man from Quantum of Solace — check him into a delerium tremens treatment facility and get someone else.
5. Also, whoever had the bright idea for Bond not to sleep with the co-star, should go onto another project. Fer cryin’ in the sink. “Not sleep with” is what Moneypenny is for. Bond should sleep with at least two women, preferably three. At four, things start to get a little bit silly. Three is a good number.
6. A cool car would still, in 2011, enhance the final product provided it is handled right. Move the emphasis away from the gadgets, and over toward “guys with balls would kill to have this car.” I think that worked well in Casino Royale.
7. What’s really been missing is the grisly demise. We owe the Connery/Moore-era James Bond a huge debt for having pushed the boundaries of the PG movie rating. People don’t realize it nowadays, but back then you weren’t going to see a bad guy get eating by Piranhas, or electrocuted in a chair, or crushed in a car, anywhere, except in a Bond movie. So re-use what works: Bad guy has stockholders. He gathers them around a huge table and says “who’s with me?” Everyone is in except one guy…and you know what comes next.
8. Put some thought into the threat. If it isn’t threatening in some way to every man, woman and child on the face of the globe then it isn’t a good threat.
9. Also, when M has her briefing with Bond, the thing she asks him to investigate should be something MI-6 would really have some business investigating. I would say both Daniel Craig movies passed this test, but some of the older ones did not (some of the Ian Fleming books did not).
10. I’m all for a return to gadgets. I was even a fan of the quasi-invisible car, although I recognize I’m in the minority on that one. But the best gadgets are going to have a Tom Clancy kind of feel to them. Real, or conceivably possible on a micro-level, not just on a Star Trek macro-level. Think of the cover of a Popular Mechanics issue that isn’t going to hit the stands for another year.
11. If James Bond parades around in front of the bad guy in some kind of a disguise, it should work for a good long time. I think if you sat in front of the older movies and did a survey, you’d find the average length of time Bond uses a cover before it is blown, is something around two minutes — I frankly don’t understand why he would’ve kept bothering with it. I also don’t understand why things are that way. If Bond earns the bad guy’s trust right after his plane lands, and we’re well into the second hour before the bad guy figures out who he is and what he’s doing, wouldn’t the bad guy be really pissed off and therefore scary? Just sayin’.
12. Want to see more of the “Dark Bond” thing with Daniel Craig. I think it suits him. Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore were particularly brilliant about this. You know the drill: Bond is being all smartass Napoleon-Solo, in Moore’s case a little bit foppish, and then someone in the bad guy’s hierarchy rubs out someone Bond happened to care about, so after a little cat-and-mouse game Bond has the assassin cornered and out comes this Mr. Hyde sort of a Bond. Quantum was supposed to deliver on this, and failed. Casino Royale delivered, but it was with more of a flavoring of “poor Bond is rather nauseated when he kills people even though that’s what his training is really all about.” Thus far, Brosnan beats him in this department because Pierce had this look of “yeah dude, your time is up.” I’m absolutely certain Craig has what it takes to turn that around.

A story coming up out of President Obama’s home state of Illinois, which helps to show us what they’re all about as if we didn’t already know:

A triumphant Gov. Pat Quinn congratulated fellow Democrats early today after the Illinois Senate and House sent him a major income tax increase without a single Republican vote in favor.

Quinn smiled and shook hands on the floor of the Senate around 1:30 a.m. after the Senate voted 30-29 for the bill, which would raise the personal income tax-rate by 67 percent and the business income tax rate by 46 percent.

The House passed the bill hours earlier Tuesday night — likewise without a vote to spare and with nary a Republican in support.
:
Republicans, powerless to stop the Democratic agreement, were left to blame the majority party for lacking the guts to make tough budget choices.

“So here we are in the very end of this lame duck session on a late night putting more burden on the hardworking people of this state,” said Sen. Kyle McCarter, R-Lebanon. “Here’s an investment tip, put a lot of money into moving vans.”

“You may think your stabilizing this budget but you’re not,” said Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine. “You’re bankrupting our state with this bill.”

So I have this former colleague over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging who’s a moderate, but more thoughtful of a moderate than most. His big deal is the deficit. He thinks it’s unconscionable for both the democrats and the Republicans to continue to embiggen it; the former through wasteful spending and the latter through tax cuts. He wants tax increases, but not for their own sake. He thinks the further expansion of the deficit is the one metric in the equation that threatens to explode out of control.

His point of view, I think I get. What I do not get — where the democrats agree with him — is the exuberance. The smiles, the handshakes, the congratulations. The high-fiving; the “yipee” factor. My former co-worker might like what they did here…I’m qualifying that with a “maybe”…but I’m certain he wouldn’t be grinning about it. The headline of this story, plus the first two or three paragraphs, all seem to be heralding some kind of ticker tape parade or at least a champagne and scrambled-egg breakfast. Yay, private enterprise just became less profitable in Illinois. Yay, less prosperity less freedom. Hip hip, hooray. All right! Way ta go! We’re really gonna have fun now!

You know what, I think they ought to go ahead and do that. Mark the date and have an annual parade so we can see what they’re all about.

Myself, I disagree about what is the one metric threatening to spiral out of control. I think it is a composite; I think it is public debt, in proportion to GDP, plus a bunch of other things.

