Blogger friend Phil made a comment, and pointed to his own stuff in doing so. The subject is why our current President, and by extension all or most liberals, don’t want us watching Fox News. The critique against Fox is supposed to be that it is far less enlightening or accurate compared to other networks; but little-to-nothing is said by these critics about the factual tidbits Fox brings that its competition simply leaves out.

Phil notices something about how the leftist mind comes to call true things false and false things true. It isn’t their motivation to do this…at least, that is not their primary motivation. Rather — well, I’ll let him tell it.

All during the [ObamaCare] “debate”, their side was talking about what was literally in the bill’s wording (when you could get them to talk about details in the bill at all rather than The Grand Idea or how evil/stupid their opponents were) … and our side was talking about what the effect of the bill would be.

We said “it’ll mean this will happen” and they said “Fear monger! That’s not IN THE BILL!” and hence it was, to their eyes, “proven false”. But now even proponents are openly admitting that that [the medical rationing, or “Death Panels”] is exactly what we’re talking about. Government officials being in charge of what care you get based on whether it’s “worth it”. To whom? By whose standards?

This is bigger than the death panels. I see it in quite a few issues.

“If you make it more expensive to employ people, fewer people will be employed.” “LIAR! There is nothing in our legislation that raises the minimum wage, requiring businesses to lay off employees!” It’s all about intentions. Cause-and-effect be damned. Take away people’s guns, and they won’t be able to defend themselves. But our intention is to make people safer! So violent crime isn’t going to go up, it’s going to go down! Because that is what we intend to have happen!

The trouble is, to the loyal leftist history always began yesterday morning. So our nation’s long and busy history of government programs that were intended to cause one specific thing, and ended up causing something more-or-less the precise opposite, is conveniently overlooked.

Intentions. “It Isn’t In The Bill.” That is all that matters. If you factor something else in…like, real-world rules of if-you-do-this, such-and-such-happens…well, you’re evil, stupid, crazy and bitterly clinging to your Bible and your guns. Fooey on you.

Update: On the subject of how this makes false things true…I’m looking over this list of broken Obama promises (hat tip to Linkiest) and it probably isn’t what you’d ordinarily expect. Not a whole lot of dry reading about repeal this bill, pass that bill…this is wild, out-there type stuff. Remember when you were seven and you wanted to become President so you could make it illegal for your little brother to beat you at Monopoly, or by Executive Order you could make it possible to hide broccoli in a glass of milk? This is a little like that.

“That is why there will never be true security unless we focus our efforts on targeting every source of fear in the Americas. That’s what I’ll do as president of the United States.”

I’m curious. How many sources of fear are there in the Americas? Did He promise to get them properly targeted, or just to focus our efforts on targeting them?

I think the defense is going to be, He has intended for the sources of fear to go away and that is plenty good enough. Some variation of that. Because outside of that, this promise is rather tough to defend.

Just a typical problem you walk right into, when you live in a world in which intentions are everything & nothing else matters.

I’ve said a lot of things like this myself…although the context is different.

Any jackass can kick a barn door down, but it takes a carpenter to build it back.

No…there hasn’t been some amazing flip-flop between 1953 and now. Rayburn is talking about “building” the one product democrats really care about building…left-wing legislation. He’s issuing ominous foreshadowings of the next two years as he’s compelled to hand over the Speaker’s gavel. Republicans are jackasses who are going to kick the barn door down.

I imagine, if you’ve never really built anything, it’s easy to think you’re in the process of building something when what you’re building is nothing more than a piece of machinery that destroys.

But out here in the real world, of real people who aren’t politicians, who build real things that do real things and help other real people…Rayburn’s words ring true. The process of destruction is infinitely simpler than creation. It is one hell of a lot sexier, too. Everyone wants to destroy, nobody wants to admit they’re destroying, but destruction is quick, easy, fun to do and fun to watch. It’s the Morgan Freeberg Theory of the Charismatic Wrecking Ball.

There is no more dreadfully boring thing to watch, than something getting built…except, maybe, for that same thing being designed. Yuck. Measure, draw, erase, measure again. Razing packs a whole lot more entertainment punch compared to raising.

Therefore, for the addled mind, it is more worthy. Since the purpose of life…after all…is to have fun and be entertained.

Oh my…how politically incorrect this is.

Andrew Cline, writing in The American Spectator…

There’s a reason President Obama tries so hard to convince Americans not to watch Fox News. He keeps shamelessly lying about easily verifiable facts. Evidently he figures that left-leaning media outlets won’t call him on it, so if he can only convince people not to watch FOX, he’ll be OK. Unfortunately for the president, the American people simply have to look around them to see that he isn’t being honest with them.

Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, the President repeated his biggest health care reform whopper: You can keep your current health insurance. Here is what he said:

“There’s nothing in the bill that says you have to change the health insurance you’ve got right now. If you were already getting health insurance on your job, then that doesn’t change.”

Yet hours before he uttered that line, the Boston Globe reported that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care was canceling its Medicare Advantage coverage specifically because of new regulations imposed by Obama’s health care law.

A little while ago I echoed a mini-manifesto peeled off by a left-winger who wanted to bully and cudgel and sway people away from watching Fox News.

Fox News, four or five months back, captured an abrupt about-face with regard to Our First Holy President’s appreciation of technology. Remember when He was going to make the White House more sophisticated, because He knew how to work a Blackberry and an iPod and what not? It went straight from that, to bragging about not knowing how to work these things, to appear more folksy.

If you got your news form something other than Fox, you’d never have known. Ah yes, I know what the rejoining argument is supposed to be…you don’t have any business knowing because it doesn’t matter.

Funny, it mattered quite a bit when people were voting in droves for His Majesty. So sophisticated! There’s Just Something About Him!

Still the Obama apologists are out there saying…don’t watch it. Or we’ll call you stupid. Or evil or rotten or bigoted, or, or, or…

But it’s funny. If I watch the mainstream media, minus Fox, it seems all the questions I’m seeing put to His Gloriousness are one of:

1. What are you worried about as negotiations with the evil Republicans begin, on [insert subject here]
2. What do you have to say to people who [insert situation here]
3. Human interest pablum (daughter wants to know when he’ll plug the hole, picking out the White House dog, etc.)
4. What’s it like to be so awesome?

Haven’t heard much by way of hard questions. I mean hard — like, for example, “If you voted in favor of TARP as a Senator, isn’t it hypocritical to complain about the previous administration handing you a big deficit?”

