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?

Everyone you’ll ever meet, is exactly like you.

Nobody is thinking about anything except what they can do to make you happy.

Whenever they do something nice for you, it becomes their job from that day forward. Show that you belong in the driver’s seat. You’ll feel really good about it later.

The day you figure out those three items are horse squeeze, you’re well on your way to growing up and getting something useful done.

Did Barry just tell a whopper about ducking out of the nuclear summit to attend his daughter’s soccer game?

[T]he story has several problems. The first one is a biggie in that there were no scheduled soccer games for Sidwell Friends April 10, as evidenced here. The second is that the area reported that the game was played at appears to be one of high crime…

What’s more concerning is that no one can confirm if the Secret Service even accompanied Obama on his adventure. Furthermore, let’s look at the elapsed time. If the president left the White House at 9:20AM as reported, according to Mapquest, it takes about sixteen minutes to get from the White House to 40th and Chesapeake NW, bringing his arrival time to the field at 9:36AM or so. But then he would have had to leave the field at the latest at 10:00AM to return to the White House at the documented time of 10:17AM. So he spent about twenty minutes at the game? When did the game end? That time is vague as well.
:
Even three days later, there are still no pictures of the president from Saturday’s game. The USA just disarmed to Russia, Poland’s president and 95 others were killed hours before, and there were many international leaders in Washington, D.C. for the nuclear summit set to begin on Monday, April 12.

Nothing malicious going on here, IMO. If I have to speculate, I’d say someone close to the top made the call: Just tell the riff-raff whatever you think they’ll be happy hearing. Soccer game. Everybody loves the doting dad who shows up at a soccer game. It was purely focus-group driven.

I used to marvel at the Clintons’ lies, how some of the lies told didn’t seem to present any obvious payoff, nor could anyone possessing reasonable levels of intellect fail to detect the near-certain potential of getting caught. Our current Secretary of State having been named after Sir Edmund Hillary is one example that comes immediately to mind. It’s as if the lies are being told as a sort of leisure activity…a competitive sport in itself.

I’m told Sarah Palin is unqualified for this office and, furthermore, that she’s doing it all for the money and possesses a staggering level of disrespect for her “fans.” She has quite the doting-mommy rep; wonder if she would have told an obvious fib about ducking out to watch her kids’ soccer game. Something tells me no. Something tells me, also, that we’re a little bit too concerned about smarts and not concerned enough about character.

I’m further told by that something that we’re about to be gloriously schooled with regard to these skewed priorities of ours. People have quite the capacity for putting up with shenanigans, until said shenanigans start hitting ’em in the pocketbook. Then things start to change right quick.

Having someone in charge who you think is oh-so-much smarter than you…who also thinks He is oh-so-much smarter than you…and isn’t inclined to deal honestly with you, can be awfully expensive. How much of that can we afford? This, to me, is the pivotal question — not “Where is the soccer game being played” or “Can you tell me what the Bush Doctrine is.”

Neal Boortz read my mind as I put together the previous post…and found the perfect nugget that shows us where exactly it’s all headed.

Barack Obama and the Democrats are so eager to make America more like Europe. With our current spending levels and our soon-to-be taxation techniques – the value-added tax – they are well on their way to solidifying a full-fledged moocher society. Which leads me to this…coming soon to the United States:

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.

“It’s really hard,” said Mrs Davey, 29, who is seven months pregnant. “We can’t afford holidays and I don’t want my kids living on a council estate and struggling like I have.

“The price of living is going up but benefits are going down. My carer’s allowance is only going up by 80p this year and petrol is so expensive now, I’m worried how we’ll cope.

“We’re still waiting for somewhere bigger.”

Mrs Davey has never had a full-time job while her 35-year-old husband gave up his post in administration nine years ago after realising they would be better off living off the state.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flatscreen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer – not to mention four mobile phones.

With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seater minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes.

But according to the Daveys they have nothing to be thankful for.

