Good Lord, what a disgrace:

It’s official, TIME Magazine is a complete joke

Joe Klein has reviewed Bush 43’s memoir and is as shallow and clichéd as any leftist can be in it:

As I read on, trapped in the sketchy carelessness of this presidency, I was surprised by how angry I didn’t become. For me, at least, weariness has replaced anger. Bush’s was an exhausting presidency that will, I suspect, be remembered more for its waste — of time, lives, money, moral standing and economic strength — than for anything else. We have survived nearly a decade now since Sept. 11, and the cataclysmic events of that day have receded, not just in memory but in importance, compared with the global economic changes and Wall Street sociopathy that together challenge America’s future pre-eminence. We have not been successfully attacked since, a matter of luck and skill. We do have Bush to thank, in part, for that — but far too much testosterone was spent kicking irrelevant butts and landing, breathless with self-regard, on carrier decks to celebrate victories that were Pyrrhic at best. We struggle to recover from the thoughtless carnage of his tenure.

Sketchy carelessness, eh, Mr. Klein? Tell me please, I’d really like to know — where do you see TIME Magazine’s place in the grand scheme of things? Are you just pumping out glossy petroleum-based paper with any ol’ thing carelessly sketched upon it, to be aged a couple of years and then stacked on a coffee table in a medical office’s waiting room? You think that’s where the demand is in this age of the iPhone?

More photoshop jobs of our 43rd President holding books upside-down. How edifying. How educational. Boy, I really feel like I know what’s going on in the world now! I just got a window into the cobwebby mind of Joe Klein as he was reading a retired President’s autobiography.

Of course, some folks aren’t going to see anything wrong with this, because they happen to agree with Klein’s view of things. Ends justifying the means, or something. I cannot help but wonder what they’d think of Fox News photoshopping our current President…mmm…running around with a bucket over His head? It would be “fair and balanced,” wouldn’t it?

On a slightly different subject, I left a comment over at blogger friend Rick’s place about liberals and other anti-war zealots who don’t know, or care, about what country it was that we invaded — just “sovereign nation that did not attack us” and that’s all they have to say. Of course, my criticism isn’t quite so much about the not knowing. I cannot claim an encyclopedic knowledge of the details of Hussein’s regime. What really rankles me is the not caring. All this passion worked up about a decision having been made with which they do not agree, “blood-on-his-hands” and all that.

After all these years I am still thunderstruck by how under-prepared the average liberal is to discuss what Saddam Hussein really did. What he was trying to do, what he had been trying to do, what he got caught trying to do, what he was on record having done…and what this illustrated as far as what kind of a threat our nation was facing over there.

If we’re going to be passing value judgments on the wisdom or lack thereof of going into Iraq to take the old regime down, shouldn’t that stuff…y’know…kinda come up once in awhile? These are the people who fault Christine O’Donnell for not being able to name a Supreme Court decision off the top of her head. This is their one big topic upon which they like to opine most feverishly and most tediously. It’s even displaced the Florida “recount,” remember that?

And when you get to the details, without flocking to Google they generally can’t talk butkus about it.

It is really, really something. I think of it as a national embarrassment and national tragedy, I really do. A longing for peace, and a passion for peace, is a good thing, and a vision for greater understanding that leads to a lasting peace is a laudable goal. But there is so little follow-up that I have to conclude, for the most part, the lip-service toward “understanding” is exactly that and nothing more. Just lip-service. If there was more to it, they’d understand more than they do.

Thursday morning, in a post that received much attention and inspired much discussion, I made an observation about the way liberals tend to introduce their audiences to the subject matters they want to discuss. My observation was in the way they, in keeping with the tradition of all collectivist economies and totalitarian regimes, discourage the acquisition of knowledge and assume a superior level on a sort of information-trickling pecking order, essentially telling people what to think. As a general rule, I observed, you would even be able to see it just scotch-taping a six-lines-per-inch printout of a liberal blog posting on the wall of a large room, next to a similar printout of a posting by someone ideologically inclined toward the opposite…then walking to the far side of the room and look upon their disparate forms:

The conservative (to your left) says “Look what this guy said, then look what happened over here. Now, my thoughts about this are these…”

The liberal works differently. He explains to you what’s going on in the world according to his own take on things. This guy’s “The Real Deal,” that woman is “stupid,” this guy over here is “a village idiot.” He’s clean and articulate. He’s a dimbulb. He’s sophisticated, he’s educated, she’s a bible-thumper bent on establishing an American theocracy.

If there are quotes at all, they’re in the bottom half. Just little snippets, very often taken out of context. Not there to prove anything, just to lead-in to the next snarky one-liner. It isn’t an absolute no-exceptions rule, but it works well as a general one.

What is funny about this, is I have also previously observed that liberalism has degenerated into a — what’s the word. Not a science, not a discipline, not a justice system, not a religious order, not a way of viewing the universe…but sort of a hodge-podge of all these things. A dogma. And if the dogma could be summed up in a single sentence it would be “Look at this thing over here I hate so much, come gather with me and help me hate it.”

I just think if that is the priority…and the evidence says that it certainly is…I would expect a greater emphasis to be placed on defining the thing. Right? But liberals don’t have that much respect for the individual. One liberal explains to another what is going on, and he’s essentially making an intellectual clone of himself.

You will note from the comment thread that one of our readers did not like this observation, because he’s a liberal. He was also the example I cited…which I know from having the same thing happen to me, this can be a little bit of a jarring experience. So he did what liberals tend to do with observations they do not like: Pretend I was defining a hard rule to be applied to everybody with no exceptions (I never said such a thing, and in fact said much toward the opposite)…and point me out as a hypocrite who can’t or won’t follow his own rules. Then he proceeded to prove me absolutely right, waxing lyrically about all the things he figured out the motives of Sarah Palin, whom as far as I know is a person he has not yet met. True to form, there was & is no firm evidence forthcoming to prove any of what he had to say about her, or even to compel a neutral mind to receive these ideas more hospitably. To the best of my knowledge, they seem to have been things that were fun to think, nothing more.

I say again (since it was ignored last time I said it): This posting is not an example of what I’m talking about because it is a re-inspection of something else that has already been inspected elsewhere. My observation concerns writers who introduce their readers to the topics they wish to discuss. If you want to see how I do this so you can weigh an accusation of hypocrisy in your own mind, you can check out how I do it over here.

And I don’t intend to allude back to that discussion again since it’s been milked to death…and I don’t like talking smack about Huckup because he is, kinda-sorta, in his own way a somewhat fair and principled thinker.

But I did upload the image with those essay-form-outlines for a reason, and I intend to embed it and refer back to it again and again and again, whenever the occasion calls for it. I intended that from the beginning, for this is something I have been noticing for awhile now…view conservative commentary from a distance alongside liberal commentary, you will notice even from twenty feet away a distinct difference that reflects the different thinking styles. Conservatives and liberals are both close-minded in their own ways. But conservatives close their minds after they have experienced something. Yeah, I’m even talking about that big one, “God doesn’t exist.” With most of them, the experience is parenthood, and I’m part of that crowd. I was raised Presbyterian and taught in childhood that you should have faith, which means slamming your mind shut like a steel door on the notion that we may be living in a godless universe. But in truth, I never did completely close my mind to this until I watched my son develop in his mother’s womb. And find out about what’s going on. This machinery, you know, it’s a whole lot more complicated than people give it credit for. Doctors can’t even explain it to you without using that troubling past-tense verb, “designed.” To keep all the secularists from being offended, everyone uses passive-voice so it’s linguistically unnecessary to explore who’s doing this designing. But eventually a truly curious mind will need to ‘fess up that someone’s doing it and it ain’t Darwin’s ghost.

To the subject at hand. I said that I intended at the beginning to re-embed the image of the paragraph-boxes. I did not expect to be doing it within just a couple of days. But this is a perfect fit:

People have struggled to define what the Tea Party stands for, but Sarah Palin has provided a manifesto for the incoming freshmen. She starts with the conceit that the results of the midterm elections have put the government back on the side of the people. But she quickly disabuses us of that belief. I will list Palin’s priorities for you, so you don’t have to read her entire screed.

1. Defund ObamaCare.
2. Eliminate earmarks.
3. Make is procedurally easier to cut taxes than to raise them.
4. Enforce zero-based budgeting.
5. Cancel all unstarted stimulus programs.
6. Return all non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels (she may have meant discretionary spending).
7. Extend all of Bush’s tax cuts indefinitely.
8. Control the growth of Entitlement spending.
9. Control the borders, but decouple it from immigration reform.
10. Continue our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
11. Get tough with Iran.
12. Sign free-trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia.
13. Oppose ratification of the START treaty.
14. Side with Netanyahu’s position that all of Jerusalem is part of Israel, and that no building in East Jerusalem can be considered settlement expansion.
15. Keep Guantanamo prison open and deny all prisoners there access to the courts.
16. Return to Bush’s freedom agenda.
17. If anyone in the press praises your actions, do a reappraisal because you’ve probably gone off-track.

So, this is what Palinism stands for. It does not appear to deviate in any way from the policies of George W. Bush. Excepting earmark reform, increased hostility toward Latinos, and an even more Likudnik-friendly position towards Israel, nothing in Palin’s proposals would change how the country was run between 2001 and 2009.

It’s Bushism stripped of all it’s redeeming features. [emphasis mine]

What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think. What to think.
What to think.
What to think.
What to think.
What to think.
What to think.
What to think.
What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think, What to think, what to think…and…here’s a link.

A link that I don’t really expect or want you to click. I’ve summarized it all for you so you don’t have to do any of that…you know…that reading of things written by people who are not me. Don’t do that, just take my word for it.

Pardon me for noticing this thing people don’t want me to notice. I grew up in the seventies and early eighties, during which time I was told it was liberals who were “open minded.” Conservatives were just doltish old people who acted in movies, got elected President through nefarious means and then fell asleep in cabinet meetings. Liberals are smarter because they’re more humble and more curious…

Funny how I so seldom actually see any of this. Liberals telling other liberals what is going on, is purely an exercise in the-blind-leading-the-blind. There’s so little by way of actual exchange of knowledge, it’s so much more just dispensing of instructions.

Here’s what Palin actually said:

Welcome to all Republican Freshmen and congratulations!

Congratulations to all of you for your contribution to this historic election, and for the contributions I am certain you will make to our country in the next two years. Your victory was hard fought, and the success belongs entirely to you and the staff and volunteers who spent countless hours working for this chance to put government back on the side of the people. Now you will come to Washington to serve your nation and leave your mark on history by reining in government spending, preserving our freedoms at home, and restoring America’s leadership abroad. Some of you have asked for my thoughts on how best to proceed in the weeks and months ahead and how best to advance an agenda that can move our country forward. I have a simple answer: stick to the principles that propelled your campaigns. When you take your oath to support and defend our Constitution and to faithfully discharge the duties of your office, remember that present and future generations of “We the People” are counting on you to stand by that oath. Never forget the people who sent you to Washington. Never forget the trust they placed in you to do the right thing.

The task before you is daunting because so much damage has been done in the last two years, but I believe you have the chance to achieve great things.

Republicans campaigned on a promise to rein in out-of-control government spending and to repeal and replace the massive, burdensome, and unwanted health care law President Obama and the Democrat Congress passed earlier this year in defiance of the will of the majority of the American people. These are promises that you must keep. Obamacare is a job-killer, a regulatory nightmare, and an enormous unfunded mandate. The American people don’t want it and we can’t afford it. We ask, with all due respect, that you remember your job will be to work to replace this legislation with real reform that relies on free market principles and patient-centered policies. The first step is, of course, to defund Obamacare.

