Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

Greg Plum has gotten hold of a memo from the DCCC leadership that says no. No matter how bad our product is, there’s no revolution coming.

Republicans will need to win 39 seats to take back the House. Democrats will win at least four Republican seats (the best opportunities include: LA-02, HI-01, IL-10, DE-AL, FL-25). As a result, the real number of seats Republicans will have to pick up to win a majority is at least 43. To win 43 seats, the NRCC would need to put 70 to 80 seats in play. The NRCC have simply not put that many Republicans seats in play and do not have the resources or caliber of candidates to do so.

They still have a lot to worry about, IMO. Exhibit A: They’re worried! Now, why are they worried? Supposedly we had a revolution back in ‘08, and put some wise, benevolent spiritual leaders in place who have been toppling the old ways and erecting a government that works for “everybody.” The Death Star is all exploded and there’s nothing left to do but dance with the Ewoks on the Endor forest moon.

How could we ever back away from that? Who’d want to? If the policies are the best ones that work “for everybody.”

Well, it seems there is a feeling in the air that the Obama delivery is not equal to the Obama promise:

Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.

Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. The very constituencies to which he made his greatest appeal – the young and the disadvantaged – still suffer. This is despite the $787 billion stimulus programme last year, much of which was sucked into America’s corrupt and inefficient local government system, or did favours for congressmen and senators, or provided wonderful pay days for trade unionists, or in some cases all three at once. The President sought the stimulus on the grounds that it would stop unemployment rising above 8 per cent; so that has been an expensive failure. All Mr Obama appears to have done is wave the money goodbye. Last week, trying not to sound provoked, Mr Bernanke announced that there was “unusual uncertainty” about economic recovery. The dollar fell against sterling and even the euro.

Mr Bernanke wants a renewal of Bush-era tax cuts for people earning over $250,000 a year, which are due to expire on December 31. So do many Democrats, who fear that removing incentives and purchasing power from the better-off will harm recovery by reducing consumption and employment. These are arguments familiar from Britain, about the equally damaging and pointless 50 per cent rate. The response, by Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is familiar too – the “rich” must take their share of the burden. It is equally specious here; the political importance of bashing the (presumably Republican) wealthy plainly exceeds what is good for the US economy.

What we’re seeing is not so much a discredit to liberal politics, or Mr. Obama, or Keynesian economics — but rather to the idea that government needs to be in the equalization business. Remember the comments to Joe the Plumber? “I just think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”?

Government cannot do this because government doesn’t have an off switch. It inherently lacks the ability to say “Okay that’s it, you’re not a bad dude anymore because you’ve paid your fair share. You’re not rich anymore, you’re no longer evil, we’ve hired enough women that men no longer enjoy an opprobrious statistical advantage, we can stop subtracting test points from Asian students now.”

The task of equalizing something carries with it an implicit expectation of the ability to monitor; to measure. The story of “civilized” governments identifying specific demographics for a run of gettin’-even-with-em-ism, is much older than the American republic herself. This monitoring, spotting, declaring the equalization to be all fine & good mission-accomplished, is something that has never taken place. In short: All we’ve seen these governments do is identify good guys and bad guys. Assume a comfortable position and let the pummeling begin.

I remember from thirty-two years ago that this is how Carter lost his job. It wasn’t a fiery rage, and it isn’t that in the here & now, against Obama. At least, the feelings are not nearly as inflamed as they were four years ago against George Bush, on the other side.

Rather, there’s just a muted, but palpable, feeling of what can best be described as fatigue. The shopping spree is over. We can’t afford any more of it. And maybe the reason we can’t afford any more of it isn’t quite so much that it’s an overindulgence of a good thing…but that it was just a stupid idea from the very start. We’re waking up. Believing in ourselves. It’s always the first step to really solving a problem, you know.

