HazZzMat

The Mandate of Clear Thinking: Real Issues (continued)

2011-11-05T16:07:00.001-04:00

3) Crony capitalism:

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power. So, do you want to know why the permanent political class doesn’t really want to cut any spending? Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them.
Gov. Sarah Palin, from speech at Indianola, Iowa Tea Party meeting
September 3, 2011

Gazooks! Sounds awfully close to an OWS rant! Back to Populism? Well, funny thing. Even groups radically opposed to each other’s ends often agree on why they want to get there. Look over what she said and compare it to, say, the pile of money handed over to Citibank, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, Chrysler. The latter two especially, “this is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work…” No, it’s spending $2 million for every UAW job (and vote and campaign contributions to the DNC and Democrat candidates), an unsubtle vote-buying plan. And, of course, it’s often not the ballot box vote that counts, but the future (or past) contribution vote:

The Solyndra scandal has ignited fury among congressional leaders who are chastising the commander-in-chief for responding to an economic recession with a failed “green energy subsidy experiment.” …House committee released a special report blasting the president for wasting nearly $100 billion to create “green jobs.” Undue political influence has determined how much of the money has been disbursed, investigators found…As President Barack Obama’s disastrous and costly green energy agenda becomes the focus of a congressional investigation, the administration celebrates the multimillion-dollar “green makeover” of a public housing facility in Washington State…The festivities come on the heels of a major scandal involving a California solar panel company that folded after receiving more than half a billion dollars from the government. The White House helped the bankrupt manufacturer (Solyndra) get the money over the objections of federal budget analysts and news reports have identified one of the company’s major investors as an Obama fundraiser… Obama's green jobs agenda rife with corruption, says ranking lawmaker, Jim Kouri, Examiner, 9/29/2011

As has been widely reported, even in MSM, even White House officials tried to stop this loser, a five hundred million dollar gift to an Obama supporter to uphold a company that its auditors said would fold in less than a year. (It did). This is the kind of deal you’d expect from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela – hey, you scratch my back and I’ll give you some money I took from the people.

Last week General Motors introduced its $41,000 Volt electric vehicle…a massive new product program that likely wouldn't exist in a free market, focusing much of the ailing company's attention on a product that won't move in any volume without thousands of dollars per vehicle in government subsidies…Volt has raised new criticisms of the GM bailout for having wasted billions of taxpayer money. Back in April GM and the Obama administration attempted to deflect some of this negative feedback by announcing that GM had repaid $6.7 billion in government loans. What was missing from this announcement, however, was the fact that the money to repay this loan had come from a working capital fund provided by the federal government's TARP program. Switching money from one pocket to another seldom does much for financial health…But all these criticisms miss the most costly aspect of the government bailout: By intervening in the bankruptcy process, the Federal government kept GM's assets and employees in essentially the same management hands that have underutilized them for decades… The High Price Of The GM Bailout, Warren Meyer, Forbes, 8/10/10

Note the key points. The Volt has an $8000 subsidy for to keep the price down to one still far above a middle-income person’s likelihood of purchasing a vehicle that has hardly sold any copies. The so-called payback of government loans to GM was simply borrowed from the TARP money GM received (contrary to the 2008 law’s intent). Further, the profitability of GM is itself an illusion generated when the government’s reorganization plan allowed them to spin off prior debt and liabilities. That old GM is a sinkhole of losses, most picked up by you and me. But friends is friends, eh? Anything for a union brother, and anything not to upset the old management so much that they might not support the President in 2012. The writer hated it when Carter’s administration bailed out Chrysler in the 1970s, but, look closely, and you’ll find that Lee Iacocca’s version of the company paid back every dime of principal and interest without any restructuring of the loan.

President Obama’s administration claims that there is no cronyism involved in granting waivers from provisions in the Obamacare law, but when AARP becomes exempt…it really makes you wonder…The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)…decided to exempt providers of “Medigap” policies. AARP just so happens to be the nation’s largest seller of such policies. And oh, by the way, the AARP donated millions to the Obamacare advertising campaign, and millions more on lobbyists…Not only did the AARP advocate for Obamacare, they also included in their support an attack on their biggest competitor. Of course, the White House and HHS are trying to claim that favoritism didn’t play a role when deciding this exemption, but come on, who honestly believes that?... The AARP break exempts the health care provider from publicly releasing and explaining health care payment rate increases on their supplemental insurance plans….Senate majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Max Baucus (D-MT) wrote to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last October asking her not to make this exemption: “Some beneficiaries enrolled in the United of Omaha Life Insurance Company will see their Medigap premiums increase by approximately 40 percent between 2010 and 2011,” they wrote. “An increase of this magnitude raises serious concerns about premium-setting practices and rate review procedures in place for Medigap policies.”…This comes just days after learning that 20 percent of the latest round of waivers granted went to upscale hotels, restaurants and nightclubs in Nancy Pelosi’s home district…Those who were in the position to grant these waivers obviously knew that these businesses were in the former Speaker’s home district….If the bill is so great, why should any company want a waiver, even if it’s temporary? Also, if the process for determining who gets the waivers is meant to be transparent, why isn’t the HHS releasing the names of rejected waiver applicants? More Cronyism With Obamacare Waivers, Ashe Schow, Action for America, 5/20/2011

Hey, if everybody’s in on it, eh? Such cronyism makes hash of any kind of management decision-making in companies in the same business, or under the same threat from government programs. The government is, in effect, saying “We don’t care if you’re good; we don’t care if you create jobs; all we care about is if you can do us a favor. Get it?” (Enter Rahm Emmanuel with a club) Gangsters in Brooklyn have more style.

Obama’s connections to less than reputable…groups like Goldman Sachs, the Chicago Climate Exchange, “Fannie and Freddie,” former Chicago Governor Rod Blagojevich, Franklin Raines, Bill Ayers, Van Jones, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, etc…have placed Americans in the unfortunate position of having to question everything that the government says and does. This epiphany has forced the Central Illinois 9/12 project to investigate the suspiciously preferable treatment Obama and his cohorts have provided to the Chicago-based, community-based investment bank, Shorebank…Shorebank is “focused on domestic and foreign microfinancing, is heavily engaged in the financing of ‘green’ projects and ‘green’ jobs, and has a host of ties to the Obama and Clinton administrations.” … Shorebank contributed heavily to the campaigns of Barack Obama, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, and Sen. Dick Durbin…They’ve also donated to left-wing organizations like MoveOn.org…Over the past decade, ‘green’ Shorebank has become a shill and a front for the cap-and-trade crowd and those with a radical environmentalist agenda.” Perhaps most intriguing is that the Joyce Foundation is a major shareholder of Shorebank, the same foundation that has been interconnected to the Chicago Climate Exchange and the entire cap-and-trade scheme. .. While 10 other Illinois banks were closed in 2010 alone, local and federal government agents have fought vehemently to keep Shorebank afloat. In 2009, Shorebank received $35 million in federal funds for grants and tax credits. Unfortunately, the bank still reported losses of $50 million in the same year, prompting a “cease and desist “ order by the FDIC, as well as by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation…Chicago Congresswoman Schakowsky and Senator Durbin favored providing state help to the bank, but when Shorebank discovered another route for financial support in February 2010, they seized it. The Chicago Daily Observer cites the 9/12 project: “Secretary Geithner proposed ‘enhancement’ to TARP funds specifically aimed at community development banks that would allow them to receive capital investment funds at a 2 percent rate (compared to the standard 5 percent rate) and to receive federal TARP funds that would be matched to funding received from private institutions.” In a furtive attempt to assure that Shorebank is eligible for the funding, Schakowsky argued that the funding would function as a “jobs program for the area…In order for this to work, Shorebank must be recognized as a “Community Development Financial Institituion.” If so, it is eligible to receive TARP money and prevent seizure by the FDIC… Shorebank: Another Example of Cronyism, Raven Clabough, The New American, 5/21/2010

This is sort of how Mafia controlled businesses work. It may look like a restaurant, may even serve good food, but its real function is to launder money from drug sales and other criminal activity. And, it’s a long part of the current Presidential team’s historical background:

As state senator, Obama’s interest extended to medical programs as well as to hospital real estate matters. Soon after his election he unsuccessfully requested a $1 million state “earmark” for the Chicago Medical Center hospital. His wife, Michelle, had been selected for an executive position there by board member and close friend Valerie Jarrett. In 2005 her part-time salary was raised from $120,000 to $317,000, about twice what Obama made as senator…Ms. Obama’s primary role was to create what has been described as a low-income “patient-dumping” program called the “South Side Health Collaborative”. It featured a gang of “counselors” that advised unprofitable low-income patients they would be better off at other hospitals and clinics. Jarrett gave her approval to the concept, and David Axelrod was hired to promote it. Soon Chicago’s inner city populations began hearing that the program would “dramatically improve health care for thousands of South Side residents”, and that the medical center was generously willing to provide “a ride on a shuttle bus to other centers”. In late 2007 Dr. Eric Whitaker became the hospital’s Executive Vice President for Strategic Affiliations and Associate Dean for Community-Based Research. He had worked with Ms. Obama and was recommended to Blago for the job by Senator Barack Obama through mutual pal Tony Rezko. Whitaker had also been hired to an earlier position as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health based on Obama’s recommendation, and remains a good friend and member of the President’s inner circle. He has vacationed with the Obama family in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii. Dr. Whitaker’s name has recently surfaced in connection with a federal investigation into an alleged cash-siphoning scheme involving funds awarded by the Illinois Department of Health and Public Services to Margaret A. Davis, a former director of the Chicago Chapter of the National Black Nurses Association. Special focus is being directed to a no-bid contract and seven AIDS and cancer-related grants from which she may have embezzled $500,000 for personal use. While there are no known subpoenas linking Whitaker to any illegalities, Davis’ June 9 grand jury indictment is part of a larger criminal investigation involving health department and other state agencies he oversaw during his time as department director. Obama Kick-Back Cronyism - Part 2: Illinois Health And Human Disservices, Larry Bell, Forbes, 11/02/2011

Read the whole story and part 1. The remarkable thing about such deals, as with any high level gangsterism, is the utter shamelessness of the parties, not that this is new. You can find the same gleeful pursuit of personal gain in the Gilded Age among politicians like James Blaine and Rosco Conkling. Thought we’d escaped all of that with the transparent administration? Hey, if you didn’t get that with the clean Clintons, or now from this administration, you won’t get the hilarious scene in The Devil’s Advocate when half the real politicians in New York, and a few from outside, get together in a party thrown by the Devil (Al Pacino in one of his more endearing roles). In the crony world, sleaze is king. Making dirty deals is their entitlement program. You’re unsophisticated and don’t belong there if you don’t get it. No, that’s not true. The way this writer sees it, people who get it and participate in cronyism don’t belong in office; they belong in jail.

Now you know why the President said of Gov. Palin, “if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.”

Luther

The Mandate of Clear Thinking: Real Issues (continued)

2011-11-05T10:29:00.004-04:00

2) The Communist Resurgence

When the hammer and sickle came down over the Kremlin in 1991, a seventy-four-year-old experiment collapsed in bankruptcy, political disintegration, and cheering. Trillions in treasure, many millions of lives, more than forty years of struggle, four decades of the Strategic Air Command being on alert, the underlying agreement between both parties on partisanship ending at the border – it all ended that night, preceded by the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Across Europe, east and west, millions danced in the streets. Small wonder.