“It doesn’t bother me that taxpayers are paying for me to have a large family,” added Mrs Davey.

“We couldn’t afford to care for our children without benefits, but as long as they have everything they need, I don’t think I’m selfish.

“Most of the parents at our kids’ school are on benefits.”

She added: “I don’t feel bad about being subsidised by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there.

“If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to. I don’t put in anything because I don’t pay taxes, but if I could work I would.”

To the gulag she goes!

This thing about having the huge pack of whelps, is actually the oldest part of our present decline. Think about it: What’s the one thing about childbirth that has changed most drastically over the last hundred years? Answer: The financial implications. Children used to be assets. Today, they’re liabilities.

What do you do with liabilities? You avoid having them in the first place…if you’re smart. And so we have an Idiocracy world, in which the gene pool becomes more and more polluted, as smart, independent, capable people only reproduce in quantities they have the wherewithal to manage…and the dependency class reproduces in far greater volume, not meeting up with any discouragement in this enterprise from anywhere.

The result? One or two kids, over here, are taught when you want something you have to work for it…fifteen kids over there are taught how to whimper, whine, snivel and protest.

Coming soon to America.

Thanks go to blogger friend Rick for the find.

The pointlessness to trying, that is made manifestly clear by this cartoon, is the key to dividing and conquering the enemy I think. He presents a unified front in dismissing the idea that the economy may very well lose its oomph with extravagant entitlement programs, soaring debt and ever-more-progressive tax policies. But the enemy is not unified, in spite of appearances, when he snickers and laughs at us as we point out the obvious.

His leadership, I think, knows we are right. You can tell by what remedies are designed, packaged, and proposed to us. It goes back to my observation that unpleasant things are never bad for the environment. Never, never, not ever. Cushy toilet paper that feels good on your derriere, is destroying the planet — crappy, scratchy, substandard utilitarian-grade sandpaper is never destroying the planet. Just the good stuff.

I think the leadership understands the point being made. When there is no payoff for real success, the incentive disappears. The economy is driven by individual incentive. They only dismiss this because they have to. When everything they want done, is designed to remove the joy from living any & all life save for those lifestyles most dilatory, it’s clear what they’re trying to do. So they aren’t really dismissing the idea.

Their dismissal is amplified by the huge layer of useful idiots, underneath them, who genuinely doubt it. In their small minds, there is one reason and one reason alone to champion the cause of any one class, even to defend the class when it is under attack: You’re afraid the victim will be heckled and hounded into some kind of statistical or financial oblivion. And so they snicker, they chortle, they roll their eyes and make sarcastic comments — anything to avoid facing the truth, that when we tax “the rich” punitively we’re really taxing our children and grandchildren.

And then there is the even bigger layer of useful idiots underneath them who don’t even think things out that far. These are the “pie people” who think if one guy’s pie slice is larger, nevermind the reason, someone else’s slice must have been made smaller and now we need to have Soshul Jusstuss. This bottom-layer of useful-idiot, ironically enough, thinks we are the useful idiots. They think “Wall Street” has sent us into the heartland to join the Tea Party, to do their bidding. For free.

But the truth is that there are some powerful economic forces around the world, with much to gain if the mightiest financial superpower the planet has ever seen — can be somehow brought down to its knees. And that will certainly happen if the individual incentive is removed from the equation…if it is just too much of a pain in the ass to try to get ahead, and nobody bothers anymore. It’s a serious issue. Talk to anyone who has actually managed to put the family dynasty on top…not to inherit it, but to start out low, and end up high. Ask them what it took. If President Soetoro is right and we’re all better off if we spread the wealth around, it’s just a natural consequence of that new policy of “change” to say — fuggedabowdit. Let’s all just clamor for our social justice, for our 35-hour weeks and our 70 days of paid vacation every year, and we’ll all just sit around swanky bistros sipping Turkish coffee all day talking about bullshit.

