His Divine Eminence gave an interview to 60 Minutes:

In the interview, [interviewer Steve] Kroft points out that in his speech in Kansas, [President Obama] mentioned income inequality, a phrase that suggests a need to redistribute wealth. The president quickly responded:

President Obama: Look, everybody’s concerned about inequality. Those folks in there, who were listening to the speech, those are teachers and small-business people, and probably some small-town bankers, who are in there thinking to themselves, “How is it that I– we’re — working so hard, we now have Mom and Dad working hard, maybe if they’re lucky, they might have two jobs to try to pay off their house note, and it just seems like they’re treading water? And meanwhile, they know that corporate profits are at a record level, that a lot of folks are doing very well. What’s happened to the bargain? What’s happened to the American deal that says, you know, we are focused on building a strong middle class?

That is not a left or right position. That is an American position. And the question is going to be, in this election, whether or not we are able to reclaim that vital center of American thought and American values that says, “We’re all in this together and, you know, it matters if we are building a broad-based middle class, where everybody is able to do their part and everybody’s able to succeed.

For awhile now, I’ve been noticing four unavoidable flaws with liberal ideas, which is to say that if they manage to get everything they want, and we are to accept the notion that their goal is to improve the situation of something bigger than a left-wing political agenda, their ideas are guaranteed to fail in service of that goal due to one or more of the following reasons:

Time. They’re drunk on the elixir of friendly historians scribbling down such nonsense as, Franklin Roosevelt ended the Depression. And so they don’t worry about legacies. They’re very often caught neglecting the refinement of the message that would be handed off to history, opting to focus their attentions on the emotional rapture of the moment. The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its sloppy core message that never did quite gel into any useful form, is a perfect example of this.

Commerce. Considering how much arguing they do about wealth and who has it, it just blows my mind that they demonstrate so anemic a grasp on what it is. They show a complete ignorance of the difference between occupations that create it, and occupations that do not. They seem to think the occupations, themselves, are the wealth, and that when an economy moves it’s just thriving on its own built-up inertia, like some sort of perpetual motion device that doesn’t need any fuel. “Get it going” is all that is needed. When I had my first car, I was responsible for gas and repairs; I suspect most liberals just borrowed their parents’ other car whenever they ran into a problem, and then daddy went & had the repairs done and the tank topped off. They seem intractably dedicated to the notion that any engine not running, including the economic engine, will run just fine if someone just turns a key. They see motion the same way they see life — it’s there just because it’s there, and if you start asking chicken-and-egg questions about it it just means you’re a shallow stupid ol’ teabagger.

Incentives. Conservatives and libertarians have been screaming for generations, “If you want more of something, subsidize it, and if you want less of something, tax it.” Granting the benefit of the doubt that our liberals do really want to make things better, they must not be getting the message. They’re constantly advancing plans to subsidize lifestyles that, if improvement of society is the end goal, nobody would want to see becoming more widely practiced. I haven’t been able to get a liberal to define in clear terms what “prosperity” looks like; haven’t been able to get any one of them to say “more people would be rich.” I think they understand subconsciously that if they were to admit to that obvious truth, they’d admit their policies have something to do with hostility toward people who achieve what we want more people to be achieving…and, therefore, there’s the guaranteed fail.

And the big Kahuna:

Abundance, and/or omnipresence. I see them constantly trapped in the thought-whirlpool that the goal must be to make something more highly regarded and highly valued, and the surest way to get there is to make that thing more plentiful, ideally, so that it becomes impossible to ever get away from it. This is a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true. This is, from what I have seen, the most common failure point of the four.

And that’s what Chairman Zero is doing, near as I can make out.

“And meanwhile, they know that corporate profits are at a record level, that a lot of folks are doing very well. What’s happened to the bargain? What’s happened to the American deal that says, you know, we are focused on building a strong middle class?” On the planet on which I live, on which people have red blood and up is up & down is down, that first sentence looks like something is on the right track. I don’t really know what this “bargain” is He’s talking about, nor am I sure of this “American deal.” I don’t know what He means by “building a strong middle class.”

I can hazard a guess. I feel qualified to do so only because, for my entire life, I’ve been hearing this cliché from our liberals. And yet, said guess is all I can hazard, since throughout all that time I’ve not yet heard one say exactly what it is they mean by this…

“Strong,” near as I can figure, has to do with that fourth plank of fail, the abundance. It also has some kind of “don’t fuck with us” property to it. Middle class wants something, someone doesn’t want to give it to them, and they’re forced to give it to them anyway. So the same thing liberals would deny the purveyors of politically incorrect speech, they want to give to the middle class, and then they would like the middle class to be “thriving and robust” which means numerous.

Let’s just cut to the chase. Middle class, if it means anything at all, must mean — enjoying the security that eludes the grasp of the impoverished, yet lacking in the affluence, privileges and options enjoyed by the very rich. “Strong middle class” cannot mean a class of people who can attain this affluence, since that would contradict the very definition.

So “strong” must mean precious and cherished, according to that fourth plank of fail…there are so many middle-class people you can’t ignore their desires, once their desires have achieved consistency and cohesion. Or he means, within our legal or political framework, it’s impossible to ignore what they want because they have some kind of power. Momma Government will see to it that they get the things they want. You know, those two possibilities for what they have in mind, I think lose their contrast with each other; they melt together into one thing, if for no other reason than because the liberals are in charge of the definitions, and I don’t think they’ve put this kind of thought into it. A strong middle class means — you’d better pay attention to them and you’d better give them what they want, because they’ll get it one way or another.

