Hat tip to Coyote Blog, and thanks to blogger friend Daphne for sending it in in an off-line.

This one’s going viral. Or it should.

Breyer made a brilliant point, the same way Joe Biden beat Sarah Palin in a debate: Didn’t do it. Flashed pearly whites in a grin that telegraphed self-satisfaction, condescension, insouciance and ignorance. Strip away the grin and there’s nothing to it.

Not a shred of logic as far as I can see. This guy’s really sitting on the Supreme Court? I mean, when an Associate Justice offers his thoughts on an issue on which I disagree with him, I expect him to weigh in with some brilliance and give me some “omigaw” moment. Where’s the “omigaw” moment? Breyer certainly acts like he laid one down…has the mannerism down. But there’s nothing.

Kinda reminds me of this.

Anyone got a good argument they can offer against impeachment? An argument that will give me an “omigaw” moment? I’m not talking about impeaching all justices who weigh in on the minority; that would be tyranny of the majority. I’m not saying that — I’m talking about where the Constitution plainly says something, and that particular amendment is sprinkled with extra, special verbiage to make sure nobody misunderstands (which the Second Amendment is, go look it up). That particular amendment is worded in passive voice, when most of the others are worded in active voice, to make it clear that the authors of it don’t give a good goddamn who is doing the “infringing” it is wrong, wrong, wrong. And then, pondering the plain meaning of this language that is not used in the other amendments, SCOTUS says “yep that is what it says.”

And this guy wants to keep living in a fantasy world. Not just participate in the vote on the minority side. But build castles in the air.

It seems to me a plain, unalterable fact that we need people serving on the Supreme Court who won’t go doing that.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Reason:

More people are going to college than ever before, but those extra years of education aren’t translating into the fancy-pants jobs that most people expect after snagging a sheepskin. Sixty percent of the increase in the number of college grads between 1992 and 2008 are doing low-skilled jobs that used to be done by people with high school diplomas or less. Ohio University economist Richard Vedder does the math:

In 1992 the BLS reports that total college graduate employment was 28.9 million, of whom 5.1 million were in occupations which the BLS classified as “noncollege level jobs” while in 2008 the BLS data indicate that total college graduate employment was 49.35 million, with 17.4 million in occupations classified as requiring less than a bachelor’s degree.

An example or two from specific occupations is useful. In 1992 119,000 waiters and waitresses were college degree holders. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 318,000. While the total number of waiters and waitresses grew by about 1 million during this period, 20% of all new jobs in this occupation were filled by college graduates. Take cashiers as well. While 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates.

These numbers are big enough that we’re not seeing a clsuter of arty comp lit major-novelist-waiters picking up some cash while living their dream in a garret. The stats show people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college in another era, responded to incentives like cheap loans and went to college in the ’90s or ’00s, graduated at 22- or 23-years-old, and then got the same gigs they would have been qualified for at 18.

Hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation. That’s gotta be a kick in the nuts. Here you are in your cap & gown, and if you’re lucky you can scrub pots after closing time at Sizzler’s.

Wonder who’s taking it tougher. The ones who sprung for tuition on their own, or the ones who skated on through thanks to mommy & daddy’s second- and third-mortgage?

If you think there’s something wrong or surreal about this…

…but that this is completely on the up-and-up and right as rain…

…I would have to say there’s something wrong with you. Probably. Not that I want to judge anyone. But it would probably be good for you to have a check-up from the neck-up.

Update: Treacher, via Instapundit: “Say what you want about Sarah Palin quitting her job, but at least she finished her own press conference.” Good ‘un.

What this country really needs is a leader who’s willing to finish what h

I wonder who this one person is who complained? Macy’s will, of course, not only refuse to answer to that, but do everything in its power to dissuade people from asking that question. Can’t build an awesome “everyone with a mouth is a fucking loose canon” perfect Utopian society, without a thick muffling cloak of safe anonymity upon those loose canons.

This is “42 definitions of a strong society” stuff. The right to face your accuser is not merely a ritual phrasing embroidered into our Constitution; it’s a darn good idea. This is where the alternative goes. A society that cannot stand — a society filled with towering tempered glass spires, and every single grown-up walking around is an eight-year-old malcontent with a rock.

One person complained, about nuthin’, so Santa has to take a hike. You know, it’s not that I think the joke is a good one or that I’m jotting these thoughts down to try to defend it.

But I shouldn’t have to. This was just plain wrong.

Was she looking for something like this?

He reads the Washington Examiner first, then Politico, and “Then I look at the [Washington] Post, which is not what it used to be. Each year it’s less than what it used to be before….It’s so neocon I can hardly read it….I read the New York Times….You gotta read some other newspapers before you read the Times, you have to work your way up to it…. The [Wall Street] Journal, once in a while, not often.”

And…

I used to love the [Washington Post] Style section. … What a joke it is. … It’s about this ridiculous show business news that is totally boring.

Also in this interview, Chris Matthews said something truly amazing:

‘Hardball’ is absolutely nonpartisan.

Stossel:

“To get an address, somebody’s got to recognize that that’s where you live. That means … you’ve a got mailing address. … When you make a deal with someone, you can be identified. But until property is defined by law, people can’t … specialize and create wealth. The day they get title (is) the day that the businesses in their homes, the sewing machines, the cotton gins, the car repair shop finally gets recognized. They can start expanding.”

That’s the road to prosperity. But first they need to be recognized by someone in local authority who says, “This is yours.” They need the rule of law. But many places in the developing world barely have law.

There can be no real property, without a way to recognize a right to the property.

And for a right to be a meaningful right, it has to endure without regard to who might have a grievance against it being there, or to who is capable of prevailing against whom in a physical contest. If might makes right, order becomes indistinguishable from chaos.

For people to have property, they have to be able to keep it just because they have earned it, and for no other reason. Regardless of who it ticks off, how upset they get about it, or what they can do.

It’s clear the number of fans does not tell the whole story; in fact, it may be irrelevant, and it’s even more likely that it’s something of a negative indicator.

The whole article is here (hat tip to Instapundit).

…to the student who earned a “C”:

You have asked me why this happened. I offer the following explanatory theories:

1) You are so dull that you couldn’t find East with the rising sun, a compass, and a praying Arab as visual aids. To call you a lunkhead insults lunks everywhere. If dumb were population, you would be China.

2) Perhaps due to 1), you have mistaken the professor’s advice for a complete proofing/copy editing service. It is not. Showing your professor a draft is not an abdication of your responsibility for the quality of your work.

3) Perhaps due to 2), you have decided that specific, marked instances of mechanical/formatting/syntactical errors are the only times such errors occur in your draft. This is not a wise decision.

4) The various instructions I gave earlier in the semester regarding such niceties as citation form continue to apply, even later in the semester.

5) The initial draft of your paper made me long for the Purgatorial terrace where the eyes of the envious are sewn shut, as that would have kept me from having to read it. As that was not an option, I informed you that your draft “need[ed] a lot of work.” Pursuant to 2), you were the one expected to do said work.

6) My international students (who are non-native speakers) have a finer grasp of elegant expression than you do. You have taken the language of Shakespeare, Milton, Strunk and White and made it read like marbles being poured into a wood chipper.