You’ve also got to be deadly serious about cutting the deficit. Despite what some would like us to believe, tax cuts didn’t get us into the mess we’re in. Government spending did. Tough decisions need to be made about reducing government spending. The longer we put them off, the worse it will get. We need to start by cutting non-essential spending. That includes stopping earmarks (because abuse of the earmark process created the “gateway-drug” that allowed backroom deals and bloated budgets), canceling all further spending on the failed Stimulus program, and rolling back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels. You can do more, but this would be a good start.

In order to avert a fiscal disaster, we will also need to check the growth of spending on our entitlement programs. That will be a huge challenge, but it must be confronted head on. We must do it in a humane way that honors the government’s current commitments to our fellow Americans while also keeping faith with future generations. We cannot rob from our children and grandchildren’s tomorrow to pay for our unchecked spending today. Beyond that, we need to reform the way Congress conducts business in order to make it procedurally easier to cut spending than to increase it. We need to encourage zero-based budgeting practices in D.C. like the kind fiscally conservative mayors and governors utilize to balance their budgets and reduce unnecessary spending.

There in the insulated and isolated Beltway you will be far removed from the economic pain felt by so many Americans who are out of work. Please remember that if we want real job growth, we must create a stable investment climate by ending the tidal wave of overly burdensome regulations coming out of Washington. Businesses need certainty – and freedom that incentivizes competition – to grow and expand our workforce.

The last thing our small businesses need is tax hikes. It falls to the current Democrat-controlled Congress to decide on the future of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. If it does not permanently renew all of them, you should move quickly to do so in the new Congress. It would remove from households and businesses the threat of a possible $3.8 trillion tax hike hitting all Americans at the worst possible moment, with our economy struggling to recover from a deep recession! You must continue to remind Democrats that the people they are dismissing as “rich” are the small business owners who create up to 70% of all jobs in this country!

Another issue of vital importance is border security. Americans expect our leadership in Washington to act now to secure our borders. Don’t fall for the claims of those who suggest that we can’t secure our borders until we simultaneously deal with the illegal immigrants already here. Let’s deal with securing the border first. That alone is a huge challenge that has been ignored for far too long.

On foreign policy and national security, I urge you to stick to our principles: strong defense, free trade, nurturing allies, and steadfast opposition to America’s enemies. We are the most powerful country on earth and the world is better off because of it. Our president does not seem to understand this. If we withdraw from the world, the world will become a much more dangerous place. You must push President Obama to finish the job right in Iraq and get the job done in Afghanistan, otherwise we who are war-weary will forever question why America’s finest are sent overseas to make the ultimate sacrifice with no clear commitment to victory from those who send them. You should be prepared to stand with the President against Iran’s nuclear aspirations using whatever means necessary to ensure the mullahs in Tehran do not get their hands on nuclear weapons. And you can stand with the Iranian people who oppose the tyrannical rule of the clerics and concretely support their efforts to win their freedom – even if the President does not.

You need to say no to cutting the necessities in our defense budget when we are engaged in two wars and face so many threats – from Islamic extremists to a nuclear Iran to a rising China. As Ronald Reagan said, “We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.” You will also have the opportunity to push job-creating free trade agreements with allies like Colombia and South Korea. You can stand with allies like Israel, not criticize them. You can let the President know what you believe – Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, not a settlement. And for those of you joining the United States Senate, don’t listen to desperate politically-motivated arguments about the need for hasty consideration of the “New START” treaty. Insist on your right to patient and careful deliberation of New START to address very real concerns about verification, missile defense, and modernization of our nuclear infrastructure. No New START in the lame duck!

You can stand against misguided proposals to try dangerous, evil terrorists in the US; precipitously close the Guantanamo prison; and a return to the failed policies of the past in treating the war on terror as a law enforcement problem. Finally, you have a platform to express the support of the American people for all those around the world seeking their freedom that God has bestowed within all mankind’s being – from Burma and Egypt to Russia and Venezuela – because the spread of liberty increases our own security. You, freshmen lawmakers, can and will be powerful voices in support of foreign policies that protect our interests and promote our values! Thank you for being willing to fight for our values and our freedom!

In all this, you should extend a hand to President Obama and Democrats in Congress. After this election, they may finally be prepared to work with Republicans on some of these issues for the good of the country. And if not, we will all be looking forward to 2012.

Remember that some in the media will love you when you stray from the time-tested truths that built America into the most exceptional nation on earth. When the Left in the media pat you on the back, quickly reassess where you are and readjust, for the liberals’ praise is a warning bell you must heed. Trust me on that.

I and most Americans are so excited for you. Working together, we have every right to be optimistic about our future. We can be hopeful because real hope lies in the ingenuity, generosity, and boundless courage of the everyday Americans who make our country exceptional. These are the men and women who sent you to Washington. May your work and leadership honor their faith in you.

With sincere congratulations and a big Alaskan heart,

Sarah Palin

As a conservative, you would have to be nuts to think such a manifesto is not necessary. It is not by any means some kind of order that has been put together by someone elected to office with authority in it; it is an offering, to be accepted or rejected according to future events. Just like our nation’s original Declaration of Independence. It is a statement of principles. The 104th Congress was brought in on the strength of just such a resolution. The goodwill that was made available from that moment, was all but squandered away by the sessions of the 110th Congress, by which time the legislative branch was working according to make-it-up-as-you-go-along. See, it’s that conservative mind-closing process to which I was referring earlier. Two methods are tried, one consistently succeeds and the other consistently fails. After awhile the sensible mind becomes closed.

But only within its own domain. In submitting such a resolution, Palin recognizes, as do all mature adults, that others may have different ideas. Even if everyone agrees on the primary subject matter, it is still necessary to have a debate proving that to be the case, and you cannot debate things that have not in some way been scribbled down. That’s why I did pretty much the same thing way back when Palin’s old running mate was selected (to my chagrin) as the Republican party’s nominee.

But the point is, in summarizing what has happened, the mature, capable mind will not attempt to obscure the details from those whom he seeks to persuade to his point of view. The mature mind does not seek to clone itself. It is not afraid of the different perspective brought by others, from their disparate life-experiences. It is does not fear individuality.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

GBIL (Girlfriend’s Brother-in-Law) sent it via e-mail.

Update: He also sent this one…

Thing I Know #183. When an education has given you the ability to dismiss ideas more quickly, it’s not really an education.

I was making a reference to that particular TIK in a comment I left at the home place of one of our occasional comment-posters, who tends to lean leftward. He’s none too fond of the leggy former Governor of Alaska, which suits us just fine…but where we get into a scrap, is where he joins a large body of thought that starts from this dislike and allows it to discolor reality as they are in the process of perceiving it.

Sarah Palin, cocooned as she is in the conservative media echo chamber which never, ever calls her out on her patent falsehoods, not only seems incapable of admitting fallibility, but also thinks that compounding lies with even more egregious and disingenuous ones is no problem as long as it placates her fawning admirers who can see no wrong in anything she does and who see her as combatting that evil, “lamestream” media for daring to point out her lies. There is just no way that a serial liar like she is should have any business even being close to the Presidency.

The scrap is unavoidable because the discoloration of reality is absolutely, positively consistent. Every single time the Wasilla Wonder can possibly be wrong about something, she must be. And anybody who defends her in any position at all, must be the one who is incapable of perceiving reality accurately. If Sarah Palin is caught eating her dinner with her salad fork, it must be an indicator of something deep, dark, unscrupulous and haywire in her very soul, and we know this is the case because they know what they know.

Under no circumstance can there possibly be any doubt. Ever. About anything Palin-related.

Aside from that, all the ingredients in the now all-too-familiar Palin-argument-stew are present and accounted-for. This is one of the special concoctions, in which Palin herself has felt inclined to revisit something, tempted by the opportunity to lay an awesome smackdown upon a smarmy WSJ Palinphobe.

The original disagreement, forgotten now to all, has to do with Quantitative Easing, a Keynesian move that enjoys common initials with the current monarch of Great Britain: QE2. Does it work? Well, as is the case with a movie title, the “2” at the end does not portend success beyond the “1.” And since it’s a government effort, you know the “2” is necessary because the “1” failed.

Palin made a comment about food costs gong up, and Sudeep Reddy nailed her on it because they have not been. So we have a situation here: If food costs have been going up, Palin is right and Reddy is wrong; if they have not been, Reddy is right and Palin is wrong. Well, not only have food prices being going up but the Wall Street Journal said so. So Reddy is not only wrong, but gloriously wrong. He’s been exposed as not even bothering to read his own paper.

This entire thing, to me, is ludicrous. The Palin bashers enter the argument with this preconceived notion that, as I said, if Palin can be wrong then she must be. A disagreement starts and then both sides are expected to play along with this fairy tale fantasy that the Palin bashers first soaked up all the relevant information, and then came to a dispassionate, reasoned conclusion about what is happening…and then, oh dear, discovered Sarah Palin is in error. Why do we play this game? Seriously, why even bother. We just got done with that Party Like It’s 1773 thing where the Palin haters made absolute fools out of themselves, by flying on the seat of their pants and letting their passions take them for a ride. Next time they make the same noises, they want us to pretend it didn’t happen and we somehow accommodate them.

So now we are to pretend food costs have not been going up.

To diminish the reputation of some housewife out in Alaska, who just happens to have once held an elective office? A housewife? We’re to gang up on a housewife with our superior knowledge and wisdom about whether food costs have been going up? Gee, uh…arguing with a housewife about how much food has been costing…who we going to argue with next, I wonder. With a fisherman about what fish do? Wouldn’t the cool-headed dispassionate observer who knows how to think…like…fly up there and go on a shopping trip first, if he really wants to be “right” about something?

Oh yeah, it’s Sarah Palin who is the housewife. That changes everything. Dumb ol’ broad must not know what she’s talking about.

Anyway…that’s a summary of the whole situation. I’ve already written more about it than I wanted to, and I said at the time I don’t really care about the other details like QE2, or whether Jimmy Carter’s second presidency is screwing up the economy as badly as his first one. I care about PDS. These people seem so certain that they’re perceiving reality as it actually exists. But when they give you a link to show you how wrong Palin is, and you actually chase it down to read what is said on the other side…you find it boils down to something like that. They form their speeches for the benefit of people who, clearly, are expected to just believe what they are told.

So here’s the “D’Jever notice??” moment. I formed a comment for HuckUpChuck’s place, and since he’s still on Blogger it wouldn’t accept more than 4,096 characters. A “Blogger Character” is something like a “Microsoft Minute”; I had my reply nicely polished down to 3,900+something and it was still complaining about length, just like all the humans who read my stuff.

I’m not going to abuse Huck for being on Blogger, I know lots of people who are on it. I was on it. It’s a little tough to move off.

I like everything about Blogger, apart from the experience of using it.

But here is what did not make the cut. It’s something I have been noticing for a long time, since before PDS existed, back in the BDS days.

And it’s got to go somewhere:

Go back and look at my article again. Look at it on a BIG monitor…maybe print it out, tape it to a wall, and look at it from across the room. There are only minimal remarks from me, before I start quoting people. Two mini-paragraphs of two lines each, then an indent. AFTER the quote, I give my opinion about it, then I go into the next quote, give my opinion AFTER the quote, and on and on. By the time I come to the situation that is the focus of this current disagreement, I’ve quoted everybody who’s said anything that matters…then I give my opinion on the whole thing.

Palin’s FaceBook commments, I see, are structured the same way (although she quotes inline).

