CNSNews.

Gateway Pundit.

Hat tip to Sister Toldjah.

Throughout all of my mortal life, conservatives have been on the defensive about two things: That they lack compassion, and that they think of and treat people “different” from themselves as inferiors. Time after time I see a prominent conservative granted the opportunity to do the right thing, and take a pass on doing it, only because doing the right thing would reverse some of his “progress” in trying to deny or refute one of those, or both. They are “When did you stop beating your wife” questions: Once you are accused, any action you take to address the accusation in any way whatsoever, only does more damage. Denying it does the greatest damage.

I’d like to see liberals become defensive about something: Their tendency is to make bad decisions, because they aren’t motivated to understand why someone might disagree with what they propose to do. To them, it’s always something that begins with “you’re”: You’re stingy, you’re cold-hearted, you’re mean, you lack compassion, you’re a racist, you’re a homophobe, you’re just a jerk, you cling to your gun and your Bible…

For the good of the country, I’d like to see liberals placed under suspicion for this, everywhere they go, just as conservatives are placed under suspicion of being racists and sexist pigs — and are never, ever finished proving that they aren’t these things. I’d like to see liberals caught on a spinning hamster-exercise-wheel of trying to disprove this thing about themselves, that they cannot intellectually grapple with an opposing argument, and the ad hom is their only refuge. Because in many cases, from what I’ve seen, it’s true.

Update: Gerard wants to push the definition all the way out:

“A raaaaacist is anyone who’s winning an argument with a liberal.”

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities… [emphasis mine]

— Sarah Palin, during her acceptance speech last summer.

After all that hubbub, and all the chatter since then about community-organizing, you might very well be wondering what exactly a “community organizer” is. You might also rightfully wonder what it is that community organizers do to/for the communities they organize.

Read and learn. Gene Schwimmer, writing in the American Thinker:

Imagine a large city, such as my home town, Detroit used to be, before liberalism destroyed it. Imagine that, in this city, a developer offers to buy a plot of land on which to build a multi-story office building. The upper floors will provide space for visionary entrepreneurs to start new businesses and to expand existing ones, create new products, new services and above all, new jobs. The ground floor will be retail space, providing much-needed products and services to the people who work in the offices above and to the rest of the city, too. And of course, for the people who work in them, the new stores will provide jobs.

Now imagine that someone else has a different idea. This person views people who buy land, put buildings on them, facilitate the creation of new products, services and jobs, but who have the gall to enrich themselves in the process, as evil, bloodsucking capitalists. This person believes that “the community” would be better served by turning the plot into a children’s playground. Or he may believe, grudgingly, that an office building might be okay — but only if the construction workers come from “the community.” (The many jobs that would be created for the people who would work in the building is, of course, irrelevant.)

Imagine further that this person has a lot of friends and associates in “the community.” When he talks, they listen, even when he tries to create an issue where no issue has existed before. (If “the community” needed a children’s playground on this particular patch of vacant land so badly, why did no one demand one before?)

Ever been to Detroit, during or after the Coleman Young days? Then you will join me in shuddering at the thought of Detroit being held aloft, with no shortage of legitimacy, as a harbinger for where the country’s headed. Not good at all, dear reader. We can only hope the country as a whole shows some “bounce,” some determination to head out of the lint-trap of liberalism-created blight once it’s been ensconced there…some bounce that so many of our localities have failed over the generations to show.

How do we get from building childrens’ playgrounds, to a cesspool of blight? It has to do with manufacturing an incendiary regional passion, where one did not necessarily exist before. Schwimmer continues…

The community organizer’s job is to speak to groups within “the community;” write letters to sympathetic newspaper editors; bring in outside experts and professional rabble-rousers (who often come with their own professional rabble) and, most important, get the media to cover the demonstrations — all with the object of assembling the critical mass of humanity needed to embarrass and/or pressure the private parties and/or government into doing what “the community” wants. Or, sometimes more accurately, what the community organizer has told them they want.

That’s the community organizer’s job. That’s all he does and it’s not rocket science. Any anti-Semitic, loudmouthed racial demagogue can do it (and, incidentally, become as rich as a real estate developer in the process). Community organizers are a dime a dozen.

Need a shot of optimism? Then head on over here.

Hat tip, for both links, to Maggie’s Farm.

If I have to pick just one snippet of text that will demonstrate Josh Olson just might deserve to benefit from the livelihood he has as a scriptwriter, I think these two paragraphs just might do it. I’m looking for the occasion upon which I might shamelessly steal them, and thinking back on some situations in which I could have stolen them had I been aware of them.

At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I’m a dick. But if you’re interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that it is, in fact, you who is the dick in this situation, please read on.

Yes. That’s right. I called you a dick. Because you created this situation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acquiesce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very definition of a dick move.

“You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.” — Abraham Lincoln

John Holdren, the Science Czar, on American “Exceptionalism”:

Like having a fox in charge of the chicken coop.

From Weasel Zippers, via Boortz.

One among many reasons why the How The World Works Guy says — Holdren needs to go. Now.

The Clinton Triangulation Strategy lives on: This side is childish, that other side is childish, so ignore both of them and just listen to what I say.

Hat tip to WebWench, at Nealz Nuze, where Yankee Infidel speaks for me:

Ledger claims to know the facts, but he’s clinging to some “facts” that have already been debunked through analysis already. Rightists are students of history, and as such, we are concerned about what government control of health care will do to the industry. Having 1 party (the government) not only be a referee in the industry but also a player instead obviously unbalances the scale in favor of the government/public “option” to the point were the only option that will survive is the government/public “option”.

