Hon. Sen. Nancy Raine Greene addresses the Canadian Senate:

Honourable senators, I rise to address Bill S-205, an Act to amend the Income Tax Act. If passed, this amendment would give tax credits to Canadians who invest in so-called carbon offsets. While I have no objection to citizens spending their own money in any way they choose, I do not support the government’s giving tax credits for carbon offsets. I say this for several reasons. First and foremost, I consider it an unnecessary and undesirable expense at a time when we should be looking for ways to reduce the tax burden on Canadians. While it is true that the amendment would benefit those who invest in carbon offsets, it would be an expense that would have to be covered by all other taxpayers. I say it is unnecessary because, contrary to the assertions of the honourable senator sponsoring the bill, it addresses an issue that is more and more being questioned by new scientific evidence. We simply do not know that our actions have a significant impact on the global climate, let alone that “the consequences of not acting can be catastrophic,” to quote Senator Mitchell.

I do not pretend to be a climate expert, but I have spent a lot of time over the past decade reading about this topic and listening to those scientists who are true experts. This, I believe, puts me in a good position to apply a common sense approach to the issue.
:
It has often been suggested that to “fight climate change” Canada can easily make a conversion from conventional energy sources to low-carbon-dioxide emitting wind, solar and other power sources. In his speech supporting Bill S-205, the honourable senator promoted these energy sources as job and wealth creators for Canada. However, honourable senators, the experience in Europe tells a very different story.

For example, researchers at the Instituto Bruno Leoni in Italy found that for every so-called “green job” created by subsidies, nearly five times as many ordinary jobs could have been created in the general economy at the same cost. The Italian researchers add:

“What’s often ignored is that the creation of green jobs through subsidies or regulation inherently leads to the destruction of job opportunities in other industries. That’s because any resource forcibly taken out of one sector and politically allocated in favour of renewable energy cannot be invested elsewhere.”

A November 2009 German economic paper from the Ruhr University Bochum and RWI, a publicly funded research institute, concluded:

“It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated.”

It’s nice to see the other side get a fair hearing — up North.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Freakin’ painful to watch anymore…

Hat tip to Powerline, by way of Gerard.

What can one say, except:

Mark Tapscott at Washington Examiner notices the pattern:

The campaign inadvertently became public when video of a presentation by Pew vice president Sean Treglia to a group of journalists at the Annenberg Center let the cat out of the bag:

“The target was 535 Members of Congress and the idea was to create the impression that a mass movement was afoot, that everywhere they looked people were talking about campaign finance reform,” Treglia explained on the video.

Not one of the journalists listening to Treglia challenged him on the fact he was, in effect, admitting a massive, systematic pack of lies.

Nor did any of them do what was minimally required of them as journalists, which was to write a story about Treglia’s admission.

What it’s really all about is programming. We’re being programmed and we’ve been programmed for a very long time now.

Bill Clinton wants to spend more money and Newt Gingrich’s Congress doesn’t want to spend it, the result is a government shutdown, who’s to blame? Erm…must be those Republicans for not going along with spending. More money. Than has ever been spent before. In the country’s entire history…when it’s broke and leveraged. To the maximum extent allowable under its own laws.

Humans are genetically wired to do whatever has already been preferred by their peers, however they choose to define those peers. Copy off your neighbor’s desk, do whatever everyone else is doing. And so this creates an incentive for agenda-driven political movements to puff themselves up, to look bigger than they really are. I’m sure both sides are guilty, in this anecdote or in that one, of astroturfing.

The difference, in my mind, is that the lefty groups are reasonably well assured they’ll never get caught at it. Not in such a way that it will matter. You have to keep in mind, the damage is done not through the getting caught, but by the reverberation from the event of getting caught. Damage in politics is done more by the echo than by the actual percussion. The media controls the echo and the media wants the lefties to win whenever possible.

Just skimming over the Tapscott editorial, which has a decent round-up of all these Potemkin village incidents, I had previous knowledge of just about all of them and my initial impression of each of them — to some extent, anyway — was: The deception involved in the astroturf was only secondarily astonishing. The primary impact on me, with each one, was just how brazen the lefties are about it. It’s as if nobody stopped to let them know we’re now living in the age of YouTube. But then you have to think, waitaminnit, what actually happens if and when they get caught? The answer is: Not a whole hell of a lot.

People remember Watergate, they don’t remember things like the Standing Up For Families debacle. Our media sees to it.

Update: P.J. Tatler: On the question of “What if it’s all a Potemkin village,” there’s no “what if” about it.

The reality is, there is no “what if” regarding the nature of activism on the left. It is a nation of Potemkin villages from the local to the national level. These Potemkin operators created a network of activist fronts that turned Colorado from red to blue a few years back. A similar network was set up in Texas in 2007 and 2008, centered on Matt Angle’s Lone Star Project. That group lives off of the money left to it by the late trial lawyer, Fred Baron, and a few major leftwing foundations. I documented how Angle’s group operates back in 2010. Angle’s group failed in 2010, but they’re still active.

Find out why.

I am offended that, once again, parties in positions of power have decided to pretend that all women are cut from the same political cloth. I am offended, and alarmed, that religion is seen increasingly by many of those same parties not as a vibrant good in our democracy, but as a mere sideshow for nostalgic people or citizens in need of a crutch.

I am offended that the Catholic Church has been attacked as being anti-woman — the same church in which strong women like Sister Elizabeth Ann Seton built a world-class education system for the poor in a less-than-welcoming environment. I am offended that my government would penalize religious women like Seton in the future, telling them they cannot be who they are called to be; telling them their consciences must be dictated by the state.

And I am deeply offended about what is being said about men. A few good men have stuck their necks out lately in defense of religious freedom in America, and they deserve to be thanked and defended as they counter a dedicated campaign of dishonesty, hysterics and even raw bigotry.

