Hat tip to blogger pal Daphne.

(Naughty language warning in effect.)

Via HopeNChange Cartoons, via Gerard, we find out this morning some loudmouthed individual who, although virtually anonymous, seems to be partially responsible for such a wise decision as getting our current President elected — had this to say about the Ground Zero Mosque controversy.

There is a debate to be had about the sensitivity of building this center so close to Ground Zero. But we can not let fear and rage tear down the towers of our core American values.

Wow, that’s both sensitive and clever!

Not and not.

So into what towers are seven out of ten Americans crashing our fuel-filled passenger jet planes? The elites in their ivory towers — Weehee! I can do it too! — have offered only one thing, which doesn’t fit the oh so sensitive metaphor of some plurality of “towers,” presumably, two. If the mosque is not built, or if it is built somewhere else, religious freedom is in awesome shape. It’s doing just fine. About as well as any other day on which the Department of Motor Vehicles insists you must remove your burqa for your driver’s license picture.

Since their argument logically fails, let’s inspect the situation one more time and try to figure out what’s at stake. To fit it to the events at hand, the first core value that comes to mind can be best qualified thusly: Fuck off and die, I’m allowed to do it so I’m gonna.

And the twin tower that goes with it is: And after I’ve done it, I’m gonna call it an act of fellowship, so fuck you again.

Speaking just for myself, I think it is the second tower of core values that I’d like to melt in the inferno of my passenger jet plane bomb. On the first one, I can begin to see the logic; when you have “freedom” but you only get to do what people like, that isn’t really freedom.

But there is a cost to be endured in practicing freedoms that offend others. Principally, there is — and I’m somewhat aghast at the sheer density of anyone who honestly cannot see this — the friendship of those offended. “Fuck off” means forever; you don’t get to go buddy-buddy up to them afterward.

And you certainly don’t get to build any kind of “fellowship center” on a foundation of fuck-you-buddy-I-have-the-right-to-build-right-here.

This much should be obvious. What’s getting in the way, I think, for those struggling with the delusion that a mosque at Ground Zero would be emblematic of “core American values” is the idea that anyone who is part of a DVG, a Designated Victim Group, cannot ever be told no. (It has to be something like that; otherwise, they’d be protecting our core values by defending Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and I don’t see any of ’em bothering to miss reruns of West Wing to do that much.)

This is where they’re constantly being tripped up. You toss a few hypothetical situations at them, ask their opinion about each, and they’re exposed in short order. Equal treatment under the law is not the issue. Exercise and expression of religion is not the issue. “Fellowship,” mutual understanding, mutual respect, these are not the issue. They’ll turn on all of these things if someone in a DVG is about to be told no.

And freedom? Liberty? It most certainly is not about those. The pro-Ground-Zero-mosque people don’t even understand the concept, it seems to me. Follow the argument: Freedom of religious worship is a core value of our society, and so we must allow the mosque to be built at Ground Zero and then we all have to like it. Yes, that is part of the mandate, have you not heard? Here and there you’ll hear one of them say “you don’t have to like it, but…” and that’s the furthest thing from the truth. We have to rid the world of discrimination, and “discrimination” is what they say it is. You have to like the mosque. If you don’t like it, they have a problem with that…even if you keep it to yourself. They’ll not be happy until you’re told what to think, and you do what you’re told.

That isn’t what America is supposed to be about, because that isn’t what freedom is.

Andrea Mitchell comes right out and says it: It’s about sensitivity, but only sensitivity toward persons in certain groups — that is the “core value” that is really being defended. And the best way to show this sensitivity is to make it a special, focused sensitivity…the kind of sensitivity you show, simultaneous with telling members of other groups to go piss up a rope.

It is about special considerations, special favors, special treatments. Not freedom, religious or any other.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When a hyperliberal starts a speech gushing over how precious some of our freedoms are, you better look out because you’re about to lose some.

Image shamelessly swiped from American Digest.

Filmmaker James Cameron is too busy to shoot it out with the boneheads.

Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.

The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.

Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he said in an interview.

Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word.

His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.

Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.

They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.

“We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you’d like. The more the better,” one of James Cameron’s organizers said in an email.

It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.

Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.

But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.

They wanted to change their team. We agreed.

They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a roundtable”. We agreed.

Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.

Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.

He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.

No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.

We all agreed to that.

And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out ” Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.

James Cameron’s behavior raises some very important questions.

Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?

Or is it just a pose?

The man who called for an open and public debate at “high noon” suddenly doesn’t want his policies open to serious scrutiny.

I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.

But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.

More here.

Cameron challenged Andrew Breitbart, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano and filmmaker Ann McElhinney of ‘Not Evil Just Wrong.’ The debate was already in the program for the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit. The website program described the agreed to debate as “AREDAY Climate Change Debate: Reality or Fiction?”

After setting up the public global warming debate, Cameron and his negotiator then changed formats multiple times and initially said it would be open to the media and then said he would only participate if it was private with no recording devices. The skeptics agreed to all the changes. According to AREDAY organizers, activist Joseph Romm of Climate Progress urged Cameron not to go ahead with the debate as well.

I’m sure we’ll be told this doesn’t prove or disprove a single thing. And indeed it doesn’t…except for one thing:

There is a lot of empty political posturing on the Chicken Little side of this so-called “debate.”

The last, and perhaps most important, of my 42 definitions of a strong society is that nobody ever talks about the world ending, for any reason. Chatter about Armageddon is about as old as recorded human history itself, and it’s unhealthy. It is both a symptom and a cause. It shows people don’t feel sufficiently important just living out their lives, doing what they do. In order to matter, they need to exist at the terminus of something.

And once they start to think in these terms, they start to invest their identities in it. It’s like a twisted form of immortality. Oh, look at me…yeah, my headstone will have a date on it after the dash, but it won’t be any earlier than anybody else’s.

And then they start to skimp on their everyday efforts. Avatar is a good example of what I’m talking about, actually. Awesome exterior shots, yet another major revolution in CGI, the scenery, the colors, the creatures, the camera angles…just an amazing achievement in film-making…every single frame out of the entire roll, just chosen at random, once viewed in all its glory completely takes your breath away…

The story stunk on ice. Very few people have anything good to say about that part of it.

James Cameron wants to be in charge of building the last really profitable movie the human race ever sees. That’s what I think, because while the man definitely has a lot of talent at what he does, nobody is putting his works alongside the works of DeMille, Hitchcock or Spielberg.

Even Cameron wouldn’t be up for a comparison like that.

Oh well, maybe he would, but he’d cancel at the last possible second. Har! Hey, I couldn’t resist that one. Can ya blame me?

Existing in the middle of something can be a terrifying thought. That is what global warming is all about; some among us just aren’t up for it. You’re born, you live, you die, there were people born before you were born and there will be people living on after you’re gone.

I do not pretend to understand this. To put out as many feature films as Cameron has, that have generated, what, ten digits of income worldwide? That’s what single-digit billions is, right, ten? He has accomplished something very impressive and should feel proud. Just as, being our nation’s Vice President for two terms, along with the other things Al Gore has done…these are things that should make someone feel complete, to say the very least.

