In business as well as in all walks of life, people will make decisions to change the course of their enterprises, or the course of the ventures placed under their stewardship, if and only if

1. They feel empowered to do so.
2. They feel authorized to do so, which is slightly different from the question of feeling empowered.
3. They perceive that they, personally, are likely to experience a net gain from the change in direction. I say “net” because by & large, most changes in direction start out at a cost to the person who instigates them. They have to make it big to break even.

Now, we have certain “Dagny Taggart” personality types who can be relied upon to instigate this change of direction, when it’s called for, consequences be damned. And we have other personality types who are the opposite, Lord knows. Bureaucrats, bred to the bone. If the rulebook says plow the ship into that iceberg, then that’s what we’re gonna do. But this question of personality-type is simply a sway upon question #2, and maybe #1. The triad of questions is really what drives the decision-point, within all of us.

All three tumblers have to click into place before the lock can be opened. If the lock is opened, creativity is applied, and if it isn’t it isn’t.

Without that, people will just follow the rules. And here is your explanation for Robert Conquest’s Second Rule of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left wing.” It isn’t because group-think turns conservatives into liberals (although there’s something to that). People simply lose their incentive to think independently. They color a little bit out of the lines, they get their noses poked for it, they do it again, they get poked again, repeat a few times…and then they say, y’know what? It just isn’t worth it. I’m here to earn a paycheck. The third tumbler locks shut, then the second, then the first.

No more innovating.

I don’t comment on these very often, because too much of the time it seems like I have to keep researching to find out the whole story even though, examining the pattern as a whole, it seems almost all of these Castle Doctrine defenders end up being justified. That having been said, this looks to me like a complete run-down of everything that matters, at least, what the network saw fit to put on the air…

I note that every single word in that item is concerned with re-actions, not actions. Except, that is, for Ms. Jackson and the intruder. I don’t hear anything about officers being dispatched to the scene, which is odd since the call is supposed to be twenty minutes and Jackson is repeatedly begging that someone be sent.

At the two-minute mark in this tape, or thereabouts, the dispatcher makes a reference to someone being on the way. Wonderful.

Google and I are not getting along with each other well enough to figure out what happened to this investigation, and the District Attorney’s decision about whether or not to press charges. It’s been two years by now. Maybe that means she’s clear; I hope so. I hear on the tape the dispatcher is advising her “you can defend your property if you need to” at about 5:47. On the teevee newscast they make a comment about Oklahoma state law that backs this up.

I don’t see why this was called a homicide at all. I don’t see why it was referred to the D.A.’s office.

It looks to me like there’s a lot of fuss and trouble being made to provide answers to the public that nobody needs, and nobody’s demanding, while other questions are being neglected. I don’t know if anyone is too worried about being protected from Donna Jackson and her shotgun. On the other hand, most people if put in her situation there, I think would rather wait ten minutes than twenty for some help to arrive, and five minutes would be even better. Why did it take twenty? When they said “opened an investigation” I thought it would be about that.

It sounds like there’s a lot of adrenaline going, on the dispatcher’s side of the call, after the shot was fired that wasn’t there before. Thought I heard someone say “get someone out there” just before that point, which sounds really bad to me. Hearing a lot of detail about where exactly she lives, three minutes afterward, which sounds even worse.

Can’t find out anything about this after this turning-over-to-D.A. thing. I hope that means Ms. Jackson beat the rap. Dispatcher seems to be about as useless as a bag without a bottom, although I get the feeling that’s got to do with process and procedure. Sheriff’s office contributes two pieces of helpful information: Who the perp was and what might have been wrong with him, and what they’re doing to protect the public from the homeowner with a shotgun. Hooray!

In that TV newscast up there, beginning to end, it’s treated as a bad thing that just happens to people now & then, completely unavoidable, like a tornado. More than half of the information we get from the interviews, on a time basis, has to do with how people felt. Nobody takes action to prevent a damn thing, except one person, and she’s in trouble for it.

Just going off this, it seems we are devolving into a pussy society and we deserve every bad thing that is coming our way. Human interest and drama drama drama, but no will to confront evil. Not much effort going on to protect the innocent. There’s a law that says Ms. Jackson is within her rights, but at some point at least, it seems that law isn’t counting for very much.

Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen argue that President Obama should awaken to His unsuitability for further leadership, decline to run for re-election, and the Secretary of State should step in:

He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.
:
Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country. A CNN/ORC poll released in late September had Mrs. Clinton’s approval rating at an all-time high of 69%—even better than when she was the nation’s first lady. Meanwhile, a Time Magazine poll shows that Mrs. Clinton is favored over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by 17 points (55%-38%), and Texas Gov. Rick Perry by 26 points (58%-32%).

But this is about more than electoral politics. Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does. Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington.
:
Having unique experience in government as first lady, senator and now as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton is more qualified than any presidential candidate in recent memory, including her husband. Her election would arguably be as historic an event as the election of President Obama in 2008.

I’m gonna tear this one up. Not because I dislike Hillary Clinton and think she’s vastly overrated. Although I do and I do. But because to the best I can see, the excerpt above exhaustively captures everything the column has to say about why Clinton would make a good candidate/president.

I’m seeing something about loyalty and experience. I’m seeing an almost delusional bandying-about of that word “would,” as in “would become”; classic left-wing insanity. It makes me feel good to think such-and-such a thing is going to happen, therefore, I have fooled myself into thinking it is likely to happen. Gonna put all my chips on red, and your chips too.

Hillary’s loyal, because she hasn’t back-stabbed her boss, and since her decision right now is not to run, that suggests strongly that she’d have nothing to gain by doing so. Another classic left-wing mistake. This person didn’t go on the attack during this window of time, therefore this person can be trusted. Sometimes the tiger doesn’t eat you because he isn’t hungry.

And the experience. When she was running for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s seat, it was great fun asking Hillary fans what she’s actually managed to accomplish. Uh der, der, she tried, uh, it’s for the children, homina homina homina. The situation’s unchanged, now, a decade later. Is Hillary just a wonderful Secretary of State, one of our best ever? How so, exactly?

I’m not criticizing to dissuade the proposed solution. Frankly, I think the whole question is a waste of attention cycles. If it became completely obvious to everyone, everywhere, that Obama needed to step down, that would be an everyone-but-Obama epiphany because Obama Himself never would agree to it. And as they approached Him to bow out for His re-election bid, I think the last word on it would have to be His, and He’d never agree to it. As far as whether that’s good or bad for the democrats’ prospects in terms of hanging on to the White House, I don’t think it matters very much.

Their policies have been given a fair shake, and they reek.

But none of this has to do with what I really want to scrutinize here, which is everything else within her qualifications stated here. I’ve saved the best for last. I want to go on the attack against this: The “how someone else will react” aspect of it. This practice of pundits speaking out, with great fanfare and bumptious glory, on behalf of other people they don’t know, will never meet, and certainly do not have the same priorities that the pundits have. This creepy vicarious-confidence thing.

“Has the stature.” “Ability to step above partisan politics.” “Capable of uniting.” “Commands majority support.” Polls say, better positioned, blah, blah, blah, oh would you please for crying out loud stuff a sock in it. I’m completely fed up with seeing this happen with Mitt Romney, I’m not the least bit enthused about watching it happen with someone else. The willful denial of the plain fact that mediocre is mediocre, the hallucination that mediocrity is some sophisticated form of excellence.

For years and years, now, I’ve been confronted by people broadcasting to everyone within earshot and line-of-sight what they’re all about, by announcing their frenzied, jubilant support of Hillary Clinton. The problem isn’t that I disagree. The problem is that they’re trying to tell me what their values and priorities are by doing this, and they’re failing, because there isn’t much being communicated. If there is a Hillary Doctrine, then what is it exactly? What would Hillary do differently about her health care plan? She’d almost certainly have one, and it certainly wouldn’t be “bipartisan” in any way, shape or form. How about stimulus spending? What would Hillary do there that any other democrat wouldn’t do? Drill-baby-drill? Iran? North Korea? Crony capitalism? I’m sure she can make statements about all these things, but can she make any that are uniquely hers? Stray off the beaten path in any way?

I referred to Romney above. This predilection for pretending there’s something superior, extraordinary and unique about candidates who bring nothing of the kind — arguably, because they bring nothing of the kind — is not a trait exclusive to democrats. But it certainly is something we still see, this late in the game, in great abundance. If we had need for it, it would lose value because of this abundance. But we never had any need for it in the first place.

Excellent is excellent. Mediocre is mediocre. When you’re reduced to arguing that something is the very best just because you’ve got some polls, and a gut feel, that it would be popular even though there isn’t anything really different about it…well, what you’re doing there, is proposing a sandy foundation for your mighty fortress. You’re arguing for a fad. That’ll work great — today. Tomorrow’s a new day, and that’s the problem; that’s pretty much what we did last time, isn’t it?

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

— Aristotle.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Thing I Know #58. To insult a man says nothing about other men, but for some reason, anything said against one woman is perceived to be said against everything female who ever lived.

Because there is some truth in this — it’s a Thing I Know, after all, not a “thing I kinda sorta suspect might be true and someday I should maybe check it out” — my remarks in the post previous could be fairly regarded as somewhat reckless.

I should watch what I say. Yes…

Now, let’s juxtapose.

Hillary Clinton has risked a huge backlash after sympathising with those who rioted in support of the officials caught up in the Penn State ‘abuse’ scandal.

The Secretary of State said she could understand the ‘passion and emotion’ of the students who flooded the streets and overturned cars when they learned football head coach Joe Paterno had been fired.

She said that two members of her own family had gone to Penn State and made the team so she could appreciate their point of view.

Her poorly chosen comments are likely to enrage the families of the victims, who are still coming forward with fresh accusations.

Paterno was fired along with assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who is accused of molesting boys over 15 years and raping one in the shower.

This is not an attempt to hide behind the excuse of “Yeah, but this other person over here did the same thing.” That would be completely lame. Besides of which, the two cases of intemperate commentary are not the same…

Hillary Clinton is our current Secretary of State. She holds our nation’s highest diplomatic post.

I, on the other hand, am nothing more than the Chief Cook and Bottle Washer for The Blog That Nobody Reads.

I’d like to see a scrutinizing, inquisitive conversation take place about this: From where do we receive this conventional wisdom that, if you want to unload palettes and palettes of your crap, a sure-fire sales technique is to offer a family portrait of the matriarch cracking the whip and yanking the putz back in line? What gets that going? What keeps it going?