Mike Todd at Waving or Drowning wants to give the recently departed Sen. Ted Kennedy a decent send-off. That is certainly his right. I have neither the time nor the inclination, to deny him that right. Part of the reason I’m so dis-inclined to interfere with the expression of one’s innermost thoughts that run so contrary to my own, is this: I’m not like Ted. I understand people are different, and life would be boring if they were not. Kennedy never really was at ease with that. Some of his “greatest” speeches were inspired by his resentment against people and organizations who thought about life in non-Ted-like ways.

But another consequence of me being not-like-Ted, is that I am occasionally curious about things. I notice things are out of place, and when I notice things are out of place I don’t think it is a cause for celebration and drinking, but rather a cause for learning. Mr. Todd’s silly, hagiographic farewell (hat tip: Rick) is a cause for the rest of us to learn something about ourselves if ever there was one.

Just look at it from a thirty-thousand foot level:

Paragraph One comments “I admire people who don’t hide from their brokenness” in the course of building up to the statement “my heroes tend to be imperfect.” Okay, the object of the exercise is to say something positive about Ted. Mike’s managed to squeek out a negative and make it look like a positive; Teddy didn’t try to hide the negative. A couple months back, some homeless guy waltzed into my girlfriend’s store and shattered a bunch of bottles of booze so that he could be sent back to jail — the cops said, alright. You know, he didn’t try to hide his brokenness either. So that jailbird bum is on the same level as Ted? According to you, Mike, he’s managed to match the Senator’s most appealing quality.

Paragraph Two winds up with “Some are describing him as the greatest Senator in history, and I don’t think that is a stretch.” People who can’t admit to what they’re trying to say, even to themselves, write like this quite often. To say “Ted Kennedy was the greatest Senator in history” would be out of the question. Too active; too much responsibility being taken. For a few years now I’ve been noticing this about Mr. Todd, and Rick has occasionally commented on it too. He doesn’t really say things, especially in response to being challenged. He just goes through paragraph after paragraph implying things. In the zoology of writers, he is a decidedly non-skeletal, gastropodic slimy mollusk of a being.

Todd then tells the story of the Senator “accepting,” in 1983, membership in the Moral Majority and then “requesting” the opportunity to give a speech. Todd and myself agree on what is the most notable part of that speech:

I am an American and a Catholic; I love my country and treasure my faith. But I do not assume that my conception of patriotism or policy is invariably correct–or that my conviction about religion should command any greater respect than any other faith in this pluralistic society. I believe there surely is such a thing as truth, but who among us can claim a monopoly on it?

Four years later, Sen. Kennedy made himself “great” in the minds of his fans and lackeys once again, during the confirmation proceedings of failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Sen. Kennedy rejected everything meaningful about his speech four years earlier. Sen. Kennedy — let’s see, we can just go through the list, can’t we? — assumed that his conception of patriotism was invariably correct, and that his conception of policy was invariably correct. He was steadfast in claiming his conviction about religion-versus-state issues should command greater respect than anybody else’s conviction about the same thing; he was certainly consistent on that from womb-to-tomb.

And absolutely, positively, during the Bork nomination and at many other times, Sen. Kennedy knew there surely was such a thing as truth, and he himself claimed a monopoly on saying what exactly it was —

Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.

Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the first amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.

The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

In light of the 1987 Bork speech, Mike Todd’s words seem even more risible than usual when he says, in reference to the 1983 speech, “[it] is yet another piece in the puzzle of [the] ‘unity’ theme that seems to be hammering me lately.”

Mr. Todd, I think I have found the last piece of that puzzle for you. People like Ted Kennedy, do, after all, leave large gaping holes behind when they depart, suitable for causing an utter collapse of the flimy structure built on top. It is their vision of the world and how it should work; it requires their leadership in order to make sense. Their ramshackle, inconsistent, quivering, whimsical, vacillating leadership. It would make much more sense, of course, to champion the cause of unity all the time. It would also make much more sense to demonize and derogate those same concepts all the time. Or, if one is committed to being a fair-weather friend to unity, to tack back and forth in the interest of the Constitution and the country…rather than to get a few more licks in against the Moral Majority and against Republicans.

But of course, it’s really just about attacking people isn’t it? That’s why you can’t go into any great detail about what made Sen. Kennedy great. Kennedy was great because he shared enemies with you and had brilliantly refined the fine art of inflicting damage on that enemy — by holding it to standards of behavior while rejecting any standards for his own behavior.

This is the final nail in the coffin on Todd’s eulogy for the Senator. It doesn’t suffer damage because I disagree with it personally; it suffers damage because it disagrees with itself. It is an apt illustration of Thing I Know #265: “You can’t be better than everyone else when you’re trying to be like everyone else.” This is the internal contradiction that ultimately robs it of any structural strength, and destroys it from within. For all this great urgency to salute Ted Kennedy with this giant-among-mortals theme, it seems so few among his fans can really follow through on it. Todd himself availed himself of the perfect opportunity, oozing his gastropod form within a slug’s antenna of calling him, but not actually calling him, “the greatest Senator in history.” He can’t quite bring himself to bubble out the superlative. What’s the problem, Mike?

The problem is with — to borrow a phrase from the departed Senator from the famous “Bork” speech — a glaring inconsistency with Ted Kennedy’s America.