Well these men and others like them are not feeling complete. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way a psychosis works. They’re suffering from feelings of inadequacy that can never be mollified. Not unless they’re still in their seats watching the closing credits, when it all goes dark. They weren’t born early enough to see the beginning, but they’re gonna watch the ending — that’s the dream.

I’ve got a feeling that if James Cameron can ever resign himself to the terrifying reality that he’s living in the middle of something, and is going to be a figment of history someday, maybe after that reckoning he’ll put out a movie I actually want to add to my collection. And then put in my DVD player and watch. A few times. This, to date, is something he has not yet done. And maybe it’s self-centered for me to think this, but I believe this is the current inadequacy upon which his energies would be more properly focused.

Richard Baehr, writing in American Thinker, takes the latest Paul Krugman effort to the woodshed.

Krugman is a Princeton economics professor who won a Nobel Prize in Economics. So the alternative explanation for Krugman’s column today — that he is just stupid, and very bad with numbers would seem to be far less likely than that he lies in order to deliberately mislead Times readers and the general public.
:
He admits in his column today that extending the Bush tax cuts that President Obama wants to continue for another ten years is expensive. Those tax cuts are for individuals earning less than $200,000 a year, or families earning less than $250,000. In his article, Krugman does not provide any numbers for the cost of extending the tax cuts for those earning less than the target amounts. Those tax cuts are by far the biggest share of the cost of extending the Bush 2001 tax cuts. Despite that, Krugman lets loose this whopper with relation to the cost of extending the 2001 tax cuts to the highest earners:

“And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break.”

Quite simply, if you take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income, he is not likely to get a majority of the tax benefit of that group. Far from it.

I don’t need much convincing. Speaking of a tax cut as something that “costs” money is Item #7 on my list of things that gave you away as an imbecile; Krugman’s columns typically start from that premise, and then work forward into bristling thickets of nonsense, because he’s a Keynesian. “Tax cut” isn’t even an honest expression of the way Keynesians think about the issue; “allowance increase” would be a more accurate term. The money, all of it, belongs to the state and we’re voting on how much generosity the state should show in allowing us to keep a little bit of it for awhile.

I do not know why we seriously try to perceive economic matters in this way when reality has so thoroughly schooled us it is the wrong way to go. I do not know why, when Paul Krugman jots down his codswallop, a link to it is yanked up to the top of the Memorandum scroll where it seems to slam up against a big bell with a loud “Ping!”

I do not know why he still has a New York Times column. But I suppose I should be glad that he does; it’s a useful window into how the professionals at the Old Gray Lady see the world. Money is wonderful stuff…except, it has this tendency to coagulate around rich people, who don’t really deserve to have any more of it than the next guy. Except for us, and our friends. For the time being.

I recall back in the eighties there was a lot of negotiating between the White House and the democrat-controlled Congress about taxes and the social programs funded. The democrats could have this increase…if Reagan could have this tax cut. George W. Bush ended this by letting his own Congress go ahead and have pretty much every spending increase they wanted, sidestepping the debate to save up on his “political capitol.” I can see why Bush would have wanted to do this, since Reagan didn’t realize any enduring political victory from all the back-and-forth — but it was cute watching democrat congressmen show all this hyperventilating angst about the “DYAFASIT”…only half of the time. As in, oh, now we’re talking about federal largess that might actually land in my district, so suddenly the deficit doesn’t matter.

Addorable. Like I saw one right-wing blogger jot down about some other left-wing idiosyncrasy, “I could just pinch your cheeks. Really, really, REALLY hard.”

Krugman needs a vise around his head, like that guy in Casino.

And this country’s economy is going to get much better, once money has been placed under the control of the people who make it and put real wealth behind it. The question is whether that is even possible anymore.

I can’t quite agree with all the people saying “best fan film ever,” but all in all it’s good enough for an embed. Acting is a little on the substandard side, except for the lady. The story is a mash-up between Robocop 3, Phantom Menace and Zorro.

But no conference rooms or handrails. I like that.

Bird: I’m out in the middle of nowhere! I am ruler and master of all I survey! I am completely awesome!

Me: Complete agreement without reservation on Points #2 and #3, my fine feathered friend. I glug my grog in your honor, one bachelor to another.

Allowing your Point #1 to stand without further comment.

Yes, there is a lesson here kiddies. When you think you’ve acquired a superior grasp on reality — even when you have proof — those whom, you can see, have been easily deluded, still retain an entitlement to their dignity.

I like to think this is one of the key differences between liberals and conservatives. Reality is important, don’t get me wrong — you cannot figure out what to do in a given situation, with any greater competence than you’d realize from a purely random-chance selection, without understanding it.

But it isn’t everything. The correct perception of it doesn’t even gauge intelligence accurately. Some living things forsake it, and they have their reasons.

But here and there, now and then, they still command a certain dignity. Yes, there are people like that. You’re best off looking for ways to show your respect, dismissing with a snotty derision only when all other methods have utterly failed.

On Saturday morning, I had set the alarm for 2:20am. But the Chinese food from Friday was not setting right with me, so I rose at 1:58 and shut off the alarm.

I sidestepped the ritual of preparing her the homemade morning coffee, since she would rely on Starbuck’s and so would I. I submerged myself in a hot bath, and at 2:50 I changed into my bicycling gear, kissed her good-bye and drove the car to the corner gas station to fill it.

She was mostly ready to go when I came back, at 3:15. She’d started NCIS, one of her Cutie Quincy shows, an hour before we’d have to leave for the airport so she’d know when her time was up. I stretched out so I could store up some energy, and in a few minutes the credits rolled.

She only needed her carry-on. I took it to the car for her. I dropped her off curb-side, at United terminal, 4:23. We kissed good-bye. Twice. She was pre-reserved, so there was no point to finding a spot in the parking lot.

As planned, I drove back to our homefires. I gave my bod a once-over with some Coppertone SPF 8, then inflated my mountain bike’s tires and got moving.

I thought it prudent to park for the better part of an hour at Starbuck’s…by this time, I was out of bed for over three hours without a caffeine fix, and that just wasn’t right. Besides of which it was still pitch black. Who knows what in the hell is out there. Coyotes? Snakes? A real man is capable of tangling with the Wild West — that’ what I was doing out here in the first place — but part of that capability is the resolve to engage only those exigencies that absolutely must be engaged. I grabbed myself a cup o’ Joe, tended to some of my secret projects on the HP mini, then re-saddled as the streaks of gray out in the East turned to rosy red.

Click the pic to embiggen these first four pictures from my week and a half of virtual bachelorhood. We engaged in some more chit-chat at 10:30 during her layover in Chicago…during which time, I was still toiling over my weekend errands on two wheels.

I’m forty-four now. I can wipe my own ass, pick out my own clothes, cook a fine meal. I’m about to toss a big ol’ side of salmon on the grill as I write this. And it’s nice to go conquering the wilderness whenever I feel like it, without worrying about a traveling companion who hasn’t built up her endurance.

But I’ll be happy when she comes back. Quoting myself in an off-line to blogsister Daphne:

We [men] like to be capable; trouble is, we’re inherently efficient. Starting at age twelve we look for ways to cut corners, drinking straight out of the carton and all that. Efficiency is very often at odds with being a good man. Once we’re alone, we’re reminded of this constantly, and we don’t like it because that’s a reminder that we’re inherently incomplete. Perhaps women are just as incomplete without us, but your side seems to have this enviable ability to remain blissfully ignorant of this.

