Peter Ferarra:

President Obama and the Democrats argue that any debt limit deal to reduce federal deficits and debt needs to be balanced between spending reductions and tax increases. But as I show in my new book, “America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,” that is not how we did it the last time we balanced the budget, in the 1990s.

The Republican congressional majorities elected in 1994 were greeted in February, 1995 with then President Clinton’s new budget projecting continued federal deficits of $200 billion or more indefinitely into the future. The ensuing government shutdown battles ended with budget policies that cut both taxes and spending.

Republican congressional majorities, led by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, enacted the largest capital gains tax cut in U.S. history, slashing the rate by 40% from 28% to 20%. Along with some other tax cuts on capital, that helped to promote an economic boom that produced surging revenues.

The Republican Congress then cut federal discretionary spending from 1995 to 1996 by 5.4% in real dollars, after adjusting for inflation. As a percent of GDP, federal discretionary spending, including defense and non-defense, was slashed by 17.5% in just 4 years, from 1995 to 1999.

The Congress also adopted some entitlement reform. The AFDC welfare program was terminated as an entitlement, and sent back to the states with work requirements and federal financing in fixed, finite block grants. Agricultural subsidies were phased out under the Freedom to Farm reforms (later reversed under House Speaker Dennis Hastert). President Clinton deserves credit for going along with these Congressional Republican reforms.

As a result, $200 billion annual federal deficits, which had prevailed for over 15 years, were transformed into surpluses by 1998, peaking at $236 billion by 2000. The national debt was reduced by $560 billion in surpluses from 1998 to 2001.

Political discussions about what happened in the 1990’s often involve this budget surplus President Clinton “gave” to his successor, George W. Bush. Every once in awhile — more likely if I happen to be involved in them — the question will come up “What exactly did Bill Clinton do to make the economy so rosy?” and our progressives don’t have an answer to this. They have no idea what happened, they just have a sound bite and that’s all.

But our conservatives have an idea what happened: Clinton spent his first two years taxing and spending and stimulus-ing and health-care-plan-ning, at the end of which the electorate handed him his own ass cheeks on a plate in the form of the 104th Congress. The super-duper-awesome nineties economy took off after that.

It’s not because Republicans are smarter. Some of them are just as daft, just as removed from reality, as your average liberal democrat. It’s got to do with government’s power to, not so much fix the economy, as be in the way as others try to fix the economy; good things happen when you move it out of the way. And it also has to do with incentives. When the incentives are provided for more screwing around, more smoking of the weed, laying about on the ass, waiting for everybody else to do something, people will accommodate. When things are made a bit more comfortable for the ones who take personal responsibility, and a bit less comfortable for those who do not, again, people will oblige. It really isn’t complicated at all, let alone as complicated as our beltway friends are making it out to be.

Hat tip to Boortz.

If I ever had hospitable feelings toward this sentiment coming out of Washington that us rubes here in flyover country need to participate in some “shared sacrifice,” this is the point where I’d reconsider.

President Obama demanded again yesterday that Republicans raise taxes in return for giving him the debt-limit increase he’s also demanding. Nice of him to be so accommodating. He has in mind, oh, something in the neighborhood of $1 trillion. But it turns out he’s a piker compared to Senate Democrats, whose budget leader has announced that his tax target is $2 trillion.

Mr. Obama said yesterday it’s time to “eat our peas,” and $2 trillion is a lot of peas.

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad emerged from his months at an undisclosed fiscal location yesterday to denounce Republicans, the rich, corporations, George W. Bush and anyone else he could blame for the ugly reality of a $1.4 trillion deficit 30 months into a Democratic Presidency and two years into an alleged economic recovery.

He didn’t release an actual budget outline, as he is obliged to do under the law but which he hasn’t done in two years. Instead he trickled out enough details to assess his rough priorities. Of the $4 trillion in alleged deficit reduction over 10 years, about half would be from tax increases, mostly on what he called “abusive tax shelters and tax havens” and families “sufficiently fortunate to be earning a million dollars a year.”

Hmmm. In 2008 about 320,000 Americans reported income of more than $1 million, or about 0.3% of all income tax returns. They paid about $250 billion in taxes that year. Mr. Conrad is going to get nearly $2 trillion more from them without damaging the economy? That should be some trick.

Forget all the debates about whether a nation can tax itself into prosperity, like Churchill’s man in a big bucket pulling himself up by the handle. Just don’t even get that complicated with it — these jackwagons aren’t even doing fifth-grade math.

They aren’t even coming up with plans. Rather, they’re running a mad, circuitous route on an irrational impulse. Tax more, spend more, then go back, Jack, and do it again.

Remember the “stimulus,” or, as it was officially titled, the Recovery Act of 2009? It was President Obama’s first major legislative initiative, enacted the month after he took office with only Democratic votes in the House and just three Republicans in the Senate (one of whom was a Democrat by that summer). The price tag was huge, some $800 billion, or 50 times the size (in nominal terms) of the stimulus Bill Clinton proposed at the outset of his presidency. Congress killed the $16 billion Clinton stimulus because it was too expensive.

Unemployment that January was 7.6%, and Obama’s economic advisers warned that it could rise as high as 8% without the stimulus. With the stimulus, it rose as high as 10.2% in October 2009. Last month’s rate was 9.2%, still 1.2 points higher than the level the stimulus was supposed to prevent us from ever reaching. By contrast, in January 1993 unemployment was 7.3%. Without the Clinton stimulus, it had declined to 6.5% by the end of that year.
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One school of thought is that the so-called stimulus failed because it was, as former Enron adviser Paul Krugman puts it, “woefully inadequate.” This is the economic analogue of the Kagan Principle, which liberal Supreme Court justices would use to limit freedom of speech: The more stubbornly corrupt the government is, the more justified it is in curtailing fundamental liberties in the name of preventing corruption.

It’s a common refrain among those who lust to increase government’s size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn’t go far enough.

Let’s generalize this into the First Rule of Liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government. As Obama said today, complaining about Republican pressure to cut spending: “I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes–like new programs.”

Question: Do we get to eighty-six the old programs when we come up with these new programs? I’ve got a feeling I already know the answer to that one.

I think the President, like all good liberals, has His own definition in mind for the word “everybody” and it is not the classical meaning for that word. Or perhaps when He is compelled to meet with people who are not like-minded, like in these budget deals for instance, He still doesn’t see a lot of disagreement because the Republicans are thinking “yeah, go ahead and run on that next year, I can’t wait.” It’s certainly the first thought in my mind. Be honest in 2012. Tell us what You’ll be doing in the next four years — that You and Your friends don’t think we’re taxed enough and You and Your friends never will, nor will You and Your friends ever think we’re spending enough on government programs.

