It began with some lefties putting up a link to a hundred bits of liberal-against-conservative snark. It ended with the libs running away crying about the (Zulu time) late hour making them all sleepy & what-not, the tough day they had, their hurt feelings, snips, snails, and puppy dogs’ tails (Facebook membership required I think).

The tough-guy Beta Male aggressively non-threatening NPR dude who stepped in when it got too hot & nasty for the delicate Grrrrrl-power English lass who went cyber-shrieking out of the room in a furious grand exit, declared my writing flawed. Ooh, how shall I ever recover. But the flaw was neither spelling nor grammar nor punctuation, rather the flaw he detected was with a perceived plurality of interpreted meaning. Eh, sorry Hawkeye…that’s a real stretch. It’s the kind of thing lefties seize on when they are desperate to change the subject, when they get in that mode where the uncertainty is only in what they’ll eventually find, not in whether they’ll find it. Kind of like a soon-to-be-ex-wife assessing the job you did with the cleaning of the bathroom.

Hey, what can I say. I’ve pretty much had it with people critiquing my writing based on their not liking what it points out. And that was certainly the case here, because I’m not seeing a single word I’d prefer to change.

As to whether it’s true? Hehe. I’ve argued with a liberal or two in my time; I know what I’ve seen.

An observation to make: Lefties seem to be emphatic that their policies are the best and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But you haven’t long to discuss that with a lefty, before the subject changes to how much better of a person the lefty is than you are…so the policies must not be good.

Also, you haven’t long to discuss with a lefty how much better a person the lefty is, before the subject flips around to how much worse of a person you are…which is a subtly different thing…so I guess the lefties haven’t got much to offer about being good people, either.

Now obviously this doesn’t apply to everybody who is left of wing. Some of them are decent people; some are intelligent. That may even be true of the people with whom we were having our discussion. It would’ve been nice to see evidence of it.

But I’m really most concerned about the policies. Might as well face facts. The “policies work” morphing into “me better than you,” and the “me better than you” vectoring off into the “you worse than me,” are just topic drifts brought about, and made necessary, by the plain and simple fact that the policies have no bragging rights. They haven’t fixed anything. And it isn’t because they haven’t been given a fair shot. In fact, I would argue between 2007 and 2011, liberal public policy has been given more of a fair shot in the United States than it’s ever been given anywhere. Except maybe across eight decades in Russia, perhaps? Yeah, that was a success story if ever there was one.

It’s simple embarrassment. A double-boomerang maneuver resulting from simple embarrassment.

Funny, I was just noticing this myself before the HotAir write-up.

My observation was a little different, though: As of yesterday, Bachmann is a crazy-eyed whack-job emblematic of where those dangerous Republicans want to go, and Tim-P is a reasonable centrist independent moderate emblematic of who the dangerous Republicans would like to leave behind.

It was just a few days before Pawlenty dropped out — just a few days! — that they were being called the “Minnesota Twins.” By somebody, somewhere, there’s little point digging it up because it was a generalized, floating, prevailing, permeating theme.

I expect this trend to continue as the GOP herd is culled further. Every time someone is ejected from the running — “God damn it! Wouldn’t you just know those crazy Republicans would get rid of that reasonable, reasonable guy!”

An oldie but a goodie…

So yesterday I burned through half a tank of gas “scouting out” some new bike trials. It’s time-consuming, but relaxing in its own way and I’ve found it to be a smart thing to do. Google Maps doesn’t tell you where the hills are, you know, and it’s not too functional at warning you about the spots where there’s simply no place for a bicycle to go. Anyway, about four hours went into the ether for this excursion, and I did ’em all without the benefit of any audio distractions of any kind. The brain just starts to percolate. Not with entirely useful stuff, mind you. Just as a sampling, I had suddenly realized, in my four-wheeled air-conditioned chrysalis, that the “Dinner With the Bad Guy” scene in James Bond movies seems to consistently take place within the last thirty minutes of the film, whereas in all other action movies it seems to be required somewhere in the first half.

Wouldn’t mind at all getting together with you to knock back a couple cold ones, if you’re the type who’s sitting there right now saying “Duh, hey…now that I think on it, he’s right.” But I suspect most people will say, just dang, how do you get off on these tangents, Freeberg?

Another thing I thought about was power and freedom. I have long been convinced that our failure to find satisfaction in our system of elected representation, is due not entirely to our perpetual unpleasant discovery of the ramifications involved in allowing all others to have a voice. We are unhappy, primarily, because we don’t know the difference between power and freedom.

Upton Sinclair wrote, “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC.” He was speaking of his experience running for Governor of California in 1934 under the platform “End Poverty In California” — in which he lost, but his point was that he netted many more votes in that campaign than he did previously, running as a socialist. Labels are important. They’re far more important to us than they would be, if we went running around being honest about our motives all the time. But we’re all sons and daughters of Adam, possessing such a formidable level of genius that we can deceive even ourselves. Yes, the calories in the donut count when nobody’s looking, and yes that politician is a rotten egg-sucking socialist. But he knows what Upton Sinclair figured out, so he doesn’t call himself one. Doesn’t mean he isn’t one.

Now freedom and power are interesting and illuminating tells against our psychology, because they aren’t even used as labels.

I think most people would be willing, even eager, to sign on to the statement “I’m going to vote today to preserve my freedom” whereas the same cannot be said of the statement “I’m going to vote today to acquire power.” Conversely, the “power” statement would probably, in many cases, be much more refreshingly honest. That’s what I think the problem is: People believe they are casting a vote for the sake of their own freedom, but their intent is really to deny someone with different interests of their freedom. The denial of freedom for this other guy, in turn, is their idea of “power” but even that is mostly an illusion. Someone somewhere (I’ve pretty much given up on my quest to try to find this again) made an excellent point that if there is any one facet to life in America in which local authority remains everlastingly sovereign, and respected across the board, it is the selection of stations on the stereo in our cars. His point was that because of this, we do not have alienating, heated arguments about radio stations. But as sure as the sun is going to rise tomorrow, if we were to eliminate all radio stations except for one, and coordinate the programming on that one station and vote on its contents — do I even need to finish that sentence. You know what would happen. We’re already living it day in and day out…with all other things that are centrally managed.

People want an end to the contention and they want to be unified. You do that by allowing people to choose what makes the most sense to them, and protecting them from the impact of what the next fellow chooses to do.

Do that, and everybody has real freedom. They have real power, too.

What we have been doing is exactly the opposite. We trundle off to the polling place before or after work on a Tuesday in November to protect our “freedoms” we think, but really to acquire “power” by making sure some other guy is defrocked of all this power. If we succeed at it, then the next election cycle or maybe the second one afterward, maybe the third, he’ll do it back to us again. Every now and then one of these back-and-forth rituals is finally settled forevermore, never to be raised as a question ever again. In that case, it has not escaped my notice that the final solution to the problem has something to do with less power and less freedom for everybody, save for whoever makes the rules, and nobody’s really sure who that guy is. But the end of the road is that we don’t get to pick the car radio station anymore. It’s one less choice for us, some rule to be followed…and I have the unsettling feeling that a majority of my countrymen find some comfort and satisfaction in this. Oh goody! A rule to follow. I can’t get in trouble.