I really don’t watch that much of Fox News myself. None at all, really. Just not a teevee guy. But it just strikes me as bad form to be complaining about hard-hitting journalism as if we’re suffering from some kind of glut of the stuff…when, if anything, what we really have is an acute shortage. Our Top Dude is out there still telling us we can keep our health care plan if we want, while it is being demonstrated this is not the case.

It isn’t a case of — the boss says something poorly-thought-out, and it’s proven to be in error a whole year later. It’s a case of: Boss says something, it’s proven wrong, and He keeps on saying it. Then…He does it a whole bunch more times. It’s at the point where it brings discredit upon the entire nation when He is allowed to keep getting away with it.

I’d like to know. And no, infiltrators don’t count…

From Human Events, which explains,

A liberal protester at the “One Nation Working Together” march physically assaulted a HUMAN EVENTS reporter who was videotaping Rep. Charlie Rangel (D.-N.Y) at the event at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The reporter, Emily Miller, was first hit from behind while she was taping Rangel as the Harlem congressman glad-handed supporters in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Miss Miller is heard on the video saying, “Please don’t hit me.” The protester proceeds to yell at the reporter, “Well get out of the way! What do you think this is? A–hole.” The activist was attempting to meet Rangel herself. Miss Miller continued videotaping the event, when suddenly the same unhinged protester lunged at her, hit her on the arm, and yelled, “Don’t take my picture.”

I see from this item at Cassy’s place, that we have finally reached the Rubicon of lazy, impractical thinking: “Facts” are being used to suppress other facts. People who acknowledge reality are being castigated for avoiding reality, and people who shun and poison reality are being extolled for the merit of somehow fortifying it.

In logic, the Law of Identity states that an object is the same as itself: A ≡ A. Any reflexive relation upholds the law of identity. When discussing equality, the fact that “A is A” is a tautology.

“That everything is necessarily the same with itself and different from another” is the self-evident first principle of linguistics, for it governs the designation or ‘identification’ of individual concepts within any symbolic language, so as to avoid ambiguity in the communicating of concepts between the users of that language. Such a principle is necessary because a ‘symbolic designator’ has no inherent meaning of its own, but derives its meaning from a cognizant agent who correlates the given designator with a conventionally prescribed concept that has been previously learned and stored in their memory.

— Wikipedia entry for Law of Identity (sentence-case & bold mine).

This is the essential building block of all statements that purport to comment on real things. It is the common unified ancestor. Without the capability of recognizing a thing as what it really is, no truth can be recognized, and if truth cannot be recognized then falsehood can’t be recognized either. Nor can you graduate to more complex thoughts about cause-and-effect; you cannot make a statement that A causes B, if you cannot first come to some understanding that A is A.

But you can’t recognize things as what they really are, that’s hateful!

I was waiting for the trash pictures to pop up before commenting on the “One Nation” rally, which is the left-wing answer to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” assembly from two months ago.

I couldn’t be more bored by all the shouting back-and-forth about crowd counts. What is the point of this…that there are more people sympathetic to growing government than people sympathetic to shrinking it down? Who gives a fig, if we can’t afford any more growing? It would signal to us that 2008 is a time for leftists to come into power, but 2010 really-really-is the same thing even moreso?

No, I’ve been holding out for garbage photos. And they have arrived:

More at Marooned in Marin.

Near as I can figure, the message of the “One Nation” rally is that we are all one, we’re in this boat together…so let’s make those other people not count, and really stick it to ’em.

Let’s show our numbers, and our resolve to get out to the Reflecting Pool to demonstrate our steely resolve, and how determined we are…to fight any expectation that anybody should ever do anything exceptional outside of here.

The poor dears don’t know if they want to be ordinary or extraordinary. They don’t know if they’re promoting the excellent or the mediocre. They don’t know if they’re about unity or division. They’re completely confused on all these counts.

No wonder they can’t pick up their trash.

Update: Lest someone somewhere think I’m being unkind…a little perspective, please. I didn’t even raise a welt. What Byron York noticed is gonna leave a mark.

Organizers of Saturday’s “One Nation Working Together” rally at the Lincoln Memorial are proud of their diversity. Before the event, they predicted it would be the “most diverse march in history.” It turned out they were right. Looking around the rally, there were Teamsters Local 311, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, Communications Workers of America Local 2336, American Federation of Teachers Local 1, United Auto Workers Amalgamated Local 171, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and representatives of many, many other unions. That’s a lot of diversity.

Doug Ross has more pictures…these are pictures you are not going to see in the legacy media. Like…this…

Update: Mark links to a video with much more of the same, and we start to see what all the arguing is really about…

Argumentum Ad Plausible

A logical fallacy that used to occur only sporadically, but requires a name now that we’re living it every single day.

It is a theory of events related to each other by cause-and-effect; the person advancing the theory, who in the realm of reality is not known for respecting cause-and-effect, mistakes its plausibility for its proof. See, we sit down with our enemies to talk out our differences with them, and war is avoided. It could happen!

And when it doesn’t — when reality runs up against theory, and it turns out they disagree — the exuberant demonstrate that sanity has deserted them, or avoided them for the time being, by declaring that reality lost and theory won. See, never mind what you saw happen just now, what’s supposed to happen is this…and then they recite the same sequence of events again.

It is an insistence on engaging in experimentation, coupled with an intellectual disability to engage in true experimentation.

If we just issue a credit for cars that are traded in, we can save the auto industry.

We “stimulate” the economy, and it “primes the pump,” we get the money flowing again…businesses start hiring and people have jobs.

I just think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

That Victory Mosque in New York…don’t you go telling the Imam he needs to build it somewhere else. If you do, it will be interpreted all over the world as a knock on Islam, and bloodshed will result. Better to just let him build it right where it is.

Let’s elect Obama to be our President, because sophisticated or not, He certainly comes off that way. He impresses everybody around Him, everywhere He goes. He’ll command respect, represent our country well, reach agreements with our allies and our enemies that couldn’t have otherwise been reached…there will be some kind of big “change” that will give us lots of “hope,” and as an added bonus we will “all” be “part of something” that’s really really “big.”

I’m an actor, but I’m just starting out. I wash dishes at this restaurant while I’m between jobs.

No, see, the county government widens this highway with stimulus funds…and what you’re not taking into account, is they buy all this asphalt that they otherwise wouldn’t have bought, and the asphalt manufacturer, he goes out and buys some new trucks, and then the truck manufacturer hires some new people, and…and…and…

Elena Kagan is going to turn that stuffy, stodgy old Supreme Court around once she is nominated — she is so funny!