A good test of a relationship is, are you happier with her than you are without her.

I can find some measure of happiness without her. But I’ll be much happier with her back by my side. I miss her. It’s a good feeling to genuinely miss someone, after so many years — decades, really — achieving an ideal state of happiness alone.

The world is filled with women who can command an unreasonable level of attention from a man; that is how the human genome is wired, after all. But what kind of woman can transform a man in such a way?

The phone rang, and it was her. The clock said 6:58. She’d waited for the house to go to bed, at nearly ten o’clock over there, so we could finally talk without interruptions. About little tiny bullshit things, the way lovers do. She’s finishing up Season 2 Episode 2. Of what, I asked? Ah, it’s that one…yet another show about wisecracking twenty-something hotties carving up stoic dead people. She’s kept the household drowning in this stuff. Crossing Jordan, NCIS, Bones, CSI, et al. She never reaches an exhaustion point with the “Cuter Quincy” genre. Myself, I’m a bachelor just rattling around in a too-large apartment like a BB in a boxcar, in his underwear, gnawing on butter sticks washed down with St. Pauli girl. I’m taking advantage of the stretch to finish off seasons 6 and 7 of Dukes of Hazzard.

But since I kind of like her, I imagine I’ll be missing the NCIS nonsense before she’s back. Except for that jackass David Caruso with his stupid sunglasses — bastard. So glad she’s not into him. If I never see that one again, it’ll be too soon.

Anyway, left to myself I see my own tastes are certainly no more intellectually stimulating. Once them Dukes are cuffed & stuffed, as time permits I’ll finish off the complete run of Knight Rider, Incredible Hulk and The Fall Guy. As my thirteen-year-old son has inquired about these episodes, I have frequently deadpanned that all prime-time television was required to do certain things in the early ’80’s, but of course it is only half a joke. These staple items were de rigueur. Somewhere along the run of however many seasons were granted by the producer-gods, each show had to have…

1. An episode involving the rescue of a gorgeous Olympic athlete from a Soviet state
2. A skateboarding episode
3. A trucking episode with lots of CB radio chatter
4. An episode with some adorable sentient robots, provided such a device was not part of the regular cast
5. An alternative-fuels episode, usually involving a contest
6. Lots of government-agency conspiracy episodes
7. At least one amnesia episode
8. A mind-control episode
9. A telekenesis episode
10. A hypnosis episode
11. An episode with extraterrestrials
12. An episode involving a seance
13. A “Milagro-Beanfield” episode involving a poor community of hard-working decent people being screwed by a rich guy
14. An episode about the hopes and dreams of an aspiring country western singer
15. An episode about earthquakes
16. An episode about race cars

There may be some exceptions. To confirm, you’d have to string these along the top of a table, list the shows down the side, and start filling in boxes…but there is some anal-retentive list-making obsession that is beyond even me. Even now. I think I’d just as soon learn quilt-making, at least then I’d emerge from it knowing how to do something I didn’t know before. I’ll leave that magical spreadsheet to someone else chomping at the bit to prove me wrong.

But I don’t think I am; I think everybody hit everything, before McDonald’s introduced the McNugget.

Anyway, I’m not too wild about teevee, and I’m not about to delude myself into thinking I’ll put in the requisite number of hours to polish all this stuff off. And you can completely forget about anything coming out lately. I heard on the car radio some kind of back-and-forth about a show called “Jersey Shore.” Lots of people are claiming not to watch it, and it turns out to be like a supermarket tabloid…ultimately, everyone ‘fesses up to taking a peek.

Now, I’m really on the outs here because I really have no idea what they’re talking about. And in terms of raw curiosity, my get-up-and-go has gotten up and left; I don’t know, I don’t want to know. It sounds like more “reality-teevee” bullshit.

But I’m looking forward to picking her up at the airport on the 31st. It’s going to be a long ten days for me. I’m thinking of sending a limo when the time comes.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, hasn’t it? His Holy Eminence had to backpedal on His endorsement of the Ground Zero Mosque, and immediately afterward a poll comes out that says 18% of us think He’s a Muslim. Dr. Laura walked away from her show in the wake of the “racist rant” scandal. We’ve got more flap about the GZ Mosque itself. And for some reason, that “sexist video” made by the Republicans is getting some more news…the one that points out how hot the conservative women are and how ugly the liberal women are. “She’s a Lady” and “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

From this, the usual is to happen: Our liberals are to show us the very worst human nature has to offer; they are to display the spirit that held American citizens captive behind barbed wire fences in 1942. And then, inexplicably, the rest of us are to assume a defensive posture — in a social phenomenon nobody has been able to explain to me in any lucid way since all the way back to grade school, we are to apologize to them.

Let us look hard at what has happened. I think when you inspect the details, and human nature, you see that in spite of all the unpleasantness, you find this is a string of events that we should hope to see repeated.

What the recent events have done, is force a separation between the agenda-driven liberals and the “Aunt Sally” liberals. The leaders and the followers. The bigoted leftists who want to make a pariah caste out of anyone who doesn’t agree with them about everything, and the sweet people you happen to know, the family matriarchs who bake you pies and creamy mashed potatoes whenever you pop in to visit, who happen to have voted for Obama and would do it again.

Deep down, I think everyone recognizes the problem. It is mostly one of semantics. You say “liberal,” and most of us think of Aunt Sally. You say “progressive” and we think of Aunt Sally. Aunt Sally was a “feminist” back in the day, so when you say that word we think of her then, too. And when you start to describe all the ways liberals are breaking things…and let’s face it, it’s really, really hard to ignore it while they’re in the middle of breaking them, isn’t it?…it sounds like you’re pointing out something bad about Aunt Sally who made us all those homemade pies and biscuits during the holidays. Poor Aunt Sally! You couldn’t possibly want to do to her what…uh…er…ah…

— what the people Aunt Sally voted into office two years ago, are trying to do to you?

I propose a change in nomenclature. Liberals who want to turn “free and reasonable exchanges of opinions” over the dinner table into fire-and-brimstone sermons, scolding the opposition over their “bigotry,” are not liberals the way Aunt Sally is a liberal. If it’s some asshole you met on the innerwebs, or some Glorious Being elected to be our President, or even worse yet some spokesman for the Glorious Being…these obnoxious personas are different from Aunt Sally, who wouldn’t be engaging in anything of the kind. Aunt Sally doesn’t understand the issues, nor does she pretend to. The worst she’s going to do, is become a Cheesecake Nazi…imploring you that, if you’ve been accused of being a hateful bigot and unworthy of burning the same oxygen as real people, just let the accusation stand so we can move on to something else. There’s cheesecake!

Aunt Sally should be left alone. Her political ideas, detestable and empty as they may be, are spawned from her desire to be a decent person — which, also, has given birth to a sincere effort to be one, and this has paid off over the years. When we lump Aunt Sally in with the Internet assholes, and the McGovern-voting granduncle who’s accusing us of racism just because we notice Obama is a bad President, we feel bad about it and we should feel bad about it. We all know someone at work who is part of Obama’s forty percent approval rating, and we cannot honestly accuse such people of being stupid, easily fooled, lazy, or in on some worldwide conspiracy to banish individual thinking & hard work to oblivion. Some of these Obama-fans are smart as a whip and work their asses off. Give them their due.