The deficit? No. If you’ve got a carefully jotted-down income statement showing me I’m going to take home $25,000 less than I’ll be spending in 2011, I’m not one bit worried. I’ll just churn through that puppy and drop everything on the expense-side of that sheet that I don’t have to have, until it comes out right. Sure it’s a lot tougher for legislators to do that with their pet projects, but that doesn’t mean the financial concepts are any different.

Once you get into that BOHICA Cycle though, that’s where the trolley really comes off the tracks. It’s happening in the United States, in Illinois, New York, California — every single place democrats have been in charge long enough to leave their mark.

Why? The story linked up top says the new tax increase, the “hooray, we’re bilking people more” tax increase, is gonna raise $6.5 billion. It won’t, of course. That number is produced by simple addition and multiplication, and presumes people will maintain consistent earning and spending habits as the tax consequences are in a state of flux. That they won’t change any of the decisions under their control, as the employers that sign their paychecks see less of a profit coming in, and new, artificial expenses are built into the products and services they bring to market.

It is our “free” press that is most at fault for this problem. When the $6.5 billion target is missed, they won’t talk about it. Not in terms of how it should be discussed — “last year, legislators used fourth-grade math to figure out how much extra revenue they’d get from the tax increase, and they turned out to be wrong.” In all my years of reading newspapers, I’ve never seen a statement printed that way, although I have seen it happen time after time. No, they’ll wait until the new deficit is broken down, agency by agency, until it percolates down to the level of social programs…they’ll print up a story about some “vital” assistance being “cut.” Then they’ll find some sad sack who doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his heating bill or get his hangnail treated, and stick him on Page B-1 like they always do.

But hey, that’s all next year. In the meantime — congratulations to the democrats of Illinois for getting that tax increase they wanted. You must be so pleased and proud. Hooray! Hey, are fireworks out of the question?

So back to the Arizona shooting. We’re all split squarely down the middle on this thing; our pinhead columnists and authority figures are convinced it was an act of political extremism, whereas the red-blooded people with whole brains, are leaning toward the gunman being just-plain-nuts. The evidence is falling in behind the ideas of the people-with-whole-brains. But the jump-to-conclusions people have fancy titles and big, big names. I guess that’s why they don’t need to wait for facts like the rest of us.

We’ve all heard the arguments by now about why this might be Sarah Palin’s fault, and about why it might not be. Also, by now, I think it’s pretty clear it’s the latter argument that has carried the day. The facts keep on pouring in to help support it; the offerings of those who promote the former do not enjoy the benefit of such a crushing weight of friendly evidence; their motivations are extraordinarily suspect; and, for the most part, I think most people clearly understand the concept of “just plain nuts.” It typically means, and seems to mean here, that the subject is not particularly interested in any particular strain of ideology.

The left took on a mission to deftly pin this on the tea partiers. They failed.

B-u-u-u-t…not really. People are still following this story, and as of now anyone still following it has fully realized the whole proposition was stupid. Anyone who isn’t on the partisan fringe, that is. And neither fringe-side decides an election, or even part of an election. It’s the wishy-washy people who make the rules, for better or for worse. That’s how it works. And they “know” there’s nothing right-wing about this assassination attempt. The caveat has to do with why I put the word “know” in scare quotes like that.

We need to come to grips with an ugly truth about the mind of the casual observer. The mind of the scholar who is passionate about a certain subject only occasionally. We don’t like thinking about it because we all have this flaw.

I have a favorite analogy I like to use, and it is a crass one. You’re at a cocktail party and a man walks into the room, climbs up on top of the banquet table, drops his pants and defecates into the punch bowl. Simultanously, he points to a random partygoer and says, “Hey, you just dropped a turd into the punch bowl!” In other words, he points at somebody else and accuses them of doing exactly what he’s doing. Pretty silly, right?

Well, give it another second or two of serious consideration anyway. Because if you’re the guy he’s pointing at…think about it. It’s a “When did you stop beating your wife?” moment. There’s no suitable response. Oh sure it seems perfectly reasonable to say “What are you talking about, I’m not the guy taking a shit into the punch bowl, you’re the guy doing that.” Indeed, the personal observations of everyone in attendance will back this up. But…well…now you can see the connection to the Arizona shooting, I think. It doesn’t matter what the facts say. It doesn’t matter what people can see with their own eyes.

It’s something embedded deep within us, burned into our wiring. We see two people, each accusing the other of doing the same thing, and the attention span just shrivels like a raisin. We tune out. We walk away. It doesn’t matter if we’re watching one guy shit in the punch bowl and the other guy not doing it; the point is, we stop relying on our own senses. Our predilection is going to be to put the the two players on the same level even though logically, we know they do not belong there because they are not the same. We start to think “I don’t have a dog in this fight” even though we do.

So the mission to “deftly” pin this on the right wing, has failed, but it has also succeeded. The prevailing viewpoint, that one that has to have command over everything even if it cannot be explained, goes something like: Oh sure both sides do it, and both sides need to tone it down. We “know” that going even just this far is silly. As a commenter said on Althouse’s blog,

Anyone else find it creepy that new standard what me may and may not say is: How will it affect the behavior of an abviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?

We all find it creepy, we all find it risible, we all find it unworkable. But that’s the meme that will be carried forward.

And the evidence says that, if it does have to be toned down before the next politician or little girl gets shot, then it is the left that has far more work to do in the toning-down department.

The evidence says that. But remember: Man, table, turd, punch bowl. Doesn’t matter what the evidence says.