7) Did I mention that in a game of Jeopardy! against Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, you would still somehow manage to finish fourth?

8 ) Yeeeaaargh!

9) All of the above.

Therefore, I suggest you take the C (which left me wanting to shower after writing it in my gradebook) and be grateful. Also, never darken my classroom again.

Love and sloppy wet kisses,

Prof. M

Ah, the professor who takes his job seriously, meets up with the grown-up man-child who has thus far been able to argue his way into & out of everything. Hilarity ensues, although not from the point of view of the man-child.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. — allegedly written by an English professor at Ohio University.

The things you find in the New York Times letters section:

Robert H. Frank’s article (“Taxing the Rich: It’s All Relative,” Economic View, Nov. 28), on the rationale for allowing tax cuts to expire for families’ income over $250,000, is focused on the wrong issue. It’s our spending that’s a problem, not the ability of the wealthiest to pay even more.

I want the wealthy to keep doing what they’re doing. Personally, I am happy I have spreadsheets (thank you, Bill Gates) and can order all my holiday gifts in 15 minutes (thank you, Jeff Bezos). The richest of the rich, in most cases, provide more value to the world via the items they create than any charity or government organization could dream of. Their wealth is an exact measure of the value they have provided to society.

J. Todd Larson

Bainbridge Island, Wash.,

Nov. 29

The writer is the president of Citium Wealth Management and an adjunct professor in the M.B.A. program at Seattle University.

The Frank article is here.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin’s page on the Hello-Kitty-of-blogging.

Blogger friend Phil has thoughts on this issue too.

But it’s really not about “fair shares”. It’s about people wanting something, seeing someone who has the means to give them what they want, and getting their grubby hands on the levers of government power to force those other people to cough up more of their dough. Not only are they already giving more dough, they’re giving a bigger percentage of their dough for the cause. At what point will it become “fair” if it is not “fair” now?

The answer is never.

We seem to be caught up in a big national debate about socialism. I notice the socialists are lately deploying an argument that could be expressed as “if you think a socialist is what I am then you obviously don’t know what socialism is.” I hear lots of people begin this argument but then they don’t complete it — they don’t say what exactly it is a socialist does, that they are not doing.

I would expect we can all agree that if your vision is one where everyone has the same amount of stuff, that would make you a socialist. So from this, I infer the quibbling is about matters of degree. I am interpreting the socialists to say “I would be a socialist if I wanted everyone to be left with the same amount of stuff, but I do not want that goal. I just want to use our tax code to sort of trot out in that general direction, a little bit.” I think they rationalize their non-socialism by insisting they’d stop at some point.

That’s what I think when I take them seriously — and maybe that’s a mistake.

But my point is: How come it falls to the rest of us to figure out where they’d stop? How come it isn’t up to them to tell us? They use numbers like “wealthiest one percent” and “those who make $250,000 or more” to assure us that they only want to bring pain to those other guys — we don’t need to worry about it. And if we keep worrying about it it shows how dumb we are.

To be a smarty-pants, I guess you just need to tune out and not absorb any information about anything.

But if we do this tuning out, to show how smart and unconcerned we are…then how far does it go? It goes toward complete entropy but doesn’t actually reach it because they’re not socialists. So how much equalization gets done? When the dust settles, how much loot is the most productive, wealthiest person left with, and how well off is the laziest person? How come they don’t spec it out? Wouldn’t it be to their political benefit to do so?

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, by way of RightNetwork:

Despite protests from the Democrats, the Republican Party made banning slavery part of its national platform in 1864. Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-IL) wrote the final version of the text, combining the proposed wordings of several other Republican congressmen.

FrankJ is noticing what I’ve been noticing:

…I’ve listened carefully to a number of liberals, and here is a transcription of their argument of why we need to raise taxes on the rich:

“I get really worked up about the rich not paying more in taxes because how much they earn affects me because of [unintelligible]. And we really need the tax money; sure, we did a ton of spending without worrying about having revenue to back it up before, but now it’s really important because of [unintelligible]. And I don’t buy the argument or historical evidence that raising taxes will decrease tax revenue by harming the economy since [unintelligible]. There is just no reason to think that taking money away from job creators will harm job growth if you factor in [unintelligible]. In fact, raising taxes on the rich could help the economy by [unintelligible]. Really, the reason I get so worked up about us needing to tax the rich is because once their taxes are raised we all get the awesome prize of [unintelligible].”

I think that covers their whole argument. Did I miss anything?

I think it does, and I don’t think you did.

Doing crimes, doing time: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Earning money: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Paying taxes: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Hey, give ’em credit for consistency.

Just another smarmy secularist. Oh, no wait, I forgot: She isn’t saying anything about a desire for more secularism, her argument is grounded in diversity. Okay, very well then. She’s a cowardly fucking secularist.

And she’s being eaten alive in the comments section. Oh, that just warms the cockles of my heart. Really, it does. She deserves it. Just give it a read…

It seems there should be no debate that Christmas does not belong in the workplace. The people who disagree do not understand what it’s like to be a minority, and they fail to accept that Christmas is not a universal holiday.

“Should be no debate” — that’s rich. This is where the whole thing falls apart. Diversity has something to do with tolerance, right? Tolerance has something to do with diversity? Diversity-tolerance, tolerance-diversity? Two great tastes that go together like peanut butter & chocolate?

Anybody who thinks so, I’m gong to show them Penelope’s column. It absolutely oozes non-tolerance.

What are my own feelings about it? Ann Landers wedding rule — and longtime readers will know what I mean by that. It’s one of the few pieces of sage advice on which the addled-minded late advice columnist agreed with Yours Truly, or maybe it’s more appropriate to say Yours Truly agrees with the advice of the deceased fuzzy-brained advice columnist: When someone says “If you want me there you’ll have to dis-invite X” there is only one appropriate, one logical answer: “That’s a shame, we’ll miss you.”

You do not negotiate with terrorists, and you do not appease people who make those kinds of ultimatums. Period. It all comes down to this — if your productivity & cheerful demeanor slip a notch or two because you were just reminded someone has a different belief from yours, then you are the problem. Just like the wedding guest who says “I’m not coming if X is coming” is the problem.

Penelope has allowed herself to wander very far afield from where she wanted to go; she’s on a very dark path, although she may not realize it. She has begun to systematically abjure things that are not compatible with “diversity,” and I don’t think it’ll be too long before she starts to target the people she thinks are incompatible with this goal, as she sees it, as well.

And she has a big ol’ fistful of studies that say this is key to workplace productivity; profitability; competitiveness.

Whatever trivial differences there are between the people who are like her, and the classic caricature of Ebenezer Scrooge, are melting away rather quickly huh? Kind of like a snowman whose season has passed. Um…how is she any different…gender, age bracket, nationality. And diet. And she looks kinda hot in her own way, whereas Scrooge certainly did not — although others are hotter. Other than those things she’s pretty much a carbon copy at this point, right?

If I had my way, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

Yup. That’s her; she’s there.