The freedom thing I find more disturbing than the power thing. There would be an obvious stigma attached to a person who says “I’m going off to vote so I can get more POWER!” even if that is, in most cases, true. There would be no such stigma placed upon someone who says “I’m going off to vote so I can keep my FREEDOM!” That’s what we’re all supposed to be doing anyway…

So how come I don’t hear that many politicians, nowadays, making speeches about freedom? I hear “millionaires and billionaires” and “private jets” so many times, the cliché becomes a caricature of itself…and then I hear it a whole bunch more times. But the simple word “freedom”? It doesn’t seem to make the cut.

FDR used it; he built an entire speech around it. Having apparently learned the same lesson Upton Sinclair learned, he used his labels wisely and in such a deceptive and sneaky way as to deploy the “F-word” for the explicit purpose of advancing the “S-word,” socialism. Seven decades later, his legacy has been continued with such gusto that his heirs-apparent would sneer at his “Freedom of Speech” and “Freedom of Worship.” They work against both, zealously, pretty much constantly. They’re proud of it.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Because hey, it’s Friday.

Atlas is shrugging:

…I love it here in San Diego. The weather is amazing, the beaches are beautiful, and the people are friendly and generally entrepreneurial. It’s a refreshing change from the Bay Area, where everyone seemed like they were always “too busy” to hang out. Here, life is more laid-back, and I’ve grown to appreciate it.

But one thing I’ve struggled with about California for years is the government. The government is notoriously business-unfriendly–with everything from high taxes on business earnings to badgering businesses into more work…

Nothing out of the ordinary about this at all. Nothing out of the ordinary about this person’s disgust with the stupidity, the “final straw,” or the wonder-why-I-didn’t-do-it-sooner. And wait until you read about that final straw.

John Hawkins fills us in on why and how the Tea Party is ruining America:

1) The Tea Partiers Lost America’s AAA Credit Rating. Sure, the Tea Partiers may have supported the Ryan Plan and Cut, Cap, and Balance, both of which would have preserved America’s AAA credit rating, but what we’ve just experienced is a “Tea Party downgrade.” How does that work? Well, just as Paul Revere caused the British to attack America and Mothers Against Drunk Driving causes people to drive drunk, the Tea Partiers caused America’s credit downgrade with their incessant demands that we cut spending to avert a credit downgrade…or something. It’s a little foggy.

2) The Tea Partiers Are Extremely Radical. Have you heard these radical yahoos going on about what they want to do? They actually want to stick to the Constitution and balance the budget! What kind of crazy talk is that? Need I remind you that the last time we had people talking like that in this country, they clung to their guns and religion, too. Next thing you know, they actually overthrew the government over taxes. Are those really the type of people we want to emulate in this country?

One of my Facebook friends has commented that she will not vote for a Tea Party candidate because their ideas are far too extreme. So I submitted a reply politely asking for the single most extreme Tea Party position on any issue. I’ll let you know what she manages to produce, in the comments below, as soon as she comes up with something.

So I’m arguing with this lefty college professor, and you can tell already I’ve got him completely creamed because he pulled the “Me and my friends are all political science professors” card. No, c’mon, I’m not making it up it really happened. He’s trying to pawn off that debt-downgrade-Tea-Party’s-fault thing…and I’m not buying it. So that makes me dumb. You know how this goes: The lefty produces a premise, or a “whenever,” or an explanation or a theory, with just a glimmer of promising evidence. It is opposed to common sense in some way. But because of this glimmer of promising evidence it’s supposed to completely change your world view, and from this instant forward you’re supposed to drift around pointing back at this guy, I guess, and tell everyone you meet “He just completely changed my worldview!”

See, you’re supposed to think: It could be…therefore…it must be. This is exactly the way people can no longer afford to think, when they’re in the business of building things that actually have to work, which is why it’s popular with professors. In this case, there’s that passage in the S&P report on America’s debt downgrade that seems to say we could’ve saved ourselves from the natural consequence of spending with wild abandon, if only we’d done what democrats want us to do: Stop worrying about debt when the time comes to spend money, and only worry about debt when the time comes to raise taxes.

Classic prog idea: It makes sense if you’re a wizened sage smarty-pants…and are completely lacking in common sense. Because with your feet planted back on the ground where they belong, you have to think: Well now waitaminnit. If I’m married to someone and our credit gets downgraded, and she’s been saying all along “don’t spend the money, don’t spend the money, we shouldn’t be going so far into debt”…after the downgrade happens am I going to be the one to tell her “I told you so”? Dude…that makes no sense at all.

See how easy it is to prove this is a sucky-ass idea. Just correlate it to real life — and, yeah, to really pound the hammer into the wall, for some folks, we use the female to represent the sensible point of view just like in a detergent commercial, a lot of people won’t respond otherwise. And, just like that, it’s crystal-clear. How is it some people can’t see this? Can it be they know something the rest of us don’t? They sure act like it!

And that is when I had my flash of brilliance. Maybe…maybe…that is the warning system right there. As I’ve been writing in these pages, over and over again right back to the very beginning — we live in a time when there is a rich, vast array of services available to us that spare us from the necessity of rational thinking. We are safe and we can part with a few bucks to spare ourselves from labor, if we want that option…and if you live in California and we’re talking about changing your own oil, unless you have an accepted way to dispose of the old oil, you don’t have the option! People tend to forget what this ultimately means: We don’t recoil from sucky-ass ideas because there’s no reason to.

So we have these ninnies running around, not all of them left-wing shills (although most of them are), plying us with their barely “plausible” nonsense. They’re lonely people because this is how they renew their social contacts — their ideas are found to be antithetical to common sense, but there’s something plausible about it, so the idea must be true and since it isn’t the first thing you’d assume, this makes them brilliant and now you’re supposed to accept the anti-common-sense idea plus tell all your friends about this wonderful, brilliant person you found on the Internet who showed you this truth you’d never have otherwise realized and it just completely turns your life around.

My flash-of-brilliance moment was nothing more than a new appreciation for how often we’re running into this. It’s growing, starting to surround us, it’s everywhere we look now. Someone has a new angle to present — but it isn’t really a new angle, it’s just a bunch of barely plausible crap that’s supposed to win them some friends.

Then I had a moment of exuberant scientific curiosity: Formed this way, an idea would not very often be a good one, would it? It would almost have to be a sucky-ass idea in order to prosper when it is formed in this way toward this objective. So, theory: If an idea makes a person feel exclusively bright…if it’s like a special gemstone he can carry in his pocket that gives him special, individual worth…you can pretty much conclude right there and then that the idea sucks ass.

A I searched through my short- and long-term memory trying to figure out if this gels, I found one single exception and I had my moment of sensible humility. Because, to be completely honest about it, I might very well have had my eyes closed with a big smug smile on my face when I told my fiance and my kid “Fine, you guys keep using your pussy Windows operating system but I’m all fed up with it and I don’t need it anymore.” And this, I must say in all humility…has turned out to be an okay idea. So my decision of what OS to use is just fine, but my theory needs just a little bit of refinement.

If it makes you feel above everybody else, but it isn’t Unix, the idea sucks ass. That’s my hypothesis. With that one little waiver in place, it seems to work. People who feel all smug and special because they’re switching to Unix, are sick and tired of Gates & Ballmer’s shenanigans and they just want something to work. People who feel smug and special about something else, on the other hand…driving a hybrid…drinking out of an eco-cup…blaming the people who said “Hey, let’s not go so far into debt” when the credit gets downgraded…placing an order at Starbucks that takes longer to explain to the “barista” than it does to get the drink actually whipped up, with more calories than a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds — and then insist they make it with non-fat milk — these people all have ideas that suck ass.