And you can’t support Obama if you believe in yourself. He’s worked hard for a long time to make Himself the perfect walking incarnation of paternalistic government, the feeling of co-dependency that goes with it, helplessness, and truckloads and truckloads of guilt.

Time to move on.

Had a conversation with a woman at work today. Apparently she forgot my answer the first time she asked several months ago, but she asked “why is there a picture of Sarah Palin on your wall?”
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I’m a supporter, I told her. She couldn’t believe it…[She] says she’s not into politics at all and she never voted before she got married…but now she does…get this…to cancel her husband’s vote.

She said “I won’t send you my cartoon of her then. You wouldn’t appreciate it.” Then she described it to me. It said something about we didn’t go through X number of years of women’s suffrage to put Sarah Palin in the White House.

I said “I don’t get it, anyway. Is it because if she doesn’t agree with you then she’s not a real woman?” She looked puzzled for a second and replied “Let me think of another way to put it.” and fumbled around for a few seconds.

I said “You can’t, because that’s exactly what they meant.”

What it really, of course, boils down [to] is that [Palin] doesn’t believe in abortion as birth control, she doesn’t sound like most people they know, and she’s way too pretty — and she’s everything women’s suffrage was really about (she was the Governor of a State for crying out loud!) and that pisses them off. She’s supposed to be agnostic…demand a woman’s right to kill her baby at any point during a pregnancy, think that being a wife and a mother is somehow a form of slavery…oh, and she’s supposed to look like Helen Thomas.

I’ve had my own experience dealing with these bitter, crusty females. who are part of the Palin Hater Brigade. And my experiences lead me to believe that last item in Phil’s list is the most important one.

It isn’t political ideology. Not quite so much. Think about it…a man who is aspiring for high public office, or has maybe achieved it, holds opinions about things that do not like. How do they feel about this? If that man is George W. Bush and they happen to be really excited about liberal politics, maybe they’ll launch their blood pressure into the stratosphere at the mention of his name, just as they do at the mention of Palin’s. But other than that, no. If they’re not that much into politics, just leaning left, receiving the newsletters from the DNC at home, feeling somewhat strongly about “woman’s right to choose” but regretting that abortion has to happen anyway…just another white straight conservative Christian male isn’t going to launch them into a frenzy. He’ll just be a dick, as far as they’re concerned. He will be a mild irritation. He won’t turn their faces purple. He won’t make veins stick out of their necks. He won’t send them into a sputtering fit.

Not like Sarah Palin.

In fact, I venture to guess given enough time, I can find a few conservative, Christian, Republican people who agree with Sarah Palin…I’m talking here about women, mind you…who are just as angry with her as the Birkenstock-wearing liberal hippie flower-child women. Angry over nothing. Political opinions have very little to do with this.

Power & Pulchritude: What’s Allowed

There is a large, and perhaps still growing, contingent of mostly females who believe it’s quite alright for some among their sisters to be prettier than they are. And more powerful. Just not both.

Our current President has had an opportunity to nominate replacements for, what, two Supreme Court vacancies now? And both nominees are ugly toad-like women. You only have to analyze the statistics so long before there is an ugly truth revealed to you: Someone is being satisfied with this unbroken trend. It has to be the case. If you sent me out to find women this homely and unappealing, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t know how to start. Two out of two of our vacant seats on the Supreme Court have to go to homely women? This is what “best qualified” looks like, huh. Yeah. Tell me another.

It shouldn’t come as news to anybody who’s been around the block, that women are jealous creatures. My theory about this is that there is a curvalinear relationship. It’s rather like children pushing miniaturized shopper-in-training grocery carts when you run in to the store to buy a gallon of milk: Two unattended children pushing these wagons from hell into your ankles, are together four times as obnoxious as just one. Three such children would leave your ankles nine times as bruised.

My thinking is that among women reviewing the situation, another woman who possesses both authority and beauty is like mixing the rocket fuel and liquid oxygen together. The situation becomes much more explosive than it would be if she had one of these qualities but was missing the other.