You know what I hear when someone says “Merry Christmas”? Lots of things, chief among them the very same thing I hear when someone says “Welcome to Hooters sir!” I know I’m someplace where there aren’t any tightasses. I hear “Come, let us break bread together because we’re all here together, we’re all brothers and sisters; maybe we have some long-simmering dispute, but if we do, we’ll pick it up in January. Have a seat at our table, and leave your troubles on the doorstep!”

I’m sorry, if you have a problem with that there’s something wrong with you. Something frightfully, terribly wrong. I don’t care if you have a bookshelf full of Nobel prizes, a healthy society is not going to be listening to people like you until you get a serious attitude check. The issue is not wisdom, but brotherly love…which, contrary to what may have become my rightfully-earned reputation as a cold-blooded bastard, I daresay is a bit more important. The brotherly love — you people who are like Penelope and Ebenezer, you see it where it doesn’t exist, and you deny it where it is paraded right before your cynical eyes, in as real and genuine a form as it has ever been beheld.

The English language deprives me of the words I need to describe how much I pity you.

Say hi to Marley’s Ghost for me, Penelope. If he doesn’t pop up on your doorstep about seven o’clock tonight, he should. If he and his pals turn your damned attitude around, I’d like to see you over a table filled with num-nums and good wine and a great big ol’ stuffed goose in the middle. If it doesn’t happen, then maybe next year. And pardon me for daring to disagree, but I’m sure your employer & mine would do just as well as they would’ve otherwise.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Just bookmarking without comment.

Other than to give the reason why: Election/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan stuff excluded, this is easily the most important story of 2010.

If you’re unemployed and hoping to land something, you’d better hope to hell some uncharacteristic magnitude of leadership emerges from, of all places, the beltway. Otherwise you’re completely screwed.

Me:

From here forward, no more about the Wonder of Wasilla…Back to Palin, when she points out something meaningful, or is imploded by the major scandal that has been so breathlessly anticipated by her enemies for over two years straight now. Or, when she turns out to be right about something and the O-Man turns out to be wrong…which is the trigger most likely to get tripped first.

But some whiny pussykins writing a meandering screed — thereby proving she’s relevant AND electable — is not going to get any notice from us for the foreseeable future. This is just stupid. Someone wants attention so they write “Palin Go Away!” and they just…get it? Enough is enough.

Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times. Different sentiment, but essentially the same moratorium in effect.

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.

She’s the Zsa Zsa Gabor of American politics. She once did something noteworthy, but she’s now just famous for being famous.

…except, of course, I’m breaking my own moratorium by mentioning his. But what the hell, it’s worth it. Besides, I’m a blogger. If I come up with an idea and someone copies me, I have to point it out.

Blow just doesn’t get it. “Famous for being famous” is Courtney Peldon. Now, did you recognize that name? Probably not; you’ve probably read the name “Sarah Palin” a whole lot of times since the last time you’ve heard any mention of Peldon. In fact, there are really only two things in common between Palin and Peldon, and “famous for being famous” is not one of them.

They’re both vastly more aesthetically appealing than the average chubby-liberal-goth-chick in Seattle, and each is more qualified to be President than our current one.

The one that is being talked about more often, however, is constitutionally eligible to run in an election for that office. And, I still maintain, if she comes gunnin’ for it the job is hers. I maintain, furthermore, that deep down everybody with a working brain knows this, including Charles Blow. That’s why nobody anywhere is actually ceasing & desisting from talking about what’s-her-name. We have a lot of people (including me) saying they will. We have lots of people talking about how everybody else should. And we have truckloads and truckloads of liberals who are wishing everybody would. Starting now.

And absolutely nobody is saying “hey, it’s a great idea if we start talking about Sarah Palin!”

But people are talking about her anyway…all the time. You know the real reason? Because it is becoming an impossibility to imagine a credible sequence of events, between this moment and 2012, culminating in an outcome other than Gov. Palin being our new President-Elect. Lot of comments about how it can’t happen because this-insurmountable-obstacle or that-insurmountable-obstacle. But not a single credible scenario that stops it from happening.

Reuters, via Yahoo News:

Employment barely grew in November and the jobless rate unexpectedly hit a seven-month high, hardening views the Federal Reserve would stick to its $600 billion plan to shore up the fragile recovery.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 39,000, with private hiring gaining only 50,000, a Labor Department said on Friday. However, data for September and October was revised to show 38,000 more jobs were gained in those months than previously estimated.

The unemployment rate in November jumped to 9.8 percent, a troubling sign for an economy many had thought was strengthening. Economists had expected 140,000 new jobs last month with the jobless rate holding steady.

“The U.S. economy has yet to achieve the escape velocity needed to improve the worrisome jobs picture,” Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment offer at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California.

No hiring, few working, little to none among the new businesses being launched. Local, state and federal governments awash in red ink with nobody left to tax.

How much more evidence does one need before one is ready to chisel the epitaph? How about…every single city with a population greater than 250,000 mired deeply in liberalism, with a democrat mayor and a big ol’ mess of leftists on every council and advisory panel. And, in all those cities, the primary metropolitan newspapers splash whiny human-interest stories on every single square inch, every single day, of someone being dependent on a government program and they’re in dire straights because the budget is going to get cut again. Because that municipality just can’t make ends meet.

When everybody, everywhere, has run out of things to tax. And the demands for more and more government largess just keep right on rolling in.

When it’s like that in all fifty states, all across the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea…can we then proclaim that liberalism doesn’t work?

Or no. Will it somehow be Bush’s fault.

Much thanks to Neo-Neocon for this bit of unpleasant reality.

VDH:

When they are out of power, modern leftists advocate massive government spending and large deficits. They applaud when Republicans and conservatives sometimes prove as profligate as any big-government liberal. But when invested with the responsibility of governance, they come to understand that Keynesian “stimulus” must eventually cede to the same unhappy logic as the private household’s indebtedness.
:
There is an iron law that transcends politics and limits the application of fiscal liberalism: Print more money and money becomes less valuable; default just once and all future credit is lost or intolerably expensive.
:
In a similar way, the WikiLeaks mess reminds us of the adolescence of crusading freelance leakers and their enablers. This time the disclosures are not morality tales about Vietnam or Guantanamo. They concern a tough Hillary Clinton urging her State Department subordinates to spy on United Nations personnel. Barack Obama is not seen calling for the planet to cool, but is shown as so desperate to keep his promise to shut down Guantanamo that he is reduced, in tawdry fashion, to horse-trading photo-ops with the leader of any small country willing to take a detainee or two off his hands. In other words, those who once sermonized about the morality of leaking the Pentagon Papers and details of U.S. policy in the war on terror are now seeing that a let-it-all-hang-out transparency can be nihilistic rather than liberating…

Likewise, the notion that “civil liberties” were sacrificed in the effort to stop Islamist terrorism increasingly is shown to be a liberal talking point, not a serious criticism of responsible wartime government. Barack Obama conceded that argument when he flipped on every pre-presidential critique he had made of George W. Bush’s protocols. At one time or another, Obama, as law professor, state legislator, senator, and presidential candidate, had ridiculed the Patriot Act, wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, the Iraq War, Predator strikes, and Guantanamo.
:
Surely one lesson is that when out of power one is not responsible for Americans’ being murdered, and thus has the leeway to call for a sort of cosmic justice in a way one cannot when in power.
:
What are we to make of this great history lesson of the last two years?