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg points out — if America is going to become just another European country, then someone, somewhere, is going to have to become the new America.

When the facts aren’t on your side, when logic isn’t on your side, use slander.

Opponents of the fiscally conservative tea party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic and moronic.

Jason Levin, creator of http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15—tax filing day, when tea party groups across the country are planning to gather and protest high taxes.

“Every time we have someone on camera saying that Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen, we want someone sitting next to him saying, ‘That’s right, he’s an alien from outer space!'” Levin said.
:
Levin says they want to exaggerate the group’s least appealing qualities, further distance the tea party from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them.

Exaggerate the unappealing qualities? Or spin them from whole cloth?

Their web site seems to call for the latter…

Whenever possible, we will act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them…Sound like fun? It is!! If you’d like to join us… [emphasis mine]

Funny thing is — from this guy’s web site, from his Twitter feed, you kind of pick up the impression that he’s anxious for the word to get out about this effort. Now, I haven’t completely got this figured out, I don’t think…or else he hasn’t…but it seems to me fairly obvious that his chosen method of deception depends on keeping this on the low-down. Doesn’t it?

Aw hell, let’s help him out. If ever you do see a tea party protester shouting racist bullshit in the air, or carrying around a misspelled sign, let the word go forth across the four winds that there remains more homework to be done. Or…better yet. Anyone who disagrees with Obama is supposed to be racist? I guess any tea partier who’s caught being racist, is bound to turn out to be a “party crasher” so we should all just ignore that.

I’d like to know this guy’s angle. Is he a useful-idiot? Or maybe he’s being paid for this…wouldn’t that be a gol’-dang deal. Or maybe he’s just super excited about Obama’s policies. And what motivates that, I wonder? Inquiring minds wanna know.

But I don’t suppose I’m gonna find out.

Kyle-Anne Shiver walks us through the equation — and pulls no punches.

If President Obama were really the smartest guy of his generation, then he would have done the following:

He would have, first and foremost, surrounded himself with unimpeachable, morally sound, and experienced cabinet members. Instead he filled his cabinet with Clinton retreads, tax cheats, polarizing ideologues, and unfit-for-the-real-world academics.

Dumb. Really dumb.

Second, President Obama — if he were really smart — would have told his Chicago intimates, especially Desiree Rogers and his wife, Michelle, that until the economy was in full — very full — rebound, there would be no expensive, vulgar partying in the people’s house. Knowing full well that he had come into the presidency on his own rhetoric that we were facing the worst “economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Barack Obama would have known better — if he were really smart — than to order up gala parties with imported Wagu beef at $100 per pound, while he was speaking out the other side of his mouth about the disgusting nature of executive retreats to Las Vegas. A smart man would have known the people would see him as a hypocrite.

Instead, the Obamas partied hardy to the thralls of every society page in the country, quickly making themselves the butt of jokes from coast to coast.

Third, President Obama — if he were really smart — would have turned serious executive instead of media addict. He would not have appeared on a late-night comedy show. He would not have spent more time in front of a camera’s glow than he spent at his desk. He would have rolled up his sleeves and gotten down to the hard work of governing instead of hamming it up in public 24/7, which any truly smart person knows is not only bound to get old very fast, but also sends out the message loud and clear that no one is actually acting as president.

There’s like, a bunch of comments underneath alerting Ms. Shiver to the fact that The Holy One isn’t a dumbass at all, that He fully intends to do all the damage He is doing. They draw from tracts & theses like this.

This misses the point, in my mind.

We just spent a shitload of time being told not only that Holy Man is a raving sooper-genius, but that He has America’s best interests at heart. Now, if it is a proven matter of fact that both of these premises cannot hold up — does it really matter worth a tinker’s damn which one has failed us?

Neal Boortz is noticing something he’s actually been noticing for awhile.