The obvious answer is “It must work, because if it didn’t work we wouldn’t keep seeing it.” Okay. I’m sure it must work; why does it work?

“Why” is a special word. A what, when, where and a who are all usually answered by means of a singularity. You point to one thing and there’s your answer. Why is more complex; many factors often contribute to a why, and I’m open to the idea that this is the case here. People buy more crap when they see a woman ordering a man around.

I notice whenever I’m seeing it in action, logic is somehow disconnected. Here I’ll walk you through what I mean: Simply take this spot at face value. PowerPoint is a software product facilitating a medium of communication that is so powerful, so persuasive, that it can get you anything you want…unless you’re the man of the house, in which case, it won’t. That’s the product. So the maker of the product is putting on an ad that says the product only works a part of the time. Family men are outside the market that the advertiser is trying to reach. Uh, really? Who buys software? Is this an attempt to reach out to a younger audience? Get the academic editions of the software titles moving off the shelves? Color me skeptical; I don’t think the average college student is too excited about his mom telling his dad that dad can’t play golf.

Another place the logic breaks down: When our current President uses it. Just listen to Him, He does it all the time. Can’t make it all the way through a speech without it, it seems. Michelle won’t let Me do this, Michelle makes Me do that, better not let Michelle catch me in this…again, we have a “huh, what?” moment. Did this guy just get elected to the presidency because He’s supposed to be “sort of God” or something? What a sloppy, disconnected illusion we have here. Barack Obama is above everybody, we’re all better people because He’s our President and He’s just a little slice of perfection…things become right instantly when Barack Obama says He’s behind them…infinite authority and all…but Michelle Obama tells the deity to jump and He says, how high? Okay then, if that all fits then I guess Michelle Obama is really in charge of the universe. Why didn’t we just elect her?

Current operating theory — and not exactly going out on a limb: This has nothing to do with anybody anywhere except family females. Somewhere there is some research, and perhaps some marketing experience to back it up, that chicks will open their purses faster if you run this simple idiom past them. It’s not true of any females I know personally, but then again, I have no idea how many females are like that because when I get a clue that a female is like that I stay as far away from her as I possibly can. I figure they want me to. So I’m in a bit of a weak spot if I rely on anecdotal evidence, I personally don’t have much. What I do have is from many years ago, before I learned who I needed to avoid. I’ve been in a committed relationship for seven years. For all I know, maybe nearly all women are of this vinegar-over-honey, Rueben-Rueben-I’ve-been-thinking, fish-needs-a-bicycle mindset. I have to approach this with humility; a lot could be going on without me knowing about it. Actually, that’s got a lot to do with why I’m asking the question.

But is this really well thought out? Selling computer software to women who hate men. Why do they need computer software? They Facebook, they tweet, they text on their phones to other man-bashing females, if they need something done apart from that they just order their schmuck to get it to work on the computer and they start yelling at him if he doesn’t get it done. Then they watch Twilight or Sex in the City or something. Seriously, why would they need PowerPoint?

I find it sensible to speculate some executive somewhere got a vision. Sales of this product are down among women age such-and-such to such-and-such. Advertising agency, what can you do about this? Advertising agency says, when we want to ratchet up activity in that particular demographic, we do this…and presto. It fits. Over the last fifteen to twenty or years or so, there’s been this creepy trend where if you buy something that costs more than fifty bucks they want to know all about you. Annual income, approximate age, zip code, industry…please help us complete our survey…blah blah blah…and I just have this dim fuzzy recollection that this is the time span during which we’ve seen more of this “look at her order him around” trope.

Women of sound, capable mind, everywhere, should get really pissed about this. They should revolt. I would. I can tell you from personal, albeit filtered, experience that there are a lot of women who do not think this way. They don’t find it charming when Obama makes up stories about being ordered around by His ol’ lady, they don’t buy more junk from someone whose ads tell stories about female dominance, and they damn sure don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of gelded, hairless males standing around waiting to be told what to do.

Someone, somewhere, is operating from a repository of research that isn’t very well married-up to reality. Or, if it is married-up to reality and some correlation has been found between diminishing men and moving merchandise, we must have some man-bashing females running around spending money to buy stuff without any understanding of what it’s supposed to do. I’ve used PowerPoint. I’ve met women who get that emotional thrill out of the idea of men being passive and ineffectual. I have trouble seeing the two go together — lots of trouble. Not that PowerPoint is hard to use. But from my own tidbits of anecdotal knowledge, it would be like a pot-bellied pig using a blender or something.

The cool thing about teevee ads, is you can tell whether they succeed or fail based on whether you keep seeing them. I think we’ll see more teevee ad females ordering around their hubbies…but this particular one, I believe, is not long for the world. I think it’s a fail. But I’m not sure of this at all; time will tell.

Update: Thinking about this some more…there’s a much bigger phenomenon taking place here, involving corporate America bringing products and services to market packaged with messages that involve cheap mindless gimmicks. The gimmicks are becoming more valuable in the marketplace of ideas, if & when they demand very little by way of empathy or critical thinking. In effect: The producers/marketers insult the consumers of the products by portraying them in flat, simplistic ways, and then the consumers reward the marketers for this by buying their crap.

Oh yeah, definitely, I’m going to be very interested to see what else rolls in from this guy’s account. Can’t wait.

It’s clear to me he couldn’t wait to show the whole world what he’s been doing, and what his face looks like, and most of all how proud he is of the shenanigans. But he doesn’t want to show us what the uniform looks like because he doesn’t want to “ruin that.”

Okay then dickhead, keep on doing it. Enjoy your twelve-year-old scotch and your bloomin’ onion. And think what you want, it’s a free country thanks to men and women much better than you…but whether you want to acknowledge it or not, these expensive drinks are merely tokens. Much like moon-cast shadows, or the tiny piece of ice sticking out above the ocean’s surface warning of an enormous berg beneath. Which, in this analogy, is the gratitude. You get the tasty treats and the liquors, the real veterans get the gratitude.

That was the take-away from all this, right? That some people live their lives finding ways to serve others, and other people live their lives finding ways to sponge off people? That’s the message you’re trying to get across, true? Okay, so noted. You have succeeded.

Thanks for the reminder, and enjoy the perks asshole!

How pathetic. It’s like calling yourself a master car thief, when you’re just running around detaching the hood ornaments because you don’t know how to drive.

And my suggestion for anyone who’s concerned now about paying for the meal of a serviceman in uniform is: Look for the clean teeth. Not that I can speak from experience, but there is this little thing called boot camp where you’re taught to do all the little things…they don’t let you do anything else until you’ve completed it…and from all I’ve managed to learn about it, brushing your teeth in the morning is not an optional thing. I’ve yet to meet a real veteran with teeth like those. Even wounded soldiers with hooks for hands have clean teeth.

Politico offers a headline calculated and designed to make you hate Newt Gingrich more than you already do: Newt: Fire the janitors, hire kids to clean schools. And when you click it open and actually read it from top to bottom, you find the former House Speaker is making all kinds of sense, no wonder they want him gone. Hey Politico! Yeah, there is someone I trust a little tiny bit less than I did three minutes ago, but it ain’t Newt Gingrich.

He added, “You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars.”

“They all learned how to make money at a very early age,” he said. “What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all that stuff about don’t get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central.”

Newt is still in recovery mode with me after the couch commercial with Pelosi. Diggin’ himself out of a hole, but doing a very respectable job of it. His comments here, from the tippy top all the way to the bottom, make rock solid perfect sense. And he’s calling out a problem that, if unattended and allowed to fester further, can be expected to do us incalculable damage. There’s a mindset that is creeping in, in fact has been creeping in for a number of decades by now, that “kids” should not be doing anything at any time of the day that they wouldn’t choose to do, even if they’re getting paid to do it, and if ever they’re deprived of the option of just getting up & walking off to something they’d prefer to be doing then that’s some kind of abuse. Therefore, work just has to be completely out of the question.

Ironically, I notice it’s common for girls of tender age to be working at something, although their problem is a little bit different. They get stuck in retail. We love the idea of girls going to college to get an education that will make them independent, but name a course she can take that will lead to a promising, practical career, and you will have hit on an idea that is still anomalous today. We still have it in mind that girls should go to college — to take silly stuff for their coursework. Not engineering or architecture; and, if that is the case, only because it’s some kind of a “program” or other event that’s supposed to inflate the reputation of somebody else, not because she’s shown an aptitude for it. You have a daughter who’s coming of age, you want her to work, if she’s pretty you just make sure word reaches something somewhere with a phone or a cash register, and you’re done. The businesses want pretty girls by the phones and cash registers. The point is not that things are easy for girls, by any means, or for their parents; the point is that you have to get creative and imaginative with boys. Cradle to crypt, our males are given stronger and more plentiful incentives to be lazy.

I’ve noticed over the years we have a lot of people who talk about “rooting for the underdog” who, when you get to know them a little bit better, you find they’re just describing the way they relate to people. For instance, you ask them about the friends and acquaintances they have and ask them to describe each one, you’ll get back a whole bunch of weaknesses. She’s allergic to shrimp. He has PTSD. They’ve both been out of work since last January, she just scored something part-time but I’m worried sick about him. Their kid just got busted for a DUI. That one has ADD, that other one is an insomniac, he’s got dyslexia, she’s screwing every guy in town. It’s a wonderful way of looking at life if you want life to be a soap opera, and I guess maybe that’s what’s going on here.

But what’s the stereotype of soap opera watchers? Housewives, retirees, unemployed people who have reached some state of contentment with being unemployed. They’ve got some system of subsistence going, that had to be set up in the first place and therefore required some nominal level of problem-solving skill; perhaps most taxingly in the case of the housewives. But they’re all done with that and are tuning in now for some “junk food TV.” As for what they do while they watch the soaps, the stereotype is divided between those who are folding laundry and those who just veg out. But the stereotype is united on the idea that their brains are all turning to mush, and I consider the stereotype accurate on this point. Watching soaps turns your brain to mush. Looking at people as fascinating little portraits of weakness and dysfunction, turns your brain to mush. We are wired to become whatever we watch.