Even in its late stages, the communist experiment guided from Moscow was a murderous, oppressive monstrosity. In its home country, it had murdered millions under Lenin, twenty million or more under Stalin, with periods of mass starvation as forced collectivization failed, and an endless succession of show trials, conspiracies, and military interventions to enforce the party’s grim rule. Life in Russia’s client states was only slightly better. Gorbachev’s loosening of this totalitarian state provided the excuse the general population needed to toss them all out, with hardly a shot fired. “Why waste bullets on a corpse?” was a popular saying in Moscow in 1990. Ammunition wasn’t needed elsewhere either, except in Rumania, where one of the nastiest Red thugs, actually a couple, were gleefully, horribly tortured, mutilated and murdered by crowds, rather like Mussolini had been during the Second World War. There were remarkable intellectual circles, such as those around Havel in Czechoslovakia, intellectuals devoted to the idea of free thinking, freedom of action, liberty of the individual, and capitalism, albeit a somewhat more restrained variety than you might find in a movie about America’s Wild West. It was shocking to Western intellectuals, many of them sympathizers with the Soviet Union, Communism, and socialism. The astonishing wave rising against the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe between 1978 and 1989 pushed aside all allegiances and standard explanations (much like the Arab Spring of now). Even old Lefties like the late, great Leonard Bernstein were delirious when the Berlin Wall came down, though it is hard to imagine Maestro Bernstein as easily inviting Vaclav Havel’s drinking friends to a party on Sutton Place as he had once done for the Black Panthers. The Left, we know all too well, picks its cocktail and dinner companions very carefully.

Just before, Soviet armor had already left Poland, most of eastern Europe. Trains rumbled east daily with tens of thousands of Red Army troops. In an extraordinarily astute gesture, Helmut Kohl, chancellor of the reuniting Germany, arranged to pay salaries for, and feed, the Red Army until they could be resettled in Russia. Good thing. Imagine a million or so guys in uniform, jobless, still armed, hungry, with no future? The collapse was a dangerous moment. As a Russian KGB chief from the bad old days remarked about Cuba in 1962, “some colonel could have started a shooting war without anybody finding out it until it was too late.” It didn’t happen. The world had the good fortune of having a brilliant team, led by George Bush, Sr., who used the impending collapse to negotiate settlements of Cold War disputes across the world, reducing tensions, clearing the Iraqis out of Kuwait. For a while, it looked as though we’d entered the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama addressed it in a famous, if someone dreamy, essay.

The old regime tried a comeback through a military coup, but after the standoff, with new hero Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank with a bullhorn, promising never to surrender to the old days, the Bolsheviks, like their fascist brothers from Franco’s era in Spain, acknowledged that their day was over. It was a moment of rare beauty in political affairs. But, as in the remarkable, 5-year television series Babylon 5, an unsubtle rendering of the story into science fiction, the dismissal of Bolshevik shadows marked the end of one war, and the beginning of another. Optimists who saw nothing but a rosy future for the newly-dominant democracies had forgotten an important lesson: the Left never gives up.

All during the 90s, the Left continued to subvert institutions in the United States in a process described by Wonker’s posts regarding the Gramsci strategy. In sum, it’s a method of undermining American political, social, religious and cultural institutions, employed in the U.S. by the Left (a strategy encouraged by Saul Alinsky and disciples) because our politics and culture are so strongly aligned against collectivist thinking and organization. While it’s true that almost all union leadership were socialist or communist before World War I, by the 1930s, with the bitter experience of the Soviet Union, it was a rare labor union that openly aligned itself with Communists, already notorious for forcing Russian unions into being tools for forced labor under Lenin and Stalin. By the 1950’s, most U.S. unions disavowed the worldwide Communist movement, and were as much targeted by KGB as were the State Department and the CIA. As notorious as the Red Scare eras were, especially in Leftist mythology, the McCarthyites in the late 40s and early 50s forced many Soviet agents out of government departments, unions, and colleges and universities. These Reds were not there as free agents of different ideas, the favored myth of tenured radicals, but to subvert, destabilize and attack a sworn enemy.

But, as we watched the hammer & sickle come down, there came a natural urge to celebrate, to swear off strategic military expenditures, to demilitarize society, to spend the peace bonus (as we had after World War Two). For those too young to remember, we had emerged from an often grim, two-generation struggle. How dangerous this bipolar world was, how close the confrontation between Red and Free could get to an outbreak of war likely to destroy the planet, popped up in Red scares, television, international crises, and the movies, as it did in Stanley Kramer’s drama, Fail Safe, and Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, Dr. Strangelove… in 1964. Fail Safe presumed something slightly fantastic (as did strategic planners in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations), that a reasoned negotiation could end in an acceptable trade, at however terrible a cost, could stop all-out war in case of an accidental attack (an all-too-likely possibility -- for all its safeguards, nuclear war is automated war). As a cultural artifact, Kramer's film is a remarkable reminder of the inhuman chess game being played, which created an environment of terror described by Elie Wiesel as “the universal concentration camp.” Dr. Strangelove…, on the other hand, presumed something quite a lot less fantastic, that human frailties, which planners believed could be checked with orders of battle and structuring of confrontation, would win out regardless. “Some colonel” would start the ball rolling. In the film, the commander of an air force base launches a nuclear attack on the Russians without orders from Washington. The subsequent efforts to fix this “mistake” are shown as the futile efforts of clowns masquerading as general officers, timid leaders, and a lunatic ex-Nazi unsubtly based on Henry Kissinger. It is deliriously funny, even now, even as the song “We’ll meet again…” is belted out over the end of the world (actual footage of hydrogen bomb tests in Russia and in the Pacific). Strangelove… is the most horrifying film about this period conceivable, largely because its director, Kubrick, and its writer, Terry Sothern, felt that we weren’t smart enough to play with our own toys.

A later generation got the very frightening “Day After”. In 1991, it seemed, all was well. The East, like the West, comprised just folks, eager to get on with uncomplicated things: making businesses work, raising families, settling international disputes with talk instead of terror, getting along. The notion of a worldwide conspiracy began to achieve the status of either an old and discredited scare story, like the boogie man, or as a sign of a political commentator trying to go back to the old days to get back some of his friends' old power.

In the decade since 9/11/2001, however, it has become devastatingly clear that our celebrations were fine for the dismissal of one worldwide conspiracy, but had ignored the rapid development of another, what Jamie Glazov has described in United In Terror: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, the bizarre support and assistance by the Left for radical Islam’s world-embracing vision of destroying the secular world and replacing it with one unified under sharia law, a vision almost indistinguishable from that of the Comintern (or the Nazis) in 1935.

It is truly strange. If the Left is about Progressivism, and Progressivism includes such things as equal rights for all people, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, etc., why would it ally itself with a theological movement that has demonstrated violent opposition to all of those changes? ‘Why did Stalin ally himself with Hitler?’ would be the historical analogy. Answers are not hard to find. Glazov, like many others before him, including Hannah Arendt, puts it in plain view: It’s not about Progressivism. It’s not about anybody’s status. It’s about power, the power of those who claim to be working on our behalf to totally dominate our lives.

And as you look out there at the various uprisings, terrorist acts, and the peculiar unity of purpose in all of them, don’t be as fooled as a number of unions apparently have been. The people burning Oakland, Rome and Athens, like those in the Arab Spring, are the unconscious partisans of a new generation of tyrants.

The fingerprints of the preeminent funder of the activist Left today, George Soros, are all over the anti-American “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The seventh-wealthiest person in America (net worth: $22 billion), Soros has publicly embraced Occupy Wall Street and financially supports a left-wing group that is funneling money to the movement…This Communist sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that wants to radically transform America. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline…The nonprofit organization that has taken Soros’s money is the Alliance for Global Justice…As of Nov. 2, the Alliance reported $206,000 in donations earmarked for Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street and George Soro’s Footprints, Matthew Vadum, Frontpage Magazine, 11/4/11

Countries and groups in the chaotic transition between one stable period and the possibility of a better one always have to be on guard for people like Soros and his colleagues. Far from being entrepreneurs, or real advocates of progress, they are parasites who use political rhetoric and artfully placed gifts to make themselves look like patrons of the a New Way. However, what they intend is to instigate chaos in a particular market, as Soros has time and again, whether his undercutting of the British pound, his illusory support for democracy in the Ukraine (ask someone who actually lived there what happened), or for his ongoing play in the United States, including a major role in elevating the current resident of the White House into office. In these campaigns, Soros has exploited local chaos not for social and political improvement, but for personal financial gain. The Left itself arises during similar periods of chaos and change, offering the same old bad medicine every time. Since its tactics are similar to Soros’s (and a number of similarly motivated wealthy men), especially in its employment of subterfuge, they are an oddly natural match, as are radical Islamists and the Left. Where the Left becomes even more useful is when it decides that the time for backroom conspiracy is over, that the day has come for mass demonstrations and violence. Chaos rises. A currency is destabilized. A compromising deal is made with a frightened, elected political leadership. The smoke clears, the ruins are examined, and, funny thing, the parasite has left town with his money and ours.

OAKLAND -- A majority of Occupy Oakland protesters sought Thursday to distance themselves from masked vandals who they said had undercut the movement by hijacking the tail end of a mostly peaceful protest, damaging downtown buildings and clashing with police…"They are smearing our movement," Raleigh Latham…said to applause at a morning meeting…at the movement's City Hall camp. "People who want to destroy our community are not welcome here." They may not be welcomed by all of Occupy's committed sympathizers. But the hundreds of black-clad activists who coalesced downtown late Wednesday to take over a vacant building, barricade a street and then battle with police and vandalize stores are proving to be a complicated problem for the leaderless movement…Many protesters, while saying they favor nonviolence, believe in provocative actions like marching on businesses and forcefully shutting them down - which happened at several bank branches during the comparatively peaceful daytime hours of Wednesday's general strike….Occupy Oakland Struggles With a Provocative Fringe, by Berton, Bulwa, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/4/2011

Oh, isn’t that the way it always is? A gentle movement, disavowing leaders as too macho, or inhuman, or undemocratic (where do these sleepy children come up with such clichés?), is suddenly confronted by the arrival of fringe actors throwing Molotov cocktails and assaulting the police. Get with it, kids. This is what the Left has always done! And, to make things worse, such provocateurs are a principal tool used by governments for generations, instigating violence to disgrace opponents of its policies, or to encourage support of its own, stalled legislation or ignored decrees! Wake up, America. Get the point. They’re back and they’re serious and they’re just as out of touch with reality now as they were in 1917.

