MediaIte via Confederate Yankee:

Today in United States v. Rod Blagojevich: following up on his 2008 claims that then-Senator Barack Obama was one of a few people who could testify to his innocence, his defense team issued a motion today to subpoena the President to testify in court. Most of the juiciest bits involving Obama’s role in choosing a new Senator are blacked out, or so we thought. It turns out a lucky PDF glitch gave us VIP access. Who wouldn’t want to see the blacked out part? Let’s investigate!

In sum, it’s “not a particularly damning conversation.” But it could be the tip of the tail of a very large brontosaurus. And, the evidence on the basis of just this, at least strongly suggests the President told a fibber. Not a “you’ll never see your taxes go up by one dime if you make less than 200k” fibber, but one of the bad ones, where you’re really, really not supposed to get caught.

Which brings up another thing that the evidence strongly suggests. This came out of yet another improperly redacted PDF file. I think it’s a little unfair to saddle Holy One with the technological ineptitude of every li’l government employee, but it kind of puts a damper on the whole “modern new tech-savvy administration” parade we were “all” supposed to have been throwing.

Come to think of it, where did the tech-savvy reputation come from anyway? Barack Obama has an iPod? Something tells me that particular historical item is not going to age well.

Occasional commenter PhysicsGeek has his own place and you really should head on over when you can spare the time. His ancient dusty old archives (two, nearly three months back) contain some stuff good enough for our most recent:

A group of 40 years old buddies discuss and discuss where they should meet for dinner.

Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen restaurant because the waitress’s there have low cut blouses and nice breasts.

10 years later, at 50 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because the food there is very good and the wine selection is good also.

10 years later at 60 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because they can eat there in peace and quiet and the restaurant is smoke free.

10 years later, at 70 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because the restaurant is wheel chair accessible and they even have an elevator.

10 years later, at 80 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because that would be a great idea because they have never been there before.

That godless heathen small-tee tim, who I named, came up with a great observation at Rick’s place. The occasion is Barack Obama’s speech about financial “reform,” and it’s about that R-word.

Ah yes, “reform”. Just like they did with ‘housing’ and ‘healthcare’. Next will be ‘Cap & Tax’, then Illegal Immigration’ and ‘Gun Control‘…“reform”.

Howzabout ya’ll just stop already with the “reform” nonsense ‘cause that word doesn’t mean what you think it means. Screwing us doesn’t hurt less because you name it something else…Barry Sotero.

Semantic double speak may work on the minions who bought into the Hope/Change, unicorns and rainbows for everyone, let’s be part of something historic, never mind the dude has never held a job that generated revenue to cover his own paycheck much less the billions that the companies he now wants to “reform”, but it doesn’t mean squat to the rest of us O (sh*t) man.

Though there is one “reform” I’m looking forward to – NOVEMBER.

And it got me to thinking.

You know, we have a pretty dismal track record with seeing through that word and you cannot really blame our politicians for using it. It works, what? A hundred percent of the time or something close to that? Quick, what’s the last thing that was called “reform” that didn’t pass. I think it is a hundred percent. I think if I had a car that started as often as “reform” gets signed into law, I’d keep it forever. So would you.

But you know what? That doesn’t mean that everything called “reform” has to be a bad idea. Once in awhile, we can put together legislation that makes sense, that would help the country, and put that salesman’s word on it. Just to shake things up a bit.

So I came up with a little list.

1. ILLEGAL Immigration reform. As in ILLEGAL. Did I say ILLEGAL?
2. Putting-up-with-communist-assholes reform.
3. Domestic drilling reform. Drill-baby-drill.
4. Portraying-the-military-in-movies reform.
5. Aggressive interrogation reform. Which means start doing it.
6. This-Is-Sparta reform. If our soldiers rough up terrorists we don’t throw them in the brig, we give ’em medals.
7. Deficit spending reform. Budget deficits simply aren’t allowed anymore. Learn to deal, Congress.
8. Birth certificate reform. Just pull the thing out, President-Elect, like I have to do when I apply for a passport.
9. ACORN/Census reform. Anyone who put you guys in charge of this, is banned from public service for life.
10. You-go-first reform. Congress makes laws that affect the rest of us, Congress lives under those laws first.

Now, I don’t care if you’re a conservative or a liberal. Those are good ideas, right? Well…maybe our bedwetter liberals would balk at the waterboarding. But is it really a liberal position that terrorists get to saw off the heads of American journalists while they’re still alive, desperately gurgling through their severed windpipes — but that our bravest, finest young men and women should spend twenty years in Leavenworth if they so much as slap the guy? That’s really a liberal position?

If that’s the case, then who in the hell is worried about November? Make that a central issue, take over the House and Senate, and bang you’re done. President Soetoro calls up to say “I’d like a bill sent to my desk to help spread the wealth around” and you tell Him no.

But back to the original point.

It’s like saving the planet. Things that bring harm to the planet, you’ll notice, are never inconvenient things. Toilet paper that scratches your ass is not bad for the environment; assholes who drive around in convertibles with their tops down, and their speakers going boom-chicka-boom, are not bad for the planet. Comfortable, cushy toilet paper is bad for the planet, and that truck you like to drive that comes in handy, is bad for the planet. It’s the same case with that word “reform.”

Joe McCarthy once said of Gen. George C. Marshall, “If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest.” That is supposed to be a notorious quote; I don’t see why. To me, exactly the same principle apples to that word “reform.”

If the word were simply random and arbitrary, rather than a passcode for destroying this country from within, the laws of probability dictate that some of the laws festooned with this label would serve the interests of the country, and the people living within it.

That isn’t what I’m seeing. I cannot currently recall any exceptions to the trend: That which is attached to the name “reform” is antithetical to common sense.

In fact, I just thought of an eleventh: Reform reform. If the bill is brought to the floor of either house, and it has that odious word in the title, it is summarily dismissed. Seriously, why not?

Don’t let a crisis go to waste. Have you ever considered how embarrassing it’s going to be if future generations actually pay attention to what was said, right about now, and when? They’ll be all like “So Rahm Emmanuel got caught saying ‘never let a crisis go to waste’ — and then, after that, Barack Obama gave one speech after another with the word ‘crisis,’ hundreds of speeches a year, years at a time??” Yeah I know, junior, I’m having trouble figuring it out myself and I’m living in it.

Obama blamed “a failure of responsibility,” according to excerpts from the speech provided by the White House, saying “it is essential that we learn the lessons of this crisis, so we don’t doom ourselves to repeat it.”

“And make no mistake, that is exactly what will happen if we allow this moment to pass – an outcome that is unacceptable to me and to the American people,” Obama will say.

Alright, get out the daubers and cards and let’s get this party started. Lessons, crisis, teachable moment, responsibility, make no mistake, let me be clear.

But there is a problem. What was that Einstein said about you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it? How about with the people who created it?

Everyone from disgraced former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to analysts at the Brookings Institution and Barclays Capital to the GOP leadership and Rush Limbaugh has noted the reeking political opportunism in the air.

As the New York Post reported Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee immediately bought sponsored Internet ads on Google that direct web surfers who type in “Goldman Sachs SEC” to Obama’s fundraising site. “It’s time to hold the big banks accountable,” the money-grubbing DNC message bellows. But just like his crony capitalist predecessor George W. Bush, Obama has relied on Goldman Sachs and Wall Street power brokers to engineer massive government interventions to “rescue” failing businesses with the tax dollars of ordinary Americans.

While irony-challenged Democratic candidates like mob-linked banker Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois (who hopes to fill Obama’s old Senate seat) call on Republicans to return their fat-cat Goldman Sachs donations, the Democrats are silent on the $994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged.

The democrat firefighter comes bringing buckets of gasoline.

When he throws the gasoline on your burning house and the flames leap up higher, and you notice it, he makes fun of you for noticing it.

And then he lets you know that union rules prohibit you from doing anything to fight the fire yourself.

Then you find out he set the fire in the first place.

And he makes fun of you for noticing that.

A graphic creation of blogger friend Phil.

The lefties can see it too. Have you picked up on that surge of desperation lately? It’s like having the entire Alinsky book thrown at you at once, whereas before the ObamaCare bill it was more like one chapter at a time. They done screwed the pooch but good, and they know it.

Hat tip once again to Boortz.