Palin-bashers…work the opposite way. We get to the quotes in the bottom of his article, after we plow through two…three…four…five or more paragraphs telling us what we’re supposed to think about it. It is an exact reversal. Your own post is a single article containing your thoughts, with a link we have to go follow to find out who said what. And the link is to Chittum [the upside-down article with the quotes in the second half].

So even the writing style represents the thinking style. It just has to do, I think, with how the universe is seen, felt, heard, sensed, perceived. We form an inference about something, and in that space in our heads, a story forms alongside the inference. Recorded in that brain tissue somewhere is a story alongside every little thing you know…and as time dulls the outline of the memory, the story lasts just as long as the thing learned.

With some of us, the story is the thing, and it is told before all of the facts are in. That’s what a cognitive bias is. It is harmful because it tends to filter out any information that doesn’t fit the narrative.

Example: Ask a Palin hater what’s the last thing Palin did right? “Quit as Alaska’s Governor because she sucks so much” doesn’t count; what complimentary things do they have to say about what she’s thought, said, done? Ever? If there isn’t anything, anything at all, that could be the symptom of a deeper problem.

And the contrast you see in the form and shape of these essays that hit the web, as I said, remains more or less consistent. It isn’t a “Love Palin/Hate Palin” contrast, because it predates her presence in our popular culture.

But you do see it in the Chittum piece. You see it in a lot of DailyKOS treatises. Lots of paragraphs about what you’re supposed to conclude…and okay now that we’ve got that spelled out, let’s go look at some quotes. It’s upside-down thinking.

And yes, I realize this particular item more-or-less follows that other, upside-down, form and shape. <grin> Doesn’t count. I’m providing further comment on something I’ve already described elsewhere.

Bottom line, some of us base our conclusions on observed or demonstrated fact, others only pretend to. Perhaps when Ralph Waldo Emerson said that thing about consistency and simple minds, this is what he was talking about.

Discovery:

Painful sunburns are usually associated with people, but many whales are now acutely sunburned, with cases escalating in recent years, according to new research.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to demonstrate that sun damage to whale skin is on the rise and is likely tied to increasing levels of ultraviolet radiation resulting from the thinning ozone layer.

“The thing is, whales do not have hair, fur or feathers that could offer some protection, and they are forced to surface in order to breathe,” co-author Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse told Discovery News.

“Other animals have behavioral adaptations — hiding in the shade, for example — but whales cannot afford to do so,” added Acevedo-Whitehouse, a postdoctoral fellow at the Zoological Society of London.

So what are you standing there for? Do something! Like, uh, call the Justice League…

The Morning Call, Pennsylvania:

The damage didn’t seem bad at first, but two miles after a Wilkes-Barre motorist hit a raccoon on Interstate 80 in Tobyhanna Township, the car’s coolant was gone.

Lamont Hubbard, 39, was eastbound on I-80 at 11 p.m. Sunday when he ran into the raccoon as it crossed the highway. Damage to the car was minimal, state police at Fern Ridge said, but the radiator was punctured and leaked steadily as Hubbard drove on.

In 2 minutes, he was forced to pull over and call for help, police said. No human was injured.

Cafe Hayek.

Bill Gates’s monetary wealth, for example, is approximately 70,000 times greater than my own, but I’m certain that he doesn’t daily ingest 70,000 times more calories than I ingest in a day. I’m also certain that the food Bill Gates eats isn’t 70,000 times tastier than the food I eat; that his many homes are not 70,000 times larger than my one home; that his children are not educated 70,000 times better than is my child; that he cannot travel to Europe or to Asia 70,000 times faster or more safely than I can; that he doesn’t have 70,000 times more annual leisure than I have; and that he will not live 70,000 times longer than I will live.

I’m even sure that he’s not 70,000 times happier than I am.

So, really, it’s incorrect to conclude that Bill Gates’s real wealth is 70,000 times larger than my real wealth. The difference isn’t remotely close to being that large.

Hmmm. What would the logical thinker conclude if it could somehow be established that Mr. Gates was 70,000 times happier than the average fellow?

That we need to find a way to re-distribute Bill Gates’ happiness? Or that it’s on other people to think to themselves “I wonder what Bill Gates did to become that happy, and what it would take for me to do the same thing…”

But it’s a good point about “wealth.” We argue about how much people have and we don’t put that much thought into what that word really means.

Hat tip to one of my friends and former colleagues on the Hello-Kitty-of-Blogging.

What in the blue fuck is going on here…

Sad.

According to POLITICO, the staff members of Democrats who got slaughtered are being visited by all kinds of support professionals (you know, resume advice folks, so that they can land on their feet).

But also this…

But one of the staffers was described as a “counselor” to help with the emotional aspect of the loss — and a section in the packet each staffer was given dealt with the stages of grief (for instance, Stage One being anger, and so on).

Said one staffer: “It was like it was about death.”

+++blink+++

But I thought these were the people who were going to face down our nation’s worst problems, the housing bubble, the unemployment rate, China, Pakistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda…

They need grief counseling when their butts get paddled in an election?? I thought they lost the election because the electorate was stupid, what happened to that? Since when does dealing with stupid people cause such emotional turmoil? And if it does, then is there any hope at all?

Hat tip to Instapundit.

I care about Palin-bashers. They’re a threat, although not to her. They create bubbles of fantasy, and then start living in them, every time they open their mouths. Which is often.

Some background, although by now you probably don’t need it. The former Governor of Alaska criticized the latest round of pump-priming plans from the federal government.

All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.

This is a controversial theory and we’re split squarely down the middle on it. The ivy-league snobs, movers-and-shakers who make money and power off of pump priming schemes, and smarmy Palin-bashers are on one side; Sarah Palin, the ghost of Milton Friedman, humanoids who eat food and pay for it, anyone with a decent long-term memory, reality, history, logic and common sense are on the other. This abstract concept we keep referring to as an “economy” is a means by which some of us generate wealth that did not exist before. It is also a communications network. Tampering with supply of commodities, like money, interferes with the communication. So does tampering with demand. It works best, over the long term, when it is left alone. That’s because over the long term, it services our needs not by delivering goods and services but by facilitating the communication about the supply of and demand for those goods and services.

Artificial interference creates bubbles. It inflates prices for a term, and when the term is up the bubbles collapse so that people on both sides of the transaction enjoy an ample opportunity to get the shaft. This has been proven out, time after time, commodity after commodity. Oil and oil products. Rental property. Agricultural goods. Housing. Health care services. Just name it, when we start screwing with it people get screwed.

My point is, though, that: Palin said something so the Palin-bashers see an opportunity to renew their sense of identity…which means to bash. Oh fine, she represents exactly nobody, so go ahead and bash her — she obviously doesn’t care so why should I.

The problem is the thinking process. Palin’s argument has something to do with rising food prices. And so the rejoinder has to have something to do with food prices not going up. Hello fantasy bubble, here we come.

Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact. The consumer price index’s measure of food and beverages for the first nine months of this year showed average annual inflation of less than 0.6%, the slowest pace on record. Even if you pick a single snapshot — say, September’s year-over-year increase in prices — that was just 1.4%, far better than the 6% annual increase for food prices recorded in September 2008.

Hey, all you food shoppers. Prices haven’t been going up. A Palin-basher found some statistics that say they haven’t. Aren’t you glad to hear that?

Don’t worry, the lady needs no help defending herself.

Ever since 2008, people seem inordinately interested in my reading habits. Among various newspapers, magazines, and local Alaskan papers, I read the Wall Street Journal.

So, imagine my dismay when I read an article by Sudeep Reddy in today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the fact that I mentioned inflation in my comments about QE2 in a speech this morning before a trade-association. Here’s what I said: “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.”

Mr. Reddy takes aim at this. He writes: “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact.” Really? That’s odd, because just last Thursday, November 4, I read an article in Mr. Reddy’s own Wall Street Journal titled “Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies.”

The article noted that “an inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants…Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months.”

Now I realize I’m just a former governor and current housewife from Alaska, but even humble folks like me can read the newspaper. I’m surprised a prestigious reporter for the Wall Street Journal doesn’t.

Zing! That, like they say, is gonna leave a mark.

But that isn’t the end of it. There never is an end to it as far as the loyal Palin-basher is concerned. Sudeep Reddy tweeted, proving he was right and Palin was wrong, by…finding someone who agreed with him. So no, food prices have not been going up after all.

It’s changed from who-ya-gonna-believe, Sudeep-Reddy-or-your-lyin’-eyes…to…who-ya-believe-Sudeep-Reddy-and-Ryan-Chittum-or-your-lyin’-eyes.

Unbelievable.

I was going to ignore the whole thing. Everyone else is already writing about it after all, and I think deep down, most people understand that there is a deep and troubling psychosis involved with the widespread, popular Palin-bashing. I’ve long maintained that Palin-bashing is older than Palin herself, that she is a symptom and not a cause. That when she is excoriated and snarked-at and sniped-at the way she is, people are really confessing their own weaknesses.

When they devolve into saying “Palin is wrong because prices are not going up” — there really isn’t anything else that needs to be said, is there?

But I was intrigued by this paragraph from the last link up there, the Reddy-tweet-story:

The food inflation article that Palin cites acknowledges there has been no inflation yet. It’s just a risk, given soaring commodity prices.

So Palin is saying prices have already been going up over the last year, the tweet-article says no, it’s just a risk that this will happen, it hasn’t happened yet.

They really are trying to tell you what your food shopping experience is. Just amazing.

Perhaps that is why…I say “perhaps” because I’m really not sure…I decided to click open the link and read it for my self. The Wasilla dimbulb can read it, and she isn’t even supposed to be able to read, right? Seems like the least I could do.

And lo…

An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants, threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.

Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months. [emphasis mine]

Not much point reading any further past that. But we should anyway. Right above the body of the article is a notation that there are corrections below. Go to the correction, and we find…

BJ’s Restaurants has been steadily raising prices this year so that by early next year they will be 2.5% higher. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that BJ’s planned to increase prices early next year by about 2.5%.

In the body of the article…

Stater Bros. has seen the prices it pays for cereal rise 5% in recent months. The chain has passed about half the increase on to consumers while making up for the rest by trimming other expenses, such as what it spends on cell phones and delivery truck tires.
:
Domino’s Pizza Inc. is letting consumers decide whether they’re willing to pay more. The company is offering two medium, two-topping pizzas for $5.99 each but has recently offered the option of converting one of them to a premium pizza, with more toppings, for an extra $2—a price increase, in effect.
:
Food prices are rising faster than overall inflation. The consumer price index for all items minus food and energy rose 0.8% over the year to September, the lowest 12-month increase since March 1961, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. The food index rose 1.4%, however. The U.S. Agricultural Department is predicting overall food inflation of about 2% to 3% next year.

To be fair to Messrs. Reddy and Chittum, the emphasis of the article is on what food prices are about to do; so their craven and obvious hair-splitting is not entirely without merit. But the evidence it brings is best characterized as a hodgepodge, a jumbled salad mix of past & future price hikes.

Which means Palin’s counter-point was valid.

Which means Palin’s original point was valid.

Which means it was a waste of time and energy to “correct” her. It was unnecessary, pointless, had nothing to do with informing anybody about anything. Worst of all, it was inaccurate, ignorant and just plain dumb.

Palin bashers may be competent in their own everyday lives, but only until that name pops up. Then they can’t think straight anymore. No, I don’t think they should be trusted with figuring out who our nation’s president should be.