It isn’t a hard-and-fast logical conclusion to be drawn. If it was, I wouldn’t be able to grant a waiver from it. It’s simply an observation about the times in which we live. Very, very few of us are charged with the task of building something that might seriously injure or kill us, or somebody else, if it doesn’t work right. And so, to accommodate this vacuum of critical thinking we have demonstrated, we are being confronted by a tsunami of endearing, socially-elevating, smug, talk-with-your-eyes-closed ideas.

That suck ass.

Potty-mouth language warning.

Hat tip to my local morning radio guys and blogger friend Buck.

It’s interesting that the Angry Left gets away with this; you could argue they’re not getting away with anything, in the sense that they’re fooling absolutely nobody, just enjoying all the benefits that would be involved in fooling everybody. “Angry protesters”? “Residents of the district”?

Astroturfers. What’s wrong with using that word? It was invented for precisely this very thing. Loser Move-On-Dot-Org hacks.

And teachers, huh? Hope there’s not many of those. I’ve seen a lot of things paraded past my face persuading me toward sticking the kid in a private school…a lot of things…statistics, reports, stories, rumors, you name it. Nothing pushes me toward that line quite as much as the idea that something like this might in fact be a “teacher’s union” protest. It is the most compelling argument toward private or parochial in our modern times, and that is really saying something.

A meme has taken hold; it says that the Tea Party is to blame for the United States’ recent credit downgrade. Perhaps it is more fitting to say the meme has been “launched.” Progressives do that with memes, they launch them, just like NASA used to launch space shuttles before President Obama came along, or shipping lines launch a new vessel on her maiden voyage. Some shuttles and some vessels have long and distinguished careers, and some burn up in the atmosphere or sink on a reef after just a few times out. Well hey, let’s launch the meme and see what happens. Throw the crap at the wall and see if it sticks.

According to the meme, the Tea Party is to blame for the credit downgrade because we didn’t get a big tax increase out of the debt deal. This, somehow, would have saved our AAA rating.

It seems to be coming from this passage in S&P’s report, which for obvious reasons has been quoted frequently:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act…

Gee whiz, there’s a quote straight from the source that will buttress the argument, and everything.

Except I’m doubting like the dickens any thinking individual can coherently spell out the logic. Let’s give it a try by starting out with the basic concepts, on which everyone can agree. We have this thing called an “economy” and an economy can be strong or it can be weak; right now it is anemic. Because the economy is anemic, our government is having difficulty raising the revenues that would offset its spending, some 25 to 30 cents on the dollar of which, on an annual basis, is brand new and wasn’t part of its budget as recently as three years ago.

To say any more about the spending is to depart from that narrow focus on which all points on the political spectrum will find agreement. I’ve already mentioned something on which my left-leaning friends would like everyone to remain silent. So let us really fracture the envelope we have now pushed, and note that we are fracturing it: I think an “economy” is a system or community of multiple parties, exchanging goods or services, each party acting toward the benefit of its own interests. So a “strong economy” is one in which it is easy to channel the disparate interests into economic activity, which is trading; an “anemic economy” is one in which there is difficulty involved in doing this.

Still basic stuff, but we don’t agree on it anymore. Liberals cry foul. They may or may not say that my position is wrong, but you know they must have a different definition in mind when they say the cure for a “weak economy” is to “raise taxes.” Taxes have the effect of making it harder to envision a profit from the trading. Liberals may dispute my definition of what an economy is, but they do not dispute this part of what taxes do to the profit motive — on that point, they find agreement. This is why they like the higher taxes. They say so often. So-and-so is getting by too easy, “not paying his/their fair share.” We need higher taxes so the rich/wealthy can give back to the community.

So they must disagree with me about what an economy is. When they agree with me that the economy is weak and sickly, their fix is to raise taxes which, in their view, would somehow strengthen this “economy” upon which they are actually proposing to place a heavier burden.

Wow, these are the people who want to regulate health care for our old people? What do they do when their grandmothers get weak and sickly? Have her move in…and then put the old battleaxe in charge of moving the furniture around?

There is another point to be made here about liberals and higher taxes. I’m afraid this point may not be relevant for quite some time, but it’s still worthy of comment: Those who are capable of recalling pertinent events after a greater stretch of time — and perhaps this is a dwindling audience — will recall that our liberals think higher taxes are very important when everyone agrees the economy is strong.

We saw it in the 80’s, we saw it in the 90’s, we saw it in the “aughts.” Right? Boom times…the rich are doing okay…they get richer, the poor get poorer. The divide between rich and poor is growing. The economic recovery is leaving too many poor people behind. Blah, blah, blah…so this is an interesting point, that is very often overlooked in our fast-paced, blink-and-you-miss-it world of “The Only News I Care About Is Right Now.” When the economy is doing well, our liberals look at higher taxes as a necessary restraining device — it somehow becomes the government’s business to make sure nobody is doing too well. When the economy is flat-lined, comatose or just put on a sickbed for a spell, our liberals think higher taxes possess some medicinal value. They aren’t a restraining device anymore, they’re an energizing elixir.

So it seems they don’t even have their own definition of what an “economy” really is. They don’t know. That means you’d better not ask them, or the conversation will become uncivil and it will be all your fault. But the liberals know what higher taxes do! They make the economy stronger — or put it in check, or something. Always, always, higher taxes will move us in the right direction where we want to go. Like magic. The answer is always higher taxes.

Meanwhile, on the Tea Party’s culpability in the debt downgrade…well, the S&P passage may look like it stands on its own. But for those who show too much recklessness in interpreting it in ways helpful to their own ideological agendas, the facts are not kind to what they’re trying to put together.

See, when we citizen simpletons waved signs like “You Can’t Spend Your Way Out Of Debt,” and “Stop Stealing From Our Kids,” we thought we were helping. It probably sounds crazy to you, but we figured the best way to avoid a debt crisis was to — gee, it seems so silly now — not to borrow all that money in the first place.
:
President Barack Obama wanted to spend $1 trillion in borrowed money on the stimulus, and we opposed it. Then he wanted to add trillions in new health care entitlements and we opposed it. Then he wanted a “clean bill” on the debt ceiling — authority for another $2.4 trillion in debt with zero in spending cuts — and we opposed that, too.

So obviously the downgrade is all the Tea Party’s fault. Because, um, well, you see . . .

I suppose that’s dry reading. So let’s sign off instead with the Tweet of the Day, via Prof. Jacobson, by way of Gerard:

I think that sums it up nicely.

Isn’t a credit-downgrade what you’re ultimately supposed to be afraid of, when you’re spending way more money than you’re taking in?

Just a useful sentence from Ed Driscoll that I wanted to preserve:

[The Tea Party] has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.

A Thomas Jefferson quote by way of Land of the Tea:

I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. We must make our choice between frugality and liberty, or excessive spending and servitude. If the debt should be swelled to a formidable size, its entire discharge will be despaired of and we shall be committed to a career of debt corruption, and rottenness. The discharge of the debt, therefore, is vital to the destiny of our government.

And yes, doubters, he really did say it.