Be the drunk, pushing the last few minutes before final call, obviously over-served and clamoring incoherently “Whaddya gotta do to get a drink in this place??” And then let we, The People — the nation’s bartender — hold a vote on it.

Is three months of dust too much? I think not…

You see how much I love “diversity” — I’d take Sarah Palin as the next President, and Maddox too. Can’t straddle a divide much broader than that.

(Naughtly language warning.)

It’s been awhile since we blogged some Steyn. Are you ready? Don’t have a mouth full of cereal, juice or coffee?

I think we ought to be harder when minor functionaries of a failed leviathan reveal themselves to have a defective understanding of the role of government in free societies. Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe“, has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison’s iconic incandescent in economic terms:

We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.

So what? I waste my own money on all kinds of things. If I wanted Steven Chu to have a say in it, I’d get Parson Bloomberg to marry us at Gracie Mansion.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of “stimulus” and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with.

Hat tip to William Teach.

Charles Krauthammer invokes it out of necessity:

Obama has run disastrous annual deficits of around $1.5 trillion while insisting for months on a “clean” debt-ceiling increase, i.e., with no budget cuts at all. Yet suddenly he now rises to champion major long-term debt reduction, scorning any suggestions of a short-term debt-limit deal as can-kicking.

The flip-flop is transparently political. A short-term deal means another debt-ceiling fight before Election Day, a debate that would put Obama on the defensive and distract from the Mediscare campaign to which the Democrats are clinging to save them in 2012.

A clever strategy it is: Do nothing (see above); invite the Republicans to propose real debt reduction first; and when they do — voting for the Ryan budget and its now infamous and courageous Medicare reform — demagogue them to death.

And then up the ante by demanding Republican agreement to tax increases. So: First you get the GOP to seize the left’s third rail by daring to lay a finger on entitlements. Then you demand the GOP seize the right’s third rail by violating its no-tax pledge. A full-spectrum electrocution. Brilliant.
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Highly placed leaks are portraying him as heroically prepared to offer Social Security and Medicare cuts.

We shall see. It’s no mystery what is needed. First, entitlement reform that changes the inflation measure, introduces means testing, then syncs the (lower) Medicare eligibility age with Social Security’s and indexes them both to longevity. And second, real tax reform, both corporate and individual, that eliminates myriad loopholes in return for lower tax rates for everyone.

That’s real debt reduction. Yet even now, we don’t know where the president stands on any of this. Until we do, I’ll follow the Elmendorf Rule: We don’t estimate leaks. Let’s see if Obama can suspend his 2012 electioneering long enough to keep the economy from going over the debt cliff.

Hat tip to Boortz.

Not to toot my own horn or anything…but five years ago, I predicted the Obama phenomenon. I did it the way I predict pretty much everything; it works very well. I simply observed what I had seen already.

One of the tactics I see that seems to intensify the potential for failure, is something I have come to call the “Gonnadooz versus Havdunz” approach. It’s an indicator that the salesman is lying about the superiority of what he provides, and is acutely aware that his product is, in fact, inferior. It works like this. You pitch me something…you compare the service you provide to an equivalent service provided by the other guy. You talk about what the other guy does, you go on and on about the history of what he’s been doing, shining the light in the direction that accentuates the blemishes. That’s the “Havdunz.” And then you talk about what you will do. That’s the “Gonnadooz.”

You can’t point out the blemishes of a “Gonnadooz,” because there aren’t any yet. It’s like pointing out the warts of a ghost. It’s just an ethereal vision, nothing more. So it’s an unequal comparison. Prospective customers may be forgiven for overlooking the hobbling effect that this has on the comparison vehicle. But the salesman built that vehicle. He must know.

Is Barack Obama going to run for re-election completely on the “Gonnadooz” of His second term, from 2013 to 2017? Just command us lowly rubes to forget all about His first? Rather than fill up two single-spaced pages with some phony-baloney “jobs created or saved” nonsense, arrive at the campaign season with zip by way of positive achievements or whelpy things pretending to be positive achievements…dust off the fake Greek columns…and be just like the IBM computer salesman from the old joke, tell us how awesome it’s gonna be when we finally get it?

I know we’ll see some of that. For the campaign to rely on it completely, seems almost like recklessness. More hope & change? More planted trollops pretending to faint in front of His speeches?

Maybe, on the debt reduction issue, that’s the plan. It seems far fetched to me, but I’m not in a good position to handicap His chances. This is a completely different world from the one in which I live, and I just don’t understand it.

Victor Davis Hanson has balls of solid rock. He’s ready to write the epitaph…in pencil, I hope, for I am not so sure…on our long years of national madness (hat tip again to Gerard).

In these years of insanity, I used to be asked on-campus questions, but delivered as lectures, along the lines of “Bush’s polluting pals are ruining the planet when we know Al Gore’s cap and trade would save us. Now it’s too late!” Of course, in 2006 gasoline was relatively cheap, unemployment low, and there was growth in the economy. College students had the luxury of declaiming how George Bush had wiped out the polar bears as they waited for several good job offers.

Do you remember the hysteria over the supposed trampling of the Constitution? Those were the days of anger when Harold Koh, instead of writing briefs defending the Obama’s administration’s targeted killing by Predators and bypassing the War Powers Act in Libya, had been suing various Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations over the unfortunate at Guantanamo. At one time or another, a Sean Penn, a Hollywood producer (Rendition, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, etc.), a Whoopi Goldberg, a David Letterman, and legions more were all claiming that we had lost our freedoms to the satanic George Bush. These were the glory days of Dick Durbin comparing U.S. servicemen to mass killers, as John Kerry claimed they were quasi terrorists, in Harry Reid’s “lost” war, committing John Murtha’s war crimes — to the chorus of Michael Moore (guest of honor at the 2004 Democratic Convention) cheering on their killers as “minutemen.”

The point about the luxury of desultory thinking, is one worthy of being made much more often, and my own archives drone on about this at some length although I’m too lazy to engage in some quality rummaging at the moment. Our feasts & famines do seem to be driving this cycle. We engage in prerational thinking during those times when we feel like we can afford to do it. Thirty dollars a week plunked down on fancy drinks at Starbucks, and not feeling the pinch, Yay! Drinking water and groceries delivered, a bazillion and one channels on cable or satellite, plus those red envelopes from Netflix to help supplement the video appetite. Don’t feel like cooking? The pizza place is on speed dial.