President TOTUS’ approval rating is continuing to slide downward downward downward…since about the beginning of 2010 the number has been within a stone’s throw of the percentage of voters who pay absolutely no income taxes whatsoever. Now, at 47%, all perceptible difference between the two quotients, is gone. The margin-of-error is certainly well beyond whatever difference remains.

Perhaps this is Holy One’s bedrock — the threshold beneath of which any further sinking is a logical impossibility. And maybe this is why politicians choose to become democrats; you give away money to people that you took from other people, take the credit for it as if it came out of your own wallet. How & why do people & did people ever fall for this? I dunno. But anyway…your “bedrock” altitude ends up way in the high forties, as in, when you’re screwing up all over the place and everyone knows it, that’s where you end up.

Contrasted with the politician who intones, and acts out, the dictum that “Robin Hood” government is just-plain-wrong. He has to perform, or else his “bedrock” is about half as much, somewhere around twenty-two.

Giveaway-politics is the refuge of politicians who know their policies suck ass. And it seems to me that, generation by generation, it’s working better and better.

Update: Intentionally or not, blogger friend Gerard provides a link to the perfect graphic at iOwnTheWorld.com.

Mona Charen:

In the latest installment of politically correct, not to say Orwellian, language emanating from the Obama administration, the term “rogue states” has been sidelined in favor of “outliers.” The switch was unveiled as part of the just released Nuclear Posture Review. States like North Korea and Iran, labeled “rogue” by the Bush administration, will no longer labor under that punitive adjective.

This is telling. While the administration insists that the full spectrum of new initiatives — from the New Start treaty to the Nuclear Posture Review to the Nuclear Security Summit — are aimed at containing the world’s two most provocative nations, Iran and North Korea, the stream of euphemisms they’ve insisted upon sends the opposite message.

Rogue isn’t even a particularly harsh word. When applied to individuals, it is frequently paired with “lovable.” Regarding elephants, it suggests an animal that is out of control, but not necessarily vicious. Still, it was too severe for the Obama administration.

Outlier has no negative connotations at all. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “One whose domicile is distant from his or her place of business.” The Macintosh computer dictionary adds a secondary connotation of exclusion from a group. So to employ the label “outliers” for nations that are, by any civilized measure, criminal is pusillanimous. No doubt the leadership in Iran has also noticed that an administration that softens its words has also modified its proposed sanctions. Whereas once Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of “crippling” sanctions, she has now climbed down to “sanctions that bite.” Can annoying sanctions be far behind?

The administration does not like to use hurtful words to our enemies. Our friends are another matter. Compare the treatment Great Britain, Honduras, and Israel have received with the walking on eggshells approach to our foes. Early on, the administration jettisoned the term “Global War on Terror” in favor of a catch phrase only a bureaucrat could have coined — “overseas contingency operations.” The word “terrorism” was similarly airbrushed from official language. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano prefers the term “man-caused disasters” because “it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear …” A more anodyne term has now surfaced from a number of officials — “countering violent extremism.”

The detainees in Guantanamo, too, have had a name change. They will no longer be called “enemy combatants.” The new name hasn’t been chosen yet, though cynics might just use “former clients of Obama Justice Department lawyers.”

I’ve never understood why the left does this. It certainly isn’t something that wins elections, and it may have a powerful effect in the opposite direction. It isn’t defensible because anything you say to defend it, just comes out sounding stupid.

I recall when this was done for the benefit of handicapped people…although I have trouble remembering the year. There was a “Hyphenated” movement — if you were in a wheelchair you were mobility-impaired, if you were short you were vertically-challenged. There was one pairing up between receding hairlines and “folically challenged” but I think that was satire deployed for the purpose of calling out the lunacy, by Johnny Carson if memory serves. The satire ultimately worked.

The question that really needs to be raised is what’s wrong with the older nmemonic. Why create a new term. Now, as was the case then, the problem is not that the older phrase fails to convey something that should be conveyed; the problem is that the older phrase does convey something that someone in some position of authority does not want conveyed.