These people shouldn’t be allowed to even pick out their own shoes. Their hatred warps their sense of reality. Palin says food prices are going up, and suddenly they imagine food prices have been holding steady when they haven’t. Palin says it’s a sunny day outside and they start packing umbrellas just because…or Palin says it’s raining, and they leave the umbrella at home. If somebody worshipped Palin, to the point they did exactly the same thing in reverse — Palin says such-and-such a thing is so, so it must be, and no research is necessary on the matter — I’d say those people’s opinions should be taken with a large grain of salt, too.

Palin-bashers are sick. In a way. It is a national epidemic. Something should be done to get them the help that they need.

Just leave my tax dollars out of it, if you please. I need all the nickels I can get hold of to buy my food, even if Reddy says that is not the case.

Blogger friend Professor Mondo links brilliantly, yet again.

Bruno Behrend at Chicago Boyz suggests the questions that should be used to frame the political debate for the next couple of years:

“Can you govern yourself, or do you need a Federal Czar to govern your life for you?”

and

“Can you find a doctor, a light-bulb, or control the flow of your toilet, or should one of our Federal Czars take that decision out of your hands?”

He goes on to suggest that framing the debate in these terms is a necessary step toward a rollback of statism. It’s an interesting strategy.

Behrend’s point is that the right people will win such a debate, by a 75-25 margin.

I, on the other hand, sought to make a different point when I observed this disparity some five years ago. People, according to my ruminations on the evidence that comes to my eyes and ears, are dedicated to whatever ways and means they have nailed down for living life. You see people placed in situations in which it’s ridiculous to seek help from others, and they do it anyway. Other people are put in situations in which it is risible and silly to depend on oneself, and they (we) do that anyway.

Our voting has come down to a selection between two absolutes, two “everywhere, always, whether you like it or not”‘s.

Which half of humanity is to be accommodated by government, the Architects or the Medicators.

Behrend might very well have a point, that the outcome of the decision will be altered significantly if it is simply framed as what it really is. I have long thought so, and would like to give it a try. That’s what it is all about anyway. We might as well admit it.

Why should the Architects win? Because that’s the American dream. If you want to be a Medicator with a leviathan of a government servicing all your needs womb-to-tomb and telling you what those needs are, there are hundreds of other places all over the world where you can go.

There is only one shining beacon on this globe built to accommodate the Architects. And the Medicators desire to snuff it out, like a candle. That is their nature. When you’re dependent, you don’t want anyone else to be independent. Your business becomes everybody else’s business, so I suppose it’s only natural you want everybody else’s business to become yours.

Sure, let’s vote on that. But let’s do it honestly.

Republicans will make a move to repeal ObamaCare, and Obama is going to make some wonderful, awesome speeches about how this is not the right way to go, that we have to keep the law in place because it’s going to make life easier for us any week now. You know, I don’t think I’ve felt as sorry for any White House speechwriter as the guy who’s going to put these together. The New York Times will love whatever it is, but…just wow. How would you even get started?

We need to be thinking and talking about extending the Bush tax cuts. The party-of-more-and-bigger-taxes is in charge of the White House and the Senate, but this one might actually go through if it’s timed right. Only a month and a half left to the year, you know.

People who say “got to raise taxes, the money won’t come from anywhere else” — I get that. Disagree with it, it strikes me as living life on a merry-go-round, but at least I understand. What I do not understand is people who are enthusiastic about this. What is this widespread, feverish, rock-star-like appeal of higher taxes?

It must be easier to be an atheist when you’re a vegetarian. Imagine how silly it would be, if we were surrounded by Tribbles who were made of marshmallow and chocolate with a yummy caramel center, to say “they’re just like that because they evolved that way.” To a meat-eater gnawing on chicken wings on a rainy Sunday morning, this is what atheists sound like. Cook the animal’s flesh over flame and it turns into a delicious snack, you’re saying that was not part of a design? It certainly isn’t survival-of-the-fittest to have yummy flesh on your bones that tastes good with a dry rub.

We need a “Barney Frank” law. I’ve been listening to the President drone on for years about “The Folks Who Caused This Mess in the First Place” — well, there he sits. And Massachussetts might like him just fine, but it seems to me the nation as a whole has an interest in preventing more screw-ups like Fannie & Freddie.

I also don’t get people who are upset at the Tea Party folks, saying even more Republicans would have been elected on Tuesday if the movement had less influence. So you like the name “Republican” but object to fiscal discipline, and the idea of the next generations being able to earn and keep money? What exactly is it you want to see happen? Is it just that eighteenth letter that enthralls and enthuses you?

If you voted for Barack Obama two years ago I really don’t know how you can claim to know who’s “qualified.” How could you possibly think you’ve got what it takes to see this in people? You’re probably an excellent reverse-divining-rod for who’s “qualified.”

Speaking of which, two years after we elected a President mostly because Katie Couric successfully smeared someone from the other side, it’s time to say it: Katie Couric stinks on ice at picking our presidents. She’s even worse at that than she is at her real job.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel and Right Wing News.

Bagdad Bob Gibbs:

The White House does not think President Obama will have to veto legislation repealing his signature legislative accomplishments.

Though Republicans are rattling their sabers with threats to repeal the new healthcare and financial regulatory laws, the White House feels safe with its buffer in the Democratic Senate.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday he does not think repeal legislation would make it out of both houses of Congress.

“I honestly don’t think it will come to that,” Gibbs said at his daily briefing on Thursday in response to a question about whether Obama would veto any attempts at repeal.

Republican leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Reps. John Boehner (Ohio) and Eric Cantor have said several times since Tuesday’s elections that they still plan to repeal the healthcare and financial reform laws.

Obama said Wednesday in a postmortem press conference on the midterms, which saw Democrats lose the House, that Americans do not want Congress to “re-litigate” the battles of the last two years.

Professor Reynolds has a comment:

That’s okay. Make ‘em vote for it again….

Exactly. There’s one guy in Washington who isn’t squeamish about being associated with ObamaCare by name, and that’s the guy who’s name is already on it.

People in the democrat party are not terribly fond of say those words the rest of us have to say all the time, before we can do anything that requires independent thought — something as simple as driving a car to a destination through unfamiliar backroads: “I think if I take this option, it will get me closer to where I want to go.” They very rarely seem to have thoughts like this.

Instead, it’s the legislation worked. It created or saved this-many-millions of jobs, even though there was a net job loss. If we did not pass fill-in-the-blank, the bad thing that happened right afterward would actually have been even worse. We need to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.

And the bill is good, not because of the effect it will have on things, but because it is such a sure thing for passage. You cannot block it. Or in this case, now that we’ve passed it you’ll never repeal it.

I don’t think they’re all that way; I think the ones from whom we hear over and over again, are the most powerful ones, the ones with the greatest authority within their circle. And those are the ones most entrenched in their way of thinking.

This way of thinking is liberated from cause-and-effect. I mean, by this, every plan they have is atomically simple — the plan itself defines the goal. In other words, when they propose a more progressive tax structure to fix the economy, so that 50% of us end up owing nothing, their goal is not to fix the economy. Their goal is to make the tax structure more progressive so that 50% of us end up owing nothing. I think all their plans are like this, so they never have to think about if-this-then-that.

And I mean EVER. “If I sleep with this intern my wife will leave me”; they don’t have to think that either, since if they’re caught, they’ll just have to appear on camera and talk about how nobody’s perfect, with the good little wifey standing by her man. No consequences, not for anybody, anywhere, never ever ever. Being conservative is the only thing that ever meets with an undesirable consequence; that’s the world in which they live, I think. All the evidence I’ve watched seems to lead back to this.

And so, when we discuss whether their plans should be defeated, or repealed, the discussion seems to continually go back to the eventual outcome — you shouldn’t try, because it’s an exercise in futility. What a sucky-ass defense; it might even work if there was a cost involved in trying to repeal ObamaCare. But imagine living your life this way. If you perceive the outcome is likely to go a certain way, you shouldn’t even get started on any effort to alter it because that would be Against The Rules.

I’m not sure the average progressive can define for me what the word “progressive” is really supposed to mean, but I’ve got a feeling it’s supposed to be the exact opposite of that kind of thinking.

Those of you reading about Governor-elect Brown and returning-Senator Boxer might be observing, correctly, that if you’re a democrat looking for a place to survive, this is your shelter. You may not be aware of the passage of Proposition 25, which is just California’s icing on the cake: Weary of the absurd summertime ritual of our legislature failing to pass a budget, voters have lowered the threshold from two-thirds to a simple majority.

The conclusion is inescapable: California, like no other state in the union, is ripe for a Tax Me More fund. Obviously, the prevailing sensibility here is that individuals don’t own money, it’s the government that owns money and we need to elect people who possess experience and skill in the fine art of taking it away from us. Californians who feel this way need a place to send their money.

We stink on ice as a local business climate. We absolutely, positively suck. We are the second-worst in the union, down one slot from being third-worst last year. We do everything we possibly can to keep businesses from moving in here, and to the businesses that are already here we give the Ferris Bueller treatment: Hello? What are you still doing here? Movie’s over. Get out! Leave!

But things are not going to stay the same. We’ve got Governor Brown coming in.

Prop 24, which would have repealed corporate tax breaks, did go down in defeat…

Proposition 24, also known as the “Tax Fairness Act”, was defeated Tuesday as voters decided to allow corporate tax break legislature to stay in place.

The legislature, passed in 2009, permits businesses to choose whether they would like their income tax based on sales, payroll or property in addition to tax credit sharing amongst their affiliated businesses.

If it had passed, Prop 24 would have created approximately $1.3 million in state revenue by 2012-2013. But opponents say that California’s budget woes should and will not be fixed by increasing taxes on businesses.

That’s a ray of hope.

But all that says is, as we careen wildly toward the brink with the throttle wide open, there is a perceptible gap between the gas pedal and the floorboard. We’re not doing everything we possibly can to make it impossible to make a dollar…just almost everything.

A Tax Me More fund would offer an outlet for all this guilt Californians apparently feel about having too much money (which, just to make sure the record is absolutely clear on this point, I’m not nearly decent of enough person to share in this — send me as much lucre as you want). And, it’s not enough for Californians to not have any money, apparently they’re all torn up with guilt about not having to look around long enough for a job, it’s too easy to find one.

Set up the special account, set up the Post Office box, and spread the word far and wide. Give Californians a way to get rid of that money burning holes in their wallets. There’s guilt that has to be relieved here, and it’s just inhuman and unproductive to allow fellow human beings to keep on stewing in it.

Something must be done.

A whole lot of things led to the results we saw last night. I’d offer there has been a palpable feeling in the air that we are voting on economic liberty; that there is economic suffering. A feeling that, perhaps, prosperity has left us because we have voted it away.

There is hope that maybe we can have jobs and savings again, if we vote the other way and arrive at the polls ready to accept wealth and the responsibility that arrives with us — if we say “yes, we are good enough to have money, we don’t have to give it all away to the Government.”

But a lot of idiotic asinine quotes got us to last night. John Hawkins has rounded up a list of seven quotes that, in likelihood, made a deep impression on America that she put the wrong people in charge last go-’round. These deserve to be remembered at least until 2012, when we vote on Obama’s successor and figure out what to do as the next class of Senators come up for re-election.

“As she prepares to step down as President Obama’s chief economist, Christina Romer said Friday that she wishes she could redo one of her first official acts for the president: last January’s forecast that a big shot of federal spending would save millions of jobs and keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent.”

“But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.”

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“What good is reading the (health care) bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about (Scott Brown’s win), but if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”

It comes down to, there are two ways to cast a vote: As a baby and as a man. The baby way is what we do in high school. We figure out who is cool and who is a dork, and we live out our lives making sure the dorks never, ever ever ever find acceptance anywhere and the cool kids never, ever ever find any rejection. Certain people are always supposed to be told “no” and certain other people are always supposed to be told “yes”; when the class elections come up, that’s just an opportunity to keep exercising those same rules.