At home, you do what your wife tells you to do. She does what the doctor tells her to do. The kids do what the teacher tells them to do. You go to work, and do what the boss tells you to do. Pretty soon, you have a life completely stripped bare, 24-by-7, of any occasion on which we have to deal with the situation of our ancestors: Do whatever you like, but be prepared to deal with the consequences. Your mind-within-the-mind, the one that is made of energy and not matter, is nourished by this brand of “oxygen” and over time, will surely perish without it.

Prerational thinking — the kind that reckons with only one consequence, which is banishment from the collective. It has brought us up to, and perhaps past, the brink of ruin. The village has settled on a consensus, for whatever reason, that Pi is three-and-a-half so it must be true. Why not just go with the flow? Even if it’s wrong, we can afford to be wrong. Gas is two bucks a gallon and the unemployment rate is 5.6%. I’m still getting my water delivered and there are still all these channels. Coming up with the right answer, during a time in which we’re only pretending to be oppressed or starving or shorted in some way, fails to retain its value as a cherished ideal.

We got crazy because we were lazy. We got stupid because we got fat.

The unemployment rate, now, is 9.2%. Nearly double. One wonders how well Fahrenheit 911, with all its flimsy connections to reality, would do if it were released today. How about a dingbat House Speaker telling us to pass the bill so we can find out what’s in it, how would that fly now? Economic alarm does have a nourishing effect on the mind-of-energy. We may work like the dickens to try to deny it, but when the cupboards start to go bare we have this instinctive drive to start saying “No…really. Is that true? I have to know, I need this to actually work.”

We actually become hostile to the ideas we can tell are bad, or are so poorly thought out they can only turn out to be good because of some happy coincidence. We engage this feeling of hostility — if we are hungry or if we are afraid we might become hungry. We are not so vigilant when hot plates of Szechuan and Four Seasons, carried right to our door, are just a phone call away. Well you know…the phone call and the forty-five or so highly inconvenient minutes of waiting. Boo hoo.

Hate to say it folks, but we needed a recession. We needed a good kick in the ass. Living this way, for a time, makes you stupid. And this ultra-pasteurized, ultra-sophisticated, zillion-cable-channel Paris-Hilton-rodent-canine-in-a-purse five-dollar-caramel-macchiato citadel we’d built for ourselves, was doing that to us. With the benefit of hindsight, as VDH demonstrates, we can see we had gone very, very far down that road.

I tried to warn ya.

Never did have much appreciation for that saying until just now.

I really don’t like the idea of picking on Ann Althouse, and I find The Other McCain to be handling this, let us say, indelicately. But the timeless axiom does hold true, and Althouse is guilty of demonstrating it.

If you voted for Obama, you made a mistake. Unless, that is, you intended to dabble in a metamorphosis into a communist nation, raise taxes, put a major drag on the economy, send spending through the roof and give billions of dollars away to Barry’s pals. If that isn’t what you wanted to see happen but you punched O’s chad anyway, you were snookered because you didn’t pay attention. It was not a “rational choice,” it was a lazy, emotionally-driven choice. Period.

Say what you want about President Soetoro, but He isn’t that sneaky. Or at least, He wasn’t that time. He explained exactly what He was going to do. Remember? That conversation with Joe The Plumber? Were ya sleeping?

An Obama voter describes in vivid detail, the not-so-gradual opening of her eyes…

“Our media makes being an informed voter, a full-time job in this country.”

Hat tip to Chicks on the Right.

From Prof. Jacobson:

It’s all about the message:

Top Obama adviser says unemployment won’t be key in 2012

President Obama’s senior political adviser David Plouffe said Wednesday that people won’t vote in 2012 based on the unemployment rate.

Well no, of course it will not be about unemployment, considering the numbers continue to look dismal:

Jobs Picture Gets Even Worse as Rate Swells to 9.2%

U.S. employment growth ground to a halt in June, with employers hiring the fewest number of workers in nine months, dousing hopes the economy would regain momentum in the second half of the year.

I don’t know that a competent, skilled general ever looks at a battle as a sure thing. Perhaps that would go against the job description. But if ever any one did, he’d surely be delighted to discover the enemy’s high command is thinking the way David Plouffe thinks: rose-colored-freakin’-glasses. Wish on something, expect it, demand it, and reality will magically comply.

It seems progs just can’t get away from it. Ever since FDR slipped into a final coma, the left loses the White House and the Senate every so many years, almost as a matter of ritual, as a direct result of this delusion that they can dictate to the rest of the country what our concerns are supposed to be. Say-it’s-so, make-it-so. When it works, it works, but it only works about a third of the time. Maybe less than that. So they get voted out.

These jackasses are supposed to be a force to be reckoned with in 2012, huh?

The new motherboard finally showed up last night.

Looks like we have a computer building project on Saturday. Happy happy, joy joy.

Lots of false starts to this one. And this was the last component needed. Isn’t that always the way things go? Why is that?

Don’t ask me how, but while we were on the road for the holiday doing our bit to emit carbon and shove the price of gas upward, we were given occasion to talk about “The Mode.” You know, the women-mode…the one where you have to do something all over again, because she’s just let you know in no uncertain terms that you botched it good. But you don’t exactly feel like jumping right into it because with the mode she’s in, the verdict will come down that you botched it again, and how you did it & re-did it, you have the feeling it isn’t going to factor in to things too much. The Mode will decide everything, and at the moment it is not working in your favor.

I think men of all ages, co-existing with all sorts of grades and flavors of women, have encountered The Mode. It seems to me there is a communication glitch occurring between the sexes here. The female, by handing down one item of criticism after another after another, is communicating a simple message of “you need to be paying closer attention.” The fellas, on the other hand, think like men; how unreasonable, huh? And so they are picking up a message of “your energy here is entirely wasted.”

Now, a word or two is necessary on the subject of my unique story. I’m a peculiarity among most men. The typical male will start out in his adulthood convinced he knows everything about women, and then he’ll demonstrate this is not so, the first time he encounters The Mode. He’ll take the message literally that he needs to be paying closer attention, and busy himself with managing an ever-expanding list of things that need to be fixed or improved upon. This is precisely the wrong approach, not at all unlike trying to push a grocery cart down a steep hill. It gets away from you pretty quickly, and your efforts to keep up only result in actions that are at odds with the female’s expectations…which, in turn, causes the list of things to be fixed-or-improved, to explode even faster. The male pays a very steep price for this. My price was steeper than most, and so I had burned within me at a tender age that most central and all-defining of libertarian tenets:

Expect to see more of that which is encouraged, and expect to see less of that which is discouraged.

