It seems to me that without fail, every single time our current President gets away with something that would have been out of the question for His predecessors…or tries to get away with it anyway…

…right then and there, we have to become immediately re-immersed in the you-know-what. The race. Time once again for a national dialogue. Like a defense mechanism. His Divine Eminence tries to get away with some crap, it doesn’t quite go over like He thought it should’ve, and so here we go again on this tangent. Every time He walks out on the ice and it turns out to be thinner than He thought, that’s the rope.

Well, you know what I think about the word “dialogue”.

Good things about the Superman reboot: I like the people who are involved in it, they all have good names with me. Even Costner. That, alone, should ensure a good product in the summer of ’13.

Bad things? I just don’t see the necessity of a reboot. The Singer product was in itself a halfway-reboot. It had some problems but it didn’t have Batman & Robin problems. It was also going somewhere…and pardon me, I had some measure of curiosity about where these things were going. A Kryptonite planet? Son-of-Superman?

Amy Adams is the answer to the problem that Kate Bosworth is an unfit Lois Lane? How? Because she’s older, is that it? And I’m having this beef about pretty much all of the cast-ing. The cast is fine. The roles into which these actors have been placed, raise some questions…pretty much every single role does that. Diane Lane? She’s just slightly older than me, and still a sexpot. Why do we have to have a sex-kitten Martha Kent? It’s possible to be a class act when you have a 64″ waist, you know. How come that’s out of the question in movies nowadays?

I’m afraid at this point, Superman is turning into something of a classic Opera, or Shakespeare play. I mean that in the sense of…I say “Here’s a new Superman movie” and it’s like saying “Here’s a new production of King Lear.” You know each and every single plot point, and in addition, you already have a pretty well crystallized and dead-on idea of what what will be left out. The variety will be in the new faces and the timing and the music, nothing else.

Superman MUST be launched into space as a baby. You MUST show those oh-so-wholesome Kents rescuing the baby and then raising him. He’s GOT to suddenly discover on the farm one day that he can fly. Metropolis…gotta get that reporter job…gotta meet Lois Lane…Fortress of Solitude…Luthor…real estate is the one thing they’re not making anymore…

There’s just too much standard stuff that cannot be moved out of the way. The bitching is supposed to have something to do with Superman not fighting anyone. Well, there isn’t time. So…he won’t…and, at the end of it, there will be disappointment and bunch of loudmouths clamoring for a reboot.

If I wrote it, I’d make it like Lord of the Rings — a trilogy, with each installment released twelve months after the previous. And Clark doesn’t even leave Smallville until Part II. At this point, based on what I’ve seen, that’s the only thing that will dig him out of the rut.

But that sums up the situation as it exists now. It’s not a prediction. The future’s always pliable. His isn’t…that’s the focus of my complaint…but that could change. Let’s see what they do.

The fellow Nobel Laureates and economics professors and students and enthusiasts of Keynesian economics…who just totally get what you’ve been trying to say all these years…

How exactly are those cool people implicitly understanding, within a split second, that this quote was faked? What’s the giveaway, the one part of it that anyone & everyone who knows which way is up, without a trace of doubt or hesitation, would conclude is something you wouldn’t say?

You’ve written all these columns and appeared on all these Sunday morning talk shows, and after that I must ‘fess up I’m a little unclear where the line is drawn. Where’s the definition, the perimeter, the “Oh no, Paul Krugman would never say we need to wreck that” outline?

Something’s going on lately. They’re acting all cornered, wounded, tender, defensive. Since the election of Nancy Pelosi back in ’06 they had been going back to being petty, childish, smug, snooty, “aggressively non-threatening NPR male” Alan-Alda peevish. Now they’re back to the way they were after the Bush v. Gore decision. Us smart and good, you stupid and evil! Grrrr!

Not all twelve of these observations are entirely new. Some of them are things I’ve noticed awhile ago, a few I’ve even written about, but those have become more crystallized with the events of the last two or three months.