So Palin’s face will be the symbol of inflammatory rhetoric leading to shootings. Even if Barbara Walters, herself, has trouble buying into it. Our mistake is thinking that The Left is gambling something, putting something at risk, when they say plainly dumb things like “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.” We make a mistake in thinking they’re putting their credibility at stake chasing off after the Underpants Gnome theory of mass shootings by crazy people.

They don’t live in a world of facts, evidence, logic, exoneration, vindication, conviction, damnation, anything of the like. They live in a world of reverberation. Making ripples. Things becoming true just by being repeated over and over again; that is their world.

They do this stuff over and over again because it works. It failed here, but it also triumphed; and, on balance, it is a win. The exercise in face-to-phenomenon association has been a smashing success. Even better, the consensus that has emerged is that we need less contention and more peace. We’ll figure out what “peace” means later.

Meaning, it will be up to them to define it.

Meaning, “peace” will become just a matter of doing whatever they say. And finding a way to shut up that irresponsible, hatred-inciting hick from Wasilla for crying out loud!

That’s how they work. Whenever they get their way, the rest of us become less free. The chasm that separates us from truth and common sense, yawns just a little bit wider. We become a little bit less independent, and a little bit less whole. The net effect is that we decide more things while doing less real thinking.

Nobody wins except the guy who is selling a bad product. The guy who wants us to accept one product, reject another, and stay away from scrutinizing any ideas too closely, be they old or new.

Update 1/11/2011: Neal Boortz monitors the progress being made to channel this momentum into some kind of ban on talk radio.

Update 1/12/2011: Palin responds, and as usual is far classier — and more patient — than I am:

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Rockin’ the ol’ boat, are we. Well, good…

All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.

I noticed when we were watching Mean Girls last night, Tina Fey stole one of my lines. This was something of a shocka, since her way of looking at the world has been very clearly established as fundamentally different from my own way of looking at it…and it must be a line that came from the heart since she wrote the screenplay. She’s asked to address an auditorium full of poorly-behaved girls, to offer something that might restore their self-esteem or some such, and she says something like (paraphrased) “it looks just fine to me, they seem to think very highly of themselves.”

Bingo. That’s it. We confuse a sense of true accomplishment with a feeling of self worth, and make the mistake of thinking the little brats can have the latter without going through the trouble of earning the former.

I think Homer Simpson had some wisdom to dispense on this subject too. “Trying is the first step toward failure,” I recall hearing on someone’s e-mail notification sound effect or laptop boot. That captures the other side of this. An attempt…toward anything…involves an evaluation of success, and an evaluation of success might conclude toward the negative. The potential for failure exists, and the failure would damage their self esteeeeeeem…so it’s best to not even start.

I’ll not be blogging it because I made a vow I’m not going to give people attention here just because they want it, and see bashing Sarah Palin as a way of getting the attention. That’s what has been going on for a long time now, and regrettably the shooting has turned into another example of it. Ooh ooh ooh, if I can echo the Jane Fonda Twitter line that Palin caused the shooting, people will pay attention to ME ME ME!

Not playing that game. But I did link to a sensible Howard Kurtz column over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging, and a lengthy and interesting discussion has ensued…

Update: This is worthy of a link if nothing else is. William A. Jacobson, Two sicknesses on display in America: “The manner in which the left-wing is seeking to exploit this crime reflects an attempt to replicate the political success Bill Clinton had after the Oklahoma City bombing.”

E-mailed to me from GBIL.

(Girlfriend’s brother-in-law.)

Lots of good quotes in this Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook column, although none better than this sub-headline some pithy editor slapped in:

If you believe that a new entitlement saves money, you’ll believe anything.

Like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss once said, “When we saw you would willingly spend your entire days in cubicles smaller than a prison cell, we realized anything was possible.”

I’m going to peg this at sixth grade. Would there be some problem with sixth-graders reading a column like this, perhaps doing a report on it? It would have helped me figure out what was going on, quite a bit; when I was in sixth grade, Jimmy Carter was our President. A lot of grown-ups on both sides were insisting government was lying to us in obvious ways, but nobody ever filled in details. Back then, things were different. If one adult was in favor of Carter’s policies and another adult was opposed, the adults would likely have known each other and wanted to stay friends. They’d only give us the details up to the point that objective was about to be placed in jeopardy and then they’d stop. We didn’t learn much from talking to the grown-ups, and we learned even less from the public school curriculum. President is Commander-in-Chief blah blah blah Senate six years blah blah House two years blah blah blah. That about covers it.

Kids should learn a whole lot more, especially when our elected representatives are lying to us about such elementary contortions of fact & logic…of math.

Of all the claims deployed in favor of ObamaCare, and there are many, the most preposterous is that a new open-ended entitlement will somehow reduce the budget deficit. Insure 32 million more people, and save money too! The even more remarkable spectacle is that Washington seems to be taking this claim seriously in advance of the House’s repeal vote next week. Some things in politics you just can’t make up.

Terminating trillions of dollars in future spending will “heap mountains of debt onto our children and grandchildren” and “do very serious violence to the national debt and deficit,” Nancy Pelosi said at her farewell press conference as Speaker. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius chimed in that “we can’t afford repeal,” as if ObamaCare’s full 10-year cost of $2.6 trillion once all the spending kicks in is a taxpayer bargain.

The basis for such claims, to the extent a serious one exists, is the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis this week of the repeal bill, which projects it will “cost” the government $230 billion through 2021. Because CBO figures ObamaCare will reduce the deficit by the same amount, repealing it will supposedly do the opposite. The White House promptly released a statement saying repeal would “explode the deficit.”