But the stronger, agenda-driven variety is a big a problem. Their coverage is broad and their substance is acrid. They’re in the White House, they’re in the colleges, in the public schools, network teevee, cable teevee, all over the forementioned innertubes. Let us start by defining them. I propose the term “Hyperliberals”; your pie-baking leftward-leaning Auntie is not one, because I’ll wager she doesn’t have or do too many of these things:

– Very quick to judge people who might have a different viewpoint, imagining all kinds of undesirable personality attributes in ideological opponents, indulging in easy convenient fantasy with regard to imaginary thoughts and sometimes quotes;
– Frequently caught bestowing “rights” and privileges upon members of Designated Victim Groups (DVGs) while simultaneously denying precisely the same allowances to others;
– Dripping with hostility toward the religious (minus Muslims) — persistence in a belief that all of the world’s problems are caused by religion, and a refusal to acknowledge any of the situations in history that have been improved by the actions of the faithful;
– Exclusion — an enduring behavioral pattern of proposing solutions to problems that are entirely concerned with identifying some loathed class, and isolating it, making it ineffectual;
– Calling others selfish for merely maintaining possession, or wishing to maintain possession, of the property they have rightfully earned;
– Hostility against marriage and parenthood, an apparent desire to degrade the human family arrangement into something more bovine;
– An unexplained and unexplainable passion for tax increases, for their own sake;
– Antisemitism;
– A cognitivie dissonance that begins with their stated purpose of building an egalitarian society filled with self-sufficient, capable individuals, and ends with an unrelenting enmity toward persons and institutions that really try to make this happen: Boy Scouts, parochial schools, stay-at-home Moms, tea party activists and the like.

I say these are two weeks we should want to see repeated, because the Hyperliberal…this toxic, poisonous elite within the liberal community — the anti-social among the socialists — have been separated from the Aunt Sally people. We haven’t heard much at all from Aunt Sally this week. But we have heard much, and seen much evidence of, the Hyperliberal. The liberal vampires…

I’ve been calling those on the left “vampires” because when you hold a mirror up to them, they don’t begin to see themselves. I’ve been trying to gently explain that they’re not arguing the issues, only demonizing their opponents, and they just can’t/won’t see it. I couldn’t possibly be talking about them this way. They are the virtuous ones.

I think this is due to either narcissism (which would be unsurprising given the self-esteem movement of the last several decades) or extreme cognitive dissonance. Either way it supports the idea that liberalism (which is really leftism now) is a mental disorder. My evangelical friend says it is a spiritual disorder, which may get more to the point of the “vampire” label.

This is a psychological problem. It is an insecurity. It is, I think, a desire to feel important, tragically infused with an inability to realize this importance in absolute terms. The patient can only feel significant when someone else has been made far less so.

Your hard-working, intelligent liberal co-worker does not have this problem. He hands in his work on time, goes home, gets a kiss from his wife and he goes about his business happily — feeling important. Rooting for the liberal side, for him, is just like rooting for one sports team or the other. Your Aunt Sally doesn’t have this problem either. She makes a nice dinner and a dessert to go with it, everyone wolfs it down and she feels important.

People like our current President need to constantly shun others, to constantly scold. It is much like obesity, in that there’s some nerve going haywire, an “I’m hungry” nerve. The body is nourished but the impulse to eat persists. It’s exactly like that, except it’s a need to lecture. So out comes some poorly-thought-out diatribe about “folks” bitterly clinging to God and guns.

It has become easy to see, these two weeks, why it is so important to drive these people from power, or at least offer their motion a stiff resistance. Our freedoms are never in greater jeopardy than when these liberal vampires start talking about how important our freedoms are. Have you ever noticed that? We have a First Amendment that says Congress shall make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This, somehow, means you cannot pray in a public school. The old joke is that as long as there are pop quizzes, there will be prayer in school…but there is a serious side to this. A nation got started so that people could worship freely — our hardcore leftists wax lyrically about how important that is, then they stop us from doing that very thing!

It’s very much like a husband telling his wife how much he loves her right after his latest frenzy of beating her senseless. Except husbands who do this don’t often claim it’s someone else who did the beating.

This “I love you even as I’m attacking you” relationship our liberal-vampires have is not quite so much against our freedoms; it is against reality itself. This is another reason why it is important to all of us that they be put out of power, why things will continue to get worse as long as they have it. Their plans seem to all have it in common that they are “intended” to achieve the exact opposite of what common sense says they would do. Remember the underpants-gnome episode of South Park, about the gnomes that stole the little boy’s underpants to make a profit? The gnome explained it thusly:

Step 1. Steal underpants
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit

Remember the economic stimulus? Step 1, spend a dazzling amount of money on brand new programs, the need for which had not been previously perceived or discussed…Step 2 ??? Step 3, budget surpluses galore.

Step 1, find as many ways as you possibly can to make it more expensive to hire people, and keep them on your payroll after you’ve hired them…Step 2, ????? Step 3, unemployment rate tumbles to the ground.

Step 1, build the Ground Zero Mosque which is a heap-big poke in the eye to New Yorkers, especially those related to the ones who perished in the 9/11 attacks…Step 2, ??????? Step 3, Islamo-Western relations improved mightily.

Step 1, tax the businesses and the rich people to such an extent that it’s painful to be either one, Step 2, ????????? Step 3, they’re grateful to you or they damn well oughta be.

Step 1, sue Arizona for trying to keep illegal aliens out of their state, Step 2, ????????? Step 3, illegal immigration crisis is solved.

Step 1, right after a white talk radio hostess complains that black comics can use the “N” word and people in her position cannot use it, fire her (thereby proving her point beyond any reasonable dispute or doubt), Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, sit back and watch race relations improve overnight.

Step 1, tell a Gold Star mother her son deserved to die, Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, take a bow because the discussion of of our various national problems and issues is bound to become more civil, how in the world could it not?

Step 1, bail out banks for making bad loans, Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, watch the new era of sound financial discipline unfold.

Step 1, constantly criticize this notion of “American exceptionalism,” bow to every single foreign dignitary you possibly can, say not a single positive thing about your own country other than what you can change it into… Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, Americans feel much better about themselves and the country in which they live.

I could add to this list all day long. Liberal plans do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do. That is, they do exactly the opposite of what the liberals tell us the plans are supposed to do.

No, I don’t think the Aunt-Sally-liberals are part of this. They work hard, they’re decent people, they’re smart. They just don’t pay attention after they’ve been given their instructions.

I’m talking about the balance of the liberal community that remains. They aren’t trying to do what they are representing themselves as trying to do. Or they have inextricably intertwined their brittle egos to solutions that, had they thought about them in a quality way for just a few seconds, they’d realize are the wrong solutions.

Or, they’re pig-fucking stupid. We’re talking about a lot of people here, so maybe it’s a combination of all three.

No, I don’t have a lot of respect for them. And I’m not feeling so much as a twitch of guilt about it either. These people are trying to hurt me. They’re trying to hurt you too.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel and at Right Wing News.

Twenty-two levels. Interestingly, it’s mostly females up to level 5; the “gentlemen” dominate from there on out. Got it from FARK.