I’m a little leery of comedy being given a platform specifically so it can be used as a weapon. After awhile it stops being funny, since humor isn’t the primary mission.

But for now, from what I see the jokes are okay. Barack Obama jokes are still fresh, and will be for quite awhile because there’s this soft rule that He’s a Holy Man and you’re not supposed to make fun of Him. And yet inwardly, when people evaluate Him with their faculties of common sense, in their heart of hearts and skull of skulls they all know He’s become something of a joke, so the joke is kinda just sitting there ready to be made. Every punchline has a little bit of an “ooh” to it, as in I-can’t-believe-he-said-that.

“I can see Russia from my house!” never had that going for it.

If this is a weapon, it displays promise of being a potent one. Let’s hope they do better than Air America.

They’re pulling out the big guns now:

Liberal Democrats and their friends in the media have tried just about everything to dismiss and discredit the tea-party movement. They’ve accused Americans who are anxious and angry about a rapidly encroaching government of being racists, extremists, birthers, pawns of a corporate “AstroTurf” effort—and, now, potential Timothy McVeighs.

No less a figure than Bill Clinton seized on the occasion of the Oklahoma City bombing’s 15th anniversary to lecture tea-party activists, first in a speech last week to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, then in a Monday New York Times op-ed. “Have at it, go fight, go do whatever you want,” he said in the speech. “You don’t have to be nice; you can be harsh. But you’ve got to be very careful not to advocate violence or cross the line.” In the op-ed, he wrote: “There is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government.”

Taken strictly at face value, these statements are unobjectionable. Yet given that the tea-party movement has been peaceful and law-abiding, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Mr. Clinton is engaging in a not-so-subtle smear campaign.

In doing so, Mr. Clinton is taking a page out of his own Presidential playbook. Five days after the 1995 bombing, he delivered a speech in which he denounced “purveyors of hatred and division.” He said, “They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. . . . When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it.” A news report at the time noted that Mr. Clinton made these incendiary accusations while “never putting a noun to the pronoun.”

Mr. Clinton’s opposition to “demonizing the government” would be more credible had he been heard from on the subject during the first eight years after he left office—when, for example, Hollywood demonized George W. Bush by releasing “Fahrenheit 9/11,” or when Mr. Clinton’s own former Vice President railed against the man who beat him in 2000: “He betrayed this country!”

Instead, Mr. Clinton’s effort to exploit the memory of Oklahoma City looks like a partisan cheap shot. In his speech last week, the former President observed that, unlike the Boston Tea Party, “this fight is about taxation by duly, honestly elected representatives that you don’t happen to agree with, that you can vote out at the next election.” Our guess is that the next election is what he’s really afraid of.

The fight is about out-of-control entitlement spending by duly elected representatives who were told, in no uncertain terms, that their constituents opposed it by three-fifths to two-fifths.

It’s about being marginalized as a rube, a ruffian, a mobster, a racist, a hack, a thug, an arsonist, a thief and a liar if you don’t go along with brand new national debts so incredibly exorbitant that your grandchildren will only dream about having a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

It’s about one energy crisis after another, during which time our liberal politicians tell us we can’t drill here or there because it might make things a tad uncomfortable for some kind of stinkbug. It’s about a prolonged economic malaise, during which time our liberal politicians attack our businesses as if the businesses were monsters, rather than legally recognized entities chartered for the purpose of making money. Tell executives of those businesses they can’t make bonuses over such-and-such an amount. Nationalize entire industries and then have the gall to say you aren’t doing it. And (don’t forget this step) BlameGeorgeWBush.

It’s about having our shoes piddled on, and being told it’s raining.

The most historically significant note jotted down by “Tea Party” in the history textbooks of tomorrow, I think, will not be that they fixed something that was broken, but that they demonstrated something else was broken. They have been, more-or-less, a model for what dissent should be in America. They have been what everybody says they want: Self-disciplined, contained, principled and peaceful disagreement. The way their movement has been treated, by the modern aristocracy, the think tanks, the legislators, the executives, the establishment media, the academia, by overly-bloated self-important huckster ex-Presidents, et al — has been nothing short of scandalous. It really is a national disgrace.

Yup, I definitely approve:

The Arizona House on Monday voted for a provision that would require President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate if he hopes to be on the state’s ballot when he runs for reelection.

The House voted 31-22 to add the provision to a separate bill. The measure still faces a formal vote.

It would require U.S. presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the constitutional requirements to be president.

Phoenix Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema said the bill is one of several measures that are making Arizona “the laughing stock of the nation.”

Mesa Republican Rep. Cecil Ash said he has no reason to doubt Obama’s citizenship but supports the measure because it could help end doubt.

I approve because I’m with that last guy. I’d bet a l-a-r-g-e amount of money Obama was born in Honolulu. But the precedent we’ve set by leaving things as they are, is a terrible one.

This country is being overrun by ankle-biters. By which I mean, people who resolve disagreements by means of ridicule, avoiding things like evidence, inferences, conclusions, all that good stuff.

The way I see it, Obama has never had a reason for demurring on the issue of releasing the long form. I think He sees the ankle-biters the way I do; as an important constituency. And this is His nod to them. We’ll argue this thing your way. By making fun of anybody who doesn’t just decide it the way we want…like we’re little kids or something.

I’m not saying He was born in Kenya, but enough is enough. I present a personal check, I show my driver’s license. I apply for a job, I show my social security card or my passport. I get sworn in as President, and…clue?

If the little people have to do it, the big people have to do it. Period, end of story.

What the hell, the electrons don’t cost anything. Let’s clutter ’em up.

Here’s the backstory. Blogger friend Westsoundmodern embedded that video, we’ve been talking about it on & off — not because it’s got good lookin’ women in skimpy clothes in it, but because the conversation that ensues just brings out the worst and most thoughtless in liberals. We like to make a study of both of those, good lookin’ women in skimpy clothes, and the disconnected, incoherent thoughts that swim around in the addled brains of liberal douchebags. So keen-eyed nobodies who visit The Blog That Nobody Reads, will note we have been returning to this.

“Joe America” just uploaded the capstone to the pyramid of dumbshittedness a few hours ago, and it really is something to behold:

Morgan,

I agree, if people are calling tea-baggers racest without cause, they are being racist. My comment was directed more at Westsound’s blatant sexism and belittling of any woman who thinks she can get by on her talent and brains alone. Maybe someone like Helen Thomas doesn’t give a crap whether someone like you find her attractive or not. I guess if you’re paying for fashion advice, you go to the woman at the Macy’s make-up counter; if you’re paying for some sort of specific expertise, one that requires education and knowledge, I personally don’t care what they look like; Results are what matter – Substance.

I think a lot of people look at the photos of the tea-party protests and wonder: where are all the non-white people? Maybe only white people are rational and dislike being taxed in to the ground? I don’t know… But as far as I can tell, they don’t seem to have any real solutions, just complaints about being taxed too much. Well, me too. I just get tired of whiners and complainers that have no viable solutions. They’re just wasting everyone’s time – in my opinion.

Questioning the patriotism of someone that balks at invading another country is a far cry from telling someone to get out of the way if they don’t have any solutions to the mess we’re in. A monopoly on free speech? Oh yeah, those damned minorities keeping the white man down again…..

I don’t know where you live, but around here there are plenty of literal creationists and born again nut-jobs. I’m not calling them crazy, I’m just saying that anyone that believes that god created the world in seven days is a nut-job. I don’t car how long days were back then – It’s flat out crazy-talk, and goes against all scientific thought.

Sarah Palin says she believes in creation. The only difference is that she uses the old “days were way longer back then” explanation. It’s all just degrees of mental illness to me. If I told you I believe that God came down and punished half the people in the world by making them have dark skin, and I’m descended from the white (good) people, so I’m never supposed to breed or worship with all the dark skinned people (like the Mormons believe: http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_racism.html) you would call me crazy, intolerant, or racist – maybe even against Mormons? – Unless of course you were a Scientologist, then the Mormons would side with me in calling you crazy. It’s all relative I guess. People can believe anything they want; and I have the right to deem them total nut-jobs. It’s a free country after all.

And no thanks, to what I consider a “crazy person” running the free world. I don’t care if you get your ideas from the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, or a book brought down by an Alien Angel, it’s all the same to me. It’s not what I believe in, and you can keep it to yourself, thank you very much.