It is the creation, or validation, of a new strategy — by means of sending some more synaptic jolts toward that part of the brain that is responsible for creativity. Regardless of your political leanings, that’s just a bad mix. Reality has its own reality: It doesn’t care how many people are rankled by it, and it doubly doesn’t care whether you find it entertaining. It just chugs along.

If you think A should cause B, because it gives you a warm feeling to think so…reality might disagree. And if it does, you can take your B and stick it. Well, it seems we have a lot of people walking around who just can’t see that. Perhaps they don’t know what it looks like to see an idea put to a test, and so they don’t notice themselves failing to do this. But to them, explaining how the idea works, is equivalent to testing it. They are not accustomed to seeing a thing…causing another thing. And so when they hear themselves expressing a simple cause-and-effect relationship, they imagine something wonderful has taken place.

They think their theory has been absolutely proven. When, in fact, they haven’t even conjured up any particularly persuasive evidence to support it.

See, we’re gonna legalize drugs, see, and then the black market, which exists only because the drugs are illegal, that’s gonna go away, see…and then when people try the drugs who otherwise wouldn’t have tried the drugs, they’ll find out it really isn’t that great and drug use is gonna go way down. But meanwhile, because it’s legal, we’ll be able to TAX it, see, and then, and then, um, we’ll raise all this money from the people who decide they want to go ahead and use it, see, and we’ll have SO MUCH MONEY! All these state governments in debt, the federal government in debt, that will just be a thing of the past. We’ll pay it all off overnight.

He never would have been able to shoot her, or even break into her home, if he didn’t have a gun. We need to get rid of all these guns. Then nobody will ever shoot anybody because there won’t be any guns.

I’m not going to argue with all of this. Drugs certainly will be legal if they stop being illegal…that’s just recognition of a simple fact. But the rest of it seems to be a new tragedy for the times in which we live. People confuse the plausibility of an idea with its proof.

And when the idea is proven not to work, they can’t see it. They can’t process the information, because they’ve already seen it “proven” the other way.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel and Right Wing News.

I’m past the halfway point to my dirt nap, I think; and, to date, not a single soul has been able to provide me with a sufficiently edifying and sensible definition of the cliche that is the title of this post.

And when you think of the policies whose virtues are supposed to rest on an agreed-upon definition of this phrase, that’s more than a bit odd isn’t it?

This gets into Aristotle-Basic-Laws-of-Thought stuff…specifically, the Law of the Excluded Middle — shorter form, “Either/Or.” Indeed, with the benefit of the insight gained from the years that are in my wake, I have seen very little evidence of any pair of waterlines that would have to exist in order to define a “middle.” Instead, I see a greater and greater accumulation of evidence that there is only one such waterline — which would have to mean there is only “rich” and “poor,” with no real middle to be seen. So the laws-of-thought say no middle…and, again, life’s experiences say the same.

In history, the notion of a Middle Class seems to have come about when people began to enjoy comfort and stability without having been born into it by virtue of pedigree. Or by inventing some new industry and becoming the captain of it. When people could start clocking-in and clocking-out, putting in an honest day’s work, repeat it for a few decades and live like a King. Relative to their parents and grandparents, I mean…once that became possible we had a “middle class.”

I think when you examine a specific household; like, for example, when a politician is addressing a single constituent, or a bunch of constituents who all occupy the same bracket; then, and only then, we have a good definition for “middle class” because then, and only then, we have a good definition for the two waterlines. The lower waterline separates dependency classes from non-dependent classes. You are not lower-class, because you don’t have to wait in a soup line, or depend on AFDC benefits, or OSI payments, or “welfare cheese,” or whatever. You depend on paychecks, which you earn, at least in theory. Even if you’re a public sector pencil-pusher in some job that would never exist in a company run by sane people, you’re still drawing a check. And it has the look and feel of a free market. So you aren’t lower-class.

For the high water mark, the definition is even clearer: Whatever you make. Anyone who has a higher income than that, is “upper class.” Rich. Never feel sorry for the rich. They’re evil. They didn’t work for their money. It doesn’t belong to them, or it shouldn’t anyway.

Left to my own devices, which is regrettable, that is the best answer to the question I can produce. “Poor” is anybody who relies on alms — “rich” is whoever makes more than me. Or you. Or whoever is being addressed the politician who uses this term. “Middle class” is whatever is in between those two.

If you consult Wikipedia you’ll find an exhaustive list of historical attempts to define this term. None of them work better than mine.

An interesting aspect I’ve noticed about the middle class, over the years, according to the people who are so enthused about using this term: It is one of the few elements within a free market, whose fortunes rise and fall in direct, as opposed to inverse, proportion with its population. Normally, when you sell something you prosper if there are many buyers & few sellers, and when you buy something it’s helpful to you when there are many sellers and few buyers. But if the middle class dwindles, we’re all supposed to be in a world of hurt. Nobody’s been able to explain this to me, either. The middle class is supposed to be big, robust, dense and fat. “Everybody wins” when that happens. Eh, I dunno…that sounds suspiciously like lots of votes that benefit just the politician, to me.

That’s the only part I can see. If your plan is to take lots of money away from anyone who makes more than $50,000 a year, you’d want lots and lots of people to make $40,000 a year. But who else would that help besides politicians like you? Anybody?

How does that old, Reagan-era cliche go. “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class gets squeezed out.” Squeezed out? What the hell is that supposed to mean? People are working hard, acquiring new skills, changing jobs, earning promotions…so there aren’t as many people left making $40k a year? The people who now make $60k need to go back to making $40k, so the people who make $40k can feel better about themselves?

Now we’re heading straight into a crabs in a bucket mentality.

No — not heading into. That’s where it all started. Really? Am I really saying “middle class” is just code word for “I want everyone to be comfortable and secure…but I don’t want too many people making more than me”? Am I really saying that when politicians start talking about the importance of a “robust, vibrant middle class,” that they’re pandering to this crowd?

Um, actually yeah. Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying.

Once again: Fundamental laws of thought, coincide with the experience of life. That means something.

…which is an exceptionally rare thing. But before the public even got to hear about it, House & Senate sat down and injected the heavy hand of government, to bring it down with a bone-shattering thud upon something that has been irritating me massively.

So is it time for me to support the nanny state?

I’m thinking no. I was big enough to admit, before, that in its nanny way it was doing something I liked…and I supported it then. I ended up burned on that.

Intelligent people learn. Non-intelligent people don’t.