There’s a code-of-honor taking place to reinforce this, which Palin is violating it seems. And for better or for worse, it seems this leaves me without other data points I can use to test my theory — I don’t know of any other women accepting or pursuiing positions of real authority, who are gorgeous and strutting around. So I cannot make a comparison there. But I can make a comparison to men. There is something going on with the fellas.

They have a different curve. Like I said over at Phil’s place:

Males, on the liberal side of the fence, can be as pretty or as homely as they like. It does seem that if you want to run for President, you have to be somewhat pleasing to the eye. Henry Waxman won’t be running for President.

So with real power, among liberals, men have to be at least as handsome as John Kerry, and women have to be at least as homely looking as Hillary. Outside of that, you need to accept some constraints on your power, as must we all really. Unless you are in a position to provide indeterminate benefit to the progressive cause, like Barry & His pals. Then, you can be a sultan, with a nation assembled solely for your pleasure. Tell the lesser mortals to conserve on their carbon emissions and vacation in the gulf, then take off for Maine, with your family dog in a separate jet. The sky’s the limit. It’s all good.

Now let’s just get one thing clear here: I cannot explain any of this. I’m just making observations, gathering data, plotting points, trying to make sense of it all. You’ll have to look to our collectivist-minded and our left-wingers to figure out what’s really going on here.

But I do think we should get it straight who’s keeping women under a “glass ceiling” here. It isn’t the political right. And it isn’t men, for the most part.

President Obama’s Inaugural was a hopeful day, with an estimated 1.8 million people on the National Mall celebrating the election of America’s first African-American president. The level of enthusiasm, the anticipation and the promise of something better could not have been more palpable.

And yet, it has not been realized. Not at all.

Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.
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The first hint that as president Mr. Obama would be willing to interject race into the political dialogue came last July, when he jumped to conclusions about the confrontation between Harvard Prof. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates and the Cambridge police.

During a press conference, the president said that the “Cambridge police acted stupidly,” and he went on to link the arrest with the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

In truth, the Gates incident appears to have had nothing to do with race—a Cambridge review committee that investigated the incident ruled on June 30 that there was fault on both sides.

Well, the review committee got it half right.

They were playing to a modern mindset that says when persons of disparate race are involved in a disagreement that spirals out of control in any way, the person with darker skin must be found unconditionally blameless. These mobsters are being manipulated, in turn, by a swaggering elite that seeks to enslave the melanin-enhanced as well as the melanin-challenged, with a dysfunctional protocol that says skin color decides guilt & innocence. “Fault on both sides” was a concession to this anarchy, and it brought the anarchists an important victory: If you’re a white cop, avoid these confrontations in the first place. It’s the only way you can come out ahead. Pretend something’s wrong with your radio and you can’t hear the dispatcher.

But back to the President, since it’s a much more serious charge that this racial division goes all the way to the top.

It isn’t accidental. Listen to Obama talk about something that doesn’t have to do with race: I, I, I, Me, Me, I, I, Me, I just think, seems to Me, Michelle & I, I, I, I, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me. The subject shifts to race, and all of a sudden it’s we, we, we, we, America, Ms. Sherrod, bloggers, talk shows, Cambridge police, we. He stops talking about Himself, because He’s cataloging sins…things that have been done wrong. When that happens, He isn’t part of us anymore. Suddenly, He can grind out entire paragraphs without mentioning Himself one single time. He’ll re-join us when the lecturing is done. Then He’ll be happy to tell us, once again, what He thinks about things.