It all comes down to that problem they have with the first plank…time. A proper liberal is living every single day between cradle and coffin, in a strange, surreal remake of “Groundhog Day,” in a perpetual revolution. There’s always this huge constituency that is being denied not only the various free goodies, but the opportunity to get them…and has always been denied this, throughout all the days in history, right up until yesterday. From this point forward we’ll be living in a truly egalitarian society, unicorns will fornicate in the open fields, there will be peace throughout the land, Hatfields and McCoys and Rabbis and Ayatollahs will all get together for a friendly game of kickball and Ewoks and Wookies will play some happy tunes on empty Stormtrooper’s helmets. And then there’s today. Viva la Revolution! But tomorrow will, actually, be just like today. All the tomorrows are just like today. That’s why they like “change” so much; they’re spending their entire lives in it.

“Strong” means — you can get what you want, after the revolution’s over. But you lack the means to acquire it before the revolution because you’re one of the oppressed. That’s what strong really means. It means dependent. It means when an election is coming and liberal politicians start looking for despondent, desperate, dependent people so they can rustle up some votes, you’ll be one of those despondent, desperate, dependent people.

And the President thinks it’s very important that there be a lot of people like that. That’s what a “strong” economy is on Planet Liberal; not too many people enjoying the only sign of wealth that truly matters, independence and self-sufficiency. That, paradoxically, would be a sign of a weak economy, therefore we must avoid that at all costs.

The President’s wrong, by the way. It’s not correct to say “That is not a left or right position, that is an American position.” Or if it is correct to say that, it’s correct only in the sense that some muggers aren’t concerned about left- or right-politics, and some muggers are American.

And no, “everyone” is not concerned about income inequality. Maybe everyone He knows. But that particular statement was just plain dumb. President Obama demonstrated there that He needs to get out more, and contrary to the perception that was being floated to us four years ago, He is not worldly or wise or even sophisticated, and is actually very, very sheltered.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

An oldie but a goodie.

Everyone’s talking about it, I probably don’t even need to link to it, but it’s here.

There’s a reason everybody’s talking about it, of course: It doesn’t make any freakin’ sense. The slightly-good-looking and somewhat-annoying girl-next-door has enjoyed some success improving her appearance in a bikini…and that makes her hottest of all time. Okay, here we go again: It sounds a little bit mean, and I’m sure it’s politically incorrect as just about anything, but if the judgment is to be rendered on who’s a hotter woman than who, then all the straight women and gay men need to recuse themselves. It just isn’t their thing. Some salamanders are born without eyeballs; would you consult one on the best wallpaper for your kids’ bedroom? No, you wouldn’t.

Well, I’m certainly qualified. And so, a short list of women who are hotter than Jennifer Aniston, who somehow didn’t even make the list. Keep in mind, I was asking myself “Are they better-looking than Jennifer Aniston has been known to be on her very best day?” That was my criteria, and I came up with:

Maud Adams
Jenny Agutter
Karen Allen
Nancy Allen
Christina Applegate
Amanda Bearse
Genevieve Bujold
Dyan Canon
Lois Chiles
Corinne Clery
Elisha Cuthbert
Brittany Daniel
Lisa Darr
Zooey Deschanel
Britt Ekland
Angie Everhart
Barbara Feldon
Sherilyn Fenn
Heather Graham
Kate Hudson
Elizabeth Hurley
Amy Irving
Mitzi Kapture
Kloe Kardashian
Cheryl Ladd
Sheryl Lee
Lucy Liu
Shelley Long
Sophia Loren
Rose McGowan
Ali McGraw
Alyssa Milano
Maria Montez
Mary Tyler Moore
Olivia Munn
Tara Reid
Diana Rigg
Tanya Roberts
Keri Russell
Izabella Scorupco
Jaclyn Smith
Jill St. John
Heather Thomas
Jeanne Tripplehorne
Bridgette Wilson
Lana Wood
Natalie Wood

Now, one or two of those might actually have been on the list, and maybe I missed it because I didn’t go looking around for women who are hotter than Jennifer Aniston, until I was all finished leafing through what they put up, page by page. As I took that first step, I put together a roster of their mistakes — women who should’ve placed higher, and someone in charge of this misguided effort deliberately ranked behind Jennifer Aniston. For shame, guys. It comes to 34 names, which is a third of the total.

In the order they appear, on this bottom-to-top list, they are:

100. Catherine Bach
97. Cybill Shepherd
96. Mila Kunis
94. Kathleen Turner
90. Barbara Eden
86. Grace Kelly
84. Loni Anderson
80. Elle MacPherson
77. Kelly LeBrock
76. Anita Ekberg
71. Cheryl Tiegs
64. Kylie Minogue
59. Diane Lane
56. Bo Derek
48. Kathy Ireland
47. Aishwarya Rai
40. Mariah Carey
39. Cindy Crawford
38. Teri Hatcher
37. Claudia Schiffer
33. Beyonce
30. Jayne Mansfield
28. Ann-Margret
29. Kim Kardashian
23. Carmen Electra
20. Heidi Klum
19. Heather Locklear
18. Shakira
16. Christie Brinkley
12. Scarlett Johansson
9. Jane Fonda
7. Bettie Page
3. Marilyn Monroe
2. Raquel Welch

I don’t doubt there are a lot of dull, or joy-killing, women out there who find it reassuring that someone well-known and jilted by Brad Pitt came out on top of something. Unfortunately, this invalidates the entire list. It doesn’t even rate as any kind of a “list” if there isn’t consistency in the criteria as they are being applied, and in this case it seems “hot” means one thing for the bottom-ninety-nine personalities cited, and then for this top contender it simply means “there are some swimsuit pictures floating around of her that look kind of okay.”