People look at other people as vessels of strength, when they must. See, that’s the lesson. Once again, our challenges mold and shape the way we look at life, and the profile of aptitudes and talents we develop in response to those challenges. The prospective employer who is hiring someone to do a job, and has a tough time finding the right person for whatever reason, nurses a fascinating amalgamation of hope and despair. Hope, out of necessity — this thing has got to get done, it’s well within the perimeter of known human achievement, therefore there has to be someone out there who can do it. Despair, because of the seemingly endless journey involved in finding that person, the sheer quantity of frogs that have to be kissed to find the prince, you might say. But through the process of interviewing people and seeing one candidate after another who isn’t up to the task, without even being consciously aware of it he’s being given an incentive to ask the most productive of questions in human relationships: What can you do? It’s the antithesis of the soap-opera-viewer’s way of looking at life. Some people can tell you what their friends can do, and other people can tell you what their friends can’t do. He can fix my car. He can build brick walls. He can wash windows. He’s my butcher, he’s my baker, he’s my candlestick maker. Versus…the aforementioned…he can’t drive, she can’t spell, he can’t eat salty food, he can’t do math, she has a phobia, so-and-so doesn’t like such-and-such and won’t eat it.

Liberalism is not a political ideology. It is a whole different way of looking at life and the people who live it. It is despair.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Hate it when that happens, don’t you? So hard to concentrate. Can’t ignore one and tend to the other; one has to be prioritized ahead of the other, and then, best-case-scenario, the problem of lesser importance will have to just sit & cook, which can’t be good.

Both of the clarion calls have to do with public officials abusing their stations. Ed Darrell says it stinks to high heaven that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are eating dinner with people. Sarah Palin says something is wrong when you can become a millionaire faster inside Washington than anyplace outside of it. Okay, so…these two things are not connected in any way, other than they’re going off at roughly the same time. One’s got to do with the judicial branch, the other seems more concerned with the legislative. Darrell and Palin certainly do not lean in the same direction ideologically. The more progressive of the two would certainly assert a vast superiority on his part in terms of intellectual horsepower, of a magnitude almost incomprehensible, and his cohorts would certainly rush in to add their support to such an assertion. Quickly.

Desperately.

The only thing they have in common, really, is the message “We have to do something about this right now.”

If we can only attend to one while the other festers, it is good that there are many differences because we can use these to prioritize sensibly. The first test to apply, although by no means the definitive one, would be resonance. I imagine myself standing before a crowd that represents the entire electorate, holding my hand over one and then the other, measuring the audience’s reaction to each. Admittedly, this is not good for much other than grins, since I’m no fan of public opinion on these things and I’m certainly not a fan of the results that mob rule has brought us. But it does bring a grin, because Darrell would lose big here. And there is certainly a lesson to be picked up from it: Since when has majority public opinion, particularly the majority that is measured by audibles, ever been kind to or biased toward Sarah Palin? Loud people despise her. The correlation between a randomly-selected person’s loudness and the intensity of spite and scorn felt by that person toward her, is so perfect, that we never did get a believable answer about how she’d do running in an election against the current President, since it was all based on a bunch of irrational yelling about “won’t she please go away!” and then she did. And now, we know these people are irrational because they’re still angry with her, over something, even though she did exactly what they wanted.

But seriously: Audience applauds for Ed Darrell’s complaint that two justices are having dinner. Audience applauds for Sarah Palin’s complaint that civil “servants” are becoming overnight millionaires without doing too much service. The loud people who hate Sarah Palin so much, hand her a victory anyway; it isn’t even something we need to ponder, let alone subject to an actual test.

So the next difference is the structure of the argument. Darrell is complaining about persons and parties holding an interest in a case before the Supreme Court, exerting undue influence over the judicial officer who will have a say in the outcome. Palin is essentially complaining about “an endemic problem” of what amounts essentially to bribery; legislators selling their votes. We have codes of conduct, rules of Congress, etc. that are supposed to stop such things from happening. But Palin is taking the case to us because Congress is making the rules that apply to Congress, and it’s writing them in such a way that they don’t apply to what really needs fixing. Darrell is mobilizing the masses because the rules against Scalia and Thomas eating dinner…well…they just don’t apply.

Let’s examine that a little more closely. From the Oliphant article:

The two justices have been attending Federalist Society events for years. And it’s nothing that runs afoul of ethics rules. In fact, justices are exempt from the Code of Conduct that governs the actions of lower federal judges.

If they were, they arguably fell under code’s Canon 4C, which states, “A judge may attend fund-raising events of law-related and other organizations although the judge may not be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such an event.“

“If they were” implies Oliphant had the previous sentence worded as something like “The Canons are not applicable to [or enforceable against] Supreme Court justices, as they are to lower federal judges. If they were…” Then re-worded one sentence without re-wording the other. Now, I’m a coffee-o’clock blogger. I have no room here to scold Oliphant or his editor over this, I do much worse than that pretty much constantly. But it is a red flag for something that deserves more inspection than it got, certainly more inspection than the readership is being encouraged to give it. Another red flag is present in this unanswered question about why the Canon applies to lower courts and not to the Supreme Court. Why drop that grenade and then just walk away?

As is typically the case when the motive for writing the treatise is to agitate the masses, and asking the question gets the agitated but answering it might remove the agitation — it turns out there isn’t much of an answer to find, because none is necessary. The U.S. Constitution, Article III, says the following:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office. [emphasis mine]

An impartial reading of that would have to infer that Congress has a substantial authority over these “inferior Courts,” which is not necessarily applicable to the “supreme Court.”

In Federalist 51, James Madison writes about the independence of the “departments.” You might have heard this number before a few times from people quoting Federalist Papers, since this is the one that expresses the concerns about independence and co-equality:

It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the Executive magistrate, or the Judges, not independent of the Legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. [emphasis mine]

Much more on that subject, and you really should read the whole thing. Now, much has been debated about this co-equal business. But it’s clear that independence of these divisions of government is a driving concern. Congress cannot tell the Supreme Court to jump, and expect the Supreme Court to yell back, How high?

And yet, Congress can tell lower courts what to do. They must be able to do that, if the Constitution specifically charges them to make the calls about bringing these lower courts into existence, or rubbing them out again.

In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton addresses the issue of picking judges out and telling them their time is up. These comments seem to apply to all levels of federal judicial office:

The want of a provision for removing the Judges on account of inability, has been a subject of complaint. But all considerate men will be sensible, that such a provision would either not be practised upon, or would be more liable to abuse, than calculated to answer any good purpose. The mensuration of the faculties of the mind has, I believe, no place in the catalogue of known arts. An attempt to fix the boundary between the regions of ability and inability, would much oftener give scope to personal and party attachments and enmities, than advance the interests of justice, or the public good. The result, except in the case of insanity, must for the most part be arbitrary; and insanity, without any formal or express provision, may be safely pronounced to be a virtual disqualification. [emphasis mine]

So the two points to come out of this are: The power to remove judges by name, is a very dangerous power because of the difficulty involved in constitutionally investing that without also investing the power to indirectly determine how cases would be decided. Doubtless, the framers felt they were already treading on treacherous ground just empowering Congress to establish and dissolve the courts. And, more important than that: Congress has power over the lower courts that it doesn’t have over the Supreme Court.

Which answers the question Oliphant and Darrell inspired the agitated masses to ask, but they don’t want answered. Congress did not exempt the Supreme Court from the codes. Congress passed the codes to apply to the lower courts, and only to them, because that is the limit of their authority. Go back and read Article III again, the way that sentence is phrased. The Supreme Court is empowered and insulated in ways the inferior courts are not. It is unavoidable.

Sarah Palin, meanwhile, is drawing applause even from people who come out and say they don’t want to give it to her. Her remarks are cogent, logical and reasonable. They draw from the knowledge she has gained from actually experiencing what she calls “graft,” and being elected to the Governor’s office to effectively deal with it.

I’ve learned from local, state and national political experience that the only solution to entrenched corruption is sudden and relentless reform. Sudden because our permanent political class is adept at changing the subject to divert the public’s attention—and we can no longer afford to be indifferent to this system of graft when our country is going bankrupt. Reform must be relentless because fighting corruption is like a game of whack-a-mole. You knock it down in one area only to see it pop up in another.

What are the solutions? We need reform that provides real transparency. Congress should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act like everyone else. We need more detailed financial disclosure reports, and members should submit reports much more often than once a year. All stock transactions above $5,000 should be disclosed within five days.

We need equality under the law. From now on, laws that apply to the private sector must apply to Congress, including whistleblower, conflict-of-interest and insider-trading laws. Trading on nonpublic government information should be illegal both for those who pass on the information and those who trade on it.

She could be criticized here for jumping the gun; she currently holds no office, and thus no position of authority of any kind. A critic might ask, why five grand? Why not ten, or three? And isn’t she pretty much just running around being a solution in search of a problem, anyway, just polishing up her corruption-fighter cred, while the country has so many other problems?

But the critics can’t say things like that. Palin is merely attending to the responsibilities she has, as the person pointing out a problem, to present possible answers so that it doesn’t amount to just a bunch of mindless bitching. As for being a solution in search of a problem, well, when there really is a problem that criticism can’t apply. And who among us can say there is no problem here, or that the public is not rightfully concerned about it?

Another key difference is something I’ve slowly learned to expect from Ed Darrell. If you follow all his links and read the whole thing behind each link, you find out he must not have wanted you to do that because, with all his references properly chased down and arguments properly evaluated at face-value, and compared with the evidence he brings, the whole thing crumbles. In this case, to really nail things shut he makes a reference to Caesar’s wife. Behind his link, we find:

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

Prov. The associates of public figures must not even be suspected of wrongdoing. (The ancient Roman Julius Caesar is supposed to have said this when asked why he divorced his wife, Pompeia. Because she was suspected of some wrongdoing, he could not associate with her anymore.) Jill: I don’t think the mayor is trustworthy; his brother was charged with embezzlement. Jane: But the charges were never proved. Jill: That doesn’t matter. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. When the newspapers reported the rumor that the lieutenant governor had failed to pay his taxes, the governor forced him to resign, saying, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”

Mmmmm, hmmmm. The appearance of impropriety.

But Ed chose not to excerpt the final paragraph of Oliphant’s story, about Justice Kagan:

Moreover, conservatives argue that it’s Justice Elena Kagan who has an ethical issue, not Scalia and Thomas. Kagan served as solicitor general in the Obama administration when the first legal challenges to the law were brought at the trial court level. Her critics have pushed for Kagan to recuse herself from hearing the case, saying that she was too invested in defending the law then to be impartial now. Kagan has given no indication she will do so.