Ted Kennedy was not known for his respect for the concept of individual achievement, and here and there are some bits of evidence to suggest he was quite antagonistic toward such a thing. Praising the New England Patriots, he read into the Congressional record “At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.” [emphasis mine] Now, think on that for just a minute or two. If you want to go to a country that faces down individualism and where life is all about sacrificing for the greater good, why, there are scores and scores of places around the world where you can go. But that wasn’t good enough for Ted; he wanted the United States to be transformed into just another filthy collectivist socialist mudpuddle. He said so. He specifically identified the very concept of the individual as an inimical force, one to be engaged and defeated.

Doctor Zero made a brilliant point about this last week:

This is why the death of Mary Jo Kopechne doesn’t trouble liberal intellectuals all that much. In fact, they think you’re a bit childish and primitive for being obsessed with it.

The meme floated by the Left over the past few days, that Kopechne’s death was a reasonable price to pay for Ted Kennedy’s wonderful political career, is a brutally candid expression of the principle that even an individual’s right to live is negotiable — a commodity to be measured against the “needs of the many,” which the Left believes were far better served by Kennedy’s politics than Kopechne’s insignificant little life. The striking thing about the two most infamous expressions of this opinion, by Melissa Lafsky and Joyce Carol Oates, is how breezy they are. They don’t caution the reader to brace himself for an outrageous, controversial assertion, which the author plans to defend. Both Lafsky and Oates are rather wistful in tone. They don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t think Kopechne’s life for Kennedy’s legislative agenda was a sweet trade, the deal of the century for America.

If it’s fair to presume some things about the idol, based on the demonstrated priorities of those who worship it — and I think, in this case, it is — we are ready to re-write the Bork speech because know some things about Ted Kennedy’s America.

Ted Kennedy’s America is one in which the value of all individual attributes and possessions, including human life itself, is negotiable.

It is a culture in which unity is the primary collectivist asset, the prize to be jealously guarded by us all…until a leader of some stature tells us it is not, and then we are to turn on it and tear it asunder. Unity is good when it helps democrats and hurts Republicans, but it’s bad when it helps Republicans or hurts democrats.

It is a business environment in which, if any one individual manages to do more than his part to make life better for the rest of us, and receives payment in kind — no way can that story be concluded just yet. The dirty bastard must not have been taxed enough! Unless, that is, his last name is Kennedy.

It is an economy in which it is terribly important to us all how high the minimum wage is going to be this year…since so few of us make any more than that.

It is a nation in which leaders join hands, reaching across the aisle, overcoming their differences to write legislation together and the partisan divide should finally be healed. For just a certain amount of time. And then, as soon as the Republican can’t do anything to help the democrat, the democrat should be ready, willing and able to give blistering scolding speeches about “George Bush’s Vietnam.” The pattern remains; it’s a strategic mindset, one that exists to inflict damage on the enemy. Like a slug devouring your strawberry patch, it pretends not to be non-destructive, by moving slowly.

It is a place where we all ask ourselves what we can sacrifice for the greater good, while people sufficiently fortunate to carry the name “Kennedy” respond with the Not-In-My-Back-Yard protest “But don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!”

It’s all so clear, Mike. You’re being whacked upside the head repeatedly with this unity theme. How much less traumatic the experience would be for you, if you could show some consistency about it. But you can’t, being a slimy mollusk who lacks a skeleton, and so your heroes are the ones who similarly cannot be consistent about it. They, like you, pulsate, vibrate, meander back and forth: Oh, now we’re all to pick out an individual from among us, and worship him. Whoopsie, no today’s a different day, and now individualism doesn’t matter and is to be frowned-upon. Oh, today we’re all going to help each other out. Whoopsie, no, the most wonderful among us are the ones who inflict the greatest sum of damage upon that guy over there.

From what I see, what little that defines this mindset has to do with valuing destruction over creation. Someone destroys something or inflicts damage on something, it’s time to idolize the person who is the destroyer. But if nothing is destroyed, and the only way anyone has set himself apart from the rest is by creating something, suddenly that’s when we’re back to our war against the individual. Maybe you could confirm that for me, since Sen. Kennedy isn’t around to do it anymore.

But that’s not really necessary. I was privileged to watch the Senator for a good long time, and that pattern always remained consistent. Invidual contributions important when individuals destroy things; individual contributions toxic and resented, when individuals were creating things. That’s the Kennedy pattern. No wonder you can’t bring yourself to call him history’s greatest Senator, even though you so clearly want to. What an uncomfortable, tortured existence you must be living out, you little slug.

Jenny isn’t getting along with her GPS.

Hat tip: FARK.

That is the only title that can be affixed to this wonderful clip, as you shall see:

She nailed it. Nailed it. The health care debate, like all significant disagreements in human history, comes down to a difference in philosophies. Does government exist to do all the minimal tasks that can’t be done at the local levels, organize a military, provide redress of grievances — the things actually listed in the Constitution? Or is it a teat to be suckled?

If the purpose of government is seize wealth for redistribution to others, then let us view that act as the theft that it really is. Stop dressing it up in bullshit town hall meetings, fancy legislation, marble buildings and business suits. Stop with the pious platitudes about “Doing the Work of The People” and get down to the brass tacks. Just come on over and take my twenty bucks. With force. Let’s see it happen in front of our faces.

Hat tip to Ace, via Robert Stacy McCain.

Jennifer Rubin writes in Commentary Magazine:

James Sherk of Heritage makes a compelling case that the problem is not persistent layoffs but a drop in job creation. The labor market simply can’t absorb new workers entering the labor force. That slowdown in job creation, he says, is in large part attributable to “enormous increases in federal spending on traditional liberal priorities, such as for government-run health care, [which] raise the prospects of vastly higher taxes or rapidly rising inflation.”