Now, if deeply religious people could be elected to public office and be expected to govern with a secular hand, that might be different. But I have yet to see that happen in real life. And it only seems to be getting worse…..

And, you try writing writing more than a few sentences on your Iphone. Fosell, fossell, fawcell. oh well….

Regards,

Joe

Some observations I make about this:

One. Joe, like many millions of others, doesn’t really work with facts. He just goes through the motions of doing this. WSM “belittl[ed] any woman who thinks she can get by on her talent and brains alone”? Really? WSM came in afterward and called him out on it, to which Joe said…well, nothing. Palin believes in Creation, “she uses the old ‘days were way longer back then’ explanation”? What’s that supposed to mean? Palin’s views on Creation have been vastly exaggerated, this isn’t news to anyone who’s been paying attention. But it seems Joe’s willing to buy into every little thing he’s heard about her…and I’m supposed to believe every word too, because some anonymous guy who can’t spell things on his iPhone tells me to believe it.

Two. Joe can’t conclude anything once he does have the facts. He says “People can believe anything they want; and I have the right to deem them total nut-jobs.” Let’s see what else Joe has the right to deem. When I object to Obama sympathizers trying to gain a “monopoly on free speech” Joe “deems” that to mean “Oh yeah, those damned minorities keeping the white man down again.” Oh yeah, Joe. Sure. Whatever you deem.

Three. When Joe bases his ideas on something, he bases it on — other peoples’ ideas. He doesn’t say the idea of a seven-day Creation “goes against all scientific evidence” — he says it “goes against all scientific thought.” Now, there are lots of different ways to interpret the seven days, but Joe seems to have his mind all made up. He’ll interpret it in whatever way he “deems,” and once he’s done deeming that he’s ready to deem any adherents to be “nut-jobs.”

Four, and I’ve saved the best for last: Joe’s priorities are mistaken. Anyone who wants to be our next President can go to church every week, believe every single word out of the Bible, even view it through a strictly fundamentalist lens. Noah’s Ark, the eclipse of the sun getting stuck — everything, lock stock and barrel. That really isn’t going to affect much of anything.

When the current President is a “nut-job,” He “believes” a massive new entitlement program is going to save us money, and we should all be thankful to Him for cutting our taxes as soon as we’re done bitterly clinging to our guns and Bibles. Because of that, my children and grandchildren probably can’t earn a goddamn thing, and neither can yours, or Joe’s.

I think I got this guy pegged: He’s a secularist. He doesn’t think people can do anything good if they’re religious, and he doesn’t think people can do anything bad if they’re secular. He’s one of these smarmy atheists who have it all figured out, there is nothing up there because he’s figured it out that way.

Joe doesn’t figure things out, though. He’ll never admit this, but he swims with the tide. He’s one of these characters who, with a time machine, I can motivate to take on any opinion I want him to…just by figuring out what period in which that opinion is popular, and transporting him there. You want a Joe who believes in slavery? Coming right up. A Joe of Salem who thinks we need to hunt all the witches down? I can do that too. A Joe who wants to crucify all the Christians and feed them to the lions? No mean feat…how about a Joe who believes the Lancastrians rule by divine right? Or the Yorkists? Or Julius Caesar? Or wants to help participate in Caesar’s assassination? I can do it all, just give me Joe’s warm-putty-like mind, and a time machine with a precise dial on it.

People like this have no balls, no fortitude. That’s why Joe is so incensed about the lack of intellect in an ordinary citizen of Alaska whom he doesn’t personally know. Just think about that, now. You might conclude Sarah Palin’s a big ol’ dummy because so many people are saying so. Tentatively. Must be something to it, mustn’t there? That much is reasonable. But to get emotionally wrapped up in it, is a little nuts. You can only pull that off if you lack courage.

People like this are like jellyfish, just drifting with the current…left…right…whatever. If we all played a “truth or dare” game in which we sat in a room and talked about our experiences going against the consensus, poor Joe wouldn’t have jack squat to say. And I think he’s upset about it, if you want to know the truth. Maybe that’s why he gets so nasty over not-a-whole-lot. And that’s why I think Joe is important; there are a lot of people like him.

They go left when left is popular, they go right when right is popular. They hate themselves for it and are therefore constantly, indescribably, rude. They’re the anti-Charlton-Hestons.

Mkay, we’ll take note of that and file it for future reference. Hercules has completed his first labor.

Sen. John McCain praised a tough Arizona anti-immigration bill that will let police arrest people who aren’t carrying identification, the latest move in McCain’s rightward shift in advance of a tough Republican Senate primary this summer.

“I think it’s a very important step forward,” McCain said Monday. “I can fully understand why the legislature would want to act.”

It’s a dramatic switch for a senator who supported comprehensive immigration reform with Democratic lion Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) just four years ago. McCain is facing a primary challenge from the right in former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

His office later said his comments did not represent an endorsement, though a spokeswoman would not condemn the bill, either.

It’s not an enormous issue now, but I remember a few years back the news was thick with mention of some “needle exchange program” whereby city governments would spend good money providing free, clean needles to druggies who were shooting up illegal drugs. I see it as pretty much the same issue. When “illegal” is right there in the name of what is being done…it just seems like government shouldn’t be helping with it.

Because if government is going to help with it, even only passively, by looking-the-other-way, then what we have is a situation in which some crimes are super-duper-illegal and other “crimes” are kinda-sorta-illegal. Where it is implicitly understood that you’re “gonna do it anyway” so we’ll just work that whole thing, under the surface, if you will.

You know, we have the equal-protection clause for a reason. Shenanigans like this, by which I mean the status quo, without the new Arizona bill, violate the ever lovin’ snot out of it, IMO. I break a traffic law and I really-really did break it, it’s okay to entrap me by means of road signs that aren’t even legal. And this other guy over here, is breaking a different law…so now we have all these anti-laws that make it harder to catch him doing it. Can’t pull him over, can’t ask for papers, can’t refer him to the feds, can’t do this, can’t do that.

“Toad Tunnel” laws. That’s what they are. Bypass routes specifically constructed to penetrate a barrier, so that creepy-crawly and slithery-slimy things can get from one side to the other. Yeah, maybe that seems harsh when we’re talking about the folks down on their luck who just want to send money back home to their families. Well, you might be thinking of that; I’m thinking of kiddy-diddlers. That’s not true, you say? None of the twelve or twenty million are up to such shenanigans? Prove it. You can’t. They’re illegal.

And they’re gonna use your toad-tunnel laws. You know what happened to the real Toad Tunnel? Aside from the fact that it cost a goddamn fortune and became a laughing stock, snakes started using the toad tunnel to ensconce themselves in the fenced in “protected wetland” on the far side, and engorge themselves on the “endangered and protected” frogs. Yet another reason for the parallel to the immigration “laws.” Your intentions don’t really matter. You move up the food chain, and the predators up there are more capable of making use of such devices, than the relatively harmless specimens further down.

So hell yes this is overdue. Now back to Mac:

Immigration reform advocates were bewildered.

“He risked his political career for immigration reform, and now he is compromising his principles to fight for his political life,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice and a longtime immigration reform advocate.

Under the Arizona law, which passed the state Senate today and sent to Gov. Jan Brewer (R), police can arrest anyone on “reasonable suspicion” that they are an illegal immigrant. If they’re not carrying a valid driver’s license or identity papers, police can arrest them.

Hayworth called McCain’s Monday comments “political gamesmanship…born of political convenience – driven by his need for personal political gain.”

Why do they keep shoving microphones into the faces of jerks like this? McCain is compromising his “principles” now? What principles would those be?

I thought the whole point of this “reform” was to provide a “pathway to citizenship” so that if you can’t find a way to immigrate to the states legally, down the road such a way would be provided to you. Does Mr. Sharry have some kind of plan that, in the meantime, these illegal aliens should just keep on tootling around in their unregistered, uninsured cars without driver’s licenses? And we should all just look at other things more fun to watch, while the “snakes” among them slither through the tunnel to molest our women, kidnap our children, robbing, looting, murdering whenever it suits them?