Meanwhile, other Democrats have taken up arms about House procedure. The GOP adopted a budget rule that says repeal doesn’t have to be “paid for,” and the press corps is treating this exemption as a scandal against Washington decency.

In a memo, the inimitable Pete Stark spied a GOP plot “to shove through a massive bill”—the repeal measure is all of two pages—while Henry Waxman and other outgoing committee chairmen shook with outrage about “an offense to good government.”
:
Amid the repeal debate, Democrats and the media are behaving as if they have no knowledge of Congress’s habits or the history of government health-care programs over the last half-century. Entitlements are always sold as modest and “paid for,” then years later everyone suddenly discovers that they are “unaffordable” without digging deeper into the pockets of the middle class. How do you think Medicare and Medicaid got to their current pass?

The government can’t subsidize coverage for tens of millions of new people and simultaneously reduce the deficit, as most Americans seem to intuitively understand. The real offense Republicans are committing in the eyes of Washington is exposing its illusions.

The point that seems to be lost in this, is that it doesn’t very much matter if the people are able to cast authoritative votes every two years if they’re so dreadfully uninformed. And I don’t know if they are, but certainly somebody is, if so many members of Congress are so confident about telling us we need to spend money on a new program in order to save money, and we can’t afford not to spend it. We need to be asking what it is we have been doing, over the past several years, to allow a perception that they can get away with such a thing whether it be real or imagined.

Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post, offers a voice to a widespread complaint. The reasonable observer cannot help but entertain the notion Mr. Milbank is also offering a semblance of substance to a complaint, that in reality has none.

What the Republican majority decided to read [in the House of Representatives] was a sanitized Constitution – an excerpted version of the founding document conjuring a fanciful land that never counted a black person as three-fifths of a white person, never denied women the right to vote, never allowed slavery and never banned liquor.

The idea of reading the Constitution aloud was generated by the Tea Party as a way to re-affirm lawmakers’ fealty to the framers, but in practice it did the opposite. In deciding to omit objectionable passages that were later altered by amendment, the new majority jettisoned “originalist” and “constructionist” beliefs and created – dare it be said? – a “living Constitution” pruned of the founders’ missteps. Nobody’s proud of the three-fifths compromise, but how can we learn from our founding if we aren’t honest about it?

Right, Dana. Any time I want to figure out how I can learn something, I make a bee line straight for people like yourself who so clearly haven’t learned even the basic essentials about that very thing.

Scripsit Ghettoputer makes a diligent effort (hat tip to Prof. Mondo) to figure out what’s going on here:

1. BEST CASE: Mr. Milbank views everything through a liberal’s twisted viewfinder, in which everything is reducible to group identity and victimhood. Here, the Republicans’ purpose in reading the Constitution was to remind themselves (and the Democrats) that there are limits to legislative authority. Mr. Milbank feebly attempts to cram down his own preferred purpose on the Republicans’ Constitution reading: a history lesson showing why White European American men are evil and bad, and must be blamed and/or punished for any unfortunate occurrence befalling any Democrat recognized victim class at any time, in any place. If this is the case, Mr. Milbank’s odd take can be ascribed to his liberal myopia.

2. WORST CASE: Mr. Milbank is being purposefully obtuse in order to tar Republicans as out-of-touch racists, beholden to Tea Baggers (ZOMG!!1!) in order to further liberal aims and agendas. ‘Puter’s got some experience in the law, and in all but a few instances, one may blithely ignore repealed laws (or portions thereof) because they are, you know, no longer operative. Claiming that Republicans must read inoperative portions of the supreme law of the land is as stupid as insisting that astronomers recognize that the Sun revolves around the Earth, because that’s what the general consensus was hundreds of years ago. Mr. Milbank is not a stupid man, so ‘Puter is left with the sole remaining possibility: bad faith. But why?

Mr. Milbank and liberals want to discredit the Constitution. To them, the Constitution and its limited government concept stands in the way of letting smart people (largely, them) dictate how stupid people (largely, us) live, because the smart people know best. Mr. Milbank and his fellow travelers know well that much of the liberal agenda is, at a minimum, in tension with Constitutional mandates, if not outright unconstitutional. See, e.g., the individual mandate. Republicans reminding America that there is a limit to government cannot be tolerated, as it challenges liberals’ ability to impose their agenda on a benighted citizenry.

My own opinion? I don’t think it’s even this complicated. The persons whose sentiments are echoed by Mr. Milbank, or at least who say their sentiments are aptly represented by this argument, obviously see the reading of the Constitution as nothing more than an opportunity to ‘fess up to, and wallow around in, our nation’s historical sins. Or to cravenly pretend that those historical sins never were there.

Now, if that is the most important thing about what such a ritual means to you, how do you go about ‘fessing up to that without also ‘fessing up that you have not been abiding by the document’s confinements?

As I said a couple days ago, now that the dirty deed has been done this has turned out to be a shrewd political gambit. Yes, there were some legally current sections of the Constitution that were “abridged” or “redacted” when some pages within the binder stuck together. Seems to have been executed with all of the reliability and integrity of President Obama’s swearing-in.

But it has been logically proven to everyone paying attention — and this is the biggie: We are having an argument, in our nation’s capitol, about whether the Constitution matters.

How did Chief Justice William John Marshall put it:

[I]f a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.

If, then, the Courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

Those, then, who controvert the principle that the Constitution is to be considered in court as a paramount law are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the Constitution, and see only the law.

