Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
VDH:
When they are out of power, modern leftists advocate massive government spending and large deficits. They applaud when Republicans and conservatives sometimes prove as profligate as any big-government liberal. But when invested with the responsibility of governance, they come to understand that Keynesian “stimulus” must eventually cede to the same unhappy logic as the private household’s indebtedness.
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There is an iron law that transcends politics and limits the application of fiscal liberalism: Print more money and money becomes less valuable; default just once and all future credit is lost or intolerably expensive.
:
In a similar way, the WikiLeaks mess reminds us of the adolescence of crusading freelance leakers and their enablers. This time the disclosures are not morality tales about Vietnam or Guantanamo. They concern a tough Hillary Clinton urging her State Department subordinates to spy on United Nations personnel. Barack Obama is not seen calling for the planet to cool, but is shown as so desperate to keep his promise to shut down Guantanamo that he is reduced, in tawdry fashion, to horse-trading photo-ops with the leader of any small country willing to take a detainee or two off his hands. In other words, those who once sermonized about the morality of leaking the Pentagon Papers and details of U.S. policy in the war on terror are now seeing that a let-it-all-hang-out transparency can be nihilistic rather than liberating…Likewise, the notion that “civil liberties” were sacrificed in the effort to stop Islamist terrorism increasingly is shown to be a liberal talking point, not a serious criticism of responsible wartime government. Barack Obama conceded that argument when he flipped on every pre-presidential critique he had made of George W. Bush’s protocols. At one time or another, Obama, as law professor, state legislator, senator, and presidential candidate, had ridiculed the Patriot Act, wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, the Iraq War, Predator strikes, and Guantanamo.
:
Surely one lesson is that when out of power one is not responsible for Americans’ being murdered, and thus has the leeway to call for a sort of cosmic justice in a way one cannot when in power.
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What are we to make of this great history lesson of the last two years?Behind the recent news of massive debt, looming defaults, WikiLeaks, the administration’s about-face in the war on terror, and the implosion of the European Union is a reminder that progressivism, at least as it operates today, is a sort of high-minded adolescence, as sophisticated in faculty-lounge repartee as it is near-suicidal in its actual implementation.
It’s very much like parenting, methinks. You can make a successful go out of it without being a dickhead about it every day, or even much of the time. If you’re blessed with a child who doesn’t force you to be a dickhead, maybe you’ll never have to be a dickhead at all.
But if you go through the experience determined to use it to prove what a nice person you are, you’re pretty much guaranteed to bollux it up. Because that would necessarily mandate a fuzzy sort of dogmatic extremism: Every single time you can make a problem go away by spending some loot, you have to; every single time you can suspend a rule that would make life inconvenient in the moment, you must; each time you can appease someone who’s trying to get something he wants by flouting common sense and basic good manners, then appeasement is the order of the day.
I think Obama does deserve some credit. Disaster would surely ensue if He were to take an approach of, “but I promised my constituents I’d turn all these things around” and went ahead, facts and national security be damned. Maybe not that day, or that year, but eventually. And, to the best I know about it, He hasn’t done that. I don’t know if that begins and ends with Him, though. I’d like to think there are some Col. Nathan Jessup types out there, in “places you don’t talk about at parties,” who managed to convince the right people that if the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff went forward as planned things would get really, really ugly. If so, we want them on that wall; we need them on that wall.
What makes me think it went that way? Not much. Just, the stuff that does not directly relate to national security — the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff has indeed gone forward as planned. We are in hock up to our ass. I haven’t seen profligate spending of this magnitude of recklessness since the first Christmas shopping season after my ex-wife got hold of the household credit card.
It comes from the authorities in charge excluding it as a possibility that anybody from among the “right” people can every be told no. Generally, that is the anatomy of a poor decision. Somebody didn’t want to tell somebody else no.
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