Here’s what people are missing: If you make it alright to break this one “little” law that says “don’t cross this border unless you have the right papers” — you have to excuse everything else. All other laws are meaningless. You can’t enforce a law against someone if you don’t even know who it is. And so yes, it becomes a lawless underclass, a lawless culture. The fact that some of the people who dwell within, do follow the law…now that they’re here, now that they broke that first one…really doesn’t have anything to do with it. What’s relevant is the enforceability of the laws you have left, and that fell off the map when you said it was alright to scale the fence. From that point forward, the other laws only have a constraining effect upon those who choose to live by them voluntarily.

Good on McCain. This doesn’t make him a “good conservative” all by itself, but it is an educational moment. “Reform” people, if they’re honest, shouldn’t have reservations about what’s being done now and if they do, they shouldn’t be prattling on about “principles” being violated. It’s the enforcement of laws that are on the books already. Nothing unprincipled about that.

Not the right time to form conclusions about who’s a good conservative or who’s a bad conservative. We don’t know enough…or we’re not finding that out here, anyway. But it is a good thing to watch, to learn things we need to learn. About who’s motivated by what.

So our current President is some idiot woman named Palin, right?

I ask, because it seems all over the blogs and the message boards there are liberals making an issue out of her fitness-or-lack-thereof for the presidency. To hear them tell it, we’re simply not worried about anybody else. Nobody else is currently occupying that office. We’re not worried about anyone else being an incurious dolt or looking out of His depth.

And then there is the matter of character.

Roger Kimball proceeds with the well-deserved skewering.

I believe that the editorialist for Investor’s Business Daily got it exactly right about the second part of Obama’s response to the rallies: “Thanks for What?” he asked.

Why should they [the tea partiers] be thankful? As the president himself said on his weekly radio address a week ago, “one thing we have not done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000; that’s another promise we kept.”

In fact, that wasn’t his promise at all.

Here’s what candidate Obama really said in September of 2008: “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Got that? “Not any of your taxes.” The claim of no tax hikes on those below $250,000 as a result of the current administration’s policies is completely and utterly false.

A report from the House Ways & Means Committee’s GOP members notes that, since January 2009, Congress and the president have enacted $670 billion in tax increases. That’s $2,100 for each person in America. At least 14 of those tax hikes, the report says, break Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000. Roughly $316 billion of the tax hikes — 14 increases in all — hit middle-class families, the report says.

This comes in addition to recent data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office showing U.S. spending and indebtedness growing at an alarming rate. Government spending now totals 25% of GDP, a quarter above its long-term average. By 2035, it will hit 34% of GDP at current trends — a 70% increase in the real size of government in just 25 years.

Ha, ha, ha. Very amusing, what?

What should we make of Obama’s merriment? What does it tell us about his sense of humor? What does it tell us about what an earlier age would have called his “humor,” his character?

The first thing to notice about this moment of hilarity is how consonant it is with other Obama rhetorical eructations. For example, how similar in spirit it is to his challenge to Republicans after Nancy Pelosi managed to ram the presidential health care legislation through Congress. Instantly, there were calls to repeal the law. “My attitude is,” Obama told a crowd in Iowa, “go for it” — as if it would get them anywhere!

Obama’s amusement at the spectacle of dissent was also consonant with the remarks of candidate Obama disparaging all those “bitter” folks who “cling to guns or religion” instead of getting with the big government, progressive leftism espoused by Barack Obama.

Most of us would not buy a car, used or new, from a salesman who bursts into derisive laughter at the prospect of we, the customers, making a decision displeasing to the salesman. A salesman who thinks It’s All About Him. That’s the very picture of what it takes to move the customers across the street, to the other car lot.

There are some folks who’d still wanna stick around, if the salesman is an extra good speech-maker. But you have to be in the mood for that kind of thing. You have to be, to coin a phrase, fat dumb and happy. Or young dumb and happy, as the case may be. Well…once people have been ripped off, they’re not that way anymore.

But Obama really needs to stop His followers from all of this Palin noise. Today. It’s hurting Him badly. It’d be one thing if she was already running against Him…even then, all this deliberation about whether she’s qualified or not, when He’s the one who’s already in there, would look pathetic and whiny.

But she isn’t even doing anything. Just giving speeches, raising funds, uploading Facebook entries like millions of other citizens. So to start the argument now just looks rather un-champion-ish. It looks like, if you could point to an Obama policy that’s turned out to be a good one, you’d be doing that; but instead here you are selecting a random ordinary unelected citizen — supposedly one of the dopier ones, according to your own argument — and comparing Him, to her.

That’s the only way He can look good at this point?

It doesn’t address what is broken. What’s broken, as Kimball points out, has to do with character. Barack Obama’s job is so much bigger than He is, that He doesn’t even know what to do. He’s like a three-year-old who’s just mastered the fine art of running, joining daddy and his friends for a casual Saturday morning game of touch football, running the wrong way while everyone good-naturedly chuckles, and maybe films it for later. Just doesn’t know what He’s doing.

He comes from the Alinsky mind-mold in which, when people act like they’re not buying in to what you’re offering, you ridicule them, make fun of them, “freeze it and personalize it” as they say. Well, Saul Alinsky didn’t say what to do when everyone becomes a detractor, and they get that way just by means of common sense. Obama isn’t thoughtful enough to see that this might call for a different tactic, so He just keeps on keepin’-on. We’re so unsophisticated, we’re so racist, we’re not good enough for Him.

Putting it in plainer terms, he comes from a faraway land in which, the best way to motivate the masses to say “yes” to a question, is to stop that question from being asked in the first place. His inability to flex in this tactic is becoming a serious problem, now that the question m-u-s-t be asked. Obama’s idea of leadership is to call us a bunch of rubes; our response to this, should be to ponder the worthiness of this bespectacled chickee over here who isn’t running for anything?

Here’s a news flash: Sarah Palin may very well never run at all. If she does, the likely moment for her to throw her hat into the ring would be sometime around Thanksgiving 2011, a year and a half away. Probably later than that.

Our Obama zealots have been busily deliberating whether she’s good enough for the job, for a year and a half already, right now. They won’t ask this of the “Sort Of God” who’s already in there.

It would be poetic justice if, when the time came, that was turned into yet another Obama disadvantage. Come to think of it, isn’t that a good qualification for the job? That there’s some serious thought going on, some deliberation, about whether you’re good enough for the job, rather than the job being good enough for you?

Advantage Palin.

Makes me cross my legs in empathic agony just reading about it. Yeesh.

I’m going to take what may be a controversial position on this, and say I am quite opposed to men getting their scrotal sacks caught in these devices. Certainly isn’t the outcome I would have in mind. Yes, by all means, inspect those puppies.

I used to think you were only mildly disturbed but now I can plainly see your nuts.

A little pink toy plastic one.

Hmmm…

I note, with interest, that the entire point to this follow-up piece here is exactly the same as my bullet point #2 over here. The fellow writing is explaining the shenanigans in which he engaged when he suggested we should repeal womens’ suffrage the day before, whereas I was commenting on the phony “controversy” surrounding a video circulating the blogosphere that points out conservative females tend to be more pulchritudinous than their liberal counterparts.

If a “Larry Summers Fishing Lure” did work this well, it would probably be banned. The condemnation always comes. It is quick, thundering, voluminous, and lacking in manners by design. It invariably demonstrates what Amy Alkon was discussing in her interview with John Hawkins (I should note here that there are legitimate reasons for disagreeing with my own opinions on this issue, and they are my own in spite of all these names I’m tossing in): People are demonstrating a rudeness through the threads and the e-mail offlines, which I don’t believe they would demonstrate in real life.

The tragedy is that there is this great impetus, like a calling for some kind of a pilgrimage, to speak out on the issue. I guess this is the generation that’s been taught silence is consent. And yet nothing is pointed out. No evidence presented, nothing proven, nothing refuted. When it comes time to defend established and defined oppressed-minorities, we have been taught to challenge but the challenge consists of this and nothing more: You Stink. Like little children. Just condemnation, nothing else. We’re-not-gonna-letcha-play-our-reindeer-games. They act like it’s not worth pursuing the argument. But here’s the kicker — they just had to speak up! Saying nothing, apparently, was summarily ruled out as an option. So they still say nothing, but chatter anyway, including this guy over here. Five or six paragraphs of nuthin’.