This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written Constitutions. [emphasis mine]

If we have a written Constitution, it must be binding and supreme to the lesser laws or else it is as entirely extraneous as the left-wingers like Milbank seem to think it is. But how many Supreme Court decisions that the hard left happens to appreciate, in fact idolize and worship, would have to go the other way if the Constitution is nothing more than a historical wart. Any state in the union could criminalize abortion willy-nilly — that, clearly, is not what they have in mind — so that cannot be it. The Constitution is therefore legally relevant, legally superior.

If it is legally relevant and legally superior, then when it applies to a case along with an ordinary written law that provides a different consequence, the Constitution must triumph, so that the lesser law becomes a nullity.

With such a pecking order in place, our nation becomes a nation of laws and not of men. The interpretation of law becomes a necessary chore, one which must be carried out with logical coherency, in the three branches of government as well as in the fourth one in which Mr. Milbank toils away.

And he, along with all his sympathizers, has just confessed to “controvert[ing] the principle that the Constitution is to be considered in court as a paramount law”; he and his sympathizers “are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the Constitution, and see only the law.”

Apparently, this schism whose description flowed so eloquently from Chief Justice Marshall’s pen some two centuries years ago rages away today with little deviation or evolution, even on a micro level, from its past form. If that be the case, then I cannot imagine a more productive exercise for our Congress than to read the legally applicable parts of the founding document during the opening of the session. In fact, there’s something of an urgency to it if it generates this much controversy. The Constitution must apply, or else we’re currently engaged in some kind of lost-in-the-jungle, make-it-up-as-we-go-along silliness.

Congress has the steering wheel and people like Dana Milbank want to make a contentious issue out of whether it should observe where the guardrails are.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Edited to correct the Christian name of the great Chief Justice. It was a mistake to wax lyrically after watching The Lion In Winter without consulting my Google.

Don’t worry, it’s just in Europe. For now.

So, they’re going after pensions to make up for shortfalls. Public and private pensions co-exist in European countries. In some cases, public ones resemble our own Social Security, stressing budgets.

But instead of privatizing pensions, as Chile did in 1980 — which would have turned these obligations into assets — three former stars of European emerging markets have come up with heavy-handed incentives to turn private savings public. It’s a step backward.

Is the state an entity that exists to provide something to the individual, or is it vice-versa?

Update: Since we’re headed in the same direction, here’s how to pull back from the brink:

It all has to do with what Congress’ job is. Anybody who’s balanced a household budget knows darn good and well — it doesn’t do you a lick of good to worry about the budget-balancing while you’re making money or while you’re spending it. You have to make a commitment and stick to it on both sides. That’s news to the democrat party, unfortunately…you also have to show some math skills, and use ’em, and that comes as news to the democrats as well. They’re pretty much all about making your way through life by presenting wonderful speeches, having the right friends, and giving somebody else’s money away.

If we consistently reject that over the next ten years, we can have a balanced budget, a solvent dollar, sane interest rates and maybe our kids will be able to make money & hang onto it. Keep voting for whoever dazzles us with their hopey-changey charm & charisma-or-whatever, and we can’t have any of those things. Can’t keep our pensions, either, over the long term.

Really, we can’t. Think about it: Where’s the line drawn that protects your retirement plan?

The liberals have used the buckshot-approach to try to generate a scandal out of the reading of the Constitution in Congress, with dry-humping stories like this for example, and this. It seems they want to position themselves as being against this, and get themselves on record that way, but I got a feeling that if I say something like “liberals are against the reading of the Constitution in Congress” I’m going to get back a whole bunch of don’t-you-dare. It’s an old rule. I think Ann Coulter once observed that if it was possible to take an anti-American position in Scrabble or Parcheesi, liberals would take that position and then scold you with genuine hatred if you notice it & point it out.

You know, I didn’t think this going in, but…it seems to me the Republican establishment, breaking form from tradition, have thought this out better than the democrat establishment. The “Joe Six-Pack” voter, the guy whose vote means so much because he doesn’t know a single thing about Washington politics and doesn’t care to learn, has now seen it up close for two or three days solid: The democrat party wants to govern without any restraint. They think the Constitution is an obstacle, and not an authoritative one, just a pain-in-the-ass one. It’s undeniable now.

That was a good message to get out. Well done.

But let’s stop talking about the establishment. Let’s talk about the media…the liberals who claim not to be liberals. Chris Jansing — pretty girl, but what an airhead. Complicated? Really, Chris?

What kind of life do you need to live, in order to breeze through it in blissful ignorance of the complications the politicians hand down to the rest of us? It’s obvious Chris Jansing’s tax accountant gets the whole job done, presenting Ms. Jansing with not a single piece of paperwork other than the signature blocks…and that must be a short meeting. This must be an accountant who tried to explain some decision made to her, years and years ago, and got back the “I can’t hear you la la la” and since then has given up on it. I guess she’s never seen that U-turn sign that tripped me up a year and a half ago, or anything like it…maybe she rides in taxicabs, maybe she has a chauffeur.

I’m trying to envision this…how do you think it’s a problem when the lawmakers have to do something complicated? How do you not understand the law can be a complicated thing sometimes, and that’s just the way it is?

Or does she really think it should be complicated for the rest of us to follow the law, and simple to pass the laws? When, for the rest of us, following the law is something we just have to do to get our stuff done, whereas for those who make the law, making the law is what they do and they get paid handsomely for it.