I took that to extremes. As a result, I should have more tales of woe to share, since extremes seldom lead to anything good. But in this case, it’s worked out alright. Perhaps what I discovered is the bedrock principle upon which all working human civilizations must function. If you want to see less of something, you shouldn’t encourage it. Seems like something we should remember more easily, and more often, than we do.

So my technique has been — honesty first. The most honest response to The Mode is, if you’re trying to get me to pay closer attention, this is not the way to go about it. Here on Planet Man, if something somewhere is so loaded with problems that the faults in its behavior must be pointed out several times a minute, it is necessary first of all to catalogue the faults, so it can be determined whether they all share a common cause. And you can’t catalogue something if you don’t know the quantity of it…therefore…the very first task to be achieved, if we take The Mode seriously, is to count them.

“Yes, sweetheart, that’s the third thing I’ve botched today.”

“You’re right, cupcake, that’s the fourth thing I’ve biffed today.”

“Absolutely, puddin’-butt, that’s the fifth thing I’ve fucked up today.”

I’ve never made it past eight.

My message here for the gals is simple: The “strafing run” is not helping you. After three, you’re done. We are NOT paying more attention to you — why would we? — and we’re not going to. It isn’t that we don’t care; we just don’t manage lists the same way you do. If we’re seasoned and smart, we stopped taking the details seriously a long time ago, and come to the realization that you’re in The Mode and we can’t do anything right. If we’re young and stupid, we’ll take it more seriously, but just end up overwhelmed and frustrated.

For gentlemen: You really need to re-examine how they’re doing things, anytime the lady gets that look in her eye, where she wishes you would take a hike for a time, and in your place would materialize a nice White Zinfandel, a box of chocolates, and a video device playing some New Moon movie, or Sex in the City, or Dr. Zhivago.

But that last one works for the gals as well. It works for beer, pizza and James Bond. (James Bond never does anything wrong!) It isn’t a good effort, or a noble effort, or an effort likely to meet with success, when you try to command more intense levels of attention by dispensing endless lists. Somewhere after item number five or so, the list becomes just so much static. And if the one or two issues that are really most pressing, are not present in those five, then the only message you’ve managed to send is: You suck ass at prioritizing.

If you seek to inspire a more deferential attitude from your beau, you shouldn’t signal to us that you suck ass at prioritizing. We’re fixers. It’s what we do. If we’re picking up that you’re in the middle of handling a list of something and it’s beyond your abilities to properly handle it, we’re going to jump in and do some of it for you. This, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict, is not even in the same ballpark as the kind of behavior you’d like to see from us.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Washington Examiner:

The Hartland-Lakeside School District, about 30 miles west of Milwaukee in tiny Hartland, Wis., had a problem in its collective bargaining contract with the local teachers union.

The contract required the school district to purchase health insurance from a company called WEA Trust. The creation of Wisconsin’s largest teachers union — “WEA” stands for Wisconsin Education Association — WEA Trust made money when union officials used collective bargaining agreements to steer profitable business its way.

The problem for Hartland-Lakeside was that WEA Trust was charging significantly higher rates than the school district could find on the open market. School officials knew that because they got a better deal from United HealthCare for coverage of nonunion employees. On more than one occasion, Superintendent Glenn Schilling asked WEA Trust why the rates were so high. “I could never get a definitive answer on that,” says Schilling.

Changing to a different insurance company would save Hartland-Lakeside hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be spent on key educational priorities — especially important since the cash-strapped state government was cutting back on education funding. But teachers union officials wouldn’t allow it; the WEA Trust requirement was in the contract, and union leaders refused to let Hartland-Lakeside off the hook.

That’s where Wisconsin’s new budget law came in. The law, bitterly opposed by organized labor in the state and across the nation, limits the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. And it just happens that the Hartland-Lakeside teachers’ collective bargaining agreement expired on June 30. So now, freed from the expensive WEA Trust deal, the school district has changed insurers.

“It’s going to save us about $690,000 in 2011-2012,” says Schilling. Insurance costs that had been about $2.5 million a year will now be around $1.8 million. What union leaders said would be a catastrophe will in fact be a boon to teachers and students.

Tell the collective-minded leftists to go stick it, solve a problem nearly overnight. There’s a lesson here for the rest of us.

Ever wonder why the words “energy crisis” can be associated with the 1970’s but not with the 1980’s? Tell the left to go stick it, solve a problem overnight.

In all matters outside of sex, they don’t believe in choice. And their end goal is to make things more expensive, so one or several of their friends can enjoy a kickback.

Issue by issue by issue, this remains a constant. Liberals are exactly what they tell us conservatives are.

This is a take-off on this.

The parody is a perfectly adequate response to the original video. But maybe it would be good to jot down some reasons why I’m a Republican. Or, to be more accurate about it, why I’m a conservative, or a rightward-leaning libertarian, or why I’m a Tea Party guy. Why I’m not a democrat.