But at least the mindless drones who attacked this guy, were provoked by what appeared to be a sincere calling for repealing of the 19th amendment. I’ll oppose that, lots of other people would oppose it, but at least the people I know would be able to give you reasons why we shouldn’t repeal the 19th amendment.

Nobody ever once came up with a good explanation for why it’s “sexist” to notice how ugly liberal women tend to be, though. They just think it is. And to justify that, all they can do is a lot of name-calling.

Generations have now been taught that this is a proper method of discourse. It’s simply a logical conclusion of the “Silence Equals Consent” doctrine. The lesson is to take it with a grain of salt anytime you hear anyone saying that. Or if they can succeed in establishing that as a social protocol, uncontested, don’t be surprised a few years later when our national was-and-means-of-talking-out-the-issues is spontaneously and culturally set ablaze, and tossed into the toilet.

Update: Welcome, Memeorandum readers, to The Blog That Nobody Reads. Slip off your coats and stay awhile.

Hmmm…I wonder what happened here?

Cylarz says I meandered a bit much, and he’s right…although, in my defense, it’s a bit tough to take on these things without meandering. It is a triangle of issues that are interconnected with each other even though they don’t bear a strong relationship to each other outside this one topic.

Maybe you should read this, before reading that. Let’s just make a crude table-of-contents of what we’re talking about.

1. Conservative women are much more attractive than liberal women overall. Yes you can find a pain-in-the-ass exception or two, or three, or four, to just about anything. But the point stands, the trend is unmistakable. Anybody who responds with something that doesn’t begin with “yes you are absolutely right” or “yes you are absolutely right but” — just isn’t arguing the point honestly.

2. A lot of people do not argue this point honestly.

Take a look at Yahoo Answers, for example. The observation was made two years ago, and it wasn’t me:

Why are Republican women so hot and Democrat women so unattractive?

Elisabeth Hasselback is smoking. I mean Laura Ingraham(Drew Barrymore), Michelle Malkin(Lucy Liu) and Ann Coulter(Cameron Diaz) could be “Georgie’s Angels” for crying out loud.

The answers are spot-on. But by “spot-on” I mean non-educational, non-enlightening, non-productive, acrid, hideous, dreadful.

Actually, single women tend to be Dems, and married gals tend to vote Repub. So I suppose the young, sexy, available ones are actually more likely to be Dems, statistically speaking.

Six or seven years ago, believe it or not, I spent a block of months being available. Let me tell you something sister: Maybe this is because of my age bracket — late thirties, at the time — but women who are available generally are available for a reason. Obviously there are exceptions to that, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to pull myself off the market. And then of course there’s the factor of “now I can dress like a bag lady and stop going to the gym” that applies once some women get married. I assume you’re referring to that. That’s just selfish. Selfish women are out there, but they’re outnumbered by the unselfish women. And guys are smart overall, they tend to pull the unselfish women off the market first.

Your comment is ignorant. You need to look at the pictures we’ve been seeing, and then refer back to Point #1. There’s something going on here.

Because Republicans are not as intelligent and focus their priority on silly, superficial things.

Pure jealousy, and fraudulent on top of it. Quick, what are some of the the deeper subjects probed by the wizened, discerning mind of Joy Behar? Arianna Huffington? Janeane Garofalo? Game set match, asshole.

Elisabeth Hasselback and Ann Coulter are what nightmares are made out of. Nonetheless, Republican, Democrat, who cares? They’re both the same.

More ignorance. You people need to see this…

Refer back to point #1. Something is going on there.

3. As a modern culture, we are coming perilously close to codifying a taboo against exceptionalism. This soft prohibition against noticing one woman is more gorgeous than another, or that conservative women are more appealing than liberal women, is simply the visible tip of the dorsal fin of something much, much larger. And dangerous.

This country has now spent generations worshiping at the alter of weakness, deliberately mixing up superior achievement with substandard achievement. It’s been making safety nets into hammocks.

When we have the President of the United States selling a health care plan He didn’t even bother to write — along the lines of, we’re going to come up with some magical new entitlement program modeled after two other entitlement programs that cost several times more than what they were supposed to, and once we task our government to provide all these new services it will cure all of our budget deficits — you know what’s going on there? That is a repetition of something that an application of just modest amounts of mental elbow grease would tell us, in short order, is bullshit.

When we spend a few years wondering if “global warming” is real or whether it’s a money grab, and then we have it proven right in front of our eyes that it’s a scam and we continue to debate it seriously — that is the sign of flawed forensic thinking. At that point, the scholar is only pretending to ponder the evidence, just going through the motions of it.

To top it off, when you’re a woman and you lean left, you are subject to a rigid, intra-gender taboo against making yourself too appealing to men. Nice dresses, long hair, sweet voices are frowned-upon. Scolding, nagging, frowning, yelling are to be encouraged.

You do all this stuff for a decade or two, it takes a toll.

A large number of our women have been working long and hard to be ugly trolls, and the fact of the matter that is what our modern society deserves…because a lot of our men are no better, they’ve been working hard to prove how harmless, ineffectual and un-manly they are. Many of our citizens, perhaps a majority, have been working long and hard to argue that terrorists are not dangerous, but charcoal barbeques somehow are. The upshot? Our society is poisoning itself. We’re trying to convince ourselves that safe things are dangerous, dangerous things are safe, honest people are liars, and liars deserve to be our leaders. And shushing each other up when we say innocuous things like “Holy smokes, does that lady ever look good wearing that.”

And that’s my point. We need to draw the line here. This far, and no further — no, Mister Politically Correct Liberal, you cannot give me an order to pretend ugly women are gorgeous, and gorgeous women have nothing special going for ’em. This is a catalyst of everything else that is going wrong…although, clearly, I lack the ability to explain it in a hundred words or less. It doesn’t matter. This shit’s all connected.

Let’s call it a “virtual burkha,” for that is what it is. Well, LAN ASTASLEM.

Now, how does this happen, exactly??

It is a tiny misprint, but an Australian publisher had to pulp a cookbook after one recipe called for “salt and freshly ground black people” to be added to the dish, AFP reported Saturday.

Penguin Group Australia pulped and reprinted about 7,000 copies of “Pasta Bible” after the typographical error was found in the ingredients for spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Ah, I see…

Penguin said almost every one of the more than 150 recipes in the book called for salt and freshly ground black pepper but a misprint occurred on just one page, probably as a result of a computer’s spellchecker program.

“When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable,” [head of publishing Bob] Sessions said.

Well, I’m not so sure about that last one, but at least a plausible explanation has been supplied. It started out “freshly ground black pepper” and then the spellchecker recognized “people” and not “pepper.”

Now, I don’t know exactly what special custom dictionaries are loaded up when you go through proofreading a cookbook. But “pepper”? I’d just expect that to be in there somewhere.

Still and all, it’s a relief this matter was settled before anyone said something stupid to make it worse.

“We’re mortified that this has become an issue of any kind, and why anyone would be offended, we don’t know…” [emphasis mine]

Oops. Someone got a little too close to the action, can’t see the forest for the trees.

Stormbringer:

Truly this is the Greatest Country in the World. Don’t Let Freedom Slip Away
By Kitty Werthmann
:
I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide – 98% of the vote…I’ve never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.
:
We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.

Seriously. Seriously. If you think you’ve read something more important than this in the last week or two, you’re wrong.

Make the time. Miss the surgery appointment, and take the physician’s place in the kitchen, with a spoon, disinfected with a lighter. Stop what you’re doing and read, top to bottom.

With a grateful hat tip to Joan of Argghh! at Primordial Slack.

Watts Up With That:

Bishop Hill points out that some solar power installations in Spain were producing power at night.

He writes of what was thought to be a joke:

…The prices paid for green energy were so high that it appeared to be profitable to generate that energy by shining conventionally fuelled arclights on the solar panels.

But finds truth to be stranger than fiction:

Although the exact details are slightly different there is now an intriguing report of the scam in practice. The text is based on a machine translation of the original German text:

After press reports, it was established during inspections that several solar power plants were generating current and feeding it into the net at night. To simulate a larger installation capacity, the operators connected diesel generators.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said one industry expert to the newspaper “El Mundo”, which brought the scandal to light. If solar systems apparently produce current in the dark, will be noticed sooner or later. However, if electricity generators were connected during daytime, the swindle would hardly be noticed.