ROME -- Italian police are firing tear gas and water cannons at protesters after some smashed shop and bank windows, torched cars and hurled bottles…as…a small group of violent protesters broke away from the main demonstration in the Italian capital, part of worldwide protests against corporate greed and austerity measures…Some protesters trashed offices of the Defense Ministry and of a labor agency, smashing windows with clubs, throwing paper bombs and firecrackers and setting cars on fire…The "Occupy Wall Street" protests that began in Canada and spread to cities across the U.S. moved Saturday to Asia and Europe, linking up with anti-austerity demonstrations that have raged across the debt-ridden continent for months…Black smoke billowed into the air in downtown Rome as a small group of violent protesters broke away from the main demonstration. They smashed car windows, set vehicles on fire and assaulted two news crews of Sky Italia, the TV reported. Others burned Italian and EU flags… “People of Europe: Rise Up!” read banners in Rome. Some peaceful demonstrators turned against the violent group and tried to stop them, hurling bottles at them, Sky and the ANSA news agency reported. Others fled, scared by the violence…Rome protest against corporate greed turns violent, The Post and Courier, October 15, 2011

Worldwide revolution! Get your picket signs and Molotov cocktails here! Worldwide revolution! Get your gas masks here! Oh, boy, this just never ends. You’re out there in your demonstration best, singing about corporate greed, and about the evil, inhuman one percent, tears in your eyes in being somebody, and doing something , holding hands with the stranger you made love to last night, and all of a sudden the very smart guy in the leather jacket, who was so engaging last night at the organization meeting for the protest at the bank, is running, and, oh, my god, he’s got something burning in his hand. Oh, no, he’s throwing it through the bank’s window. You never intended this. But, now as the tear gas rises, and the riot batons start banging and bloodying, and crowd begins to scream, the blood lust of political violence begins to explode and, as terrifying as it is, you know that nobody is the target of the police but you. And before long – yes, it’s you picking up the bottle rolling back from the burning bank, the one that’s still lit, the one that didn’t explode, and, as your new sweetheart gasps, you raise your arm….

That’s right, kids. You’ve just become a murderous tool of the Left, and of all the parasites that use such irrational politics as a means to ends unrelated to progress, corporate greed, or world peace. You have, despite your best plans, become the enemy of all that you believe in.

That’s what the Left does, has done, and always will do, forever and amen.

Eternal vigilance!

Luther

The Mandate of Clear Thinking: Real Issues

2011-11-04T16:25:00.007-04:00

1) Prohibition II and the Border War with Mexico

The political elites in this country have employed a level of mendacity to cover up the real issues regarding the American/Mexican border that boggles the mind. The complete refusal of the federal government to deal with this has left people who live on border counties throughout the Southwest with their property overrun, widespread violence and intimidation, murders, and, on occasion, armed interventions inside the United States by Mexican nationals wearing military uniforms.

When presidential candidates casually toss out a talking point about “the need to secure our border,” that bland phrase doesn’t even remotely convey the catastrophic reality of life along the Rio Grande. Our rhetoric needs to catch up.
The Texas Department of Agriculture released a fascinating but alarming report late last month entitled Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment. It confirms what rural Texan farmers and ranchers already know: that our fight against narco-terrorism has taken on “the classic trappings of a real war” and that “all of Central and South America have become an interconnected source of violence and terrorism,” with Texas as “operational ground zero.”
The fact that the Department of Agriculture is now conducting strategic military assessments instead of crop reports is in itself an eye-opening indication of how serious the war being waged at our southern border has become. Compiled by 4-star General Barry McCaffrey, former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and former Commander of all U.S. troops in Central and South America, and Major-General Robert Scales, former Commandant of the U.S. Army War College, the report offers “sobering evidence of cartel criminals gaining ground on Texas soil....” Border Insecurity: The War In Texas, Frontpage Magazine, Mark Tapson, Nov. 11, 2011

This war of private gangs and American law enforcement has easily discovered origins, the beginning of The War On Drugs, the great Second Crusade of Prohibition. It started under that great liberal reformer, the racist Woodrow Wilson, with the Harrison Tax Act of 1914, which prohibited the sale of heroin and cocaine, the first restriction in American history on opiates, presumed until then, to be excellent pain killers, especially useful when no other medical treatment was available.

Next came FDR. Despite having apparently learned the lesson of Prohibition’s first Crusade against booze, FDR’s administration, and Congress, passed and brought into law The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (love that phonetic spelling!). The ban on mary jane was sold with the concept of “gateway drug.”

Next came Dwight Eisenhower, under whom the Boggs Act of 1951 established mandatory sentences for possession of marijuana, cocaine and opiates. Shortly thereafter came the Narcotic Control Act of 1956. But he wasn’t done. Ike established the US Interdepartmental Committee on Narcotics, from which the President himself called for a war on drugs. But, the best was yet to come. In 1970, Congress passed, with President Nixon’s strong urging, the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, followed three years later by the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

It is worth nothing that in the years between the Boggs Act of 1951 and the establishment of the DEA in 1973, that perhaps as many as a million people were killed by drunk drivers, and perhaps forty million people died of the side effects of smoking cigarettes. Unknown tens of millions had lives damaged by inappropriate consumption of prescription drugs. In such paradoxical comparisons, one has to draw an obvious conclusion: the war on drugs from the beginning, like that on alcohol, was primarily a moral crusade. Alcohol prohibition failed because, to be blunt, too many people liked to get high, and alcoholic beverages were far cheaper than opiates. Further, you didn’t have to smoke your bourbon or scotch or inject it into a vein. Market simply blew away the Prohibitionists. However, opiates and marijuana, for as long as you look back at this, were associated with either an extreme lifestyle (black jazz musicians working in bordellos); strange, dark-skinned people (take your pick); and with vivid and terrifying addiction scenarios. A combination of the often racist public relations campaign with the fact that only a small minority of Americans used opiates for getting high made the Second Crusade possible. To what end?

MEXICO CITY – MEXICO CITY (AP) — After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread…Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified… We've never worked the drug problem holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction…." After 40 Years, $1 Trillion, US War on Drugs Has Failed to Meet Any Of Its Goals, AP, May 10, 2010

Arrest the dealer, leave the addiction , pronounced, one supposes, with tragic gestures and a resigned sigh, rather like former Speaker Pelosi’s moan that, if we’d just had ten times the Stimulus, all would be well. Fact is, the War on Drugs, and the Prohibition on marijuana and opiates, have led directly to massive corruption in Mexico, to where the oldest nation in North America is becoming more like Sudan than America, its public officials, law enforcement and military on the run from (or run by) drug cartels more violent than any criminal organizations in the past, including those run by Chinese overseas nationals. The War on Drugs has led to brushing aside property rights (the DEA and state and local polic can take anything a drug suspect owns, and never return it, even if the suspect is judged innocent at trial). It has also led to a popular expectation that law enforcement will act with the brutal thuggery of the Russian KGB or the German SS, smashing down doors without warrants, beating up or killing suspects without warning, creating social mayhem to protect somebody from getting high.

Alcohol Prohibition ended with the following changes in the wine and spirits business.

1) Standards of product quality were established. You couldn’t sell a product that, in modest quantities, would injure or kill your customer. (Prohibition bootleggers weren’t much concerned with a client’s survival, on his or her money)
2) Taxes were to be paid on the product, and a tax stamp required to sell it. The enforcement efforts were changed to tax prosecutions and Eliot Ness, the greatest of them, did not carry a gun! Believe it or not....
3) Over the next seventy years, torts law began to settle the sourest issues of alcohol consumption: how it was sold to minors; its role in automobile and other transportation accidents; and its role in domestic violence.

Despite all of this law and regulation, the wine and spirits business now makes ten times more money, in real terms, than it did during or before Prohibition. Further, despite continuing emergence of new Carrie Nations, society has determined that drinking as a means of enjoyment, sociability, and getting high is just fine, thank you.

Ending opiates and marijuana Prohibition would entail the same changes.

Under product quality, no manufacturer of pleasure giving drugs could sell something like crack cocaine, because of its devastating, almost instantaneous infliction of addiction and the obliteration of natural restraints on violence. Nor, could someone cut cocaine with rat poison or baking soda. Needle delivery systems would probably be prohibited except for medical intervention in otherwise unrelieved pain from illness and injury.

Under the tax changes, dealers would have to be, like cigarette and alcoholic beverage vendors, licensed, prohibited from selling to minors, and barred from selling anything without a genuine tax stamp indicating that taxes would be added to the sale. Strong tax enforcement would be the rule.

Torts law would address the gaps, as it has with alcoholic beverage consumption and its effects.

As a consequence, the entire DEA and its army, including vast numbers of agents from other police agencies, here and in Mexico, not to mention state and local police, would either be relieved of drug duty, at a savings of perhaps fifty to one hundred billion a year. The million and a half prisoners whose offense was drug possession, or use of illegal drugs, could be released, reducing the pressure cooker population in US prisons, and, no small detail, make the prison population more reflective of people who had actually done damage to society.

One of the country’s great conservatives, Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review, author of almost a dozen delightful spy novels, not to mention dozens of other more substantive books, advocated the immediate legalization of drugs, on the same terms as the end of alcohol Prohibition, thirty-five years ago. He was old enough to have seen or heard about the horrors of the original Prohibition, where criminal gangs, in bootlegging hootch and beer, turned civil society upside down with their violence, and undermined government and law enforcement with corruption of civil authorities. He shocked a lot of conservative colleagues and outraged liberals, needless to say. But look closer.

As violence along the U.S.-Mexico border escalates, Mexican drug cartels have found a new and lethal weapon, borrowed from the bloody annals of Mideast terror – the car bomb. This summer, the Juarez drug cartel used a remote-controlled car bomb to kill four and wound 20 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital, creating a massive blast within walking distance of downtown El Paso, Texas, and a second car bomb exploded outside a police station in Ciudad Victoria.
An internal Department of Homeland Security document describes the car bomb used in Ciudad Juarez as the latest tactic that the armed wing of the Juarez cartel, La Linea, has lifted from Islamic jihadis. "La Linea," says the document, "has used terror tactics generally seen in Iraq and Afghanistan – mass video-recorded decapitations, targeting of civilians, and most recently the July 15 VBIED [car bomb] – to instill fear among rivals, law enforcement and the general public." Mexican Drug Cartels' New Weapon In Border War – The Car Bomb, Richard Esposito, ABC News, August 12, 2011

And again:

Down in Gov. Perry's backyard in west Texas, where they supposedly have the Mexican border under control, another Border Patrol agent has been prosecuted and sentenced to prison for doing his job in arresting drug smugglers. His name is Jesus Diaz, and if you rely on the mainstream media for news of the border region, you have never heard of him…In October of 2008, Diaz, a seven-year veteran of the Border Patrol, was part of a team of border agents who apprehended a small group of young drug smugglers…In questioning one of the apprehended smugglers, officer Diaz allegedly tugged or lifted the young man's handcuffed wrists and caused the smuggler some discomfort. Later that day, while being processed back at the Border Patrol station, the smuggler lodged a complaint with the Mexican consul, which resulted in prosecution of Diaz…The young smuggler in all probability was not facing jail time, only a swift return to Mexico, and he knew it. Nevertheless, he and his Mexican government compatriots pressed charges against agent Diaz for being "roughed up."… Diaz was cleared of any wrongdoing by two investigations – one by the Border Patrol's own Office of Professional Responsibility and then a second investigation by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general…If it had not been for the pressure from the Mexican government, it would have ended there…Under persistent pressure from Mexico, the U.S. attorney convened a grand jury and brought an indictment against Diaz. After the first prosecution ended in a mistrial, Diaz was prosecuted..and…convicted after the government gave immunity to the drug smuggler in exchange for his testimony against Diaz – even though the smuggler admitted in a deposition that he had lied at the first trial…Earlier this month Diaz was sentenced to 24 months in prison for use of "excessive force" and depriving the smuggler of his civil rights…The Mexican government's war on U.S. Border Patrol, Tom Tancredo, WND, October 28, 2011

You see the effects of the Drug War? On policy, officials, and the police, it becomes a tail chasing game. As Tancredo points out, it was probably because small traffickers aren’t prosecuted (unofficially of course) that Diaz got into trouble. The corruption had set in, and it was okay to let something small pass by. In a way, that quiet refusal to pay attention to the law is also a reflection of officials knowing that the War on Drugs is more about headlines and big property and drug seizures than stopping trafficking. The same could be said, and was at the time, about the FBI’s pursuit of “star” bootleggers before Prohibition was ended.