He explains:

The federal deficit is expected to approach $2 trillion this year, and to remain well above $1 trillion for many years to come, doubling the national debt in just five years. This situation is not sustainable…Gross private investment in equipment and software—a good measure of business investment spending—has fallen by a full 20 percent since the recession began. As long as business investment remains low and entrepreneurs hold back from starting new enterprises, job creation will remain low—and unemployment, high.

Couple that with the prospect that employers may be hit with higher energy costs, a cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, and health-care mandates and one can understand that a hiring paralysis may become a fixture in the economy, absent a substantial change in the administration’s approach to economic recovery. If the president and his advisers think we can have a recovery while they attack the private sector and seek a vast expansion of government, they are in for a rude awakening. It turns out we need those private-sector employers. Who knew?

Let’s play Devil’s Advocate on this one, just to see if I can —

Silly Jennifer Rubin! Doesn’t she realize United States history, and world history, are chock full of stories of the private sector enterprises being hounded, taxed and regulated into providing more jobs they otherwise wouldn’t have. Like…uh…uh…er…ah…

Oh dear. Let me get back to you on that.

Hat tip: Inst.

Wow, we certainly can’t have that, can we? In your congressional office that you’re running…that belongs to you & everything…as you run it as you see fit. Can’t have the little people watching you do it, that wouldn’t do at all.

Hat tip to Rick, who seems to delight in offering the Indiana Congressman as much rope as he needs to hang himself. Oh yeah, I am so down with that.

…we have very few things that we do not owe to this. Observes Blogsister Daphne:

I will never understand a certain breed of woman who discounts the power lying between her legs. Those who choose to use their pussy as a crutch, rather than ratchet that bitch up to the highest level of architectural management.

Men bend to to the smell of us, they love some premium snatch, will murder and humiliate themselves to obtain the furry object of their prime pink affection. Men love pussy, they kill for this shit, overthrow countries, gain thrones, change the course of history following their loin’s longings, entertain depths of madness following thwarted passion. They’ll slit the throats of blood kin over a piece of our ass.
:
Without man’s raw need for our bodies or intense cravings for the soft approval of a beloved woman’s smile, the world at large would be experiencing little more than cold caves, raw meat and gritty beer.

Sometimes women miscalculate their choice, find themselves bruised by a bad man, that’s called living, not a vaginal tragedy. The existence of these brutal outliers shouldn’t be a wholesale indictment of the male sex. The misogynists, rapists and wife beaters crawling the earth can’t be discounted, but let’s face the bald fact that most of these men were raised by women.

We truly do mold the world that exits the soft folds between our thighs. When women abdicate the responsibility of raising sound male children and accept twisted partners as lovers, we breed and sustain the very thing we despise most.

Knights and Princesses.

Then along comes the feminist movement, and suddenly the worms are breeding just as fast as the workhorses. Because the fairer sex, striving to assert itself, in an irony of irony suddenly becomes less picky and less choosey. They held their revolution to achieve the “power” they thought they were being denied, when in reality, they had power wielded by nobody else in all of human history. Until they gave it up.

Mistake. Big mistake.

Throughout most of yesterday I heard & read of speculation here & there that the democrats were going to start rising up to pass a health care bill this year, because very late the night before a profound, meaningful thing happened. The question “what problem is this supposed to solve?” got answered. Ha ha! No, that’s a little joke right there. Of course that didn’t happen. What happened was that Ted Kennedy started taking his scheduled course in swimming lessons from Mary Jo.

How long before the democrats would start a campaign to revive their terminally ill stinky albatross health care bill under some misguided platform of “Let’s win this one for the swimmer”? How long before we started an autumn of misery, constantly hearing the refrain that although no one can justify this Obamacare plan any better after The Swimmer’s demise, than they could before…that we just gotta do it for dear old Uncle Ted?

Now we have our answer: One stinkin’ day.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed Wednesday to push through embattled health reform legislation this year following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, who called the effort “the cause of my life”.

“Ted Kennedy’s dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Senate President Pro Tem Robert Byrd joined in the fun.

Ailing Senator Robert Byrd, one of only two to have served longer than Kennedy, suggests in an emotional statement renaming the pending health care legislation for the late Massachusetts Senator:

In his honor and as a tribute to his commitment to his ideals, let us stop the shouting and name calling and have a civilized debate on health care reform which I hope, when legislation has been signed into law, will bear his name for his commitment to insuring the health of every American.

Evidence of a parallel universe — one in which debates can be “civilized,” or debates can grapple meaningfully with the consequences of implementing a proposed plan. But it’s one or the other. Those are mutually exclusive things. Pondering the ramifications of doing something, is inherently uncivilized.

It really is democrat politicians against The People. All people; white, black, rich, poor. Every left-wing politician’s argument, it seems, is a distraction away from the “If we do this, that thing will happen” that is central to all responsible planning. Their talking points seem to systematically address all concerns in the universe except that.

Now we have to pass a bad bill to put a smile on the face of Kennedy’s ghost.

My question is: How about putting smiles on the faces of people who actually have to live with the laws that are being passed? And pay for them? Part of the democrat party world-view seems to be that by passing just the right law to force people to do something, you can make those people into a better class of people…more morally inspired and pristine…because of what they are forced to do. The reality is that laws don’t, and cannot, do that. But laws certainly can kill a lot of dreams.

So here’s an idea. Here’s another way to affix the health care debate to Kennedy’s passing. How about this: Ted Kennedy, like our health care debate, lived a long, full life and is now dead. The decent thing to do is to bury them both. Anyone who wants to live in a country that provides universal health care, there are scores of other nations they can live. True, some of those nations are desperately trying to find ways to do things the American way…but for the time being, if you want to wait half a year to get an MRI, you have your pick of where to do your waiting. Let’s honor Ted Kennedy’s memory and send all our universal-health care advocates to those places. Maybe drive them there over a bridge.