Besides, I find statements like “TV viewers should be able to watch their favorite programs without fear of losing their hearing when the show goes to a commercial” to be, not only non-intelligent, but downright brain-damaged.

CHANGE THE DAMN CHANNEL.

If the commercials are loud, that is the television network’s way of telling you they think you’re stupid.

We were watching Videodrome, which is a really weird movie. My Favorite Gal made the comment that the television’s speakers might be going…and for a minute I thought maybe she was right. I had the volume at 100 when people were talking, and still couldn’t hear them — then when something strange was happening and they played their spooky music I had to yank the volume down to 20 or thereabouts. We had this experience before, with Agency. Eventually I decreed that, since we have to slide in moves from the early 1980’s to re-create the problem, it’s probably not a television-hardware issue…since how does the hardware know what year the movie came out?

But now I’m wondering, what is Sen. Schumber gonna do about that? You say you’ve discovered a right that I have…somewhere in the Constitution, I suppose?…to watch television without losing my hearing, or living in fear of losing my hearing. So how ’bout it? Where’s my legislation? Actually, shouldn’t someone be tapping into my television, and fiddling with my volume controls in case I’m too stupid to find the remote?

Schumer is such a crapweasel. I remember him as the breakfast cereal guy. He doesn’t care about these various issues. What in the world does a loud television commercial have to do with a bowl of overpriced cereal? Other than that your kids are probably the cause of you having to put up with both of them…they have nothing in common with each other except Sen. Schumer.

He’s just a nanny-state nanny through & through, skin down to bones. He’s appealing to the there-oughtta-be-a-law folks — the ones who are incapable of ever forming the words, “I find that annoying, but we don’t need a law about it.” His constituents are the people who don’t belong here. They get ticked off about something every day, and once they’re ticked off we all have to lose some freedoms. They’ll brook no exceptions.

Steve Moore writes in the Wall Street Journal:

During a recent press conference, President Obama blamed George W. Bush for the nation’s fiscal condition. “When I walked in,” he declared, “wrapped in a nice bow was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting right there on my doorstep.” Earlier this year he asserted that “we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.”

Neither statement is correct, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). True enough, the outgoing Bush administration bequeathed big deficits to Mr. Obama. The expected 2009 deficit was $1.19 trillion, not $1.3 trillion, however—and the actual deficit for 2009 came in at $1.41 trillion, meaning that the new president added some $220 billion to the total.

Far more significant, however, was the president’s misstatement that Mr. Bush and the Republicans left the country with $8 trillion of debt over the next 10 years. The CBO’s projected 10-year deficit when Mr. Obama took office was actually $4.09 trillion. Now, after 20 months of his presidency, the expected deficit has almost doubled, to $7.68 trillion.

A strong case can be made that the people most responsible for the gigantic deficits we face today are neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama. The real culprits are Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Congress controls the purse strings. When Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid rose to their present jobs in January 2007, the deficit was $161 billion. It had been on a downward trajectory from $413 billion in 2004. Three years later, the Pelosi-Reid Congress had added $1.2 trillion to the deficit.

Of course, Mr. Bush sponsored or signed into law many of these deficit-raising bills, such as the bank bailouts and effective tax rebates of 2008. But the Democratic Congress passed them.

Long forgotten is the promise Mrs. Pelosi made on the day she became speaker: “Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.” I think future generations would like a do-over.

Budget deficits, public debt, unemployment, appeasement. It seems all four are connected.

And they’ve been on a sharp rise since, oh, January 2007 or thereabouts. If a problem starts three quarters of the way through George Bush’s presidency, and continues onward through today when he’s been out of office for nearly two years, do we really have cause to call it a Bush problem?

The Constitution mentions the legislative branch before it mentions the executive. Article I and Article II — look ’em up.

Nancy and Harry are out there claiming to have done a fantastic job. And like any other politician, it seems they actually believe it.

The way the timelines match up, they should be absolutely mortified.

From a blog post at Time by Joe Klein, hat tip to Boortz.

[Vintner Barry Sterling] said he was deeply worried about the country. “I was born on the day of the 1929 stock market crash, so I’ve lived from the Great Depression to the Great Recession,” he said, “and I must say I’m amazed by how little progress we’ve made. We stopped regulating. We dropped taxes to unsustainable levels. I spent a good part of my life in the 70% tax bracket. It didn’t discourage me from working,” he said, referring to the supply-side argument that lower tax rates spur enterprise. “It made me work harder. My father lived with 90% rates during World War II. I’m actually mystified by the greed now. I don’t understand families like Koch brothers,” he said referring to the Republican Tea Party bankrollers. “They have so much money. Why do they need more?”

First of all: Nobody gets to decide how much somebody else “needs.”

Second of all: Greed is not wanting to hang on to the money you earned. If it is anything meaningful, it is wanting to grab onto the money someone else has earned.

Third of all: You can drop half-truths all day long about how you were motivated to work harder by the tax man coming and taking away all or most of your profits…but at the end of the day, people don’t do more of something when it becomes less profitable to do it, especially when it involves risk.

I got a letter yesterday from the Vice President, who had something interesting to say. It was very surprising. I thought Vice President Biden was trying to save our economy, but look what he had to say to me:

Morgan —

I’ll tell you one thing that worries me about this election: There’s a small group of billionaires and corporate special interests that are trying to buy their way back into power. They’re spending their fortunes to defeat our folks and elect some of the most right-wing Republicans this country has ever seen.

We’ve launched the By the People Fund to fight back, with the goal of reaching 3 million grassroots donations to power the most ambitious on-the-ground effort ever waged in an election like this.

I jotted down a brief reply and hit Send:

Do my eyes deceive me?

You and Barack are supposed to be doing what you can to revive our economy…and instead, you’ve put together a “People Fund” to orchestrate a fight against the people who are trying to earn money and create jobs for others?

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

RTWT.

People who are politically motivated because they’re tired of something, aren’t so much as a fraction as dangerous as people who are politically motivated because they want to “Make The World More Better.” You get an opportunity to do something deceptive and ugly to make the world better, and hey, what the hell.

Hat tip: Linkiest.

Can’t remember where I found this, but the scrolling nature of the innerwebs was threatening to sink it forever so I thought I should snag the floating driftwood while I could.

Why Leftists Are Elitist
Posted by Shannon Love on September 23rd, 2010

Non-leftists spend a lot of time these days telling leftists that the leftists are “elitist.” Leftists usually respond with something like this:

But somehow these born-into-wealth aristocrats get away with calling people who advocate for, say a living wage, or universal health care, or decent public education “elites.”