A man — grown-up — figures out what is broken and fixes it. You can’t directly do all that with an election, so what you need to do is figure out who’s recognized what’s broken, formed a vision around fixing it, and a plan around the vision, such that their plan most closely resembles the plan you’d come up with.

Necessity is the mother of invention. We tend to start voting like grown-ups when we are backed into a corner and have no other alternative. It is rather typical to vote like a little baby for as long as you can afford to do so.

We just can’t afford to keep “cool” people like this in positions of authority anymore. It’s not working for us because it’s too expensive. And they end up being liars. They talk a good game about building a country that works for everybody, and the next thing you know you’ve got statements out of them like Obama’s priceless “punish your enemies” line. Meanwhile, their “problem-solving” ends up being little more than opening the floodgates between the public treasury and whoever their best buddies are.

If you vote like a baby, that’s quite alright because they’re just so awesome, man. If you vote like a man, you realize this isn’t going to solve the problems that ail us…

Related: Where Do democrats Go From Here?

First, we have more than a communications problem — the public heard us but disagreed with our approach. Democrats need not reassess our goals for America, but we need to seriously rethink how to reach them.

Second, don’t blame the voters. They aren’t stupid or addled by fear. They are skeptical about government efficacy, worried about the deficit and angry that Democrats placed other priorities above their main concern: economic growth.

Evan Bayh makes a lot of sense. These ideas will not be implemented…

The benefits involved in voting like a baby are felt mostly by the candidate who is courting votes from voters who vote like babies. I can tell, just from watching their behavior, it must be as addictive as crack. Sens. Boxer and Reid had the entire day to become deathly worried over their jobs, and legitimately so, and had all night to make speeches about it. What did they say? Did either one of them utter a peep about what they’d do, if re-elected, to strengthen the economy? Nope. Just pablum calculated to shore up support, to boost the moral of the volunteers. We will win. We will prevail. They will lose. Us. Them. We. They.

In both cases, it really did turn out to be the case that they “won”; but what does this say about your career when it looks like the time has come to bottom-line what it’s all been about, and that’s all you can say? That you’re awesome and you’re gonna win again?

And not a single word about service to the republic?

Well, good. They won. But as a minority party in the House; and in the Senate, probably in their last two years as a majority. All of the “cool kid” factor is gone, spent, every single drop of it. Coast to coast, every single democrat incumbent who managed to hang on to his seat, did so thanks to seniority. And Sarah Palin’s question “How’s that hopey changey stuff workin’ out for ya?” now has an answer: It’s the fucking kiss of death in 2010. Two years old, and about as fashionable as a black-and-white television set with a nine inch screen. Covered with vomit. And anthrax powder.

Thing I Know #372. Whoever sacrifices all other things for the sake of popularity, will ultimately lose that as well.

I called this one too early. However, my smart-money says I’ll not need to re-write anything and Boxer will win a fourth term. That’s a bet I’d be pleased to lose, even if I had committed some real money to it.

A certain Palin-hater is over on the Hello-Kitty-of-Bloggin’ that is FaceBook…spoiling for a fight about Palin. I’m sticking to where things go from here, how much we’re likely to hear from her from here on — it is a logical impossibility that we’re done hearing about her, we clearly are not. My adversary just wants to stick to his personal dislike of her, which he would like to explain over and over again.

I’m more interested in what’s going to happen in the months and years ahead. President Obama, that lover of car-metaphors, is zipping on down a road that is veering sharply rightward whether He wants it to or not. His choices are to make an absolute failure out of His Presidency, or steer rightward to keep the car on the road. I view this as a guarantee that His Presidency is an absolute failure, because He isn’t capable of…what, what’s that favorite word of His…change. No can do. That’s for lesser mortals.

So Obama will deliver some speech saying how stupid we are and how we need to get with it. We’ll get sicker of Him, and by 2012 Jar Jar Binks could challenge Him for the presidency and win handily.

The democrat party could name another candidate just for the sake of hanging on to the White House. I’m having some trouble envisioning this. Johnson in ’68 is something of a precedent — but that was LBJ’s idea. Obama isn’t capable of doing this either.

So Obama will be challenged, and He will lose. There isn’t time for the Tea Party to form, recruit, organize, and offer a candidate. Libertarians don’t have the flexibility to ever become relevant. It all comes down to, a Republican is going to be sworn in on January 20, 2013. There really isn’t any avoiding it.

It won’t be Sarah Palin…if she doesn’t want to do it.

Or if she’s hit by a bus, or eaten by a bear.

Or if aliens abduct her.

Or if a majority of Americans become simultaneously transfixed and enamored with Newt, or Huck, or Mitt. The three erstwhile gentlemen who have almost completely sat this whole thing out, while Palin has been out stumping and speechifying and endorsing, and generally being a potent force.

She’s easy on the eyes, too. Plus, she owns this night like nobody else in the country does, except maybe Rick Santelli.

At lot can happen in twenty-six months. But at this point, an awful lot would have to happen to stop her from being the next president. None of these events are terribly likely, and a whole bunch of loudmouths yammering over and over again how much they’re irritated by her, aren’t going to make it happen.

Like it or not, it would be entirely reasonable to pick out the perfect bearskin rug for the Oval Office. If that makes you mad, you can get just as mad about it as you want to. She’s headed in that direction and there’s nothing in her way.

Phil’s word for the day, and it’s a damn good one.

Get out there.

Yes, it’s absurd, but we have to vote on the fundamental laws of physics that bind the universe. Whether Churchill’s fat-man can sit in a large bucket and lift himself by the handle. History has already shown us over the last two years how it really works, we’re just voting on whether or not we agree.

Life can be very, very unkind to people who disagree with the way the universe works. Nature has a way of teaching you the same lesson over and over again until you get it learned.

Update 1741: Should I turn this into a “live-blogging” session? I’ve seen other election-night live-blogging efforts before and I’m not sure I’m up to putting one of those through. Anyway, I’m thrilled to pieces with Alan Grayson going down in flames. What an asshole. Also, Rick Perry is going to remain the Governor of Texas. Wonderful, Texas will not be like us…not yet anyway. That makes me happy. Some of us Californians are like that. If we’re sailing over the brink, we don’t want to see everybody else following.

Update 1746: Todd Young takes Indiana, 54% to 40%. “This is a race to watch to see how big of a Republican night it will be.” Republicans need another 163 seats to take the House at this point. They’ve won 55, the enemies of the Constitution have won 25.

Update 1757: Onorato/Corbett in Pennsylvania too close to call; ditto Quinn/Brady in Illinois. My third St. Pauli Girl, and my real-life girl has brought me some yummy dinner. Kasich in Ohio is going down in flames. I’m looking at the news pages on the web, looks like cable teevee has more currency minute by minute.

Update 1806: “We’ve Come to Take Our Government Back!” — Rand Paul. I’m liking him a lot better than his Dad. Girlfriend calls to my attention that New Mexico gubernatorial is going to the GOP, 85% to 15% with 1% reporting in.

Update 1814: Fox News calls the U.S. House of Representatives for the Republicans with a net gain of about sixty seats. Bye, Nancy.

Update 1818: Scott/Sink in Florida too close to call. Palin says Republicans need to reach out to dems, but to invite them to come on board because the train is leaving the station — but we are going in a different direction. Pay attention, this is a real leader talking. It’s got zip zero nada to do with labels, it’s all about direction.

Update 1822: Four Governor’s races called. Fallin beats Askins in Oklahoma; O’Malley hangs into his seat against Ehrlich in Maryland; Daugaard beats heidepriem in South Dakota; Bently beats Sparks in Alabama. That’s three Republican Governors against one democrat Govenor.

Update 1828: Cannot call the Reid/Angle race just yet. But they’re in my time zone. Most of the races called are in states & districts at least two hours ahead. Barney Frank prevails 63%-35% with 59% precincts reporting in. I’m going to remember this one, the “smart” money said there was a real ray of hope here. Southerland beats Boyd in Florida, 55% to 40% with 85% reporting in. Shea-Porter implodes in New Hampshire, a hyphenated female hippie with a huge cash advantage, loses against a Republican white male 56% to 40%.

Update 1833: Giving the girlfriend some shit because it looks like New York is not joining this “party” in any way shape or form. They end up looking not more sophisticated than the rest of the nation, they look more like they’re stuck in something, kind of like a trombone player who can only do one note.

Update 1839: On “Hannity”: “Complete repudiation of the democratic party.” That’s exactly what I want to hear, word for word. BURY THAT PARTY, get rid of all these silly ideas so we can debate on the things that really matter. Get rid of Keynesian economics, get rid of cap-n-tax, get rid of “sit down and talk to our enemies” with zip-zero about what would get talked-about. These are un-American ideas, they don’t belong here…and they’d be welcomed by lots and lots of other countries around the globe, none of which anybody takes seriously. GTFO and take your fail with you.

Update 1847: In Wisconsin, with 10% precincts reporting in they’re saying it’s too close to call, but at 58% to 41% it looks like a Johnson-against-Feingold win to me. In the Senate, GOP has picked up 3 and the dems have picked up zip. GOP needs 12 to take the chamber and the traitors need 6. Of course, they have Biden, so by my count they only need 5.

Update 1902: Fox News projecting win for McCain in Arizona against Rodney Glassman. Brandstad beats incumbent democrat Culver for Governor of Iowa. Tom Corbett beats Dan Onorato for Governor of Pennsylvania.

Update 1913: Kissell wins in North Carolina district #8, against Republican challenger Harold Johnson. Mike Kelly unseats democratic incumbent Kathy Dahlkemper in district #3. Republican Lou Barletta unseats Paul Kanjorski in Pennsylvania district #11. It has been over four years since Congressman-elect Barletta caught our attention. Yay Lou.

Update 1915: Local Republican party calls on my cell phone to make sure I voted. Hope that’s the last phone call this year like that…looks like New York just voted for a Republican by mistake. Someone in District #25 by the name of “Buerkle.” Heads will roll.

Update 1918: Sarah Palin and Geraldine Ferraro are going to get in a catfight in the fountain — I mean, appear together on teevee. The woman I’d like to see as our next President, and the woman who is the very, very first politician I voted to reject. Can’t miss that.

Update 1923: Hickenlooper is the next Governor of Colorado. The democrat takes it by a very large margin. They just put up a color-coded map of the U.S. by congressional district, and it looks really, really bad for the dems. Lots of red. Palin and Ferraro are appearing side-by-side, and that looks bad for the dems too. Time has not been kind to Geraldine. Sarah, on the other hand, owns this night and she knows it. She looks guarded, competent, optimistic and…yep, presidential. Hate to break it to ya, Palin bashers.

Update 1929: Palin is crediting Ferraro for “busting” the “glass ceiling.” I guess when you’re female it might have looked different…but I vividly remember Ferraro being a grossly unpleasant personality and not much else. Combative with a capital-C. Acid in her veins. Maybe that’s part and parcel of being the challenger, but that’s no excuse. In 1984, we needed some solid strategies from both sides, and all we got out of Mondale-Ferraro was a lot of hostility. Nothing else. That’s why they lost 49 states. Palin is giving way too much credit — but, that is, after all, what she has to offer. She builds consensus without sacrificing an inch of turf.

These two women shouldn’t be sharing the same stage. They aren’t even in the same league.