It’s a dating web site for sugar daddies and sugar babies. Yeah…that’s pretty much what you think it is. And the industry is withstanding the current economic malaise quite well.

Erin Miller, a 23-year-old, self-described model/actress, uses a dating Web site called SeekingArrangement.com. On her profile, she has advertised herself as looking for a “playful, open relationship with financial benefits.”

“I’m dating four sugar daddies right now,” she said.
:
Miller has only been on the Web site for a couple of months, yet she feels as though her life has already changed drastically.

“I’ve been shopping all over, nice cars. I got a new condo,” she said. “Every day is a new adventure.”

One of her sugar daddies lets her use his yacht. He also sends her a Rolls Royce and a chauffeur to take her shopping. Another date pays for her condo, and another gave her a Mercedes.

“Self-described model/actress.” For some reason, that just cracks me up.

…love it or hate it, it’s a reality now.

The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.

For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.

And I have the perception that if we were to conduct a vote on it, the folks who say this is a good thing, would outnumber the folks who say it is not. At least, that’s the way things have been up until now…when the vision of “social justice” and income equalization was a distant dream.

Now that it’s “Mission Accomplished” I wonder how much that’s going to change. The most likely future is one in which our kids swap stories about the good ol’ days, when there were rich people. Before we got rid of ’em. You know, it’s kinda tough to nurture those dreams for a better life, when there are fewer people around who’ve managed to achieve it and hang on to it.

“Brother, you asked for it!” — Atlas Shrugged, Ch. 25.

Maybe not…

One of the more troubling components of the ObamaCare bill wending its way through the House is the inclusion of individual mandates to carry health insurance. What gives Congress the power to dictate that choice to American citizens? A single document enumerates Congressional power, and former Department of Justice attorneys David Rivkin and Lee Casey have some trouble finding that power in it. They argue, with appropriate citations of precedent, that HR3200 and any other bill that attempts to impose mandates will violate the Constitution:

Although the Supreme Court has interpreted Congress’s commerce power expansively, this type of mandate would not pass muster even under the most aggressive commerce clause cases. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the court upheld a federal law regulating the national wheat markets. The law was drawn so broadly that wheat grown for consumption on individual farms also was regulated. Even though this rule reached purely local (rather than interstate) activity, the court reasoned that the consumption of homegrown wheat by individual farms would, in the aggregate, have a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce, and so was within Congress’s reach.

The court reaffirmed this rationale in 2005 in Gonzales v. Raich, when it validated Congress’s authority to regulate the home cultivation of marijuana for personal use. In doing so, however, the justices emphasized that — as in the wheat case — “the activities regulated by the [Controlled Substances Act] are quintessentially economic.” That simply would not be true with regard to an individual health insurance mandate.

The otherwise uninsured would be required to buy coverage, not because they were even tangentially engaged in the “production, distribution or consumption of commodities,” but for no other reason than that people without health insurance exist. The federal government does not have the power to regulate Americans simply because they are there. Significantly, in two key cases, United States v. Lopez (1995) and United States v. Morrison (2000), the Supreme Court specifically rejected the proposition that the commerce clause allowed Congress to regulate noneconomic activities merely because, through a chain of causal effects, they might have an economic impact. These decisions reflect judicial recognition that the commerce clause is not infinitely elastic and that, by enumerating its powers, the framers denied Congress the type of general police power that is freely exercised by the states.

Well, double-hmmm. And to think it’s a constitutional law professor pushing it. How’d this get past Him?

Update: Speaking of abiding by the Constitution, Rick brings us video of some worthy commentary from an informed and somewhat righteously blazing leatherneck, who swore an oath to defend that document and sees to it that he is good for that oath. Not to be missed:

Courteous and respectful to everyone, friendly to no one. And what an appropriate place for it. Why don’t you head on over to his YouTube home page and thank him for his service to our country. Twice.

From here.

Hat tip: Gerard.

I read stories like this one and this one; I see men whose principles and intellect I genuinely respect, get snookered by the idea that anything that could be called extremism must always be bad (think on that a moment or two, and let the irony just wash over you).

And it hits me like a brick in the balls…

The plague of the twenty-first century, which has reached the status of a worldwide epidemic, is simply this: We have defined civilization as ignorance and apathy with regard to who is, and is not, worthy of our trust. We have defined it as a worldview that there are no standards to be imposed on anyone who enters into any contract, written or implied, or any exchange of dialogue, terms, agreements, compromises. We have settled on a bankrupt philosophy that says any midpoint between two mindsets that start out divergent, nevermind the original cause of their being divergent, must irrefutably exist as some optimal point of beneficence and reason.

In short, we have defined civilization as a determination to negotiate with anyone and everyone. If you are willing to negotiate with people, but only certain types of people, we have settled on a viewpoint that you are the definition of a barbarian, and others who negotiate first and ask questions later ought to be your role model as you try to improve. The truth is the exact opposite of that.

The truth is, if civilization has any definition at all, it is a recognition of tiers of humanity. Not along lines of gender or creed or race or birth class; but of values. Civilization is opt-in, and the opting-in has to do with respect for fundamental social codes. Starting with — Don’t kill people.

People who respect these things cannot negotiate with people who do not. They can sure as hell fool themselves into thinking they can; that’s easy. But to achieve a lasting framework of agreement, depends on confining that framework within the boundaries of people who respect these basic values.

