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...
Much of the “governing” that took place in our country throughout the twentieth century, has consisted of a) identifying a problematic social program that had been put in place in some past generation to redistribute money — what in God’s name were we thinking when we put that turkey in?? — and b) putting together yet another one to give our children the same nightmares our parents gave us. We seem to possess a regrettable ability to fail to recognize a Faustian arrangement, right up to the last phases of it, the moment our nose-hairs are tickled by the sulfuric fumes.
Regarding the President’s speech Wednesday evening, I got five things out of them:
No one single plan is finalized yet, so nobody else can criticize it but I can “dispel rumors” by fantasizing about what I’d like to see in the final draft;
I get to call my opponents liars, but when they say I’m a liar it’s a breach of some kind of sacred code of civility;
If my opponents point out something won’t work, you should pretend nothing of value has been said at all, until such time as they can come up with a solution to it — but when I say something that makes no sense whatsoever but sounds good, go ahead and get as excited as you want;
Medicare is broke because it promises things we cannot afford to pay, so the solution is to promise more;
My plans all make it harder for any person or company to make a profit providing the services we say we want & need, thereby making it much less likely that it will happen — but don’t call it that, call it “holding them accountable.”
All in all, a fine and stylish re-hash of all twentieth-century left-wing proposals to “fix” our social-engineering and gimme-gimme programs handed down to us by our parents and grandparents. There’s nothing new added, but all the old stuff has been meticulously covered.
The editors of Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook have gone over the President’s remarks to see what else they can get out of it:
Mr. Obama began by depicting a crisis in the entitlement state, noting that “our health-care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers,” especially Medicare. Unless we find a way to cauterize this fiscal hemorrhage, “we will eventually be spending more on Medicare than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health-care program is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close.”
On this score he’s right. Medicare’s unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It’s like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: “The soup is terrible and the portions are too small.”
As astonishing, Mr. Obama claimed he can finance universal health care without adding “one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period,” in large part by pumping money out of Medicare. The $880 billion Senate plan he all but blessed this week would cut Medicare by as much as $500 billion, mainly by cutting what Mr. Obama called “waste and abuse.” Perhaps this is related to the “waste and abuse” that Congresses of both parties have targeted dozens of times without ever cutting it.
Apparently this time Mr. Obama means it, though he said this doesn’t mean seniors should listen to “demagoguery and distortion” about Medicare cuts. That’s because Medicare is a “sacred trust,” and the President swore to “ensure that you—America’s seniors—get the benefits you’ve been promised.”
:
Mr. Obama also called for “civility” in debate even as he calls the arguments of his critics “lies.” So in the spirit of civility, we won’t accuse the President of lying about Medicare. We’ll just say his claims bear little relation to anything true.
We’re gerbils on a treadmill, the way we hear these promises about how budgets will be met without cuts being made anywhere. We act like we can look back on some track record that promises accuracy in these rosy prophecies — or at least provides some way to determine accuracy, accurately.
That’s probably the biggest lie that’s been told or implied in this whole issue. These programs don’t cost what we’ve been told they’ll cost; they cost orders of magnitude more. There isn’t even a mathematical formula available to predict how much exploding they’ll do. The only one that’s worked out over the generations has been “>1”. Beyond that — the programs cost every single bit as much money as they want to cost, and when it happens, we’re powerless to stop it. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Except of course for one thing: Make more programs, provided the guy trying to get us to make them, is a really good speech-maker.
Update: John Hawkins interviews Congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson. You shouldn’t miss it. You know, that whole thing we talk about from time to time…hearing the other guy’s side of the story. Turns out there is one.
I was looking at all of the amendments and I knew that the Democrats had defeated the enforcement amendments about illegal aliens and these would be the amendments that would provide for verification of citizenship. That’s the wording and I’ve actually read the 1,000 page bill. The references to the illegal aliens in the bill didn’t have any enforcement. It was simply fluff.
So in other words, they say illegal aliens aren’t covered at all in the bill all they want, but if they deliberately leave out any enforcement provisions, it doesn’t mean anything because they can still…
It doesn’t mean anything. The verification, as proposed by the Republican amendments, was defeated in committee. I knew that and so I just felt like what I was hearing was not accurate. …So I was just really appalled at this.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
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That’s about as astute an obervation, distilled to its essence as I have seen — and you know what a big fan of that kind of thing I am.
Yeah, on the Wilson shout-out … that was my take, too. No, he shouldn’t have in that setting. But I can certainly understand, especially if you’ve been trying and trying to work something in, it gets unanimously defeated by EVERY Democrat vote (and how does that happen anyway? Does EVERY Democrat really really think we should pay for illegal aliens’ health care? Or is something else going on here?)
So you’re sitting there listening to the “most powerful man in the world” steamroll the American public with … yes, lie after lie — it’s gotta be frustrating to sit through and just let it happen, especially when you’ve sworn an oath to protect the Constitution and here’s a guy who comes from a culture that is proud of its abilty to interpret anything any way that suits them. You know, like a prostitute/pimp claiming “recreational entertainment” as your occupation on their taxes so that they can get a loan for a house to run a prostitution ring of underaged illegal aliens out of. “But it’s not a lie!”
Wilson apologized for breaking decorum, and all of the Republicans agreed it was a breach of ettiquette. Had it been a Democrat, he would have been “brave”, and “speaking truth to power”. Perhaps there would have been a qualified apology, and most Demcorats would have supported him.
I, for one, am done with this double-standard.
- philmon | 09/11/2009 @ 08:41I doubt the double-standard is done with us, though.
It’s an easy and effective way for the liberal charlatan, who possesses an agenda and the power to implement it, to communicate with the liberal voter — the “mainstream centrist” guy who doesn’t even know he’s a liberal. Tasks most effectively achieved by means of classically critical thinking, are shunted to the orbito-frontal cortex to be worked over by the brain’s impulse-control “don’t do that just because” nerve center. To a mind accustomed to that misdirection, that has accepted it as normal, it’s an easy matter to argue “it doesn’t matter whether Obama or Wilson is telling the truth, the important thing is to preserve civility.” The real disaster arrives with the double standard; the charlatan can choose at a moment’s notice which ceremonies are to be subject to this meticulous observance of decorum, and which one are not. If ever that starts to become nonsensical, the nonsense is only observed by those who can maintain a decent long-term memory.
- mkfreeberg | 09/11/2009 @ 09:11[…] THE 20th CENTURY AS SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: “Much of the “governing” that took place in our country throughout the twentieth […]
- Steynian 383 « Free Canuckistan! | 09/15/2009 @ 05:56