People get upset when you discuss ending Prohibition II. “What about the children? What about our community? What about the sickness in society?” Hey, look around in the Southwest, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Diego, border counties in Texas? Look at national parks overrun by armed marijuana farmers. Look at the cost, the bridge of the drug war is not a bridge from evil to Prohibition but to huge wealth for thugs, and inappropriate, and arguably unconstiutional power to law enforcement and federal agencies. The War on Drugs, from the beginning, was a Protestant Crusade directed at a problem that can’t be solved by either law enforcement or by moral pronouncements. At the time, they compared it to the Abolitionist movement to end slavery, a truly noble effort! What utter crap to make such a comparison! People like to get high. People who do are not slaves, unless they choose pleasure at the exclusion of everything else. And some people do. We can help them in far more effective and inexpensive ways (Nixon's early efforts on the War on Drugs were primarily directed at helping addicts get free of their favorite high, especially veterans returning from Vietnam.) Stopping this head-on is like conducting a guerrilla war in someone else's country. We know what happens there. The foreigner cannot win unless he acts like a Roman and never leaves.

The best you can hope to do, as the enders of Prohibition I determined, is to manage the problem so that it does the least amount of damage possible to civil rights, communities, and, of course, to our children. For the latter, the best solution, however, is to make sure they’re eager to do something besides get stoned.

Luther

The Mandate of Hell, Pachyderm 3, The Burning Witch

2011-11-03T15:44:00.007-04:00

If you've been following the previous three posts, we've been looking at what our so-called elites won't discuss, the underpinnings of political action, the responsiblity of the citizen, the causes of events -- big subjects, but each a previously ignored elephant in the national living room. Here's another:

When the writer was a high school student, part of his boyish naivete was exploded when his teacher, a brilliant, eccentric character who was an exact twin (physically, including the straight bourbon & Camels voice) of the late actor Lee Marvin, responded to my proud claim of having Cotton Mather in the one WASP string of my heritage by slamming a hammy fist on his paper-strewn desk. The ash flew off his cigarette; another butt, still smoking, fell to the rug unnoticed. Then he stood up, leaned so close I began to get high on his breath, and shouted “that son of a bitch burned one of my ancestors!” Turned out he was right. As the WASP string fades in all Americans (I’m barely a WASParoon myself), this probably strikes many as an amusing anecdote of a lost world. Really….

Then what is that smoke coming from the living room? Why does it smell like that piece of steak you forgot to take off the grill an hour ago? Why was it preceded by screams, and by so many chanting voices? Is there any coincidence in the fact that it’s three in the afternoon?

At this hour we all might be anyone,
It is only our victim who is without a wish,
Who knows already (that is what
We cannot forgive. If he knows the answers,
Then, why are we here, why is there even dust?),
Knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,
That not one of us will slip up,
That the machinery of our world will function
Without a hitch, that today, for once,
There will be no squabbling on Mt. Olympus,
No Chthonian mutters of unrest,
But no other miracle, knows that by sundown
We shall have had a good Friday….

from “Terce,” Horae Canonica, W.H. Auden

Smell that burnt fat aroma yet? It’s easy to discuss this if the subject is, say, Germany between 1933 and 1945, or Russia from 1917 to the death of Stalin. Many Americans still purse their lips and look away when the subject is the American Bureau of Indian Affairs, if not the activities of the Klan. It gets a lot harder for us, though, to respond when the subject is a national leader in 1973, 1978, 1998, 2008, or now. Why? We’re all partisans. Some of us want to burn the Witch. Some of us want to worship Her. The context itself is perverse. There’s no choice to opt out, to say "hey, there's some good with the bad." It’s worse than polarization. Hey, we have that all the time. It’s much, much worse.

It’s the transmutation of an ordinary citizen’s duty, assessment of leaders at each level, into a uniquely American Black Mass. The object isn’t assessment, but to choose between salvation and condemnation. By the time this begins to break out, as in late 1972, again in mid-1998, or again after the shock of the 9/11/2001 bombings had worn off, or yet again now, the Great Man We Have Chosen is put on trial in a witness stand built on a stack of straw and firewood. Initially, the Great One’s partisans, other elected officials, friends in other high places, the press, hold back the crowd. They’re the ones you heard chanting, the ones hoisting torches and waving shotguns and pitchforks, the ones shouting down with him; down with him; down with him! I'll bet some of you are there. Don't get burnt fingers!

In our effort at getting elephants out of the living room, historical and contextual awareness is an obvious objective of this great work. Only a halfwit, or a member of a crowd, is unaware of the fact that the best a Chief Executive can do is to set a tone for what other people do, and how they do it. It is not only true of great and good leader, but of a monster as well. In the assessment of guilt for a vast crime, as the murder of millions of Jews in World War Two, you can’t, as popular historians often do, stop with Uncle Adolf and let everybody else off without penalty. As Raoul Hilberg demonstrated, at least as responsible is the railroad clerk who, knowing full well that his signature to pass a train on to Birkenau would condemn ten thousand people to death, still attached his signature to a form thirty other people had seen and signed, fulfilling his bureaucratic responsibilities (the train is on time; the train is working; the train is safe to operate) at the expense of his moral obligations to his fellow human beings.

The example is horrifying, but let's calm down a bit. In our entire history, despite some near misses (some fortunately assassinated just in time, such as Huey Long), we have never had a monster like Hitler or Stalin in the White House. There have been some small-timers in industry, the military, and private contractors, and the occasional federal official, but nothing that could bear even an ironic comparison to one of those. However, to drive the crowd’s chanting, rhetoric is required that does precisely that, the pitch and fervor raised until individuals coalesce into one beast with a million eyes. Worse, there’s a dirty secret. What could it be?

Let’s discuss one on a somewhat different, but related subject, combat in war. A great journalist, poet, essayist, and daily columnist once sent the writer, after much begging, a package of his poems about the war. They were harrowing, eyewitness stuff, with the quality of strobelit photography, and, the late writer lamented, if you were paying attention, you could read a terrible truth. In combat, despite the horror that sickened the rest of his being, and what he often wrote about with great conviction and truth, there was a boyish warrior’s glee at violent fighting, shedding blood, and the witness of an opponent’s death. He was right; it was there, and because of that the poems were almost held back from publication until a friend said you have to put them out there. The author told me that he had been ashamed of that feeling for his entire life, and had tried to compensate for it with every act toward family and friend. “We were a Cub Scout troop with heavy weapons,” he said. Replace the boys in the woods with cap guns with boys in the woods with M-1 carbines and bazookas – you get the picture. There’s a reason so many movies are dishonest about war; wars almost invariably are fought by schoolchildren. Most crowds are comprised of adults who act like little kids in a schoolyard.

What’s the dirty secret about crowds? I’ve seen it myself at basketball games, "high school fascism" I once observed, to the great distress of a coach. When the beautiful teeny boppers start to scream in unison about killing somebody, they mean it. And the more of them there are, the more their conviction and passion grows. While innocent in a controlled environment like a basketball court in the United States, it leads to murder and riot in European soccer games. Crowds, to be frank, are crazy. And so, in a sense, the Burning Witch invited what’s happening. By appealing to the crowd, and drawing their interest, the leader attracts every aspect of a crowd, including its blind, ravenous will to murder in the cause of the crowd’s satisfaction – never its self-interest. If a crowd acted with genuine self-interest, they would be polite, discuss each other’s favorite players with amusement and irony, buy each other beer and dogs, and be happy to meet each other in the street after the game. But, crowds don’t care. Why?

Crowds strip the executive function from human intelligence. When we dissolve into a crowd, we move as surely on the most irrational response as on any other. How we feel matters; who cares what anybody thinks? We’re the crowd. We can trample you to death. We can push aside the rational discussion of witnesses, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, castrate the judge and hang him from a balcony, throw gasoline under the defendant’s table, and throw a match. We can all throw the matches. Who will stop us now or ever?

The writer participated in crowds during the Mobilization Against the War in the early 1970s, as well as in the general mobilization against Richard Nixon at the same time. Recalling what that felt like, the absolute exhilaration that nobody could shut us up in our demands to get rid of the warmakers, kill Nixon, whatever, even as tear gas and riot batons came near, can make me leap out of bed in the middle of the night, in part ready to go, in part shocked that I participated in that. Okay, no real crimes were committed. A few careers were ruined, perhaps the nation endangered. But we all grew up, didn’t we?

But I saw other sides of the crowd and its wish for witches to burn, as in a march through a western New York town, a lot of faculty members and students, no chanting or signs, just, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, a “witness to injustice,” in this case the open exclusion of African-American kids from a school district. On the sidewalks, there were no friendly faces, no familiar faces, no mothers and fathers, instead row upon row of young, tattooed men with belts wrapped around their fists, alcohol-driven rage burning their faces, the crowd that we, such a reasonable crowd, had not expected. Most of the lightly armed sidewalk watchers waited for someone to act. Someone did – was it a provocateur? Did anyone ever ask? Crowds on any side are stupid by nature. Fists flew, and then the bottles and eggs. Our line scattered, falling considerably short of that great line at the bridge in Selma as we ran under a bombardment that lasted for twenty minutes until we had escaped. What we had seen most did not acknowledge, ourselves with another opinion, willing to cut in on somebody’s march to express it, unwilling to submit to any standards of decency, civic order, or law. We had no march permit; we did nothing to negotiate with the people behind the rough crowd on the sidewalks, considering anyone on that side of town too ignorant for rational discussion; each side entered with its prejudices; both crowds ended up looking either naïve or incredibly ignorant. (The issue was later resolved when a committee of faculty, local town officials, a judge in an unofficial capacity, and neighborhood leaders sat down over a week or two of sphaghetti and chianti dinners to bring the town into the world of Brown vs. Education, by then already 14 years in the past.)

But the crowd approach is tempting. It’s like the well-observed neurosis of an otherwise sensible women attracted to gangsters. Their bad guy shows up with blood on his fist, and a smoking gun in his pocket, and she can't resist him. So beautiful and young, with perfect skin, an elegance afoot akin to a gazelle’s, and despite the truck driver diction, he's more charming to her than Robert Redford in a movie about redwoods and ponies. From the evidence, there are far more of us, perhaps a majority, who find the thought of trying and burning a presumed witch more beautiful than a rose in a lover’s hand.

Well, this makes hash out of the reasonable man idea, an Enlightenment conception that’s been bashed awfully hard for the last, say, century of war, Holocaust, Gulag, Kampuchea killing fields – take your pick. “It is one sin offering,” said Auden a little later in his great poem of the early fifties. How to get this bitch of an elephant out of the room?