Reasonable women cannot remain silent as the secretary of state pretends that the U.S. under a President Santorum or Romney would be an oppressive state for women. Or as a New York Times columnist echoes her, insisting that good men protecting conscience rights are “cavemen,” and that Republican men are trying to “wrestle American women back into chastity belts” in an “insane bout of mass misogyny.” Or as Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, calls the U.S. Catholic bishops “violently anti-woman.”

This is miserable, insulting, desperate stuff. It’s just not right. Women of reason cannot let it stand…

Wow, she writes good for a chick.

From the monster thread where some opinionated sympathizer to that Fluke slut is trying to make me see the error of my ways for calling her a slut, and failing at it, I made the point:

I notice this about leftist campaigns, be they official campaigns like elections, or unofficial ones like Fluke’s fake testimony: The two characteristics they have in common are 1) So-and-so gets a bully pulpit and unlimited face time, even when the things said are completely silly the rest of us aren’t allowed to question any of it; and 2) Lots of bitter scolding for whoever says anything about so-and-so that isn’t absolutely positive, certainly, no criticism is allowed. Again, we live in a free society, in which those two points cannot co-exist.

Get the first word, get the last word, get every word in between, monitor the communications, speak truth to power, go ahead and jump to conclusions about what the opposition said and what the opposition meant to say, but constantly insist the more embarrassing comments made by your own guys were taken out of context. And always, always, always have some gimmick attached to your chosen spokespeople, so that whoever takes issue with them is wrong before they even say anything. You’re a sexist if you disagree with Sandra Fluke, you’re a chauvinist pig if you disagree with Hillary, you’re a racist if you disagree with Barack Obama, you’re a slope-headed moron if you can’t see the wisdom in what John Kerry is saying…and if you don’t chow down on what Al Gore is spooning out and beg for seconds, you must not care about the planet.

So this latest “war on men” is really just an offshoot of that. The left is constantly in search of ways to monopolize the conversation.

If their plans were good for people, they wouldn’t want or need that so badly.

Sippican:

She simply refused to remember anything unpleasant, and seemed to forget nothing else. She regaled her children and grandchildren with stories of Cuchulain and Medb, faeries and wee people, Naomh Padraig and his clovers and snakes; a living encyclopedia of fun and fantasy.

She saved what little money came her way, and bought and sold things. Her long lost relatives would send her this and that from the Auld Sod, and she’d sell them to Yankees who collected such as her family had, as if the Irish were as exotic as Babylonians, not right across the Irish Sea from their own forefathers.

RTWT.

The announcement is that there will be no national anthem tonight and “we do apologize for that”…and then, something happens.

The 124th award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) goes to one of my Facebook friends who commented in an explosive thread about the right wing’s so-called war on women.

It is a statement for the season, and context is entirely unnecessary:

I don’t see how “not paying for” is the same as “restricting access to.”

Lest you be wondering, no, as far as I know this inquiry was never directly answered.

She has discovered the Flukeness. Resistance against buying something & distributing it for free, is on par with making sure people can’t get it.

Campaign 2012, Washington Examiner:

Vice President Joe Biden addressed 87 wealthy Democrats last night attending a fundraiser at the home of Sen. John Kerry in Georgetown. As they dined on grass-fed New York strip steaks and white truffle mashed potatos underneath a outdoor tent, Biden criticized Republicans for being out of touch.

“These guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there,” Biden said according to the pool report, “They don’t know what it means to be middle class.”

87 guests paid a minimum of $10,000-per-couple to attend the dinner.

Nothing to add.

Stanley Fish writes in the New York Times.

The double standard that is in the news these days concerns Rush Limbaugh, who called Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown, a “slut” and “prostitute” because she told Congress that her university’s health plan should cover the cost of contraceptives.
:
…some on the conservative side of the aisle have cried “double standard” because Ed Schultz was only mildly criticized (and suspended for a week) for characterizing Laura Ingraham as a “right-wing slut,” and Bill Maher emerged relatively unscathed after he referred to Michele Bachmann as a “bimbo” and labeled Sarah Palin with words I can’t mention in this newspaper. If you are going to get on your high horse when Limbaugh says something inappropriate, shouldn’t you also mount the steed when commentators on your team say the same kind of thing?
:
If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?
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Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

Sometimes, you almost have to feel sorry for the Modern Left. They got a little bit of encouragement with this issue, and they doubled-down so hard that now their mask has slipped off. And they didn’t even win anything.

In response to why should he get an even break, James Taranto states the obvious:

A disregard for fairness tends to alienate those who don’t already agree with you, and the attempt to consider the other side’s arguments fairly makes one’s own arguments more robust. If the Times were to reject the Fish Rule and actually make an effort to give the “bad guys” their due, it might be easier to find a documented case of someone changing his mind after reading a Times editorial.

In the same sense that applying theatrical outrage evenly and indiscriminately would make an argument more robust, applying it with calculated and unapologetic “that’s just the way it’s supposed to be” bias malnourishes that same argument in ways most visible to those hearing it and least visible to the person offering it. In fact, people tend to forget this, but we’re already going out on a limb when we say an argument is more likely to be correct when it is less offensive. We really haven’t got much business accepting just that much; how many offensive arguments have we seen, that turn out to be right? How many avoidable mistakes do we see made, based on thinking that has been declared somewhere to be less offensive than some alternative?

But Fish’s recommendation here leads to reasoning that is not only predictably flawed, but reliably circular. His side wins because his side has been judged — by those within it — to be less offensive. And it is to be judged as less offensive because it’s supposed to win. It’s about as useful as a wagon with one wheel a few inches bigger than the other, for exactly the same reason, traveling the same course; it is non-utilitarian because it ends up in a spot not remarkably different from where it begins. “We’re just plain right, why go into all this boring detail” sums it up nicely.

