Found it here.

This gets into what Sharon the Liberal Heretic was talking about; there is this mindset out there, it seems, that a “right” comes into being as soon as the right people think it would be a cool idea. They’re either appointed to some position of power, or else they get together and form a majority…and “endow” their little hearts out.

Most of the rights that are coming into being this way, lately, cost someone else something. When a transvestite has a “new civil right” to use the women’s rest room, for example, this obviously puts other people into situations that they just have to learn to tolerate.

I wonder how these spontaneous-endowers would feel if this was turned around. What if their auto finance company approached them someday and said “We just decided we have a right to receive your payment on the 5th of the month, instead of having to wait for the 22nd of the month.” I’m thinking they wouldn’t like that too well.

But they get to do it to others. They get to make it into a regular habit. And then, something of a nervous tic.

How do they justify this? It’s that other clause, the “created equal” clause…turns out, they aren’t very big fans of this. They can’t be.

Bull’s-eye. We push it out further and further…inventing new “rights” as we go.

From I Hate My Cubicle (warning, site is generally NSFW).

Via Fox News, we learn about the strongest statement from the Wonder of Wasilla, to date, regarding presidential prospects:

Sarah Palin may be edging closer to a 2012 presidential run, telling Fox News “I would give it a shot” if the American people think she’s “the one.”

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee was in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday for the Reagan Dinner, a big GOP fundraiser in the heart of water-testing country for presidential candidates.

Palin has remained coy about her ambitions, but she elaborated a bit in an interview with Fox News, attaching several conditions to the possibility of a 2012 presidential run.

“If the American people were to be ready for someone who is willing to shake it up, and willing to get back to time-tested truths, and help lead our country towards a more prosperous and safe future and if they happen to think I was the one, if it were best for my family and for our country, of course I would give it a shot,” she said.

I’ll make a strong statement of my own: I think we who are following stories like this, know every bit as much about the outcome of Sarah Palin’s decision, as Sarah Palin does.

I’ve been in her shoes many a time — with my name offered as a candidate for some position of leadership.

No, settle down…nobody’s asked me to run for President just yet. Nobody in their right mind anyway.

But other, far more modest, positions. Sometimes I say no, sometimes I say yes. Sometimes I say no and look back on that and go “Yeah, that was a big mistake.” It hasn’t happened the other way quite yet.

But I know from whence she’s coming. If I can’t do the job, but people think I can, and there are no other options, I might as well learn as I go…if I can do the job, but people think I can’t, then I better let someone else take this thing. It sucks big green ones, but sometimes the will of the majority must prevail. There’s no point going against it if they think you can’t do it, and there’s little point going against it if they think you can.

And let’s face it: On whether a meaningful consensus of Americans would be receptive to a Palin presidency…that’s a big fat question-mark.

There are a whole lot of people who have no confidence in her whatsoever, and are never gonna. Perhaps that effectively rules her out as a viable candidate. But if so, you’d have to rule out every single President who ever served, clear back to John Adams in 1797. In other words, this means very little. If Palin is sworn in as our next President, she is going to have her “Hurricane Katrina” or “Gulf Oil Spill” moment, sure as I’m sitting here in my underwear right now…as would anybody else. And in her case, there’s going to be a rousing chorus of “I Told You So’s.” Just as there would be, with anybody else sworn in as our 45th President.

Palin needs just as much time to gauge the public’s readiness to receive her candidacy, as anybody else would. In fact, she needs considerably more. Like the incumbent President she would oppose, she has been polarizing, albeit in a more constructive way. Nobody but nobody, it seems, feels lukewarm about Palin.

It cannot be denied that her ideas have great currency. There is, in fact, a burst of energy behind her ideas right now. Which is interesting, because her ideas are rather plain; in fact, they are wholly lacking in any irony at all. They’re of the “up is up and down is down” variety. NOBODY who is eager to brag about superhuman levels of intelligence and nuance, is going to put any capital behind quaint, plain thoughts like these.

That government which governs best, as Thoreau said, governs least.

If you want the economy to be stronger, don’t fight the people who produce our nation’s wealth. Help them.

Every move we make on foreign policy should make it more rewarding for others to become our friends, or unnecessarily exorbitant to become our enemies. Preferably both.

Make it inexpensive to hire people, or to keep them on board once you have them hired. Then, maybe businesses will keep people on board…and perhaps hire some more.

If your idea is bad, I don’t care how smart you are.

You want a “stimulus”? Cut taxes. There, that’s all the stimulus you should want or need.

A mosque at Ground Zero? That’s a no. The relevant rule is called the “don’t be a dick” rule, and yes it pertains to that dick down in Florida who wanted to burn the Korans.

Once I’m in, I’m in. If you don’t do what I say, I’ll fire you. If I’ve fired someone, and you run interference to try to get him un-fired, I’ll fire you too. When I’m elected to an office to deliver a message and set a tone, that message is going to get delivered, that tone is going to be set, and you’d best stay out of the way.

We’ve got some people in what could be called menial jobs, who are doing some wonderful, glorious things and they deserve our respect. Yes, we have ranks, we have pay grades, we have titles…but that only means so much. Anyone who’s doing something you might not be ready, willing or able to do yourself, regardless of what they pull down for an hour on the job before overtime, is deserving of your respect.

If the idea has been tried before a few times, and it hasn’t worked yet, then let’s shelve it until someone makes it work.

Alternative fuels are great, but until they’re on the assembly line, mass production, competitive in total-cost-of-ownership, energy density and ease of replenishment…drill baby drill!

Dads should instill strength and wisdom.

Moms should instill strength and wisdom.

Men should instill loyalty, trust and chivalry.

Women should instill grace, charm and decorum.

Boys and girls should possess and accumulate courage, integrity, alertness, innocence, intellect and skill.

The Government should fear the citizens, not the other way around.