It’s not unlike the transition the old anthropologist observed (read “The Golden Bough”) between tribal superstitions, which are utterly binding on behavior and expression, and modern Christianity, Judaism, some forms of Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, etc. You have to give up certainty for discussion of theological points. You have to consciously consider issues in terms of morality and practicality, politics and society, past and future, the Lord’s word and our interpretations, what Karl Jung, the great proto-psychologist of the human mind, described as the “greatest human project, to become self-conscious, to become truly aware.” Wow, big job to get this big mammal out of the living room, eh?

Maybe not. Think of the difficulty of a parent confronted by a child. What do you have to do to succeed with this frequently raving little maniac? You have to become conscious of yourself, which allows you to be aware of the little one, who has no experience, no background, little awareness beyond your loving eyes or breast. By gaining consciousness of yourself, you can work with the little ignoramus until he begins to act almost as lovably as he looks. It’s the same process. Translate it into an equally important task. Banish the Burning Witch. She and her terrible Black Mass never existed anywhere except in our imagination, an invisible elephant only too happy, at a moment’s notice, to draw us into such foolish acts as lighting matches we cannot extinguish.

Luther

The Mandate of Hell, Pachyderm 2, The Housing Disaster Nobody Was Responsible For

2011-11-03T13:45:00.003-04:00

If you’ve been following (see previous two posts, easily identified by the "Mandate…" header), we’ve been trying to look at what our virtuous elites seem unable to examine, contemplate, discuss, or even acknowledge, what the writer has described as the elephants in the national living room. We’ve talked about about one of them, US, you and me, at least the ignorant version of US that won’t see beyond its own nose (until now of course ;-)). Here’s another elephant approaching, breaking the floorboards and knocking the Impressionist prints off the walls.

An observation: in courtship, one learns, as much as you might hope for an easy catch, if you haven’t got anything to deliver to he or she, the object of your affection will look elsewhere. It’s not cultural. It’s basic biology, basic family, basic community. A useless mate is a lot more difficult to manage than having no mate at all. The preference for one with something to offer is natural. Find someone else, or go it alone. Sadly, this does not obtain in the vast movement we call politics, as much as sexual attraction may play a part. Political leadership, we have noted, like the pioneer wagon master, depends largely upon the hopes and fears of a large, loosely connected, and often ill-informed, population. The wagon master couldn’t turn to his train of Conestogas and shout “we’re going my way or nowhere,” not unless, under the panicky faces he surveyed, there lay enough sober minds to realize that the fellow might have a point, that crossing a very long stretch of barren rock might be safer than trying to force the wagon train over the Grand Canyon without the benefit of angels’ wings, or at least a 747. Sadly, this common sense protection more often disappears in crowds than not.

Back in the 70s, as part of the White House and Congress's efforts to overcome a decade of stagnation, the Community Development Act brought the idea of subsidizing housing for those who couldn't afford standard term mortgages. Very American, everybody owning a house, part of the Dream...However, Congress and the White House, besieged by an electorate sick of a failing administration, didn't go the extra mile. They decided not to fund the CDA. Instead, through successive administrations, especially the Clinton and second Bush administrations, they used the law to force the financial services business to violate the primary principals of a loan market, to wit: 1) the borrower has to be able to pay; 2) for weak borrowers, an underwriter is the only way for the lending institution to protect its capital for loaning out to future borrowers. Both standards protect the borrower, the lender, and the market's future.

Promoted by community organizers, middle class (call them liberal or compassionate) friends of the less-well-off, usually without knowing how the mortgage market (or any market) works, they prodded Congress over the years into a new, take-it-or-leave-it, requirement that would, WE claimed, save the poor, liberate us from bad consciences, and help build the American dream. As such, CDA started out by violating both tenets of the mortgage trade. When came the industry complaints that all that weak or bad mortgage debt would be lost, loan officers and their bosses were told to game the system to beat the odds. It was like requiring a compulsive gambler to win at blackjack to assure funding for her child's college education. Hey, education is good, right? In essence, the law said “if you expect to do any mortgage business, you have to cheat. If you lose money cheating, find the money somewhere else, however you can. The ends justify the means.” WE agreed, like it or not. Acorn may have conned lots of people, acted with malfeasance, and what not, but I know folks in Acorn. Most of them are well-scrubbed, attractive Americans with big hearts, and a willingness to blithely lie about the consequences of what they want done, just like most of the rest of us.

If Congress and the White House had said, No! we have to have a reserve fund for risky loans, provided by general revenue, the disaster we are still enduring might not have happened. They didn't do that, however. They felt, justifiably, that if they tried pay for an open-ended program with tax revenues they might lose four classes of constituents, not only those dependent upon the program to buy houses, but builders, taxpayers, and most of all, you guys who thought it was righteous to subsidize housing for people who couldn't afford it, that is to say, most of us. So, in the best cowards' tradition of politicians across the planet, they legislated that banks and other lending institutions were to bury bad assets with the good - or else! Sweep it under the rug, eh? No problemo.

The writer spent a lot of time working at banks in the 80s and 90s, and learned an important lesson. If you inspire a numbers & finance guy to develop a way to make money out of nothing, there's never a shortage of volunteers. And some of these kids, male and female, were prodigiously gifted, working with mathematics that would do a high energy physicist proud, and standing on the shoulders of the banking giants from the 70s and 80s. (See previous post)

And were they ever good! They created mortgage products that made the most advanced betting systems look like a high school kid's effort to outdo Murray Gel-Mann. The derivatives market they created was probably the most extravagant con game ever developed in high finance, and there have been some big ones. And it was politically mandated, popular with the customers who mattered, investors and depositors, and let's not forget politicians and regulators! Market realities be damned! Progress ahead! And, what made the politicians and their constituents so happy, and for a long time, was that this horseplaying system actually worked! OMG, truly did it ever! Profits flowed, hand over fist, exchanges larger than the economy of the known universe, with fabulous parties, bonuses the size of a small country's national budget, a commonality, almost a communion, of private and political interests, and then....

Well, you know. Blooey. As with the wisest bettor’s system, the derivatives market in mortgages blew up, nearly taking down the world's financial system. Hey, listen, OWS, it's easy to stand on a streetcorner, subsidized by the SEIU or George Soros, and bitch about the evil one percent. It's easy to shriek about your loss of an entitlement. But to be honest, look at it differently. If the loser was a trust fund baby, would you give a damn if he or she suddenly had to work for a living? What's the difference between that person's “entitlement” and a secretary in a government shop who's “earning” three times what a secretary gets in a private company? In the real world, if the economy shrinks, everybody has to adjust, the sooner the better. As a chess-playing, Ph.D. holding survivor of the Holocaust once told me, “I'd rather drive a cab in NY than take a check from a government official.” He knew where that could lead, and Zwi was a very good hack. Point?

We need to get real. We need to stop pretending that the elites have anything of value to offer in the way they analyze these things. Half the time they’re fantasizing based on political allegiances; the other half they’re just lying out of fear, ignorance, a need for approval, and spite. And the real issue in this disaster is how it happened, who the actors were, and why they fell for, or fought for, the CDA trick on the mortgage market. Politicians, regulators, business people, and individuals are not discussing this, or are openly lying about it.

Let’s look. The housing disaster began with irresponsibility among constituents and politicians who wanted a quick fix (give Louise a home so she’ll vote for me and we’ll all vote for you), regulators and mortgage brokers who wanted more power and more money for booked loans, builders who wanted more orders, shortsighted investors who thought that markets were no different from casinos -- an irresponsibility based on the all-too-human willingness to suspend disbelief when the prospect of sudden, unearned wealth and power appears. And it wasn't as if it was something new in human nature. The Dutch nearly bankrupted themselves buying tulips in a similar market five hundred years ago. And you don't have to back up that far. Think of the lunatic irresponsibility of investment bankers pouring billions of dollars onto kids who'd done nothing but develop a storefront on the Web in 1998-1999, before the dot.com crash. There was nothing behind their pretty pictures, nothing but the chance of money and power, all based on hope and dreams, as long as you weren't the owner when someone realized the product was worthless. And they thought, as did Barney Frank, or Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush on housing, that they had found nirvana, a heavenly state where millions of dollars or votes would be automatically given, an entitlement of their own! And it was a long chain. The irresponsibility of one actor depended on the irresponsibility of another, from the constituent looking to get an unearned benefit, to the politician looking for a contribution, to the homebuilder looking for more orders, to the lending institution trying to book more mortgages.

The essential feature in the housing disaster was an irrational demand to violate basic understandings about how the economy, or a given part of it, functions. Frosted with lots of sweet talk, wishful thinking, jealousy, distress that things take time – an attitude more akin to a badly parented child in a toy store than to an adult, the political support from us was powerful enough to encourage politicians, bankers and builders to take insane risks. Politicians and bankers, buoyed by the hope and belief that we expressed, became so confident that they legislated a mandate on a vital core of economic activity, requiring a market to behave as they wished it to, forcing lending institutions to violate hard won business and regulatory standards for prudent and profitable business practice. By pretending that the old standards were nothing but the imposition of arrogant elites on the rest of us, WE imagined that one day, houses, and perhaps even skateboards, would be free. We passed that on to politicians. They took the measure of their other contributors, the billionaire construction magnates, the building trades, the suppliers, the tract development crowd, and said, hey, great idea! It wasn’t. With risk thrown out the window, people of quite ordinary means began to bet their net worth in this market, using houses bought on spec as chips. Boom! Bust!

The distortions this disaster caused in our economy are bad enough, but there's another effect. The political action that declared entitlement more important than following well thought-out procedures and practices has put a lot of us in the position of Greek public employees, demanding what can no longer be afforded, unwilling to play our part by considering what’s actually happened. Driven by our own irresponsibility, fear, and greed, amplified by political and regulatory action in pursuit of power and influence, the notion of entitlement has replaced our sense of whether or not we have earned something. This is no different in character or quality from the attitude expressed by indigent welfare clients.

That's what political mandates do. Their progenitors, authors, and legislators are not required to consider the consequences in the world we live in. But, friends, WE are the progenitors. Want it to stop? Stop it yourself.

To help in that great work, let's summarize:

The CDA mandate, and its pretense of providing social justice, created a casino out of the largest fixed asset market in the world. In a regular casino, the house always wins. In this casino, we ended up with a lot of empty houses and more bad debt that we can afford to repay. Who’s talking about this out there?

It has nothing to do with Governor Perry's affinity for the dull phrase, nothing to do with Governor Romney's plainfaced sobriety and happiness to work with real people, nothing to do with the President's friendship with Bill Ayres, nothing at all to do with silver or gold-backed currencies. Who's talking then?

We are.

This writer supposes that there won’t be much talk from the political and economic elites, however, because the Community Development Act has proven so enormously self-serving and profitable for them. We know all too well from reports, even in MSM, about the fabulous salaries and bonuses for these people about who’s getting the good stuff. Far from providing housing for the less favored, which we all wanted, CDA and its associated institutional authorities, have provided vast piles of cash rewards for the principals in Fannie Mae, Citibank, a dozen other institutions, political fundraising, votes, and, in the process, so badly damaged the credit markets that, despite historically low rates, it is harder to get a mortgage now than it has been since the 1970s. But, not to forget, WE participated in this, through our hopes, deluded wishes, ignorant advocacy, and foolish denial. As such WE need to talk about the responsibility of political constituencies and citizens, to make sure the likelihood of another foolhardy gambit like this doesn’t happen. A citizen's job is not only to vote, but to check an overly ambitious fool from making a mess. That’s what the Tea Party movement has been at for years.