Behind the recent news of massive debt, looming defaults, WikiLeaks, the administration’s about-face in the war on terror, and the implosion of the European Union is a reminder that progressivism, at least as it operates today, is a sort of high-minded adolescence, as sophisticated in faculty-lounge repartee as it is near-suicidal in its actual implementation.

It’s very much like parenting, methinks. You can make a successful go out of it without being a dickhead about it every day, or even much of the time. If you’re blessed with a child who doesn’t force you to be a dickhead, maybe you’ll never have to be a dickhead at all.

But if you go through the experience determined to use it to prove what a nice person you are, you’re pretty much guaranteed to bollux it up. Because that would necessarily mandate a fuzzy sort of dogmatic extremism: Every single time you can make a problem go away by spending some loot, you have to; every single time you can suspend a rule that would make life inconvenient in the moment, you must; each time you can appease someone who’s trying to get something he wants by flouting common sense and basic good manners, then appeasement is the order of the day.

I think Obama does deserve some credit. Disaster would surely ensue if He were to take an approach of, “but I promised my constituents I’d turn all these things around” and went ahead, facts and national security be damned. Maybe not that day, or that year, but eventually. And, to the best I know about it, He hasn’t done that. I don’t know if that begins and ends with Him, though. I’d like to think there are some Col. Nathan Jessup types out there, in “places you don’t talk about at parties,” who managed to convince the right people that if the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff went forward as planned things would get really, really ugly. If so, we want them on that wall; we need them on that wall.

What makes me think it went that way? Not much. Just, the stuff that does not directly relate to national security — the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff has indeed gone forward as planned. We are in hock up to our ass. I haven’t seen profligate spending of this magnitude of recklessness since the first Christmas shopping season after my ex-wife got hold of the household credit card.

It comes from the authorities in charge excluding it as a possibility that anybody from among the “right” people can every be told no. Generally, that is the anatomy of a poor decision. Somebody didn’t want to tell somebody else no.

William Voegeli, Commentary Magazine.

The liberal-opinion industry spoke with one voice: President Obama’s tax plan was his party’s best hope to avert a midterm disaster. Over Labor Day weekend, Obama called on Congress to continue the Bush tax cuts for every family making less than $250,000 per year and to let income tax rates revert to their pre-2001 levels only on income above that threshold.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait wrote that raising taxes on the rich is “wildly popular.” Indeed, voters “are in favor of pretty much any measure that takes money from the rich.” The columnist E.?J. Dionne agreed. Refusing to continue the Bush tax rates for high-income families would rally the Democratic base in advance of the 2010 midterm elections: “What do Democrats stand for if they are not willing to take on this cause?” The New York Times editorialized that the Obama plan, by cornering the GOP, was smart politics on behalf of good policy: “Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.”

And then a funny thing happened. Nothing. First the Democratic House and then the Democratic Senate decided to adjourn without holding a vote on Obama’s tax proposal. They wanted to go home to campaign, but a decisive contingent of vulnerable incumbents refused to campaign on that. Democrats postponed consideration of the issue to the relative safety of a post-election lame-duck session.

The commentariat was furious. The Democrats have taken the “Curl Up in a Fetal Position Plan on taxes” wrote Chait, a choice he found “crazy,” “pure political suicide,” and “one of the nuttiest decisions, on pure political grounds, I’ve ever seen.” Expressing himself more temperately than Chait, as most people do, Dionne wrote, “For the life of me, I don’t get why some Democrats are so afraid of this vote.” “Profiles in Timidity” was the Times’s editorial verdict when the Democrats decided not to decide.

There are two problems with this indictment. First, voting for the Obama tax plan wasn’t supposed to require any Democratic courage. All the risks would befall those Republicans who were so foolish or doctrinaire that they would vote against lowering taxes for lots of people to avoid raising them for just a few. Second, this threat analysis was confidently delivered by people who were not themselves threatened—­journalists, whose careers won’t be altered by the midterm elections—and rejected by people who were—legislators who would be hoping to catch on with lobbying firms or think tanks if the Obama tax plan turned out to be less popular than the journalists had promised.

Found Chait’s article here. Chait points to Matthew Yglesias, who calls it “Voters Want To Soak The Rich” when poll respondents indicate, 55-43, that it would be “acceptable” to increase federal taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year.

You can come to your own conclusion of whether too much meaning is extracted from too little evidence. I think I’d be in the 55% that say a tax increase on families making a quarter million is “acceptable”; it’s constitutionally permitted at this point. But that doesn’t mean it would be good for this economy.

Neon-Dionne opined here. I find the statement “In the absence of a coherent case, Republicans were winning by default on a wave of protest votes” to be a real howler. Let’s see: The nation is in financial chaos because not enough people are making money. In my book, “it oughtta be alright to make some money” is a coherent case if nothing else is. If a culture is created in which there’s something wrong with you when you’re too productive, and you need to be punished for it — how in the world can any recession ever end?

The Times editorial is here. It makes the argument that a tax cut for the “wealthy” — this is already treacherous territory, for this country doesn’t have a wealth tax, only an income tax — would cost revenue. Hundreds of billions of dollars “would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners in the next decade if their taxes do not rise.”

This has been exposed as a falsity the first time we cut tax rates and experienced increased tax income as a direct result. And then, we did that a few more times. I’ve yet to hear of it going the other way; we cut a tax rate, and aw darn the revenues fell because the rate was cut. Are there examples of this? I don’t see anyone offering any. That is why we have this notion of a “tax cut costs money” down as Item #7 on our list of things that give you away as a clueless dork.

So our usual leftists are irked by the idea of taxes being cut for the “wealthy,” and they like to see the taxes increased in those brackets. This is not new, and it may be legitimate to say in these post-French-Revolution times, this is a good definition for what that word “left” really means: Make some profit for yourself, and you shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. The more you’re taxed, the better.

What I do not understand is the adrenaline. Why do they get so upset when the possibility emerges that a rich person might not get taxed? It’s not just Chait/Yglesias/Dionne/Times-editorial-board. Could it really be explained by arrested development? I’m middle class, I want everyone else to be middle class too…I have to carry a lunch box to work, I want everyone else to have to make themselves baloney sandwiches every morning too…I can’t drive a Lexus, I don’t want you to drive one either…

That can’t be it. There are rich liberals around, and I’m not just talking about Warren Buffet. Some liberals are richer than other liberals. How come we don’t have liberals grilling other wealthier liberals about mailing off extra dough to the IRS, until the glorious day comes that their tax liabilities are assessed at the level they should be?

Are they being deficit hawks? Don’t make me laugh. Yeah, a lot of liberals qualify for Item #7. But if they cared about deficits, they’d remain concerned about the deficits when the time came to spend money.

I don’t understand why the average progressive mind becomes so agitated and unhinged about the slope of this taxation curve. Even if they are the direct beneficiaries of the associated services, this country has been drunk on deficit-spending for decades so it’s not like they’ll feel it when the rich are soaked-real-good. Is this nothing more than a middle-school-level “us versus them” thing? I just don’t understand it, the hatred.