Our modern disease is that many of us think it’s possible to form alliances between decent people and savages. What’s even worse, is we’ve begun to re-define humanity as a readiness, willingness and ability to engage in this delusion. Even worse than that — we have started to define this as some kind of leadership, as our modern yardstick of statesmanlike conduct. To compromise with people who are unworthy of compromise. We’ve been treating this like a badge of said statesmanlike conduct: Sit down at a negotiating table with a venomous creature, get some pictures taken of you while you’re there, and this somehow shows you’ve got what it takes.

May we awaken from this sickness quickly, and may our awakening be costless to the innocent. But I’m afraid the muse of probability doesn’t smile on that wish.

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

The Airplane movies would be proud of this one. It’s wrong to find out why an “ordinary American” who has never been within five thousand miles of America in his entire life, wants to call Osama bin Laden on his satellite phone from Amman or Damascus. But the feds are going to put cookies on your hard drive and follow you around when you open a government website…because you’re not an ordinary American.

The American Civil Liberties Union submitted comments today to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) opposing its recent proposal to reverse current federal policy and allow the use of web tracking technologies, like cookies, on federal government websites. Cookies can be used to track an Internet user’s every click and are often linked across multiple websites; they frequently identify particular people.

Since 2000, it has been the policy of the federal government not to use such technology. But the OMB is now seeking to change that policy and is considering the use of cookies for tracking web visitors across multiple sessions and storing their unique preferences and surfing habits. Though this is a major shift in policy, the announcement of this program consists of only a single page from the federal register that contains almost no detail.

“This is a sea change in government privacy policy,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, Acting Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Without explaining this reversal of policy, the OMB is seeking to allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website. Until the OMB answers the multitude of questions surrounding this policy shift, we will continue to raise our strenuous objections.”

But the President isn’t a Republican right now…so this gets a pass.

Can’t help but think of that classic scene where the Sandinistas walk right on through the metal detectors with their machine guns and rocket launchers, while the little old lady is frisked. Life imitates Airplane II.

Dunn was over Unger and I was over Dunn.

Hat tip to Ace, via Hot Air.

Those three hundred days of thick gray overcast that greet Seattle every single year — evidently they don’t kill all the brain cells. Take that, hippies.

As the previous school year drew to a close, which seems like perhaps Wednesday before last although the calendar says something different — I made an effort to trace the path upon which the momentarily negligent become hardcore fanatical liberals, identifying ten terraces descending into the pit. The final terrace is, of course, a simple thing to define. Extremist; fanatical; completely distrustful of anyone with a different point of view on anything. Able to make a liberal/good versus conservative/bad issue from just about anything, like taking out trash, getting a cup of coffee, attending the birth of a child, watching a movie about space aliens invading earth…we all get the picture. My pontifications had to do with how one gets there. I liken it to threads on a screw, acting in concert with each other by handing off work from one to another.

Occupants of all ten threads have ideas about themselves they are anxious to prove to others. But the first of these, let us say the first four, use this What-I-Want-to-Prove feature as a recruiting tool. On the first of these there is the desire to alleviate pain for others. Who in the world can doubt the nobility of such a thing? But the critical error is made when the new recruit accepts that, since Plan X would make the trains run on time or deliver health care to everyone or clean the water, that anyone who is opposed to the plan must be opposed to its intended goals. Then they’re ready to graduate to the second stage. All ten of these are like this; each one designates something to prove, and a common error. Yet another fall from fidelity toward intellectual sensibility and truth. A slipping-down, to the next terrace.

Gagdad Bob has been noticing things about the clumsy logic of liberals too, and apparently been laboring just as hard to remember that they’re like the rest of us — making their errors out of some weakness endemic to us all. But his analysis, rather than simply dissecting the liberal mind, dissects human consciousness and comes up with some explanations for why they do the things they do. It’s pretty fascinating stuff, worthy of reading and re-reading as one fails to escape the civil war currently raging between right-versus-left. It explains substantially more than one can absorb at one sitting; and, perhaps, a great deal more than what would leave one feeling comfortable about things.

[W]hen they dissent, it is the highest form of patriotism; when conservatives do, it is nazism. How can this be? Are they just cynical and calculating? Or is there something deeper going on?

Human beings are not “logic machines.” Or, to the extent that they are, there are at least two distinctly different forms of logic that govern thought: the machine-like asymmetrical logic of the conscious mind and the very unmachine-like symmetrical logic of the unconscious mind. One of the most important points to bear in mind is that we might believe a person to be illogical, when they are in fact obeying a different form or logic: symmetrical logic.
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To take an example ripped from this morning’s headlines, it is obviously kooky for the left to regard citizens who don’t want the state to take over their healthcare as “fascists.” For one thing, logically speaking, anyone who wants a smaller and less intrusive government is the polar opposite of a fascist.

But in the unconscious mind, where symmetrical logic rules the night, it is the work of an instant to convert terms to their opposite. This is how we may understand what makes the leftist tick: whatever he accuses others of, is what he is unconsciously guilty of. Thus, when he says, “you are astroturfing,” he means “I am astroturfing.” When he says “American citizens are behaving like fascists,” he means “we and our union thugs are behaving like fascists.” When he says “you are a racist,” he means “I am preoccupied with race and cannot see beyond it.” Etc.
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But it gets even more complicated. For example, many people are drawn to social work because of an unconscious sense of victimization that they try to spuriously heal by projecting into others. This is why these fields are so overrun by leftist do-gooders with rescue fantasies. The leftist feels victimized by anyone or anything that arouses their tendency to feel victimized. Thus…on a deep unconscious level the real abuser — the persecutor — becomes a sort of rescuer who rescues the social worker from her feelings of victimization, allowing a temporary discharge of victim feelings.