1. Before we realize absolute success in making life completely perfect and before everybody’s safety and happiness are resolutely guaranteed, I think we can stop making new rules. Yeah, before we get there. For no reason, just stop. Otherwise, all things within our ability fall into two categories: What’s already illegal now, and what will be someday. And, you know, I don’t like that.
2. I don’t want my elected officials to make me a better person. I don’t think they have what it takes to do that, even when my favorite guys are the ones that got elected. It’s just not in the job description.
3. I think the whole point of taxation is to raise revenue for vital services. Their purpose is not to punish or reward people, or offer people incentives to start or stop doing certain things.
4. If you have a hot new idea, I think it should be tested out someplace where it doesn’t impact anyone, before we force it on people. That’s just the way I see it. For this reason alone, I can’t be a democrat.
5. I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
6. I don’t think we’re more civilized when we find reasons not to lock up violent criminals, or look for excuses not to execute them when they’ve killed innocent people. That doesn’t protect the innocent. Actually, I think that’s barbaric behavior, because innocent people get hurt and we know it. I think we’re more civilized when pull the switch.
7. I think when some people produce goods and services of value and other people do not, the people who produce things can go ahead and do their producing without advice or regulations from the non-productive people. Those non-productive people, if they knew anything about the best way of producing things, I figure they’d already be doing it.
8. The way I see it, humans are part of nature. Even when you take humans out of nature, this doesn’t make nature “pristine,” or free of malice, violence, death, even sadism…so what’s the point? Leave humans in it. We belong in it.
9. I don’t think it’s right to count “jobs created or saved.” I think when you create jobs with money you forcibly removed from other people by means of taxation, you need to produce a “net”; you need to factor in the jobs that failed to materialize because the people who would’ve created them, had to worry about these taxes.
10. I think when you earn money, and you pay all the taxes in effect at the time, whatever’s left belongs to you. And that is perfectly okay.
11. It remains okay even if you end up with vastly more money than some other guy. I don’t think there is any one point where you’ve made enough money.
12. I respectfully disagree with Michael Moore. Private property is not a “national resource.” It is a resource that should be placed under the control of the people who own it.
13. I’m worried about the exploding public debt. I’m worried about it when we debate tax policy…AND…unlike democrats, I keep worrying about it when we discuss where the money should be spent. I can’t turn it off like a switch.
14. By the way, those two are separate in my mind. Because I’m not mentally disabled, I don’t think a tax cut is something that “costs” us anything.
15. When we talk of the virtues of “choice,” I don’t think sex means an awful lot. To be a democrat, you have to think choice is important when you’re talking about sex, then you have to be suddenly anti-choice when we’re not talking about sex anymore. I just can’t bend that far.
16. I don’t think, when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.
17. However, when a child has both a mother and a father…I do think, generally, that is good for everybody.
18. Drill, baby, drill. Consuming resources is a natural part of living life, and going after those resources is a natural part of consuming them. There is no shame for anyone in any of this. The shame is in compelling others to make sacrifices you yourself are not willing to make.
19. I don’t think people are necessarily better if they voted for Obama.
20. I don’t think people are necessarily better because of the color of their skin.
21. I don’t think people are necessarily better if they’re women.
22. I don’t think people are necessarily better if they’re gay.
23. I don’t think people are necessarily better if they choose to be vegetarians.
24. I don’t think people are necessarily better if they happen to work for the government.
25. I know too much to be a democrat. I know you can’t restore the hours that the library is open, by cutting defense spending.
26. I don’t think a nation can tax its way into prosperity. I don’t think the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. And if they are, then that’s great, because you can only get so poor, but if the rich are getting richer then that would mean the economy is doing better, and who would have a problem with that?
27. I don’t believe the middle class is taking any kind of a beating when it is found that fewer people are in it. I don’t think organized labor is taking a beating when there are fewer members. I don’t think people appreciate the environmental movement more when they see more hybrid cars or eco-cups. I don’t think college graduates enjoy a brighter future when there are more college graduates. In short, I can’t be a democrat because I appreciate the simple economic truth that commodities become precious through scarcity, not through abundance.
28. I think a study that is funded by the government has just as much chance to be biased and inaccurate, as a study funded by oil companies, in fact the government-backed study has greater potential to rely on false information.
29. I don’t believe in “unfettered capitalism.” Such a thing is an impossibility, because you cannot have capitalism without a free market, and in a free market all transactions 1) must involve at least two parties representing different interests, and 2) are suspended by default, permitted to go forward only if both sides believe they’re coming out of it ahead. Capitalism is self-regulating. Socialism, on the other hand, works within the rules only until such time as it figures out it needs to break the rules, and then consistently tries to find ways to break the rules.
30. I know Ronald Reagan was right: If not a one among us is sufficiently competent to manage his own affairs, there cannot be anyone among us sufficiently competent to manage everybody else’s.

At 4:16: “This is a nation blessed by God.” Wild applause. Makes that beer a little tastier and that barbeque sauce a little bit yummier, doesn’t it?

I know VDH already made this point, but there’s something to be said for the video format, as well as for this special celebrity personality.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Great news!

My fiance finally managed to take a picture of me that makes me look thin not extremely fat.

I like the angry shirt-and-tie guy. I’d say that’s your Internet version, right there. All snarky and angry, like Bill Bixby right before he turns into the Incredible Hulk…or…maybe more like Hawkeye Pierce or any one of a number of other “aggressively non-threatening NPR males.”

Why are you a democrat? Something to do with Halliburton? Or hope & change maybe?

Hat tip to Gerard.

On Friday I said:

I’ll put up something to make you feel better about the holiday, as it approaches. At least I’ll give it my very best shot.

Re-discovered long-time blog bud Terri delivers:

Victor Davis Hansen has this covered (bold is mine):

Individual freedom in America manifests itself in ways most of the world can hardly fathom — whether our unique tradition of the right to gun ownership, the near impossibility of proving libel in US courts, or the singular custom of multimillion-dollar philanthropic institutions, foundations and private endowments. Herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans is almost impossible — and will remain so as long as well-protected citizens can say what they want and do as they please with their hard-earned money.
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This year, a minority of babies born here will resemble the look of the Founding Fathers. Yet America will continue as it was envisioned, as long as those of various races and colors are committed to the country’s original ideals.

The Founders’ notion of the rule of law, coupled with freedom of the individual, explains why America runs on merit, not tribal affinities or birth.

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While EJ Dionne just doesn’t get it.

Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country’s future that we’re usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy’s give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe — or have convinced themselves — that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

Then he goes on to explain how those damn tea partiers just don’t understand their own movement. If they did, then they would bend and we could all go forward.

What he doesn’t get is that government spending needs to be reduced BEFORE taxes go up.

If government spending continues to grow at the rate it has grown in the last few years we’re all going to fail. If the government can’t show that it is willing to give up some of it’s spending, and leave it like that for a little while, I bet we’d all be happy to pay a little more to get some of this freaking debt reduced. But NOT with a government that thinks our money is their money.

Dionne does not get it.

We are a free people because we insist upon it. Not because the federal government grants it. That IS a principle so profound that it’s worth standing your ground.

Robert at Small Dead Animals has a special treat for the readers there: The Fourth of July Declaration by Prager University.

We’re out here by the seashore for the long holiday, losing our “rented beach house” virginity. Got a Weber kettle, fire pit, and close proximity to the beach. Making good use of all three, declaring a little independence of our own.

Happy Fourth, everybody.

Unbe-freakin’-lievable.

Twenty-eight hours after a housekeeper at the Sofitel New York said she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she spoke by phone to a boyfriend in an immigration jail in Arizona.