Their more moderate fellow citizens aren’t backing ’em on it. Most of the fleecing that’s been pulled off on me personally, successfully and otherwise, has actually been perpetuated by poor people; “rich” people have been relatively nice to me. And I have the impression most people share that general experience.

But when the rubber hits the road, when a rich person makes a little bit more money, alright let’s say there’s a marginal possibility some other fellow would be a better judge of how that money should be spent and where it ought to go. But if that other guy can make a better decision there than the rich guy who made the money, wouldn’t the other guy have been the one to make it?

Volokh has thoughts on it.

Co-blogger Randy Barnett’s proposed Repeal Amendment has generated a great deal of controversy. The amendment would give a two thirds majority of the states the power to repeal any federal law or regulation. The idea has now been endorsed by a number of congressional Republicans, including soon-to-be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Randy argues that the amendment could play a significant role in “deterring even further expansions of federal power.” Critics such as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claim that it would seriously undermine the Constitution or even “destroy” it.

I think that both sides’ claims are overstated. If enacted, the Repeal Amendment would have only minor effects because mobilizing 34 states (the number needed for a two-thirds majority) to oppose any congressional enactment is extremely difficult. Proponents of repeal would have to win not just 34 votes, but 67 or 68, since every state but Nebraska has a bicameral legislature. In some cases, the party that controls the state senate is not the same as the one that controls the lower house, which makes it difficult to get both to vote for the same repeal proposal.

As Randy himself points out, “[g]etting two-thirds of state legislatures to agree on overturning a federal law will not be easy and will only happen if a law is highly unpopular.” If it were that unpopular, it seems unlikely that the law would be enacted by both houses of Congress and the president in the first place. In practice, therefore, the Amendment’s effects would largely be limited to repealing a few old laws that no longer have significant political support. And even in those cases, assembling the required two-thirds majority will be difficult.

Generally, I’m not too charitable toward arguments that take the form “once it’s in, it ought to be in for good.” We have a lot of lavishly funded political movements lately — ObamaCare was one, but there are many others — that have something to do with a “deflowering” event. Say yes here, and it will never be possible to say no, ever again.

Rather like throwing a match into a drum of gasoline. Once it’s lit, there will be no way to extinguish it. In what way does this quality of “can’t ever extinguish it, ever, no matter what” serve the interests of a constitutionally representative republic?

And our democratic process does very little to persuade me that once The People have spoken, the matter should be settled forevermore. I live in California, where it seems just yesterday our union apparatus was clamoring from the rooftops that the recall effort must fail, should fail, and inevitably will fail…because Gray Davis, dang it, had just been re-elected as our governor. The people obviously wanted him! Well, that’s not the way things shook out.

Sometimes…a lot of the time, in fact…there is an advantage to be had from asking “okay one last time: Are you sure you really want this?” That’s what responsible people do with the important decisions they make in their personal lives, and I don’t see why they should be prohibited from doing the same thing in the voting booth, through their state representation.

Politico:

The House Democrats’ prized global warming committee died quietly on Wednesday.

It was four years old.

Created in 2007 by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to draw attention to the causes and effects of climate change, the committee didn’t have much of a chance to survive the upcoming Republican takeover. Wednesday, the axe fell.

“We have pledged to save taxpayers’ money by reducing waste and duplication in Congress,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for incoming Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “The Select Committee on Global Warming – which was created to provide a political forum to promote Washington Democrats’ job-killing national energy tax – was a clear example, and it will not continue in the 112th Congress.”

With the end in sight, Committee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) organized what was billed as an “all-star” cast of witnesses to testify Wednesday on the dangers posed by climate change. And like the Democrats’ hopes for a bill limiting carbon dioxide emissions, things didn’t turn out exactly as planned.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark didn’t show and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was delayed by several hours.

I decided to go ahead and include that last paragraph because I think it’s important. When you watch all the shakers and movers and eggheads and authority figures, with the presumption that the planet is indeed in danger and the cream of our society understands all of the relevant details…their actions present you with one conundrum after another, many of them logically unworkable.

When you presume the climate change thing is a scam and a naked power grab, there is no conundrum. It all makes sense. Gen. Clark has been part of a power grab, for the time being it is a futile one, so he just can’t find the time to show up. Is that how you act when the planet is in danger and the know-nothings have been voted in to restore all the policies that will slide the entire planet into oblivion? I seem to recall Dennis Quaid had some passion to show in “Day After Tomorrow” — he showed up. With the planet on the line, wouldn’t you, y’know, find the time to be there?

Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook:

‘It is not a sensible way to run a country to have this magnitude of tax issues left to annual uncertainty,” said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner earlier this month, and he’s certainly right about that. But at the current moment the single biggest obstacle to more certainty is his boss, President Obama, who still refuses to compromise on the tax increase set to whack the economy in a mere 30 days.

After meeting with Congressional leaders yesterday, Mr. Obama dispatched Mr. Geithner and budget director Jacob Lew to negotiate a deal. Yet the President is still holding out against even a temporary extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax rates. Republicans won 63 House seats running against those tax increases, but Mr. Obama still seems under the spell of the dead enders led by soon-to-be-former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The magnitude of the looming tax increase ought to snap him out of this hypnosis. If the Democrats who still run Capitol Hill for another month fail to act, tens of millions of American households will see their paychecks shrink immediately in the New Year.

One of many reasons why the donkey party lost me, years and years ago. Whenever you talk about some kind of subsistence that relies on loot involuntarily collected from the taxpayers — welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance extensions, social security, medicare — it seems they get it: The economy can’t do well unless people have money to spend. Heck, they’re the the ones selling this idea; they use it to justify everything they have to say.

And then when you start talking about earning paychecks this entire principle just sails out the freakin’ window.

Well, unless you’re talking about paychecks earned by unionized employees.

It’s not free enterprise they hate. It’s that F-word, free. They like that other F-word, “forced,” so much better. Rules, rules, rules deciding where every single nickel is supposed to go, how long it’s supposed to stay there, how fast it’s supposed to come back, and under what conditions.

In the things that separate the political parties, this is one of the very few constants, the “free” in free enterprise. They’re against it, everlastingly.

Her again.

Yeah, she’s in my sidebar as a Wonder Woman pinup, and the better her future prospects, the better it is for the country. At this point, it is an impossibility that she’ll go away like some people want her to…and I’m glad for this. But it’s not healthy for EVERYBODY to be talking about ONE PERSON and to be talking about her ALL the time. We have national secrets scattered far and wide, you might as well load ’em into a cropduster and dump the payload over the most crowded street in Manhattan. DPRK is up to shenanigans and so is Iran, or have we forgotten this?

From here forward, no more about the Wonder of Wasilla — unless it’s something meaningful. The latest attention-whore who wants us to stop talking about her now! I really mean it! Stomp my feet and hold my breath until you stop talking about her! — this does not merit notice from anybody else, therefore it does not merit notice from us.

And yes, you can take this as criticism against Memeorandum. Have you been checking their scroll for the last two weeks or so? I just gave a fair description of the items pegged up at the top of it, during that timeframe. They need a check-up from the neck-up.