Anthony Watts is on the case.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

A blonde is typing away on her computer in a coffee shop. Suddenly she lets out a shriek. “My work! My computer screen just went black and now I can’t find my work!”

One of the other patrons suggests, trying to be helpful, “Maybe the battery shut down. Did you have it plugged in?”

Blondie indignantly clucks her tongue and rolls her eyes. “No, you idiot! It’s wireless!”

Brad Hoffman (hat tip to Ed Darrell):

[President Barack] Obama should have let the Bush tax cuts expire last year, which would have dramatically reduced our deficit. [emphasis mine]

Like, you let the tax cuts expire, that would make the tax rate higher. A higher tax rate means the government takes in more money, which is what it needs in order to pay down the deficit! Because when you have a deficit it means you haven’t been taking in enough money, so what we need to do is pay more taxes. You idiot!

What’s so hard to understand about this? And why won’t my stupid wireless laptop work anymore?

Many explanations are possible; perhaps it is the most valid one that actually applies, and whatever it is, it just completely changes everything.

But. Would that even matter?

I’ve been “in computers” for 23 years now, some 19 or 20 of them in some huge leviathan construct — believe me, I know bureaucracy. I can spot it a mile off, I know what it looks like up close, I’m more familiar than I want to be with how it looks from the inside.

The thinking that got Obama elected is thinking I have seen many, many times before. Here I’ll summarize it quickly from memory…and those memories do not draw on Barack Obama.

Management’s management, alright? We don’t need someone who knows the ins and outs of what we’re building or what we’re doing. It’s all just a bunch of widgets, isn’t it? What we need is someone with people skills. Someone who can inspire others to follow where he’s going. Just hire someone for this job who will secure that much — all the other pieces will fall into place.

Two problems: One, you aren’t giving up your search for A (effective management) in favor of a search for B (the pizzazz, ooh, there’s just something about him!) — in hopes that the realization of B will naturally bring about A. That is a tempting rationalization, and there is some allure to it; but that isn’t what’s going on. What’s happening is, you are sacrificing A for B. You get effectiveness when you apply a pressure that demands effectiveness — it must be unremitting and unceasing — there is no substitute for it. Second problem: As our President vividly but perhaps unintentionally demonstrates for us, when the dust all settles you don’t even get B.

Barack Obama has become a nightmarish, freaky bore. I mean, just face the cold hard reality: When He steps up to a podium, do you even have a glimmer of “let’s see what He has to say here”? Anticipate learning something new? Seeing something unexpected?

Can you even rely on being entertained?

We searched our kingdom for a new, wise and able King, and instead ensconced a court jester onto the throne. Now we don’t even have a decent jester. Yeah, yeah, I know…racist of me.

Ah, God bless the Internet and God bless Google. Finally found it.

Happy Friday, everybody.

Well, we’ve reached a negotiation. It’s pissing everyone off, so it’s probably about as good a compromise as could be reached. I’m sure a better compromise might have been…well, better…but it’s an open question as to whether that was possible, and a worse compromise surely would have dealt more damage.

Let’s review at a high level with all the drama left out of it. That’s when we learn the most, you know; reviewing things at a high level, and with low drama. It occurs to me that with all this conflict compressed into a couple of months of “ZOMDFG The Debt Limit Cometh” we may have seen our entire human-species story conveniently mushed into a handy package of relatively miniscule time. The opportunity for learning about ourselves is rare.

We have these capable people, we have local widows and we have town drunks. That is to say, we have people who are capable of meeting their own essential needs and then sparing a bit of effort afterward to help others. We have those who are in need of the assistance through no fault of their own, and then we have others who live in a state of dependency as a chosen lifestyle who think work is for suckers. Now, within the capable people there is another meaningful distinction to be made between those who earn their daily bread creating products and services that can be sold — and then we have those who, although they bristle at having it pointed out, push paper around and produce nothing. That’s a touchy subject, so much so that this last divide cannot even be acknowledged if the peace is to be kept, unless the audience within earshot has been carefully selected.

Now, you put these pieces together into a unified mass, and you can divide that mass again yet another way, this time according to how people think: Those who are receptive to all of the above three distinctions, and those who will acknowledge only the one divide between capable and incapable. Conservatives and liberals, in other words. Conservatives understand there are producers and non-producers; they understand there are local-widows and town-drunks. Liberals only see the difference between what they call “haves and have-nots.” So add this to the long list of reasons that the liberal viewpoint not only doesn’t make sense, but cannot make sense; in a twist of irony which no sane writer of fiction would allow himself, liberals fail to gel with reality because they are not sufficiently “nuanced.” Our side doesn’t know its butt from a hole in the ground, but somehow, we have all the money — except when a survey comes out that says liberals must be more sophisticated because they enjoy higher incomes and have achieved higher levels of education. See, even when they measure things liberals can’t keep it real, because the measurements change to accommodate what’s being currently discussed; what is to be “proven.” They see themselves as champions of the underclass, the David striking a blow against Goliath, but when they seek to assert themselves their tactics become like those of the Goliath. The rest of us need to learn to welcome our new overlords, they’ve taken over the academia, the communications industries, the science institutes, the executive branch, everything that is an establishment. Anyone who isn’t a liberal, even flush after an election victory, needs to bend, yield, give way, make do, learn to compromise, etc. But oh by the way we’re filthy stinker rich people who have all the money.

Now, into this picture of the people, we have to add the picture of our nation’s government’s finances. The revenue situation stinks on ice. We’re taking in something like three dollars for every four we spend on defense, social services, stimulus programs, foreign aid, administration, and interest on the debt. Much of the spending is new; up until just a few years ago, we somehow figured out how to get along without it. By the way, the debt situation, like the revenue situation, is about as bad as it can possibly get. Were the revenue situation to be completely turned around starting tomorrow, there is still much difficulty involved in seeing how we can ever dig ourselves out of this hole.

The point of all this is one I’ve made many times before. Those who obsess over the one people-distinction, the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, and close their eyes to all the other people-distinctions…have-nots due to circumstance, and have-nots due to personal preference…haves from making friends and pushing paper around, and haves due to money fairly earned by helping others…of necessity must also blind themselves to the deteriorating financial situation. As we round this meaningful corner of truly losing control of the government’s finances, to such an extent that we’ve never lost this much control before — they still need to make their noise about finding creative and innovative new ways to spend money. The real tragedy is that their ideas are not stationary; they’re sliding down a slippery slope. Some among them are thoroughly enmeshed in the progressive worldview, ready to tattoo themselves with it from head to toe. Others are simply headed there, humans only just recently bitten by the zombie, at the nascent “What’s wrong with us all coming together to help each other?” gullible, innocent, almost adorably naive stage.

Now, look what we just saw happening here. Leave aside which side got what it wanted out of the final compromise; ignore that, for in my view it’s a little like figuring out chair positions on the Titanic. Take a look, instead, at the public-relations battle. Liberals pride themselves on their public relations. They took a beating from beginning to end here, and no, it was not a “lost leader” as part of some grand strategy of theirs. They looked like idiots and they didn’t plan to. Even worse, they looked that way to the “no dog in this hunt” types, the moderates, the Main Street people, the freshly-bitten slippery-slope-sliders. Idiots. Harmful, dangerous idiots.