Investigators with the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned the call had been recorded and had it translated from a “unique dialect of Fulani,” a language from the woman’s native country, Guinea, according to a well-placed law enforcement official.

When the conversation was translated — a job completed only this Wednesday — investigators were alarmed: “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing,’ ” the official said.

It was another ground-shifting revelation in a continuing series of troubling statements, fabrications and associations that unraveled the case and upended prosecutors’ view of the woman. Once, in the hours after she said she was attacked on May 14, she’d been a “very pious, devout Muslim woman, shattered by this experience,” the official said — a seemingly ideal witness.

Little by little, her credibility as a witness crumbled — she had lied about her immigration, about being gang raped in Guinea, about her experiences in her homeland and about her finances, according to two law enforcement officials. She had been linked to people suspected of crimes. She changed her account of what she did immediately after the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn. Sit-downs with prosecutors became tense, even angry. Initially composed, she later collapsed in tears and got down on the floor during questioning. She became unavailable to investigators from the district attorney’s office for days at a time.

Now the phone call raised yet another problem: it seemed as if she hoped to profit from whatever occurred in Suite 2806.

This particular strain of the feminist movement — the Anita Hill offshoot, the “Women Never Lie About This Stuff” strain — has been aging rather poorly. It has now devolved into that brand of silliness that only possesses a passing similarity to common sense, from the perspective of people who’ve lived through its maturity; the ones suffering from the “frog in a pot of gradually warming water” syndrome.

Expose it to someone intelligent and sensible, who makes an acquaintance with it in one dazzling instant — a Visigoth or a Hun who’s been frozen for centuries, Mork from Ork, your great-grandchildren who read about it in history books and then come asking you about it, My Favorite Martian — and there’s no way to explain it logically, or even, why & how we were hoodwinked by it.

What’s this? A certain demographic group never lies about this stuff, so you just presume it’s on the up-and-up? Send men to prison, end their careers? You call that justice?

But yeah. We’ve been living under this system for generations now.

Don’t pick on the girl.

They tell me I’m wordy where everyone else is brief. It has not escaped my notice, that they say this about things that seem to be sufficiently complex that the “brief” people never seem to be finished discussing them…but that’s a rant for another day…

There’s lots more wrangling to be done about that Ohio decision, and the only thing that can be stated with confidence is that Anthony Kennedy will end up making the final call. One thing I know for an absolute certainty, is no matter how ObamaCare turns out, more is coming afterward; we aren’t finished with statist politicians beseeching us to support this-or-that centrally-managed scheme. That’s going to go on and on. The non-productive people will always want to make rules about how the productive people produce. And suckers will fall for it. When you get a bill for $2,000 after having a cut stitched up over the weekend in the emergency care center, there’s something appealing about a plan to “fix it.” Or “reform” I guess is their favorite catchphrase. Maybe that’s the answer. Slime that word “reform.” Kill off every appealing buzzword they find.

But this crap is going to go on. When my grandchildren are suffering senile dementia, we’ll still be hashing this stuff out.

Here, I’ll make it REAL simple. I’ll be brief where everyone else is garrulous. Just to shake things up a bit.

Pick a year. Like, for example, 1975. Would you say government has become more involved or less involved in the administration of medical care since 1975?

Wow, that was easy. Okay. Would you say medical services have become more customer-oriented, or less customer-oriented, since 1975?

More or less prone to screw-ups? I’m not talking about amputating the wrong foot. I just got done facilitating communication between a referring physician and a referred physician, just got them to agree the referring physician did, indeed, fax over the correct paperwork. Turned that puppy around in a week or two. You know, I could have used that time actually working at my job…so I could go home earlier…

It seems to me almost like a ritual. Oh dear, we didn’t get the referral. Oh dear, it’s wrong. You’ll have to call them back and…

How about cost? Would you get slapped with bill for two thousand bucks after having your hand stitched up in the emergency room — in 1975?

So, government has gotten much more involved. Customer service is down, screw-ups are routine and expected, costs are soaring out of sight.

No need to argue in a vacuum about what “would” happen with more government intervention. We already know. We know it for an absolute, tested fact.

Argument over.

The public school “unable” racket, that is. You know the drill by now. Bewildered parents are contacted by very prim and proper school officials, and politely corrected with regard to their previous mistaken notions that junior just might have the potential to live a normal life. No can do, parents. We’re here to tell you the kid’s Rain Man.

There does seem to be a broad and intense epidemic these days, of public school officials notifying parents that kids are unable to do things.

That coincided nicely with my son’s kindergarten administrators telling us that he’s: “unable to express ideas in front of a group, unable to selectively listen for sounds, follow multi-step directions,” and our supreme favorite: “unable to to complete assigned tasks in allotted time.”
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The school administrator that summoned us to discuss my boy’s “inability to complete assigned tasks in the allotted time” came in, plopped a slovenly 8″ thick, undifferentiated and dogeared pile of foolscap paper on the table, and was sipping from a franchise restaurant disposable hot coffee container unavailable in the town I live in. And although the meeting was held at their school, had been postponed twice already, and she has a secretary, she was a full twenty-five minutes late.

This is all part of a big octopus of bureaucracy, one that is engaged lately in a writhing, slithering effort of some kind — and, as is the case with any octopus of bureaucracy, no single tentacle can explain fully what it’s all about.

But I don’t trust this octopus. It’s calling in one parent after another after another, and delivering the same canned speech about junior-can’t-do-things. Assuming it takes itself seriously, it must be bearing witness to a skyrocketing disability statistic — and its response is to just keep on keepin’-on, not bothering to question anything, just call in the next parent to deliver the next speech, that yer-kid’s-an-invalid.

After a few years of this problem spiraling out of control with the tentacles all writhing around like that…eventually you have to blame the parents, for putting up with it. They don’t all react the same way Sippican did.

In which some grown-up hippie starts giving motivational speeches about choice being a detriment, and Lee Doren goes after him.

I think, in this one case, Mr. Doren is being a bit overly tough on the guy. Mr. Schwartz does have a point here. People do tend to under-perform, to their own lack of satisfaction, when given too many options.

The aging hippie’s mistake — and is this not always the case? — is to confuse the common with the ideal. People have been known to experience confusion when they are offered too many choices. That means, according to graying-hippie motivational-speaker Mr. Schwartz, that’s what will happen with all of us. A weakness borne by some, is a weakness that encumbers all.