In my world, you can’t graduate from sixth grade without watching something like this all the way through. And maybe writing a report.

Hat tip to blogger friend Phil.

Taranto speaks truth:

If the intent of the Ground Zero mosque is “to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together,” it is already a failure on its own terms. But the [New York] Times betrays its own lack of interest in conciliation by urging the president to “push back hard.”

By using the metaphor of physical assault, the Times makes clear that it views the placement of the proposed mosque as an assault on the sensibilities of what Times columnist Ross Douthat calls “the second America” — and that it is eager to see those sensibilities assaulted.

This is a constant with leftist movements. They all hold themselves out to be unifying, and they are. But they’re only designed to unify some subset of us. They’re meant to create a new elite.

Someone’s always supposed to be left out. Someone’s always supposed to be told they don’t count. To be alienated.

Conservatives shoot for a hundred, liberals shoot for fifty-one. Conservatives say, hey…if we want the economy to take off, shouldn’t government get out of the way? If we want more people to be hired, shouldn’t we make it less expensive to get them hired? And they find it disconcerting that anybody could possibly disagree. They’re not mobilized into action because someone disagrees; just profoundly disappointed.

Liberals just want to reach that fifty-first percentage. They don’t give a rip about the fifty-second. The loyal dissent, once it’s been eroded down to forty-nine, can hang around. In fact, it’s essential. Someone has to be made ineffectual. Someone has to be told they can go fuck a rusty jackhammer.

Without that vital ingredient, the feeling just isn’t complete.

They aren’t here to bring us all together or to make progress. That is not part of the agenda.

Speaking of bare asses being paraded around in public (see previous post): Here’s an example of an ass I’d just as soon see covered up, or not at all. The one on the right.

As blogger friend Gerard says: “Excuse me, but isn’t the person on the right supposed to be in charge of the Federal Government’s ‘No Child’s Fat Behind’ program?”

There is something going on with the office of the First Lady and it’s something related to our two major political parties. The one so aptly represented by Michelle Obama’s husband, it would seem, is pushing toward a fixture eerily reminiscent of the British royal family…or Marie Antoinette herself.

Office of the First Lady…hmmm….

The First Lady has a Chief of Staff. When did that happen? She has two dozen people working for her.

I’m seeing a lot of apologia for this, and there’s nothing apologetic about any of it because it all seems to take the form of “B-b-ut LAURA BUSH!” Nobody’s ready to explain what the 24 people actually do, in the service of someone who does not legislate, does not execute, does not adjudicate, does not nominate, doesn’t even decide anything.

Here’s how I see it: You need a scheduling assistant and an expert on etiquette. In Michelle Obama’s case there could be someone like Michael Caine’s character from Miss Congeniality giving badly-needed tips on “gliding.”

More and more, the democrat party seems to be the one that thinks it’s kind of neat when the ol’ man sneaks around behind the First Lady’s back. “Hooray, Bill Clinton got away with it!” and all that. How come these are the same people who think she should be like the Queen of Hearts, holding her own Royal Court? How come there are 21 names between their vision of the services the First Lady requires, and mine? What exactly are these people supposed to be doing all day? Distracting her?

I see shenanigans taking place with this office. Yes, I’m quite serious…and it’s more than a little bit embarrassing to be pointing it out, since that office isn’t supposed to be an office and it isn’t supposed to be doing much of anything. It’s an exercise in awkwardness to be demanding the extra attention, or answers to questions…which is probably why the shenanigans are taking place there.

Seriously. This country was started so we could get away from royalty. Maybe it’s time we got away from it. Two hundred thirty-four years? Yeah, I’d say that’s long enough. Let’s get rid of royalty.

Americans have already taken a long, hard look at the Wonder of Wasilla. A loud, angry, desperate stream of incendiary rhetoric has emerged that she lacks the requisite brainpower…but “desperate” is the key word there, and the stream of rhetoric is not a consensus, no matter how hard it tries to look like one. The consensus that has emerged is that America would like to keep looking.

But as long as the current leadership offers us all of the pain of having an idiot in charge of things, with none of the benefits — nobody is being eliminated from anything.

Newt Gingrich has seen this, and is considering a run in 2012. A lively discussion ensues over at Daphne’s place, where the hostess is less than enthralled.

I’ve already offered my opinion there.

In a way, it’s useful and helpful when the public clamors to wild-ass nonsensical opinions and declares them to be “moderate”…in this example, the idea that the planet is some kind of danger, and if humanity will only take a proactive stance and bring its fume emissions into check, maybe it can be saved. That is helpful, because the phony thinkers reveal themselves, like poisonous reptiles, arachnids and lizards, slithering out from under the dark spaces under big rocks. They make their big show of reaching across the aisle to the opposition, to showcase their extraordinary harmlessness.

Offering themselves as perfect leaders for a constituency that wants to be governed by Wesley Mouch.

It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another.

Well, we don’t need a Wesley Mouch and we don’t want a Wesley Mouch. What we need and want, is someone who will stand up to the bullshit that is threatening to consume us and annihilate us. On purpose.

As far as I’m concerned, any Gingrich candidacy died right there. In an instant. Like a fly under a swatter.

Why do the Brits think America’s President is headed for a crash and a burn?

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people
2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership
3. Obama fails to inspire
4. The United States is drowning in debt
5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat
6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake
7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive
8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration
9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security
10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness

Economist:

Why, asks a Democrat leading a training session for fellow activists, doesn’t “Yes we can” work as a slogan any more? “Because we haven’t,” a jaded participant responds.

The democrat party is going to try to save the midterms by…get this…ramping up on the “it’s all Bush’s fault” rhetoric. Karl Rove explains why it won’t work:

Democrats can’t sell themselves as “the results party,” as Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine proclaimed in April. Nor do they have an attractive or popular policy agenda moving forward. Mr. Obama’s fixation with blaming his predecessor has badly weakened him. Constantly engaging in the blame game makes the president look enfeebled and whiny rather than sturdy and confident. One of any president’s most important possessions is his reputation for strong leadership.

Democrats are likely to lurch from one approach to another. Candidates on the ropes often do. At this stage, though, it doesn’t much matter what they decide on. The narrative for this election is firmly in place.

When the lessons you learn from politics on the national stage, match up with the lessons you learn from politics in high school or in the office — you are being exposed to fundamental truths about human nature and it’s a good time to power up the long term memory. What we are learning now, is the same thing we’ve learned before. Reality has been beating us upside the head with it whether we’ve chosen to pay attention, or not:

When you sacrifice all that you have, all that you know is right, and all that you can do just to be popular…in the long run, you are left without even that. You lose everything.