So our President is a divisive agent, a willfully divisive one, and not only does he see race as part of the division He seeks to deploy, but He has a carefully laid-out and executed strategy in place for dividing us along racial lines. He seeks to remedy & heal nothing. But it isn’t just about race. It’s also about money. Have you listened to this “full” video clip of Shirley Sherrod’s speech to the NAACP? I’m using scare quotes because there’s still some editing that’s been going on. But the point is this: It started out being about race, how a woman of color found herself approached for her legal assistance by a farmer of pallor. She didn’t apply the full force of what she could do for him, feeling that he should be helped but only by his own kind. The longer, 43-minute version becomes relevant because the speech is revealed as a “Grinch” story; the protagonist realizes her way of thinking about things is wrong, she reforms, and she does things she would not have done if she had not reformed. The speech was about this reformation, which is why there is such anger about the posting of the abridged version.

But why did she reform? I’ve seen lots of leftists subjected to this spiritual awakening, and it isn’t permanent, one-way, or spiritual. In my case, they’ve gone back and forth, and with the wisdom of hindsight I’ve come to realize something: What they were trying to decide, was whether or not I was a “mark.” Was I desperate enough yet that, if they short-circuited some rules to “help” me, would I give them my soul. This is the true face of the progressive movement: Put the non-producers in charge of figuring out how the goods and services are allocated, and if enough people are in desperate circumstances & stand to benefit from your little modern Bolshevik revolution, they will help you do this and you will succeed. You cannot succeed without them. This is how Shirley Sherrod saw that white farmer. She changed her mind about him. As his plight became more and more desperate, she figured out how he would come in handy.

This is a perfect illustration of Obama’s agenda. He is not a unifier because He cannot ever be one. He’s had a long time to enhance, rather than diminish, the control exerted over the production of things by those who do the producing; He hasn’t taken advantage of that opportunity one single time. Every move He has made has been to put the non-producers in charge. And ultimately, you have to drive wedges in order to do that. You have to have class envy. If we all have the feeling that we’re in the same boat, then our natural inclination is going to be to let the producers have the control that belongs to them, so the rest of us can benefit. To shift the wealth to the non-producers, you need to subvert the natural order of things, and you need to achieve broad interest in altering that natural course. Get the message out that the non-producers are the only ones interested in bringing a benefit to others across class lines. You need to spread a myth: Money makes a person naturally mean and selfish, unless the money a person has is money that came from somebody else, then that person becomes virtuous, egalitarian and civilized. Our poor, and the thieves who steal what they give to the poor, are the only enlightened beings in our society, or in any other. That is the Obama agenda and that is the Obama propaganda drive.

So anybody waiting for Obama to be any kind of unifier, is in for a long wait.

Partial hat tip to Irish Cicero, since I already had this in my “stack” when I was following a trackback to his place where he was talking about me…when I scrolled down I saw he already did a decent write-up about this.

You know, it would make a decent bumper sticker wouldn’t it:

Can We Elect a Black President Who’s Not Quite So Communist-ey?

Our all-time record of daily hits, before this, was 14,650 or something in that neighborhood. February 2009, right after the first State of the Union speech by His Holy Eminence, we had put together a handy Venn Diagram to show what we thought of it. Which caught an Instalanche.

Today’s results, in web page hits and page views, compared to the month previous, look like this:

That’s a new record: 16,266 hits as of now, it’s 11:30 and I’m going to bed. My ass has been hurting me all day.

Not really caring too much about the traffic, but looking forward to making the new friends.

Update 7/28/10: Irish Cicero sends congratulations for reaching this milestone.

There are currently only 232 million IP addresses left — enough for about 340 days — thanks to the explosion in smartphones and other web-enabled devices.

“When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago, it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses,” carrier relations manager at Australian internet service provider (ISP) Internode John Lindsay told the Herald.

“Bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn’t really exist, the idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn’t occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn’t been invented [and] the idea that air-conditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous.”

Nothing sells quite like the next Apocalypse.

Nowadays, there are more nobodies, so in a spirit of consideration and cooperation, we make a point of keeping the headlines clean…and pulling the spicy language down in the small-font body of the post where it fucking belongs.