As I said last time around, this is the insanity of greenery.

Rush Limbaugh finds an apt quote by way of an interview that was clearly intended to offer a different message (hat tip to Bob Belvedere):

RUSH: A black tea party protester was featured last night on NBC’s Nightly News.

KELLY O’DONNELL: There aren’t a lot of African-American men at these events.

DARRYL POSTELL: Heh, heh, heh. Right.

O’DONNELL: Have you ever felt uncomfortable?

DARRYL POSTELL: No. No. These are my people!

O’DONNELL: (snickering)

DARRYL POSTELL: Americans.

RUSH: “These are my people: Americans.” A black tea partier, NBC Nightly News.

Whenever people ask me “What exactly is this Tea Party movement all about?” — enough time has passed that everyone’s heard an answer, and that’s the problem, more than one has been offered — I make a point of giving out a consistent response: They are concerned parents and grandparents.

I had an older relative, who has since gone on to his reward, who used to love to argue politics. But not really. The poor fellow was born at just the right time to suffer through the worst of the Great Depression, and to see his household get “saved” by means of the relatively easy employment of FDR’s alphabet soup agencies. And so the constraints of our “discussions” were well understood. You can talk about the security people enjoy because of a government program and you can talk about the awful things that may happen to them if the government program is not there. Just those two things. And then when I give the signal that I’m tired of discussing politics the whole thing comes to a stop.

The percentages of the future generations’ paychecks that would be disappearing into the rat-hole of foreign-held debt, never entered into it. The man loved his wife, loved his children, doted on his grandchildren. To leave his heirs in financial comfort, rather than misery, after his passing became a concern of his so intense, you could feel it rolling off him when you shared a room with him, and I developed a new respect for him during his last couple of years. His intellectual gifts were vast, and surely he had the wherewithal to comprehend he was only weighing one side of an equation that had more to it…and the ramifications were dire.

To this day, I still don’t understand it.

Tea Partiers are people who can see what he could not. Maybe they aren’t as well-traveled, or well-read, or compassionate, or even as bright.

But to me, they are people who managed to secure a comprehension of the problem that he never could quite grasp, and have taken the next logical step.

Now, on this other matter of calling someone else “my people,” crossing racial barriers as you do so. There are folks out there snickering at that notion? They find that funny, do they.

This is something I don’t understand, either. If the black Tea Party protester were to reach off the screen, pull a white lady into the frame and say “Oh and by the way, I would like you to meet my wife” — what would Kelly O’Donnell say to that. She’d chuckle? No, she’d make a point of taking it in stride, showing how open-minded she is about interracial marriage. This is called soft bigotry. Marrying, we’re going to go ahead and let people of your kind go ahead & do. Joining a Tea Party, nuh huh, that’s stepping off the plantation. You get a derisive chuckle. You get some special condemnation over & above what we’re tossing out at the white folks.

I’m told there still is some bigotry out there.

I’m told the Tea Parties are it; nobody’s going to ’em except a bunch of white folks.

The second of those two axioms, has bit the mat hard. It is yesterday’s propaganda drive. By now, most people realize whatever the Tea Party is, it isn’t a Klan rally and it’d be a pretty damned awkward one if it was, with participants of all colors walking around willy-nilly to-and-fro.

The first of those two? I’m going to have to go ahead and admit they were right. There is a lot of bigotry out there. Lots of bigotry. It just doesn’t look like what it used to look like. It looks like: “All black people are supposed to agree with me. If they don’t, I’ve got a special treatment for them, and it’s not the same way I treat white people who disagree with me.” Yes, it is definitely out there, in abundance, and it is a shame upon our modern culture.

Hat tip to Don Surber.

I was given cause to think back some more on the Anti-Star-Trek mindset that has so thoroughly imbued modern liberalism, when I heard He Who Walks On Water elaborate on the issue this morning on the radio:

Did President Obama just snub the moon? “I just have to say pretty bluntly here, we’ve been there before,” Obama said in a speech laying out his plans for NASA on Thursday. Obama insisted that he was “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future,” despite his decision to end its space-shuttle program.

Just three words for this one: Pretty fucking ignorant.

But I’m impressed by something else, too. It is obvious to anyone paying attention, by now, what Holy Man means when He says He is “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future”: That mission is, of course, to further study man’s impact on the ecosystem, and our species’ contribution to carbon emissions and global climate change.

Which, of course, means doing fewer and less of the things we do to make things, help each other, get stuff invented, make life more fulfilling and efficient.

Which is really what scrubbing the space shuttle missions is all about. Forcing the individual to make less of a mark. And of course, if you make a profit doing whatever it is you do, we’ll pour our energies into making sure you make less of a profit…ostensibly to even up the playing field and make us all equal, but not really trying too hard about that either.

I notice a dichotomy about this. And the dichotomy has a lot to do with this bowing-to-foreign-heads-of-state thing. Good Americans object, sometimes vociferously, to the bowing; it is a disgrace to those who have fallen in battle defending this country, giving their all to make sure no American is forced to bow to anyone. We object because by subordinating Himself to foreigners, Obama is putting the entire country on inferior footing.

But the dichotomy is this: Barry isn’t really making Himself inferior. And you see it in this flippant comment about “We’ve been there before.” When Barry tries for something, this rule doesn’t really apply. He pointed it out Himself when He was sworn in, although He managed to mess up the technical details once again: He noted that forty-four men have now been sworn into office. The correct number is 43, counting Him, but the point stands and it’s his point. Hey, Barry! We’ve had Presidents before! Step down and let Hillary take it.

Seriously, He was given a lot of chances to do this throughout the long summer of ’08. But Barry was meant for grander things than second place. Barry gets to try for things; the rest of us do not. We are meant to be ordinary. The rule is so rigid, that if any of us step out of line there’s something terribly wrong. We have to be taxed, the space shuttle program has to be cut, our auto company executives have to be told to step down, and nobody can earn an executive bonus that’s out of the ballpark from what His Holiness’ unelected, unaccountable czars think is alright.

It’s not too different from what I saw a few years ago when President Clinton’s Justice Department went after Microsoft, specifically Richest-American Chairman Bill Gates. It was supposed to be about “monopolistic” business practices, but keen-eyed observers could see the writing on the wall: A private citizen had gotten too big. You’re only supposed to get so high, unless you work for The Chief.

Sometimes when I manage to catch Rush Limbaugh, I wince when he goes into one of his tirades about liberals and how they “worship” government as the source of all good things. I’m not in agreement on this point. After twenty-two years, if I could call it I’d have Rush look into this issue a little bit more thoroughly and carefully:

Liberals do not love government much more than the rest of us, which is to say they barely even like it. It’s much closer to the point to say, government gets a special license to succeed at things, not because it is anointed or perfect, but because it is anonymous. Nobody, other than the President and a tiny cabal of elite Senators, is going to carve out a legacy by doing these things. The desire is to live in a world in which the individual’s pathway to success, is lit dimly or not at all. It takes the pressure off.

It goes back to what I was saying about the mugging. You see a man getting held up at gunpoint late at night, or a woman being abused or molested. So you high-tail it out of there to save your own hide. If nobody else was around, and you have no pride and no character, you get to stand tall — maybe you can even swagger. Hey, you could’ve gotten killed!

But if someone else is around and they put a stop to things, you look rightfully like a fucking pussy. And you feel like one too.

The easiest speech any politician made to any of his constituents, was a liberal politician speaking to a liberal constituent about all the good things he was about to do for the “middle class.” That cuts right to the heart of it. The liberal voter understands he has it much better than many others, especially those who came before in generations past. “Middle class” alleviates the guilt that would normally come with it, when it comes time to steal from others. It reminds him that there are others who are even better off…therefore he “needs” the loot. Or “the poor and downtrodden” need the loot.

But it’s also true. What we today call liberalism is chock full of people who simply aren’t worried about their headstones and what will go on them. Their loving parents may have put them through college, and then they got some kind of a job in which it’s impossible to make any kind of a mark, which isn’t what they want to do anyway. So they get up, eat breakfast, drive, do whatever it is, eat lunch, do some more mediocre undistinguished work, go home, giggle at Will Farrel’s impression of George W. Bush and then the next day they do it again. Until it’s time to quit. Just like two-legged cattle.