This is a problem. If the undesirable conveyed meaning was severely at odds with the truth, it would wear out on its own. So there is a widespread perception that politically-correct overhaul operations like this are the tools of professional and compulsive liars, and I & all thinking persons find that perception to be accurate overall.

Josh Painter brings us news that Sarah Palin has apparently bludgeoned the Obama administration into a more commonsense position — once again. Gateway Pundit agrees.

For the last decade plus, I notice the democrat party has been repeatedly trounced by people they have declared to be morons. Not just Palin. What’s-his-name too. The Crawford guy. Except he had to have an official title of some kind in order to beat ’em at their own game over and over. Palin, on the other hand, is just a private citizen.

Update: Under one of my posts at Right Wing News, interested commentator AF_Vet backs well-known left-wing gadfly D_Vega up against the wall over this latest event and wants to know what Vega has to say about it…Vega having gone on the record repeatedly to say Palin doesn’t know what she’s talking about. (Apparently not having bothered to acquaint himself with what exactly it was Palin was saying.)

AF_Vet says “This oughta be good.” We agree. We are watching carefully along with him.

Update 4/12/10: Aaaaaannnnnnndddddd….drum roll please. It’s the “As I’ve/He’s Said All Along Back To Day One” defense. There’s no change to the policy you’re only imagining it because you’re so stoooopid.

Anyone else shocked to see that one coming?

Okay, I want to see a virtual show-of-hands. Is there anyone here sympathetic to Barry’s position, or who knows somebody who is…who, as of Friday after the policy had been first announced, honestly down to the marrow of their bones interpreted it to mean “if we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off.”

I guess being a lefty means never having to tell the truth about your initial perceptions of things, or your heroes’ initial intent behind their things. History always began this morning when your Mom made you wake up.

And although I’m not sure whether the good “Republican” knows what exactly it is he did here, the liberal side of the blogosphere is now abuzz and who in the world can blame them? What a motherlode.

“The question has been raised about whether or not our president is a socialist,” Paul said. “I am sure there are some people here who believe it. But in the technical sense, in the economic definition of a what a socialist is, no, he’s not a socialist.”

“He’s a corporatist,” Paul continued. “And unfortunately we have corporatists inside the Republican party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country.”

Paul said examples of President Obama’s “corporatism” were evident in the heath care reform bill he signed into law last month. He said the mandate in the bill put the power over health care in the hands of corporations rather than private citizens.
:
He said the only hope Republicans have is to change the bill for the better. Paul said he will introduce his own legislative fix when the Congress returns from recess next week.

“There’s one piece of legislation that I’m going to introduce, it’s going to be one page long,” he said. “It will be to remove the mandate so you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.”

His speech, which touched on his oft-repeated calls to close down American military bases overseas and shift toward libertarian-style social policy, drew cheers from the Paul fans in the crowd and what sounded like boos from others in the room.

What incredible, staggering ineptitude. Folks, this is why Palin’s screw-up in front of Katie Couric means so little to me, right here. Couric never had her for lunch quite as scrumptiously as did the liberals just now feast on Dr. Paul’s bleached bones. He dug his own hole and walked right into it. Their only out, thus far, has been to carefully avoid any & all discussion of this “economic definition of a what a socialist is” and make fun of anyone & everyone who’d call President Soetoro a socialist.

And they got a so-called “Republican” now helping them with that. To the best of my knowledge, Congressman Paul never did take on my favorite question about this: So if ya wanna be called a socialist, what exactly do ya gotta do??

I wonder what Ron Paul would say about what blogger friend Phil wrote on this subject:

[I]f Socialized Medicine isn’t socialism … if nationalizing companies isn’t socialism … if redistribution of wealth isn’t socialism … maybe we have diffferent [sic] dictionaries.