Exploring the narcissist. Pure gold.

Definition given:

A friend of mine explained the credo of the narcissist as follows: “I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around.”

No, she doesn’t mean narcissists think prepositions are perfectly fine things to end sentences with.

Were all the definitions, scientific & otherwise, to be pitched into the abyss and it were up to me to start the field of study all over again, I’d say: You are probably a narcissist if your default perception of others’ opinions is that they are mere obstacles and/or inconveniences, without regard for who possesses logical ownership of the topic. The introductory story, for example (and the title of this post) is about a mother essentially reducing her grown-up daughter to the status of a dress-up doll, and having to contend, with an exasperated sigh and an attitude to match, with the unwelcome epiphany that the daughter has her own ideas about what to wear.

I’ve noticed over the years that narcissists initiate conflict, not when they find indirect evidence that someone disagrees with them about something, but rather when they are placed in proximity to someone who disagrees with them about something. I suppose, in that sense, we’re all narcissists. But therein lies the solution to the problem: Narcissist comes across a rule he doesn’t like, he reacts the way everybody else does, and follows the rule. He sees someone proposing a whole suite of additional stupid rules…if it’s on television or some other non-interactive medium, again he’ll react just like anybody else.

It’s when the people with unwelcome opinions are placed in proximity. When the narcissist perceives he may have influence over the outcome, or events may unfold in such a way that he’s ultimately given this influence, that’s when the trouble starts.

No, I’m not saying lock them up and throw away the key. I’m just pointing out, if that were to happen, it would probably work. These are people who enjoy life the most when they lack influence. At least, that’s when the rest of us enjoy a suspension of the conflict. Then again, the conflict might bring pleasure to some of these more extreme types…but for the rest of them, it’s still an observation worth making, I think.

What does it say for your protest when you need to place a Craig’s List ad to get people to join it?

Well it isn’t quite so much that…it’s for a roommate for one of the tents.

My step father gave me his old tent to use so I can occupy the financial district. I set up a few nights ago but the cops were able to kick me out by using a big german sheapard [sic] to scare me. I want a roommate to help set up a new camp and watch my back in case the NAzis with the GERMAN dog come back to kick me out. I also have a video camera we can share in case they harrass [sic] us.

I am clean and keep a neat tent. I shave and shower every other week, we can alternate so some one is always in the tent. My girlfriend will bring food so we don’t have to leave. $1.00 rent is due upon our agreement and is due on the first of every month. It is not refundable as your dollar symbolizes your dedication to the tent and our cause.

Uh…what’s that again? “Every other week”?

Please tell me anyone who responds to the ad, will at least be making some inquiries about his girlfriend’s cooking. Wonder what life’s like for her? That would be two or three times a day, wouldn’t it, “Oh, gotta go down to the financial district with some food for my stud…”

Parakeets. They’re living just like parakeets. Parakeets in vinyl cages.

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers.

This blog exists for, among other reasons, pointing out what which has not yet been pointed-out. May not seem like that at times, but that is supposed to be one of the things we’re trying to do. And so we try to bestow the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award upon things that have not yet been so honored by anybody else. But this is just too good…even though blogger friend Rick has found reason to single out this wonderful observation from his brother, we’re going to have to go ahead and get in line.

Love those that rail against the corrupt reps. in Government while at the same time advocate raising taxes to send more money to Congress to piss away. Brilliant!

It seems to be the default perspective from which to see things in this era. The crooks who are in charge cannot be trusted, let’s go find them some more money.

That would be a .700 caliber. I’m sure it seems like a silly exercise, until such time as the dinosaur actually comes chasing after you.

The cartridge, named the .700 WTF (“What The F…”) and is made by fire forming a .50 BMG brass case, trimming it to 3″ in length and then sizing it. The round is loaded with a 1132 grain paper patched .700 lead cast bullet.

The rifle, with just a 16.25″ barrel, can push the 1132 grain of lead up to 2300 fps. Thats 13,000 ft/lbs of energy, right up there with the .50 BMG and far exceeding the .700 Nitro Express. The cast lead bullet has enough energy to pass clean through a 1/4″ steel plate.

From our blog-uncle Gerard, again. Yeah, we’re linking to him repeatedly, fracturing an informal policy we’ve had, since the very beginning, in doing so. Got a problem with that? He’s linking just as often to us…and he’s the one who was clinically dead, and he’s more interesting than we are. No, really. He’s taking on some big-game caliber slugs traveling at Mach 2 plus something. We’re just embedding some video clips of foreign-country weather girls with nice lookin’ legs. Which is something, I suppose, but still.

Besides of which, it just so happens we’re breaking in the new .22 targeting rifle tomorrow bright & early. Which is just about perfect for a sheet of heavy card stock with some rings printed on it, whereas the .700 WTF is just about perfect for a fucking T-Rex straight out of Jurassic Park. With lawyer-intestine still dangling off its incisors.

Well, now. That leaves us a mere 48 hundredths of an inch. We’ll just work our way up gradually.

Twenty Novembers have come and gone since my own divorce, and I really should be showing more maturity about this whole thing. But fuck it.

I mean, after all, that’s pretty much what Kevin’s ex said just a couple years ago:

As Kevin Cotter tells the story, when his wife of 12 years moved out of their Tuscon, Ariz. home in 2009, she left behind just one thing: Her old wedding dress, pristinely preserved in his closet.

“What do you expect me to do with it?” he asked.