When you believe in things like these, you pass up chances to show off how much smarter you are than everybody else. That, I’m thinking, is why Barack Obama & friends don’t believe in them. You’re looking here, folks, at the reason why Obama ideas tend to be bad ideas. When you ascend to “There’s Just Something About Him!!” levels of wonderfulness, you can’t ever be caught peddling a mundane idea…even in situations where the mundane idea is the only one that will net some positive results…or where the mundane idea is the only non-destructive, non-toxic one. You have to peddle poison. You have to do whatever is ironic. Whatever grabs attention. Whatever says “the world is flat and wet is dry and up is down.”

Because extraordinary people do not believe what ordinary people believe. They aren’t allowed to. That’s why the last two years have been so wretched for so many people. Any idea that would really lower our unemployment rate, strengthen our economy, encourage our nation’s friends, discourage our enemies…has been summarily eliminated from the discussions, where discussions count, at the very first stage. Demigods like Barack Obama have a responsibility. They can’t go thinking ordinary thoughts, putting their glorious weight behind mundane, mortal ideas. Might hurt their mojo.

So we have to keep trying “ironic” ideas. Down-is-up-and-up-is-down ideas. Of course they don’t work…and when they don’t, there’s always some wonderful excuse.

Well, the public seems to have tired of this. I believe comment-poster Jason spoke for my nation, when he said:

This is why I laugh at the accusation that Palin is an airhead. If this is what we get when the smartest guy is in the big chair, I think I’d prefer the airhead.

For the last two years, I’ve been debating with liberals on the innerwebz. Actually, it’s more accurate to say I’ve been debating them, rather pointlessly, for two dozen years, off and on. Yeah, really. Well, in recent times I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of watching them become more insecure, more brittle, more agitated, as their Holy Man has spent His goodwill. Now, Palin has become a more and more pivotal force in our nation’s politics, and they’re borderline apoplectic.

Cornered, they are demanding something out of me and people who think like me. They want a simple acknowledgment of the one point they seem to think is absolutely devastating to a Palin candidacy. The last time I was beckoned to grant my approval to this simple truth, was just a handful of hours ago. And the simple truth is this: That Palin is ordinary. There’s little-to-nothing that is special about her.

This is either a Saul-Alinsky tactic to get the opposition pissed off…or else, it is sincere. Lately I have begun to think it is sincere. They really don’t get it.

You see, we’re living in two different worlds. They want Obama. And before Obama, they wanted Kerry. Before Kerry they wanted Al Gore, and before Gore they wanted Clinton. They don’t care about ideas, they want personality. They want a personality that is so remarkable, that it can be associated with any idea…random ideas…poorly-thought-out ideas…messy hodgepodge ideas…bad ideas…harmful ideas. They want a personality that is a balloon, so buoyant that it can be festooned to the weight of an awesomely bad idea, and still achieve lift. That is what they have been wanting for a very long time.

That is all Barack Obama is. Obama is nothing more than His skin color, coupled up with His hopey-changey-charisma-or-whatever. Obama is a gimmick, one so buoyant that it can be affixed to the dead weight of a bad idea…which, in turn, is selected randomly. That is what He represents.

Those of us who live in the other world, don’t care about the personality too much, we’re all about the idea. Because we work for a living, you see. So we want ideas that will work, like we work.

We want ideas that are so good, that they can be carried aloft by any old personality. The personality of Sarah Palin…or of Ben Stein. Yes, she talks like a dotty old Aunt from Minnesota. Her voice has a warbling sound to it, that I confess I couldn’t listen to twelve hours a day — any more than I could listen to Obama’s smugness for that long.

But her ideas are good. They are effective in their simplicity…and in their truth. They are up-is-up, down-is-down ideas. They are the ideas we need.

Obama took charge, and the unemployment rate rocketed up to 9.5 or 10 or so, and just sat there.

Enough is enough. We, as a nation, are ready to vote on some ideas. And whether Palin receives the vote as a candidate, or not, her ideas are the ones that are receiving the support right now. It can’t be any other way, because at this late date we just can’t afford anything else.

Fox News:

From the administration that brought you “man-caused disaster” and “overseas contingency operation,” another terminology change is in the pipeline.

The White House wants the public to start using the term “global climate disruption” in place of “global warming” — fearing the latter term oversimplifies the problem and makes it sound less dangerous than it really is.

White House science adviser John Holdren urged people to start using the phrase during a speech last week in Oslo, echoing a plea he made three years earlier. Holdren said global warming is a “dangerous misnomer” for a problem far more complicated than a rise in temperature.

I thought this had something to do with clear, scientific, independent thinking. How come it always seems to be inextricably interconnected with a lifestyle and political fabric that depends on queen-bees and worker-bees? “Today, we’re calling it [insert new term here].”

Are they trying to make this thing look like a foot-in-the-door for turning America into a socialist paradise?

Today’s favorite color is purple. Today’s favorite number is three. You like cabbage.

I have a new standard for people who try to sell me on global…whatever. Lights in the bathroom. That’s my standard. I want to see half of them unscrewed. Don’t tell me how many light bulbs you’ve put in. I want to know how many you’ve taken out.

No, not “see” them unscrewed…I’ll take your word for it. That may be a mistake, but I’ll believe what you tell me. Nevertheless, I must insist on this: Half your bathroom lights should be removed from their fixtures, or unscrewed so they don’t light. RIGHT NOW. I don’t want to hear some pledge that it’ll be the first thing you do when you go home tonight.

Because let’s face it, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. In fact, at five in the morning it feels pretty good. Haven’t had your coffee yet, bathroom is only partially lit. Gotta save the planet, it’s the only one we have.

If you have the bathroom fully lit up like an actress’ makeup mirror, while you’re trying to tell me I have to scale back, and feel bad, and “offset” myself…I find that unforgivable. You are beneath contempt. You shouldn’t even be consuming oxygen in the same room as me.

Ten CFR light bulbs every time you take a leak? You serious??

So tell me, John Holdren. How many lumens bouncing off the bathroom wall at Holdren Manor. It’s my business, I have a right to know. You brought it up.

From FailBlog.