Again, think of the typical leftist activist who is “rescued” from an otherwise meaningless life by entertaining persecutory fantasies of global warming, or “income disparity,” or “male oppression,” or “racial profiling,” or what have you. This explains why the leftist clings to his persecutor long after the persecution has stopped. The left cannot “let go” of George Bush, any more than the radical feminist can let go of her symbolic “rapist” or the Islamist can let go of his Jew hatred, for these are the organizing principles of their own rage and hostility. Six months ago I predicted that the left would be unable to let go of George Bush. I was right. They cannot let go because “he” is a vital part of them.

Update: This aside comment about radical feminist and rapists reminds me, I had damn well better be sure and bookmark this wonderful essay, a link to which arrived yesterday in an offline courtesy of Daphne. It only relates to the topics above insofar as it is a wonderful example of them. No question about it — if liberal silliness and douchebaggery was fast food, this would be the Taco Town. She managed to hit every single bumper in the pinball machine, even making quick work of the list of words I totally hate.

While I agree that abortion and contraception are necessary at the moment, because we are living under male supremacy, women do not have any level of sexual freedom and intercourse is an unfortunate reality in many women’s lives… I am also looking forward to a time where abortion and contraception are no longer necessary. A time where women can engage freely, safely and lovingly in relations with other women, or in non-coital relationships with men.

I cannot in good conscience jump on the abortion/contraception is great for women bandwagon. In my opinion it has done as much damage as good. In reality, it gives men another crowbar with which to wedge open women’s legs. Yes, it gives *some* women, *some* level of control but it is a very, very far cry from actual liberation.

It’s terribly sad watching someone, whether it’s a liberal or a normal person, building such an identity around a quest for a prize. It takes someone on the outside looking in, to see what remains hidden from the person in the middle of the struggle: The identity is built upon the journey, not the destination, so if ever the day comes that the journey ends, the misery will have only just begun.

And that, in turn, reminds me of another e-mail I got from one of my former colleagues…it’s a Family Guy clip. Careful with this, it’s got dirty words in it.

Yup. That’s a hardcore liberal for ya. The (imaginary) day comes where some Golden Fleece or Holy Grail has finally been acquired, and any sense of self that has been cobbled together up to that instant, is gone forever. In its place is nothing but a sickening, desolate sense of emptiness. How can you not feel badly for them?

Hat tip: Blogger friend Duffy.

And Cracked has managed to come up with six ways how…

6. The Environment is Doing Great

Ever since Al Gore became the boogeyman who springs up from the back seat every time we gas up the Hummer, environmentalism has been big on everyone’s mind. We try to recycle, carpool and eat less bald eagle. But is any of that enough? Well, probably not, no. But don’t worry, where your personal efforts fail, global economic crisis excels.

5. Great Deals on Whores

It says something about the power of the current economical crisis when even the oldest profession in the world feels the cold, uncircumcised sting of the recession in its rear end. Sadly, times being what they are, many conservative politicians and hard working fathers had to cut down on teenage-runaways; instead spending their meager extra dollars on things like grandma’s medication and HBO.

4. Tons of New Junk Food, and Fine Wine to Wash it All Down

If you tend to watch lowest common denominator shows, such as America’s Got Talent, Cops or anything on the FOX network, and the commercials that cater to the audiences of said shows, you probably already heard about KFC’s new grilled chicken despite the fact their very name makes this new idea look completely ridiculous. It’d be like Gary’s Fisting Emporium suddenly offering non-fisting services, like firm handshakes and hugs.

3. Old Media is Dying Faster

Let’s be honest: All of us have dreamed about making money off the Internet, but generally only the ones with a handful of undiagnosed manic disorders who undress in front of a camera for sweaty middle-aged men have made that dream a reality. Many companies still refuse to treat this series of tubes as anything serious, writing it off as some whippersnapper fad like Frisbees or Polio shots.

2. People are Forced to Grow Up

They say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And while that may be true, it doesn’t really mention douchebags who are poor but have rich parents. Where do those young men and women who wear knit scarves in the summer and wax philosophical over frappuccinos fit into the equation? Nowhere anymore.

1. You are Living Healthier and Feeling Better

Research by Stanford University and the University of North Carolina has shown that when times are good people tend to not take care of themselves. We eat bacon-wrapped bacon and drink Thunderbird while we shower. We eat out at restaurants, we neglect our families and drop the responsibilities of raising kids on stoned teenagers and crooked daycare centers because we are also usually overworked and overstressed when the economy is booming.

Wow…I really like the picture of that environment-lady…but the sentiment involved in these bullets has the faint whiff of, oh I can’t quite place it…+++sniff-sniff+++ That’s it! Now I got it! Liberal douchebag anti-human self-loathing claptrap.

In fact, Number One kind of reminds me of our Treasury Secretary’s asinine comments from a week ago.

Oh well. There’s something to be said for seeing silver linings in every cloud, anyway.

Just a fine piece of writin’, with some observations that really make you think. Especially as your yard-ape moseys out the door to his first day of school, be it public or private, in a few weeks…it’s got about six weeks of dust on it but it’s well worth pondering, whether you’re in the eighth grade on in your eighth decade.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten — required reading in those decadent days of my ’70s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.
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So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O’Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we’d all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that:

The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we’ve lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we’re set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea.

Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.
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We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned:

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

How does this start? It starts with a lazy intellect that believes one more rule can always solve everything.