“Whatever the $%^@# you want,” she replied.

The comment hit a nerve, and a couple of months later Cotter and his family started joking about ways he could repurpose the gown. The frock had cost him nearly a grand anyway and seemed like such a waste just sitting in storage.

AND…a blog is born.

Ah, the deep symbolism. And the contradiction. A wedding dress symbolizes purity…chastity…naïveté…ultimately, dependence on this big tough strong manly male. It is everything that modern feminism is supposed to have risen up to oppose, and yet, after some forty-five years of said feminism, the battle has yet to be engaged.

Perhaps because — among other things, a wedding dress also symbolizes “Today is my fucking day and I get all the attention” — and feminism hasn’t got a whole lot to say against that?

At some point we shall have to ponder the meaning of all these years of this empty sparring. For now, we shall enjoy Kevin Cotter’s 101 uses.

Last year I made the point, and I’d made this same point many times before…and I’ve made it many times since…

When two boys get in a fight on the playground, moderates are united with conservatives in their desire to take a chunk out of the hide of whichever boy threw the first punch. Liberals stand alone in demanding a pound of flesh from whoever threw the last one.

The larger point that this supports is that we are currently living in an era of nonsense. If someone on the boob tube describes a certain other person’s vision or ideology as “extreme,” you automatically know they’re talking about a conservative and not a liberal. Usually, the conservative will want to de-fund a program and that is found to be extreme.

But then if you do your homework, most of the time you’ll find out the reason there is this “extreme” desire to to de-fund the program it’s because the program is a boondoggle. Hence my comment about the era of nonsense. On my planet, if a program is soaking up funds every year and it isn’t doing what it is supposed to do, it’s a sensible and moderate position to take that the program needs to go away, or at least, some probing questions need to be asked about it. On Planet Talking Head, however, the only moderate position you can take is to allow things to continue as they have been.

Extremists are criticizing moderates for being extreme, and taking extremist positions, calling them moderate, and getting away with it.

Back to the schoolyard fight pardigm. I invoked it here and here and here and here…I like it a lot because it is a uniquely American value, a required value for any sensible, stable, self-sustaining civilization. You have the God-given right to defend yourself. People who do the right thing, should finish up ahead of the troublemakers.

Well. Look what Ben Shapiro found.

Last week in Boston, a seven-year-old boy named Mark got into a fight with a bully. The bully put his hands around the boy’s throat and began to squeeze. That’s when Mark fought back; he kicked his aggressor right in the family jewels. In a normal society, we’d celebrate Mark. Throw him a ticker tape parade or something. Bullies need a sharp kick to the testicles. That’s how you convince them that bullying is wrong.

But in Boston, Mark was charged with sexual assault.

Just to get this straight: Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank’s gay lover can run a homosexual prostitution ring from his apartment and Frank will not be prosecuted. But a boy kicks a bully in the berries and he faces expulsion from school.

It’s not the bully who lost his chestnuts. It’s our country.

Once again: The moderates stand with the conservatives. People who don’t give a rip about democrats and Republicans, will say — emphatically — no, you can’t do that. If bullies are picking on kids and they get some blowback from it, leave it alone, the situation handled itself. Save your interference for when the bullies are doing their thing and not suffering natural consequences from it, that’s what discipline is for.

The liberals stand alone in saying: Oh, no. Law and order? Can’t have that. Better to have chaos than law and order, if the law and order arrives by means of vigilantism. Better to let the hooligans win. Better to let Gotham City burn all the way to the ground than to have Batman running around doing his thing.

Liberals stand alone here. And yet, we end up doing things their way, time after time.

And we’re told doing it any other way is extreme.

And we believe it.

After awhile, you know, you can’t blame the liberals anymore. After awhile you have to come to the realization that upholding order over chaos is everybody‘s job. And we’ve been failing it. Shapiro’s right, it isn’t the bully who’s lost his cajones, it’s the country that has that problem.

A Tumblr blog. Might come in handy someday.

Emperor Misha is reading up on history:

His Imperial Majesty is currently going through his copy of the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History that a kind reader sent to us, and it is certainly enlightening…Quotes such as this one from FDR when his brilliant plan to hike prices on food while everybody was starving in his Great Depression was struck down by the Supremes:

“Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?”

Why the HORROR! Individuals owning the land they live on, doing with it what they please and keeping the fruits of their labors?

Sound familiar?

Of course, there is the problem of corporatism; the market is not a perfect thing, the marketplace does make its share of monsters that grow in size and power, and ultimately do harm.

But this open letter from the libertarian right to the moderate left addresses that quite handily (hat tip to blogger friend Gerard):

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.

Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
:
You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

I pointed this out years ago: Any good examples you’ll find of capitalism really pissing in its boot, when you look a little closer you’ll find it isn’t really capitalism. Which is to say, it isn’t a completely free market. What you’ll invariably find is, a bunch of big-government crony-capitalist types got some scheme together by which the government would “regulate” an industry, the scheme involved taxpayer money being doled out to their friends in some way, and that’s when the trouble started. As a general rule, this happens with commodities that are most important to us.

The price of a barrel of oil does something within a day or two — “pocket” depressions are created, where all sorts of people who were able to afford to drive to work that Monday, by Thursday, no longer can. The cost involved in having a baby delivered soars by thousands of percentage points within a generation. Tuition. Civil Remedies. Mortgages and rents. Any labor that is unionized — the government gets involved and suddenly we have a new case of “pure and unregulated” capitalism hurting people, except it isn’t pure capitalism.