1. He knows trigonometry.
2. He can drive a stick shift.
3. He NEVER uses the word “basically.”
4. He can type without looking at the keyboard.
5. He eats meat. He drinks beer. He goes to Hooter’s.
6. On the weekends, he does *something* that makes him sweat.
7. He can bend a beer bottle cap into a metal taco, with one hand.
8. He’s not in touch with his “feminine side” and does not wish to be.
9. He can shoot. A real gun. Something with a caliber that begins with “3” or higher.
10. He can tie knots. Lots and lots of knots. Something besides the bow-line and the square.
11. With his wife/girlfriend/kids in the room, he uses the word “chicks.” No apologies offered.
12. He very rarely apologizes for anything; if he does, it’s about something he’ll never do again.
13. He knows how to cook. Something that involves mixing a sauce together and heating something up.
14. A woman who builds a household with this man, knows the household is different because it’s him.
15. His voice never ascends above Middle C, unless it does that naturally; which of course it does not.
16. When he meets people, he stands up, looks them in the eye, shakes their hand, and gives them his name.
17. He will take a bullet for the ones he loves. He knows who they are, and if the time comes, he’ll be there.
18. He also knows the ones he does not love so much, and he’ll sacrifice for them too. He will take the blows that were intended for the one who did him wrong.
19. But he’s no patsy. People who owe him favors, know they owe him favors. If they forget, he’ll remind them.
20. He fixes things. He did not go to a class to learn how. He figured out how it worked and then he fixed it.
21. He does not come home to be informed that there is a dog in the house now. He maintains control of the house.
22. He does not drive his kids to school. His kids know how to do things, including how to get themselves to school.
23. He is well read. He has read Atlas Shrugged from cover to cover. He can tell you the parts of it he agrees with, which is most of it.
24. He knows how to spell things. He knows how to use punctuation. He knows his homophones and homonyms. He has mastered the complexity of “it’s”.
25. He thinks the happy ending to “Stepford Wives” is a tragic ending, and that all the eerie parts of it are actually happy. He isn’t afraid to say so.
26. When women, children and liberals are present, he changes the language he uses and the jokes he tells. He does NOT…NOT…NOT change his opinions to suit the new crowd.
27. He keeps his opinion when everyone else agrees with it. He keeps it when just about everybody is disagreeing with it. He only abandons it when the evidence tells him he should.
28. He is naturally enthused about changing the state of objects from a great distance. Shooting things with a gun; flying a model airplane by remote control; pissing on a leaf floating in a stream from a bridge up above it.
29. He possesses the ability to pave his own road, as well as to observe social protocols. He can survive if society is completely dismantled, but he can follow orders too. He is Patrick Swayze’s character in Steel Dawn.
30. He can, and does, figure out for himself that more work is necessary. A reward he’s been anticipating may be delayed, or given up entirely, because of what he realizes must be done. And he does it without a word of complaint.

1. No conference tables. Conference tables are death to good science fiction. The “I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing” scene is the last time anything cool has ever been done around a conference table.
2. No handrails. Bottomless pits look so much more awesome without any handrails and so do staircases.
3. No old women and no young men. The buxom planet-princess who’s never met a real man before, only needs a father; a mother would just be in the way. And Captain Kirk doesn’t need any competition from another young stud.
4. No foreign languages. No matter how far away the planet is, everyone should speak perfect English.
5. There m-u-s-t be gravity, artifical or otherwise, EVERYWHERE.
6. Fat guys should always die first.
7. No geography. When you land on a planet, the guy who runs the planet should be no more than thirty feet away. When the bad guys catch you and put you in a holding cell on a space station as big as the moon, the computer that holds the bad guy’s secrets should be right across the hall from the detention block.
8. All ancient alien computers should have a self-destruct mechanism built in so that any unexpected piece of data, logical contradiction, buffer overflow, general protection fault, file seek error or divide-by-zero error should result in explosive self-destruction, preferably involving fire. All the better if it sets off a chain reaction that destroys the entire complex in which it is housed.
9. Girls should, at the worst possible time, lose complete control of themselves, a state which can be cured only by means of a well-meaning gentleman applying a brisk impact to the face which causes them to fall into a deep sleep so they can be carried to safety.
10. Robots should be anthropomorphic, they should always have personality unless they’re “medical droids.”
11. Bad guys can’t shoot straight.
12. When the Captain gives an order to the crew, they should follow it to the letter unless they’ve been taken over by exotic space viruses or evil alien beings. When the Captain receives an order from his superiors, though, the orders are all fouled up, and evidence that the superiors have been taken over by exotic space viruses or evil alien beings.

Greg Gutfield has an idea about the mosque to be built by Ground Zero in New York:

Well, you know, I was thinking — I went on to their Web site, the Cordoba House website. It’s a lovely website, and they talk about preaching tolerance and communication.

And I thought how interesting is it that they are preaching tolerance and communication to Americans? I thought, wouldn’t it be great to test their tolerance?

So I figured let’s open an Islam-friendly gay bar next door to the mosque. That is my proposal and I’m sticking by it.

I’m not a good businessman and I’m a terrible activist, but this might be the greatest idea I’ve ever had.

I’m inclined to agree with that.

Ralph R. Reiland writing in Pittsburgh Live:

President Obama’s program for more jobs includes a call for the government, starting in January, to take more money from “the rich,” from the nation’s key job creators, a strategy that’s intrinsically irrational and counterproductive — unless you think that all jobs should be with the government.
:
An analysis of IRS data for 2007 shows the top 1 percent of income earners receiving 22.8 percent of total income and paying 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes. Similarly, the top 5 percent of income earners received 37 percent of total income and paid 60.6 percent of all federal income taxes.
:
In the high-tax era of the late 1970s, pre-Reagan, the United States was a net capital exporter, with American individuals and companies investing more abroad than foreigners were investing here.

Cuts in income taxes at every level, reductions in taxes on capital gains, and cuts in the highest income tax rate during the Reagan years, from 70 percent to 50 percent and then 28 percent, turned that capital loss around and created what the National Bureau of Economic Research called “the longest sustained period of prosperity in the twentieth century,” the creation of 17 million new jobs from 1981 through 1989.

Obama is moving in exactly the opposite direction.

The theme of Republicans being anti-science was still in a state of crescendo during the 2004 election; I recall it became an even more prominent fixture in 2006 and 2008 and may have been a primary contributing factor to their defeat.

What captures my attention about this, though, is not that the democrat party holds itself out as superior leadership in the “supporting science” department, but where. Having made a sweep through my political memory about this issue, and being satisfied that it is a functionally exhaustive one, I dredge up three public policy questions to which this has been applied.

1. The planet is on the brink of dying off because of our toxic human fumes;
2. You cannot properly do stem cell research until you first grind up some babies;
3. The theory of evolution proves this is a godless universe.

I’m not counting all the chatter about the who’s-who of “X has a Blackberry” and “X can’t figure out how to use an iPod.” I’m ignoring it because I think it’s stupid.

So I can’t think of anything beyond those three. What do the three have in common I wonder? That’s the “D’Jever Notice” moment: Humans have all the origin, all the destiny, all the sanctity, and all of the entitlement to a continuing existence of a cluster of bacteria on a kitchen sponge. It all seems to come back to that. We are an infestation and nothing more than that. There’s no reason for anyone to love our species save for what we are going to become later.

If something comes up to substantiate it, our liberals shout it from the hilltops and make sure everyone hears about it over and over again. If there’s something to suggest otherwise, they ignore it. That isn’t an illustration of science, that’s cognitive bias.

Those aren’t white coats they’re wearing; they’re straight-jackets.

And, at times, that is not so hard to see.

From bLaugh.

Consumerist:

Cops love finding iPhones at crime scenes because the phones carry so much priceless data about your usage habits, or as the cops call it, evidence. That email you typed months back about feeling stabby when you drink? It’s still there because there because the iPhone captures everything you type to help fuel its spellcheck abilities—even emails you thought you deleted. And that’s not all.

* Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.
* iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.

Neal Boortz was saying something this morning about some musician guy running for President of Haiti or Jamaica or Cuba or something. Whatever it is it’s got something to do with this clip.

I’ve been doing it the wrong way all this time!

No, I’m seriously re-thinking how I’ve been tying my shoes now. This is bound to get extra confusing.

Blame Hector Owen.

With the dropping of a gavel…once again.

I just don’t see this as a terribly big event. The pattern has been nearly perfect, has it not? Gay marriage appears in a court, and it wins…it appears at a ballot box, and it loses. I’m looking for a break in the trend, and there hasn’t been one yet, so the trend is going to be the story until such time as it is disturbed.

And what is the story about this trend? Our courts are defining for us, over our protests, what marriage is.

I do think it’s pretty sad this legal framework, and culture, that we’re setting up. The adoptions that will take place, effectively guaranteeing that the child(ren) will entirely grow up without the benefit of a female mother, or a male father, as the case may be. The specific instances I don’t find quite so tragic — two gay parents, a whole lot better than none at all, right?

The tragedy is the culture. We will be required to pretend, on pain of civil suit, that a motherless or fatherless household is just as good as a two-parent home with a genuine mother and a genuine father.

Which takes us to exactly the same Ground Zero destination point, to which all left-wing ideas inexorably lead…

This particular individual isn’t contributing anything truly irreplaceable and may be discarded at will.

“Kidzmom” and I disagree on just about everything. And I do mean everything. But since we split up, she has always acted like there is no substitute on this entire green planet for my fine self when it comes to fathering that child. And I have reciprocated on the subject of mothering him. The boy had to go under the knife yesterday. Know how many phone calls there were to the next state over? I lost count. Why? Because like all strong wise men, I know my limitations. I can’t mother.

Some human efforts are irreplaceable. This is the idea that our society is gradually losing. And the people are not in favor of it. Generally, we want to matter, and we want to matter as individuals. Not as a herd of livestock that has to be managed and told by our aristocrats what is a marriage & what isn’t a marriage.

It’s a religious concept. Now government is telling us what it is. That means, with enough time, government can define for us all other aspects of our religious “freedom.”

One or two other sensibly-minded gadflies are joining with my fine self on an experiment, to find out what happens to lefties who use their “let me further persuade you to my point of view with my dismissive attitude” technique — when it doesn’t work. The result, so far, is: What started as a left-winger bitching about the bad press Obama was getting over skipping the Boy Scout centennial, has popcorned into a thread just shy of eighty comments about all sorts of stuff.

The persuasive-dismissive-attitude thing is being retried and retried. It’s developed into something of a nervous tic for them.

Socialism isn’t bad at all. It has worked quite well in a number of other places. Why? Well, because when and where it has worked, it has been restrained by the best impulses of Capitalism. The all or nothing meme is getting really worn out.

Here in the United States, I would posit that Capitalism works best. But only when it is restrained by Socialistic impulses. That’s why our Capitalist system worked, more or less, swimmingly from 1945 to the early 1980’s. There were economic ups and downs, but no cataclysm. The only clusterphucks we’ve known economically have come in 1929 and since deregulation in the 1980’s. Why? It’s not because the Gilded Age Presidents or Ronald Reagan were pure evil. Liberals who talk that way presume these men WANTED to destroy America. And that’s just nonsense. They meant well, were sincere and were, clearly, sincerely wrong.

Socialism is no evil, unless it us unbridled. In North Korea and the old Soviet Union, it was unbridled. Capitalism is no evil. In fact, it is pregnant with the potential for great good. When it is bridled. Since Ronald Reagan (and in fairness, I should note that some deregulation was championed by the supposedly liberal Jimmy Carter), we have had nothing but a succession of extreme Capitalists as Presidents. Barack Obama is simply a Capitalist, but not an extremist. If nationalizing Willard “Mitt” Romney’s health care reform plan is Socialism, then Billy Sunday’s tent revivals were Roman Catholic masses.

Socialistic restraints have kept capitalism bridled. Our messy capitalistic-socialist hodgepodge is the best of both worlds, or something.

I guess when I see socialism making these big messes, like the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac situation, and blame them on capitalism…that’s just the wonderfulness oozing out.

So I replied:

Capitalism places the opposite participant in a transaction (seller, if you’re the buyer; buyer, if you’re the seller) in the same position of authority that socialism invests in some centralized dictator who is far less interested in the outcome, knows a whole lot less about the nature of it, and is consistently an asshole.

Capitalism has no need to be bridled. It is self-bridling. It is equally risible to talk about bridled & non-bridled socialism; it is inherently unbridled. Any & all charter documents that seek to place limits on power, socialism labors to undermine. Once the ruling party gets it in their head they want to do something, anything standing in the way is exactly that and nothing more. Just an obstacle to be defeated.

And the socialism-isn’t-bad guy came back with:

Capitalism is self-bridling? OMG. Morgan, that is possibly the most clueless thing I have ever heard any intelligent person say.

Tell that to the people in Anniston, Alabama; Mossville, Louisiana; and Lima, Ohio. Tell that to the families of the miners killed in West Virginia or the workers killed on the BP Oil rig.

Unbridled Capitalism is no different than unbridled Socialism. Both lead to negligent homicide.

This orgy of deregulation must be stopped, just as the orgy of oppression in the old USSR had to be stopped.

Heaven help me, it’s the dreaded OMG retort. It’s been the juggernaut of arguments since the debates that took place in ancient Athens.

What is this guy, twelve?

Yes Jim. Self-bridling. Capitalism has its restraints built in. They may be disappointing to a pipe-dreamer who’s come up with a vision, unenforced by reality, of what the self-restraints ought to be (socialistic governments are absolutely NOT self-bridling). But they’re there.

You sell something, the buyer has to agree to the price and the terms. Otherwise you go out of business. You buy something, the seller must agree or you go home empty handed.

Government does something like, oh…regulate BP? BP writes in the answers to the audit in pencil, the auditor traces over it in pen. The mentally flaccid will say “Aha! See? That’s a failure of capitalism!” But it isn’t. “Regulatory oversight” was put in place, and it was found not to work.

Hey wouldn’t it be sweet to have a job like that? You’re supposed to do something…and when you use the time to stare at porn all day instead of doing your job, it’s the other guy’s fault.

You want unbridled? Look at Obama or any other leftwing dictator asshole. The rules say He can’t do something, and whatever that rule is it’s just a minor irritant, nothing more. That’s what I call unbridled.

Or if you insist on something in the private sector, look to the businesses that employ illegal aliens. There’s your “unbridled.”

Capitalism is self-bridling. Obama makes it a lot more expensive to hire people, and in keeping with the law, the corporations lay people off. And then this is supposed to be the fault of capitalism somehow.

But I never said the bridling had to be comfortable for everyone. Businesses that want to operate out in the light, do what must be done in order to stay legal. And then it’s their fault, even though the leftist government comes up with the policies. Often, in contravention to the Constitution and other laws.

Obama shakes down BP, has the “audacity” to pick up the phone and order them to put billions of dollars in a pot. Hey, is that your idea of self bridling? Just curious.