I’m generally not too enthused about the “Back off, because your guys are doin’ it too” defense. But a defense exists to deflect an offense, and when the offense is the Caesar’s Wife play — essentially, that the mere appearance of something fishy should rise to the level of something substantial, because of the high office and authority a justice holds, when in a more mundane circumstance it certainly would not — the mote-in-thy-own-eye defense not only works, but it’s completely devastating. Here sit these nine justices, just out of reach of the tendrils of Congress because the Founding Fathers hashed out over & over again how these departments are supposed to be related to each other, and that’s how it ended up. The Darrell and Oliphant argument essentially boils down to: Scrap that part of the design, because we’re upset about it, and we think we can get other people upset about it. They wouldn’t pretend to have thought this through, or to be representing anybody else who’s thought it through, to the extent that Hamilton, Madison, et al did.

Same old liberal democrat nonsense. The peasants are revolting, so just give it to ’em.

Palin, on the other hand, is stirring up the peasants to lift pitchforks and torches over something this carefully-designed machinery is doing that it was never designed to do.

Hmmm…

What’s causing it? Seems to have something to do with this picture…

A while back Blogsister Daphne was giving me a friendly jibe, in the form of a list of Hollywood damsels I should find pulchritudinous. And I gave it back to her by pointing out who she forgot. My reasons should be obvious.

I’m wondering what caused the spike, trying to think out the various scenarios. I’m thinking a little bit about web security vulnerabilities. Seems a Google bot discovered Ms. Wood from our archives and connected a category page to the image. Search terms that come out of this, include “Natalie Wood hot” and “Natalie Wood naked.” Yeah, good luck on that guys. International traffic, although a part of life and something to be expected, and by no means an inherently bad thing, makes me a little suspicious. All three of those qualifiers also apply to guys looking for pictures of naked women…as does the suspicion. And the suspicion factor multiplies when we’re dealing with guys from France looking for pictures of a naked Natalie.

I’m reassured to see a Google search for “Jessica Alba no clothes” hitting the same page. This suggests hot-button is the page, not the image, and the situation is no more complicated than the ‘bot making a find, and the indexing algorithm promoting it in the database because the find has been in high demand. We are supposed to be elevated in priority when search engines do their stuff; it’s part of the hosting service. Hasn’t netted us a result like this before now, but then again, to a “big” blog eighty hits an hour is nothing to write home about.

Update: Ah, hah. Hubbub from the radio sez: The investigation around her drowning death is being reopened. Didn’t know, we’ll have to look into that. That does help explain some things.

Some twenty years ago, one of my fellow coders arranged for a bunch of us to, as they say, “jump out of a perfectly good airplane.” This was back in my Detroit days. We went, we came back to work, didn’t feel much like writing more code…after all, the whole thing was to take a break from spending a hundred hours a week or more writing code. Although maybe we did anyway. But I remember one among us yelling “Oh! So now he’s Joe Parachuter!” whenever one of us freshly deflowered former parachute-virgins would start to opine authoritatively about parachute jumping. And looking back on it, it was funny…I’m sure every single one of us who had something to say, said it in such a way to suggest we’d been doing it since we were old enough to walk, when in fact it was an entirely new concept to us just hours before.

Of course, I was one of the truly dedicated ones. I went up and did a second jump, at three thousand feet, the following weekend. So that’s two jumps for me…nineteen years ago. Yeah, I’m Joe Parachuter. Come gather around, I’ll tell you all about how incredibly tiny those cows seemed to be, half a mile beneath my feet, on that brisk spring morning in ’92. Yeah, I don’t need to down too much grog before I sound like I must be the guy who freakin’ invented parachutes.

The point to this is to single out a very special kind of human hubris. Perhaps it would be appropriate to invent a new word to describe it. Think of this as the impulse to — after we have finished some challenging task, envisioning ourselves as the very pinnacle in all of human achievement with regard to that particular task, nevermind who else might be more accomplished at it, who might have come before, what others may have achieved. I learned to swim today! I’m freakin’ Aquaman, or Greg Louganis, or something.

If you’re thinking this is a rant about America’s First Holy Roman Emperor, you’re right.

All bow down to His divine leadership, as we observe the Great American Smoke-Out:

Now, fair’s fair here, and I know His Eminence is not leveraging His own personal success quitting smoking to inspire the occasion. Truth be told, I don’t know what inspired it, nor do I care. To me, a vice is an individual thing; if I choose to partake and others do not, that’s fine, and if others opt for it and I do not, that’s fine too. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to kick a habit, or to start in on a habit, because it’s a designated date for a lot of other people to do the same thing. Can’t even start to relate to that. But hey, if you’ve been wanting to quit smoking for a while and this is what gives you the impetus to get over that little peak of resistance, then I say more power to ya.

Me, I’m — grass no, tobacco no, hard drugs no, beer yes, wine occasionally, hard liquor very rarely. If someone else is doing exactly the same thing, or doing something completely different, it doesn’t have a bearing on what I do and I can’t understand how it has any effect on anybody else. But like I said: If you’ve been trying to quit, and this manages to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, then whatever it takes and you have my blessing.

But the hubris about which I was opining earlier. This thing where, something is done and it’s a big deal to the person who does it, although obviously it might be fairly mundane to others who have done that and much more…for the person who just did it, to say “I am Joe Parachuter! I am the vanguard of this effort! I am a living icon, emblematic of all of mankind’s efforts to do…whatever it is…” And to then start recommending others do it, as if you’re leading the way.

I’ve never really had to “quit” smoking. The summer before the parachute drop, I dated a young lady who was heavy into smoking, and it seemed natural to take up the filthy habit myself. This was in Seattle, which I left for Detroit a few months later; when she was history the smoking was history. My parents both quit smoking back in ’74, about fifteen hundred miles apart. Dad moved down to Arizona for the summer to get his doctorate. He wrote back to my Mom every day, to say now I’m down to half a pack…now I’m down to four, now I’m down to three. By the time he came back, Ph.D. in hand, he managed to get it to zero. Mom, meanwhile, just quit cold turkey. I’m guessing she just figured out she was only smoking because the person she was with happened to be smoking. And I’m guessing I take after Mom.

All of which is a rather round-about way of saying: Even if you happen to be the President of the United States, there’s something a bit off about you if you quit smoking — especially if you’ve been going about it in the extraordinarily leisurely way President Obama has been — and, based on that experience, hold yourself aloft as the poster-child of quitting smoking. I respect that Barack Obama has the cred to say “I was hooked on smoking and I managed to quit.” But I can’t quite see where He gets off saying “If I can do it, you can too.” I recognize that’s not a word-for-word quote. But let’s get real. That is the intended message here, is it not? And isn’t that just a little silly. Barack Obama could have quit smoking in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…what about all those other people who, due to some family hardship or job requirement or whatever, had to quit smoking on some specific day? And what about the people like me and my Mom, who just (although maybe we’re lucky this way) seem not to have addictive personalities? And what about people who never started? Don’t we get to be emblems too?

The other thing that impresses me about this is at 1:03: “Today, some big tobacco companies are trying to block these labels, because they don’t want to be honest about the consequences of using their products. Unfortunately, this isn’t surprising.” Yes the word-smithing is very careful. But you do realize, don’t you, that what He’s saying essentially boils down to: “These people are booger-butts, because we’ve come up with a swell plan to destroy their entire livelihood, and they’re not actively participating in it with us.”

Yeah I know it’s cigarette companies. Believe me, I don’t have any more sympathy for them than Barack Obama has for them, on His best day. But that doesn’t make the message any more sensible, does it? “Look what bad people these people are, for not assisting us in their destruction.” Does it really matter that the tobacco industry is not a sympathetic figure? Who’s next? Isn’t that a question that just has to be asked?

So when I first rolled out of bed a couple hours ago, I was thinking about this linkage I did to the White House’s exuberant confidence in the health care law’s upcoming day in court, not so much in the context of how charmingly bubbly they are with this heady air of confidence, but what a stark contradiction it is to, oh, let’s say…President Obama taking the unprecedented step of literally talking down to the justices during a State of the Union address for a decision He didn’t like that well.

And then I was watching this…

The young lady who begins speaking at 0:23 is obviously progressive of bent, like our current President, obviously anxious to make an impression on whoever is listening regarding who she is and what she’s all about. And she must be something of a nervous dimwit because she ends up portraying something that’s already become a caricature. Seriously, I mean, how do you see it when the words that come out are:

Just coming from a place [folds hands over chest, gesturing to herself] of having, y’know, being in college for a long time, and taking a bunch of environmental studies, courses, and knowing, that y’know that climate change is real, and a big part of climate change is y’know the United States is, I guess, [unintelligible] consumer driven, y’know, um, [crosstalk] [it gets pointless to transcribe any further somewhere around this point]

I’m going to go way out on a limb and make a connection between Barack Obama and the curly-haired feminist. Just assume they can find a thing or two on which to find agreement…which I can probably cite some solid examples…but also, assume further, that they’re carbon copies of each other across a whole bunch of issues because they share a common background, two Venuses emerging from a common ocean.

Be that the case or not, they’re making a common mistake. Each is presenting an argument that derives all of its persuasive power merely from the fact that it is being presented. In the White House’s case, there is more, of course — if you read the story you see there is at least one decision (more than that, actually) running in their favor, from U.S. Court of Appeals Justice Laurence Silberman. But the White House, in the comments they’re making about this case since the Supreme Court’s announcement that it would hear arguments, is not relying on that. As is their custom, the logic of their statements relies on no-logic. Just bravado. “It’s going to go our way, for look how enthused we are!”

That is silly. I’ve been watching this and weighing it in my own mind, and I still have a lot of uncertainties about it. But one thing I know for sure is that neither side has reason to double-down. This is looking more and more like one of those things that depends on what mood Anthony Kennedy is going to be in on some crucial day sometime before June.

What if you were to accept the White House argument at face value? Then it gets even sillier: Things are going to go our way, because we are feeling optimistic and enthused, because the case is going to be decided by these chuckleheads who so thoroughly screwed up that Citizens United decision. So, say what? John Paul Stevens, the one justice who’s been replaced since Citizens, was the one big problem?

That’s the logic. So, obviously, the argument does not rest on logic. It rests on passion. And the trouble with passion is that it’s fleeting and personal. You cannot use it to forecast something, and it means very little outside the mind & body of the person who happens to be feeling it.