And, once again, the structure crumples in on itself, falling in to that ages-old vestigial remnant: It’s beyond human capacity to be great. We all must settle for mediocrity, resign ourselves to being footsoldiers in some far greater construct, like carpenter ants slaving away for a queen. Wealth redistribution.

What did Reagan say about this? Crudely paraphrasing: If not a single one among us is sufficiently responsible to manage his own affairs, who among us is competent to manage everybody else’s?

This whole thing cuts straight to the quick of why I think leftists are full of shit, and maybe I shouldn’t opine on this on such a gorgeous, breathtakingly beautiful Friday night before a long weekend. But here it goes: The utterly phony sense of egalitarianism. It really makes me wanna barf. The contents of the package are the precise opposite of the covering. Supposedly, we’re going to make this perfect society where everybody is equal; but, in reality, the “normal” people are going to slave away, without the benefit of choice, and these ultra-special people at the nucleus of the atom are going to make all the decisions and tell the drones how to live. Because the drones are too simple and stupid to handle a decision.

Happy Friday, everybody. And where were you nineteen years ago?

Yeah, I’m at that age where, a few years ago, I’d see one of these new swimsuit models and think “Yeah, with a lot of awkwardness maybe I could have been her father, and therefore I shouldn’t look.” And now, it’s more like “Aw hell yeah, I can name the woman who could have been her mother.” In Ms. Upton’s case, I was already divorced from my first marriage at the time she was conceived. And she’s got me wondering how long it’s gonna be before I’m admiring ladies in swimsuits who could be my granddaughters. Ewww……

I suppose you just shouldn’t be thinking about the passage of time. Admire the curves…quit looking up birth dates in Wikipedia. That is the part that can’t lead to anything good.

June of ’92. Seems like just yesterday.

Once again: Ewww……..

I’ll put up something to make you feel better about the holiday, as it approaches. At least I’ll give it my very best shot.

Have a completely awesome and wonderful long weekend, everybody. And don’t forget what it’s about. Not that it’s a problem here…this may be The Blog That Nobody Reads, but we’ve got some smart nobodies here.

Robert at Small Dead Animals has to ask:

In last night’s Reader Tips, SDA regular ‘ET’ asked some important questions:

You know, I had thought that the MSM wouldn’t attack Michele Bachmann as they attacked Sarah Palin. Because, I thought that Bachmann was ‘in the Washington bubble’ while Palin was outside it. I was wrong.

They are viciously attacking her. So it’s not the Washington bubble that protects you from the MSM. Is it because she’s a woman? But they didn’t pillory Hillary Clinton that way. So – what’s the reason?

Is it because she’s a conservative? And the MSM are not a free press but a propaganda site for the left – both in the US and Canada?

Here’s one recent prominent example. Here’s another. More than a little interesting, is it not, that the Media Party seems perfectly fine with such open misogyny?!

No, it doesn’t have anything to do with a “Washington bubble.” And my fellow Palin fans will be distressed to learn of my doubts that it has too much to do with the uppity female’s perceived ability to win a race. In other words, if you can find me a conservative female who’s not a threat, one who’s a complete non-starter, I think she’ll be on the receiving end as well. I also have doubts that it’s all liberals who are dishing this stuff out.

I think what you’re looking at is socially awkward men, who have spent a whole lot of their lives thinking of themselves as not-socially-awkward. They’ve learned to relate to women on an extraordinarily narrow communication path. Use the word “totally” a whole lot, leave the toilet seat down or at least talk about leaving the toilet seat down, say “women’s right to choose” a few times and she’ll jump into your bed. Hey, it worked before…

You’re seeing the distress that comes with the sudden realization that women are people, and people are complex. That’s why the most acrid vitriol comes from comedians; their livelihood is fastened inflexibly to their ability to relate to people, and they’re just starting to discover, when all’s said and done, that they suck at it.

All Women Don’t Have The Same Values. That can be a scary thought, to those who think they know all there is to know about women, because there wasn’t too much to learn in the first place. Their perception of the fairer sex is being knocked around a bit — and it’s a perception that hasn’t had to deal with any disturbances, any tremors or reverberations, since age fifteen.

As usual, he has to find a special way to do it better than everybody else:

He doesn’t use the word, but this is a SNUL. A good-sized chunk of all Internet content at any given time, is SNUL; a bunch of bloggers singing a commonly-motivated, but disconnected, chorus of Sorry No Updates Lately.

It’s good to see SNUL becoming popular lately. It is post-summer-solstice. Here in California, there is a crisis that has come about because of the March, April and May cloud cover. Our ladies are frantic, it’s been years since firework stands went up while their legs were this white. And so SNUL beckons, and the jorts come out. The margaritas, they aren’t going to be sucking themselves down you know.

Blogger friend Phil thought highly enough of the acronym to make a special graphic for it:

And now, I have a SNUL of my own. In my case, it’s got to do with paying the bills…see you at beer o’clock tonight.

It’s obligatory. And I don’t use the O-word the way it has come to be commonly used in the blogger world, as a sort of a sneer against a topic that has been overly-exposed. This is really important.

And some of these errors have been made many-a-time and been around awhile; they really cheese me off. Like, for example, #1 and #5.

As far as the importance overall, Aaron at Patterico sums it up as well as can be managed:

I consider it nothing less than a journalistic scandal that this piece was (1) a cover story, (2) written by their Managing Editor, (3) who serves in an organization dedicated to teaching other journalists about the Constitution, and yet it is rife with factual errors, including many that are obvious simply by reading the Constitution.

Every few months or so, someone will say a word or two audibly, or perhaps type in a comment to the same effect, in an effort to propound a feeling of futility with regard to blogging. Sometimes it’s an innocuous question, but the message is always the same and it isn’t being put just to me. Something in the universe, some entity or construct vague and undefined, is unsettled and in an unsatisfactory state when I have my say, and if I shut up, then something vague and undefined is then, somehow, made good and right.

I don’t know for sure what drives this, because such critics won’t define what they seek to leave undefined. In fact, that appears to be the focus of their criticism; they like seeing things continue to be undefined. So that’s my best idea: They come from a world in which, when definition is likely to lead to conflict, it is better to avoid the definition and therefore the conflict. They are anti-Pragers, in other words; they’d rather have agreement than clarity.