1. They want government to manage more and more intimate aspects of our lives, without transparency, oversight or process of appeal, even though six years out of ten they tell us the government is doing bad things because the guy at the top of it is stupid or evil.

2. They’re terribly concerned about the solvency of the government during these debates about taxes, and want the “rich to pay their fair share” so the government doesn’t run out of money and go into debt. But then when it comes time to discuss the continuation of a program, or possibly starting up a whole new program, suddenly their concern about government solvency flies out the window.

3. They seem genuinely agitated about the length and the emptiness of the yawning chasm between the rich and the poor, and rail against the social problems attendant to the preservation of an aristocracy entrenched in privilege which is perpetually renewed without merit. But the very first thing that happens when they’re in charge, is their election of some charismatic individual who is to be entrenched in sustained and unearned perpetual privilege. All of their domestic agenda items have something to do with just a narrow and elite few unilaterally dictating the benefits and burdens to be applied to the many. Everyone is to be impacted by what is done; it cannot be set up in a test bed to see how well it works, it must be deployed for the very first time right on the production floor, and there can’t be any getting away from it. And yet any discussions about how it will work, have to take place behind closed doors, and not everyone can take part.

4. You ask them to point out when & where higher taxes did something good for an economy, and without fail they point to FDR’s New Deal which, along with the opening of World War II, lifted us from the Great Depression. Okay…so your policies, plus the LARGEST MILITARY CONFLICT IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, will measurably improve an economy?

5. They don’t even seem to have an internal understanding of what an “economy” is. It seems like their point-of-view is that the government is part of the economy, but I don’t hear them actually say this, nor do I hear them dispute the point that the government is outside of what is commonly referred to as the “free market.” It’s like this is a question on which they haven’t coordinated yet; is “the economy” a different, larger thing apart from the “free market”? Or are these two terms used to describe the same thing, the government is outside of the economy — which must mean they think “the economy” is something helped when wealth is removed from it, so that their prescription becomes indistinguishable from the notorious bedside bloodletting of the middle ages.

6. According to them, America has cherished modern liberal values from the very beginning and it is the conservatives who are usurping the constitutional values of the republic by demanding the republic be governed according to the Constitution. The American Revolution, therefore, was a victory of liberalism over conservatism, which was represented by King George III and Great Britain. Yet, also according to them, there is something about America that makes the poor get poorer, allows businesses to run roughshod over “working families”…it’s just a terrible place and we need someone strong to fix everything. Take it all seriously, and it points to an inescapable conclusion that liberalism is destined to fail. And that’s according to the liberals.

7. They say one of the many things wrong with Christians is that the Christians insist their faith is the only path to salvation, therefore there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t follow it. They then proceed to vilify Ayn Rand as a terrible person…and then throw out the zinger that oh, by the way, didn’t you know she was an atheist? Which seems to have some significance for them. But, according to their own argument, such a thing cannot have any significance in any way whatsoever. Judging from their own conduct, it obviously does.

8. They certainly are fond of diatribes about their ideological opponents being evil or stupid. Produce some evidence unfriendly to their position, ask them for something similar to support what they’re trying to say, and if they don’t have it ready — here comes the snark. It will be bitter, it will be pointed, it will be focused, it will be personal. Above all, it will be a sure thing, like tomorrow’s sunrise. But according to their constant complaints, it’s the other side doing that. Classic psychological projection. Evil, stupid, stupid, evil…with a great flourish, they go through the motions of applying some intelligence test, or “goodness” test, and finding their opponent wanting. But what they’re really applying is a loyalty test.

9. The evil/stupid thing has some complexity to it that’s a little tough to figure out, for those on the outside. Liberals seem united on the idea that George W. Bush is stupid and Dick Cheney is evil. Circulate a questionnaire among a thousand liberals, and all thousand will mark the boxes that say Bush=Stupid and Cheney=Evil. That seems to be the orientation; now and then someone will occasionally pronounce Bush to be Evil, but I’ve yet to hear a single one say Cheney is Stupid. I haven’t heard anybody say Sarah Palin is Evil, either. Did they all meet somewhere and decide Dick Cheney is some kind of rocket scientist genius and Sarah Palin is an okay person, therefore the dogs of Cheney=Stupid and Palin=Evil just aren’t gonna hunt, so don’t even try it? If that’s what they think, they’re doing a great job of hiding it.