Here I must pause to notice yet another subtle thing about the Fluke debacle: Of all the arguments for Limbaugh’s…uh, I’ve lost track of what exactly it is they think they’re trying to do to him, let’s called it “conviction of the crime”…the one that manages to arouse the greatest sympathy from me, is that “slut” is a word to be avoided because it is deliberately vulgar and coarse, not technically accurate, potentially defamatory, et cetera. In short, we must expunge this piece of slang from our vernacular so that the discourse can remain civilized, elevated and lofty.

But the people who put their eggs in this basket, so to speak, don’t seem too interested in lofty discourse. I’m seeing Fish getting filleted in the comments section, and the consensus objection seems to be: Limbaugh’s a jerk, you don’t need to offer this apologia for a double standard, we’re not applying one…see, this is what I’m talking about. Caveman arguments of “us good, him bad.” It fails to consider ideas, even as it goes through the meaningless motions of, supposedly, evaluating them meticulously. It uses elementary-school-playground reasoning even in the midst of condemning elementary-school-playground taunting. Those people over there are wonderful and awesome, can never have a bad idea; those other people are horrible and terrible and can never have a good one. Well, it is an election year, I suppose our expectations must be relaxed.

Sandra Fluke is a slut, by the way. Applied to a woman, the word means a slovenly one. Slovenly means untidy, careless and neglectful in appearance, manners and repute. Go ahead, look ’em up. Her testimony was to the effect that the expense involved in birth control for Georgetown students, like her, was so great that it wasn’t reasonable to expect them to bear it, it was so great that it would have to be paid by someone else. It’s difficult to think of another item of personal maintenance that could be so intimate, meaning, a non-slovenly person would desire to take care of this without sham “hearings” on Capitol Hill. And, when the birth control is used for recreational purposes, it’s entirely optional. It sucks to be celibate because of a reason like this, but people do it.

If that option of chastity for sake of financial independence is somehow automatically ruled out, for recreational reasons, that’s a self-control issue. We’d have no problem saying that about alcohol, marijuana or gambling. Why not here? So the most credible way you could say Limbaugh is wrong in what he said, is: Fluke is not a slut, she’s a spokesperson for other sluts. And, her defenders have simply lost track of how undignifying it is, to choose to live a life dependent on others. They’re polishing a turd. Just like Gerard said: “I hope she thinks the damage she’s done to herself was worth it, because to get it she made herself into the kind of ‘damaged goods’ parents once used to warn their daughters against becoming. The rich irony is that she doesn’t even know it yet. But she will. She will.”

I’m not sure what is happening to the word “slut” here. It’s either being banned from existence entirely, or it’s becoming a woman’s version of the N-word (they can use it, others cannot), or maybe the outcome will be to Stanley Fish’s liking and the word will become an pejorative of progressive-only privilege. Or, no metamorphosis of nomenclature will take place at all. My hope is that, if it is in a process of Gandalf-The-White transformation, at the end of it all the word will be understood to mean: Someone who wants what she wants, even if someone else has to pay for it, involuntarily — and doesn’t care about that because she just wants it.

That would be good. That would be, perhaps, the best linguistic resolution possible. The more I think about it, the more I like it. We’ve needed a word to describe this for awhile. We have been suffering needlessly for the lack of having one.

Wisdom, again, from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

Ever notice the people who want “laws kept out of my/her uterus” are the same people who want lots and lots of regulation everywhere else?

Dana Loesch writest at Breitbart’s Big Journalism:

A trio of polls released yesterday shows the harsh reality from which the embattled President Obama and the media hoped to deflect by fabricating a “War on Women.”

The newest Washington Post/ABC poll shows that the majority of Americans strongly disapprove of the way in which the President is handling a number of issues, chief among them the economy and gas prices. According to the March 10th, 2012 poll released yesterday a net 50% of those surveyed disapprove of how Obama is handling the job of president with 39% “strongly disapproving” and only 28% “strongly approving.” This is up from the net 46% taken on February 4th of the same year.

On the economy, 50% “strongly disapprove” whereas only 20% “strongly approve” of the President’s management. His negatives greatly outweigh his positives on everything from his handling of Iran, the budget deficit, Afghanistan, and on “the situation with gas prices” where 52% “strongly disapprove” of his job performance. It represents an increasing trend.

The latest New York Times/ CBS News poll:

At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.

The last of the trio comes from Rasmussen which illustrates how a full 59% of the country view Obama as “more liberal” than they are themselves.
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If the incumbent wants to win a second term, focus on fixing what’s broken — the barrier between big government and private enterprise — and staying out of what isn’t. There’s no need to purposefully victimize women for the sake of using them as pawns in an election. That itself is an act of war on women.

Related: Jammie Wearing Fool:

Three groups that supported him in 2008: The young, women and less affluent are abandoning him in droves, but somehow it’s the GOP that’s got a problem.

When he gets blown out in November, it’ll be reported as “Obama Unexpectedly Loses 40 States” or something along those lines.

Also, from Frank J. Fleming at IMAO:

With the GOP war on women, it’s just too bad Ted Kennedy isn’t around to drive women to safety.

Too late to vote on it, nevertheless, I’m all in favor if they let me pick the targets.

And your favorite Dark Lord of the Sith on a unicycle.

The trouble with the Fluke matter is, we need to get off it and on to other things that are far more important; and, at the same time, we don’t.

On the one hand, the matter is settled. President Obama has been so hugely embarrassed by the whole contraception-mandate thing that His pals on Capitol Hill figured out there was no way of saving Him short of the Winifred Skinner technique: Put some sad sack in front of the cameras and tell a tall tale about the woe and misery involved in this one loser trying to cope with life. Oh, how can this happen in America! We need reform! This is all old ground for us by now, there are “real” problems elsewhere that need solving.