There is a certain high-quality grocery chain that has earned my respect as a successful business, that has recently engaged in a marketing campaign I find to be detestable:

Hey, I’ll give ’em their due. A kid missing a mother will be worse off, in many ways, than a kid missing a father. And Moms do a lot of work that just has ta get done. They get very little credit for this 364 days out of the year.

No, the reason I find this to be so reprehensible is because of its cyclical nature. Why did we need a feminist movement in the first place? Because of a shitty prevailing attitude that hey, I’m a man, I do my man stuff, it’s a man’s world and nobody else anywhere is contributing anything to it that really matters. My wife is nothing more than a bedroom plaything, my house cleans itself, and in my office the files all arrange themselves auto-magically and I know how to look up a phone number — I holler at my secretary that she should get it for me.

Now look what we have going on here. Mom’s world. What’s that say? Exactly what was said at the beginning of the exercise…I’m the only one doing anything worth doing. Same bullshit attitude, but the roles have been switched.

That is not what was supposed to happen.

My gal had some fun with this. She was picking up a flank of fish over at the seafood counter, and asked the manager “My boyfriend says since it’s a mom’s world, if I send him here on the way home to pick something up, maybe he shouldn’t come because you guys won’t let him in.” Naturally, the manager laughed it off and clarified that I was welcome anytime. He’s probably a decent joe. I don’t think the spirit of my complaint was properly conveyed, though.

When I see these guys wandering the ethnic spices aisle or the dry foods aisle or the canned juices aisle, with all that uncertainty…tiny footsteps…you know that walk of despair I’m talking about, right? And then whip out the cell phone to get hold of these last-minute instructions — what exactly is “couscous,” anyway? — it about makes me sick.

You can tell there’s no “please” coming from the other end. There’s no “thank you.” Why would there be? She’s making stuff he’s going to eat. He’s doing a household chore he’s expected to do, and she’s telling him how.

Exactly the way you treat a little kid.

I realize the dynamic is unavoidable, anytime you have a specialist doing the actual work and someone else, who doesn’t know the subject matter as well, helping. But this naturally leads to exactly the kind of disrespect we, as a society, decided so long ago we didn’t need anymore.

Why are we encouraging more of this?

There is a certain kind of woman to which this is designed to appeal. There must be a piece of respected research out there that says these women will buy more of your product if you suggest to them that they matter and nobody else does.

I have met some women like this. I have no respect for them whatsoever, and so I have no respect for this particular marketing campaign.

The ninety-ninth award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) goes to Proessor Mondo’s late Dad. It is a sentence reported in passing on another thought, and paraphrased, second-hand. The topic is the higher education bubble:

This also ties in to an idea my father drilled into me a long time ago. He said I could get a good — even a great — education anywhere, but I had to want it.

Stop the presses, stop everything. This is a big thought. The context is universities, as in the economical ones versus the prestige-value ones that really break the bank. And you already know my thoughts on this:

Thing I Know #263. The one thing that’s wrong with higher education that nobody ever seems to want to discuss, is that it is valued through something called “prestige.” Get this prestigious diploma. Get that prestigious degree. Attend a prestigious university. My alma mater is more prestigious than yours. Trouble is that genuine learning has very, very little to do with prestige. It is, arguably, the exact opposite.

Once I expressed my admiration, Mondo expounded on what his old man was all about:

I hope you’ll trust me then when I tell you my late father was Smart. We’re talking at least 4 or 5 standard deviations to the right end of the bell curve here. And he used it, going from an apartment in the projects of Nashville, TN to becoming one of the top professionals in a very technical field…[some more stuff to provide evidence]…

See? Smart. But in the 43 years in which I had the chance to know him, he never would have seen himself as being “too talented to do what ordinary people do.” In fact, he saw himself as a regular guy, if a talented one, and was generally happy to live what he saw as an ordinary life in the burbs with his high school sweetheart and his kids. I never saw any indication that he thought any honest endeavor was beneath him. If other folks wanted him to be mayor, that was fine, but he would (and did) also serve as janitor at the city building when that was needed.

There’s some discussion taking place here, vis a vis contrasts…with a certain other guy whom I’m tired of talking about. You know the one. Hope, change. That guy.

Regarding the main point, about smarts, education…ultimately, it means readiness, willingness and ability to do what must be done. Yeah, the janitor can be smart. Take the initiative. Don’t wait to be told what to do. Figure things out.

I suppose there’s a reason I can identify with this. I don’t identify with much anymore, and I guess I never really did. I didn’t set out to be a software engineer, I just saw things needed to be done, and everyone was standing around waiting to be told what to do. No nicely pre-assembled procedures would be forthcoming, someone would have to figure things out so I figured things out. That was just upbringing.

I’ve often had the strangely reassuring, and also unsettling, idea that I’m the product of such needs and nothing more than that. In other words, I don’t really have any special aptitude for writing computer software — I have experience doing it because it needed to be done and nobody was doing it. If I grew up in a seventh-century village down by the seashore in post-Roman England, and what the village needed most was someone who could gather the clams, I’d be a clam-digger. If there was a need for ditch-digging and nobody knew how to do it, I’d be a ditch-digger.

Smarts, ultimately, is flexibility.

And to think you can only engage in a learning process, in some gilded institution constructed for such a purpose and only during the four years out of your life where you’re supposed to…well, that’s just silly. Maybe that’s why it’s not commonplace you can find anyone willing to say such a thing.

But a lot of people believe it. This is a great human tragedy.

All right, all right…we’ll talk about that other guy, President Barack Obama:

David Foster at Chicago Boyz posts the following jaw-dropper from Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett about her boss:

He knows exactly how smart he is… He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

Now, this is Jarrett saying this, not the man himself, so your (and his) actual mileage may vary. While the first part of the quote is interesting enough, it’s the attitude conveyed in the last sentence that stuns me.

Foster fills in just the very few small pieces that are missing from this thesis:

Strangely, it would appear that Jarrett believes that the above statement reflects positively on Obama.