10. If they have a plan for improving the economy, and after it’s implemented the economy improves, this is proof that their plan must have worked. If, after the plan is implemented, the economy suffers — this, also, is proof that their plan is the right way to go, we’re just not doing enough of it.

11. I notice when our country is in some conflict with another country, their recipe is for a diplomatic solution. Very often I hear the phrase “sit down and talk out our differences.” They don’t discuss much what exactly is going to be said in these sit-downs, but after you listen to them awhile it’s clear they want America to be making most or all of the concessions while the other country makes none. Another thing I hear from them often is that we are “seen” as arrogant, lacking in humility, and we need to work harder to clean up our rep. Now, when their partisan faction enters into conflict with somebody else, they work this very differently — in that situation, it is the other side that needs to be making more concessions to them, even if they’re the ones who just lost an election. Their party does not have a problem with “humility.” I suppose that reads like I’m saying they’re safeguarding liberals’ interests in a way different from how they’re safeguarding the country’s interests…well, hey. Gotta call it like I see it.

12. They must understand that if we have a pressing and urgent problem with the atmosphere filling up with carbon & the earth heating up as a result, and we also have a pressing and urgent concern with our government running out of money, an individual’s effort to curtail his own carbon emissions isn’t going to make any difference at all with the environmental problem, whereas a few people contributing voluntarily to the Treasury just might change the outcome for the better. And yet, liberal individuals do not brag about donating excess money to the Treasury; they brag about drinking out of eco-cups and driving hybrids. That is supposed to show they’re the ones more concerned about things like “reality” and “science.”

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

They’re out again. I’m not sure what it is; Obama’s failed economic policies, I guess. Maybe His speeches are more boring than usual. Maybe someone actually started snoring audibly a few minutes in.

But it seems whenever His Eminence is trotting around giving wonderful speeches, a meme resurrects itself like it’s some dark, unholy anti-Easter…rolls the great rock away from its tomb…and emerges to proclaim the gospel that Jesus Christ was a socialist and all those who are not socialists better make right with The Lord for the end of the world is nigh.

It fails the first test of soundness in an idea, failing to retain its shape and composition when placed under the simple pressure of being taken seriously. Ponder it without ridicule for awhile and it collapses under its own weight. There is therefore a certain loss of dignity involved in even indulging it.

But the challenge has been answered, and it’s a decent job. At least good enough for the archives.

This theological assertion — a reading of Scripture that has completely escaped theologians for two millennia — rests on the story of Ananias and Saphhira, who were struck dead after they “lied to the Holy Spirit.” They had sold land, given part to the Apostles but claimed that they had given all. Here are the Apostle Peter’s words to Ananias:

Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4 Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.

Catch that? The very passage which Mr. Paul believes clinches his argument that the Bible endorses “terror-enforced-communism” actually reaffirms private property rights. The land belonged to Ananias, and after he sold it, the money was “at [his] disposal.” (Indeed, Jesus Himself declared that “the worker deserves his wages.”) His crime wasn’t withholding money; his crime was lying.

While the Bible is hardly an economics text, some economic and social themes do endure, and they are incompatible not just with socialism but also many aspects of the modern welfare state.

While the Bible calls us to help the poor, it is also clear that the poor must help themselves to the extent they are able. In 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul warns against idleness and says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” In 1 Timothy 5, Paul also declares, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” Even inclusion on the widows’ “list” (which entitled widows to receive aid from the church) was conditioned upon age and good conduct.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades, by way of Linkiest.

Susanne Eman wants to become the most obese human being ever and she’s halfway there.

It’s certainly obvious she doesn’t want to become the world’s fattest sack of goo in secret, this is all about achieving fame. So I’m going to do my best to help her.