Ol’ FDR was terrified of the farmer making decisions. There’s the mindset: There’s got to be some system of checks and balances in place, anytime someone decides to do something — unless that someone is me or one of my dear, close friends.

Boortz states the obvious:

Just look at the cast of characters. You have government and liberals behind the attacks…almost exclusively. And why? Simple: Because it’s government we’re supposed to worship, not God. It’s government we’re supposed to look to for support in rough times, not our church. It’s government we’re supposed to look to for comfort, not our faith. In fact, our faith is supposed to be in government, and government doesn’t like competition.

You do have to admit, beltway stimulus spending doesn’t have a lot to do with banning Santa Claus from classrooms, and neither one of those have much to do with telling climate-change skeptics they’re endangering humankind. But our liberals…(insert pinky into corner of mouth, hook lip from inside, and pull).

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account.

After all the long weeks and months of monotony, something’s changing. I know I’m a lot less worried about who ends up being nominated; I’m much more worried about what the primary & general elections will be about.

If it’s a personality contest I’ll save you some time: Romney will flatten Newt, or Newt will trounce Romney. And then Obama will absolutely cream whichever one goes against Him. It’s silly to even wonder about it.

Why Republicans work so hard to wage battles they know they’re going to lose, I’ll never understand. When the elections are about ideas, they win. If this election is about ideas, they’ll win. Clue?

There are a lot of things going on that make me more and more concerned about this. Like this, for example; I struggle to remember any recent statement I’ve heard or read that is more stupid than “This is the biggest alpha dog battle of the campaign so far.” Stupid, that is, if your objective is to get rid of Obama. Not so stupid if you’re trying to get more people to watch the debate, I suppose…and therein lies the problem.

It won’t work on me. Newt will win, or Romney will win. I can learn to live with either one. Either one will win if the general election is about ideas. Either one will lose, hugely, if the general election is about personalities.

Republicans need to be very careful absorbing the learning experience that the country’s had. It certainly has had one. The lesson is that Obama’s ideas stink on ice. And hopefully, we’ll realize that this is generally true of most super-duper-popular-isn’t-He-just-wonderful teleprompter Guy Smiley types. If the idea’s wonderful, you don’t need the world’s most awesome idea-salesman for it, it’ll sell itself.

But there is a mindset out there that the learning experience is something else: Barack Obama just isn’t so charming, and someone with more charisma can be found somewhere else. That’s an illusion, and not even a very good one. It is very dangerous — it is Barack Obama’s best, surest hope for a second term.

I’ve also muttered something to the effect that I’m seriously considering joining the “Write In Sarah Palin” campaign, although I’m still not sure whether this is a reference to the primary or the general election. The people giving me a bunch of flak don’t seem to be sure of this question either, nor do they think it matters much. I’m a moron who’s about to throw away his vote and get Obama re-elected! And I reply…well I’m not sure if we’re talking about primaries here, but anyway, I’m in California. California is going to go for Obama. If I could unilaterally decide that California wants Palin to be the nominee it wouldn’t matter worth a hill o’ beans. And then they throw me some weird argument that seems to attempt to make the popular vote somehow relevant…which it isn’t…and if it was, and so-and-so lost but the margin was smaller because dissidents like me would fall into line and back Mittens or Newteley, that would somehow mean something. Which, of course, it wouldn’t…it’s really something to see, it’s like they’re getting confused by their own words in mid-sentence, and frustrated, so of course they take that out on me. Maybe I deserve it for saying something that got them so upset. But they can’t come up with a scenario that makes it matter.

I tell them, hey — if what you’re trying to say is, if such a campaign gets off the ground then nobody in a swing state like Ohio or Florida should join it — then I agree a hundred percent, yes you’re right. That doesn’t placate them too much.

I’m not sure how many people are thinking this way. I have the impression that it is a very popular way to think: Someone is going to get nominated, and everybody who wants to see Obama out should back that candidate and never mutter a single peep against him. Well, enthusiasm is important. I’ll go so far as to say, it’s more important than usual next year. Turnout is going to be very important. Turnout will probably decide the election.

But enthusiasm only matters so much. It isn’t everything. Even if enthusiasm decides the very last thing, it doesn’t start the first thing — it relies on other things. Look at Newt Gingrich, for example: His popularity surge has been historic, but each and every single time it’s happened, it took place after Newt took to the stage and skillfully and assertively articulated an idea. I don’t perceive any sentiment out there that could be summed up as “Just put Newt in charge of everything, he’s so awesome and his judgment is sound!” People like Newt after Newt makes the case about what he’s going to support, and why. Before he does this, people don’t like him so much.

In a contest against Barack Obama for general-personality-awesomeness, Newt will lose big. So will Romney.

But the ideas to be championed, are good ones. They sell themselves. People are good, people are worthy. If an economy thrives when people prosper, and we want our economy to thrive, we’ll have to make it easier for people to prosper. You should be able to defend your house against an intruder. Racial discrimination is wrong, in either direction. America will suffer an abundance of enemies and a shortage of friends, as long as it’s less hazardous and expensive to be our enemy than to be our friend.

Meanwhile, Obama is much more fun to watch than either one of those pasty white guys. Cuter, too. There’sJustSomethingAboutHimICan’tExplainIt!!!

Like I said: Why Republicans consistently try to engage battles they know they’re going to lose, I just don’t understand.

The perils of personality-politics.

The tide is turning?

Outrage poured across the /internet once reports of a 9-year-old receiving a two-day suspension for calling a teacher “cute” surfaced, but now it appears he’s receiving some justice, WBTV reports.