That’s the common mistake shared with li’l Miss Lots Of Courses And Stuff. She has an argument to present, and the argument does have a foundation, but the foundation of the argument is the presentation of the argument. We can see she’s very passionate about climate change being real, therefore it is. There are other people sympathetic to what she’s trying to say, who can present some actual evidence, but that isn’t material to the point she’s making here. The point she’s making here is: Look, this is the way it is, because see, here I am saying it and I’m so, y’know, articulate and stuff.

I don’t want to pick on her over the y’knows and the ums. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do when you’re speaking before a large crowd and your concentration is divided. But in her case, I think…and I’m absolutely certain of it in Obama’s case…there is an ancillary purpose to all the audible filler. It’s to hold the floor — and — send out an audible signal that you’re determined to hold the floor. She will not be interrupted, she will not be cowed or intimidated in any way.

I’ll tell you the trouble with this kind of thinking.

As an avenue toward making decisions, it must yield the best decision less often than a purely random-chance avenue would. That’s because, for her to accomplish her goals, the outcome has to bear the imprint of her personality, just as when President Obama makes a decision about something there has to be a palpable feel of “it was decided this way because Barack Obama is the person who decided it.” That seems like a good thing to have happening when it’s a child, of the age of three, or five, or twelve. We want kids to feel like they’re a part of what’s going on.

But this is mutually exclusive from the desire of having a reproducible result. This is a most glaring error when we watch the simple things being decided. In the most extreme cases of left-wing immaturity, you can see the frustration starting to form when they decide simple things: “But wait, where’s the part where I get to notice something that escaped everyone else’s attention?” See, that’s an important part of maturity. If you’re really gifted with an unusual insight, and it really does come in handy, there will be opportunities to show it off later. If the decision we’re making right now is a simple one, it’s a simple one. Some conclusions really are obvious. Recognize them, the way anybody else would, and move on.

It’s when that is excluded as a possibility across the board, all the time, that the real damage takes place because a coin toss would say “ObamaCare will survive its Supreme Court challenge” about half the time, whereas the White House we have now will say that all the time as a hard-and-fast rule — not of predicting Supreme Court decisions, but of propaganda. They’re weighing the statements, and established beliefs, and backgrounds and histories of the nine justices about as thoroughly as Li’l Miss Been To College is weighing the evidence of climate change.

The contradiction is that they’re making these steadfastly-bad decisions, decisions less likely to result in the correct outcome than a process relying on random chance, in support of a search for something that has nothing to do with the matter at hand: Individuality. They’re looking to establish an identity. They want to distinguish themselves. Li’l Miss Been To College sees fit to stress this point during her intro; in the case of Obama, of course, it’s always been what He is all about.

And yet, in both cases, what they’re pushing is antithetical to individuality. ObamaCare is all about a war against the individual. Li’l Miss Been To College And Junk comes right out and admits, if I’m parsing her y’knows correctly, that climate change is all about the US of A being too materialistic & stuff.

Individuality has its place. Definitely, I’m a big fan of sticking to your guns when you manage to see something that’s escaped everyone else’s attention, as long as the decision is an important one and you’re sure of whatever it is you think you know. But when you’re out looking for that occasion, you become very dangerous, especially when part of your agenda is to deny that opportunity to others. The problem isn’t that others don’t have a chance to be special; that’s not really important. The problem is, that’s a tell-tale sign that you’re motivated by insecurity, and can therefore be relied on to pursue this process of making steadfastly-bad decisions. Maybe you can bring some special insight on the complicated ones, but you’re a spoiler for the really simple ones. Like…uh…let’s say, bring my laptop in out of the balcony, before I go to bed, if it’s going to rain. People like this tend to arrive consistently at the wrong answer when there are no subtle variables in play, whose comprehension by a uniquely fastidious and insightful decider might lead to an altered, improved outcome.

I don’t deny there are some conservatives who have this problem. But the thing we have come to know as “liberalism” in this day and age, has slowly emerged as a manifestation of the problem: Persistent display of one’s own personality and talents in even simple deliberations, while denying that opportunity to others, thus subordinating evidence and logic as actionable factors, and arriving at conclusions by means of personal insecurity rather than reason.

Dr. Thomas Sowell notices what I’ve been noticing:

The smart money inside the Beltway says that the Republicans need to pick a moderate candidate who can appeal to independent voters, not just to the conservative voters who turn out to vote in Republican primaries. Those who think this way say that you have to “reach out” to Hispanics, the elderly and other constituencies.

What is remarkable is how seldom the smart money folks look at what has actually been happening in presidential elections.

Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections when he ran as Ronald Reagan. Vice President George H.W. Bush then won when he ran as if he were another Ronald Reagan, with his famous statement, “Read my lips, no new taxes.”

But after Bush 41 was elected and turned “kinder and gentler” — to everyone except the taxpayers — he lost to an unknown governor from a small state.

Other Republican presidential candidates who went the “moderate” route — Bob Dole and John McCain — also came across as neither fish nor fowl, and also went down to defeat.

This actually goes back quite aways. Generally, a conservative politician is injured when the difference between him and his opponent is muted, obfuscated, toned down or otherwise made difficult to perceive; a liberal politician is injured when that difference is highlighted. Bold, primary color Republicans win elections. Passive, muted tone Republicans lose them.

I actually heard a woman on the radio yesterday morning counter-attacking the people who had criticism for John McCain, insisting that he deserved to be defended because, hey, he picked a running-mate who really ignited the base. Uh, yeah. That’s what running mates are for; they bring things to the ticket that the guy in the top slot cannot bring. Well you know, based on what I have seen — I don’t think they can bring that. I think, on Election Day, people who are slightly of a conservative bent but not passionately in that camp, will make a decision about bothering to vote based on whether they can recognize what the top contender would actually do once elected. This is an enormous demographic, I think people are right to be putting some serious energy and curiosity into finding out what it takes to bring in their votes. But I don’t think a moderate candidate brings those votes in. I’m not entirely sure why there is this widespread perception that this is the case.

Maybe it’s the irrational fear of America becoming a Christian theocracy. Not the people who cling to that fear, but rather, the people who are playing to the concerns of people who cling to that fear. You know, I don’t think people who have this phobia vote for Republicans. I don’t think it happens one time out of a hundred.

Answering the Professor’s question: Wouldn’t bet against it.

We find this video at Lex Communis by way of blogger friend Rick.

You’ll be wanting to head over there for a transcript. I looped the third minute of this a couple times to see if I missed something, and when you watch it you’ll understand why.

Nancy Pelosi is a most curious higglety-pigglety hodge-podge of shrewdness and lunacy. This thing about “you can vote against lifting it but you can’t obstruct it” is something I recognize from some of my animated conversations with lefty bloggers and commentators, I’ve sometimes referred to it as “I never said anything about blowing up the car, I just suggested checking the fuel level with a match” or “Nobody’s saying we should jump off the cliff, we’re just saying walk out to the very edge, climb over the guardrail, face outward and leap forward as hard as you can.” More abbreviated, I call it “I never said A, what I said was B.”

Whatever it is, Nancy Pelosi is very far from being the only person doing it. And some respect is due, I think, she is the former Speaker of the House, constantly lauded as the most powerful female in Congress, plus she’s loaded. Obviously this tactic of “I never said A, what I said was B, and it’s all about B” must be disseminated, somewhere, from some central location, and she must have used it with some success somewhere along the way.

But she’s talking in circles here, contradicting herself in statements just one sentence apart. I think what she’s trying to say is, you can vote against raising the limit but you can’t obstruct the debt itself as it approaches that limit. But it’s like she forgets to make that distinction, and based on her words alone I can’t leap to the conclusion that this is what she meant, just because it would make more sense and it’s kind of close to the guttural sounds escaping her maw. Frankly, she comes across as a dingbat.

Now Mr. Stewart — obviously he’s coming at this with a different orientation compared to me, but it’s still worth pointing out this thing he says after the six-minute mark which is different from my own opinion: Members of Congress are sent there, by the voters, to make government into a lever that will streamline us and make us more efficient. This is the progressive viewpoint that appeals most strongly to Main Street; when people want to get left-wing politics sold to people who don’t care about politics one way or another, this is the packaging. How did Elizabeth Warren put it: Nobody does anything on their own. Okay, she too didn’t say A she said B: Her quote has to do with getting rich on your own. But that is the mindset. A problem is defined, and either we send people to Congress to come up with some solution to the problem, or else nothing is done. Classic False Dilemma. There is no third choice, it’s all of one or none of anything. That was Bill Maher’s argument just now, that anybody who isn’t in favor of the government doing more, must be lazy. He must have been right, a lot of people cheered and clapped when he said it.

I know a lot of progressives, and most are decent people. I try to define my disagreement with them according to the effects of their policies, which over a long term for some reason they don’t notice, and keep it away from the character stuff. But here, I can’t help but nurture some suspicions about character. The “If we’re going to do anything about it at all, we have to have government do it” is a recruiting drive, a zombie-bite exercise, a deliberate attempt to make liberals out of the no-care-that-much crowd. The “I never said A what I said was B” is a retention effort, a shoring-up, an attempt to stop liberals who are already recruited, from seriously considering the arguments of The Enemy, stop them from defecting. And I have the impression that even when that last one is implemented incompetently, the way the Former House Speaker did it, it still works. These things they do to help advance the liberal cause, always seem to work. They work even when they don’t work, going down in defeat only when they face off against a contrary force that is somehow more powerful; two steps forward and three steps back, but still, the two steps forward got done.

When the beneficiary of their actions is the country, rather than the liberal agenda, suddenly nothing works. And we aren’t supposed to notice. They’re going to make us like something better, so they’ll bury us in a great big taxpayer-subsidized abundance of whatever-it-is, and we end up getting sick of looking at it. Or, they’re going to make sure everyone can get something when they need it, by passing regulations against the suppliers…so nobody wants to supply it anymore, the market isn’t given a signal that the reserves are getting low, and we end up with a shortage.

In other words, their efforts to help the country tend to run into this problem in which said efforts produce results exactly the opposite of what was intended. Their efforts to help themselves, don’t ever seem to run into that. Maybe it really does happen, and I don’t notice because the effects are muted. Like for example, the effort to make Barack Obama look like some kind of deity, which I frequently mock in my subtle way by capitalizing the H when I refer to Him. That seems to have backfired, as of today. Well making Obama look like a demigod would be of benefit to Obama, and the democrat party, so it seems to me that when it starts to backfire there is some responsible changing of course, a tripping of circuit-breakers if you will.