On the other hand, there’s something important taking place that hasn’t received the attention it deserves. The Sandra Fluke thing, with the slut issues and the free speech issues removed — and, yes, I’m ready, let’s do that — is revealed as a Winifred Skinner thing. We’ve got these politicians who are supposedly “serving” us, and they’re supposed to have such fine and upstanding character, chosen from the best and brightest among us. And, as respect for the legislative branch in particular, and our government in general, continues to sink like a bowling ball dropped over the Mariana Trench, they continue to put these losers in front of microphones to guilt us into more unaffordable social programs. On Planet Liberal, the Constitution is meaningless, and the only constitution that applies is an unwritten one. It’s got something to do with inventing new rights every now & then, by means of drama.

If anybody calls them on it, they invent more rights for themselves, on the spot, again, by means of drama. Specifically, they should be allowed new influence and powers because their feelings were hurt just now.

If this tactic appealed only to the other sad sacks strewn across the country, it wouldn’t work. Yes, we’re in an idiocracy for the moment, and that means every new year finds us weaker and more pathetic than the year before, which may mean each year there are more sad sacks than there were one year previous. But they’re still in the minority. The problem here, as I see it, is empathy: We’ve got these “moderates” out there who work honestly and hard, and pay their own way, but they want to show some compassion toward those who must live off the efforts of others. They fail to distinguish between those who are indigent by circumstance and those who are indigent by choice. They behold, to use a metaphor I’ve used previously, the local widow and the town drunk. They see only commonalities between the two, and no differences.

They’re entirely decent people, but since they are not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem. Perhaps we should dispense with the diplomacy: They’re suckers. They bought every little cock-and-bull story told to them about Sandra Fluke, by The Left, over the last two weeks. Wolfed it all down, and begging for seconds. Sandra Fluke told truth to power! Georgetown gals need three thousand dollars for their ovarian cyst medication! Ban Rush Limbaugh because he said something legal but offensive!

Remember when the radical Islamists out in New York wanted to build a Victory Mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks and the liberals started calling everyone racists who didn’t want to roll out the red carpet? They said it was all about something called “religious freedom” and claimed to have always held a deep genuflecting respect for the principle. And then demanded that we not chortle at the thought…lest they become offended. Just so adorable! Well, this time the thing they’ve always believed going back to the very beginning, is that anyone who so much as thinks the word “slut” should be vaporized on the spot. Yeah, them. The “Sarah Palin Is A Cunt” people. Don’t crack a smile, whatever you do! Choke it down! Wouldn’t want to offend them…

Yeah, it’s a double standard. But let us perceive it for exactly what it is. Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

The Modern Left does not HAVE a double-standard.

the Modern Left IS a double-standard.

That is their mission, that is their message…so yeah, they said “hey Rush shouldn’t use that word” and they end up embarrassed because, it’s on tape, their guys have been using that word, much more frequently, and other words much, much worse.

If the same opportunity was presented to them a hundred more times, they would have plowed right into the same embarrassment and self-inflicted damage a hundred more times. This was all quite unavoidable. It’s what they are. Special rules for special people, and lowered standards for whoever they define to be victims. It is their primary position and their core value system.

This applies to all issues on which there is significant disagreement between conservatives and liberals, at least all the issues that are not exclusively concerned with building a police/nanny state. The formula is ever-present on issues foreign and domestic. X has endured Y…and because X has endured Y, we have to have Z and, furthermore, you are not allowed to say anything about X that isn’t absolutely flattering. Z is a consolation prize to X, punishment rained down on the head of whoever did Y, or some combination of those two. That is the leftist position. On everything.

They are anti-equal-protection advocates. Across the board. They want special privileges for defined elites. That is the product they are selling.

Palestinians aren’t bombing Israelis, they’re just fighting back the only way they know how, after Israelis used American weapons to incinerate their babies.

We took the land away from the Indians, oops Native Americans, so they should have their own fishing seasons.

If we can somehow manage to dredge up some passionate argument against the way you got the evidence, then it never happened and you “must acquit.”

And if we can’t do that, then the poor convicted rapist/murderer guy had a rough childhood and is not to be blamed.

Blacks can use the N-word, whites can’t.

We’ve got to recognize same-sex marriage, because, who are you to tell people who they can’t love?

Women make seventy cents on the dollar compared to men, so now that the marriage is over, he needs to pony up the cash to keep her in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed.

We need to keep Affirmative Action around, with quotas, for, oh, so-many more years or so…

You can’t build that dam, the snail darter lives there.

No drilling, no pipeline. Caribou mating season or something…blah blah blah pristine.

Hillary Clinton’s husband messed around on her, so she is eminently qualified for just about everything.

Don’t call them illegal immigrants, call them undocumented, they work hard follow the law…et cetera.

Rick Walker bad, public sector unions good.

Andrew Breitbart bad, Shirley Sherrod good.

I could keep adding to that list all day…but what’s the point…once the pattern is defined and understood, it is visible in everything they do. And in each case, it is a measurable event that the plane of reality is being abandoned — because, in each case, if someone within the victim class is provably guilty of some transgression, the liberal position is going to consistently be offered that reason and justice must be derailed (simplest example of this would be in the illegal-immigration problem).

This is a significant point, and it is important that more people become fully aware of it. It will affect the outcome of the election this year. Since around the time of Bill Clinton’s victory twenty years ago, The Left has enjoyed easy victory by peddling their nonsense to the moderates I mentioned above — the charitable, kind-hearted, hardworking moderates. Who are suckers. Because those suckers cannot tell the widow apart from the town drunk, and make no effort or achievement toward understanding there are people walking around determined to live off of the sweat of others. People who think only idiots work hard. And why shouldn’t those town-drunks think such a thing, if their lives have been devoted to suckering the sucker moderates — and it has always worked?

The passionate leftist approaches the sucker moderate and recites the formula: X has endured Y, therefore we must have Z. The sucker-moderate decides it the way he decides everything else: By finding whatever can be perceived to be the most “extreme” position on the issue, and rejecting it with great zeal, and great visibility, almost ceremoniously: I denounce that! But they select that most-extreme position emotionally and not logically. Because, logically, “Rush Limbaugh should be taken off the air” would be found undesirably extremist, but somehow these overly-emotional sucker-moderates settle on “Sandra Fluke can pay for her own personal items” as the extremist ethos that must be expunged from our delicate societal sensibilities.