I’m taking all these possibilities into account as best I can. But still, all the conclusions come to one single point: Jansing is intellectually anemic.

It’s a complicated process to pass laws now? Horrors. What a frightening thought. ::eyeroll::

Yeah, good luck with that.

Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), set his goal as nothing short of winning back control of the House in the 2012 elections.

“We’re all trying to win it back,” Israel said on MSNBC when asked if it was Democrats’ goal of winning back enough seats to make Pelosi, the former Speaker and new minority leader, the next Speaker.

Not entirely unreasonable. The “big middle” of America really doesn’t give a rip one way or the other. I remember Sean Hannity was trying to make people think about this back in ’06; I regard that as one of the silliest things he ever said. Even a loyal Hannity viewer isn’t going to care that much.

People don’t even care about what the House of Representatives does, let alone who leads it. Now, on that one, a change would be welcome…as America’s financial position becomes less and less solvent, the House’s potential to screw things up further becomes “progressively” embiggened.

I’d certainly like to see a durable, logical mini-essay from a supposed “moderate” or “independent” meandering through a theme of “yeah, Speaker Pelosi again, I could learn to live with that.” Someone who claims to want the country to do well. Make that all gel together. I dare ya, I double-dare ya.

A catalog of specimens out of a single stock photo trope…way more specimens than you might think.

All those happy women. My goodness, is that all women want? What’s so funny about being left alone with a salad?

Becca (commenter #5) sez…

I LIVE for stock photos! Seriously. Happy Black Woman Shopping is one of my favorites…I’ve never been that happy about ANYTHING

I think it says more about us than it does about the non-creative photographers & photo editors. Tropes are comforting. Females being pleased, are pleasing. Or something…

Maybe it’s something we carry out of childhood. You make that ramshackle thing in art class and give it to your Mom on Mother’s Day, and every single kid that ever had a mother has to stop the world from spinning and wait for that smile. Will Mom like it? Of course she will. But the point isn’t whether or not the smile comes, the point is that the kid is waiting for it. We all grow up that way, I guess…

As for why the happy-woman-shopper thing has to be a black thing, I dunno. I’m completely out of the loop on that one.

Obviously these things motivate large numbers of people to buy large quantities of crap. Beyond that, I can explain nothing, I can only observe…and link…and think…

Hat tip to Joan.

Daily Mail:

An American woman is fighting for her life today after suffering horrific burns in an arson attack which killed her fiance and three other members of his family.

Kate Donohue, 25, had been visiting Puerto Rico with Jesus Sanchez to celebrate their recent engagement and had been invited to a family party by one of his uncles.

They had just sat down for dinner when Sanchez Diaz went berserk with a blowtorch and set light to the walls he had doused in kerosene. He had also placed fuel canisters under the table.

He had invited 14 people to the welcoming party he was throwing in his two-storey house in the mountain town of Florida on January 1.

‘He planned the party so that everyone would show up,’ said police spokesman, Lt Reinaldo Jimenez.

When everyone was seated, Mr Diaz emerged from his room armed with a 9kg container of propane gas and then doused them with kerosene, he said.

Sanchez Diaz then set them on fire using a stick wrapped with a towel soaked in fuel.

A witness described seeing members of the family fleeing the house in flames and neighbours desperately trying to douse them down.

It’s necessary to take note of stories like this. We’re told the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” has to be subject to evolving standards of decency, written as it is within a living, breathing document. And, of course, as the prohibition evolves, it always has to evolve downward…toward kinder, gentler punishment, toward that ultimate pussy definition of “cruel/unusual”: If it’s something I wouldn’t want to have done to me, and you wouldn’t have done to you, then it’s something we can’t do to anybody no matter what. Yeah, we’ll ultimately reach the point where punishment itself becomes unconstitutional.

What happens to this elastic definition of “cruel” punishment when the crimes that are to be punished, become so deplorable and heinous? There’s something wrong when an arsonist is taken into custody who would subject fourteen members of his own family to such an excruciating demise, apparently for no reason whatsoever…and then, if his jailhouse mattress is found to be a little bit too lumpy, or the teevee set is missing a channel, then his constitutional rights have been somehow violated.

Would America really cease to exist, as we know her, if this creep was to be subjected to so much as a nipple-twist?

Ever see kerosene burn?

That’s the great thing about the United States of America. The “bloodless coup” advantage: Change of leadership, out with the old and in with the new, and through it all, the process functions smoothly and things stay cordial.

What a country!

Hat tip to Boortz.

Campaigning for Creigh Deeds two summers ago, Chairman Zero made headlines when He said:

“I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” he told the crowd. “I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.”

Yeah, dictatorship, that’s the way to go. I used to have a co-worker who set his e-mail notify sound effect to President Bush saying “this would be a lot easier if it were a dicatorship, just so long as I’m the dictator, heh heh heh.” He thought that was a riot and a half. Wonder if he updated it with The Anointed One’s sound bite?

Everybody likes to be in charge.

But my goodness, what a difference an election makes.

President Obama, returning to Washington from his Christmas vacation in Hawaii, urged House and Senate GOP leaders to put partisan politics aside in the name of working to boost the economy.

The president said onboard Air Force One he hoped incoming House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “will realize that there will be plenty of time to campaign for 2012 in 2012,” according to a pool report.

“And that our job this year is to make sure that we build on recovery,” he added. “We started making good progress on that in the lame-duck, and I expect to build on that progress when I get back.”