In politics as in courtship, false hope is the poison that leads to alienation, rage, and divorce. We can stop this by refusing to play the blushing bride. We can start paying attention to whom we court or who is courting us.

The Mandate of Hell, Pachyderm 1, Unacknowledged Roots

2011-11-03T12:51:00.004-04:00

If you've been following (read the prior post below), the concern of unseen elephants in the room has been raised, a cheap metaphor for what we and our leadership refuse to see or discuss.

Turns out there was more than one elephant in the room. Here's one now. Let's call the huge beast walking down your hallways, for want of a better word, Ignorance. Sorry, don’t mean to irritate the sensitive, but hope you're aggravated enough to succumb to the temptation to use a search engine. Why? As a tool to navigate the rivers and channels of (drum roll) the ghastly spectre of the past. That’s one of the biggest pachyderms in the room. It can stomp you, sit on you. So, what to do? Get to know it, pet it, feed it, and encourage it to go back to where it came from. The experience can change a beast into a friend, if not a dinner partner. If you don’t know and acknowledge it, however, historical ignorance can make Godzilla look like a kitty cat.

This elephant then is US, at least the version that refuses to acknowledge anything beyond our generation’s, or peer group’s, purview. Take a look at yourself in the mirror. Like those big ears, that very long extension on your nose? The ivory tusks are cool; just don’t try to sell them in the United States. Okay, open the search engine, or a book (a block-shaped thing with lots of leaves pressed between cardboard). Let’s consider hope and change as national aspirations.

You’ll soon find that hope and change has had more than one day in America. In the hagiography of FDR, JFK, LBJ, RMN, Jimmy, Jerry, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, etc., you'll find an array of angels of hope and change, come to deliver us. Sadly, imbibing in that kind of history makes you even more ignorant. Fact is, all those Great Ones and Devils (depending on which fantasy you believe in) were wagon masters whom WE elected, hoping that their exhortation, threats and experimentation would lead us across the Great Divide between the nightmare of the old world and the dream of a new. As WE cheered, they all hooted about hope and change, as uncertain about what was going to happen next as is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania. The key point is uncomplicated. WE not only believed in the rhetoric of each of these generations of leadership, WE encouraged politicians as to what we wanted to hear, what promised changes, what hopes. And then, WE elected them. And, when THEY fell short, or failed disastrously, WE turned on them like children disappointed by the Christmas gifts they themselves had picked out in the toy store. Notice, the active group isn’t THEM, or the EVIL ONE. It’s US. WE came, WE saw, WE liked, WE selected, WE were disappointed, WE raged about the Devil incarnate, WE ran him off the farm, and then WE started the cycle again. It’s the American way. Take your pick, but a favorite for this writer, who played every part in the melodrama, was Richard Nixon.

The U.S. in 1968 was like a freebasing junkie awaking one morning to discover that all that fun he’d been having had left the house wrecked, looted by thieves, with the spouse departed for a more promising partner, and somebody’s children, gaunt and in tattered clothes, looking at him for where the next meal was going to come from. How could this have happened? the junkie cries. We’ve gone to the Moon! We’ve waged an unfunded war for five years in a country that posed no threat to us! We’ve had an unfunded War on Poverty! We’ve encouraged our kids to do their own thing, and a lot of them did, wowing us with their shockers. But now, they’re standing around, staring at us, wondering just what the hell is going to happen next, with Woodstock over, and the adult realities all around and – gasp! involving them, personally, like me, you know? The civil rights movement had transmuted into a zany and violent black power thing. The thrilling and horrifying assassinations had led to nationwide riots. Cities were burning. Millions were staging what looked like an uprising. Oh, my God! Me? I had nothing to do with this. Send me a hero! Do it now!

Someone heard the junkie and, from behind a burning hardware store, softly intoned in a low, somewhat thuggish voice: “you are not silent to me, oh majority,” an announcement that sounded a lot like Someone who had once said I AM.

So, after our pleas, prayers, organizing, cheering, polling answers, and broadly expressed fears created Nixon’s political direction, WE elected him as an enforcer to get mobs off the street, and as a fixer to straighten out this mess already. He did just that. A few samples: Nixon and his administration forced the fight for integrating schools off the streets into the courts. Whereas Johnson’s Department of Justice had only succeeded in integrating 80 school districts, Nixon’s broke the barrier in twenty-one thousand. Legal, as opposed to violent, recourse calmed the country, and marginalized radicals. Unfortunately, the vast debt rung up by Nixon’s predecessor had sucked the future out of the economy. To address that, he played the standard cheat for a spendthrift country; he separated the currency from gold and monetized the debt with fiat money. Americans were just going to have buck up, pay off their overextended credit lines, get used to higher prices and wage stagnation, and wait for better times. WE did! A new foreign policy, aimed at crossing the Great Divide between imperial America, a fantasy we couldn’t afford in blood or treasure, and prudent partner America, began with an alliance with mainland China substituting for massive intervention in South Vietnam as a way to confront the Soviet Union. Very smart, very prudent – it is possible many of us are alive because this administration came into being. And yet, for all this miraculous fixery, Nixon’s administration was cut to pieces by a marginalized opposition’s truly malicious slander and smear campaign, which WE joyously participated in, and by the President’s own paranoia. Both finally forced the old Quaker out in 1975. Why? WE came to agree with the marginalized radicals and, somewhat more reasonably, to fear the President’s paranoia. WE pressured Congress to impeach Nixon. WE cheered when charges were brought. WE wept and sighed when Nixon resigned and vanished into the helicopter with a sad wave. WE and our dreams drove the process from beginning to end. Were we right?

Certainly, we were required to instigate the process. Even dictators and kings don't survive without popular support. We got that role correct. A fabulously dangerous era in American life ended when Richard Nixon took the oath of office on January 20th, 1969. While the machinations of international affairs kept the war simmering for four years before we officially left, fact is, we came out of Nixon’s triumphant beginning to his second term at peace, on reasonably stable terms with our most dangerous opponent, our credit standing somewhat less embarrassing, and enjoying a domestic peace tranquility in much of the country unseen since the early 1960s. Blessed are the peacemakers – hey, this wasn’t said for nothing. But, though WE should have been ashamed to do this, WE acted anyway because WE were disappointed in Nixon, life itself perhaps, and, more deadly, entranced by the rich temptations of mob behavior. WE didn't care or know that the economy was still recovering from its 1960s binge. So, aware that Nixon hadn’t been the Lord, just one of his less attractive servants, WE ignored the fact that his administration had delivered us from a national disaster. Then WE acted like spoiled children instead of as adults (often), taking our revenge on the Loser, Satan, etc. It’s not a uniquely American ritual,of course. However, it bears close witness. Do you detect any parallels between then and now? Think about it. That's what reading in history helps with; you can compare then and now.

Awareness of this common cycle in American politics can remove a lot of the danger of its reoccurring in as destructive a fashion. WE are responsible for doing that. WE are the main actors in this drama, and, as such, have to be at least as responsible as the people WE select to lead us.

In your perusal of where we’ve all been, you’ll find some other suggestive history. For instance, the shenanigans in the credit markets of the last decade have models going back to the Renaissance, where a group of otherwise sane people thought they had found a magic system to escape the bonds of mortality, poverty, and lack of dates, perhaps. Most of these, on discovery, have turned out to be naked scams run not so much by evil geniuses as by common human avarice leading participants to discard the niceties of faith, morality, society and the law to make a fast buck. The worst of these included a lot of liberal sobbing about how this new market trick was going to save the world, or at least a few tarts from suffering rat bites in the Old Quarter.

Here’s favorite version of the writer’s:

Those banking giants of the 70s and 80s, many of them English majors, developed some trickery for loaning money to people who wouldn't pass muster for a loan shark. This was the sovereign risk gambit, where you'd loan five hundred million to some colonel as long as his central government would guarantee the loan. It was rationalized with a lot of frankly embarrassing liberal chatter about saving the developing world...blah, blah, blah. The sovereign risk game served several ends, political and bottom line. The first might arise when your bank's CEO got a call from the State Department insisting that your bank participate in a huge loan to fund an important ally's very important contractor, Mr. So and So, from Nowheresville in the republic of Whoopieland. A big part of the arrangement would be the borrower’s agreement to buy a pile of equipment from Caterpillar or John Deere. A week's due diligence would convince the rawest Assistant Secretary that lending this guy fifty bucks was a bad risk. She’d make her report; and her boss would nod happily at the regional meeting, then say, "Hey, sweets, not to worry. This loan will count as sovereign risk. If the borrower bolts, Uncle Sam's good friend, the President of Whoopieland, guarantees that the bank will at least get the principal back. Considering the fees and interest we're charging, it's a damn good risk." If that Assistant Secretary wanted to become an Assistant Vice President, she’d say, "yes, my lord and master." Six months later, a scenario I often saw: her boss rushes in and gives her the good news, that she's been appointed Assistant Vice President, in large measure because of her decisive support for that loan. The bad news is that Mr. So and So has vanished into thin air, taking the bank's participation of US$500 million with him and his six mistresses. And, worse, the President of Whoopieland has just been overthrown in a coup, and the new government has disavowed any prior international debts. Whoopsie-doodle. "Not to worry, dear. The Chairman has been on the horn with the President of the United States – they went to Yale together, don't you know? And he's got an arrangement, now before Congress, to fund repayment of the principal, and half the fees, in the Fairness to Whoopieland Debt Recovery Act. Sweets, for my part in this, I've been made an SVP and Managing Director, and if you play your cards right, you'll have my old job in a month!"

Eventually, this horseplaying system went as bust as the current housing market, but not for almost fifteen years, when President Clinton was forced by similar sovereign risk arrangements to put up fifty billion to cover Mexico's default. And in all cases, who ended up holding the empty money bag was you and me, just as in the housing crash. The empty money bag is a whole lot bigger now, and, like it or not, we share the blame for the losses.

Now that you’re on your way out of ignorance, you’re probably ready for the next post, regarding the Housing Disaster Nobody Was Responsible For.

Luther

The Mandate of Hell

2011-11-02T19:51:00.007-04:00

Beginning some thoughts on what politicians and we might want to talk about as opposed to, say, Herman Cain's remarks to women, Sarah Palin's willingness to appear in public with a loaded gun, or President Obama's fondness for golf.

For some time now, approaching two years, this writer hasn't offered commentary here. Reasons include my spouse's ongoing illness. But another has to with the character of political discussion. To be honest, since early 2009, the only meaningful talk on major issues of our time has come at the popular level, especially local groups aggregating around the Tea Party movement. This national set of conversations, debates and demonstrations has been totally misrepresented by the MSM and by most officials, elected and unelected, of both major parties. At at some point, my interests turned toward participating in that conversation directly, especially since it was so grotesquely misrepresented by MSM and other representatives of the haute bourgeoisie.