Now, Obama’s health care plan is supposed to benefit the country, not quite so much the democrat party (except through the reputation it would gain from solving a vexing societal problem, or at least trying to). That has backfired too. But there’s no changing of the course, no tripping circuit breakers. Oh, no. They’re doubling down. You see it in stories like this (noisy ad auto-plays). No, we’re gonna win. We are confident. Compromise is for losers.

As I said, many progressives don’t care about this stuff, and all progressives do not have all progressive faults. Far from it. This is an elite crowd I’m singling out, even John Stewart isn’t part of it. I don’t think. But what I’m seeing here is worse than any old plain character problem. This is a special character problem that uniquely disqualifies the person laboring under it, from being qualified to fix any problem that really needs fixing. When you have to have this well-oiled public relations machine, that hums along so nicely that it seems to benefit from design and engineering far superior to what went into the solutions you’re presenting from the others who are supposed to be benefiting from your concern and your compassion, something is terribly wrong.

Incompeconomy (n.)

It had to be done. Because while this is fantastic…

Ineptocracy: (n.) a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

…its luminous effect only enlightens us on the nature of the problem that threatens to destroy us, not quite so much on how it came to be. It doesn’t break down this destructive machinery into its component parts; doesn’t point the way toward a solution. I’m a big believer in sensible pessimism, but optimism is a vital ingredient in finding a fix. To anything.

Also, simplicity is a virtue. So let’s concentrate on just the economic aspects of it:

Incompeconomy: (n.) an economic model only partially dedicated to the free exchange of goods and services, requiring that those who produce things comply immediately and unconditionally with the commands of those who do not.

This part requires special emphasis: Not “be influenced by the commands” of the non-producers, or “take into account the commands” of the non-producers.

What we are talking about here is a situation where the people who do not produce things come up with an idea…and maybe they jump through some kind of hoops, bribing and blackmailing and arm-twisting to get their 51 percent support of something, some activity that gives them that feeling they’ve done some real work…and it becomes law. Producers do not tell non-producers what to do; non-producers tell producers what to do.

And then everyone sits around and wonders why the economy sucks.

And yeah, the way I see it, one’s a subset of the other. Ineptocracy is a society, Incompeconomy is the economy within that society. Throughout all of it, the persistent working model is that the people who know what they’re doing, are shackled and bullied and cajoled by those who do not.

The point is, there are people out there walking around, just as free to cast their votes as you or me, who believe in the Incompeconomy. They do not come out and say it, but they are passionately agitated against its opposite. They view this as a non-negotiable point, that the producers are a threat to society unless & until they are hamstrung by some wise benevolent authority emanating from the ranks of those who don’t produce anything.

Very much like the dictum that the military should be placed under civilian control. In fact, this is the other side of that coin. The military should be under the command of the non-military, because, among other reasons, the whole point to the military’s existence is to achieve and maintain a monopoly on destructive power. Therefore, freedom depends on the law of the land subordinating them to something else. Well the thought process here, too nonsensical to be stated word-for-word even by those who believe in it, says the same thing about creative energies. Those who create are just as dangerous as those who destroy, therefore we cannot preserve our liberties until these creative forces are placed under the the control of something that is not a creative force.

It’s been thought out to the “Yeah, mmm, hmm, that sorta makes sense” stage, but not to the “We get better results when we follow it than when we don’t” stage. In fact, we’ve been following it, and the results are pretty wretched. Some day, we should make a point to debate the merits of this system of belief.

I got a feeling that those who believe in it, will come up with a defense of some kind after all. It will involve a caricature of the producers that doesn’t gel too keenly with reality; some Snidely Whiplash character who somehow makes his mega-millions by dumping glowing green sludge into rivers, kicking pregnant bunnies and squirrels out of the way when he carries the barrels. Twirling his mustache or something.

The one hundred nineteenth award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) is snagged this morning by a fellow member of the Ace of Spades, HQ page on the Hello Kitty of Bloggin’. For those who are signed up with the Hello Kitty, your link is here. And the sentence is:

Has there ever been a Marxist/totalitarian movement that hasn’t expected the women in their group to sexually service the men, willingly or not?

I’m hearing on the radio that a poll has come out saying Mitt Romney broke 30% — a first for him, in five years. He’s spent a full cycle being a “perceived front-runner” but hasn’t had managed to ignite any real enthusiasm. He still can’t. It’s fair to predict he won’t. People who argue with me about “might as well get behind Mitt” keep citing polls, which to me is such a glaring sign of weakness that if they knew how I saw it, they wouldn’t say it. Strong arguments do not depend on what other people think.

Dad forwarded on to me the obituary for my high school counselor. We cannot remember this gentleman with too much fondness, over & above that basic threshold human beings feel for one another when it’s time to answer the Grim Reaper’s call. In my high school days, I was “out of circulation” which is to say the teachers felt no enthusiasm about having me in their classes, and I felt no enthusiasm about giving them reason to feel enthused. Children do not have the maturity to say “I am out of circulation, I wonder what I can do to put myself in circulation” — they’re either in, or they stay out. Today, I make more per year than most of my peers who continued their promising grooming sessions to someday become The Boss; the recently departed recommended something that communicated an unwelcome pessimism, something about scrubbing latrines in the Navy or Air Force. No, he was not giving a compliment to the Navy or the Air Force, nor was it a comment that held the armed forces in any kind of outright contempt. But it was obvious he was looking for a receptacle for the refuse, and he figured that was it.

When The Dark Knight came out, I was so impressed with this scene in the hospital room between The Joker and Two Face that I made a Thing I Know out of it:

Thing I Know #274. Heath Ledger’s Joker had it exactly right. People will choose brutality, injustice, carnage, malfeasance, death or destruction every time as long as the alternative is true chaos. They want to know there is a plan. If they get the idea there is no plan, they go nuts. If there’s a plan, they’re somewhat satisfied, no matter what that plan actually is.

My struggles with high school are of absolutely no interest to anybody, I think, save for parents of kids who are going through some similar trials. And it’s only of limited interest to them, since my experiences do not translate well into advice that could be followed by someone else.

But The Joker did nail it. People go nuts if they get the feeling there’s no plan.

Once they are saddled with “no plan” fatigue, and the question swivels around to stare them in the face “what’s the plan?” — there is this tendency to come up with thought detritus. That, apparently, is preferable to “I don’t know.” A bunch of junk fished out of a swimming pool filter or lint trap in a dryer. Packaged up and presented as a good idea, when the person presenting it lacks the stones to say “This, right here, is a good idea.” Because it isn’t one.

That’s Mitt Romney. He is the good idea chosen by those who are afflicted with no-idea fatigue, and are no longer looking for good ideas.

Republicans choosing Mitt Romney because he’s polling at 30%, is like slugs choosing salt because the salt is polling at 30%.

I like metaphors, which is why when I caught sight of someone using a rifle metaphor to describe government, I lost no time in linking to it. I recall back when this anxious nation was first pondering Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as “Stimulus,” I used a metaphor to explain why it would collapse into a risible pile of silliness and become a legislative blight. Which is exactly what happened, of course. At this point you’re looking at the date and saying: Freeberg, you must need special underwear to haul those things around! And you must be one smart puppy, too!

Well if I do have big balls of solid rock and I’m smarter than the average bear, I would argue this was not very solid proof of it. Kind of an easy call. I didn’t even call it, really; the whole story about the shipwrecked sailor and the old fisherman with the three daughters, was more of a writing exercise than anything else. People read my stuff and say “Freeberg, you need to leave more things unexpressed and unexplained. This would have been a lot more fun to read if you left some points unstated and forced the reader to figure it out.” I obliged, and I must say it turned out to be a success. People do seem to appreciate the story, a lot, probably more than they would’ve if I followed my usual custom, explaining everything.

For those who might have read it and didn’t get it: The moral is that we often pretend there is a great mystery surrounding how things are going to turn out, when deep down we understand this is not the case. History is very often unkind and disagreeable to logic, and logic is very often unkind and disagreeable to history. But in cases where the two happen to agree with each other, and rhetoric says something contrary, we really shouldn’t be arguing about the rhetoric being wrong. We already know that it is. That’s why I say, when I went on record with my thoughts that the Stimulus would be a boondoggle, it wasn’t exactly going on on a limb.

And yet, people continue to pretend things have the potential to produce good results, when they really don’t. Some day, I must find a way to make some money off of it.

This rifle metaphor about government compels me to think of a way to point out how all of our arguing is essentially predetermined. Any time our friends on the left decide they do not like something, every single move after that, by them and by everybody else, has already been cast in stone. And I can show how this is the case, easily if I can just think of something that will remove the emotionalism, something that has not yet been subjected to this. Rifles, of course, don’t fit that requirement so let’s use, instead, marijuana. Ha! No, that’s not going to work. Tobacco? Cheeseburgers? Coffee?

Grapes. Yes, grapes are good for you, although other things are just as good for you, and as of this particular writing they aren’t admired or derided by either the political right or the political left. They cost a nominal amount of money, are ideologically neutral, and people are still eating them. So grapes it is. Let us suppose, for sake of argument, and for reasons unexplained since they aren’t material to the exercise, our friends on the left wake up one morning and decide they don’t like grapes. Just like they don’t like tobacco or capitalism or carbon, they don’t like grapes.

Conservatives would decide on the spot, of course, that grapes are the most wonderful thing ever invented by God or man. Logic says this would happen, and history agrees. So that is my first point; if liberals become galvanized around some sentiment, conservatives will become galvanized around its opposite, and vice-versa. We need not debate whether or how surely it would happen, since we know it would.

Liberals would move, in all sorts of directions, at all sorts of levels of government, across generations, to cleanse the human condition of this loathsome agricultural product called the grape. We would not have to wait long before some Supreme Court decision was handed down about grapes, and sooner or later there would be a wild summer filled with speech-making about the grape decision. If it’s an even-numbered year, that year’s November election would be a referendum on the decision. And from then on, every time a justice retired from the Supreme Court, democrat senators would surround the replacement candidate, horseshoe-style, to interrogate the aspiring judge on whether he put any stock in this ridiculous notion that Americans have a constitutional right to eat grapes.

Again: Logic says it would happen and so does history. If the rhetoric says something contrary, rhetoric is wrong.

America will not tolerate what liberals would want to do, which is to outlaw grapes, and the liberals in charge of advancing the liberal movement are going to be smart enough to anticipate this. See, when liberals are acting to make a stronger future for their political movement, as opposed to a stronger future for the nation, they become surprisingly much more skilled at anticipating consequences. So they would not move to ban grapes from being grown, imported, exported, bought, sold, possessed or consumed.