In reality, individuals who are exceptionally intelligent — at least those who are possessed of any degree of creativity — are rarely bored. Rather, boredom is the domain of the spoiled brat, the overprivileged aristocrat, and the person with the flat and empty interior landscape.

And many individuals who are exceptionally intelligent–especially those who have leadership aspirations and abilities–have in fact spent a considerable amount of time “doing what ordinary people do,” and have learned a great deal from the experience.

The people now running the White House are a very strange crew indeed.

To be fair about it, this is a quote from Valerie Jarrett. So evaluating the evidence strictly, we can only surmise something strange about her.

But she’s plenty strange enough. Left to my own desires, I wouldn’t burden her with the chores that other people do. I wouldn’t trust the woman to so much as pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel.

People like her are like anti-Mike-Rowes. For their own safety, they need to be isolated into citadels…which, in turn, depend on these ordinary jobs done by ordinary people, but in a very subtle way, so the residents living within don’t realize these things are being done. And then they, in turn, never have to do anything that requires competence.

That really is the arrangement they require. To provide it to them, requires a separation from reality. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be provided to them. They want to live in a dream and I think they should be accommodated.

Beats the hell out of having them actually running things.

Blogger friend Buck is having some fun, taking political-orientation quizzes from that communist-hippie outfit CAP, and taking our name in vain.

The maggot-infested dope-smoking hippies gave our New Mexico friend a score of 125, which makes him extremely conservative. Hehe, yeah right. Numerically, this makes sense since the score goes from zero to 400, with 400 being a flaming whack-job dimwit liberal. One-twenty-five is south of the the median…but if you ask me, Buck is extremely conservative like Top Gun is an extremely good movie.

We took it and we got a score of 38. Yup, our age is more than our CAP political-ideology score.

I wonder if, when the sandal-and-sock-wearing pony-tailed maggot-infested hippies construct their perfect society that works for everybody, will they keep me around? Could I be covered with ObamaCare benefits?

Can you say “Soylent Green”?

Update: The Barrister doesn’t understand all the concern about “wealth inequality” and from reading his comments, it doesn’t seem he’s ever quite gotten it.

I never have gotten it either.

Nowadays we’re constantly told money isn’t everything, what really matters is to do what you love doing. Well okay, then. If everybody just hunkers down and does what they love doing, and nevermind how much money they make doing it…the natural result of that is going to be that some of us will make leaps & bounds more money than others. And everyone will have chosen their lot, so okay that’s quite alright.

So it’s quite alright, then. Deal.

Update 9/16/10: Another thought about how the test is messed up. Left the following at Buck’s place:

Typically, when they contain the word “can” or “should,” we get into a situation where there is no such thing as moderate conservatism. Because in those situations, if you take the test again, you’ll notice CAP is exploring some utopian ideal that has already been tested a few times and found not to work. And so the conscientious conservative is going to click the 0, as I did.

That’s what conservatism really is, when you get down to it. It is having the courage — and long-term memory — to say “we’ve been down this road; if you don’t have a meaningful idea about how our next attempt is going to be different, then stick it.” “Moderate” means, although you know it didn’t work, and won’t work, you wish it would, so you click a four, six or a nine.

…or a one.

See, this is how we’re messed up as a society right now. When the question is “Government has a role to play in providing for the poor” or whatever it is they said…nevermind your political ideology, if you possess some proficiency in history you’re going to click ZERO. You won’t click one. Zero is the only acceptable answer…because you’re going to go back through our history of putting government in charge of providing for the poor.

You might spend a second or two thinking about what the lefties will want you to think about — “that guy got a samrich or a bowl of soup, and without a government program he woulda starved.” But after that, you’ll go…well waitaminnit, did everyone starve before there were government programs? No they did not. And once you have the government programs, do you have bureaucrats trying to keep the need up for the program, so they never lose their jobs? Yes you do. And does this alter the situation with regard to the poor being able to provide for themselves? Yes it does.

So we got a situation where government is digging a hole, then taking the dirt from the hole and putting it back in the hole. It has a legitimate role to do such a thing? Of course not. Nobody does. Zero is the answer.

This is a boolean. Clicking one, to show you’re almost-completely-conservative, would be the same as clicking ten. It would say “well I know this gets us into that absurd situation Morgan just described…but…clicking zero seems so heartless (so let’s try it a few more times even though we know what the outcome is).”

To me, that’s the question that defines conservatism. Conservatism is, if the idea’s already been tried and found to fail, saying “Show me how our latest attempt will be meaningfully different…or stick it.”

It is, in the final analysis, the thought process engaged by those who remain in possession of intellectual robustness and health. Its opposite is the obsessive-compulsive predilection toward consistent behavior with the expectation of an inconsistent result…and you know what Einstein said about that.

We were doing some research for this post last night, and we stumbled upon this piece of wonderfulness.

Oh dear God. Can you just imagine writing this? Sure, it is realistic enough, if you ever were lucky enough to listen to drunken, high-drama dimwits…at a different time of the day…but what’s this script look like?

Highlight, copy, paste paste paste paste paste.

Warning, don’t watch if you’re feeling the least bit irritable, or if you’re feeling a migraine coming on, or both.

But the girl is hot, yes.

Robin of Berkeley has discovered Goodperson Fever, but not recently. It is an epiphany that has brewing since childhood:

This is my first childhood memory, a hazy image seared into my brain: I am in my bedroom at around age 5 with my mother, having just done something naughty. My mother explodes, “If you keep doing things like that, I won’t love you anymore.”

Night after night, I cried myself to sleep, overwhelmed with despair at this potential tragedy. It didn’t seem humanly possible to survive without her love.

I cried and I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Then, when my tears I dried up, I decided, with the logic of a small child, that I would never, ever make another mistake. Being perfect would shield me from disaster.

Not surprisingly, I became an anxious adult, a pleaser, someone who bent over backwards not to offend. But it wasn’t just my mother who catapulted me into lifelong perfectionism. It was the absence of a forgiving God.

Without a Higher Power, there was no avenue for redemption, no way to cleanse the ever-present feelings of unworthiness. All of my mistakes remained etched permanently in my consciousness.