The unemployed mother – who cannot work because of her weight – claims she stays active by doing simple exercises and having regular health checks.

‘I go for a waddle and do stretches and exercises every day,’ she said. ‘My muscles need to hold up to my weight, so I have to stay strong.
:
Despite warnings from her doctor that her bizarre experiment could kill her, Susanne insists she wants to break the record.

Dr Patrick Flite said: ‘She’s really playing Russian roulette with her life with this goal. There are well-documented complications that come with morbid obesity.

‘I would never encourage anyone to be doing what Susanne is doing.’

Dr Flite said Susanne’s medical checks showed no current problems, adding: ‘She’s capable of making her own decisions. I don’t see any psychiatric problems or anything else wrong.’

I do. If you click through to the article, you’ll see she has that smug smirk on every single picture. (Warning: She’s wearing shorts in one.) The woman is a nut, and if current mental health science cannot identify a psychiatric deficiency then that means it hasn’t looked hard enough. I’m not a psychologist and I do not play one on teevee, but I think my initial impression is the right one: In a welfare state in which there is no place for individual exceptionalism, this is where the natural instinct to achieve it is siphoned off. Yes, this is lunacy, and it’s man-made.

Thanks, Cas.

The other obvious problem is, if she should ever reach her goal, with the elapse of a little more additional time someone else is going to pass it, and then where will she be? Well, practically speaking, under the ground and that’s another problem. Doesn’t that sum it up? When Al Bundy waxes lyrically about scoring two touchdowns in a single game at Polk High School…that’s as pathetic as Susanne Eman will become if she lives, which isn’t gonna happen. So she’s one notch beneath Al Bundy. One notch and six feet.

Ed Darrell thinks it’s time for Americans to dream, and we realize our biggest dreams through government spending. Jabba The Eman of Arizona, at “52 stone” (that’s over 700 lb.) and still packing it on, proves he has a point.

The White House won’t think outside the box on this one, so Victor Davis Hanson does it for them.

If the president thought that a campaign bus tour would rescue his numbers, he was mistaken — it seems to have had the opposite effect, perhaps because it seemed staged, almost like what a wealthy person would do if he wanted to act “real” for a bit.

But if President Obama has already purchased the new bus, why not use it Winnebago-style to see America with his family for a week, visiting a national park, a closed-down plant — or a real vineyard?

Two possibilities:

One, it’s a “Jar Jar Binks” decision, meaning the Guy At The Top came up with it, and the leadership dynamic is such that nobody in earshot would point out the obvious deficiencies in the plan, so it went forward.

Two, we’re suffering from a misunderstanding of the whole point of Obama’s “vacation.” It’s a listening tour, sure, a “get the word out that I am one of you” road trip. But Obama has no reason to show He’s one of the hoi polloi; He wants to show He’s one of the New Englanders. It’s about donations and not votes.

According to Two, which I’m thinking is a bit more likely but not by much: Obama is not going to pick up a single vote because of any whistle-stop vacation. If the economy continues to suck and He manages to win re-election anyway, He’ll have to win back some votes He lost when the economy started sucking…and He’s going to do that by buying them back with the money He’s going to start raising right now. He could very well be on to something here.

Sure is a weird transformation of our nation’s political cycle, though.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

I don’t watch these things because it seems absurd to me to provide air time to people who are selected based on the fact that, whether it’s in print or electronic form, they enjoy excessive opportunities to blather away already. And I’m not seeing any reason to revisit that particular question here. But I do see some value in checking the lunacy level. Bearing in mind, these are the people who wield influence in the status quo. These are the heavy hitters, the ones whose ideas gain traction and currency…solely because those ideas came from them, not because the ideas show promise.

I think most people don’t understand how bad the problem really is.

This is the spirit of what they’re all saying; the wording changes somewhat from one walk-through to the next, but it all boils down to this.