Another observation: Somehow, this attracts them toward “great” people like Barack Obama. It’s like they’re living vicariously through the amazing, extraordinary achievements of a deity. Someone they’ll never meet. These poor stiffs at NASA who are about to receive pink slips, the liberal voter somehow feels a close enough kinship with them, that they are to be subjected to The Rule: You can’t accomplish anything amazing. That’s for Barry to do.

These “great” people, I notice, are not particularly trustworthy. Barry’s supporters, in the moment Barry says something, inwardly know what Barry is saying is not true. They won’t admit they know it, but they know it.

When they call Ted Kennedy “The Conscience of the Senate” (+++snicker+++) they secretly see everything wrong with that, that I see.

Let’s put it this way: Given a choice of entrusting their kids over a week at a summer camp with Counselor Obama, or Counselor Palin, Obama voters would pick Palin. This is why they hate her so much I think; she reminds them of a third or fourth grade teacher they’ve actually met. She’s too familiar. They don’t want familiar, so that makes her “stupid.”

They want the alien, the super-being, the godlike persona…the safe anonymity. If you run away from the mugging but Jesus steps in and stops the mugging, you still look big and tough.

Being conservative, in 2010, is about entrusting power to people who already have your trust.

Being liberal is about putting power in the hands that nobody, with a working brain, would ever trust. Check out a list of people your average liberal thinks are imbued with a good “conscience”; you’ll start to see what I mean. Both Clintons, just about everybody in Obama’s mediocre administration, everyone named Kennedy — sheesh, that’s quite a crowd.

Would you put your kids in their care for a weekend? Because the liberals, although they’ll be slow to admit it, wouldn’t think of it. That’s how they’re different. That’s what’s wrong with them. The dichotomy.

It’s a weakness endemic to all thinking persons: For some inexplicable reason, or in some cases not so inexplicable, we see human failings in this effort over here and we refuse to acknowledge any impurity in that direction whatsoever; and then we look at that effort over there and see all kinds of skulduggery where there’s little or no evidence of it. We “learn” first, and ask our questions later.

But I would expect some in the “journalism” business to get out of that after awhile, just like the first-in-the-morning Starbuck’s cashier girl to learn not to sleep through her alarm clock. Or perhaps to be selected for this critical task on the basis of her not often falling victim to that deficiency.

It is not to be, evidently. The media has been spinning wild tales about, or using Dan-Rather-Chandra-Levy excuses to ignore, the Tea Party ever since the very beginning.

The Tea Party movement launched one year ago, in response to the unprecedented expansion of government by President Barack Obama and congressional liberals, a massive increase in spending that will create economy-crushing fiscal burdens for future generations of taxpayers.

In that relatively brief period, the Tea Party has demonstrated it is a formidable political force. The pressure the movement brought to bear at the grassroots level put liberals on the defensive for much of the health care debate, and nearly succeeded in torpedoing the entire scheme in spite of Democrats’ overwhelming congressional majorities. And Tea Party activists proved decisive in a string of electoral defeats for liberals, culminating in Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the special election to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate.

So how have the supposedly objective media covered one of the biggest political stories in recent years? MRC analysts reviewed every mention of the Tea Party on the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening newscasts, Sunday talk shows, and ABC’s Nightline from February 19, 2009 (when CNBC contributor Rick Santelli first suggested throwing a “Tea Party” to protest government takeovers) through March 31, 2010.

It’s the biggest media disgrace since…oh, well, the events leading up to Obama’s election. Just pondering it for a second or two here, not making mincemeat out of the issue on my Smartphone for weeks or months at a time, my initial ranking would be: Election 2008 first; Dan Rather’s other fiasco second, the National Guard Memo thing from six years ago; and then the Tea Party issue would tie for second place, perhaps leapfrogging over the National Guard thing.

Seriously. If I was any kind of an ombudsman in the industry, I’d be going to work and raising some red flags on the situation in general. My message would be one of “C’mon folks, after that debacle of Election 2008 we need a win here.”

Instead, we have propaganda straight from the White House. The “mainstream news” offers a take on something that, when you match it up against the sound bites coming from partisan resources and official government agencies, or tumbling from the mouth of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, it’s identical on a word-for-word basis. That alone should sound an alarm.

None of which is news to you if you’ve been visiting the Media Reearch Center. But the tea party thing is special because it has been a sustained event. Many, many opportunities have been offered to restore the missing credibility; few of them have been taken.

Every single April 15th there is one. A snotty, sneering, attention-whoring editorial like this one.

Well let’s back up. I’ve got this extended lunch break I really can’t spare. I have a one o’clock meeting I cannot miss, it’s April 15th, and I’m at the Post Office with my girlfriend’s federal return, her Franchise Tax Board return, a bill payment that has to get in the mail today, that silly census form, and my own IRS return. I get everything else taken care of, and I avail myself of the latest technology so that I can get my federal return enveloped, addressed and stamped. By means of that kiosk. Which I’m pretty sure I did last year and the year before.

Machine asks me “What zip code would you like to mail this to?” and I look at the tax return on page two, toward the bottom. Now, ever since I was a little kid, to the best I can recall, it’s got that “If you have a refund coming mail it here…if you owe money mail it here…” right above where they ask you for your bank routing number, etc. We-ell, it’s not there. I don’t have any record of this. Everything else is signed and ready to go. But for lack of an address, which is really just a nine-digit zip, I have to step out of line, go to my meeting, and come back later that afternoon. Because the form’s been changed.

Maybe my memory’s faulty. Has this been going on for awhile? Downloaded it from a different place on the web site? What’s going on here?

I don’t really care what the answer is. You probably know where I’m going with this: It’s little things like this. After awhile, it feels like fighting someone…before you even get to the part about haggling over the tax liability.

Seriously. If my life is missing that, I’ll just drive around Folsom. Can’t go here, can’t go there, now that you’ve gone here you have to go there…don’t you dare make a U-turn here.

And then this jackhole writes an editorial about how he loves paying taxes (hat tip to Robert Stacy McCain). Or rather, some jackhole of an editor figures he’ll pump up his circulation by demanding a provocative column about how wonderful it is to pay taxes. It’s got all the tired retreads, you’ve seen ’em before.

Paying income taxes confirms my pride as a modern-day American citizen. As loudly as I might declare my love for this country, I need to put my money where my mouth flaps. For those like me — not fighting in Afghanistan, not toiling in our foreign service, not extinguishing fires or fighting crime as a public servant — paying taxes makes real my commitment to a functioning America.

Besides the crucial social goods that taxes yield (schools, roads, soldiers, embassies, air traffic control), there are key business-related dividends that benefit people, including Tea Partiers, in the long view. Tax-supported research propagates new ideas to help make companies profitable and hiring. The microchip, the Internet, cellphones: Pick your daily necessity, and the government played a fundamental and pro-active part supporting the research and development necessary to get that product launched and its industry humming. The Tea Partiers dubiously downplay and deny government’s crucial role incubating the innovations that shape our economy and change our lives.

Pick your daily necessity, and it depends on the government getting its fingers into our pockets. The people who pay these taxes, the businesses that pay these taxes, they don’t bring us these “daily necessities,” oh no no no. They/we are all just kind of in-the-way. Government builds the useful things, prints up the money that it owns, and then through its niceness greatness and wonderfulness it generously allows us riff-raff to borrow some of it all for awhile.

McCain righteously takes him out to the woodshed over this:

For Benjamin, it’s all about how taxes make him feel, or rather, how he feels about people who are less happy to pay taxes. Like all liberals, Benjamin cannot seem to grasp two important points about taxation:

* Taxes are not voluntary. If Benjamin wished to pay more taxes than he currently does, no one would stop him from doing so. His argument for high taxes, however, supports the compulsory collection of additional revenue from his fellow citizens. Why are Benjamin’s positive feelings about taxes more important than the negative feelings of those who wish to keep more of their own earnings?
* Taxes extract wealth from the private economy. Money that is collected by the government as tax revenue is money that is not available for investment in business. Progressive taxation, which imposes higher rates on the wealthy, thus has the long-term effect of causing disinvestment, removing capital from the economy.