The paradox is this — and, this is why The Left is just as ready as anybody else, to stop talking about Sandra Fluke. They don’t want what follows, to sink in. They don’t want the sucker-moderates to become aware of it. It’s unaffordable, from their perspective and position; this would give the whole game away.

The truth is, you cannot buy into “X endured Y and so we must have Z” without surrendering your believable credentials as a moderate. There is nothing to limit the Z. One of the clarion calls used by The Left in the Fluke debacle has been: “Nobody has said she wants the government to pay for her contraceptives, she just wants her insurance to cover it!” The truth is: Nobody has said that and nobody needs to. Granting her victory in the argument she’s really trying to make here, there’s nothing stopping that next step, is there? The whole testimony was all about how unaffordable it is, for any ordinary Georgetown student, to take on this particular expense all by her poor hapless helpless self. That is the point she was seeking to make.

Here, as is the case with all other liberal positions on the issues — there is nothing to limit the Z. They are inherently extremist positions. You are not able to say anything negative about X; you cannot even think things about X that are less than flattering; therefore, it is not logical to expect any limits should be applied to Z. It is ever-expanding. Always one Capitol Hill testimony, or Wall Street protest, away from the next event of expansion.

To the sucker-moderates, a week ago this was a simple issue: Rush Limbaugh called someone a slut, do we sucker-moderates like that word? No, that’s an easy call, so…yes, he should apologize, and what a terrible person he is. That makes Fluke an angel, along with everyone supporting her, they’re all wonderful people. But now that they’ve had a chance to mull it over awhile, The Left is scrambling for a distraction, which is rather surreal when you ponder that Sandra Fluke was a manufactured distraction from something else, herself, in the first place. The sucker-moderates are starting to see the hypocrisy laid bare and it looks ugly. See, they only want to side with the leftists; they don’t want to admit that they’re becoming converted leftists themselves, they’ll never tolerate that. Ever. Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair, they’ll buy into the system but they’ll never buy the label.

And, they’re starting to become aware that the check they’re being asked to write, is a blank one.

You know how bad this situation really is for The Left? The sucker-moderates are starting to wake up to the fact that, deciding public policy issues according to things like emotion, and sympathy for only a few of the impacted parties within the equation, is not only unfair but unrealistic. They are forming a new awareness that such a situation is encumbered by Herbert Stein’s Law: Whatever can’t last forever, won’t.

That particular awareness could be fairly described as the very definition of being a conservative!

And what I’ve decided is, I don’t like ’em. I’ll go further: I can’t stand them. I fucking hate ’em.

Okay I’ll make one single exception to that: If it’s like when James Caan snapped at Robert Duvall in The Godfather, and then immediately said, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that — if it’s a case of, the grown-up side of the brain hasn’t been in charge, and it just took control again and is in a process of making things right — then, and only then, I like apologies. Then, and only then, apologies are okay. When there’s some definable difference between what just took place, and the way people really are, when the person apologizing is admitting to something like “Ah, there’s a steering wheel in my head and I let go of it just now, I’m not gonna do that again, and what I just said is not real.”

But we don’t get to see that now too much, do we?

I’ve heard repeatedly from the left that Rush Limbaugh’s apology was insincere, and he should have taken an example from Ed Schultz’ apology to Laura Ingraham:

It rubs me the wrong way, frankly, that the left seems to think this is the model to which all other apologies must aspire. It isn’t that I think it’s inadequate; I don’t. It’s from the heart, and it leaves nothing undone. But I don’t like to see a grown man grovel. And, let’s face it, they like that. Can’t get enough of it.

Shortly after his apology, Ed Schultz saw a snake slithering by, and decided to rub its belly. He reached waaaaaaaay up from where he was, on tippy toes…couldn’t quite get there…gave up, slouched over, continued shuffling along, saw a hole in the ground, jumped into it, then grabbed the hole and pulled it in after him. Total humility in the wake of total humiliation. Every leftist watching is positively giddy with excitement over the way his shoulders sloop. This is why they hate westerns with the hero in the big hat walking tall after saving the town. This is the polar opposite: The obliteration of the individual. If only the same thing happened to Rush Limbaugh! And Karl Rove and Ollie North, while you’re at it.

The leftists who say, Schultz did it right and Limbaugh should learn something, are guilty of having lost track of their own argument. Their protest against Limbaugh, and this is not conjecture on my part because they’re stating it word by word themselves, is: He’s sorry for having been caught. He’s apologizing because he’s losing advertisers and trying to stop the revenue hemorrhage. Okay, that’s a fair point because, truth be told, that’s exactly why I’ve come to loathe apologies; more on that below. But — did Ed Schultz do such a great job in the clip above, that he’s immune from the same criticism? Go back and watch it again. Yes, he’s contrite, and reading from a script that could only have been written by someone who truly empathizes with the offense. But it could also be fairly characterized as an apology given only because a revenue stream is showing signs of drying up. You could see the whole ritual being skipped, if the advertisers weren’t getting ready to bail. Maybe they’ll admit it and maybe it won’t. It doesn’t matter, because it’s true. It’s just another apology for having been caught.

The contrite Ed “setting an example for my grandchildren” Schultz doesn’t really have a moral objection to calling women sluts if they disagree with him politically. Because if he did, he wouldn’t have said this:

And with that, I don’t wanna talk about Schultz anymore because this isn’t about him.

What this is really about, is: I am hearing, in the past few years, at what appears to be a continually accelerating pace, a crescendoing drumbeat of people expressing these “sincere” apologies for behavior they fully intend to do again. Or at least, with the same situation presented to them, would do again. Yes, I believe this is true of Limbaugh; I have listened to him way too long to believe otherwise. He has had a name for it going all the way back to the beginning: Illustrating absurdity by being absurd.