And that is the point I wish to make here. It is a point I’ve made before: Modern-day liberalism is the precise opposite of what it pretends to be, the inverted-color image of what those who embrace it, seek to make of themselves. It is supposed to be about independent and logical thinking, but you can’t get much less logical than “screw the debt picture we have to find more ways to spend money.” It isn’t independent. Once confronted with something that is plain truth, a fact so verifiable and simple that it cannot be denied, liberals will refuse to discuss it if it endangers the agenda. One of my favorites is “Is Peggy Joseph (the ‘Obama gonna put gas in my car and pay my mortgage’ lady) smarter than Walter Williams, Charles Krauthammer and George Will?” They simply won’t address it. It’s mind-boggling to watch this. They’re emotionally invested in that hardcore-case worldview, in which the dumbest person who agrees with them, can boast of greater intellect and capability than the most promising among those who dare to dissent. And so the subject is changed, because it seems if they confess to the obvious someone will leap out of nowhere to grab and tear up their “left-winger in good standing” card.

Seriously, try it sometime.

We found out why Barack Obama got nominated back in 2008. No president in modern times, I daresay, has dealt with any situation with greater incompetence and laziness that what we just saw out of Him. Quick, name one thing Barack Obama did about this besides giving wonderful speeches, just one thing. You can’t. And at this point, should the speeches even count? You and I breathe in oxygen and return it to the environment as carbon dioxide; Obama gives speeches. But if you have a single negative thing to say about Obama then you must be racist. So yes, Obama is where He is because of the color of His skin. Every politician desires some cudgel to be wielded to allow him to have the final word in an argument — Barack Obama just so happens to have one. And absolutely nothing else that would make Him of any practical use to anybody.

I have also written, to excess, about how liberals boast of their grand ambition to make life more “fair” and to make people more “equal.” But that this, too, is polar-opposite/mirror-flipped from what they really want to see happen, and you don’t have to study them too long before this becomes apparent. Social spending, military spending, invading a country, aborting babies, a mosque at ground zero, gun control, labor unions, teacher salaries, evolution versus intelligent design — discuss any one of these things with a liberal for more than thirty seconds, and the discussion will loop around to someone being innately better than somebody else. These people are so wonderful, those people are bitter clingers. What did we just see happen here? Liberals came to an argument without facts and without reason, and ended up calling the other side a bunch of names.

Like I said: A compression of human history. The complete picture of what we are, warts and all.

Call them liberals, progressives, moonbats, lefties, whatever. They are, ultimately, line-erasers. Distinction-losers. They seek to conflate those who need help because of genuinely hard luck, with those who choose to rely on the efforts of others because of genuine laziness. They seek to do this so they can achieve the next tier of compassion, understanding, wisdom and open-mindedness. They achieve the exact opposite. They appear to genuinely believe they are laboring toward a level playing field in which everyone with a heartbeat enjoys equal rights and equal opportunity. Consciously or not, they labor toward the exact opposite of this.

They talk a great deal of “sitting down to talk out our differences” with “understanding” and a willingness and capability manifested on both sides, to perceive subtle “nuances” and achieve a productive “compromise.” Which, then, both sides can recall fondly, remember as an occasion on which something meaningful got done, goals were reached on both sides, understanding was achieved and conflict was avoided. We’ve just seen how they conduct themselves before, during, and after such a sit-down.

They walked into the “sit-down” intent on getting everything they wanted, compromising on nothing, got all pissy with their representatives at the table when the compromise was offered anyway. They got even pissier when the compromise was reached, signed, sealed and delivered. Now they’re scheming of ways to get even. Because they’re so much better than everybody else and deserve more, and everyone else is so terrible and awful.

They’re supposed to be working toward a better world. But a child can see the world that has been built, may be completely screwed, and it isn’t because of conservatives saying “stop spending money” — it’s because of liberals saying “spend all the money you want plus a whole lot more.”

They have giant holes in their lives that can’t ever be filled. Feeling guilty about drowning girls in the back seats of their cars, or whatever…they must do penance, but the penance somehow has something to do with the rest of us being forced to spend money.

Severian. Channeling Freeberg, but in a better position to comment than Freeberg.

Hat tip to Phil.

Wisdom from Yours Truly, on the Hello Kitty of Blogging…which is more appropriate, I believe, as a post of its own. So I’ll plant it here:

I think progressivism holds appeal because it does the opposite of what people say about it: It sorts people into different levels and locks them in place there. This guy here at the top is supposed to decide everything, that guy there has the authority to destroy people because his judgment is completely perfect, all these other people at the bottom should just mill about waiting to be told what to do.

Funny thing is, that’s exactly how the enthused progressives are [naturally] configured. Some of them want to boss strangers around, and others want to line up for their three hots every day and just be told what to do. So the allure i[s] that you’ll be locked into the plateau that is most comfortable to you. It seems there isn’t a progressive anywhere who’s entertained the thought, even momentarily, that maybe the this perfectly-run United Federation of Planets will find the “right” role for him that is different from what he’s envisioned.

We see three tiers, at least. You have the Obama/Hitler/Napoleon/Mao/Stalin guy at the apex of the pyramid…the demigod. The public figure whose face is to be put on posters, and by his very definition cannot make any mistakes since anything he does instantly becomes the definition of moral, just and right. You have the middle manager who carries out the Sun King’s directives. Then you have everybody else.

There are ranks within ranks. Man-God-King has a consort and other immediate family members; they are demigods too. The middle managers are placed on a higher relative level as they are positioned closer to the Man-God-King. As for the proles milling about, sheep-like out at the periphery, it seems they are also ranked within their own caste according to whether they agree ideologically. The “I for one welcome our new overlords” proles are better than the Tea Party proles.

But that is the ziggurat right there, the upside-down funnel. Social structures that accept the left-wing approach, constantly, arrange themselves into this configuration, popularized since ancient Egypt. It’s timeless, I think.

I further perceive that the most enthused progressive aspires toward the middle ring, seeing himself as a middle manager. From arguing with these people, it seems to me they get a perverse thrill out of telling other people what to do…it’s as if, if they were to go out and do their converting and there was no converting to do because everyone already agreed, they’d become exquisitely unhappy. So they’re salivating about the prospect of forcing plans on people, but are not ready to become the person who comes up with the plan because that would involve too much responsibility. They want to receive a plan from someone, and then hammer it into place somewhere else.

I believe their ambitions are formed by absences: They don’t want to come up with the plan, they don’t want to take responsibility for coming up with the plan, and they don’t want to learn to live with something that doesn’t meet with their agreement. They’re simply avoiding challenges, and while they’re at it, avoiding the stigma that would come with avoiding challenges…and so they engage in an illusion, trying to appear to be doing something.

Hence, the appeal of wanting “To Be A Part Of This Thing.”

Winner of the contest at Power Line.

On the debt issue, or debt ceiling issue, or budget issue, or budget deal issue, or the deficit spending issue…whatever ya wanna call it…Terri thinks my position is the conservative one.

She’s right, of course. That’s the problem.

I have this unrealistic viewpoint of budget issues: The way I figure it, companies and people and governments are all forming budgets for essentially the same purpose, and that’s to get all stressed out before the money gets spent instead of after the money gets spent. Of course they & we do this for different reasons…but that doesn’t matter, that’s essentially what budgeting is.

And so my unrealistic viewpoint is, however you define “conservative” with regard to the government’s budget, that’s what conservative should mean with regard to your household budget. What you call “liberal” with regard to the government’s budget, that word should have the same meaning when used to describe your budget too. “Middle of the road” just logically follows those two. In my world, that’s how it works.