Update 1936: Called Cassy earlier in the evening, since she was liveblogging and so was I. She indulged me for a few minutes and then demoted me to IM because talking & typing was a bit too challenging (actually, this was my experience as well). I see over on her site that Nikki Haley has won. Cool. Bob Gibbs beats Zack Space, democrat incumbent, in Ohio district #18. Also cool.

We’re going to tune into some of our Netflixes now until the news starts thinking about discussing the Pacific time zone, which is where it really matters to us. Things are looking alright so far.

Update 2010: Fox News is projecting the obvious: No refudiation in the Golden State, Brown & Boxer to win. Hope Babs got a good scare out of it anyway. The GOP takeover of the House looks more and more like a done deal. At this point, the GOP has 44 seats in the next Senate, compared to 49 for that other part plus 2 independents that caucus with them. So it’s a one-chamber smackdown; I’ll take it.

Update 2015: A bowling ball, being brainless, moves by sheer momentum and with no strategy or contemplation of cause and effect. Daily KOS commenters, being weak of mind are not too much different.

Update 2122: Brown is our next Governor and Boxer looks like she’s headed for a fourth term. Its California — we hate $$$. We don’t want ordinary people to have any of it, we want it all to go to super-duper-wonderful demigod democrat people. Looks like Reid has it in the bag, up by seven points, so Nevada hates prosperity too. Great to see Kasich pulled it out of the fire in Ohio, and Lungren and McClintock are doing well too. Thinking of hitting the sack before the Alaska race is done, which the Wall Street Journal is telling me might not happen for weeks anyway.

The bottom-line stuff looks pretty sweet. House is a complete blow-out. The Senate is quite a dent, not a toppling but that was a statistical long shot from the very start.

Had the entire Senate been up for grabs…well, you can plot that out at your leisure. Multiply the GOP gain there by three, and add to 41.

It’s a successful refudiation, no getting around it.

I never thought I’d see a feminist come out and admit that’s what it’s all about. The context is a column by one Melanie McDonaugh lamenting how economical and workable the DNA test has become; pining for the good old days when a lady whose discretion lost out to her lust, simply rounded up all the candidates who knew they could be guilty, and picked the wealthiest. Or least recalcitrant.

A feminist is calling for a draw-down in technology because, darn it, this is the way The Good Lord built us. Mothers are supposed to know and Daddies are not. Science shouldn’t go messing with this!

At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away, the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers. DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves.

What is surreal about this article is that there are only two words I can find in the entire thing, that even attempt to express concern for the welfare of the child. Usually when someone is anti-paternity-test, that’s the deciding factor, the child; and, in those cases, the child has typically progressed somewhat out of the womb and developed some kind of relationship with the “father.” There is little reason to believe McDonaugh is arguing out of this concern, especially when she comes out and admits it’s all about power, power, power.

Refreshing candor.

It all goes to show, once again, that feminism does indeed labor to cure our ancient inequities in the balance of power between men and women — but only those inequities that are pointed in one particular direction. True “equality” is not, and never has been, the agenda. As Glenn Reynolds notices, “How very . . . retro of them.”

As long as I’m making up fancy new slogans, I have another clarion call to make. The word that appears in the title of this post, I hereby suggest be given a new official meaning. I suggest it be re-defined as “calling things what they really are.”

More specifically, “calling things what they are without a bunch of bullshit euphemisms.”

If we can agree on that, then I agree with the majority that she is manifestly unqualified.

“Qualified” has a new definition lately too, I notice. It has something to do with finding fancy, creative, innovative new ways to make up look like down, wet look like dry, malevolent look harmless and reasonable look silly.

Thank God for “unqualified” people like Sarah Palin.

And I’ve just about had it up to here with the “qualified” people. I’m afraid I’ll be hard pressed from here on out to see the Q-word the same way ever again. Day by day, I’m starting to see it as “Qualified…to offer me some pleasant alternatives to facing reality.”

Mental grown-ups don’t need people “qualified” like the leaders we have now. To a mature, capable adult, it will be an invigorating change of pace watching the corrupt bastards get called out as corrupt bastards.

And I’m very happy Palin is as “unqualified” as she is.

Mad props to blogger friend Phil for taking my idea and running away with it in the graphics department. Now the campaign can begin. It is one whose time has come, no matter what the results are day after tomorrow. After all, we have a lot of people walking around, free to speak, act and vote as you and I…who desperately need to be told NOW&IHAPBEY.

1. If you want people to sacrifice so global warming can be diverted, but you have a big car with more than 4 cylinders in the engine
2. If you have switched your house to CFL’s because of global warming but your bathroom is FULLY lit
3. If you want taxes to be raised because we all need to do our part, but every year you pay what you owe and not a single nickel more
4. If #3 applies although you fully well know you’re one of the “richest Americans” that you’re always complaining about
5. If you use the word “greedy” to describe people who just want to keep what they have earned
6. If you use FaceBook to “stay in contact with friends and relatives,” but you really use it to push liberal propaganda and then un-friend whoever doesn’t enthusiastically agree
7. If you complain about Rush Limbaugh but have never listened to his program
8. If you complain about not enough women taking part in the political process, then turn around and wish openly that Sarah Palin would just shut up and go away
9. If you think the worst of conservatives you have never met just because someone else told you to
10. If you hate the Citizens v. United Supreme Court decision, because free speech rights should not apply to those money-grubbing corporations, just people…and, of course, labor unions…
11. If you pontificate at length about the virtues of free speech, but fling around slogans about how Fox News needs to be shut down
12. If you think men need to be more in touch with their feelings
13. If you think it is a problem that men don’t cry often enough
14. If you think girls need to grow up to voice their opinions without anybody asking for them…but boys should keep their opinions to themselves and make the effort to find out what girls think…
15. If you think we need to sit down and talk to our enemies, but can’t tell me what’s going to get talked about
16. If you complain about all the problems in the world caused by religion, and simply ignore the problems that were caused by secularists
17. If #16 applies and you know absolutely nothing about the good works that have been done over the centuries by religious people, because you just don’t want to think about it
18. If you say things to the effect of Christianity being just as bad as radical Islam, and the only example you can offer of Christian oppression is something like “The Crusades? Huh? Hey, what about that?”
19. If #18 applies and you cannot name any of the centuries in which The Crusades took place
20. If all your arguments about why Obama should have been elected come down to wonderful, superlative things about Him…but you cannot name what, exactly, any of these things are
21. If you think it’s a terrible problem that kids are exposed to violence on the television and in movies, but snark away at other people who object to too much sex on the television and in movies
22. If you bark away with the word “racism” any time anybody proposes a solution to vote fraud
23. If you have any kind of opinion about illegal immigration that you want to express without using the word “illegal”
24. If you think women wearing skimpy Halloween costumes would be a great way for them to show their independence, when they aren’t doing that yet…but once they start wearing them, you call it a symbol of male opppression…
25. If you’re a schoolteacher who says “I’m not here to teach you what to think I’m here to teach you how to think”…and day by day, you practice the exact opposite of that in your classroom…

Because when you’re such an oh-so-fashionable lefty liberal, hypocrisy & confirmation bias are still bad things. People may not like that, but it’s true.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

From RightChange.

Update: On the other hand…if we are to call this a Restoring Sanity rally (thanks to FaceBook friend Elizabeth A. Terrell)…I’d really hate to see the Restoring Insanity rally.

The weigh-in starts at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, and we are ready.

Hope we do well, although this time ’round I’m only half of a team. The younger of the official Pinewood Derby constructing duo is with his mother this time of year.

We’ll find out tomorrow how we do.

Clicky the pic to embiggen.

From his closing remarks, it looks to me like he’s going to help us out on Tuesday with the Obama midterm smackdown:

Look on the screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. (points to the Jumbotron screen which show traffic merging into a tunnel). These cars—that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car-a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it—the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car—an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear—often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by conscession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay—you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

If you want to know why I’m here and want I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.

Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you.

I’m not editing these words in any way, just a simple cut and paste. And yet what Jon Stewart is describing is a very conservative vision of America. Where we don’t take the Obama approach and sling around ad hominems, calling people who disagree with us teabaggers or complain about bitter people clinging to Bibles and guns, or give speeches about punishing enemies, or use metaphors about taking keys away from people who don’t know how to drive. Why, even the example Stewart chooses to use, involves all these people driving cars!

If his words are to be taken seriously, then I look forward to his help two days from now voting out as many democrats as we can manage together. They need a mid-course correction. For the last two years they have pushed agenda after agenda, which all have it in common that they intend to concentrate power into the hands of just a select few. Stewart, with his sanity restored, does not appear to be supportive of that. He wants everybody who can drive a car to be able to drive one, and to be respected as just another dude or dudette trying to meet his deadlines and other challenges in life.

How very anti-Obama. I don’t believe I’d be able to write a better anti-Obama speech myself.

Quite a turn-around for you. Welcome to sanity, Jon Stewart.

An article by one Bruce Thornton appears in RightNetwork:

To progressives, income disparities and economic winners and losers are intolerable injustices reflecting capitalism’s rigged rules and privileging of profit over people. Use the power of the state to correct those rules and intervene in the market through regulations and tax policy, and you can eliminate those injustices, for, as the President let slip, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Hence the relentless public demonization of “greedy” Wall Street and corporations, and the attempt to use regulatory and taxing power to siphon off their capital and put it to achieving the progressive vision of “social justice.”

Questioning these assumptions is where the political discussion has to start. We need to make not only the practical point that punitive taxation and regulation of the economy retards growth and leads to unemployment, lower tax revenues, and a reduced standard of living. We also need to attack the false belief that something as complex and intricate as a 14-trillion-dollar economic system, one predicated on the trillions of free choices and transactions made by free people, can be understood by “experts” the way we understand an engine, and thus tinkered with in order to achieve an idealized world in which we “spread the wealth around” so everyone has roughly the same standard of living.

This notion, moreover, runs counter to the underlying philosophy of capitalism, and if acted upon will eventually destroy the economy. The point of the free market was not to make everybody rich, but to create and increase wealth over time so that fewer people would suffer the abject poverty typical of the vast majority of our ancestors. Predicated on freedom, capitalism understood that the great variety of talent, virtue, and luck meant that there would still be losers. But there always will be losers in human life. Capitalism created economic mobility, and over time could give those with talent and drive the opportunity to become winners, rather than fixing them and their children in immutable economic and social roles.

There’s only one definition of conservatism that works. It is, after all, not a point or a region on an ideological spectrum, nor is it a prejudice or a fear. It is a willingness.

It is a willingness to renounce things that do not work. After an idea has been given a try a few times, it is a willingness to say “this does not work, let’s stop trying it until someone provides some solid evidence dealing with how it can work.” It is sanity. It is a hopping-off from a merry-go-round, and it requires maturity. A lot of people don’t believe in it, not because they have risen above it, but because they aren’t capable of achieving it.

In their world, the only difference between the current situation and everlasting success is one more lap. But that is the way children think when they wrestle with a problem that is too big for them.

Conservatism is what adults say. Conservatism says wait a minute…results matter. So far your results suck, so take this albatross out of here, back to the drawing board, and bring back some good results from there — until then, we’re done. We’re through. And you get just as mad about that as you want, but you’ve made as many “oopsies” on the production floor as you’re gonna.