“We will be sending an official letter of apology to the parents,” Gaston County Schools Spokesperson Bonnie Reidy told the station. “Also the suspension will not count against the child and the child will receive additional instructional assistance to make up for the time out of the classroom.”

Principal Jerry Bostic, who determined the boy’s alleged comment was sexual harassment, has also resigned, according to the report.

Is our society finally coming to its senses? Are we looking at the long-awaited demise of the risible “Could Be Construed As” standard?

Not holding my breath. Standing up for justice for the benefit of a nine-year-old is easy. The last in line for sympathy is the grown-up, 25-to-65-year-old straight white male 72 inches tall and still possessing all 21 digits. Not whining, just stating a simple matter of fact. In the courtroom of public opinion, if someone who’s a member of that group goes up against someone who is not a member of that group, the outcome is pre-determined.

So, no. I’d need to see more. But I’m still holding out hope.

And it’s still a victory for common sense over stupidity, which is always welcome.

Well…I must say, this is a little embarrassing. The anniversary ends with a zero, you would expect an unusually high level of solemnity and punctuality in observing the occasion. As it is, things are so quiet it seems there’s an expectation that the last survivor has expired, and we can move on. As is often the case with unhelpful messages, it isn’t stated syllable-for-syllable or word-for-word, it’s more of a perceptible stench. An absence of something. No movie promos. Hard to see any speeches or ceremonies taking place. Google’s page just has a search box and nothing else.

I can understand the desire to bury the past. There may even be good intentions behind it; Japan is not our enemy. Some people are more dovish than they were ten years ago, they’ve got their reasons and I can respect that.

But it just seems to me, there’s something wrong with your argument if the best shot it has of looking like the right one, arrives as a consequence of people not talking about something.

One of the lessons we have learned from Pearl Harbor, is that when a nation declares war on another, it’s at least possible for it to be unambiguously and incontestably in the right in doing so. If there is a political agenda in motion today that finds this message to be inconvenient, I don’t think it’s asking too much for said agenda to take a break for one day while a grateful nation remembers.

Seems like just yesterday, when not a single week would go by without someone saying Sarah Palin’s “fifteen minutes were up some time ago” and “it’s time for her to go away.” If I had an archive of recordings I could consult, I believe I’d find much of this defeatist muttering was muttered after she’d gone away.

Donald Trump has gone away, too, but now he’s decided he doesn’t like being gone-away. So he’s promoted himself from aspiring conqueror to kingmaker. And yet: Where are the loud, bumptious voices, preaching to the rest of us that Donald Trump Has Exhausted His Fifteenth Minute Of Fame And Must Go Away Now?

Well, I’ll say it. He’s doing incomparable damage.

The truth that no one seems to be willing to audibly point out is, Donald Trump actually shares a lot in common with our current president. Not quite so much the ideology or the positions on the issues, but this vision for proper government. This whole notion that a candidate is elected with a message, the message becomes a mandate…and, at some point, the message is subsumed, overwhelmed by, and ultimately made insignificant in the looming shadow of the messenger. We get this “most important guy” whose opinions are supremely significant, even if those opinions directly contradict the message that got him elected in the first place. And then this scale of significance, in short order, starts to decide everything. Everyone else in the country is inferior to this guy on top. And that’s even if they agree with the top dog; if they disagree, they’re not significant at all, and this top dog guy gets to scheme up some creative new ways to make the dissenters even more insignificant than they already are. The significance becomes a virtue unto itself and the insignificance becomes some kind of a transgression. People start to brag about the correctness of their positions because they’ve got more Twitter followers than whoever else might disagree.

I know Donald Trump subscribes to this whole school of thought, because he relies on it so often. How many times have we heard him defend himself against someone else, because he counts more than they do. In fact, I struggle to recall a single time he’s persisted long in defending an idea, by actually discussing that idea. So Barack Obama and Donald Trump, it seems, agree on how the government should be run. They both agree there needs to be some “soft monarch” up at the top, who dictates what’s right and what’s wrong, one minute to the next. If that guy ever does something wrong, that thing stops being wrong, right there-and-then, just because Mister Wonderful is doing it. They agree on this, they just disagree on who that top guy should be.

This is anti-American. If we are on the brink of realizing some truth that places the country’s continuing survival in real jeopardy, then surely that would be the truth: We lately cannot conduct our elections in such a way that we vote on the acceptance or rejection of ideas, we instead vote on the acceptance or rejection of people, and we’re going to be stuck in this loop for a few more cycles. How many of these four year cycles, I wonder, would it take to make such “stuckage” terminal to America herself, and make the nation’s demise a certain thing?

I submit that to deal a lasting blow to the spirit that makes her great, it takes only one. We just got done demonstrating that much.

This latest stunt has me actually agreeing with Ron Paul, no mean feat that. Newt Gingrich has been called out by Congressman Paul on the mistake he’s making “kissing the ring” of Donald Trump, and Gingrich is doubling down. When you make a mistake and refuse to admit it, you’ve made two mistakes.

Paul’s right.

Gingrich is wrong.

Trump needs to go away. Right now. He never had fifteen minutes here.

…well…if you’ve had this discussion with someone left-of-leaning lately, you’ll know the next thing that happens is as reliable as nightfall. They love their facts and statistics — cling to them like some kind of security blanket. And they seem to understand the concept that statistics, especially statistics that consist of averages, are produced by counting all of something in some consistent way. But they live in this funny half-world in which large pieces of the “all-of-something” disappear, or never existed in the first place. Yes, they shun information and shun facts. Ask a prog about anything that has to do with a non-favored demographic group that is being inconvenienced in some way, or is suffering in some way. Men being hit harder by the current economy, or Christians being forced to close their church services for a re-routed gay pride parade, or the Boy Scouts losing United Way funding…

They don’t want to pay attention to this stuff. Which is their right, of course. But then they have this adorably naive way of carrying-on like when they deliberately ignore half the picture, their statistics somehow still count for something.