We know how. Discussion of taxes has been disputed as racist, homophobic and anti-feminist by extremists, not to mention their useful idiots in MSM. It has been turned aside as irrelevant by a slick twist on the facts by the President and by the Democrats, who declare “half the country doesn’t pay federal taxes.” The national Republican party has added to this by addressing only federal taxes and federal spending, as if there were no other taxes. The political rhetoric’s raving against the Tea Party's arguments bears no resemblance to reality. Content to ignore so many problems, looming and present, the elected, appointed, and presumptive leadership travels down the road to national bankruptcy and the risk of major war in what appears to be a complete denial of the facts.

The Republican national party's argument is not quite as irrelevant as the ravings of MSM, Leftists like Al Sharpton, or the President of the United States, but in some ways it's worse. Its leadership claims to stand in for the complaints of the Tea Party movement, while at the same time completely misstating their arguments. How?

Let's take taxes again. Half the US working population pays no significant federal taxes. Federal taxes, for the middle income individual, are a small factor. The largest problem is local, especially property, school, sales, business, local and state income taxes. While the federal tax bite has become increasingly born by a very small percentage of the population, federal action, from Congress and the Executive, has mandated so many new or enhanced local services, all unfunded, whether for education, medical care, or a raft of other unfunded programs, that the tax burden for middle income workers, especially in states like California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and others, has become as unbearable for them as it is for their employers. None of this is direct Federal taxation but is attributable to unfunded Federal mandates. The Feds mandate and localities and states have to tax to get the money. It's ruinous. Don't believe me?

In the last decade, 800,000 middle-income people have moved out of New York City, and more than a million and a half from the state. The number is even higher in California. In western New York, for example, you can travel along stretches of the Finger Lakes resort areas and find no civilization but what the writer calls Medicaid ghost towns, where the only remaining residents are recipients of federally-mandated subsidies. Manufacturers, job-seeking younger people, their families, and their disposable income, have left for where the cost of doing business, and the cost of living, are significantly lower, such as Texas or Florida. In New York City, it is estimated that fifty percent, or more, of the enormous freight of social programs and services mandated by the Feds and by the state is paid for by taxes on fewer than ten percent of workers. The departing middle-income Americans, who produced a prodigious amount of goods and services, have been replaced in small part by wealthy people from the US or overseas, but mostly by uneducated immigrants who serve the wealthy as nannies, drivers, housekeepers, construction workers, home health care attendants, and handymen -- New York’s model now more like Mexico City’s than Paris’s, Berlin’s or Barcelona’s.

The current Mayor has celebrated this by encouraging a "sanctuary city" policy, supporting expensive housing development, an increasingly immaterial economic base (financial services, advertising, TV production, publishing), and provoking the exodus of companies that produce anything that might dirty the environment. (A recent and notorious example: the low bidder on wheelchair-accessible taxi was a Brooklyn group with a good track record. It would have meant 5,000 new, good-paying jobs, not to mention a nice positive contributon to the US balance of payments. The Mayor chose the Japanese bidder in an unsubtle bow to environmentalists). On the street, the most startling change is the departure of services that supported regular folks, the modest family restaurant, the hardware store, the family tavern, the family-owned clothing store. They’ve been closed by astronomical rent hikes, vast over-regulation by the city, and by hostile action by agencies intent on chasing every last bug out of restaurants, bars, or corner coffee shops. Increasingly, the city looks more like an Asian capital, with a small, fabulously wealthy elite, who live a boutique life, and their millions of lackeys, who eat or work at McDonald's. To someone who’s lived here since 1973, the change is hideous, and is entirely attributable to a decision to destroy a modern, middle class society and to replace it with a medeaval system of rich overseers and peasants. It is beautiful to look at -- so is Hong Kong from a distance, but bears little resemblance to the creative, dynamic, struggling city of thirty years ago.

Throughout, this process has been powerfully reinforced by the burden of local taxes imposed to cover the costs of federal and state unfunded mandates. Why hasn't the explosion of mandated, unfunded programs been at the heart of tax discussion then? Let's resort to a little story.

A family living in a nice house of several thousand square feet had a problem. They just didn't have any room. They spent nights at the family get-together each Tuesday discussing what could be done. But, no matter what contribution each family member made, from Lindy and Bob (the parents), to Gma Bertie (the grandmother), to George and Alice (the kids), and to Lucy (the dog, a Great Dane), they couldn't solve the problem: wherever they turned, sat, stood, or tried to sleep, they always bumped into something. One day, Gpops, who’d been missing since a huge fight with his wife of forty-two years (Gma Bertie) returned home. After the tearful reunion of the grandparents, who did love each other, Gpops embraced each family member. George and Alice whispered to him when their turn came. “Hmmm,” Gpops said. Then, Lucy came over, and licked him on the ear. “Hmmmm,” Gpops said. Then came Lindy and Bob, whispering somewhat louder. “Uh-huh,” Gpops said. Finally, Gma came over, hands on her hips, just short of another argument. Gpops asked a dangerous question: “Well? Are you going to tell them, Mother, or shall I?” “They won't listen, Pops.” “Listen to what, Gma?” the family cried. Gpops stood up, surveyed the parlor, and said in a fine, booming voice. “First thing, you've got to get this damn elephant out of the living room.” The family's eyes opened with a chorus of cries, g-rated cursing, and Lucy's harsh bark. A few hours later, an enormous vehicle arrived from Barnum & Bailey, a company headquartered in Washington, and escorted the elephant back to the circus in DC.

That little allegory is what it has been like following MSM, Presidential candidates, Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, the White House and not a few bloggers I consider friends. We're not acknowledging the elephant; or we don't want to. Making this worse, there's more than one pachyderm there. We'll be looking at them over the next few posts.

Luther

Obama Fakeout Obscures High Oil Price Policy

2011-06-26T12:09:00.000-04:00

Few in the MSM have picked up on the ludicrousness of President Obama's and the IEA's surprise Strategic Petroleum Reserve announcement late this past week. It was intended to disrupt speculation in oil prices/futures, particularly in the price of Brent crude which was way out of line and causing no end of vexation in Europe. Read all about it in my latest Washington Times Communities column under my new blog/column head, The Prudent Man.

The real story here, however, is more complex. The administration has done everything it possibly can to squeeze oil, gas, and coal supplies/usage in this country, the better to drive fuel prices up to unnatural, unaffordable heights, thus causing the US populace to beg the Feds to support non-fossil fuel alternatives. I.e., the administration is still enslaved to the myth of global warming climate change and will destroy this country and its middle class to force a non-solution on an unwilling people, all of which, of course, is subsidized by the taxpayers. Roughly 19% of whom, BTW, are out of work for some reason.

New "Prudent Man" Post Up at Washington Times Communities

2011-06-05T22:21:00.000-04:00

My explication of the ridiculous LinkedIn IPO--Part II--is now up on my new column, The Prudent Man, at Washington Times Communities. If you wondered why you couldn't get any stock in this offering, check it out, and all will be revealed.

The Meaning of Liberty

2011-05-30T14:04:00.001-04:00

Just spotted this Michael Ramirez IBD Memorial Day cartoon via Power Line. Proves once again that very often a picture is indeed worth 1,000 words. Or more.

(Double click image to enlarge.)

Prudent Man: New Column in Washington Times Communities

2011-05-30T12:21:00.001-04:00

Since budgetary and economic topics come up on HazZzmat more often these days, I've decided to remove most of my market and financial observations to my new column over at the Washington Times Communities, the site where a number of Times writers (and some new ones) migrated after that paper's severe downsizing about a year and a half ago.

The new column is called "The Prudent Man" and my initial entry explains why.

Today's offering is Part I of a two-part series on the very nearly criminally negligent IPO (Initial Public Offering) of LinkedIn stock to the general public--most of whom never had a chance to get a single share while the Big Boys got enough to buy several hotels on Boardwalk or, at the very least, a few tropical islands.

I'll be putting up one or two columns a week on the new site in what I hope is not a vain attempt to educate investors as to how the game is really played. And, if possible, to build a little pressure in Washington and in New York to stop the fleecing of small investors as well as the gradual erosion of the small businesses that still constitute the backbone of this country.

Meanwhile, readers in the DC metro area will continue to find my performing arts news and reviews in my Curtain Up! column, also at the Washington Times Communities.

Memorial Day: Remembering Iraq War Vets

2011-05-30T12:08:00.000-04:00

It's always tough to find the right words to describe (what at least should be) our collective gratitude to the men and women who have defended our U.S. way of life both here and abroad for nearly 250 years now.

I.e., my late dad--a "Naval" Marine commanding a battery of big guns on the U.S.S. Bunker Hill--fired away at kamikaze Zeroes near the end of WWII. But he and his fellow combatants still had to endure the literal heat of battle as at least 4 of the fuel-lade kamikazes managed to crash into the Bunker Hill's flight deck, burning hundreds of sailors and marines to death and nearly sinking this great carrier. But both the living and the dead aboard the Bunker Hill were only a few among the tens, the hundreds of thousands of American heroes who saved us from the relentless drive of totalitarianism.

What can you really say about heroism like this except to sit back in awe and wonder at the kind of dedication that inspired this inner and outward courage?

Today, we can easily forget how we gained and retained our freedom at great cost. Most of us, this writer included, never had to face a barrage of kamikazes; or a war in the jungles of Vietnam where death could arise without warning from jungle trees or tunnels or by the hands of a Vietnamese woman or child secretly bringing a grenade to a friendly Yank's campfire; or an unendingly hostile and complex desert hell in a hostile Middle Eastern country where we attempted to introduce the radical idea of democracy.

It's this last (and still not-quite-finished) war that Walter Russell Mead discusses online today. Aside from paying slightly too much courtesy toward liberal pieties, I think he offers a lengthy, well-reasoned, and inspirational assessment of what political and military courage really takes on a day when we all should pause to remember. One of his major observations:

While the politicians washed their hands and hung up white flags, and while the press lords gibbered and foamed, the brass kept their heads and the troops stood tall. And gradually, a miracle happened. America started winning the war.

Click the link above to read the entire piece.

Obamanomics vs. Boeing; or, The Incredible Vanishing Workforce

2011-05-11T09:11:00.000-04:00

This quote from Senator Lamar Alexander during a Hugh Hewitt interview, re: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) attempt to shut down Boeing's new manufacturing plant in right-to-work South Carolina:

I don't see how the president allows this to go on for very long. Killing job creation in a jobless recovery isn't a great way to persuade people of your fitness for a second term.

Good point. It is astonishing just how easily the unions and the environmento-freaks pull President Obama's puppet strings. Boeing's vicious, Seattle-based factory union workforce has been notorious over the years for threats and strikes against its employer. When they happen--and they do--not only are the union members themselves out of a job. The entire Seattle support system suffers as do Boeing's numerous suppliers. The ripple effect has historically been wide-ranging and damaging to many sectors of the economy.

But no matter. Obama appointees of NLRB are actually dragging Boeing to court for: constructing a new manufacturing plant in South Carolina that will employ non-union labor. I.e., for engaging in capitalism, not to mention interstate commerce. Not to mention creating thousands of jobs directly and indirectly in economically hard-hit South Carolina. Now at this late stage, when the factory is already built and the moneys expended, the Administration is trying to deal a crushing blow to Boeing on the eve of one of the largest aerospace build cycles of all time: the building of the new Dreamliner.