I was alone in the world, attempting to be my personal mini-God. Assuming the role of my own judge and jury, any mistakes were dealt with swiftly and harshly.

Beginning in my teens, I turned to the gospel of liberalism as a balm for my shame. Through liberalism, I was offered the potential for redemption. Finally, there was a way, however fleeting, to feel like a good person.

My story is not an unusual one; it is typical among most of the liberals I know. I see the same behavior patterns and mindset in those around me.

Thus, liberals are determined to become model, global citizens. They’ve morphed into politically correct zealots, the ones who proselytize their faith with hardcore fanaticism. By doing so, they wash away their sins.

When a culture banishes God as the ultimate arbiter, a guilt-ridden populace is the inevitable outcome. And stripped of God, what other path is there to liberation than liberalism?
:
Liberals thus champion Obama’s agenda even it threatens their self-interest, safety, and well-being. They go along like lambs to slaughter.

Liberals support illegal immigration, the muzzle of the Thought Police, and redistribution of their hard-earned cash. By being good foot soldiers, white liberals hope and pray that they will finally be forgiven.

But, of course, this will not happen; Obama is no prophet. His end goal is not to unite this nation. He and the other radicals are simply manipulating desperate liberals into sacrificing their health care, their granny, and the nation’s security for the promise of redemption.

The Gospel of Obama in action is the polar opposite of all those promises of hope and change. Every day, Obama fans the flames of white guilt in order to squeeze out more penance. In Obama’s America, there’s just no end to the white man’s burden.

Like the liberals around me, I used to view the Democratic party as my path to absolution. Yet two years ago, I suddenly awoke from this foolish belief. For reasons I’ll never fully understand, Truth came knocking on my door.

And now everything has changed. When I made that recent mistake, I did not dissolve into a cesspool of shame. Instead, I stopped dead in my tracks, closed my eyes, and prayed. I asked God to please forgive me and to wash away my pain and sorrow.

And suddenly I felt better, lighter, lifted up and supported by a power far greater than my own.

Now, the liberals keep telling me when you read the Bible, the one message that comes out is that we need to become marxists; those who have wealth need to give it away so that it finds its way to those in need.

But when I read the Bible for one single message, the one that comes out, and remains consistent between the Old Testament and the New, is a warning. Against confusing the business of mortal man with the glorious matters within the dominion of God.

And wonder of wonders…real life has taught me precisely the same thing. As it seems to have taught Robin of Berkeley. Use your wisdom for all it is capable of managing, and use your faith for the balance of what remains. Beware of false prophets and false idols.

Hat tip: blogger friend Rick, again.

Awww…

The white flag hasn’t reached the top of the flagpole yet, but Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf all but surrendered on Monday morning in his battle to build a Muslim interfaith community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero. At an unusual meeting Monday morning at the Council on Foreign Relations in midtown Manhattan, Rauf said that he wanted to find a “solution” to the furious imbroglio over the planned center, which opponents say is inappropriate, insensitive to the memory of those who died in the 9/11 attacks, and likely to inflame tensions rather than build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims. Saying that his advisors were “looking at every option,” including a suggestion that the project be delayed until it could win greater support and become less divisive, the imam pledged to “do what’s best for all.”

“Everything is on the table,” he told the more than 300 members of the group, which rarely holds on-the-record meetings and normally focuses on foreign affairs and national security rather than domestic or urban issues. In fact, the imam this morning was acknowledging the obvious: the project has been on de facto hold for weeks because of the numerous obstacles it now faces—first and foremost, a lack of funding.

This will be an interesting situation to watch. Worst-case scenario is: The 23rd James Bond picture will be indefinitely on hold because of a really insurmountable lack-o’-funding…they still won’t open a Boston Market near me…the beer store across the street still won’t put my favorite brand in the cooling case where it belongs…but miracle of miracles, the mosque will find a way to get built. Perhaps by means of a federal stimulus? In which case, I’ll have to watch these guys and find out how they’re doing it.

“I’m not really this important, am I?” I asked my favorite gal. “They make lists of things I like, and yank ’em away?” “Apparently,” she said.

Let’s just keep watching this. I’ve got a feeling lack of funding doesn’t mean lack of funding. Annoying things, I’ve learned over time, somehow, some way, have a way of making themselves happen.

This is not a list of one hundred greatest movie scenes, and it isn’t a list of one hundred long movie scenes.

These are movie scenes that promise something wonderful, and compel you to watch them. They assert themselves. They do not merely tempt you to put off a potty break. That would not work; that is what pause buttons are for. These are scenes that you can intuitively sense must be kept intact, no matter how long they are, and you have to consume them that way.

And if you have seen them before and you know what’s coming, still you refuse to chop it up. You look ahead, make sure the beer is already fetched from the fridge before it starts.

This takes something. The actors, the writers, the directors, all have to be at the top of their game for these to be rolled out right.