But history insists that if there’s one thing liberal politicians like to do more than anything else, it is to manipulate Archimedean levers of power over the private transactions of supposedly-free people, to demonstrate to their liberal supporters that they have good liberal intentions so that they can grab some vital liberal votes. Logic agrees that they have no reason to stop doing this at all. So history and logic agree, again, that the liberal politicians will pass “sin” taxes on grapes. They’ll pass them in the county and they’ll pass them in the city. They’ll pass them at the state level and oh, boy, you had better believe the feds will join the party too.

History and logic also say the liberal politicians will use the proceeds of these sin taxes to do something to discourage the eating of grapes. It will probably have something to do with funding “research” to figure out if grapes are bad for you. History and logic say that when the research is done, the answer that will be produced by the research will be in the affirmative, yes, grapes are absolute poison. The science will be settled. Actually, the conclusion will, of course, have been reached before any of the “research” took place; the gathering of the data, and anything that was done with the data, were all just obligatory hoop-jumping exercises, with the conclusion having already been reached.

At this point, I should pause to pass on an important message from the Muse of Logic: She wishes to clarify that she is smiling only on the idea that these things will take place, not that they should. Important distinction to be made.

History and logic agree that a new hustle-and-bustle of government activity will now come to be dependent on this new grape tax. History and logic agree that the price of grapes will skyrocket. History and logic agree that the consumption of grapes will plummet.

History and logic agree that, because of all this, the city, county, state and federal government budgets will become emaciated. Big, bloated new programs depending on a revenue stream that is no longer there. Unavoidable.

History and logic agree that the position of conservative politicians will be that we’ve made mistakes and should reverse them. History and logic agree that the position of liberal politicians will be that, with a revenue shortfall, taxes are going to have to be raised on the very rich. They can’t find anything to cut, anywhere, except maybe the military.

History and logic agree that our “moderates” will dish out a bunch of pablum about “I’m neither conservative nor liberal, I’m middle-of-the-road…” and then they’ll come down on the side of the liberals. Repealing a program, after all, sounds just so extremist. And so, onward we’ll go, being more polarized and more divided, with a bigger more expensive and more insolvent government, adding more and more at all levels to a debt situation that explodes, in slow motion, out of control.

Logic hastens to add, once again, that she finds favor only in the notion that these things will happen. Not that they should.

Parables with metaphors in them are, ultimately, lessons in how a familiar situation looks from a different perspective. The metaphor exists to remove the emotionalism, so people can think about the vital elements more clearly. Morals of such parables often come in two parts: Observations about what is really going on, which are hopefully greater than what people typically realize about them before the parable is told, and suggestions about how they should be handled, which are somewhat different from how the situation is typically handled.

I can leave the moral of this one unmentioned, too, right?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

An apt metaphor:

I’ve noticed the phrase “antipathy for government” being used a few times, specifically in reference to a particular Republican sideshow candidate. And I think we should take a moment to discuss what exactly libertarian-ey folks–and the politicians trying to court them–think about government and its proper role.

I don’t hate government. If I did, I’d be an anarchist, not a libertarian. I’m about ninety percent sure we need some amount of government, and about ninety percent sure we need taxes to support that government.

The thing is, a government is like a rifle: there are certain tasks for which no other tool will do. There are certain tasks you can do with other tools, but the rifle does them better if used with care, so using it is wise. But there’s a world of tasks out there that it’s terrible for, and trying to use it for those purposes will end up breaking the thing you want to fix and catching your neighbors in the stray fire. So you keep careful track of where you point the thing, and keep your finger off the damn trigger.

So I don’t hate government any more than I hate rifles, but I respect the damage both can do, and insist on keeping strict muzzle and trigger discipline. When you’ve built a government with a hundred-thousand employee strong bureau dedicated to regulating every aspect of agriculture and food, with an attitude of such pervasive, granular control that it thinks nothing of creating a “Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force” to “strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace and maintain and expand markets for Christmas trees within the United States”, you’re waving your damn rifle around with your booger-hook on the bang-switch, and other people on the firing line are right to be concerned.

I would add: The way we use government is actually much worse than this. For some reason, after we go through our election cycles and everyone’s been forced to sacrifice something in the fine art of compromise, and presumably the extremists on both sides have had to sacrifice the most so that we can find a sensible moderate approach behind which we can unify and proceed forward — over the long term, the way we end up growing the government is pretty close to what the most extremist, statist-minded left-wingers want. And when we discharge a projectile from this rifle in an effort to solve a particular problem, seems to me our subsequent actions are not very much affected by whether or not that discharge was a hit or a miss. Apart from the obvious, that is: If it’s a miss, we’re going to keep firing.

There’s unfortunately even more to add on. Government does not fire at a target, miss, and try again. Every time the weapon is discharged, what our government is doing is “legislating” that a round will be fired at such-and-such a direction every year from now until the end of time. In other words, if another bullet is fired in some different direction, with the intent of hitting exactly the same target, and that one is a hit, our government doesn’t have the inclination or the incentive or the track record of going back and saying “Okay, the target is over there…so that legislation obliging us to fire in this direction, to hit that target, is wrong. No need to argue this point, it’s an established fact. We need to repeal that legislation and stop firing over here.” Can’t do that. Because the bad legislation is “law,” you see. It’s also a jobs program.

Pointing these things out, is not “hate.”

As usual, tellin’ it like it is:

…[L]ike every other American, I was delighted when our State Department was able to bribe Iran to release the two hikers, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, but that initial euphoria only lasted until their plane landed, and Bauer’s first words were: “Two years in prison is too long,” adding that he hoped that their release, “will also bring freedom for political prisoners in America and Iran.”

It was at that point I decided I needed to find out more about these two nature lovers who couldn’t find a more benign place for a stroll than the bleak Iraq-Iran border.

Inasmuch as this jerk felt compelled to find a moral equivalency between the country that had tossed his sorry ass in prison and the country that had spent a great deal of time, effort and money, to gain his release, I wasn’t shocked to discover that Bauer is a freelance journalist for the San Francisco-based, far leftwing New America Media; that Fattal describes himself as an environmental activist; and that Bauer’s fiancé and fellow hiker, Sharon Shourd, who had been released a year earlier, is a member of Just Cause, an Oakland-based group that favors racial reparations, continues to oppose white colonialism decades after it ended, and even, ironically enough, finds nice things to say about Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

In a word, this nation has moved mountains in order to obtain the freedom of three typically ungrateful, brain-dead, Berkeleyites.

I sincerely hope that after their upcoming wedding, Shane and Sharon Bauer, along with best man Josh Fattal, spend the honeymoon taking a hike.

Speaking of Iran, something just went boom, and some are speculating the blast was caused by an attempt to mount a nuclear warhead onto a missile. That would have to be filed as a very bad thing.

This particular match-up has always held some fascination for me. It’s a food-chain juxtaposition turned upside-down.

Guess I’m just weird like this. You walk up to me and say “Hey, Morgan K. Freeberg! Let’s start up a whole separate society and make sure it doesn’t allow any pursuit of profit, has no respect for right to property, and makes no effort to have any law and order!” I’d say…well…if you do that, I expect you’d end up with some shithole stacked high with a bunch of people who don’t have anything, or can’t hang on to what they have, a lot of squatting, bullying, and no law-n-order.

So I’m watching that video (by the way, I’m peeling off with these obscenities as kind of a warning, the video’s language is not office- or family-friendly) thinking…uh, Einstein? Where’s the big surprise?

We still do not know what “middle age” is, for a blog. We know we’ve been around long enough to see some respectable compatriots clock-out, in the sense that they decided blogging was not for them. We notice that, among the ones who are left, many are doing it the way we’re doing it, with our credo of “this is a scrapbook and not a billboard.” That takes some meaning out of our seven candles, I suppose; can’t crow about your success if there never was a possibility of failure in the first place. But still & all, that’s not entirely true. We’ve been lucky enough not to fail any job interviews (to our knowledge) because of blog content, or drop the blog as a condition of taking a job in the first place, or lose the whole thing due to some disastrous database crash. I suppose that’s something. But if that’s a success, we owe much of it to Terry Trippany who started out as a fan, and then became a fan urging us to move off Blogger to WordPress, and then collaborated on the technical details with us, helping move data around, even hosting us for a couple of years.

Time for the blog to get some reading glasses? False teeth? Red Corvette? Prostate exam? We’ve no idea. There are some blogs older than us; but not by much, and fewer than there used to be.

How does a blog succumb to the passage of time, if its owner does not? Perhaps the future that has yet to unfold, will provide an answer. Perhaps it won’t.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

I disagree with our current President on a number of things, on that much I am sure, but I have some uncertainties about His mental stability when I read about situations like this:

The White House on Friday rejected House Republicans’ subpoena for all internal communications related to the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee, instead providing 135 pages of documents that administration officials say meet the “legitimate oversight interests” of congressional investigators.

In a letter to top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee Friday, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said the documents “do not contain evidence of favoritism to political supporters or any wrongdoing by the White House in connection with the Solyndra loan guarantee.”

Solyndra, a California solar panel maker that received the $535 million Energy Department loan guarantee in 2009, filed for bakruptcy [sic] in September. The GOP has pounced on the Solyndra bankruptcy, raising questions about the administration’s green agenda.

An administration official said the documents offer little new insight into the loan guarantee to the failed solar panel maker.

“The Bottom line: No news here. It’s the same stuff you’ve seen before,” the administration officials said. “There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
:
The White House withheld about a dozen pages of documents related to the restructuring of the loan guarantee “because of the deliberative nature of the communications.” Ruemmler offered to make the documents available to committee staff for review.

Just weird. This “I’ll just pontificate voluminously about your many personal shortcomings that become obvious when you ask me this question” thing. Weird, weird, triple-grade-A weird, and no I’m not likely to downgrade that rating any time soon. It permeates this administration and it’s obvious it’s a case of the fish rotting from the head down. Typical spoiled brat baby boomer bullshit. Someone got spoiled, someone was never, ever asked by His mother and stepfather what He was doing with a stolen cookie in His hand and a shattered clay jar at His feet. And now, anytime He’s asked a question He doesn’t want to answer, it automatically means something is wrong with the person asking it. Really? What if it was, say, four years ago and it was President George Bush getting embarrassed over Solyndra…anyone want to promise me it wouldn’t be a junior senator from Illinois leading the charge to force the White House to show what it’s been up to?