“Okay what we have to do is raise taxes on the rich. And then we keep doing it, over and over again, until there aren’t any rich people anymore. Now, after we’ve gotten rid of all the rich people, we, uh…that is, the next step is, er…um…gah! This is no fun! When do I get to say some bad things about conservatives and Republicans??”

From here, by way of blogger friend Phil.

Hat tip to blogger friend Buck.

Niiiiiicccceeeeee……………………………..

Reason, via Althouse.

Way, way off to the left…

I am not morganovich, but s/he speaks for me…

…interesting to see that the left takes in 76% of the top 20’s money, then spend their time vilifying the re[p]ublicans for selling out to ” large special interests”.

[T]hat’s pretty astounding hypocrisy.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Ethan Cordray at On the Square, at First Things:

There’s no denying the popularity of zombies—by which I mean the modern brain-hungry, shambling, disgusting, undead-or-plague-infected monsters, not the traditional figures from voodoo culture. The modern craze started in the late 1960s and 1970s with George Romero and John A. Russo’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and the movie franchises that followed it. But recently the popularity of zombies seems to have grown dramatically. Movies like Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and Shaun of the Dead seem to come out every year; books like Max Brooks’s World War Z and the young adult novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth climb the bestseller lists; and video games like Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead sell millions of copies.
:
But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture.

Zombies represent the appetite divorced from everything else. They are incapable of judgment, self-awareness, or self-preservation. Though they still move and act, they are not really alive. They hunger and are never filled. And they aren’t just hungry for anything—they specifically want to eat the living, and even more specifically the brain, seat of rationality and self control.

In Pauline terms, they are the sarx in its purest form. Without a soul to control it, the flesh is a slave to its own desires. The rise in popularity of zombies, then, may reflect a rise in anxiety over the elevation of appetite in modern life, a popular recognition that appetite has gotten out of control, and that unchecked, unreflective, and immoderate appetite is a form of death.

Hat tip to Anchoress.

It’s definitely a Thing That Makes You Go Hmmmm…especially for me. Many’s the time I’ve driven through the mean streets of Folsom, where the story is always the same: Dickhead in the car in front of you has all the time in the world, dickhead in the car behind you is in some big ol’ hurry — until he passes you and gets his butt in your face, then all of a sudden he has all the time in the world. What a bunch of dickheads. Move it, dickhead!

And then I stop and think…my God, this is why they behave like this; they’re doing it to each other. They just did it to me, and I’m becoming one of them! It’s like zombies! And I’ve been bitten!

So why now? I think Cordray is on to something. People “work” by sitting in cubicles five feet wide and seven feet deep, and doing something that justifies a status report or a time sheet. That’s their “work.” If they’re exceptionally lucky, they’ll be among the very few who actually build something and then they’ll be able to say, look, I pulled in a paycheck by building something. But most people don’t build something…so they perform something…then they get the paycheck and spend it, or give it to somebody else to go spend. Then they consume, sleep, and it’s time to go do it again and again. Perform and consume. Occasionally some unsettling piece of evidence will arrive to suggest nobody’s placing any real value on the performing, that the remuneration of the paycheck is simply part of someone else’s performance. And so people, quite logically, start to feel like zombies; just drifting through a so-called “life” with an appetite.

Why now? Because we’re bored, that’s why. We are overly-urbanized. The problems we manage to identify in hopes of a constructive solution, we look to others to solve — without faith.

Update: Neal Boortz has a video clip up that seems apropos. “Flash Mob Loots 7-11”:

An amazing and riveting story, via Instapundit, by way of blogger friend Rick.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.

Walking away, he could hear her whimper, but forced himself not to look back until he crossed the street. Then he turned and saw a man step out of the apartment. The man read Weinstein’s note. He puzzled over the baby.

Cradling Natalie in his arms, the man walked half a block to a police station and disappeared inside.

Weinstein was beside himself.

What if the Gestapo took her from the police?

What if they decided that she was a Jew?

Pat Condell tells it as he sees it. Potty-mouth language warning is in effect…but it makes much better sense than any other description you’ve heard, do’nit?

Hat tip to Gerard.

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.