1. Carrie tears down the gymnasium
2. Luke blows up the Death Star
3. Battle at Falkirk
4. Kirk lowers Reliant’s shields
5. Eliott Ness saves the baby
6. Indy saves Marion in her bar
7. Shark attack in the estuary
8. Michael baptises the baby
9. Mitch sticks it to The Firm
10. Indy steals the idol
11. Yoda pulls Luke’s ship out of the swamp
12. Gabriel attacks Col. Tavington
13. Rocky trains
14. Qui-Gon’s demise (six scenes)
15. d’Artagnan takes care of Rochefort
16. Allied ambush on the bridge
17. “Commence firing; fire at will.”
18. Michael tries to buy out Moe
19. Rocky fights Apollo to a draw
20. Indy hijacks the truck
21. The T-Rex attacks the car
22. Ness dispatches Nitti
23. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
24. Capone’s “team” speech
25. “O-Ren Ishi, we have unfunished business.”
26. Showalter and Grimsrud encounter a trooper
27. Rob Roy takes down Archibald Cunningham
28. Papa chases Bernardo
29. “There never was a Raymond.”
30. Ethan steals the disc
31. Sol checks out
32. Michael hides Vito from Solozzo’s hit men
33. Thorwald sees his wife’s ring on Lisa’s finger
34. Clarice meets Hannibal
35. Final scene
36. Final scene
37. Sergeant Dohun saves his Captain
38. Fist fight
39. “You tell God, that was a kindness you done.”
40. “My straw reaches across the room…I drink your milkshake, Eli.”
41. Final scene of the first half
42. Final scene
43. Motorcycle chase
44. Ben stops Elaine’s wedding
45. The man in the black mask is confronted by Inigo Montoya
46. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
47. “You blew it up! God damn you! Damn you all to hell!”
48. Schmidt comes back home and opens his mail
49. Robin Hood duels Guy of Gisbourne on the winding stone staircase
50. Karate chop fight scene
51. Chariot scene
52. Ray buries Marty
53. Ferguson follows Madeleine to San Francisco Bay
54. Car chase
55. Motorcycle chase
56. “I coulda been a contender”
57. Fifty eggs
58. Dueling banjos
59. Walking-barefoot-on-glass
60. “Do ya feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”
61. Pearl and Lewt go at it
62. Oliver and Barbara on the chandelier
63. Final negotiations between Showalter and Grimsrud
64. Bunny in the stewpot
65. Rooney breaks into Ferris’ house
66. “You can’t handle the truth!”
67. Tevya’s dream
68. Archibald steps off the field and can’t go back
69. Otto swallows Wanda
70. “I didn’t kill my wife!” “I don’t care!”
71. Coffee’s for closers
72. Vito Corleone takes care of Don Fanucci
73. Jason battles the skeleton army
74. Quint’s demise
75. “All five.”
76. Jack Crabb at Little Big Horn
77. “Is it safe?”
78. Jimmy bumps off Dave
79. That sad, sad ending
80. Skydiving
81. Vincent and Jules argue about rubbing a woman’s foot
82. Quantas!
83. Ed 209’s glitch
84. Miles retrieves Jack’s wallet
85. The little girl is poisoned by her stepmother on the videotape
86. Sophie makes her choice
87. “You’ll never be one of them”
88. Hermie beds Dorothy
89. “Can you read my mind?”
90. Moses parts the Red Sea
91. Atticus Finch stops the mob
92. Shoot-out in the O.K. Corral
93. Jets meet Sharks
94. Burning down the house
95. Sally proves a woman can fake an orgasm
96. The Nazis find Tom
97. Hitler’s autograph
98. Miles is refused another glass
99. Kay had an abortion because her marriage was an abortion
100. Butch goes back to pick up the watch

These scenes make their own rules. They work with music, or without it — usually without it. They can take as long as they want to tell you whatever story is being told. You’ll take it and you’ll learn to like it, because you know this is where you’re getting your money’s worth.

If the movie does end up being great, and you find yourself thinking about it the next day, your mind flashes back to These Scenes…or That One Scene.

Can you make me do a Homer-Simpson “D’Oh!” over and over again, to the point where I have to make a list of 200? Tell me what I forgot.

Update: Oh, you want to get into a scrap about Delaware? Head on over to Daphne’s place, she has a lively thread going.

We don’t have much of an opinion about Delaware because we don’t live there. All these years later, though, I do have to give a positive review to Holiday Inn Express in Dover. If you’re looking for a place in the area, head there.

Here is wisdom, found in the usual place. I daresay, there never has been a human more deserving of seeing a building named after him while he’s still breathing, than Thomas Sowell. George Washington, and Aristotle, maybe. Sowell would be third on my list.

Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools.

That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

Take the simple phrase “rent control.” If you take these words literally– as if they were money in the bank– you get a complete distortion of reality.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, “rent control” laws do not control rent.
:
Warm, fuzzy words and phrases have an enormous advantage in politics. None has had such a long run of political success as “social justice.”

The idea cannot be refuted because it has no specific meaning. Fighting it would be like trying to punch the fog. No wonder “social justice” has been such a political success for more than a century– and counting.

While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right– that it is unjust– that some people are so much better off than others.

Justification, even as the term is used in printing and carpentry, means aligning one thing with another. But what is the standard to which we think incomes or other benefits should be aligned?

Is the person who has spent years in school goofing off, acting up or fighting– squandering the tens of thousands of dollars that the taxpayers have spent on his education– supposed to end up with his income aligned with that of the person who spent those same years studying to acquire knowledge and skills that would later be valuable to himself and to society at large?
:
None of these things is equal or can be made equal. If this is an injustice, it is not a “social” injustice because it is beyond the power of society.

You can talk or act as if society is both omniscient and omnipotent. But, to do so would be to let words become what Thomas Hobbes called them, “the money of fools.”

This was the column-to-tweet yesterday, and rightly so. Slide it into the thickening file labeled “Elections Have Consequences: The Public Knows the Least About What it Wants, When it is Most Excited”:

Gallup has released a new poll asking respondents to assess the major accomplishments of Congress in the last two years: the national health care bill, the stimulus, the bailout of auto companies, the bailout of major banks and financial institutions, and the financial regulatory reform bill. The pollsters found majority opposition to all those measures, with the exception of financial reform.

The numbers: Bank bailouts, 61 percent disapprove versus 37 percent approve; national health care, 56 percent disapprove versus 39 percent approve; auto bailouts, 56 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve; stimulus, 52 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve. Only financial reform, with 61 percent approve versus 37 percent disapprove, is a winner for the representatives and senators seeking re-election.

Although the bank bailout was passed with significant bipartisan support, the news is terrible mostly for the House and Senate Democratic leadership. It’s even worse for Democrats when you single out the opinions of independents. Just 32 percent of independents approve of the bank bailouts; 35 percent approve of national health care; 38 percent approve of the stimulus; and 40 percent approve of the auto bailouts. Sixty-two percent of independents approve of financial regulatory reform.

The most partisan division is found over the national health care bill. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats approve of the bill, opposed to just 13 percent of Republicans, and 35 percent of independents, who approve.