Back to Palin, when she points out something meaningful, or is imploded by the major scandal that has been so breathlessly anticipated by her enemies for over two years straight now. Or, when she turns out to be right about something and the O-Man turns out to be wrong…which is the trigger most likely to get tripped first.

But some whiny pussykins writing a meandering screed — thereby proving she’s relevant AND electable — is not going to get any notice from us for the foreseeable future. This is just stupid. Someone wants attention so they write “Palin Go Away!” and they just…get it? Enough is enough.

Meanwhile, a not-Palin-related (not quite anyway) question for you to mull over. Submitted: Presidents who are anticipated with a sense of “There’s no way he/she can possibly be electable, what a joke”…compared to other Presidents anticipated with a sense of “Aw man, take it to the bank, that’s our next President, he seems so Presidential, just fits into the office like a hand in a glove. Just so qualified.”

Generally, the former turn out to be better Presidents than the latter, after history has jotted down the final page. They are underestimated by their opponents, they tend to win more often when they are challenged (or do the challenging) over some issue, they arrive with a more discernible identity. The issues they confront, after they’ve worked them over, bear an imprint that says “the outcome is distinctly different because this is the person who had the power when the matter was decided.”

They are more fearless and capable leaders, they are less generic. Perhaps this is because they have more to prove.

But we’ve had a lot of people make it to the Oval Office just because they were really good at brooking compromises, giving speeches, selling things…just acting all dignified, and blandly “Presidential.” That, I submit, has been a long-standing failure. They weren’t even good at staying popular over the long term. Like the suitor of a young lady who tries to woo her over by agreeing with everything — “Oh, whatever you want to do.” The matters that couple decide together, reach an outcome without bearing his imprint, and his paramour becomes bored. That’s the American electorate. Without leadership, decisiveness, an individual imprint, there’s no reason to stay enthused and the presidency ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

My supposition is that all these gentlemen who have seemed “natural” for the office — with the exception of George Washington — have been fated for this pathetic legacy. I’ve seen just enough history to toss that one out there…it will take some research to prove it out some more (although I believe that it would).

Discuss.

Update 12/1/2010: Tammy Bruce notes the irony: To take Scarborough’s screed seriously, you need to re-define “manning up” as having something to do with getting together with the other boys, and beating up on the girl just because you don’t like her being there. Third graders have a better grasp of the manning-up concept.

Slate:

To be fair to Clinton, she isn’t the first secretary of state to issue cables telling U.S. foreign service officers to spy on other diplomats. According to the leaked diplomatic cables, Condoleezza Rice likewise instructed State Department diplomats to collect such intelligence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if previous secretaries of state encouraged if not instructed their diplomats to push information-collection all the way to intelligence-gathering.

But what makes Clinton’s sleuthing unique is the paper trail that documents her spying-on-their-diplomats-with-our-diplomat orders, a paper trail that is now being splashed around the world on the Web and printed in top newspapers. No matter what sort of noises Clinton makes about how the disclosures are “an attack on America” and “the international community,” as she did today, she’s become the issue. She’ll never be an effective negotiator with diplomats who refuse to forgive her exuberances, and even foreign diplomats who do forgive her will still regard her as the symbol of an overreaching United States. Diplomacy is about face, and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton’s scalp.
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How embarrassing are the WikiLeaks leaks? A secret cable from April 2009 that went out under Clinton’s name instructed State Department officials to collect the “biometric data,” including “fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans,” of African leaders. Another secret cable directed American diplomats posted around the world, including the United Nations, to obtain passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, and other data connected to diplomats. As the Guardian puts it, the cables “reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network.”

Pretty big stuff. Salon isn’t exactly a mouthpiece of agenda-driven Mellon-funded neocons, by any stretch. If it does shake out this way you can forget all about Hillary in 2012, and likely in 2016 as well. Or afterward.

Good riddance. I hear so much about…ah…a certain other woman being “unqualified” and Hillary, from the moment I first heard about her, has always been given a pass. The idea of an eight-year-term as First Lady being some kind of useful experience is one I have always found laughable…and it has not escaped my notice that Hillary seems to have a person or party to indict, in some way, whenever she talks about anything.

Even looking past the right-wing left-wing politics of the situation, I just think the world has become too complex to be engaged by any authority figure whose modus operandi is to find blame for every little thing. There are problems out there that just…are. Nobody caused ’em. They still need to be addressed, and blame is not leadership.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: The world will be a better place when her public “service” career comes to a permanent end. Let her make oodles of money on the lecture circuit, where she will surely use more spurious arguments to blame more people for more things. But, there, she will be just another bucket in a vast, toxic ocean. That’s where she belongs. Let her stand in line, peddling her ideas, pocketing some big coin for doing it. Better that than legislating or executing any actual policy. I’d love to hear the argument about how that’s done us any good.

Hat tip to Viral Footage, by way of Linkiest.

Why…the HELL…not. There’s a little bit of attention-whore behavior around 0:58, other than that it looks like what I think it is: An individual, in it for herself, determined to spend absolutely as little time as possible in that detestable place while still following the rules.

I’ve worn gym pants and tee shirts for this, for the same reason. Before that, I went the other way: Dressed to the nines, since I’m going on a business trip after all. But that’s stupid. Nobody is seeing you until the next day…there’s metal in the belt buckle, metal in the shoes, metal, metal, everywhere.

You dress the part. If they like you, they’ll wave you on through when they get bored…if they hate you, they’ll wave you on through when they run out of excuses. She’s figured out a creative and visually appealing way to deprive them of excuses.

And you know what? These days, that is probably the most boring swimsuit a size six can buy. Solid black, covers up all the essentials modestly. I’d like to meet anyone who has a problem with this — and stay far, far away from them.

At 1:03, it seems she is being given some instructions just for her. That, my friends, pisses me off. She is not under any requirement whatsoever to take this process seriously. Nor am I, nor are you. Nor are we required to refrain from using our resourcefulness in the way the Good Lord intended, to make the experience easier for ourselves.

“The United States does not have a security system; it has a system for bothering people.” — Shlomo Dror, Israeli air-security expert.

Yup, we’re talkin’ about her again. I’ve half a mind to call a moratorium on Palin-related matters…and I would…but I got a feeling we’re witnessing some kind of thermonuclear meltdown among the Palin haters. No, worse than that. Some X-wing fighter has lobbed a photon torpedo into the small exhaust port in their trench.

William Jacobson:

[A]s I reflect back on the past two plus years since Palin’s nomination, I’m wondering if an all-out, knock-down, drag-out fight with the Palin haters is just what this country needs most, not least.

You really need to go read that one in context. It’s a paradigm shift from another idea, one I happen to find quite reasonable, that when President Obama stands for re-election, the focus of that election needs to be Obama. He’s most likely to lose that way, which would be good for the country; and, it’s fitting and proper.

Some of the Palin-bashers are Republicans, and they make the point that a Palin candidacy would jeopardize this. I think they’re right. I just don’t find the argument convincing, because it’s incomplete. It identifies a problem without identifying a solution. And it allows the enemy to pick the generals. Who ya gonna reject as “unqualified” next…whoever the democrats don’t want to run against? How far you want to take this?