Translation: We leftists are not elitist because we do things for the economically non-rich that we leftists believe to be in the best interest of the non-rich. Elitists only do things that leftists believe to be in the interest of the rich.

By the leftist definition of elitism, we could live in an absolutist, hereditary aristocracy and still not have an elitist government as long as the aristocrats made decisions that, in the opinion of leftists, benefited the poor.

The leftists are wrong. Elitism isn’t defined by who benefits, elitism is defined by who decides.

FrankJ takes the one hundred and first Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award.

With relative ease, I might add:

How hard would it be for a browser to say, “This webpage is about to play annoying music; do you want it to?”?

However — we do have to grant an honorable mention to another entry. This one, also, is from FrankJ. Same post.

Sadly, “Bush sucked” and “Bush was way better than Obama” are not mutually exclusive.

So I see we’re getting another one of those “Congress addresses a court decision in the wake of a smackdown” situations on Net Neutrality.

U.S. regulators would get authority over Internet-traffic practices of companies such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. for two years in a plan being weighed by congressional staff, two people involved with the talks said.

Legislation letting the Federal Communications Commission regulate Internet service providers was being discussed with industry representatives yesterday by aides to Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the private talks.

The two years would give the FCC and Congress time to permanently resolve a long-running fight over rules on net neutrality. Internet-service providers would be barred under such regulations from selectively blocking or slowing content going to subscribers while favoring their own offerings and those of business partners.

“I’m pleased that Chairman Waxman and the other members of Congress who are involved are making a real effort,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said today at a news conference in Washington. “I admire and I appreciate the effort and I hope it succeeds.”

The compromise would let the FCC claim authority over Web service delivered over wires, such as by cable and fiber-optic lines, while allowing the agency to write less-stringent rules for wireless services such as mobile phones, the people said.

The smackdown actually happened several months ago. You might have missed it — fellow Right Wing News contributor Melissa Clouthier captured the decision, linking to a Google cache from Wall Street Journal:

A U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission overstepped when it cited cable-giant Comcast Corp. for slowing some Internet traffic on its network, dealing a blow to big Web commerce companies and other proponents of “net neutrality.”

In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the FCC exceeded its authority when it sanctioned Comcast in 2008 for deliberately preventing some subscribers from using peer-to-peer file-sharing services to download large files.

The push is on to somehow — any way it can possibly be done — put the Government in the driver’s seat. What is strange about this situation, what the public doesn’t really understand, is this: The situation has been made more urgent for those who support Net Neutrality, in the wake of a policy framework agreement between Google and Verizon. Which brings about some, although by no means all, of what they were wanting.

It lets some of the pressure out of their movement. It allows a portion of the crisis to go to waste.

ZDNet did a decent write-up on it a few days ago:

The proposal offered by the companies contains seven elements. They are:

* Make the FCC’s current wireline broadband openness principles fully enforceable at the FCC. Those principles ensure that consumers have access to all legal content on the Internet and can use any application, service or devices of their choosing. The Comcast court decision called the enforcement of those principles into question, the companies said.
* New enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices would prohibit wireline broadband providers from discriminating against or prioritizing content, applications or services that cause harm to users or competition. The principle includes a presumption against prioritization of Internet traffic – including paid prioritization.
* Transparency rules. The proposal creates enforceable transparency rules for both wireline and wireless services which requires broadband providers to give consumers clear, understandable information about the services they offer and their capabilities and to provide app and content providers with the information they need about network management practices.
* The FCC’s role and authority. The proposal provides for a new enforcement mechanism for the FCC. Specifically, the FCC would enforce these openness policies on a case-by-case basis, using a complaint-driven process and could move swiftly to halt violators, including the authority to impose a penalty of up to $2 million.
* Allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services offered today. The companies note that it’s too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options. The proposal includes safeguards to ensure that such online services are distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules.
* Different rules for wireless – for now. The still-nascent mobile landscape is changing rapidly. Under the proposal, most of the wireline principles would not apply to wireless, except for the transparency requirement. Also, the Government Accountability Office would be required to report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace.
* Finally, the proposal supports the reform of the Federal Universal Service Fund, so that it is focused on deploying broadband in areas where it is not now available.

The Hard Left, which generally seems to move on things like this as a singular entity, is not cool with this. The unicellular organism, aptly represented by Susie Madrak and Josh Silver, is apoplectic.

The deal marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as you know it. Since its beginnings, the Net was a level playing field that allowed all content to move at the same speed, whether it’s ABC News or your uncle’s video blog. That’s all about to change, and the result couldn’t be more bleak for the future of the Internet, for television, radio and independent voices.

Which I find at once both amusing and sad. Silver’s argument is an ultimate absurdity: We’ve gots ta have some new rules, because the way things have worked up until now is just great.

What Google and Verizon have done, is cobble together a modern-day version of the Hays Code. Not so much in the content of their framework, as in its motive:

In the early 1920s, three major scandals rocked Hollywood: the manslaughter trials of comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who was charged with being responsible for the death of actress Virginia Rappe at a wild party in San Francisco during Labor Day weekend of 1921; the murder of director William Desmond Taylor in February 1922 and the revelations regarding his bisexuality; and the drug-related death of popular actor Wallace Reid in January 1923.[citation needed]

Other allegedly drug-related deaths, of stars Olive Thomas, Barbara La Marr, Jeanne Eagels, and Alma Rubens, resulted in persistent calls for censorship and “cleaning up” of Hollywood through the 1920s. These stories were sensationalized in the press and grabbed headlines across the country. They appeared to confirm a widespread perception that many Americans had of Hollywood — that it was “Sin City”.

Public outcry over perceived immorality in Hollywood and the movies, as well as the growing number of city and state censorship boards, led to the creation in 1922 of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (which became the Motion Picture Association of America in 1945), an industry trade and lobby organization. The association was headed by Will H. Hays, a well-connected Republican lawyer who had previously been United States Postmaster General and the 1920 campaign manager for President Warren G. Harding. Hays immediately banned Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle from the movies, in spite of Arbuckle’s innocence, and instituted a morality clause to apply to anyone working in films. He also derailed attempts to institute federal censorship over the movies.
:
An amendment to the Code, adopted on June 13, 1934, established the Production Code Administration (PCA) and required all films released on or after July 1, 1934, to obtain a certificate of approval before being released. The first film to receive an MPPDA seal of approval was The World Moves On. For more than thirty years following, virtually all motion pictures produced in the United States adhered to the code. The Production Code was not created or enforced by federal, state, or city government. In fact, the Hollywood studios adopted the code in large part in the hopes of avoiding government censorship, preferring self-regulation to government regulation. [emphasis mine]

So it is exactly the same principle being applied. The industry convinces Congress, and the American People, that it is to some degree self-regulating. The pressure behind the legislation is somewhat bled off.