Here’s how it works. When someone presents an argument that is so ludicrous, that it falls apart simply by being taken seriously by somebody, Rush — takes it seriously. It is as effective as it is logical. Yes, I’m going on the record: He had nothing for which to apologize here. I don’t care if he says otherwise and I don’t care that he did apologize. This is the real reason why the apology was ineffective. There was no call for it in the first place.

Therefore, show me a thousand people who feel he needed to make the apology, I’ll show you a thousand people dedicated to the idea that his sin was irredeemable, and any apology would be irrelevant. Have him go back and give a Schultz-apology, and it wouldn’t matter one bit. Not a single mind would have been changed. The apology was a mistake. Or at least…battle tactics aside…the apology was a mistake. Limbaugh made a mistake giving it. And I say “battle tactics aside” because it is becoming more and more clear to me that the liberals made a mistake demanding it.

We’re plunged into a thoughtful deliberation about the double standard established by, enjoyed by, and perpetuated by, liberals. The “mainstream” people who actually decide elections are becoming more aware of this double standard. That’s bad for liberals and good for everyone else. For every pound of ass-flesh Rush Limbaugh loses to this, the situation now is that the Establishment Left loses two pounds, and I perceive that this point-of-diminishing-returns was crossed sometime between noon and eight o’clock Wednesday. That, too, is good.

But that doesn’t legitimize Rush’s decision. This situation would have occurred, along roughly the same timeframe, were the apology withheld.

The problem is this: The apology loses value when it is used as an instrument of deceit. And with the trajectory where the custom is headed, it is to be used as an instrument of deceit more and more frequently, and for other, more sincere, purposes more rarely. The left is finding Limbaugh’s apology wanting, and I think they should. Rush is offering them an empty packaging with nothing inside. The point they’re missing is that this empty packaging is more than what was owed.

I do think Bill Maher deserves some props for this tweet:

Hate to defend #RushLimbaugh but he apologized, liberals looking bad not accepting. Also hate intimidation by sponsor pullout

I’ve taught my son that an expression of gratitude is obligatory, if someone does something kind for you that they didn’t have to do. According to that litmus test, Maher gets a high-five. Perhaps a cynical cost-benefit calculation went into it. In fact, it’s likely. Maybe the asshole gets out of bed every morning thinking “What can I do to make conservatives lose something and let liberals win something?” That’s likely too. Almost certain. But it doesn’t matter, because he didn’t have to do it.

I don’t like apologies anymore. They do not do much to improve situations. I will admit here that I am nursing a grudge against the implement when my quarrel is really against the implementation, much like a gun-hater might hate guns because of some disaster brought about by one carelessly wielded gun in the possession of someone who never should have been allowed to touch one. So with that in mind, I understand this is not a completely fair grudge. I don’t care. The gun analogy breaks down, because we spend, rightfully, a great abundance of effort and energy on making sure guns are used only by people who have some business with them, and understand the common-sense rules that apply to them.

We sure suck at doing the same thing with apologies. The apology has become the very emblem of inept government.

In fact, I dislike the whole model of government that supports, and is supported by, the image of the prominent and influential public “servant” issuing an apology. Seriously, what am I to learn from such a display? Let us start with the common theme that applies to all of them: Had a thought been germinating in my cranium that the wrong folks are in charge, the “press conference” is intended to dissuade me from that notion. But the apology is directed at multiple people, is it not, for I by myself am not sufficiently important to pry an apology out of people who have power over me. And the apology is issued at a specific time, in the wake of a specific event; what I’m getting at is, there must have been a prologue to the apology. There had to be a logical reason for people to think this person is unfit for the office he holds. The apology is intended for the powerful to get the last word in — against observed reality. In short: The apology is not about contrition, it is about power. Someone else, who has power the apology-issuer does not have, rightly or wrongly has stirred up a tempest in a teapot and done some thinking on behalf of someone else. The thinking says that the words or deeds of the person issuing the apology, once entered into the record, are terminal to that person’s fitness for the office he holds. Somehow, the act of issuing the apology is going to reverse course, it’s going to alter the outcome, which means a deal has been struck and now someone is going to do some more thinking on behalf of someone else. Unless the apology fails, that is. Then, too, it isn’t about contrition, it’s about power.

So can we stop with all the high-minded and supercilious nonsense about what a proper apology looks like?

The more I look at these apologies, the more I hate them. I only see the Limbaugh apologies, which make me think “Whose boneheaded idea was this,” and the Kennedy/Chappaquiddick ones that make me think “Why are you wasting my time, we know what you are now.” All I see anymore are two factions, each of which possesses some kind of power the other doesn’t have, one of which is corrupt, and in some cases both of them are — forming an agreement to partner up with each other when they don’t really want to. All I see is a reluctantly codified pact between two inimical forces. A corrupt pact. So-and-so is going to keep his job…Cui bono? Cui plagalis?

The peanut gallery is supposed to look on it and say “Oh, well that’s a relief. For the last day or two I’ve been troubled by a feeling that we didn’t have wonderful awesome people in charge of everything,” then go back to worrying about the important stuff. Something to do with someone on the idiot-box getting voted off or out of something.

Darn, it looks like I’ve once again taken a simple thought and exploded it into a dry, meandering epistle on my blog. I’m so, so very sorry about that. Think I’ll go cross-post it now.

Blondes versus Brunettes.

From here.

President Obama explained that he felt it was necessary to console Miss Fluke because he was thinking of his two daughters, Sasha and Malia.

“One of the things I want them to do as they get older is engage in issues they care about, even ones I may not agree with them on,” the President said at a news conference last Tuesday. “I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way. And I don‘t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.”

But by accepting this explanation, one is left wondering why the president didn’t console, say, conservative author Laura Ingraham when she was called a “slut” or Sarah Palin when she was called things far worse than anything uttered by Mr. Limbaugh.

