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...
Constitutional professors quoted in the press and across the Web explain that much about the federal government’s modern authority is “settled” law. Even so, many of these legal commentators are quite close to arguing that the national government’s economic and political powers are now limitless and unfettered. I wonder if Justice Kennedy believes that.
Or as David Kopel asked on the Volokh Conspiracy blog: “Is the tax power infinite?”
In a country that holds elections, that question is both legal and political. The political issue rumbling toward both the Supreme Court and the electorate is whether Washington’s size and power has finally grown beyond the comfort zone of the American people. That is what lies beneath the chatter about federalism and the 10th Amendment.
Liberals will argue that government today is doing good. But government now is also unprecedentedly large and unprecedentedly expensive. Even if every challenge to ObamaCare loses in court, these anxieties will last and keep coming back to the same question: Does the Democratic left think the national government’s powers are infinite?
Your Volokh link would be here.
Liberals have two problems. First, they have come to rely on dictating to their audience what is to be thought of as an extreme idea and what is thought to be a moderate one. As an example, these references to letting a “wild wild west” of capitalism running unfettered — simply don’t make any sense. Capitalism being self-regulated, a completely unregulated capitalist society cannot exist. What runs off willy-nilly drunk on its own power, is the regulation.
Here, they are simply exercising the third technique for motivating large numbers of people to do a dumb thing without anyone associating the dumb thing with your name later on: switch moderation and extremism with each other. It doesn’t work here because Kopel’s question beats it to the punch, and once the question is asked, the audience sees it is a fair one. How far are we ready to go with this federal taxation power? Like it or not, it is what stands in the roadway, ahead of us, confronting us, head-on.
The second problem the leftists have is that they seem to be the last to realize when they argue for a strongly centralized federal government, it only seems to work in their favor some 30% to 40% of the time. Once those other guys are in charge, our liberals screech louder than anybody about runaway, unchecked federal power. It just so happens to be about matters other than taxation when theirs is the party of dissent.
But it really doesn’t matter that we have these subject changes as the power is handed off from one side to the other — it is certainly not a sign of sensible thinking to be arguing for unlimited, unrestrained, unchecked centralized power during the three-eights-of-the-time the people our leftists appreciate the most, happen to be running most things…or the seventh-of-the-time they’re running everything. It isn’t a model for good government and it may not even be consistent with basic sanity.
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Well put, my friend.
Absolutely it does. They believe in a “scientifically” structured society, planned out by “experts”. Only by totalitarianism can this be implemented. They delude themselves that central planning and liberty are incompatible. They persist in willful ignorance. They think it will bring about Utopia.
But only Todd Rundgren can do that. 😉
- philmon | 04/01/2010 @ 07:46Uh, that should read “they delude themselves that central planning and liberty are compatible …. .that’s what I get for editing as one task in a flurry of multi-tasking.
- philmon | 04/01/2010 @ 07:49Once those other guys are in charge, our liberals screech louder than anybody about runaway, unchecked federal power. It just so happens to be about matters other than taxation when theirs is the party of dissent.
Flashback to 2005 for a moment, the year Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith was released in theaters. Bush was still president, and Hollywood was bubbling over with asinine comparisons between Lord Sidious a.k.a. Emperor Palpatine, and George W Bush. Liberals hither and yon borrowed the line from the Padme Amidala character, “This is how democracy dies; with thunderous applause.”
In the movie, the applause heralded the rise of a strong central government, one which had arisen by gradually co-opting more and more power from the Galactic Senate, a decentralized and ostensibly democratically-elected power structure. This particular moment in the movie is simply the culmination of an unchecked growth of government power which had been building throughout the movie trilogy up to this point.
In real life, many liberals both inside Hollywood and outside (I want to say even some of the actors who were in the film) drew all kinds of ridiculous parallels between this and the Bush presidency, pointing to the Patriot Act as a specific example. And here, I thought sending the FBI to have a chat with people talking to terrorists…had absolutely nothing in common with a Dark Lord of the Sith effectively dissolving the peoples’ legislative body and ruling by decree.
The really funny thing? In the movie, the Sith Lord – the trilogy’s true villain – was two-faced. He was pointing to the Trade Federation as the threat, and said that the Republic’s only hope of salvation was for him to take full control of its resources in order to deal properly with this threat. Of course, once that threat was finally extinguished, he used his position to further consolidate his hold on power and continue to augment his authority by taking over that which formerly belonged to the common people. The people were led to blame a scapegoat while the real threat worked behind the scenes. Once the mask was finally off, it was too late.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? If not, I’ll draw it out for you. We’ve got a president, Congress, and a sycophantic media apparatus working overtime to make sure all of the nation’s problems are blamed on Big Whatever, George W Bush, Tea Partiers, Christian “militia” groups, homophobic racists, and anything else they think they can tie to the political Right. Meanwhile, the real threat to freedom and liberty comes from the guy already in power and his willing participants, as he is busy nationalizing that which belongs to the common people.
Is it sinking in yet? Bush isn’t Palpatine…Obama is.
Now to his credit, I never heard George Lucas himself draw any of those stupid parallels between Bush and Palpatine, but so many other people did that it nearly ruined Star Wars for me permanently.
- cylarz | 04/02/2010 @ 02:06