Translation: We’re the guy in the convertible…we put ourselves in this situation…

So we keep this in mind from now on, right? These young, sexy, well-spoken guys from a new generation, under the banner of the democrat party, talking a mile a minute about “hope” and “change” and not saying what they’ll do once they get in. We’ve learned our lesson once and for all about this now, right?

Yeah. I’m a dreamer. But not the only one…

Okay, alright…one item about the handlebar-mustache-Koran-burning thing. Maybe. My personal opinion is this really doesn’t qualify for it, this is a story about astronomical magnitudes of smugness.

I’ll just let the video speak for itself. The NewsBusters article about it is here.

This charts a whole new frontier for unprofessionalism and asshattery. Maybe it’s par for the course for “Morning Joe” or whatever…I dunno…finding it hard to get my give-a-damn aroused here. I’m just amazed by it all. Just drop any pretense of trying to learn anything, and fall back on pure finger-waggling?

Well, points for honesty, I guess.

So you’re all just torn up inside that the “Burning a Pile of Korans” story came & went without The Blog That Nobody Reads putting up a single post about it, huh?

Me neither.

Now that the kids are off to school and “real” life is beginning again, here’s some real news.

You might not have seen it reported, but the Senate will vote this morning on whether to repeal part of ObamaCare that it passed only months ago. The White House is opposed, but this fight is likely to be the first of many as Americans discover—as Nancy Pelosi once famously predicted—what’s in the bill.

The Senate will vote on amendments to the White House small business bill that would rescind an ObamaCare mandate that companies track and submit to the IRS all business-to-business transactions over $600 annually. Democrats tucked the 1099 reporting footnote into the bill to raise an estimated $17.1 billion, part of the effort to claim that ObamaCare reduces the deficit by $100 billion or so.

But this “tax gap” of unreported business income is largely a Beltway myth, and no less than the Treasury Department’s National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson says the costs will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvements in tax compliance.”

Meanwhile, small businesses are staring in horror toward 2013, when the 1099 mandate will hit more than 30 million of them. Currently businesses only have to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase from vendors and the like. Under the new rules, they’ll have to report the value of goods and merchandise they purchase as well, adding vast accounting and paperwork costs.

Think about a midsized trucking company. The back office would have to collect hundreds of thousands of receipts from every gas station where its drivers filled up and figure out where it spent more than $600 that year. Then it would also need to match those payments to the stations’ corporate parents.

Most Democrats now claim they were blindsided and didn’t understand the implications of the 1099 provision—which is typical of the slapdash, destructive way the bill was written and passed. As the critics claimed, most Members had no idea what they were voting on. Some 239 House Democrats voted to dump the 1099 provision in August, and the repeal would have passed except Speaker Pelosi rigged the vote procedurally so it needed a two-thirds majority. She thus gave Democrats the cover of a repeal vote without actually repealing it.

It reminds me of those commercials for a certain Internet-portal job/resume placement/posting company, with all the little kids saying “when I grow up, I want to be an ineffectual, donut-eating butt-kissing cubicle jockey” or whatever…

“When I vote for these new guys and they get sworn in, I want the House Speaker to pull a bunch of sneaky tricks. I want the IRS to become more onerous. I want to have to work all weekend long flailing around for records of any transaction my business might have spent more than fifty smackers a month on, in sheer terror that the IRS is going to take away everything I’ve ever had.”

Change you didn’t ask enough questions about.

Click pic for more.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Commentary at Newsbusters:

Amazing. So first she says the failure of the bailout to stoke lending is an example of how government doesn’t work, and then she asks for more government intervention to get the economy going.
:
Moments later, [George] Will put the icing on the cake:

WILL: We started arguing about the tax cut. The president says we can’t afford the tax cuts for the wealthy because that would add $700 billion to the deficit over ten years. Which is to say over ten years it would add less to the deficit than Obama added with the stimulus in one year.

Aw…

Two years into his presidency, Obama’s approval ratings have fallen like those of most of his predecessors, who tended to dip in the polls about halfway through a term. Then again, most presidents aren’t an industry unto themselves. The people who have made bank despite a bad economy are certainly taking notice.

Souvenir vendors in Washington say once-thriving sales of the garish merchandise fawning over the president are nowhere near what they were. Sales peaked at the height of Obamamania, between the election and the inauguration, but vendors said that Obama paraphernalia still moved from their shelves through much of 2009.

Couldn’t see that coming.

To the warehouse it goes, fifth shelf up, between the disco balls and the Mork-from-Ork rainbow suspenders.

Just heard it on the radio a few minutes ago:

Awesome. Completely awesome.

Gerard Alexander, writing in the Washington Post:

There is power in the accusation of racism against conservatives, one that liberals understand well. In an April 2008 post on Journolist, a private online community for liberal journalists, academics and activists, one writer proposed a way to distract conservatives from the campaign controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor. “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us,” Spencer Ackerman wrote. “Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

No doubt, such accusations stick to conservatives more than to liberals. It was then-Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, after all, who described presidential candidate Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” If a conservative politician had offered such an opinion, his or her career might have ended; Biden was rewarded with a spot on Obama’s ticket. Liberal missteps on race and ethnicity are explained away, forgiven and often forgotten; conservative ones are cast as part of a sinister, decades-long story of intolerance and political calculation, in which conservative ideology and strategy are conflated with bigotry.

The article then goes on to provide a decent chronology. It doesn’t quite get down to the “why” of it though.

I think you’d have to break up the conglomeration of “liberals” to answer that. Most liberals, I think, are decent people who want to do good things but are easily bamboozled because they don’t pay attention.

There are other liberals who, deep down inside, don’t believe the leadership of the government or the policies codified change a damn thing — but they’ve spent all their living days imbibing deeply from the cup of community fellowship. They see every challenging decision as a two-side melee between sports teams and they want to pick the right team.

And then you have the sociopaths like Rahm Emnanuel, living out the goals and dreams that the “sports team” liberals only think about in their fantasies. Win. Beat. Trounce. Decimate. Flatten. Prevail. Rout. Kick ’em when they’re down and don’t forget to wear your cleats.