I hope I’m out of step with everybody else. Because brother, let me tell you what…what I’m heard being described as “inflexibly right wing” within discussions of the government’s reckless-spending-issue…

Let’s boil it down this way. I get my paycheck and I have a stack of bills I have allocated to that paycheck. The way I see it, it is that paycheck’s job to pay those bills, because the next paycheck is going to have a whole new stack of bills up against it. So it’s like this: If I do a “right wing” job of managing that paycheck, you know what that means? It means I don’t spend a single nickel of it on bullshit, until I’ve paid every single nickel of those bills. And “bullshit” is anything that isn’t a bill, including food. Sorry, sweetie! You have to cook tonight even though I got a paycheck — no pizza delivery — because I haven’t gotten the phone company to answer their damn phone and take my money yet. I keep paying bills and paying bills, until there isn’t anybody left who’s willing to take money from me anymore…I figure up how much of what’s left to allocate for frivolous incidentals, like groceries, and I hold that out. And I put the rest in savings. Hopefully at least half of it will go in savings. That’s a “right wing” way of managing a paycheck as far as I’m concerned.

“Left wing” means I get sloppy and lazy. I go, “oh I’m rich because I haven’t paid my bills yet,” I start computing how much I can blow on miscellaneous crap, and I spend that first. At some point I get around to paying my bills, and I take a gander at my checkbook register to try not to overdraw the account, and hope against hope that one number’s bigger than another.

If I’m really lazy, clumsy and incompetent about it, I figure out aw crap I went over a little bit…then I have to pull a quick hundred bucks or two out of savings, so I can finish paying my bills. That’s a rather left-wing, liberal, overly tolerant way of paying my bills.

Or, maybe I let a bill go so the next paycheck can handle it. It’s still within the thirty days right? That’s left-wing. And I don’t say that to insult left-wingers, that’s just the way it works. That’s the direction we’re talking about — left-wing tolerates slop, right-wing requires strictness.

Anyway. That’s where I put the goalposts. Right wing pays bills and then savings and then indulges bullshit with what’s left over, if anything is left over. Left-wing indulges the bullshit first…might dip into savings a little tiny bit…but not too much. If it does, the savings will be replenished later. That, when I manage my household finances, is “left wing.”

Now. Let’s look at what has happened to our ideological positions with regard to managing the federal government’s budget.

Pffffffffft……..where to begin??? I guess we should start with right wing. What does it take to be an advocate of a “right wing” position on this particular issue? It would be easier to enumerate the positions that would not be right wing. Strident, shrill, uncompromising, and downright rude right wingers…Tea Party people…what makes them this way? Upon what are they insisting?

“Hey folks, would it be too much to ask that we at least track how many freakin’ digits are in the debt we’re racking up?” “Gah!!!! Shrill, strident, take-no-prisoners right-winger!”

Middle of the road means, I guess, go ahead and raise the debt ceiling and keep right on spending. Find creative new innovative ways to spend money. I call that liberal but the prevailing viewpoint says that’s middle of the road…for reasons that entirely escape me.

The government’s spending a trillion dollars more than it’s taking in. Every year. Would “Hey…let’s try not to make it two trillion” — would that be right-wing? Would that be unrealistically, uncompromisingly Tea-Party-ish?

The democrats wanted a stiff tax increase in this deal, to punish — er, I mean, make those “millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share.” I’d say no to that…but I’m a right winger. I suppose anyone who gave the slightest bit of resistance to it was a right-winger. Of course, Congress doesn’t have the authority to demand a certain amount of revenue for the government; all it can do is raise the tax rates, and hope for the best. Just like, at the kitchen table as I go over the household budget and realize I’m not making enough money, I can keep spending what I like and hope I can get a big raise next year. To pin my hopes on that, in managing my budget, is something I’d call left-wing. I’ll bet you’d call that left-wing too, as you manage your own budget.

When did that become a centrist position when we think about the federal government’s budget?

How far does Congress have to go — or any member of Congress, within that august body — to be considered “left wing” during deliberations about the federal government’s budget? Oh, my. Is it even possible? I haven’t even heard any one particular position called left wing. I don’t think anyone with a real voice and with real influence, has even kept track of it — I don’t think they’d know how to answer the question. From all I’ve managed to read and hear over the last few weeks, everything is either “right wing” or “mainstream/centrist.” And all of these positions, with very few exceptions, have to do with spending essentially as much money as has already been spent. Not my idea of moderate at all.

Well. I think my own opinion is as middle-of-the-road as middle-of-the-road can get. I think Congress should manage their budget the way I manage mine. And what would I do if my financial picture looked like the government’s? Hah! The mind boggles.

Raise the debt limit? Are you out of your freakin’ gourd? Try spending limit. No wait…try savings minimum.

I’d make Genghis Kahn look like Abbey Hoffman if they’d left it up to me. At least, by their standards of “right” versus “left”…

Coffee, straight from my own coffee pot in my own kitchen. Ahhhh… ++slurp++

I drove through about two thousand miles, give or take, with a total of about maybe…I dunno…ten, twenty minutes of audio entertainment Friday morning when it got nightmarishly boring. The rest of the time I just did some thinking. One of my deeper thoughts turned to superheroes in general. You see some of them functioning as individuals, like Batman and Spider Man, and others work within a group like the Power Rangers, Fantastic Four and the Justice League.

Some of these characters are transitional. That is to say, they have their adventures as individuals and then you see them as part of a group, and then they have their own stories as individuals again. With a lot of the big names, it’s a very casual transition. Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Aquaman are just kind of…in there, and then out there. Doing the hokey-pokey, in, out, in, shake it all about. There are others like The Huntress who are unceremoniously drummed out and then allowed back in, each transition part of a story with high philosophical meaning about the ramifications involved with working in a group. Those ramifications typically involve living up to a higher standard, and that, in turn, typically involves treating the bad guys in a humane way that doesn’t conclude with some desperate need for immediate medical attention.

Sometimes, a story arc will involve a member of a group leaving and then rejoining in time for a climactic battle scene, during which time it will become evident that he realizes much greater success when he is part of the group. This part of it, like a lot of other fiction, I have found to be the exact opposite of real life. Which is odd, because a fictional construct of the most realistic sequence — the hero works on his own, finds a way to change the world for the better, joins a group, finds he isn’t contributing much, goes out on his own and returns to his previous cycle of changing the world for the better — is not to be found in too many places…not within my knowledge, anyway. It’s a big comic book world, I’m sure everything’s been done at least once somewhere.

But if it has, it just doesn’t seem to take.

I wonder why? Sure we all like to have the little kids understand the benefits of working together and sharing their toys and activities with each other. But we want them to earn some money someday, don’t we? Wouldn’t it be useful to warn them about creativity-killing bureaucracies? There is The Huntress, of course; but it always seemed, to me, that the message being delivered had something to do with her being a better person when she was part of the Justice League, nevermind if she enjoyed a higher functional purpose, or if she even looked right in that role.