Problem: If our job this year is to make sure we build on the recovery, our job must necessarily be to scrap this left-wing apparatus that was just put together. And it isn’t me saying that, it’s the electorate saying that. It was decided about as clearly as it ever could be.

We’re having something of a crisis of leadership here; we need to better define what the L-word means. Does it mean, doing your bit to produce a conclusion to a matter that is beneficial to all concerned? Or does it mean just making sure you’re in charge? Or could “good leadership” be a reference to a sort of sleight-of-hand, whenever bad stuff is coming down, making sure it sticks to somebody else as if they had been making all the decisions, and then grabbing the wheel again? Sort of, ducking down to miss the flying turds, making sure it all lands on somebody else, but spending an absolute minimum of time out of the driver’s seat. Down and then back up again, in a flash, like a reverse-prairie-dog.

Further proof that Obama supporters don’t work. Everybody who’s been in the job market for awhile has had a boss like this somewhere along the line. It isn’t inspiring and it isn’t fun.

Whatever. It’s hugely snort-worthy that President “I Won” is saying we need to put politics aside now. You know, if it’s just one veto-override after another from here on out, it occurs to me that Congress would be doing exactly as He has asked. The numbers may not be there to make it turn out that way, but hey a guy can dream.

Made the following observation over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging:

The government is under conservative leadership for roughly six years out of every ten. Liberals, therefore, want more of life’s decisions to be made by an organization they consider malicious, wrong-headed, treacherous and evil sixty percent of the time.

I’m not just whacking a wasps’ nest (although that certainly is part of what I’m doing…never claimed to be above that stuff, it’s not like anybody else is). This is one of the prime, or should I say central, reasons why I don’t trust liberals. They seem to count on the idea of me, and other people whom they address, lacking any semblance of a long-term memory. A Republican is in charge, and — oh goodness! Abu Ghraib! Selling crack to inner-city kids through the CIA! Renditions! Waterboarding! Look at all this awful, terrible stuff we’re doing! And then a lefty becomes President and suddenly…you know what we need, we need to find a way to get the government into more stuff, we need to set things up so the government makes more decisions.

One of my former colleagues didn’t like the observation, so he did what lefties do: Drag the whole thing off-topic. Last night he ran out of steam, dissolving into a puddle of incomprehensible gibberish as everybody else politely went along with him to see where he was going…something to do with George W. Bush and Clarence Thomas being bad people, or something. So since he wasn’t going anywhere, I went back in and appended/expounded:

Back to the subject at hand: I have a reader who likes to say “all institutions, save for the ones that are by definition right wing, ultimately become left wing.” He’s right, of course, but my question is, are left-wingers counting on this? One example of what they want that I find puzzling, is for the FCC to start revoking broadcasting licenses if stations & networks don’t meet their definition of fair-and-balanced. If I were a lefty I would look at how the government is in the hands of right-wingers three fifths of the time, and I’d say “Yeah, maybe limited government is something we should want FCC should not be getting into this…it could bite us in the butt.”

They don’t even seem to have a whiff of a concern about it. Their credo seems to be, if it can be managed, the government is where it should be managed.

Is it just a primal instinct/impulse? Or are they counting on the law of decrepit institutions leaning left?

I’m going to go with “mixed,” tentatively. Lefties tend to be divided into rudders and propellers — those who decide where the ship is going to go, and then the rank-and-file who provide the propulsion. It’s hard to keep this in mind, but I notice whenever I ask questions of the nature “what is the plan, here?” — the answer seems to come back that the rudders have a plan, and the propellers are just falling into line.

It certainly isn’t natural to be talking up a big ol’ shitstorm about what an evil, awful, sub-human hive of scum and villainy all these government agencies are with that village idiot in charge at the top…and then, just six months later, insisting that the government should be in charge of our health care just because the new guy says it should be. What’s the vision here? Once democrats take over the government, they’ll be in charge forever? Or that time doesn’t exist?

Washington Examiner:

Consider one conundrum in American politics. Income inequality has been increasing, according to standard statistics. Yet most Americans do not seem very perturbed by it.

Conundrum Schmomundrum. That’s exactly the way it should work. Anyway, the article goes on…

Barack Obama may have been elected president after telling Joe the Plumber that he wanted to spread the wealth around. But large majorities in polls approved when Obama and congressional Democrats abandoned oft-repeated campaign promises to raise taxes on high earners in the lame duck session.

Why don’t voters care more?
:
[A]s George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes in the American Interest, “The inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.” Bill Gates may have a bigger house than you do. But you have about the same access to good food, medical care and even to the Internet as he does.
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Cowen is worried that high earners in financial industries benefit hugely when they bet correctly but are sheltered from losses by government bailouts when they bet wrong. It’s a problem that the financial regulation bill passed by the outgoing Congress addressed but, in his opinion and those of many others I respect, did not solve.

But there’s little evidence that most Americans begrudge the exceedingly high earnings of the likes of Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg or J.K. Rowling. We believe they have earned their success and don’t see how taking money away from them will make the rest of us better off. [emphasis mine]

Americans are grown up, and her politicians have been left behind.

In my lifetime, I have seen a great push in social circles and in Tinseltown (means movie-making) to celebrate the “common man”; not just the guy whose circumstances keep him shut out from a life of wealth, but the guy who chooses a more rustic existence. He tells his kids that money isn’t everything…and he’s right!