The accusations of racism, are the great emulsifier. This creates a conduit through which these three disparate communities can finally communicate with each other.

…is a bunch of lying liars.

People like this, are the reason the national discussion of politics has degraded in civil tone so badly over the last fifteen years or so. This does as much damage to our spirit of fellowship as burning a pile of Korans, and is every bit as offensive.

From RightNetwork: All That’s Right With the World. Check it out, all the time. Miss what’s going on there, you miss a lot.

“Would you quit calling it that? It’s not a Ground Zero Mosque. It’s not there.”

“It’s being built at Ground Zero.”

“It’s two blocks away, dimwit! Putz! Imbecile!”

“That’s at Ground Zero.”

“No it isn’t! You right-wing hillbillies, always putting the hate on science.”

“It’s as close to the crater as you can possibly build anything.”

“But it’s not there. It’s not at the bulls-eye. It’s just kinda close. Don’t you know anything?”

“It’s close enough.”

“No, it isn’t! And you’re stupid for saying so.”

“Yes it is.”

“Is not, not, not. Is not to infinity, squared, plus one.”

“It is…”

“ZOMG! That is disgusting! Reprehensible! Awful! Horrible! Disrespectful! A new low, even for you!”

“…aw, gee, here I thought we were having a lovely talk about facts, fiction, right, wrong, you smart, me stupid, all that good stuff.”

Yeah, and then there was a switcheroo. Now you’re having a debate about human decency and fact has nothing to do with it.

I guess the maxim that guides in this situation is: When the facts are on your side, pound the facts, if they aren’t then pound the table.

Pretty much the way liberals argue everything.

Update: Remember the Clinton blow-job thing? It went pretty much the same way. Linda Tripp produced some tapes, and after that it was all about OH MY GAWD what an evil troll she is and what deranged awful people these Republicans are…

But up until then what it was about, was “Linda Tripp is not to be believed,” in the words of Clinton’s lawyer Bob Bennett. Is this a much-loved and popular and effective two-times-elected President being smeared by unscrupulous lying opportunists who are responsible for creating the situation…or is the President responsible for creating the situation, do we have a sexual predator installed in the White House?

The facts emerge, and they say it’s the latter of those two that is the truth. And before you can say “wham bam thank you ma’am,” we’re having a debate about human decency instead of about facts. Switcheroo. The “is not, is too” is out the window.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

China’s U.N. diplomat had a few too many and then grabbed the microphone:

“I know you never liked me Mr. Secretary-General – well, I never liked you, either,” said Mr Sha as Mr Ban looked on, smiling and nodding awkwardly during the 15-minute toast attended by the UN’s top brass.

Mr Sha, who was appointed the UN undersecretary general for Economic and Social Affairs in 2007, also made no secret of his fractious relationship with Mr Ban, although did say he’d grown to respect the South Korean.

“You’ve been trying to get rid of me,” said 62-year-old Mr Sha according to the senior UN official present, “You can fire me anytime, you can fire me today.”

Later in his impromptu speech Mr Sha turned to an American colleague, singling out Bob Orr, from the executive office of the secretary-general.

“I really don’t like him: he’s an American and I really don’t like Americans,” he said.

A second senior UN official who was at the dinner said: “It went on for about ten or fifteen minutes but it felt like an hour.”

Officials present at the dinner suggested that Mr Sha might have been the victim of a misguided attempt at humour.

The next morning Mr Sha requested a meeting with Mr Ban during which he was “deeply apologetic” according to Farhan Haq, the acting deputy UN spokesman.

Mr Farhan said: “Mr Sha told the Secretary General that he realised that the way that he spoke, coming as it did after he had had a few drinks, was inappropriate, as it went too far. He was also aware that his statements had embarrassed and irritated other senior advisers.”

That’s diplomacy.

Hat tip to Mark.

An already-much-talked-about article in Nature. It is unfortunate for Nature that it is much-talked-about; once again, I see the word “science” being tossed around to describe something that isn’t science. In this context, it would be more accurate to think of it as a synonym for “guilt.”

There is a growing anti-science streak on the American right that could have tangible societal and political impacts on many fronts — including regulation of environmental and other issues and stem-cell research. Take the surprise ousting last week of Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent Republican senator for Alaska, by political unknown Joe Miller in the Republican primary for the 2 November midterm congressional elections. Miller, who is backed by the conservative ‘Tea Party movement’, called his opponent’s acknowledgement of the reality of global warming “exhibit ‘A’ for why she needs to go”.

It goes on like this, with the word “denier” being used here & there.

The comments are priceless. Number 13538 speaks for me:

Sadly this editorial is receiving wide and somewhat negative coverage across the internet. This would appear to be due in part due the use of the phrase “Denialism over global warming”. I would like to point out to the editors of Nature that “Denier” is seen as a term of vilification amongst those skeptical of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. “Anti Science” is also a term viewed as offensive by those CAGW skeptics worried about the supplanting of the traditional scientific method with what is referred to In the popular vernacular as “Post normal science”

As the editors of Nature and it’s readers would no doubt be aware, the unproven hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hinges on water vapour feedback from minor CO2 radiative forcing. Research that has been based on empirical evidence rather than computer modeling has indicated that any such feedback may be neutral to negative. It is looking increasingly likely that the catastrophic CO2 warming hypothesis is incorrect.

I would like to advise the editors of Nature to distance themselves from the use of offensive terms with regard to the CAGW debate. Due to the significant expenditure on what is increasingly looking like a non problem, it is likely that a major blame game is about to begin. We do not live in the age of Big Brother. Rather, due to the internet we live in the age of Little brother, and Little Brother is watching and recording. When looking for those to punish for what may be the world’s largest hoax, the vengeful will only have to search the internet for terms such as “denier”, “denialisim”, “contrarian” and “big oil shill” to identify the guilty. As I indicated before – Little Brother is watching and recording. Be a little more careful 🙂