Our liberals react to this pretty much every single way they possibly can. They rename themselves to “progressives,” they talk about punishing enemies (hat tip to Gerard), they make a lot of noise about bitter people clinging to Bibles and guns. They tell lies that whoever is opposed to what they’re trying to do, must be opposed to new ideas. That’s not the case at all. The only thing they don’t do, is what mature, responsible, intelligent people with new fancy ideas do: Confine them to a proving ground. No, in liberal-land, the sandbox is not a sandbox at all, it is the universe. It is wherever the results will be felt immediately, irreversibly, by everyone. You can’t put an experimental elixir in a laboratory, to be fed to volunteers; you have to put it in the water supply of the township, the county, the state. Even better to just drop it in the ocean. Nobody can opt in to liberalism, slogans notwithstanding. Opting in might lead to opting out.

This is where Thornton’s point comes in. Liberals do not think government is sacrosanct. They don’t even like government any more than normal people do. They want their experiments to be tried out, for the very first time, all over the place. Step One always seems to be to empower the government, because there isn’t any legal way to get away from it. It is practically universal, and it operates by force rather than by choice. That is why they can’t get enough of it.

Conservatism just says: Don’t. It is a very accommodating and flexible brand of conservatism we have been seeing lately — it waits until the liberal plan does its damage, in production, before it says “that’s enough, stop now.” Real conservatism would insist on the laboratory setting, involving voluntary, opted-in subjects, before the plan was ever tried. Real conservatism would say: If you want to experiment, congressman/senator/President, you have the wrong job. The office you occupy has to do with serving the public, not using that public as a lab rat.

One other point: There is no moderate position between these two things. That is a myth. Once experience has shown an idea to fail much of the time, you either pull it out or you don’t.

Have a happy one!

So what are your plans?

I was reading through that Shelby Steele article that was making its way around the innerwebs in the last couple of days, the one that talks about the democrat party’s “bad faith” in America and how it came to be. Perhaps inspired by this, the Review & Outlook editors of Wall Street Journal gave their readers a rather priceless run-down of the relevant events since those tumultuous sixties. As I understand what they are offering, it is a history that begins with a bang followed by a multitude of pulses; we put the liberals in charge of everything, then we figure out it doesn’t work. We take a few years to forget the lesson and then we do it again. I’ve offered my own observation that we are experiencing a sixteen-year “Heartbeat of Stupid” and the systolics I’ve measured correlate very closely to what the editors have picked up: Kennedy/Johnson, Carter, Clinton and now His Holy Eminence.

I agree, too, with the most enduring message Steele gleans from it all…

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the ’60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the “imperialism” of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the ’60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America’s natural default position.

Among today’s liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

I have noticed that the common prop used by the liberals, as they leverage this tricky dichotomy of bad faith in the United States and good faith in all else, is — knowledge. People on the left wing who exercise real power, as well as their cheerleaders and other minions out in the field who try to gin up some enthusiasm about their hopey changey…stuff. Knowledge is the key to the recurring trope, which is: We are in a process of change, and the change has to do with learning. You trust this thing and you don’t trust that other thing. Then new information comes your way, and you show your intellect by being open to the information and it changes your view of things. Now, what was untrusted before, is trusted; what was trusted before, might not be now. That process seems to be central to everything they are trying to communicate to us, in one form or another.

But it has not escaped my notice that this is a complete sham. The learning never comes, because if it did, the liberal would have to demonstrate the humility he demands others show. This is quite out of the question. The liberals we know are immovable granite savants, possessing such an enviable command of truth, wisdom and knowledge, that not even a miniscule alteration is needed, wanted or for that matter desirable. They’re just like teenagers; they already know everything.

Generally, the false moment of paradigm shift is still ahead of us with regard to things we are required to accept, and it is somewhere in our past with regard to things we are expected to abhor. President Obama still needs more time to clean up the mess made by His predecessor George W. Bush, who cocked things up so terribly that this continues to be a convenient catch-all excuse up to & beyond the point it has been worn down into self-parody. As far as President Bush himself, the moment of pretend-learning is, obviously, in the past; according to the liberal, we know everything about Bush we’ll ever need to know. To borrow from his successor’s favorite metaphor, he has been behind the wheel already and shown he doesn’t know how to drive. No need and no point for further inspection here.

That whackjob Imam down in New York who wants to build that mosque on Ground Zero — according to the left wing, he hasn’t shown himself to be up to any mischief yet. Supposedly, we’ll all be keeping an eye out for that provocative or incriminating action, or quote. But really, we all know it will never come; the jury only appears to be out deliberating the matter. Does that mean being a liberal is about never harboring any suspicions? No, it does not. The Boy Scouts have already incriminated themselves beyond redemption; not only do they discriminate against homosexuals, but they won a Supreme Court case about it. Speaking of the Supreme Court: Justice Clarence Thomas is supposed to be excoriated — mind you, it doesn’t have anything to do with being a conservative who is also black, it’s about Anita Hill. There never has been any evidence to support her claims, but again, why let facts get in the way? Thomas is to be hated, therefore his “learning moment” is in the past. We know about Justice Thomas everything we need to know.

This is the very foundation of the pretend-universe in which our modern liberals live: We pretend we already know some things, and we pretend we’re in a process of waiting to learn other things. The “science is settled” on global warming, a hackneyed phrase tossed around to imply there is no point to learning anything further. As I’ve pointed out before, this is a redefinition of what the word science is supposed to mean; it is, more or less, a polar-opposite definition. A flip-flopping.

Speaking of flip-flopping: The junior Senator from Massachusetts, half a dozen years ago, endured no condemnation or repudiation from his party for his testimony some three decades previous about the barbaric conduct of his comrades-in-arms:

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

These statements have been shown to be problematic, and were problematic during the campaign of 2004. But it didn’t matter. Clinton lied about sex, which liberals told us was entirely unimportant because it was about sex…but even then, they admitted Clinton’s behavior was abominable. With Kerry’s slander against thousands of kids serving their country, we didn’t even get that much. Quite to the contrary, Kerry was a hero for having spoken truth to power. Kerry told a tall tale to Congress, and — well, so what? Instead, they argued quite forcefully that there was something wrong with calling him out on his fairy tale.

I suppose that’s to be expected. He was the nominee in 2004, after all. And why let the facts get in the way of a good hate? In that year we were consumed with chatter about Abu Ghraib and our liberals were showing off the “bad faith” that Steele was just talking about. Americans, everybody understood, were certainly capable of wartime atrocities, so who cares if Kerry’s testimony had any basis in fact, or not?

To grown-ups, though, it still matters. There is a difference between leading a man around on a leash in his nakedness as if he’s a canine, and attaching an electrical circuit to his gonads and turning on the juice. If everyone paying attention understood American soldiers were guilty of gross misdemeanors, then why recite made-up stories of the felonies? Or refuse to recant the stories? Or condemn others for pointing out the lack of evidence to support the made-up stories? Why not just stick to what we know really happened, wouldn’t that be responsible, proper and fair?

All of the above defines the central and primary problem with our liberals. It is the dirty little secret they’ll do anything to stop from getting out, although deep down everybody knows about it already — the “Emperors Clothes.” The thing we all know and don’t say out loud is this: Their view of the world is as polarized, as black and white, as boolean, all-of-this-none-of-that, as anybody else’s. There is no process of edification, no process of condemnation, no process of redemption. There are no states to these objects; there are only classes and roles. Good and bad. Women, blacks, homosexuals, poor, illegal immigrants, socialists, Muslims good…as long as they all vote, and vote the way they’re supposed to. Caucasians, men, straights, evangelicals, corporate executives bad. They’re supposed to be teaching the rest of us what it means to be “open-minded,” but when are they ever going to lead by example?

The moment of learning that would re-shape the world view, or even a tiny piece of it, never comes. Never, never, not ever. This month, Bill O’Reilly placed the fact that would bring this about squarely in front of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, and they showed everybody how the leftist mind handles this. They walked offstage, unashamedly, proudly, even brazenly ignorant. That is exactly what I’m talking about; it’s all about the designated roles. It’s like running a criminal trial in reverse, with the verdict reached as the jury is seated and then the evidence reviewed according to the verdict. If you’re innocent, no damning evidence is admissible. If you’re guilty, no exculpatory evidence can be seen.

There is a term for this: Confirmation Bias. It refers to the process of systematically selecting evidence for acceptance, based not on its durability, but rather on what it proves. It is the mistake we all make sometimes when we adapt reality to belief rather than the other way around. With our liberals it has become a way of life, and this makes them deserving not of our scorn, but our pity.

I am now closer, I think, to my coffin than my crib; I’m old enough that it has become incrementally absurd to doubt this is the case. With that majority of years behind me, I have yet to hear a single self-identified liberal announce those words of humility and true learning: “I used to think [fill in the blank] but then I learned such-and-such, and it changed my mind.” I’ve never heard a self-identified liberal say anything like this, although I have heard many a conservative express exactly that (Update: Hey look, there goes yet another one). Here and there I’ve heard some liberals brag about visiting third-world countries, where they “learned” something. And I do recall some liberals say “I started being liberal when I became a parent.” But these are not what I’m talking about; they don’t count, because in both cases if you talk to the liberal a little while longer, you find he believed what he “learned” well before he learned it, so there was no changing-of-mind taking place. I’m talking about exiting the comfort zone, abjuring that which was previously cherished or held in high regard — I have yet to see or hear of a liberal ever doing this.

Isn’t that something? It is a strange, odd thing. Anybody who’s discussed anything at length with a strident liberal, even just once or twice, knows how much energy and enthusiasm they put into finding that next point of emphasis, that next magical technique for highlighting the thought they think worthy. The emphasis is often more important than the thought itself. Nothing actually achieves this quite as effectively as saying “I was convinced of and invested in the opposite for a very long time, and here is the story of why I was compelled to admit I was wrong, and how my mind was changed.” That would accomplish what they want, better and quicker than anything.

But they aren’t capable of it. They lack the necessary humility. They want to get the props and high-fives for having it, but it is beyond their capacity to show it. Some of them still back Barack Obama, two full years after the mistake was made, and that proves this particular point of my criticism as well as anything can. Yes, they can abandon an old belief and uphold a contradictory a new one, but only if everyone else they know is doing the same thing at the same time, and they can be assured any record of their old allegiance will be sent down an Orwellian memory hole. In simpler terms, they don’t want to lose the social capital. They always want to be on the right side of history, even if that means the history of their own inclinations must be re-written.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

We were discussing at lunch the rather remarkable achievement of opening the Roseville Galleria for business so soon after the mall got torched by a jackass just a week before. As we were walking to our desks one of my colleagues turned to me and mentioned we needed to bring back stocks in the public square, if for no other reason than that the community deserved a chance to express its feelings about whatever transgression was being judged.

This got me to thinking, because, you see, nobody at work knows about my blog. They don’t even know about my political orientation…at least, I like to think they don’t. My tentative theory is that I’m just not that important and not worth the research. I haven’t Googled anybody else’s name, why would they want to do that with mine?

But this was cause for pause; I have written exactly the same words about the tragedy of getting rid of the one form of punishment that placed emphasis on a feeling of shame…and therefore shored up the associated feelings. Without something like that, we have no shame. People just do, like, whatever man. And so we have sad incidents like what happened in Roseville last week. We just put up with it. The events accelerate, up to and past the point where there is a palpable feeling that we’re living in the end times — and we continue to tolerate. Without a handy wooden frame in which to entrap the convicted as we pelt his mug with rotten cabbages, there isn’t anything else we can do. Just tolerate and tolerate some more.

And so we had a “shared pet peeve” moment, my colleague and I, kind of like the single solitary decent scene out of Lethal Weapon IV…only less annoying.

(Potty mouth language warning in effect.)