No reply posted as of yet. There are other dialogues going on in this thing…so I expect to see this particular train of thought Cheesecake-Nazi’d out. Ooh, bright shiny object.

But this theory of mixing together…oh my, how I’d love to set the cross-hairs of a .50 cal. upon it. This is an idea that needs to die. It is toxic. It ranks high on the list of things that have diminished the opportunities of the generations of Americans, now to levels beneath that enjoyed by their parents. It’s killing the country, this “epoxy theory.” Socialism, capitalism. Mix ’em together, shake the bag a few times, and what you get is twice as good as either one by itself.

Over and over again, we see that is not what you get. Whatever the effort is, whatever the industry is, the results are the same: The productive are strapped to a sort of gurney, and the non-productive figure out they can attain a higher lifestyle by being dicks. Then they gather around the bloated succulent victim, bare their fangs and suck like the craven vampires they are. The next generation is taught to be vampires, not bloated succulent gurney-meat; and can you blame them? Real jobs are for losers.

Fellow Right Wing News contributor Melissa Clouthier, not wanting to give the Shirley Sherrod treatment to Pete Stark, put up an embed to the full eighteen-minute video. We shall follow suit.

If I were writing this as a work of fiction, the publisher would beat me over the head about this particular character. Not enough creativity going into the Congressman’s name. Stark. As in, Congress’ contempt for their constituents is laid starkly bare. “There hasn’t been a less subtle, less imaginative name for a character since General Grievous” s/he’d say.

Melissa puts it best:

The condescension and the superiority of this man is what’s so amazing. Our elected officials believe that they’re our rulers.

Aw, that’s okay. These are the people who feel perfectly entitled to tell us what kind of health care we’re going to have.

Wall Street Journal:

Voters in Missouri overwhelmingly opposed requiring people to buy health insurance, in a largely symbolic slap at the Obama administration’s health overhaul.

The referendum was the first chance for voters to express a view on the overhaul, although turnout in the state was low and Republican voters significantly outnumbered Democrats.

With all precincts reporting, 71% of voters supported Proposition C, establishing a state law that says Missouri cannot compel people to pay a penalty or fine if they fail to carry health coverage. Twenty-nine percent voted against the proposition.

The state law runs counter to the federal health law President Barack Obama signed in March, which calls on most Americans to carry coverage or pay a fine.

Boy I’d love to hear some arguments from those twenty-nine percent. The left-wing argument is typically molded and shaped, often cynically, to fit a trope of “freedom” and “choice” but this one would have to be molded and shaped to fit a trope of “Whatever Obama Says Must Be Right.” Freedom & choice have nothing to do with it. It can’t even be perceived that way by the addle-minded. Not unless the counter-propaganda tries to make that happen. Must be some kickass counter-propaganda; even 29% impresses me.

The New York Times opening paragraph is awesomely snort-worthy:

Missouri voters on Tuesday easily approved a measure aimed at nullifying the new federal health care law, becoming the first state in the nation where ordinary people made known their dismay over the issue at the ballot box.

I know, I know, the first thing you’re taught in journalism school is to find a way to fit the “Why Do I Give A Rip” into the first line. And Senators and Congressmen have made known their opposition at the ballot box; “ordinary” people have made known their opposition at the tea party rallies. There’s still a first here, so it must be mentioned.

But the “ordinary people” is just delicious. It reveals exactly how the extraordinary people at the New York Times see things, and most likely without anyone at the NYT being wise to it.

I’ll bet anything that the White House is pissed over it. “First, what do you mean first? There’s going to be more?? This is biased coverage! We can’t get any credit for the wonderful work we do in this shitty economy…that, uh, has resulted from the Failed Policies of the Bush Administration (FaPoBuAd)^TM.”
Back to the Wall Street Journal:

Supporters of the state law said Congress was overreaching by requiring people to buy coverage, and they called the proposition a chance to stand up for states’ rights.

Opponents included the Missouri Hospital Association, which said that if the mandate isn’t enforced some who can afford insurance will get a free ride and pass the costs on to those who are insured. The association spent about $400,000 on direct mail in connection with Proposition C, according to its filings.

A union spent 400 large defending the concept of individual responsibility. Hehe.

You don’t trust what unions have to say about Obama’s plan. You just don’t.

gallup.com, via HotAirPundit:

A majority of Wyoming, Mississippi, and Utah residents identified as conservative rather than moderate or liberal during the first half of 2010, making these the most politically conservative states in the U.S. The District of Columbia had the greatest percentage of liberals, along with four New England states: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

I’m counting eight of the top-ten liberal states on my “have-visited” list, and four of the ten conservative states.

And let me tell you, this is absolutely bowling me over. Because I have another list in my head of “most-friendly” states. And actually, the ones that rank highest are not on either list. I’d put Tennessee up on top, followed by Ohio.

But these liberal states — the people I’ve met there were not by any stretch mean, just generally unhelpful. Kinda grouchy.

Pretty much exactly what liberals say our conservatives are.

Yeah it’s old news by now…their mad ravings are all just psychological projection.

Bristol has split with Levi again. So it’s time for another session of Palin-Go-‘Round. You’ve already been through a bunch of frames so by now you know exactly how the game is played:

1. Sarah Palin does something, or says something, or someone says or does something to her;
2. Liberals come up with some clever catch-phrases about it, eager to show other liberals how nasty they can be;
3. You skim through all the toxic things they have to say as they seek to impress each other;
4. Stop to consider: These are the people who want to manage health care for all of us. Scared yet?

Palin-go-round is always sickening but it’s always rewarding too. Liberals who want to show other liberals how nasty they can be, play to win. They know there are no points awarded for second-worst.

Here are your quotes. And one more time: These people want to make decisions about your health care. They think they have a right to do it because they’re extra-special, extra-intelligent, extra-evolved, extra-civilized and extra-decent people.

“This attention-seeking tramp gets everything she deserves.”

“The wonderful Palin family. Trailer park values we can all follow! A shinning example for all our youth.”

“At least this leaves Levi free to resume attacking Sarah without those mother-in-law concerns.”

“ha ha ha ha ha another loser on Palin’s family, like daughter like mother, a bunch of LOOOOOOSERS!!”

“what a bunch of morons. i don’t know who is stupider, her or her mom.”

“Hopefully , the Alaskan trailer park trash will stay out of Washington DC.”

“she got played because she’s an idiot..her whole family is nothing but trash and dumber than a sack of hair. “

“This Bristol seems to be the silliest dim wit just like her mother the queen of mendacity and vapidness.. The whole family borders on the absurd. They are the laughing stock of any intelligent person.Would that we could house them all in an igloo on an iceberg sent out to sea with the poor polar bears Sarah so hates.”

Now that we’ve concluded another set, let’s think about this:

Liberal plans all seem to have it in common, that something fundamental to human existence is to be centrally managed by demigod central figures who are so wonderful that positive results are assured.

Because those demigod central figures, apart from being so smart…are nice.

But when push comes to shove, liberals don’t put a lot of importance on being nice. They put a lot of importance on being mean and nasty. This is supposed to be why they’re better than conservatives — they’re nice, conservatives are mean.

The only thing missing is the nice-ness. It’s missing from the achievement. And it’s missing from the effort.