He Who Walks On Water told Joe the Plumber “I just think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Is there some credible reason why that cannot be the very definition of socialism? If it isn’t, then exactly what use does this word provide to us, why should it be part of the language at all?

The Holy One’s thin-skinned-ness, or lack of class, or ignorant and unrepentant chauvinism — whatever it is — is a personal quirk. But four decades and change after He became a person, He also became the anointed spiritual leader of a nation that never before needed one, as well as our 44^th President.

And so the wisdom or lack thereof regarding His decision deserves some inspection. Charles Krauthammer brings it.

[I]f the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty…the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.”
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This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.

Apart from being morally bizarre, the Obama policy is strategically loopy. Does anyone believe that North Korea or Iran will be more persuaded to abjure nuclear weapons because they could then carry out a biological or chemical attack on the United States without fear of nuclear retaliation?

I note, with great interest, that it seems to be a staple idea of the democrat party that foreign policy needs to be managed this way. We should rely on the Picard vs. Tazmanian Devil paradigm, which states that when a conflict occurs between a civilized force and a savage one, the savage mindset will be influenced by the civilized one rather than the other way ’round. They will learn from our superior example.

I struggle to recall any episode in human history in which this has been demonstrated to work.

I also struggle to recall any election campaign, in which a democrat contender behaved this way toward his Republican opponent. I pledge to limit my firepower; because being the less aggressive force is more important to me than winning.

Republicans and democrats do seem to behave toward each other with more-or-less equal servings of hostility.

Except the Republicans, on average, are even more hostile to terrorists than they are to the opposing political party. I’m just wishing my current President would show half as much hostility toward those who seek to kill my fellow countrymen, as He and His people show toward Republicans, conservatives and tea party activists. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Krauthammer has it right. This new policy is so bollywonkers and fubar’d, Janet Napolitano must think it’ll work perfectly.

Update: Buck found the perfect cartoon.

“Freedom,” wrote the fictitious Winston Smith in George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 — Part I, Chapter 7 — “is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that much is granted, all else follows.”

I hate to say 1984 is too rosy and cheerful to reflect reality, but I’m afraid that is the situation. Freedom, says Freeberg, is the freedom to say that two plus two make four — and if that much is denied, nothing else matters.

Freedom is not freedom if it is subject to the approval of others. Freedom, therefore, must possess the intrinsic authority and ability to occasionally piss people off. Or — to not piss anyone off at all…but at least possess the option. Those of superior rank, those of elevated station, those with letters in back of their names, those who hold “chits” on other persons in positions of enormous power — they have to be able to get red-faced, screaming, shouting, plate-throwing goblet-shattering mad, and not able to do a single thing about it. While you go on your merry way. Watching South Park, or blogging, or driving wherever you want.

Eating saturated fat. Drinking beer. Smacking your wife on the ass and telling her she’s still got it.

Babbling away about two and two making four…

I’m afraid the situation is, we have these freedoms as long as those who are in power don’t mind us having those freedoms. So long as that is the case, two and two make four. They’ll be sure and tell us the minute that changes. And that isn’t freedom.

For eight whole years we were told the Bush administration was “trampling” on our “freedoms.” Occasionally a Bush defender would inquire of the agitated Michael Moore fan, “What could you do without the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, specifically, that you can’t do with it??” And the subject would change. And then it would circle back. Into the comfortable old diatribe. Bush is eroding our freedoms.

Now, we really are losing our freedoms. Sure, we get to do stuff…the same way I get to drive onward, after the checkpoint guard looks at my paperssssssss.

We’re losing our vigilance. Too many of my countrymen call that free. And there are too many others who are looking for excuses to revoke even that much.

To retain our freedoms that we’re supposed to value so highly, we need some widespread education. People need to learn about…people. They need to have it taught to them that there are people running around, all over the place, who are blisteringly offended at the idea that two and two make four. Freedom is something that isn’t popular with everybody. If we have to take a poll on it before it is granted, then it is as good as gone.