I’ve been noticing something about these apologies and non-apologies, and the Gohmert clip bears this out for the most part. The apologies that are skipped by President Obama, if they were given, the point of error would be traced back to a judgment flaw on the part of no one, save for President Barack H. Obama (or people who directly report to Him). A great example: That silly “beer summit.” Rather than making a “teachable moment” out of it, it would have made perfect sense for the President to apologize for jumping the gun on judging police action in a local matter. It would have been a lot quicker, too. I think it ultimately would have been less damaging to the administration. It would have come off looking like an oh-well. Gee, it seemed to make good sense at the time. I guess when you give a lot of speeches you’re bound to slip up somewhere. Shucks, I’m human, no harm no foul.

But Barack Obama is a demigod, that’s why we make a point of capitalizing the H when we refer to Him. Admitting to an occasionally flawed decision, is beneath Him…so…we had to have a “teachable moment” with glasses of beer. All because He Who Caused The Oceans To Recede can’t admit a mistake.

And the apologies He does have time to give — I haven’t re-scanned the Gohmer clip from beginning to end with just this in mind, but it seems whenever He does issue an apology, it’s an apology for something someone else has done. People try to get me to read His biography, explaining that it’s a “love letter” to America, pointing out things the country must stop doing that it’s doing wrong…I don’t think I like the sound of that, sounds like, as they say, a love letter from O.J. to Nicole. But that fits into the pattern. Every bad decision that needs a re-do, in the Obama universe, is something that was decided by someone other than Barack Obama.

This is not the trait of a personality that makes for good leadership.

And you have Soledad O’Brien of CNN. Complete with an amazingly knowledgeable understanding of Critical Race Theory.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien’s venomously sarcastic interview with Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak culminated with her throwing out her definition of “Critical Race Theory” in the heat of her interview over the Obama/Bell Tapes released last night. Pollak had already requested that O’Brien define the term more than once, and at the 1:45 mark in the video below, she finally does. One problem–O’Brien’s definition appears to be lifted almost word-for-word from a wikipedia page, presumedly hurriedly communicated to Soledad in the midst of her interview.

Much later on in the clip, I recall she specifically asked Pollak something, he said something poignant and meaningful, and she mumbled about how she didn’t hear him because someone was speaking in her earset, but moving on…

This after playing the race card against Pollak, with disastrous results.

And then there’s this:

Throughout the day, there have been numerous edits to the wikipedia entry for “Critical Race Theory,” including the elimination of “white supremacy” as a key element (an element referenced by Joel Pollak during his interview with Soledad O’Brien and the existence of which O’Brien scoffed at throughout their conversation). At the time of this update, there had been 26 changes today alone; up until today, the last edit had been mid-February, and before that, just one in January.

The hits just keep on comin’ for CNN.

When is someone going to provide a decent news network for people stranded at airports?

Blah blah blah.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

I don’t know if, in modern times, people can feel real anger or outrage anymore. I realize it seems like we’re erupting; I realize it doesn’t seem a month, or even a week, can go by without someone getting pimply-faced white-hot outraged about something.

But it seems, if you show me a hundred occasions of such outrage, I can show you a hundred people who want some rule changed, some object to be perceived and treated as its polar opposite, some fundamental rule of common sense to be stood on its head. It has become inevitable, expected, like the crashing sound on the floor after glassware or flatware has been dropped.

All of which means, I’m lately having a tough time accepting outrage at face value. I think we all are.

Thought is not complete without linkage to Thing I Know #52:

Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.

You can’t say that, it’s racist.

Blogger friend Phil has another viewpoint on this. Since the other school was, in fact, American, it made no sense to take “USA!” as a cheer for the victorious team, therefore it was reasonable to infer racial overtones. I have seen some comments from people who are familiar with the locality, residing there currently or having resided there previously. And their words lend weight to the notion, I must say. Although it must be said this is just a couple of people, nameless disembodied voices on the Internet, and they do seem to be packing an agenda that has something to do with finding racism everyplace they look.

None of this has to do with my complaint, however: It’s proxy, third-party offense taken. The school officials found it racist? What business do school officials have imagining racism? I’m not saying they don’t, if the evidence has arisen. This isn’t it. If it’s code for something deeper that’s a real problem, well, wait for some better evidence to come along. If there’s a real problem there, it shouldn’t be a long wait, right?

There’s another problem with this though: The students involved in the chanting were punished. Not grilled about “What t’heck did ya mean by that?” and then punished. This is a significant point. “Both districts are now trying to move past this disturbing incident,” they say…uh, waitaminnit, the districts made the incident. Seriously, what disaster would have ensued had the whole thing been let go? One team wins, a trophy is presented, the crowd chants “USA!” and nothing is done about it. Why, I believe I sat through such displays myself when I was in high school. Couldn’t tell you for sure. Didn’t pay much attention because it isn’t worth it.

If I did hear USA! USA! as the Sehome Mariners cruised on through to victory…and I’m leaning toward yes, I think that was a frequent occurrence…well, that would mean Alamo Heights fans need to work on their displays of racism because they’re sucking at it right now. They’re not changing anything in a meaningful way, to get the message across. To the best of my knowledge, while I attended Sehome, our guys didn’t play against any non-American teams.

So on the basis of my own personal experience, if on none other, I have to conclude the school officials manufactured this crisis. Unintentionally, maybe. But events are unfolding in this situation, differently from the way they used to “back in the day,” because and only because the behavior of the officials has changed.

It’s from one lefty to a bunch of other lefties who’ve abandoned President Obama for not being lefty enough. Yeah I know, you were thinking “Oh good, mystery finally solved”…so was I.

The bullet points are interesting. And very well written, as far as implementing the lessons from, uh, “How to cover up your BS and make it look like something that isn’t BS.”

– Obama abolished the United States’ use of torture and the CIA’s secret prisons.

– He restored the liberal internationalist approach to foreign policy and made an historic outreach to the Muslim world.

– He stabilized an economy that was spiraling into a depression.