And we haven’t had any “Look At Me I Can’t Park For Shit” posts in all these years. Almost five years now. Why is that? Because it was a passing phase? No…here is the spooky part. We’ve been out there with our little cell-phone camera looking for transgressions. Not as a primary purpose in our peregrinations mind you. But we have been looking. Something’s happened. People aren’t parking like fucking morons anymore. Maybe, just maybe, they’re trembling in fear of The Blog That Nobody Reads. Minding their P’s and Q’s.

Until this weekend that is.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Just so brazen and in-your-face.

For the record: You can sort of tell in this shot, but I’ll clue you in anyway. There was not plenty of parking to go around. It was a scarce commodity. People were having to park way far away, and walk & walk & walk some more, and you could tell they were pissed about it and not just a little bit desperate.

Wasn’t my problem, I already had my spot. But in my mind’s eye, this scene replayed…

We all have stories to tell, hers are peculiarly Southern and like most of our mixed racial tales told south of the Maxon-Dixon line, they’re tinged with a streak regrettable sadness. Black people didn’t get anywhere near a fair shake under Southern skies before the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, admitting that fact means nothing more than acknowledging the truth of the times.
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I think Andrew Breitbart is a self-aggrandizing, corner cutting, race baiting, money chasing, media whore. Jeffrey Lord is an illiterate asshole and Shirley Sherrod doesn’t deserve a single day she’s spent under this ugly conservative sun.

Sonic Charmer has a different opinion.

I’m vaguely aware that there’s a controversy surrounding some government employee named Sherrod who was fired because she’s a racist but then she turned out to be not. But I didn’t know the details so I decided to Wiki it.

Reading about the controversy itself, it does seem as if this particular rap against her was unfair.

However, reading about the rest of Shirley Sherrod’s “career”, I think there are much worse things to charge her with:

She and her husband lost their farm when they were unable to secure USDA loans. Sherrod along with other activists sued the USDA in Pigford v. Glickman in order to protect the remaining black farms which were in danger of becoming shut down. The Department agreed to compensation which was to be paid between January 1, 1981 and December 31, 1999. The event was considered as “the largest civil rights settlement in history, with nearly $1 billion being paid to more than 16,000 victims.”

Translation: She wanted the taxpayers to chip in to give her a below-market-rate loan to buy her and her husband a farm. They didn’t. So she sued the taxpayers. She won and got the money from taxpayers. $1 billion distributed among 16,000 people (oh sorry “victims”) equals some $60k per person. Although what do you want to bet that her share was more than the arithmetic mean?

I’m seeing things more Sonic’s way than Daphne’s. Partly because of things like this video (h/t Riehl World View)…

…and partly because I’m sick of being told what to think about people. I’m sick of the sophistry. Yes, Ms. Sherrod’s speech was the polar opposite of what it appeared to be, and her boss Mr. Vilsack — not Andrew Breitbart, not Fox News, but the Secretary himself — overreacted.

Does this mean Shirley Sherrod is a decent person? No. It means Tom Vilsack is a spineless jerk.

More and more, it looks to me like this: Shirley Sherrod spent 43 minutes lying about her motives and what she’s been learning on the job, and Brietbart unfairly played a few bits out of context, the ones where she told the truth about herself.

I’m tired of the duplicity. I’m tired of being told Sarah Palin is malicious because some stalking pervert moved in next door to her. I’m tired of being told just because someone can be called a victim of something and she happens to have dark skin, and a chestless jackal for a former boss, that her motives must be pure.

In fact, there are other crackpots and nutjobs in the mix as well. I’ve had it to here with the “because”-es. I’m fed up with being told Elena Kagan will be a great Associate Justice because she’s funny. Rush Limbaugh is evil because he’s rich. Dick Cheney deserves to die because he ran Halliburton. The Gulf oil spill is in good hands because Stephen Chu has a Nobel prize.

I’m at the Popeye stage with the sophistry; I’ve had all me can stands, and me can’t stands no more.