All of life is like this. You can act because you’re tired of the infestation, or you can (not) act because you’re afraid of the insecticide. Determination to solve the problem, or fear of the remedy. Didn’t Yoda say something about this? “Do, or do not; there is no try.”

But the Palin haters, whatever funny jokes they manage to cook up about Palin…

They make up tales about Palin’s childhood health care, whether she had a boob job, make jokes about her giving hand jobs, claim she “rolled her eyes” when told someone was a teacher, examine the color of her bracelet to claim she dishonored war dead, falsely claim she advocated war with Iran, distort polling about her, attack her intelligence, berate her for recommending followers read a Thomas Sowell column, move next door to her to snoop on her, go after a blogger who defends her on MSNBC, claim her success is because men are aroused by her, go nuts because of her (first) book tour including counting the number of non-white people in crowds, blame her for a turkey farmer’s problems, suggest she contributed to a swine flu outbreak in Alaska, turn her into a pin-up girl for a news magazine, misrepresent her comment about “death panels,” claim she is “too sexy” to be a national politician, concoct the hoax that she didn’t know Africa was a continent, and hang her in effigy…

…are a much, much bigger problem than she is.

And you know what? I think that would show. I could be wrong, but at this point I’d bet on it.

Hat tip to The Other McCain.

I liked it. Didn’t agree with all of it, but I saw a lot of wisdom in what was being pointed out by Rich Dad. This outlook he was talking about, is something I’ve been noticing in the rich people I’ve known, for a very long time. They don’t see people and money the same way “normal” people do.

I’ve yet to become one of them…of course, that’s relative, and some people would say I’m well ensconced into their ranks, especially in these trying times. But I have made a point of figuring out these different things they do, and emulating what few behaviors of theirs I’m in a position to emulate. It has always proven satisfactory, not only for me but for everyone else involved as well.

Kiyosaki has been criticized for, among other things, the supposition that Rich Dad is not and never was a real person. And, some people who write for Slate don’t like the ideas in his book. Take that in whatever way you will.

My son and I made a pact that we would make a point of listening to this, beginning to end, during the long ride to his mother’s. I cannot give this “book” a thumbs-up on every single page, but I would characterize this arrangement, in hindsight, as a very strong win. Whatever conclusion you reach, this is what fathers and sons should be discussing during the teenage and pre-teenage years. Maybe earlier than that.

If you know me personally, and you’ve been trying to figure out if I survived the hilarious misadventures last night & early this morning, rest assured I am still among the living. Just getting ready to check out of Shilo in downtown Elko.

Very high marks for this hotel. I’m trying to figure out how the stay was not perfect, and I do have one flaw: The coffee pot is a cheapass model that doesn’t allow you to sneak your first cup until the entire pot is brewed. Yeah, I know. All the hotels do this, including the nice ones. But why? The sneak-a-cup feature ranks high on the lest of desired benefits to the weary traveler, especially the road warrior who was snapping chains on his vehicle after midnight the night before, and seeks to acquire command of a reasonably early jump on the next day nevertheless. That is the target clientele is it not? The story is — yesterday took a whole lot out of me, I need to bring a lot to this coming day…need a good hotel. So c’mon. Spend more than eight bucks on the fucking coffee pot. Sneak-a-cup feature.

But still, if that’s my only complaint then it’s a damn good room for seventy bucks. Kitchenette and everything. How come it isn’t this hard to find a problem when my lady is traveling with me? No, no, don’t say it…when she says the maid is doing a shitty job, there really is a problem and someone should be complaining about it. Well, there are no hairballs in this tub.

I got stuck in the backroads. I’ll take the fall for that one…kinda…since my tires were sans chains when they should not have been. But it’s crap that I have to go tootling around back there. We now have a “sixteen hundred son-of-a-bitch” rule — Morgan has to do all 1600 of the miles, down-back-down-back, nobody helping even one single inch, he turns into one and it is to be expected. The Mom is feeling guilty, which I think she should, and I’m exploiting it to the hilt. I’d think poorly of the man who would not.

So Morgan doesn’t do all 1600. Maybe he’ll do all 800 on one trip, if he gets some assistance on the 800 in the other. And on the extraordinarily rare occasions he ever has to come this far…send a fucking taxi to the Starbucks that’s just off the highway exit. Maybe I’ll sit with him. Share one last coffee & bear claw.

This, like the shopping experience, is metaphorical for the society in which we live. Some people make the decision they need lots and lots and lots of help…they’re allowed to…and because of this decision, the vast abundance of resources available to help those in need, are directed toward the benefit of a very few. And then it isn’t a few. The “I need help” crowd expands, the magnitude of help they require expands, the efficiency with which the help is given plummets downward. Then, things start to not get done. The process breaks down, and worst of all, everyone has a story to tell about how it’s all somebody else’s fault. Last night I ended up stranded because I helped somebody, and helped some more, and more, until I needed help myself because I did too much helping. This is not a new thing. “Kidzmom” and I have had this thing going on for awhile, and it’s a little bit like Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football. That just pisses me off even more.

To be honest, that’s probably the major irritant. I keep getting suckered into enabling this.

I don’t really have that much passion about this child-exchange thing…or…I shouldn’t. We’ve got a year or two to go before he can ride the train all by himself. The lesson, is the sultry, seductive slithery creepiness of this “A must help B because A can do it and B cannot” stuff. Some of these A’s, poor stupid bastards, are under the impression they’re being paid some kind of compliment and come galloping in on a white horse, armor all polished. That used to be me; now I’m in another camp of A, the A that recognizes the mission is simply not going to be accomplished any other way so you might as well do what needs to be done. Our sin, our downfall, is that we fail to spot alternatives. We are bamboozled until someone comes along to tell us “that shouldn’t be necessary, it could be worked out by means of this alternative.” I blame my/our upbringing. We were raised to think, if you expected this to take an hour and it turns out to take two, or ten, then quit your whining and snap to it. If it requires more effort then that’s all the more reason for you to get started earlier and work faster (and dumber).

Still another camp of A is the calculating businessman, whose numbers tell him that bowing to the pressure is the right way to go, because it is the path of least resistance. These are the businesses who settle lawsuits that are obviously stupid. There’s no use arguing with them, because they have the research that says this is the “right thing to do”; it’s proper, sturdy research, and more research will just lead to the same conclusion.

But as they continue their appeasement, even with the legalese that says “indemnify and hold blameless” and “we admit no wrongdoing,” the wave of appeasement in total creates something very ugly that cannot be blamed on any one of the parts that make it up. This is why we have a litigious society. This is why you have one surfer dude suing another surfer dude for stealing his wave.

In a land where the strong are punished and the weak are rewarded…there will be less strength and more weakness. I don’t understand why this is so hard to figure out.

I also don’t understand something else: What the heck happened here. As I’ve pointed out before, lefties tend to lead with the outrage, which sometimes — a whole lot of the time, actually — makes it tough to figure out what the facts are that are supposed to inspire the outrage. This is a rather extreme example, one that I hope HuckUpChuck makes the time to go check out. I’d be interested in seeing what happens, since I’ve found Huck to be much more reasonable in noodling these things out than Mr. Darrell. In fact, I’d like lots of people to go check it out. Frankly, I could use some help figuring out what happened. The Salon article spends copious amounts of space telling me what I should think, who’s wonderful, who’s a monster, and I have to read way down to find out what started it all. Ditto for the New Republic piece, which is riddled with errors, mostly grammatical.