– He expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and made major investments in job training, education, infrastructure, clean energy, housing, and scientific research.

– He saved the automobile industry by saving General Motors and Chrysler.

– He forced the health insurance companies to stop excluding people with pre-existing conditions and to stop dropping people when they got sick.

Rather unsettling how many bullet points on this list are simply efforts, with no matching achievement and therefore no mention of the results that ensued. “Made an historic outreach to the Muslim world,” for example. Would the Obama administration want to be graded on the results? I suppose the country owes the President a debt for proving once and for all that it doesn’t work…now we can quit arguing about it. That’s something.

“Stabilizing the economy” corresponds nicely to an analogy involving a sheepherd whose flock is plagued by a wolf that snacks on two or three heads in the herd every day. At some point, the sheep depletion rate will taper off — when there aren’t any more sheep left. While the shepherd does nothing…the snack rate still reaches zero. And that, boys and girls, is how President Obama stabilized our economy.

One question remains, and it is a reasonable one: So what would it take?

Sowell wrote about it, and then Palin wrote about what Sowell wrote about it. Now Whittle explores it.

“We’ve got this thing covered.”

Another good one goes. I’ll check back later to see who’s written what.

Thanks for filling us in, Terri.

Boortz is on a roll this morning:

Why do we have deficits?
:
Two political scientists, Jody W. Lipford and Bruce Yandle, did a study on taxation in America. The results of their study led them to the conclusion that our progressive tax system where high-income earners sustain a high tax burden is simply unsustainable. The reason is simple: the number of moochers are growing, while the number of producers are shrinking. That’s a fact. “The share of total federal taxes paid by the bottom 40 percent of households has fallen from 9.3 percent in 1979 to 5.2 percent in 2007, while the shares of the tax burden borne by the top 10 percent and one percent, respectively, have risen steadily,” according to their research. This acts as nothing but an incentive for people to vote for government services that they don’t have to pay for.

Voting is the lazy-man’s work. Going to the voting booth once a year or so and voting for Democrats is much easier than waking up at 4am, working three jobs, earning paychecks, and driving home in the dark. Our progressive income tax system has enabled the moochers. In fact, “during the period 1979-2007, the increasing progressivity of the federal tax code is associated with greater government debt and entitlement spending.” Coincidence? I think not.

Our forefathers predicted this. In 1810, political theorist John C. Calhoun foresaw this problem:

“The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”

We were warned, but then along came the Sixteenth Amendment establishing the income tax. These political scientists Lipford and Yandle believe that the Sixteenth Amendment “nullified the prior constitutional restraint on the size of government and enabled one group of citizens to vote themselves benefits at the expense of another.”

There’s a woman in Michigan named Amanda Clayton. You can read about this lovely little moocher right here. Last fall Amanda won $1,000,000 in the state lottery. Today she’s still on welfare and using food stamps? Why? She needs the help to pay her bills. This is mooching raised to an art form. Care to guess how she would probably vote in November?

He continues:

More research from a team at Cornell University found that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas.” An example they provide is on tax reform. “They found that if people lack knowledge of tax reforms, it was incredibly unlikely voters would be able to identify the candidates who are actual experts.”

Considering that research, is it any reason why Americans vote for politicians like Barack Obama and shun tax reform ideas like the FairTax? They wouldn’t know a decent tax reform or a tax expert if it literally bit them in the ass!

In one of the studies, researchers asked participants to grade grammar quizzes. “We found that students who had done worse on the test itself gave more inaccurate grades to other students.” In other words, incompetent people can’t even recognize the correct answers when they saw them.

Yeah, he’s engaging the same libertarian whining about the Fair Tax that we saw indulged in by the good leftists after John Kerry lost the election, Americans are too stupid for a democracy. Well, maybe there’s something to it. Did you see the clip about the lottery winner using her bridge card? That’s an example of it playing out right in front of your eyes, when you think of it. Here she is, confronted with how inappropriate it is for her to be buying groceries subsidized by people who simply are not as financially solvent as she is now that she’s won her half million dollars. And her answer is: I don’t have an income and I’ve got bills to pay. Recipient of $500,000 saying this. And she’s completely ernest about it.

Some people are simply incapable of working through a paradigm shift. They’re like mental cannonballs, heading in one direction, not gonna change to a different one, no matter what. Blah blah blah, got it tough, life gave me a bum hand, need help, blah blah blah.

So they do what must be done, just like animals in a cage, to get hold of…well, things that are on some list that doesn’t change much, whatever the list happens to say. Laundry detergent, Little Debbies, cigarettes, hair coloring kids, tattoos, and oh yes don’t forget more lottery tickets. The welfare grocery card? It’s just another procedure. Like voting. A tax reform plan comes along, they hear by the grapevine they should oppose it, from some leftist hack outfit…and repeat it as if it’s their own opinion. And then strut around feeling like they’ve done some “research,” then of course vote that way. Even with a million dollars in the bank, nothing changes. It’s very sad.

And what Boortz is really complaining about here, specifically, is Dunning-Kruger Effect. When you don’t know something, you tend to not know that you don’t know it — your incompetence perpetuates a camaflouging effect upon itself, an inability in you to recognize your own incompetence. Yes, there certainly is some of that going on.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

This “liberals must win whenever they act offended” rule has wedged us into a very strange and surreal little corner of reality here. People who maintain a personal objection against premature pregnancy terminations in whatever form, must now fail to prevent their own dollars from funding exactly that.

Meanwhile, better success is enjoyed by those who have similar personal objections against…uh…well, you tell me if this is sincere or not: They don’t want the word “slut” to be used on the Rush Limbaugh show. Rush’s show is not funded by their dollars, and oh, let me just cut to the chase, I’m calling bullshit on the whole idea that any of them have ever heard a single syllable out of it.

But they must win because they’re just oh so offended.

You, on the other hand, have to keep ponying up for that Fluke slut’s birth control.