Well, not leading. Sonorously intoning a bunch of hubbub about “transparency” and “responsibility.” Make no mistake, let me be clear. That wouldn’t happen? Seriously?

But what really worries me is the act of withholding the twelve pages that are “deliberative” in “nature.” The White House offers to disclose them in committee. The other 135 pages, it has released, and these 12 it’s going to sit on. Not a word is mentioned about the particular sensitivity of the twelve pages, let alone why any such sensitivity would exist.

There are only two possibilities here: The twelve pages reveal something the White House would just as soon not become public knowledge, for some reason, or there’s nothing particularly special about the twelve pages, and withholding some little tidbit is a crucial and non-expendable part of Barack Obama’s way of “disclosing” things. Just His passive-aggressive, childlike little way of saying “fuck you.”

You know what’s kinda freakin’ me out here? I’m not ready to eliminate either one of those. There could very well be something in the twelve pages, since you have to parse what Obama says very, very finely. Bill Clinton, backed into a corner, famously began to split hairs over the meaning of the word “is.” President Obama has clearly borrowed a page from that book. Maybe even twelve pages.

On the other hand, I can’t think back on any occasion, not a single one for the last three or four years, in which Obama was prevailed upon to disclose something He did not originally see fit to disclose, and just plain went ahead & did it. Has He ever driven a car? What happens when a cop pulls Him over and asks to see His driver’s license, registration and proof of coverage? Does He just produce the documents like the rest of us do? If He does, then in doing so, He displays a behavior I’ve not seen Him display in any public setting in any of the long years since I became aware of Him, in spite of the many opportunities made available for Him to do so. Always, always, always some line is drawn somewhere. And there’s always a thick wall of sound bites dispensed about the many personal things that are wrong with whoever is asking to see it.

It has the look of a mental malady. This need to say “I’ll show you this, but I’ve made a unilateral decision to sit on this other thing, over here. And oh, by the way, you should not be asking to see anything at all.” In fact, this situation itself is even more preposterous than usual. Barack Obama is essentially deciding that the committee should review 135 pages instead of 147 pages, because at some point between pages 136 and 147 the situation starts to become intolerable, might bore the members of the committee, and will certainly waste the committee’s time. Up to that point, on the other hand, the situation’s kinda sorta okay, just a little irritating. He’s essentially saying “Here’s a sub-selection for you to review, since we pointedly refuse to turn over the whole thing because you guys are a bunch of poopie-heads. As you can see, there’s nothing here. That makes you even bigger poopie-heads, for asking in the first place.”

You know, these two possibilities that may explain this? I still can’t think of any third one; but the two are not mutually exclusive. Both may apply.

I recall the winter between 2002 and 2003, when Congress demanded to see documents that would support President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. I’m trying to envision what would happen if that president responded the way this president is responding to the Solyndra subpoena. This effort to envision that alternative timeline, is proving most challenging to me in the details, but not in the generalities.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

From blogger friend Phil.

Update: This, too, is pretty good. Got it from Ace of Spades’ “wall” over on Hello Kitty of Bloggin’.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

The writing is impressive, wonderful in fact.

Old ’60s radicals, now in charge of “mainstream” news, are all “wee-weed up” — to use President Eloquent’s expression — by the OWS tantrums. This new generation’s display of wasted minds gives the aging-hippie brigade a moment to relive their own misspent youth. These “news” people haven’t had this much thrill going up their legs since Barack Obama hip-hopped his way to the presidency on the wings of ‘60s radical hope-dope.

But what do responsible Americans see in the “Occupy” tantrums?

Tea Partiers, of course, see the gross liberal/conservative double standard at work big time. Where Tea Partiers got legal permits and paid tens of thousands of dollars for such things as police presence, traffic coordination, and sanitary necessities like porta-potties, these leftist tantrum-throwers form health-hazard Obamavilles on public property – fee free. The Obamaville squatters disrupt the sleep and threaten the health of close-by residents with their all-hours, out-of-control misdeeds, all the while getting positive press from the aging-hippie chorus in the media.

But I’m mostly just here for the picture. Completely priceless. Bound to come in handy someday often.

Thanks to Facebook pal Cassy.

Thinking some more about what Prelutsky has pointed out about words, and Margot’s conflict with me yesterday: It occurs to me that what we’re looking at, here, is a sort of “Devil’s Toolset” for constructing societal and cultural protocols that don’t work. Changing a perfectly decent descriptive term for an idea, to some other descriptive term, just because the former has taken on a reputation that is unhelpful to getting the idea sold; that is something you only do when you’re trying to sell something that shouldn’t be sold. As for Margot’s complaint, it’s the eternal Left Wing battle cry of “Why can’t you leave me and my friends alone so we can have a private conversation about how everybody should be forced to live?” The plan should be binding, it should apply universally, there should be no way to get around it or even to recoil from it, and if necessary it should restrict how supposedly “free” individuals are able to express and think. But discussions about what exactly the plan should be, will be limited to a select few. In fact, from what I’ve managed to observe about this, a significant portion of the discussion will be devoted to the topic of “Hey! That guy doesn’t belong here!”

Of course that must be the case; you’re only talking about how everyone should live, whether they want to live that way or not. Can’t have any ol’ Tom, Dick and Harry participating in that, actually expressing opinions! Might lead to dancing, or cats and dogs living together, or something.

The Devil’s Toolset has a third item: The Faustian Bargain. We just saw that a couple years ago with ObamaCare. Once you’re in, you can’t get out. Say the resistance to a plan vacillates between 49% and 70%. Just get some commitment event to happen when the resistance is 49%, and it will never matter again that the majority once again disapproves. Very much like fastening a carabiner clip with lots of tension in the line; how hard you have to pull on the line, is irrelevant, just as long as you can manage to get it pulled far enough to click the clip in place. Once it’s fastened it’s fastened. That’s exactly what they just got done doing to us.

And then there’s the ratchet. We could think of this as a serial procession of bargains like what’s described above. For all the contention and drama we saw take place with getting ObamaCare enacted, fast, since everyone knew Obama would lose crucial Senate votes in the midterms coming up — it’s going to be much more difficult than that, getting it repealed. Thus is the case with all liberal initiatives. Not only is it next to impossible to get them repealed, but in a year or two the abnormal becomes the new normal. People become accustomed to it. Which is not to say, by any stretch, that we’re being made stronger by that which doesn’t immediately kill us. Quite the opposite. Safety nets become hammocks, skills atrophy, and worst of all, a hubbub ensues about what needs to be addressed by the next safety net.

Today is Veterans Day. Much will be said about giving thanks for the men and women who fought and died for our freedom. You know, the thought occurs to me: Giving thanks for a gift is pretty easy. Accepting the gift, and making the best use of it possible, is not so easy. Perhaps this grateful nation would do well, this year, to put its attention on both of those things, rather than just one.

Burt Prelutsky makes an interesting point.

One of the amazing things about those on the Left is that they switch words around so often that it’s hard to keep track of what they’re blathering about. People got so upset with ACORN once they discovered that the group was quite happy to help fund a brothel that was going to be populated by underage Guatemalan girls that they insisted that their tax dollars no longer be allocated for their loathsome activities. No problem. ACORN simply changed its name.

When the scandal at East Anglia revolving around scientists destroying evidence that suggested that “global warming” was a hoax came out, Al Gore and his enablers, reluctant to allow their favorite cash cow to be slaughtered, simply started referring to “climate change”.

When American taxpayers finally had enough of Obama and his crew trying to raise taxes during a recession, a move that Senator Obama had insisted was goofy, and a move that helped prolong the Great Depression when FDR did that very thing twice during the 1930s, the liberals simply started referring to taxes as fees and revenues.

When they lose an election, or just start to lose some approval which indicates they might soon be losing an election, you aren’t going to wait very long before hearing one among them lament that the job of communicating the message is not quite yet done. I saw it after Bill Clinton left office and, until the democrats recaptured the Senate with a 51st seat, Republicans took over all of Congress as well as the White House. I saw it when George W. Bush won re-election. I’m sure seeing a lot of it right now. How hard it is to communicate the message; only smart people can understand it, and maybe America is just too stupid. In fact, it often seems to me that part of this liberal “message” is that it makes better sense to try to put out a house fire with gasoline, than to try to put it out with water, as long as you’re recommending the gasoline in a number of different languages. Our progressive friends seem to be endlessly fascinated in the process of communicating ideas but not quite so keen on hanging around long enough to assess whether the ideas turn out to be any good.

And so it’s interesting that they like to change the words around, which essentially hits the reset switch on any process that was underway to get an idea communicated. Either they just like to do it, and aren’t considering the consequences upon the process of idea-communication, or there’s a cynical calculation that has been done somewhere: An altered vocabulary will gain three converts, and alienate one, netting two.

I think it’s the latter. I notice the typical liberal idea will be strongly appealing to the person who has only just recently heard about it, and strongly revolting to the person who is waiting for it to produce positive results. Or to put it more concisely: Liberal ideas are salable to the audience that awards them the benefit of doubt, not to anybody else. Look how many people strongly believe that humans have to “do something” — yesterday! — or else, the ability of the planet to sustain life over the next century, cannot be assured. Now, how do you prove that? We’ve got an awful lot of people walking around going through the motions of using “science,” but while everyone’s acting all science-y, the point is lost that real science is going to have to be dropped like a hot potato, somewhere, before we get to the cool, exciting part: Our great-grandchildren are going to be living in a desert wasteland, like a scene out of a Terminator or Mad Max movie, fighting each other to the death for road kill. And yet that last part is going to have to be included in the message, since in the political realm, it is a vital ingredient. Have to give people a reason to care. But problem: The science does not support it. Solution: Sell it to people who think in terms of “what’s the worst that can happen?” but don’t consciously realize that they think this way. Just make quota. We only need 51 percent.

The battle to get socialism sold has been particularly dizzying. Use that S-word around a liberal and he’ll scold you for using it, insisting that there is some necessary ingredient an economic model must have before it can ever be called socialism by any knowledgeable person. Ask him to define what exactly that necessary ingredient is, and you’ll be pelted with a hailstorm of evasion tactics. None of this would be happening if “socialism” was not a dirty word; and, indeed, it didn’t happen a century ago, when it was not. And so as they continue to try to sell exactly the same product, The Left must become much more picky about how it is described.