You put something out there that’s incorrect, or misleading, and there are only two possibilities after that’s found out: You were hoodwinked by someone, or you’re a liar yourself. Well, Brietbart has an iron-clad alibi about the edited video he received. If he was lying about that — if he was in fact the person responsible for whittling this thing down, and giving it an appearance so strikingly at odds with the real intent of Sherrod’s speech — there’s been plenty enough time for that to have been borne out. It hasn’t happened. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Breitbart was complicit in this.

Sherrod, meanwhile, has been helping to spread the word around that Fox News deliberately brought about her dismissal, and she knows better.

She was treated unfairly.

Only those who are withholding the intellectual vigor, or are coming up empty in an attempt to supply it, would infer from that that she’s a nice person. Just because you get the shaft, doesn’t make you a sweetie-pie.

I’ll keep an open mind, but this woman is really setting off a lot of alarms in my head. She fits a profile, and it’s not a skin-color profile. It’s one I would call “Play Dirty But Act Like You’re Playing Nice.”

Because, above all, I’m sick to death of liberals getting caught doing sneaky underhanded things, and then claiming someone conservative was responsible for making them do it. Enough of this. Obama and Vilsack overreacted, Obama and Vilsack can own the problem. For once. Even if Sherrod wants it to work out some other way. It’s their fuck-up.

So much eye candy. Lady in the bikini…boat…lady…boat…lady…boat. I was trying to figure out if this was a private yacht or some kind of small cruise ship she had to share. Doesn’t look to me like she’s sharing it in any way. So she’s doing alright, or else has a sugar daddy in which case she’s doing alright.

This looks exactly like the beginning of Tomb Raider: Underworld. Except I think Lara Croft’s boat was diminutive by comparison.

And is that a picture of Bowser stuck on a Mac PowerBook?

Nevertheless, on page 23 he offers a definition so that the discussion can commence:

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.

As I continued onward with the book, I thought back on this definition exactly as Goldberg intended, but I had another thought that he perhaps did not intend for me to have. The definition is slightly inadequate.

I see a mostly uninterrupted pattern, in which each fascist movement is an offering by one particular charismatic individual, usually a male. His wit, speechifying, masculinity, drive and flair are thrown in to every discussion about his ideas, as replacements for any logical demonstration that his ideas might make sense. To put it another way — nobody can construct a rational argument that his ideas have potential to bring about the desired results, and so wherever his apologists enjoy any representation at all, the discourse dissolves into a sloppy, childish exchange of observations about how good he is at talking to large numbers of people. This seems to be a constant in all fascist governments, the charisma of the dictator.

A few months ago we called it Obamalarkey:

Rhetorical defense of a dumbass idea, offered by subtly re-directing the discourse from the merits and weaknesses of the idea itself, toward the appealing but meaningless attributes of the personality most prominently associated with it.

As Goldberg points out, as this particular subject is poked and prodded a little bit more, it loses composition and becomes more difficult to define. But like I said, I wish he covered this part of it since it seems to be an integral component. Fascist leaders, generally, are not boring & dull. To achieve the minimal requirements of the dictator gig, they must demonstrate an ability to sell things contrary to the long-term interests of the buyer.

It seems almost medieval. King’s counselors rush up to him and say, Your Majesty! The royal coffers are nearly empty! Whaddya talking about, says the King, my country is very wealthy. All those farms with all those crops…they’re mine. I Am The State.

You know, I thought we had some kind of a revolution to do away with that kind of thinking.

I find it rather ominous: The one sequence of words you can string together to prove to your kids and grandkids that you’re senile, and have probably been batshit crazy for a good long time, is the one truth that has become more and more obvious to me as I get older: The commies are takin’ over. I’m now reaching the point where it is becoming undeniable, so maybe the time has come to check into assisted living facilities. Because from my point of view it seems the evidence is rock-hard and accumulating all around us.