Leaving aside the obvious question — “what good is the action of agreement, if you don’t know what the contents are?” — I cannot help but wonder where freedom fits into it. The man who values clarity over agreement, can be said to value clarity and freedom over agreement. Can the same be said of the man who values agreement over clarity? In that conflict, can freedom take the side of agreement? Can it be opposed to clarity? It is difficult to see how. One cannot expect to remain free for very long, extending agreement and the obligation that goes along with that agreement, to undefined covenants.

Some of our leftists insist the rest of us think of the attack on Glenn Beck’s family as an isolated incident, one that is not emblematic in any way of leftism or what it does to the soul. They are not willing, I notice, to even superficially engage in any behavior that would motivate an abandonment of the stereotype. They won’t scold their fellow leftists, they won’t call for the perpetrators to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, they won’t confront the legacy of thuggery that is interwoven with the history of organized labor, they won’t look within, they won’t have the same “national dialogue” on leftist strong-arm tactics they routinely insist the rest of the country should have about gender or race. They just want everybody else to stop — period. Don’t think thoughts that obstruct the progressive agenda, even if those thoughts are based on facts that are proven accurate.

What if someone from the right, or maybe from the Tea Party, engages in physical violence in this way? If & when such a thing takes place, it isn’t everybody-else’s-fault. I expect to see one statement after another after another, to the effect of “we can’t have this” or “we cannot be defined through deplorable acts like this.” The people noticing the thuggish behavior, and coming to their own conclusions that derogate the Tea Party movement, would be just natural occurrences — something to be expected. But when the left grapples with the same awkwardness, it’s the fault of the people who do the noticing. That’s what has to be stopped. The thuggish behavior, in turn, is what is natural and is to be expected. Stopping it would be like stopping the wind or the tides. I find that interesting.

You know, perhaps they do have a point. The left in this country is not trying to attack anything that is meaningful to us, important to our way of life…nothing really sacred. Just expendable, trivial, throw-away items. The authority of the individual to live life as he sees fit, religion and the culture that goes with it, lives of babies, sexual innocence of children, wages and the unique specialties that earn them, profits that come from the risk of our capital, motherhood, fatherhood, chivalry and the obligation to protect women, the duty to confront evil, international borders, the God-given right to self-defense, and the love of the country that has made it possible for us to survive, prosper and pursue the continuing betterment of ourselves.

Just a bunch of miscellaneous stuff like that. The really important things, they’ve left alone. So they’re not really all that bad.

But seriously, let’s get down to brass tacks on this “don’t point that out” stuff: People who have chosen not to take a stand, do not have neutral feelings toward others who decide to take the same stand. It’s no different from stopping a mugging, or helping to put out a house fire. You decide to mind your own business, someone else decides to do it differently — he makes you look bad, and you hate him for it. One crab refuses to let another crab crawl out of the bucket.

No, I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.

Boortz is taking notice of the headlines in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It is not a problem unique to that paper:

In the wake of yet ANOTHER federal judge’s smack down of a state’s (this time Georgia) attempt to enforce immigration laws the federal government refuses to enforce, some of Georgia’s finest illegals decided to have a little protest in downtown Atlanta. Not just a protest – they decided it would be cool to sit down in the middle of a busy downtown intersection and tie up traffic for a while.
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Now .. for the newspaper. Political correctness rules! Now I’m dealing with the online version of the AJC here, so I really can’t tell you what headlines were used in the printed version. But you can click here for the main page. Middle-left you will see “Six arrested at immigration law protest.” Sub-titles include “Demonstrators block downtown streets” and “Students risk deportation.” “Students?” That’s how we identify them? They’re criminals – here illegally – and we identify them as “students?” And just why are they students? Are they being supported by taxpayer funds in some state education institution? Then click on the “Students risk deportation” link and you’ll see another headline: “Immigrant youths demonstrate, risk deportation.” “Immigrant youths?” Immigration is a legal process. These aren’t immigrants. They’re part of an invasion. The headline should have the word “illegal” in it somewhere.

Terri is mulling over the six-in-ten rule, and can’t make any more sense of it than I can.

The democrats are infuriated to watch the government do its thing, six years out of every ten, under Republican — and therefore evil — management. During those six years out of ten, the government is the very incarnation of evil. Overthrowing “sovereign nations that did not attack us,” getting inner city kids hooked on crack, waterboarding “detainees” who didn’t do anything…et al…but then the other four years in ten the best thing we can do is expand the government’s authority, give it more functions to perform.

And the functions are intimate and personal. Health care. Food inspection. Creating jobs with the Obama-stimulus…which, as Ed Morrissey notes, passed with no significant Republican support at all.

[T]hey’ve begun to notice that no one is paying them much attention, especially not Obama:

House Democrats feel like jilted lovers.

They’re looking down Pennsylvania Avenue for some sign of affection from President Obama in the White House. But all they feel they’re getting in return is the back of his hand.

“How is it that the House Democrats played such an important role [in the majority], and all of a sudden [the White House says], ‘Forget it, we’ll work with the Senate and the Republican leadership?’ ” asked Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), vice chairman of the Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee.

Er … seriously? Perhaps Cuellar needs a little help with mathematics. Republicans have a fairly significant although not historically large majority in the House, and therefore can pass almost anything through normal rules without any input from Democrats. Cuellar and his caucus are irrelevant to any budget deal.

Cuellar should be very familiar with this phenomenon. When it came time to discuss a stimulus package in early 2009, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi locked Republicans out of the law-drafting process. Obama at that time told Republicans, “I won.” It turned out to be a big political miscalculation, since Democrats ended up passing Porkulus with almost no Republican support (only three votes in the Senate), and its failure ended up being blamed squarely on Democrats. Now, Cuellar and other Democrats want people to pretend they matter, but even Obama can’t muster up that much imagination.

This is the scary thing about democrats in Congress. It’s like they have a blind spot in any direction that involves someone else deciding something.

There’s a certain software company I’ve criticized often, because their products work extremely well when they work — and they don’t when they don’t. The deciding factor seems to have something to do with whether I’m using the products in the way the engineers anticipated when they built them.

There is value in this, of course. Thirty years is a long time to be using a company’s software products, so something must be working. But if it only works when I do things exactly the way I’m supposed to, it makes you wonder what in the human/machine coupling really is the human, and what is the machine. Who’s using who. Well you know what? I don’t like having that relationship with my office equipment…and I don’t like having it with my government. I’m not given much motive to change my mind about it, when I see the government operates under the premise of “Yay, we’ve been voted in, we’re here for life, everything is always going to be decided by us and our pals.” It’s just not a good way for a system to work.