The summer heat in Sacramento tops out at around 110. You can beat it by galavanting off some hundred miles East or West, to spend your weekend up in the mountains or down in the surf. But if you want to do right by your home city’s efforts to become a fun place and not California’s belly-button of drudge and debt — we have the river. With rafting. Get out of your air conditioned cocoon, expose your kids to the great outdoors the way the Good Lord intended, and have ’em assault each other with water cannons so they don’t grow up to be pussies.

Ah, but there’s a problem. Hooligans have been drinking, horsing around, bringing harm to themselves and others, and littering. What to do?

Sensible answer: Cite them for disorderly conduct. With escalating fines for repeated offenses. Punishment based on individual identity.

Bureaucrat answer: Ya kiddin’? Blah blah blah budget cuts blah blah blah police manpower. Yard-duty teacher mentality. If I make one exception I’ll have to make a thousand. It’s a shame we all have to go without something because of the bad behavior of just a few…but…that’s the way life is.

We’re taught that from the first grade onward. Our parents allow us to learn that, and then we allow our kids to learn it, and we mistakenly think of that as the glue that holds a “civilized” society together, rather than recognizing it as the anti-American toxic sludge that it is.

We think of this as the only way a people can be properly governed. There is some truth in that; it’s the only way sensible rules can be enforced, by a bureaucracy starved for quality thinking and starved for cash. Financially strapped because the tax base is wilting, dying on the vine. Starving to death because all the businesses are leaving. Because once it’s Saturday morning, everyone’s left town so they can be someplace they want to be. Where they can do things they want to do.

In Sacramento on a Friday afternoon, the freeways are clogged. People get the hell out of dodge, exactly the way schoolkids get out of school when that dismissal bell rings every day. For the same reason. So you see, the financial straits about which we hear so much, so often…and freedom…they’re connected. They are not separate issues.

Via Malkin…

We just switched it to Poor Richard Palatino Linotype, based on multiple comments that the new blog is harder to read than the old blog. The challenge we have here, is that we who are writing the blog are apparently not operating with the same set as some of you who are reading it. We were pretty taken aback when we read these comments, because on our system the font back at the old place (Tahoma) smashes things together pretty tightly. Frankly, we were pretty surprised nobody’s complained up until now. It’s pretty clear we’re not seeing what you’re seeing.

The optical equipment in our face isn’t working the same way, either. We’re among the fortunate few grinding along through middle age (we’re forty-three day after tomorrow) without any need for visual enhancement at all…and this turns into more of a hindrance than a help. We’ve spent that lifetime honing a preference for microprint. We find the bloaty stuff to be distracting. We thought the Bookman font would be pleasing to everyone, and it’s clear we were wrong.

The Palatino may not last for too long either. To work the right way, the font has to exist on our platform and on yours too. What we really need is a generic platform — the laptop is the closest thing we have to that, and that’s what I’m using now. It looks somewhat okay; compact, still easy to read. I just don’t like that name. Doesn’t ring a bell, seems exotic.

So I’m going to assume we’re not done yet.

Here are some samples. Let me know how they jive…

And now we do the same thing, embiggened…

Leave feedback in the comments below.

Yup, this is the new place, welcome to our virtual house-warming party. We made some minor aesthetic changes, hopefully you’re finding things a bit more readable. New furniture isn’t here yet, just toss your coats on the bed…

I didn’t run through a complete test script, so consider yourselves beta-testers. The “Items of Interest” in the sidebar — they aren’t done yet, they still point back at the old place. That last item was more a note-to-self for my sake, than anything else…we’ll be covering that… (Update: We got off our lazy fat asses and took care of it.)

Anyway, let us know what you think. Glad you could make it.

Big thanks to Terry “Trip” Trippany, the CEO, head waiter chief cook & bottle washer of Webloggin. For all his help getting things exported, cut over, set up, and last but not least all the free rent for the last three years.

For those who are just discovering us, here are the key dates:

11/12/04 – We get started on Blogger, with its big, soothing sans-serif font letters that say “Create a Blog. It’s Free.” We go for it, and the first post goes up.

Summer ’06 – By this time we’re several hundred blog posts into the experiment and we’ve started our Sitemeter account to keep track of who’s hitting us. Trip discovers us, says something about liking our writing, and we start swapping links.

10/20/06 – We become an official member of Webloggin, a community of bloggers scattered across the country, promoting blogging excellence. At about that time, Trip really starts hammering us about moving off of Blogger and getting onto WordPress, which we’d been thinking about doing for quite some time. (Blogger, in those days, was far less speedy & reliable compared to the way they tell me it is now.) When he volunteers his hosting space, we greedily accept.

A jump-command is left back at the old Blogger domain, which ricochets visitors there to the Webloggin address. It still works as I write this.

Late ’07 – We purchase the domain here and start misusing it horribly, using the FTP services to put it to work as pretty much just a 5GB virtual thumb drive. But you can tell from the domain name what our ultimate plan is…we’re just not getting around to things very well.

Last week – Our hand is forced when Trip announces he’s getting out of the hosting business.

Sometime soon – Another jump command will be left back at Webloggin, forwarding any visitors there, to here.

Any further details desired, probably the best way to get ’em is to poke around, peruse the Items of Interest, starting with the FAQ.

“HI I’M CAPS LOCK!!!” — heh. This is one of her better ones.

Link sent in an offline from blogger friend Phil.

Update: My favorite passage, on the subject of choosing the leaders of our government and therefore of the entire free world:

Former sports reporters certainly won’t do. We need former constitutional scholars. Who else, after all, has a better understanding of how to undermine the document?