The major difference being — the Hays Code did not voluntarily empower a government agency to enforce rules against it, as the Google/Verizon agreement has done.

We see, once again, there really isn’t any way to gratify the hard left. They don’t accept compromises, even after having walked into the negotiations with absolutely nothing. The decision by the three-judge panel from half a year ago was unequivocal. Comcast, an evil monolith of a money-grubbing corporation, had been engaged in precisely the shenanigans feared by those who support Net Neutrality: They had blocked BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service, on their network. The FCC stepped in to say, shame-shame-everybody-knows-yer-name, we’re here to enforce a level playing field. Comcast took them to court, and they won.

So the rule of the law is clear. The decision that favored Comcast had nothing to do with “how do we get a level playing field,” it had everything to do with authority. The FCC simply didn’t, and does not, have it — game-set-match.

Now the industry, or at least two giants within the industry, is giving the FCC a sort of voluntary authority anyway. The left isn’t happy. The left is howling. It sees corporate skulduggery.

They aren’t representing the public will. The public is against this kind of regulation. Now why is that; don’t they want that level playing field? Do they want to have secrets kept from them?

Perhaps it would be good to explore my own opinion about it. On this issue, I don’t enjoy much potential for speaking for the majority; I’m a fringe kook. I’m really way out there. You probably don’t know anyone who sees this thing my way. But there is a likelihood that, once we explore my thoughts on it, we might come to understand what the average citizen thinks.

Think of a private meeting taking place within a private rental hall. If I act as the officer of an organization, and use those organization’s funds to rent the hall — or maybe we own the hall — can I, in the course of a meeting, interrupt someone in the audience, cut off his microphone, ask security to have him removed?

Yes, yes and yes. This would not be violating the First Amendment. It would be exercising the First Amendment. My hall.

Let’s go back and consult the rules again shall we:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances [emphasis mine]

You say: There it is in black and white, Freeberg! Everyone gets to say everything!

No, go back and read it again. Slowly. One word at a time:

Congress shall…

You can stop now.

It’s “Congress shall not,” not “Comcast shall not.” Comcast has a rental hall; it owns a network. It gets to shut people up there.

You see, we have been on a wrong path for a whole lot of years now. We took a wrong turn before the FCC even came into existence. Supposedly, because radio station frequencies constitute a “scarce resource” in the aggregate, the Federal Government gets to use the Commerce Clause from Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Section 8, to overrule the First Amendment. This is just wrong. Yes, I’m saying in the late 1920’s, we were wrong. The Commerce Clause does not amend the First Amendment; it’s the other way around.

You say “Freeberg, are you saying the FCC doesn’t have the authority to regulate radio stations and it should let them run all hog wild like that?” And I say — yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

If the Supreme Court itself says something contrary, it’s just wrong.

And SCOTUS did say something contrary…and it was wrong. The occasion was the Red Lion case from 1969. One of the last from the Earl Warren court, which by itself is a powerful reason to overturn it in my book.

The decision goes like this: Because radio stations are a scarce resource, the Government gets to restrict, abridge, censor, regulate, even though it isn’t supposed to restrict, abridge, censor or regulate.

So now my viewpoint, whether you agree with it or not, is perhaps becoming clear. I do not respect the prior decisions that put the Government in charge of anything related to communication; in my book, “regulate” is functionally synonymous with “abridge.” I don’t see a need for a centralized authority that assigns radio station numbers, no matter how technologically compelling is the argument in favor of having one, to possess any effect whatsoever in the endeavor to conjure up federal authority where it does not exist — in fact, has been out-and-out banned.

Yes, I do think those old dead white guys from the 1790’s, were thinking of the Internet. We have abused their design on a fundamental level.

But here we come to the part where a Dictator Freeberg would really run roughshod over our existing frameworks, statutes and protocols. Here is where I would rip the heart right out of the beast.

And the odd thing is, here is where, I think, the majority sides with me.

I do not respect the authority of the Federal Government to codify, or enforce, any rules anywhere that deal with “non-discrimination.” I do not acknowledge any intrinsic ability within the government to enforce the very concept of such rules — or even to comprehend such a concept.

The Government discriminates. Period.

It engages in double-talk. It passes a supposed “Equal Protection Clause” within a constitutional amendment, and a century or so later it engages in something called “affirmative action.”

You see, the truth of the matter is this: Public agencies have an unfortunate tendency to view the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. They are friendly to some demographic groups and hostile to others. And I hate to break it to people who are still in the process of learning this, but it’s always going to be that way.

Companies see the world in terms of good guys and bad guys too. But the difference is, when the “bad guy” starts helping to pay the bills he suddenly becomes a good guy. So a privately held company will discriminate, and then at a moment’s notice, flip-flop. Rather comical to watch, really.

Government isn’t going to flip-flop until one voting bloc starts to outnumber another, a process which can take generations. Until then, the good guy stays good and the bad guy stays bad. Government discriminates. It really comes down to this: Government wouldn’t know “non-discrimination” if non-discrimination ran up behind it and kicked it square in the ass.

And this gets down to the heart of the matter. Go back and read the articles put up by devoted lefties Silver and Madrak. In my worldview, their sanity is being subjected to serious question. The chief executive of the Government — our President — six years in every randomly-selected ten, he’s a Republican, someone who is evil in every conceivable way according to these two. And their argument boils down to what? They’re upset not so much about what will be decided later on, but more on the question of who gets to do the deciding. They want more power to be entrusted in this entity that they think is thoroughly corrupt sixty percent of the time.

I’d rather listen to the U.S. Constitution…and to history. This is a situation in which they both say the same thing: If you really want something you could somewhat sensibly call “fairness” — you keep the Government out of it.

And yes, to oppose the Government’s regulation of the assignment of radio station numbers, is often ranked right up there on the scale of libertarian lunacy with opposing sidewalks, fire halls and police stations. Well, maybe people associate it with those but that isn’t how I see it. I’ll favor the sidewalks and firemen and policemen.

But Government has no role in “leveling” a playing field on the Internet. It is specifically barred from restricting our speech, and that means they can’t regulate it. They can’t tell us how to say it, where to stand when we’re saying it, and they don’t even have a role in protecting us if someone is trying to shut us up. Not if that guy owns the forum.