Me, I regard myself as a centrist in such matters. Each proposition should be weighed from all four perspectives: Benefits of chasing the dollar, drawbacks to chasing the dollar, benefits of refusing to go running after it, liabilities of of refusing. Case-by-case basis all the way, in other words. But I’m clearly in the minority — there is a rather pungent scent wafting through the air, a prevailing viewpoint that says money is bad, straight-up, and the only good people are the people without money.

Well…after you’ve taken care of the essentials. Including the winch on the truck and the big-screen.

Maybe we’ve reached the level of maturity where we understand: If, indeed, you are going to forsake money and live this life of privileged poverty…this poverty that means so little, including as it does a college education for all your kids, every recognizable electronic retail item imaginable (the year it comes out, not a little while down the road when it’s affordable) and a five-dollar drink in a cardboard cup every single morning…if, after those “staples” one is to swear off any extra loot so one can stay “good” — then, one must acknowledge the choice that one has made, such as it is. And part of that acknowledgment is to throttle back on this whole idea that, because someone else has more, that someone must be out to destroy you.

You can’t blame the other guy for you having less, when you chose to have less. Maybe we have reached the level of maturity where we realize it is OUR decision, not his. He might not be out to screw us.

Next step? You can tell by the undertone, I think, that I’m none too fond of this vow-of-poverty stuff. You know what they say about life; it is not a dress rehearsal. It seems to me this business about “only poor people can be decent” is a thought nurtured by those who think they enjoy the luxury of choosing a life-lodestar casually, carelessly. They seem, to me, to be thinking: If I’ve screwed that up, I’ll polish off the rough edges the next time ’round. And I think that’s a mistake because there’s no next-time-’round.

And money is something you use to buy what you need and what you want. To say “I don’t need any more than $$$ so I’m never going to have more than that” has always struck me as irresponsible, especially since you don’t know what’s going to happen next year or the year after. I can’t think of anything more foolish.

Oh, I shouldn’t say that — I can think of one thing more foolish. Defining your entire life’s pursuits according to the virtues of living in poverty, while living out that life entirely ignorant of what poverty really is. Thinking oneself noble because one has succeeded in avoiding decadence and extravagance…and for little other reason…while consuming those daily five dollar drinks that take longer to order than they do to suck down. I think if people are to take a vow of poverty and identify their mortal value according to this, they ought to at least know what poverty is.

But I’m having none of it. If I ever were to have thought highly of President Soetoro, He would’ve had me completely turned around the minute He said “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” I’m not going along for that ride. If I’ve earned it, I’m taking it, and I’ll choose my own charities after that thank you very much. And if that means I’ve earned more than somebody else it isn’t gonna bother me one little bit. I’ll sleep like a baby that night. What if it’s the other guy who’s earning more than I am? Ditto. Not bothered. Got bigger fish to fry.

I’m glad to see the country is coming around to my point of view. Yay, America is growing up. We’re not living on a Monopoly board anymore, fixating with an envious gaze on that chubby short guy with the walrus mustache with the fat cigar. We’ve matured out of the 1930’s.

Oh, my. Has any rule been more thoroughly shot full of exceptions than this one about “it’s way too early to talk about 2012”? Now we talk about Obama somehow becoming a two-termer:

Collective wisdom (and wishful group-think) among Republicans is that Obama will be a one-term president. “One & Done” is a rallying cry with the merchandise to match.

Not so fast my friends — as Obama’s victorious lame duck session proves, never underestimate this president or the power of the presidency.

Obama does not take defeat easily and tends to recycle negative energy into fuel for his re-launch. Obama’s re-launch plans for 2011 include spending more time outside of Washington “engaging with the public,” according to a top White House adviser. This is in reaction to criticism of him for being aloof and disconnected from the great unwashed masses.

So as the president re-engages the public, the media will be there to chronicle glowing accounts of every backyard summit. We can watch as Obama’s two-year road to re-election is paved with re-kindled love between the “lamestream” media and “The Anointed One” version 2.0. And we on the opposing team will shake our heads in disgust as our GOP candidates get lambasted in the media for every small infraction from their past and present.
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Question: How do Republicans make their way back from 173 to 270?

Answer: With much difficulty.

I have an answer for this.

Let the battle-of-personalities go. Even better, just admit defeat there. Obama, on His most audacious, stuck-up, snobbish day under the sun, is warmer and more personable than any challenger that can be stacked up against Him.

Repeat after me, challenging candidate: Yes, President Obama, you’re a much better person than I am. More fun, more compassionate, maybe even smarter. But my ideas are the ones the country needs right now.

Have democrats ever won a battle on the field of ideas? Yes, they have…when the ideas have something to do with giving money away. They get votes from Paul when they steal from Peter to pay him. Right now, the people are sick and tired of it — even the Pauls, I daresay. The objective in 2012 is to keep them fed up.

The challenge that rises up, is: Redistribution becomes appealing, and rather quickly, when people suffer too much. Paradoxically, the more dreadful Obama’s redistribution ideas are, the more people suffer, the quicker they get over their revulsion against policies for redistribution. They will start to crave that which previously poisoned them.

I think, though, that deep down people are honest. And when honest people see the game has been rigged and warped, and it didn’t come out right, they’ll start to make the connection. They’ll start to think, maybe we’ve been given a lesson here. Maybe we should have played it straight. That’s the sentiment that has to endure. If it does, Obama can pack His bags.

But in the end, I think it’ll all come down to one thing: How many people did the 112th Congress piss off?