It’s just one of the fundamental laws that make up the universe, whether you appreciate that or not: Anything that is an average, is only valid if it is produced from all of whatever the average is supposed to be reflecting. Libs aren’t happy with that. They’d rather consume their half-facts, puff up the adrenaline, and get angry. It’s more fun that way.

But the fact of the matter is…while it’s true the very rich do prosper more than the average during the boom times…they also lose a lot more during the busts. Liberals come to some bizarre conclusions here because — yet again — they’re fond of paying attention to one side of the equation, but not the other:

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CB0) says, “The share of income received by the top 1% grew from about 8% in 1979 to over 17% in 2007.”

This news caused quite a stir, feeding the left’s obsession with inequality. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, said this “jaw-dropping report” shows “why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve.” The New York Times opined that the study is “likely to have a major impact on the debate in Congress over the fairness of federal tax and spending policies.”

But here’s a question: Why did the report stop at 2007? The CBO didn’t say, although its report briefly acknowledged—in a footnote—that “high income taxpayers had especially large declines in adjusted gross income between 2007 and 2009.”

No kidding. Once these two years are brought into the picture, the share of after-tax income of the top 1% by my estimate fell to 11.3% in 2009 from the 17.3% that the CBO reported for 2007.

The larger truth is that recessions always destroy wealth and small business incomes at the top. Perhaps those who obsess over income shares should welcome stock market crashes and deep recessions because such calamities invariably reduce “inequality.” Of course, the same recessions also increase poverty and unemployment.

The latest cyclical destruction of top incomes has been unusually deep and persistent, because fully 43.7% of top earners’ incomes in 2007 were from capital gains, dividends and interest, with another 17.1% from small business. Since 2007, capital gains on stocks and real estate have often turned to losses, dividends on financial stocks were slashed, interest income nearly disappeared, and many small businesses remain unprofitable. [emphasis mine]

Daniel J. Mitchell from the Cato Institute explains the harm that our tax policies really do:

You can see, he’s been running into this too. You say “rich people lose” and there are people out there who immediately stop listening — and they tend to be the loudest ones. But that’s part of the equation. And the loud people will still want to run around pretending to be all scientifical and junk, even though they’re only looking at half the picture.

See, it depends on your purposes. If you’re scavenging for sound bites to try to get people whipped up about an agenda, it’s appropriate to cherry-pick the data and toss out whatever doesn’t suit your needs. If you’re trying to get a reading on the situation and arrive at a rational understanding of what’s going on, and you’re going to rely on statistics and averages to do this, then you want to count everything.

We’re in economic trouble right now, because we’ve spent a lot of years allowing our policies to be written and interpreted and molded and shaped by people who go through the motions of doing the latter when they’re really doing the former.

Now:

Unemployment Rate Drops To 8.6% Raising Hopes
Jobless Rate Drop Could Boost Obama
Obama Gets Economic Indicator He Can Crow About
Good News On Job Front For Obama
Jobless Rate Lowest In 2.5 Years

Bush, seeking re-election in ’04:

The President’s Jobless Recovery
Frustrated Job Seekers Cause Jobless Rate To Drop
Economy Adds Few New Jobs
Low Jobless Rate Reflects Lost Hope
US Jobless Rate Drops But For Wrong Reasons

Situation’s pretty much the same…except the unemployment rate being talked about seven years ago was 5.7%. How sweet would that be now.

Nothing further to add.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas Jefferson

Isn’t there?

If there isn’t such a rule, can’t we make one?

The details aren’t necessary to discuss, but once again we’re contemplating the sad state of health care in this country because, at pharmacy point-of-sale, I made the discovery that my fiance’s health insurance plan is about as useful as a bag without a bottom.

And also, once again: We have to have some sympathy for the people who want to support the latest whiz-bang government-intervention odyssey into the health care market. This is how the ambition starts, isn’t it? “So-and-so needs a pill that costs a quarter of a million dollars, just to live.” It certainly gives one a feeling that Something Must Be Done. And, anybody who stands in the way, or mutters so much as a squeak of resistance, must think of human lives as disposable and must therefore be some kind of a monster.

You know, it occurs to me, maybe that’s where we’re running into trouble. This idea that if a thought is understandable — if a feeling is understandable — then it is wrong to resist it in any way. EVER. The passionate thought has to go to Capitol Hill, it has to get into the books, everyone has to vote for it, it has to become the law of the land and then if it doesn’t net the results we wanted, we have to live with whatever it is forever. And then we have to pass a whole bunch more laws just like it. Where’d we get this, anyway? How and when did it become wrong to say “I understand your agitation, but there are reasons why we can’t do this.” That is precisely what so-called “customer service” people say to us every hour of every day, when our everyday grievances, demands and requests are so much more reasonable than allowing government to take over [blank] yet again. Somehow, that’s the one desire that never seems to run into the boilerplate I-understand-but-proceed-no-further-barrier, even though that’s the one desire that should.

All these horror stories. I asked one of the horror story peddlers a couple years ago: What would happen if you went to the emergency room with this in, let us say, the 1980’s? Would you have been stuck with a $3,000 bill then? Absolutely not. Okay, then…that’s like, the first rule of problem solving, if the problem is a relatively recent problem, review the history. What changed? What’s different? Too many people aren’t doing this. Obama comes up with a plan that has “health” and “care” in the title…anyone following the news, knows how He got it, He just said to Congress “Write something down that has ‘health’ and ‘care’ in the title, and send it to Me.” Wham, bam, thank you ma’am…and we’ve all got to support this because Something Must Be Done.