In fact, let’s go through all the mathematical possibilities. Work by yourself, join a group. Work as part of a group, quit the group and work by yourself. Work in a group, quit the group, have an epiphany and re-join the group. Work by yourself, join the group, decide this is for the birds, quit and work by yourself again. Cross-tabulated with…realize some successes working in the group, encounter persistent failure working by yourself, or realize some successes on your own and find yourself about as useful as a bag without a bottom when you’re in the group. How many different rows and columns are we talking about here? I do not know, and that’s out of scope…if I were to spare the few minutes getting it into a list, it would look very silly anyway and it would only serve to distract.

But your Origami-Unicorn-hey-I’m-a-replicant moment…the moment in which you realize your dreams and memories have been implanted…is this: We expect a certain moral to the parable. If you’re part of the Justice League and you realize a mix of successes and failures there, and quit to go out on your own, we have been conditioned to expect you to fail. You are ultimately supposed to learn that your proper place is within a group. If your efforts as a lone wolf are consistently successful, you’re supposed to conclude that it just doesn’t feel right, isn’t worth it, and you’re supposed to re-join the group — if you encounter failure on your own, you are supposed to come to an understanding that this is because the group is missing, and go re-join them.

Of course, if you don’t do that, and you say “Well, I may be failing as a lone individual right now, but success is just around the corner” then that would be nuts. That would almost be enough, all by itself, to make you a villain.

But if you realize persistent success in your efforts fighting as a lone superhero, and join a group, and then you find you’re chock full of fail in that configuration…then, you are expected to just keep at it, keep trying, eventually you’ll learn how to fit in and All Will Be Right With The World.

Some figures, of course, work well by themselves from the very moment in which they were created. But these are flawed, byronic heroes like the above-mentioned Batman and Spider Man. They are incomplete people, “dark” heroes whom kids can think are cool, if they want to, but the kids shouldn’t actually aspire to be like them.

As I said, this is a medium for little kids so some of this is to be expected. Parents tend to like their little darlings to be taught how to play nice with the other little darlings. But then, that’s what makes this so important. The adults should be paying more attention when their preciouses are ritually taught that engaging in efforts by yourself, is undesirable, doomed to failure, or ought to be dooomed to failure; and that self-worth is something to be found only when one functions as part of a group.

This, I believe, is not a positive development. Frankly, I don’t see the need. Yes there are some kids who’ve developed the kind of personality where they become excellent team players, and are unhappy or unfulfilled attending to their challenges by themselves. Do they require the entire comic book industry to pander to this aptitude profile, in order to feel good about themselves? Is such pandering, at an early age, even necessary? Does this even have to be defined at an early age? There’s nothing wrong with acquiring and realizing your most beneficial strengths as part of a group. Our country’s defense is based on this very thing. But if that’s where your calling is, it seems to me your drill instructor can beat the attitude into you at age seventeen or eighteen, just fine; success is not guaranteed there by any means, but it won’t have a lot to do with what comic books you were reading.

Hey, the feminists get to throw their fits whenever Wonder Woman’s legs aren’t covered up (although, at 70 she has yet to gain traction, momentum or currency — in or out of a group — without bare legs). All kinds and sorts of ethnic minority groups get to complain when they are not duly represented by some lame late-arrival to Super Friends like Apache Chief or Samurai or El Dorado. At least, I hope they complain, because I’d hate to think the writers just came up with these characters on their own…that would be really patronizing.

And don’t forget the physics. Everyone loves to complain about physics. Can Daredevil really do all that stuff just because he’s blind? How exactly does The Flash vibrate his molecules through a wall?

Anyway, everybody complains about everything in comic books — everybody’s got a pet peeve. Seems I should get mine, and that’s it right there. What’s wrong with celebrating the potential of the individual in our comic books, or even the triumph of the individual over the dysfunctional bureaucracy. Isn’t that how they got their start? Superman, the individual, wrecking the car with the group of bank robbers still inside it? Wasn’t that supposed to define the industry right there? What happened?

Perhaps this is why my left-winger friends (and crazy strangers on the innernets) and I cannot manage to come to agreement; it’s got to do with the crazy way I see things, and the way I see ’em is like this:

Imagine a family that earns $50,000 a year but is spending more than $88,000 with a credit card balance of $330,000. The discussions around the kitchen table are likely to be a little tense.

Proportionally, that’s where Washington’s finances are today, and that’s why the national discussion is a little tense, too.

Even these figures belie the magnitude of the fiscal crisis. Shutting down the entire federal government and firing every federal employee is no longer enough to balance the budget. Mandatory spending – mainly entitlements – consumes more than the government takes in.

As I understand the argument from the left, there is no disagreement here but there is no agreement either. You’ll notice their talking points seem to be — as always — tailored for presentation to emotionally excitable people who aren’t familiar with the actual numbers. Here, let me roughly paraphrase: Forget everything else, we must raise the debt limit because if we don’t it will lead to a some vague, terrible crisis. So since it’s clear what we must do today, everything else is just a red herring.

I’ll not disagree with that. But it does seem to me we were just at this party. Must bail out the savings and loans. Must pass the stimulus. Must pass ObamaCare. Must put cash-for-clunkers into effect. Must, must, must, must — don’t they get tired of that word? This isn’t Europe yet!

We are due for a downgrade to our credit, and ours would be very painful. In fact, we may have exhausted an extension on that, because of the magnitude an the intensity of the pain such a downgrade would cause.

I guess my point of disagreement is — who’s the extremist here? Kick the can down the road, because facing our come-uppin’s would lead to disaster. Don’t cut anything; borrow more; when some jackass politician comes along with a new plan to spend more money — oh, don’t tell me, let me guess it will have something to do with this “crisis” or some new crisis with a heavy overlap with this one — it’ll just be business as usual, right?

Both sides agree we’re in such a deep hurt it will get worse before it gets better. So…because it will get worse before it gets better, start extricating ourselves from this mess sometime later?

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this is a numbers issue and that makes numbers important. Fifty grand, versus three hundred thirty grand? Deal with it some other time because there is pain involved? And that makes sense because there’s a crisis?

Who’s the adult, here? Who’s the child?

Update: More concisely-worded learnings:

The president is likening the government shutdown that would follow failure to raise the debt limit to that which took place in 1995-96. But in those years, there was a prohibition against spending money Congress had not yet appropriated. Now it’s perfectly legal to spend any money that comes into the Treasury; there just won’t be as much of it, because the debt limit will preclude further borrowing. The president still can fund any 60 percent of the government he wants (the proportion that comes from tax revenues).

In his speech to the nation Monday night, Obama used tricky words to camouflage these obvious facts. He no longer spoke of defaulting on money we owe, but instead used the more vague phrase “defaulting on our obligations.” By that he means our obligations to the bureaucrats, not to our creditors.

Ultimately, whatever merit is involved in the democrats’ argument that the debt limit must must must be raised or there will be crisis crisis crisis, comes down to this: The “must” must win the day, because the crisis is far greater than we can manage to afford.

Um…if the mistake we’re about to make has to do with biting off more than we can chew, isn’t that a mistake we have made already? What did Will Rogers say about when you’re in a hole?

Sonic Charmer wants to start a DSITPT list. I hope he does. He came up with one item and I came up with an addition to sort of prime the pump.

A third item: It is a pleasurable experience to listen to rap music. I can’t understand this for the life of me. How is it people are fooled into thinking something is fun, when it’s designed to try to give them migraines? Why would you want to listen to music produced by someone who is trying to hurt you?