You can’t make capitalism work without capital, and high taxes hinder the accumulation and efficient allocation of capital. Benjamin lays aside the usual liberal theme — demonizing the rich — just long enough to stigmatize as “churlish” those who advocate economic liberty. He highlights non-controversial uses of government revenue as a way of implying that those who complain about high taxes are opposed to such things. He is not engaged in economic argument, but in political sophistry.

Honestly, I do see points on both sides. We might have started off without an income tax, and it’s horribly invasive to our privacy, arguably mutually exclusive from the kind of freedom we were meant to have. But we’ve got one now, we’re stuck with it. We do pay less in tax than the people in some of those pretend-countries like Sweden, Canada, the UK, et al. The places where you’re supposed to have something called “freedom” but you’re required to let the “bobbies” into your “flat” so they can count how many teevee sets you have and make sure they’re all properly licensed.

That doesn’t mean we’re not way far off the beaten path.

The one thing I resent the most — is the “soak the rich” aspect of it. It doesn’t matter that I’m not really rich. The whole spirit of it is anti-American. Government being put in charge of using the tax code to make sure no one person gets too big…unless he has a job in the Government and then that’s quite alright.

It’s not even followed-through-on. Exemptions, loopholes, shelters are used to make sure “The Rich” don’t really have to pay “Their Fair Share.” Even then, it would still be wrong…but as it is, government is there to make sure you cannot accumulate more than a certain amount of money unless you have the right friends. We end up with a mammoth tax code that nobody…professionals included…really understands. It’s impossible to understand because it really comes down to on-the-spot judgment calls made by complete strangers based on poorly-written rules.

The end result? Just another piece of what’s supposed to be called “America”…yet another item of machinery that is supposed to put us all on “equal” footing, and in reality labors long and hard to achieve the exact opposite. To manufacture a layer of aristocracy.

Update: Bill Whittle could not have seen this item, since it had not yet appeared when he hopped into a time machine and jumped backwards to ask some “reasonable men” what they thought of the Tea Party movement (hat tip to Neal Boortz).

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government…

…and a whole lotta others.

I wonder how Mr. Benjamin would square his ideas up against that. Don’t tell me, let me guess: The reasonable-men are all raaaaaaacists or something.

From all I’ve been able to read about this, it seems once the law goes into effect, it isn’t going to impact anyone who isn’t breaking one or several of the laws that were already on the books before. So I’m having a little bit of trouble seeing what all the fuss is about.

Reader rob pointed out, in an offline, something funny and sad about this quote:

Immigrants’ rights groups roundly criticized the bill. “The objective is to make life miserable for [illegal] immigrants so that they leave the state,” said Chris Newman, general counsel for the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Duh.

And I went ahead and stuck back in that word you accidentally left off there, Counselor Newman. You’re welcome.

It’ll really make you think twice about some stuff. Each item is something you’ve hard lots and lots of times before, especially if you’re a woman who works for a living. Not a single one of ’em has a good argument behind it; quite to the contrary, the challenge that is laid out here confronting these old chestnuts, in all cases, does have some pretty durable logic going on.

And a member of the fairer sex wrote this puppy up. That’s her headline, so don’t go calling me a chauvinist pig or anything. Not over this, anyway.

That’s a comment-in-passing from blogger friend Rick, and I thought it would make a perfect headline.

I remember starting to have some real reservations about the Star Trek franchise, as President Clinton was about to be sworn in and I could start to see what was happening to the country. Everything had to be sanitized, watered down, made harmless, and this adventure/comedy show was offering a naive picture of where it was all going to lead. (The “Who’s Better, Kirk or Picard” debate was, at the time, gathering a lot of attention.) We’d cure all these problems, get past the crude paradigm of trying to make money…heh. From this new age of enlightenment, we’d conquer the stars and begin to discover exotic new races of strange beings who wore funny rubber masks and spoke perfect English. It was a continuum of human progress, the very portrait of the unconstrained vision — the continuum would start with the United Nations, which had so captured the enthusiasm and imagination of millions back in the late 1960’s when the first show started; and it would culminate hundreds of years later with some mirroring of all the dizzying technology we saw. One smooth upward slope.

Star Trek offered a connection, an appealing one to the weak of mind, between our liberals and the basic, noble human attribute of curiosity. Star Trek was P.R. for modern liberalism. It had become hardcore liberalism; maybe it always had been.

Well, the NASA decision puts the light on the Big Reveal: President Obama’s ideology is not Star Trek. Far from it.

Perhaps it is most precise to say, the fringe lunatic modern-liberalism that is making all the decisions right now, possesses all of the naivete of Star Trek, all of the puffed-up self-importance, but with none of the ambition, desire or drive to embolden the human spirit, to venture outward, to break out of old frontiers and challenge new ones.

It is the Anti-Star-Trek.

It seeks to remain ignorant of the new, to cower and hide, to test out strange, flawed old ideas that have already failed. To meekly not go where just about everyone’s already been.

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is now in its sixth year and we’ve been making occasional references all the way back to Day One (almost) to the “alien in the laundry room.” Or the ancient savant thawed from a block of ice. Mork from Ork, Jeannie, Captain Caveman, Man from Atlantis, Uncle Martin, Commander Data.

Someone curious and highly functioning but altogether unfamiliar with our recent events and customs. Needing to have things explained to them.

Things that, until we start trying to explaining them, we fail to realize cannot be explained.

Now, some of the nobodies who don’t stop by to read The Blog That Nobody Reads, have blogs of their own; and among them, some of them indulge in our own habit which is to stop by Memeorandum to figure out what’s happening in the world. They may consider this “D’Jever Notice” item to be aimed squarely at them. Didja ever notice…

If I was the alien living in some kindly homeowner’s laundry room and pestering him daily with questions about the weird little quirks in our modern culture, and I relied on Memeorandum for my daily updates — which I probably would — I’d be pretty sure the country’s current leadership was some guy named “Tea Party.” And by “pretty sure” what I mean is, ready to swear to God about it…or…whoever. At least, that would be my impression after skimming headlines for awhile.

I’d say, Kindly Homeowner, you told me many times that April 15th was a day of some special significance, something to do with taxes…and yet it’s just another front-page thing about the tea party people. And it’s not because of tax day because I saw the same thing yesterday and the day before…last week, last month, last summer. All this time the Memeorandum people have been trying to figure out who the Tea Party people are.

I go to buy bread, to pick up your shirts from the dry cleaners to try to pay my way around here, and everwhere I go people are upset and ticked off by something called “ObamaCare.” Did the Tea Party people do ObamaCare? What about this VAT tax, that seems to get people excited…come to think of it I haven’t seen the VAT mentioned on Meme just yet. The Tea Party people don’t do that? Well, what have they done? Anything? Anything to tick people off? I can’t find a single example anywhere. It seems to me they just go to parties and wave signs. Memeo thinks this is the Number One issue?

In fact, it’s been awhile since I’ve detected any genuine curiosity about Tea Party people anywhere; seems to me everyone’s got their minds made up one way or another. So when we’re repeatedly offered all this information about what they are or are not or could be or couldn’t be, whose questions are they trying to answer?

Yes, you could explain it eventually to the sane, smart, naive, unacquainted laundry-room alien guy. But by the time it was done, Memeorandum wouldn’t be looking too good I think. Every morning…you skim over this huge long section about Tea Party people, and then past that you get to the piddly stuff that doesn’t matter. The President’s nuke treaty. Poland’s government getting wiped out. Our own President spinning wild stories about a soccer game that never existed and then disappearing for a couple hours. Three to five to eight detestable new tidbits in the health care law that nobody ever figured were in there.

The last question the alien would ask that is mostly or completely unanswerable? “Why don’t you earthlings just drop the democrat/Republican thing, and just form an official Tea Party and a Hopenchange Party?” Hmmmm…

Update: Okay, if we’re really just oh-so-filled with curiosity about Who The Tea Party People Are…Don Surber has as good a write-up as anybody else. Except his curiosity is more in line with ours, something along the lines of what people are choosing to report about it, and what not to report. Keep reading until he starts comparing poll responses from Tea Party people, to poll responses from the population overall. Tea Party people are better educated than the norm, more supportive of the two party system than the average (!), more likely to have already filled out a census form than the average, and just about equal to the average in the likelihood they’ll think positively of President Obama as a person.

They’re not crackers. No moreso than the control group, anyway. So now we can all stop wondering and get back to whatever we think matters. Right?