I just got done writing down something about the insane. Well, the incompetent represent a big problem too.

My confidence in my retirement plans has always been rather fleeting. Like many Americans, I’m worried about outliving my savings. We’re all probably more concerned about this than we ought to be, even though the future may reveal we’ve been less troubled by it than we should be. If all goes well, I expect during my lifetime to see this cycle repeated maybe four more times — politicians put out some new government health care intrusion scheme on display, and every nitwit who ever paid more than he expected for an “inhalator” will yell “Yes, yes, things are terrible, we’ve got to do something!” After four or five of these, what will the state of health care in the United States be? Will life, for an 85-year-old man in 2051, continue to be affordable? I don’t think we can afford this over the long term, right now, with the nitwits running around voting yes on this stuff.

No, a bottle of pills half-full of cotton should not cost a hundred and ten dollars. Yes, there’s a reason that it does…and no, “greed” is not the explanation. The guy selling you a box of paper clips for 89 cents wants to make a profit, too; he’s greedy, too. But you’re only paying 89 cents. Clue?

Go home and do some thinking, you nitwits. Something’s terribly wrong when the rest of us have to choose between becoming a burden on our children and grandchildren, and taking your vote away.

You may want to start with Milton Friedman’s famous quote: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

We make a point of subscribing to liberal blogs, because our curiosity and befuddlement about their ideas is genuine. We really do seek to understand, here. We occasionally will let one of these go when the feed seeks only to aggravate and does nothing to educate; we just dropped The Young Turks off our YouTube channel. But even the ones who are just out there to dispense phony arguments that regular-Joe liberals can use against conservatives in casual settings — the kinds of chestnuts where you dig into them, just a little tiny bit, and you find out you weren’t supposed to do any research on this at all, it was just a cool sound bite to be thrown out at a kegger or over the Thanksgiving dinner table. We still study these, to get a reading on how progressives think.

So we keep subscribing to Ed Darrell, whose computer data has apparently been lost to oblivion or at least placed in jeopardy. Last night he thought he’d announce to the world that he is having trouble signing on to Carbonite because…

So he can continue to slavishly devote himself to his proper progressive ideology, or he can keep things working. Reminds me of the old Vaudeville skit where the mugger pulls a gun on a guy and yells “Your money or your life!” and after a long pause, the mugging victim mutters “I’m thinking, I’m thinking…”

Just about every conservative who has attended and managed to succeed in college — or, pointedly, done the same in Ed Darrell’s class — has learned to do what he can’t bring himself to do here. Actually, every conservative who’s watched teevee long enough to see Our Holy Replacement Jesus Man-God President pop on with some public service announcement…you need to bend and flex, in ways this lefty blogger cannot. It becomes just part of living life. If you have to put up with a smarmy lefty to get something done, then you just do it so the thing gets done; if it’s that unpleasant of an experience, then hurry up let’s get it over with. Progs are not placed in this situation too often, and when they are, we see now how they react. One cannot help but wonder what kind of data is supposed to be protected here. Limbaugh’s smug mug is sufficient to stop the idea in its tracks, that the data might be worth saving?

So yes, this is why we subscribe to liberal blogs. Just like Michael Savage says, it is a mental disorder. Think about what liberal ideas do; they work a lot like Carbonite, except your “on-line service” is the government and you are required to enroll. Much of the time, the government is run by conservatives, and it seems the resulting conundrum is something the liberal just simply ignores and blocks out, from long-term memory, short-term memory and present conscious experience. Very typical behavior for mental disorders.

If it is one, then we all need to be studying it, for it is wrecking our lives, and our childrens’ lives, along with those of the progs. They want to create a perfect world filled with understanding and egalitarianism and compromise, in which everybody’s opinion is important and everybody counts. And then not live in it. Ostracizing everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

Reminds me of that weird, goofy dream/nightmare I had in that hot summer night when the last presidential election campaign was in full swing, about the tiny fortress with the strict rules and the high walls. Those who exile end up exiling themselves.

Update: You know, it’s worth pondering here — Darrell did have a legitimate reason for putting up this observation. It is absurd to think he stands alone, among the left-leaning, in nurturing a new reluctance to become a Carbonite client and it is equally absurd to think Carbonite did not anticipate this. Obviously, someone in marketing made a “three steps forward and one step back” decision.

Perhaps what we are seeing here is solid evidence that conservatives and liberals think about data protection in entirely different ways. If I ever lose faith in my own data protection measures, which is doubtful, and an on-line protection plan started to look like a good idea, there is no liberal countenance you could put up on that web site that would slow me down even a little tiny bit. Heck, put Nancy Pelosi up there. I’d just click the button a little faster to get past it.

It’s my [insert your own expletive]-ing data. My data is time. It’s time I spent on the [another expletive] computer, that I could have been spending doing something else. I’m not screwing around here.

Could we conclude that, generally speaking, the most strident liberals haven’t got much use for backups? Hmmmm…there’s a thought. They do seem to be enamored with how ideas resonate, much more than they are with how those ideas are remembered. They don’t seem to care a whole lot that something sounding good today might sound comical tomorrow. “We Are The Change We Have Been Waiting For!” comes to mind as an example, although there are many others.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Sometimes, you can improve the outcome simply by asking the right question(s)…