Anyhow. I don’t think there’s been any synchronization on viewpoints here other than what happened in the hallway on the way back from the cafeteria. There is a feeling in the air, felt by many, that society is going through dry rot because there is no culture in the society…no feeling of “this, and this, and this are simply not done.” There are exceptions. We don’t tolerate discrimination, we don’t tolerate bigotry, we don’t tolerate sexism, we don’t tolerate…intolerance. But what’s that worth, when you think about it? When we expand the definition of intolerance to include anything that might possibly be interpreted as intolerance, by a sane mind or some other kind of mind. When we keep expanding that definition until it includes tolerance, and we identify tolerance as intolerance and then show our intolerance toward phony intolerance.

What you’re then left with, is a “society,” of sorts, of cowards. People who allow anything and everything, save for whatever their anointed liege lords tell them they aren’t supposed to be allowing. Which is the same as saying people who allow everything.

So I have more people to put in stocks, when and if the day ever comes we bring ’em back.

Anybody who would oppose my stocks, because we need to keep on allowing everything (save for what the anointed mystics tell us we shouldn’t be allowing) — they need to go in my stocks so we can throw rotten vegetables at their faces.

The jackass who burned down the Galleria, absolutely, needs to go in so we can pelt his stupid face with stinky vegetables. Hey, it beats a knouting.

You know those commercials on the radio where they run a toll free number past you? They never do it just once…research has shown, obviously, that the number will stick in your head if they do it three times. That’s one, eight hundred, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. That number again, blah blah blah blah…that announcer goes in the stocks so we can throw rotten tomatoes at his dumb ol’ face.

The producer who told him to do that three times also goes in the stocks.

I notice, lately, a fashionable trend has started to run the toll free number past us four times. I didn’t hear this before — oh, say — about 2001, maybe later. That means there must be a paper out somewhere, some item of research, maybe a guideline that was written on the research, saying four times works better than three.

If it was research, then I figure there is a likelihood there is a singularity of responsibility. One individual must be responsible for having conducted it. One person has opened this Pandora’s Box and unleashed this modern “That Number Again” curse upon us.

That asshole needs to go in stocks. He needs a twenty-four-hour treatment, noon to noon. Rotten tomatoes, rotten onions, rotten cabbage, rotten squash. Pelt pelt pelt pelt pelt. That rotten vegetable again, to make sure you don’t forget it, is…pelt pelt pelt pelt pelt pelt pelt. One more time…

Better that than re-enacting Passion of the Christ. Better that than a branding iron.

Now that is what I call “compassionate conservatism.” Some people don’t have any shame, so they need to be taught some. The compassionate community will teach them some.

Drive carefully.

Quote of the day at Critical Mass:

From Robert Weissberg:

As the academy grows more stridently left wing, conservatives respond with calls for ideological affirmative action — for schools to hire more right-thinking faculty so students encounter intellectual diversity. This is a seductively alluring scheme, and thanks to wealthy donors, it is proliferating.

It is an ill-advised and ultimately anti-intellectual strategy, even in the unlikely event that it succeeds. The academy can not be, nor should it be, an intellectual version of Noah’s Ark. Sadly, this conservative version of “inclusion” mimics the Left’s subordination of truth to ideology.

The quest should be about insisting that whatever professors teach, content should be truthful, whether this truth is liberal, conservative, reactionary, or Marxist, whether the subject in English or sociology. After all, who wants conservative falsehoods to “balance” radical dishonesty? It is fantasy to insist that if students learn at 9 a.m. that 2+2=3 and at 11 a.m., 2+2=5, they will eat lunch knowing that 2+2=4.

The hunt to hire truth-seekers changes everything. Out with the ideological litmus tests; in with character and temperament. If a Marxist job candidate argues that Africa is poor owing to colonial exploitation, the sharp rejoinder should be, “Can you prove this?” Ditto for the conservative job seeker who insists that only capitalist free markets can solve Africa’s poverty.

Admittedly, abandoning ideological labels complicates life, and may even discourage donors from funding pet projects, but this is what the life of the mind is about.

All true. Also true: it’s quite common to dismiss those who criticize academia’s evident ideological homoegeneity as people who are problematically arguing for affirmative action for conservatives–when they are doing nothing of the kind. It’s happened to me quite a bit, for example. But there is a middle ground that’s ethical all the way around–one that requires people on both ends of the political spectrum to lay off the cheap political point-scoring and to focus on making sure that practice measures up to principle.

If my little darling were going to a higher-ed school and found his young mushy brain being ambushed and avalanched from all directions by doctrinized left-wing thinking — I suppose it would be fair for me to substitute the “if” with a “when” — the education I would hope for him to gain from this would not be how to keep his mouth shut and stay out of trouble, or that professors are dopes, or that the “right” way is the right way, but rather that men are emboldened by their institutions. A little bit of organization, a little bit of prestige, and the players within a circle will boldly brag about their dedication to “free speech” while, in action, doing all they can to bring it to a stop.

I would also hope he learns that human creativity and resourcefulness endure the most determined attacks from their fair-weather friends — those who claim to be championing and defending such assets. Institutions tend to claim to encourage thinking outside of the box, finding new solutions to problems; but most of this work is done before the institution arrives. While it can still be done.

The now-well-established proclivity of institutions to lean left…all sorts of institutions…is a symptom of all this, not a cause. For that alone, I’m in agreement with Weissberg and his reticence toward the “conservative affirmative action.” It wouldn’t work.

But the above points carry a lot of weight with me too. The goal needs to be truth. In the pursuit of such a goal, a conclusion towards liberalism is just as meritorious as a conclusion toward conservatism…or toward nothing at all.

Blogger friend Buck replied to a comment-poster in his own place, who was worried about tax dollars going to support National Public Radio.

Like most dreams… yours has no basis in reality. From The Wiki:

In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from local funding and 10% of their revenue from the federal funding in the form of Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants.[14][15] NPR receives no direct funding from the federal government.[16] About 1.5% of NPR’s revenues come directly from Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants.

The CPB got $400 million in federal funds last year, a drop in the proverbial budget bucket. The CPB provides funding… in small amounts… to both NPR and PBS, both of which add immense value to our culture.

I presume “the Wiki” refers to the Wikipedia article on NPR. Not exactly going out on a limb with that one, and the quote lines up, she certainly does. Our New Mexico friend has done his homework.

Funding

In 2009, NPR revenues totaled $164 million, with the bulk of revenues coming from programming fees, grants, contributions and sponsorships. According to the 2009 financial statement, about 40% of NPR revenues come from the fees it charges member stations to receive programming. Typically, NPR member stations raise funds through on-air pledge drives, corporate underwriting, and grants from state governments, universities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from local government funding and 10% of their revenue from the federal funding in the form of CPB grants. NPR receives no direct funding from the federal government. About 1.5% of NPR’s revenues come from Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the majority of NPR funding came from the federal government. Steps were taken during the 1980s to completely wean NPR from government support, but the 1983 funding crisis forced the network to make immediate changes. More money to fund the NPR network was raised from listeners, charitable foundations and corporations instead.

Footnote [16] points to the Ombudsman’s page at NPR. Which sayeth…

How many of my tax dollars go to NPR?

NPR receives no direct funding from the federal government. Less than two percent of the budget is derived from competitive grants from federally funded organizations such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Science Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.

Approximately half of NPR’s funding comes from NPR member stations. In an average year, NPR funds about 45 percent of its operations with membership dues and program fees from member stations. The balance of NPR’s annual revenue is derived from private foundations, individuals and corporations, in the form of grants, gifts, investment proceeds, and corporate sponsorships. NPR receives some revenue from distribution fees and fees from tapes and transcripts.

So everything checks out. Ship-shape. NPR depends, in this day and age, on a negligible and altogether insignificant amount of lucre from the public treasury, which is first laundered through the CPB. It is a piddling amount, a “placeholder” amount…I would call it a “flip the bird” amount. It is dimes and nickels fished out of the couch cushions, moved from one pot to another, just to get the message across that this can still be done. Purely as a “fuck you” to the people who still believe in a free market. The ladder could be kicked out from under ’em with no consequence whatsoever…it just isn’t going to happen because, well, we like to stick it to the man.

From the e-mails, this afternoon, bearing a signature from the outbox of change.org, my faithful climate change action crew. Just minutes ago:

Dear Morgan,

Since National Public Radio fired Juan Williams last week for controversial remarks about Muslims, Fox News pundits have waged war on public broadcasting. They’ve called for defunding it completely, something conservatives have wanted for decades.

Led by Sarah Palin, a chorus of commentators including Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove are trying to paint public broadcasting as the “mouth of socialism” in a ploy to simultaneously attack NPR and fire up their base a week before Americans head to the polls.

In a corporate media landscape where “news” is about little more than partisanship and infotainment, we desperately need a reliable public broadcasting system to provide the essential information for a functioning democracy. Fox News has already poisoned much of our public discourse; we cannot let it and Sarah Palin kill public broadcasting.
:
Palin and others like her are using the controversy over Juan Williams to push for a longstanding goal: the “immediate suspension of every taxpayer dollar” going to public media, as stated explicitly by Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show.

Heeding O’Reilly’s call, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is reportedly introducing a bill that would zero out funding for ALL public broadcasting, including NPR, PBS, Pacifica and more.

Defunding could not only destroy NPR as we know it, but also deal a significant blow to the entire public interest media sector. We can’t let Sarah Palin and the right wing bully Congress into selling out such an important part of our media landscape. [emphasis mine]

KNOW YE THIS. Yes, I am of the opinion that “public radio” is anathema to a free republic, especially one such as ours that claims to cherish free market principles. However, that is outside the scope from the observation I am making here.

Whether I would shield NPR from the slings and arrows of those who would “defund,” were NPR more to my ideological liking, is absolutely, positively, emphatically out of scope from the observation I am making here.

Juan Williams’ sacking is out of scope from the observation I am making here.

The proper prioritization of the NPR funding issue, alongside all the other things we’ll have in mind as we trudge off to participate in the democratic process this Tuesday (Wednesday if you’re a democrat), is also out of scope from the observation I am making here.

That I would much sooner ask Sarah Palin to watch my house while I’m on a two week vacation, compared to Vivian Schiller, CEO of NPR, is out of scope from the observation I am making here.

Charles Krauthammer’s enjoyable smackdown upon the empty (and rather caustic) head of Nina Totenberg, who remains employed and in the good graces of NPR even with her name chiseled in granite alongside wonderful chestnuts that make Williams’ utterance look positively mundane — is, likewise, out of scope of the observation I am making here.

The observation I am making here is sharp like a scalpel. It is focused like a laser. It is absolutely, positively irrefutable.

The observation I am making here is thus:

Someone is bullshitting somebody about NPR’s funding. Not so much the amount of it, but its criticality toward whatever mission it is that NPR is trying to fulfill. It is pissing in the ocean…or, it is the keystone of the temple, that once extracted, causes the entire structure to collapse.

It cannot be both.

Who is bullshitting me? And how? I have an absolute, sacrosanct right to know…or, at least, I damn well should.

Graphic shamelessly swiped from Liberty at Stake.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

What do they know that Washington doesn’t?

Puerto Rico’s governor on Monday announced plans to cut business and income taxes by more than a $1 billion annually over the next seven years in an attempt to jumpstart the U.S. territory’s economy.

Governor Luis Fortuno laid out the plan in a special address to the Puerto Rican legislature after a weekend vote by lawmakers to slap a six-year tax hike on offshore manufacturing firms operating on the island.

Fortuno called the plan the biggest tax relief package in Puerto Rico’s history and said ordinary taxpayers would see a 50 percent reduction in their taxes when the reform is fully implemented.

Hat tip to Boortz.