Why am I arguing that it’s “free speech” to shut people up? Because when public-sector busybodies ensure “everyone gets to have a say,” all too often this translates to making sure someone else doesn’t have a say; someone who isn’t part of the “everyone.” Yes, you can use free speech to make sure someone else doesn’t have free speech. It’s been done. Our Government has done it over and over again.

It comes down to respect for the right to property. That has to be the foundation of our other rights — because if it isn’t, then we have that situation where our rights come from the Government. And if our rights come from the Government, then that Government gets to take those rights away any time it pleases, and there will be no recourse, no appeal.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

— Misattributed to Ronald Reagan, apocryphal quote by Thomas Jefferson

The New York Times tells us what is wrong with what some of us are planning to do —

WANT to give affluent households a present worth $700 billion over the next decade? In a period of high unemployment and fiscal austerity, this idea may seem laughable. Amazingly, though, it is getting traction in Washington.

Stopped reading at this point. Why go on?

Out where people work for a living, this is not so laughable and not so amazing. Someone didn’t take the time to step outside the offices of the New York Times, where apparently it is considered wrong to make a profit at something, into the fresh air of the real world where people like to make money.

I saw a headline in the newspaper yesterday where democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown laid a charge down that opponent Meg Whitman has plans that would “help the rich.”

Another big-fat-DUH moment. We all want a better and stronger economy, right? What is an economy, but the opportunity to make money. And keep the money you make.

Jerry Brown is against this? Someone has some explaining to do, and I don’t think it’s Meg Whitman.

All in all, I think blogger friend Phil is right on track with that latest awesome quote he found from Ohio’s former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell:

We have become a culture where making money doesn’t entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

Reverse course on that, and I say the economy will do just fine. Make it okay to create business activity and realize a personal profit from it, and it’ll be good.

Make it possible for people to get rich, and people will do it.

Prove me wrong.

Man…there’s really no limit to how stupid the smartest-guy-in-the-room can be, is there?

He put together a nice list for everyone. Thought I would share it.

1: fool
2: gullible
3: ignorant
4: prone to hysteria
5: prone to conspiracy thinking
6: bad
7: immoral
8: silly
9: selling out your own economic self interests

Nick really doesn’t want anyone learning both sides of an issue; only the one side they can find, replicated over and over again, in the other news sources.

I found an example of what Nick must not want people to know. It concerns a private citizen’s group that has been finding rampant incidents of voter registration fraud.

“The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them” [Catherine] Engelbrecht said, because those houses were the most likely to have fraudulent registrations attached to them. “Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic…

“But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking.”

It was Houston’s poorest and predominantly black district, which has led some to accuse the group of targeting poor black areas. But Engelbrecht rejects that, saying, “It had nothing to do with politics. It was just the numbers.”

The task was overwhelming. With 1.9 million voters and 886 voting precincts, Houston’s Harris County is the second largest county in the country — and the key to Texas elections.

The group called for help and quickly got 30 donated computers and “tens of thousands of hours” of volunteer work. And then the questions started to arise.

“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters.”

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Steve Caddle, who also works for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.

Caddle told local newspapers that there “had been mistakes made,” and he said he had fired 30 workers for filing defective voter registration applications. He could not be reached for this article.

Is it possible to embarrass and stigmatize all of the American people into becoming, and staying, ignorant of one selected side of each issue that comes along?

Only time will tell. At least, thanks to Nick’s openness and candor, we know that effort is out there. And thanks to the shenanigans of “Houston Votes,” we know how advisable it is — or isn’t — to stop reading & listening where complete strangers tell you you shouldn’t be reading & listening.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

…?

I’m a parent and I see right through this:

Big brother and little sister down in the rec room playing LC&TGoL together. You have a “Leap of Faith” which depends on one player leaping into oblivion and depending on the other player grappling him with her grappling hook and pulling him up. Which she starts to do…and looks like she’s going to do…then she drops him. Because it’s so funny. Big brother is sick to death of this level and if he has to look at it too much longer his head’s gonna explode, but little sister keeps dropping him because it’s the one time she can get back at him. And laughing about it.

What do you think happens?

My God…it really is true what I’ve been saying. VIDEO GAME DESIGNERS HATE PARENTS. Don’t know why. But after this it’s undeniable.

Five minutes…followed by shouting and yelling and screaming and crying…followed by “You two stop playing that game and go outside!” and “You’re banned from that game for a whole week now!”

Over and over and over again. It cannot play out any other way. Really think about it…how else could it go?

And they must know it too.

Wonder how I can get in on some of this fun? I’m getting down to the “If ya can’t lick ’em join ’em” stage with this thing. And heaven knows, I don’t feel a spirit of camaraderie with all the parents out there.

Where do good ideas come from?

There may be a better-thought-out explanation somewhere, but I’ve yet to come across one. Impressive insight displayed here.

Hat tip to RightNetwork.

He posted without comment, and I shall follow suit…

I met a fairy today that would grant me one wish.

“I want to live forever,” I said.

“Sorry” said the fairy, “I’m not allowed to grant wishes like that!”

“Fine,” I said, “I want to die after the Democrats get their heads out of their asses!”

“You crafty bastard,” said the fairy.

Way to go Andrew. And I wonder how many other “libertarians” fit into exactly this mold. You know, just because you want everyone shooting up, sending entire neighborhoods at a time into blight, without any consequences or recourse available to anybody else whatsoever, doesn’t make you a “libertarian.”

From Newsbusters.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

Hat tip to Kate.

ObamaCare: Even worse than critics thought:

» Obamacare won’t decrease health care costs for the government. According to Medicare’s actuary, it will increase costs. The same is likely to happen for privately funded health care.

» As written, Obamacare covers elective abortions, contrary to Obama’s promise that it wouldn’t. This means that tax dollars will be used to pay for a procedure millions of Americans across the political spectrum view as immoral. Supposedly, the Department of Health and Human Services will bar abortion coverage with new regulations but these will likely be tied up for years in litigation, and in the end may not survive the court challenge.

» Obamacare won’t allow employees or most small businesses to keep the coverage they have and like. By Obama’s estimates, as many as 69 percent of employees, 80 percent of small businesses, and 64 percent of large businesses will be forced to change coverage, probably to more expensive plans.