When you read an Ayn Rand novel, it’s hard to get through those pages without drawing a conclusion that the woman who wrote it is angry at you for reading her book, and is going to drag you through bad dialogue in order to get even with you. It’s a turn-off…but, at least, when you’re done with it you’re given something to think about. Something that might potentially expand your mind, make you curious about things, if you can understand what she’s trying to say. We can safely rule that out as a possibility with rap music, because it’s repetitious by its very nature and definition. Listening to it is, fundamentally, a non-edifying exercise in entertainment. What you know at the end of it is equal to what you know when you start it, except at the end of it your head is throbbing painfully. In fact, does it end? I’ve never heard a rap song actually end.

We digress.

Another item for DSITPT would be: Young children, girls especially, need to be taught to identify what it is they like, and then they need to be taught to show assertiveness as they insist on getting it.

For pity fuck’s sake, who’s the blistering asshole who got this started? I’d like to strangle him with his own intestines. News flash for you…BABIES…fresh out of the womb…know all there is to know about identifying what it is they want, and then showing assertiveness as they insist on getting it. It’s burned into the ROM, you might say. Kids don’t need to be taught this.

I have said before, and the schedule does not permit any rummaging through the archives for a link, that many of our modern problems have to do with certain charismatic individuals assuming mantles of real authority when they are not only inexperienced in making sensible decisions, but powerfully motivated toward making non-sensical ones. If the solution to a problem is only too obvious, say for example Orwell’s simple equation of two and two make four; then some of the charisma would have to be sacrificed in providing the correct answer of four. Four is what an ordinary person would say. To those whose position has been defined and perhaps created due to an illusion of their uniqueness, four is therefore out of the question because it would injure the definition. Some flimsy justification must therefore be sought for saying three, five or ten.

In other words: We’re screwed before you even get to the liberal-versus-conservative stuff. Once we elect the “There’s Just Something About Him” types, we’re already over the cliff. We’ve already made our commitment to nonsense.

It occurs to me lately that perhaps the source of the problem is in our search for superlatives. Think of Ayn Rand’s model of the Looters and Moochers. The moochers want free stuff; they have nothing by way of products or services to offer for a barter, but they have their numbers, which means power for the looters — if the looters can acquire, and retain, the approval of the moochers. But we could survive that without a search for superlatives among the looters. If you’re a moocher, but you believe two and two make four, and you don’t want the best of the best looters, only the looter who can bring you your things at the expense of a stranger who produced it; then, you will respond to the only facts that are truly relevant in the matter of our debt problem.

They are these: Our government is committing, on an annual basis, an amount greater than the greatest it has ever taken in. The difference between current disbursements and maximum revenue is about a trillion dollars. That’s a little over a third of what the budget was a couple years ago, and a little over a fourth of what it is now.

So a committed moocher who is receptive to common sense, and applies a “pass fail” test to candidates for public office would say: Okay then. The party’s over.

But the search for superlatives involves a tournament, in which only the champion among champions will do. A looter who says “the party is not over,” obviously is superior to the looter who says that it is. Two and two make five.

A looter who says “we don’t need to cut a single thing anywhere” is better than the looter who says “the party isn’t over an we can still loot.”

The looter who says “the solution to this problem is to raise taxes on the wealthy and not cut anything,” is better than the looter who simply says we don’t need to cut anything.

The looter who says “Oh and by the way, it’s those ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ guys who made the problem in the first place” — he’s the best of them all. And so here we are: Washington, DC is stuffed lousy with ’em.

But that doesn’t mean this is true, no matter how many times we vote on it and find that message to either triumph, or at least to resonate. That doesn’t change the facts on the ground. Two and two still make four.

And the party really is over.

The experiment may be over as well. If it isn’t, we’ve certainly found an enormous weakness in it. One well worth documenting for future civilizations who may want to try similar experiments.

Never did get an answer to that one. There is none mentioned on her Wikipedia page. The mask has really slipped if she doesn’t have one.

I’m sure you’ve probably seen this by now…I never get tired of watching it, myself.

Now, to state the obvious: This is not how mature adults argue a point. And by “mature adults” I mean, if you were truly worthy of having graduated from the eighth grade. If you were not worthy but they passed you on anyway, and then you went out in the great big wide world and got some real experience, I would expect you to pick up on what follows well before age thirty…

People with degrees make the wrong call just about as often as people without. Yes, even within the studied subject matter. The question is one notch higher on the relevance scale from a complete red herring, especially if you’re discussing something that doesn’t require a degree. Like, were we headed for a depression and are we headed for one now. You don’t need a degree to sit in judgment of that.

In fact – who would I ask about whether or not we’re headed for a depression at any given time? Someone who doesn’t have a degree. For the same reason, if you want to know if a pot of water is hot, you’re better off asking someone who’s finger is in it. That would be relying on personal anecdotes, which tends to be ill-advised, but for that particular question is there any better metric?

Awesome video. Important point. Contessa Brewer is just the most stark manifestation of a brand of flawed thinking that is actually pretty widespread. Because we’re taught think this way when we’re very young, in crappy schools — here’s a narrative, learn how to parrot it, don’t do any thinking for yourself, if someone ever challenges it then don’t engage the ideas just defend the narrative.

Telling a fact apart from an opinion? Aw, that’s just for anal retentive types. Real “thinkers” just learn to mimic things. Like a baby.

Contessa Brewer syndrome. Or something.

Via Burge.

If you’re well-informed, or even moderately-informed, you know where this is going already. We’ll start off with that particular monstrosity:

In March 2010, Congress passed President Obama’s health care reform legislation. The bill had appeared in serious jeopardy, and after the upset special election victory of Senator Scott Brown (R–MA), many analysts expected the bill to fail. Instead, it became law.

The law discourages employers from hiring in several ways:

• Businesses with fewer than 50 workers have a strong incentive to maintain this size, which allows them to avoid the mandate to provide government-approved health coverage or face a penalty;
• Businesses with more than 50 workers will see their costs for health coverage rise—they must purchase more expensive government-approved insurance or pay a penalty; and
• Employers face considerable uncertainty about what constitutes qualifying health coverage and what it will cost. They also do not know what the health care market or their health care costs will look like in four years. This makes planning for the future difficult.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is something about the modern progressive that everlastingly, stridently, viciously if necessary, opposes the concept of a sandbox. You can’t ever put one of their plans in some isolated area where its effect on people will be limited and controlled. For some reason, that’s a complete non-starter. The plan has to be implemented immediately, universally, unconditionally, involuntarily and inescapably. There can’t be any getting away from it.

I’m not in a position to opine on their concerns or their priorities — since they’re so seldom challenged on any of it.

Progressives have no response to that particular critique, by the way. Present it to them and they’ll just change the subject. More likely than not, tell you the person who came up with it is a moron and an idiot, and then say the same about you if you show any signs of receptiveness to it. But they won’t respond logically to it because there is no response. They won’t tolerate any loopholes or escape hatches or opt-in strategies or containment strategies or test-beds or anything of the like.

And here we are. Thank God I found a job before Obama was elected.

Hat tip to Boortz.

What do businesses think about the Obama administration? It’s easy to speculate on it — start with the three bullet points in the excerpt from the report, above — but you have to wait awhile to get actual confirmation on it. Recently, that has happened and it’s become something of an “Everyone else is blogging it, I might as well put ‘er up too” thing.

And yes, as you’ve heard already and it has become an obligatory statement to put in: This particular entrepreneur leans democrat.