Interesting, since the issue seems to have something to do with failing to pay teachers the proper saintly respect. James O’Keefe misled people with some of his films? Gov. Christie is a bad person just for saying something positive, or non-negative, about the O’Keefe film? Wow, these people must really hate Michael Moore a whole lot! Yeah, I kid.

Once you open yourself up to the truth of what is happening, you see human history is really just one long repetition of the same story. Weak thinkers do their thinking by figuring out who is to be a valid focus of sympathy and who is not…and from that, figuring out which ideas are right and which ideas are wrong, based on which identities have become fastened to the ideas. It is childlike thinking. And while this happens, the weak and incapable…or those who choose to represent themselves that way…are made the focus of sympathy, along with those who build their livelihoods around bringing those people “the help that they need.”

Those who actually supply the help — not administrate it, not regulate it, not direct it, but personally go without something so the help can be given — are excluded from this Cone of Sympathy. They — we, the A’s — are made into non-persons. That isn’t to say we’re persecuted. What it means is, the proposed solution to any given problem, is consistently designed to arrive at a cost to us, and at no cost to anybody else. Sometimes, in the case of progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, the cost to us is a primary objective. Other times, the primary objective is the lack of cost to anybody else — absolute zero cost. No compromise is possible, or is to be allowed. Like last night; the drop-off point had to be on the front doorstep, it couldn’t be anywhere else.

This is what’s happening with our medical care. We have “co-pays” which are absolutely, positively, nothing more than a “skin in the game” device, an acknowledgment that the entire system will spiral out of control if one side can demand services while laboring under absolutely no burden whatsoever. So they labor under a token burden just to address this reality…and…there is agitation. Yes, much of the political pressure comes from the issue of losing coverage through unemployment & under-employment. But the constant refrain of “health care is a right!” must draw a bead on the co-pay, must it not? It has to. Can’t charge a fee for a “basic right.” The point is, all those within the Cone of Sympathy enjoy the privilege of demanding “change,” with a goodly measure of momentum behind the demand, whenever they’re inconvenienced. Or just “offended.” Even a little tiny bit.

The public is conditioned to see this as right and proper: One side should always pay, the other side never should. If we, the payers, protest, the protest is portrayed as whining. If someone else protests on our behalf, or the hell with us, just protests against the general stupidity of it…that is portrayed as being “dumb,” “duped” or a “shill.”

Meanwhile…people do not become what they want to become, they become what they watch. They become whatever is the focus of their attention. Society becomes bored with watching the strong, because to emulate the strong you have to get up off your ass and do things that aren’t all comfy. Like put chains on your car in the middle of the night, lying on your back, in a foot of snow.

And so society focuses on the weak and non-productive. It remains ignorant of the strong, who provide that society with all of the things it wants and needs. It remains ignorant, and it teaches its children to be similarly ignorant. It chastises, scolds, excoriates, ridicules those who would pay attention to them, let alone want to become them. Meanwhile, here are your daily newspaper headlines about the weak people who rely on government services, and the crisis developing because the nameless, faceless, anonymous, evil rich are not being taxed enough.

What happens next, to a strong, capable, adult mind, should be obvious. But, through this degeneration, society loses that as well. We learn to nurture weak, childlike minds. “Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub” minds.

It’s not supposed to be a problem. Because the higher taxes fall on that other guy, as does the punitive and risible litigation. It’s all somebody else’s headache, so there’s something wrong with you if you pay attention to it. Just shut up, direct your scorn where we tell you to direct it, and direct your sympathies where we tell you to direct that. Do it, or we’ll make a monster out of you, too.

Jammie Wearing Fool:

You can’t make this stuff up.

Six people were arrested and one officer used pepper spray as Irvington police tried to break up a peace rally that authorities say turned into a melee.

Township Police Chief Michael Chase said the dust-up started Wednesday night when members of Newark’s Anti-Violence Coalition were holding a rally in memory of the victims of a double homicide on Myrtle Avenue last week.
:
Six people were arrested on several charges including obstruction of justice and resisting arrest. Sharif Amenhotep faces the most serious allegation, a charge of inciting a riot. [emphasis Jammie’s]

One of the many tragedies of the times in which we live, doomed to be recalled by future generations the way we look back on bedside medicinal bloodletting with leeches, is the “peaceful” protest. Really, anything having to do with “raising awareness” of something. People act in ways that directly contradict the message they seek to spread around, unaware of the irony, perhaps never becoming aware of it. Rock concerts to raise awareness of global warming, that would be another good example.

Our children’s children are going to say “Eh…it was still within a hundred years of the radio being invented…people were exposed to the possibility of gaining attention on a magnitude beyond their comprehension, and they couldn’t handle it…” They’ll see it as something just like when some people win the lottery, and their lives are ruined because they can’t handle the success. Our species needs a couple of centuries to become accustomed to the miracle of instantaneous mass communication, and we’re only about seventy or eighty years in, still stumbling awkwardly.

Of course, that’s a blogger saying that, so there’s some irony right there I suppose.

A shattered man who’s lost someone close to him and becomes an avenging angel of death. It’s been done over and over again, but it never seems to get old.

The direction and the acting save this one. There is very little in it that’s original, and much that is not. At times it seems like someone got hold of my list of things I do not want to see in movies ever again, and just ran right through it checking things off. They even managed to hit #25…awkwardly. Although it’s baseball in this one and not soccer.

It has a couple of twists in it that take themselves way too seriously. The first one I didn’t call, although I was mulling it over in my head, because I just didn’t care that much…and the second one anybody with a working brain will see a mile away. It would have been a better movie if those were just left out — although I imagine, then, you’re left without much of a story.

But nobody is buying tickets for that. They’re there to watch Dwayne Johnson become a grief-driven unstoppable murdering machine, and The Rock delivers. Oh yes, that was the best part of the movie.

That aside, Kill Bill was better because a part of it was making fun of itself as it went along. And of other spectacles that had come before, parodying while it simultaneously paid homage. This one is guilty of representing its story as original, when it isn’t. It isn’t a felony in movie-land but it’s certainly a misdemeanor.

Well. At least nobody ducked down behind an open car door to block large-caliber bullets (#32), yelled loudly to make machine guns work better (#41) or opened a medicine cabinet with a mirror on the door (#8). Also, to the best I could see, not a single gun was fired more times than its magazine or cylinder capacity, unless it was reloaded (#31). Credit for that.

Overall, there are quantities of Give-A-Damn in this movie. I was supposed to go out and get a popcorn refill, and I didn’t…why? Because I wanted to see what was happening next. On the strength of that alone, it deserves a thumbs-up. Let’s say three stars out of four. We paid evening ticket prices and I’m not feeling particularly ripped-off about it. Although, if you can set yourself up for a matinee, that would probably be a better match. Still, it’s better than a “wait for video” movie I suppose.