» Obamacare will increase insurance premiums — in some places, it already has. Insurers, suddenly forced to cover clients’ children until age 26, have little choice but to raise premiums, and they attribute to Obamacare’s mandates a 1 to 9 percent increase. Obama’s only method of preventing massive rate increases so far has been to threaten insurers.

» Obamacare will force seasonal employers — especially the ski and amusement park industries — to pay huge fines, cut hours, or lay off employees.

When is the last time any “landmark” legislation brought down the cost of something?

Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella:

If the women at the feminist group The New Agenda do not hear an apology soon from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for his “sexist” comment, he will be facing more than just a few frowning fems.

At a New York fundraiser hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, Reid praised New York Democratic
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand for being the “hottest member” in the Senate.

When Politico asked Reid’s office for a clarification, spokesman Jim Manley said, “What can I say, she made The Hill’s ‘Most Beautiful’ list. Of course, he also went on to praise her skill and tenacity and described her as an effective member of the New York delegation as well.”

Amy Siskind, president and co-founder of The New Agenda, told The Daily Caller that if Reid does not promptly voice regret, she and her group will be building a coalition against the senator and demanding a mea culpa.

“We believe Senator Harry Reid needs to issue an apology,” Siskind said. “He had a chance to clarify his comments and instead of clarifying it his spokesperson just said, ‘yeah, that’s basically what he meant,’ and in this day and age if that is the way he is going to refer to one of the seventeen women in the Senate, then you know he should just get back on his dinosaur and go back to Nevada and stay there.”

Hat tip: Inst.

Wonder if Amy Siskind has a nice pair of legs. I’m a sucker for nice looking legs.

Can’t you envision a couple of dinosaurs reading about that quote, and going “Hey! Dang it, I find that offensive!” Also, it kind of looks like she’s trying to say something none to flattering about people who live in Nevada. Someone should ask Nevada people what they think of this. I’ve been to Nevada, there’s people living there…if you drive far enough you’ll eventually see some.

Dinosaurs I’m not too sure about.

…being able to deal with making a choice, on some level more sophisticated than “which option do I like better.”

This is what the arguing is all about lately. Our country has just been wrenched through a sharp S-curve. We had a President who made a habit out of telling people the situation as he saw it, and to hell with whether they were ready to hear it or not; now we’ve got a President who’s spent His entire lifetime learning He can always win, as long as He acts confident and to hell with whether He’s telling people what’s true, as long as it’s what they want to hear.

That is why there is so much arguing lately and why it is so heated. When you lack maturity, you have the luxury of defining truth according to taste. This causes strong antisocial feeling because, necessarily, it must mean anyone who says anything contrary must be a liar.

There are still quite a few people walking around who think the previous President lied about everything. Of this, alone, I cannot begrudge them. President Bush was a politician; diagnosing politicians, especially politicians representing opposing parties and movements, is something we all do pretty much all the time.

The way they decided he was a liar, however, all too often was something like this: I don’t like what he’s saying. It makes me unhappy. That makes him a liar.

What was he saying? The world is always going to be dangerous and unstable, until such time as the Saddam Hussein problem is addressed, head-on, militarily.

If you lack maturity — maturity, the way I’m defining it here — of course that’s a lie. It isn’t soothing. Doesn’t fill you with happy thoughts head to toe.

If you’ve acquired this maturity and made it your business to deal with things the way they really are, it’s a big fat DUH.

The reason it seems lately we can put so much effort into problems that really aren’t that complicated, and continue to see success elude us, is that there are a lot of people who lack maturity. It just isn’t required of us that often. We’ve got fewer and fewer people working for a living, and those among us who are fortunate enough to work, all too often are simply following instructions. The “quality” of what we do is determined entirely by how well we’ve followed the steps. So engaging reality, in addition to being frightening, is becoming a dying art.

Lately, even people who’ve worked themselves into that ultimate level of independence, running their own business, are occasionally found to lack this maturity. Think, as a consumer, how many products and services you buy — and after they’re delivered, you have the final word on whether they’re adequate or not. This is a metric caught in a steep decline. Hamburgers are built the way they’re built; if you like them, oh that’s fine, but that’s because you happen to like the burger the way they build them here. Nobody had to approach you, find out what you want in a burger, and put some real thought into how to fulfill the requirements you had in mind.

The same is true of cars. Even houses. This house is built this way because that’s the way they build ’em here, now do you like it or not?

So the result is a society filled with craftsmen, and their employees, who just follow steps.

Any given human ability that is difficult to maintain, will fade just so far and then bounce back if it is required. This one, sad to say, isn’t. And so I see parents trying to teach their children to make choices that will turn out to be the right ones…how to decide things. And they make the mistake of saying “do you like this one or do you like that one?” The child will learn to decide this as a matter of taste, because that is the path of least resistance. This failure will be corrected later on if there is a need for it to be corrected.

But there probably won’t be any such need.

And so we decide what to do based on what we like. And we decide who’s a liar based on who, within proximity, is detected saying anything contrary.

We want to exist with each other in harmony, and we want to be capable. I’m afraid we aren’t doing a good job asking for either one of those things, so we’re facing a future that is missing both. Unless something changes.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Sorry, I just can’t climb on this bandwagon.

I know the frustration with Obama is in the air and it’s palpable, like the electricity you can feel when a desert thunderstorm is near. We who were never fooled by Him, should be grateful for the materialization of she who was once fooled by Him and wised up.

Sorry, the only reaction I really want to see is a swift smack across the face. I’m just as upset with her as I am with any Obama voter, in fact more than the average. Velma Hart is not nineteen years old. She knows you don’t grow eggs in trees, and that you don’t have money in your checking account just because there are still checks left in the book, and that just because your laptop is “wireless” doesn’t mean you never have to plug it in.

I’d like to see her sent to a thousand hours of community service, telling kids in high school how not to pick a presidential candidate. Just like people who got busted for drunk driving.

Yes, I’m quite serious.

This country’s system of government depends on people recognizing their responsibilities when they vote. Just like a car is designed around the idea that its driver knows what he’s doing.

Now we’ve got a failed trillion-dollar stimulus plan, and we’re planning a second one. Every baby born is thirty large ones in debt, we’ve got one hell of an inflation hobgoblin getting ready to kick our asses. Don’t even get me started on ObamaCare.

None of this was necessary.

We owe it all to people like Velma.

++Smack++

Glenn Reynolds snags the one hundredth BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) award. Ding ding ding ding ding!

It’s more than one sentence, actually. But as is usually the case…that’s alright.

he government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Hammer. Nail. Bang!

With a grateful hat tip to Bob Belvedere.