In an economy that is deeply in debt and still reeling from the still-ongoing Great Recession (don't let the economics professors tell you it's over because it isn't for the average Joe), this administration, time and again, destroys many times over the jobs that it keeps promising to deliver. Let us count the ways. Besides the current Boeing brouhaha:

The Gulf of Mexico fishing industry is still reeling because the administration has still declared large areas off-limits to fishing due to the 2010 BP oil disaster. But there's no hard evidence that tainted fish and shellfish are being caught in a large chunk of the off-limits areas. Cost: at least hundreds of jobs.
Adding to the Clinton administration's brilliant idea of taking thousands of oilfield acres permanently out of production to satisfy the eco-freaks, the Obama administration continues to refuse drilling permits in Alaska and on America's East Coast. Meanwhile, the administration essentially has used the BP spill as an excuse to continue to deny new drilling permits in the Gulf. Cost: tens of thousands of new and existing jobs.
The administration is making it tough to open new drilling for America's spectacularly rich deposits of natural gas, citing the eco-freaks' groundwater-contamination scare tactics. Largely disproved, these groundwater contamination theories are thwarting the creation of tens of thousands of jobs in America's hard hit Rust Belt and Appalachian economies and robbing the average American of a cheap and abundant fuel that could dramatically lower our imports from the Al Qaeda-Chavez oil cartel.
With regards to the above, the administration, arguably, is deliberately goosing the price of gasoline so that Americans will give up and stop driving. Refer to candidate Obama's specific crap and trade reference to this, circa 2008. ("I'll make energy prices skyrocket.") This, of course, will also destroy large sectors of the economy and the jobs that go with them. All the better to make us even more dependent on the nanny state.

Such behavior is typical of this doctrinaire, Marxist administration. True Marxists, like Obama, really have no idea how capitalism works. They regard it as a system that creates wealth for the few, so it's their job, like that of Robin Hood, to take the profits from the few and give them to the many their supporters--like the unions and the ecofreaks. They have no clue that they're simply doing what other socialistas have done before them. They are destroying the golden goose that actually helps enrich us all by providing a comfortable living to the many.

Like Lamar Alexander, I'm not sure how much longer the U.S. can stand this before it collapses.

Patriots celebrate Bin Laden death outside White House

2011-05-02T00:18:00.000-04:00

Well, here's a cheery video for a change. Credit not given, but obviously via CNN since Wolf Blitzer is doing the voiceover. BTW, nice job, Wolf, for just shutting off the microphone and letting the celebration speak (or sing) for itself. BTW, wait for the ad to run (I couldn't take it out). Then click the forward arrow on the screen to play the clip.

Bin Laden Death Confirmed by Obama

2011-05-01T23:57:00.001-04:00

We just caught the live stream of President Obama's announcement on Fox News. Stories have yet to update, but should shortly. Some details are still not exactly complete, but it appears that this is the real deal.

Americans regardless of political persuasion should feel good about this. But leave it to Reuters to stick this snide paragraph in their report on bin Laden's death:

It is a major accomplishment for Obama and his national security team. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, had repeatedly vowed to bring to justice the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, but never did before leaving office in early 2009.

Yeah, right. Even President Obama, not exactly known for his classiness toward the Bush Administration, gave Bush and the military plenty of credit for the intelligence leading up to this operation in his statement.

The major media in this country has almost entirely lost its last shred of respectability over the last several years. The gratuitous paragraph cited above is yet another nail in the MSM's credibility coffin.

Bin Laden Is Dead. Really.

2011-05-01T23:35:00.000-04:00

All I can say is, it's about time. News is breaking as this is posted.

Fox News will stream an apparently impending Obama presser on the story. As of Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 11:32 p.m., the Presidential announcement has yet to go live, but you know how these things work. It should run shortly.

From what I can glean from other reports, Osama was whacked by a mortar hit in a "mansion" outside of Islamabad. Apparently the attack happened a week ago and the U.S. has confirmed bin Laden's identity via DNA. Again, we need some official corroboration, but it looks like this is probably the real deal.

This might also explain the recent Predator hits Pakistan has been complaining about.

Wolf Trap Premieres 'The Inspector'

2011-04-29T23:54:00.000-04:00

Read my recent review of the world premiere performance of the new John Musto and Mark Campbell opera, "The Inspector" at Curtain Up!, my review site at the Washington Times Communities. Quite an interesting show.

Slaughter in Syria

2011-04-23T11:22:00.000-04:00

Roger Simon introduces a series of videos on Pajamas Media that give true and gruesomely graphic insight into one of the many Middle Eastern thug-ocracies and their repressive, Stalinist-style policies. This time it's Syria, only the latest in the rolling powder-keg of populist revolts in that unfortunate quadrant. Read Simon's intro first, giving his rationale for offering these horrifying film clips, since he also explains how they were obtained and at what potential cost to the filmers.

One of the frustrating things about modern reporting is the fact that we rarely, if ever, get news footage from countries that have proved to be our implacable enemies over the years. Part of this is due to severe censorship on the part of those governments. Part, sadly, is due to the cowardice of the MSM which doesn't want Americans to know that there's real evil out there. (Ruins the moral equivalency argument.) The MSM themselves often obtain this type of footage, but then they sit on it, offering weak-kneed excuses for not airing it. Simon and Pajamas Media are doing a public service by making these videos available. You'll never see them on CNN.

President Obama's response thus far to these unfolding events has been weak-kneed and equivocal. We'd like to think that he's providing cover for American covert ops in various Middle Eastern countries. But given his behavior thus far on these and other matters, including our shameful lack of cooperation with NATO in Libya, I have to wonder if the President is, once again, playing the post-colonial card to improve our "image" with leftist intellectuals abroad. In other words, all these problems were really caused by British-American imperialism and we have no "right" to intervene as people sort out the evil that we caused. It's a disturbing thought.

PJ Media's footage, airing as it is right now, provides a grimly ironic commentary on this Holy Saturday, the day when Christians await the commemoration of the martyred Jesus' rising from the tomb on Easter Sunday. Hopefully, in a secular sense, the Syrian people themselves will soon experience their own resurrection as a country by toppling the Iranian-backed Assad tyranny.

The Return of Sarah Barracuda

2011-04-17T03:06:00.000-04:00

Sarah Palin is back, and how. AP reports:

Sarah Palin defended Wisconsin's governor at a tea party tax day rally Saturday, telling hundreds of supporters that his polarizing union rights law is designed to save public jobs.

Of course, the AP then goes on to trash Palin by innuendo and try to slant the story in favor of the lefty union trolls and thugs who inevitably showed up to trash the Tea Partiers. (And note: the AP puts Tea Party in lower case, another one of the hundreds of not-so-subtle, smarmy, casual digs anybody who's not on the left has to endure on almost a daily basis.

Dan Riehl has a little better idea than AP as to what's really going on here. Unlike the "professionals," Riehl has more than a clue as to what this story is really about: leadership.

It's ironic to watch so many so called establishment Republicans who seem to want to be leader of the free world dance their way around the more serious political battles of our time. They criticize, they pontificate, or editorialize, yet from ObamaCare to a budget deal, they're also careful to not too directly engage. The same can be said of them for what has played out in Madison, Wisconsin over the past month.

Whether it's talking about death panels, or blood libel, to now showing up in Madison - that's not former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. As I said to a friend and colleague tonight, wherever the current battle is, that's very often where you can find Palin. One of the first requirements for leadership is to show up out front. No one will ever accuse Palin of not doing that. Doing so also has an interesting side benefit for any would be leader. When you lead, people tend to follow and support you, even if not at first.

Riehl's commentators are interesting, too, although as usual they're invaded by the usual assortment of (probably) paid lefty trolls who trot out the tired blame-Sarah meme--you know, the one where she's a coward and a quitter for resigning as Alaska's governor. Which, as they well know, she did to prevent all the Democrat-supported frivolous lawsuits against her from bankrupting her family--which was their intention.

One commentator ("Judas Priest") runs with this, picking up the cudgels and letting loose the best anti-left diatribe I've seen in months. It's on Riehl's site, but I'm reproducing it in full here to save you some time.

You Liberals are terrified - TERRIFIED OF PALIN. You know full well she didn't abandon her governor seat, she was hit by so many frivolous lawsuits from the Left that she couldn't function as governor and do the will of the people. So cut the crap with your lies!
You want to talk about abandoning? OK, let's have at it - Obama abandoned YOU. And your silence SCREAMS hypocrisy!

GE pays no taxes. Silence from the Left.Obama takes us to war #3. Silence from the Left.
Sarah Palin called a t***. Then a c***. Silence from the feminist Left. Economy in shambles. Silence from the Left.
Foreign policy a disaster. Silence from the Left. Pump prices have doubled under Obama. Silence from the Left.
Food/clothing prices skyrocket. Silence from the Left. Over 30 Czars. Silence from the Left.
Obama loses Democratic party over 700 seats. Silence from the Left. National debt has risen to 1.4% of a Quadrillion dollars. Silence from the Left.
NPR busted in full bias. Silence from the Left. GTMO still open. Silence from the Left.
2 wars still on, one with record death toll. Silence from the Left. All Democrat Congressional and Senate representatives are millionaires, multimillionaires, or billionaires. Silence from the Left.
Obama ignores nuclear disaster now reaching our shores. Silence from the Left. Obama delivers oil rig contract to Soros-owned Petrobas so they can drill for oil in gulf and sell it to us. Silence from the Left.
Hundreds of waivers delivered to Big Corporations and unions for Obamacare exemptions. Silence from the Left.

Palin IS NOT running the country, neither is Bush or Reagan or Beck or Nixon or Limbaugh or the Koch brothers. OBAMA is. And he's doing a damned terrible job of it as his recent 41% approval rating is showing. So go back to HuffPo and tell them you need better talking points. And a better candidate next time. This one and his Liberal policies are Epic Fail.

I have nothing more to add.

Al Gore: Warmist Jackass

2011-04-16T15:55:00.000-04:00

He's ba-a-a-ack! Yes indeedy, Al Gore, aka "The Goracle." America's own Foghorn Leghorn and longtime pretender to the White House has surfaced yet again with the same old self-serving "global warming" rant. Ever notice? Each of Gore's successive media resurrections resemble trailers from those old Hammer films where Dracula constantly rises from the grave they put him in back in the previous film. In any event, The Hill reports:
Al Gore told young green energy advocates Friday that progress on global warming must come from a strong grassroots movement that can counter the oil and coal lobbies, which he alleged have “paralyzed” governments.

Gore – who compared action on global warming to the Civil Rights movement – was the keynote speaker at Power Shift 2011, a Washington, D.C. conference attended largely by college students.

Here's an audience tailor made for this horizontally-challenged warmist buffoon whose undergrad college GPA was actually lower than that of G.W. Bush, the alleged moron who beat Gore and his operatives fair and square in Florida in Y2K. Today's college kids largely learn nothing but the Marxist propaganda they hear in the average college classroom rather than actual useful subject matter.

Gore's agitprop included the following meaningless observation:

“It’s true that governments by and large have been politically paralyzed because the energy companies, the coal companies, the oil companies, the coal-burning utilities, they have spent enormous amounts of money and they have succeeded in many countries in paralyzing the political process,” the former vice president said.

Of course it's also true that the entire Lamestream Media, nearly all Democrats in Congress, and every lefty prof this or that side of the Pecos, plus America's Blatherer-in-Chief are all warmists who are casting a blind eye on the EPA's illegal overregulation of the utility and mining industries, all of which furthers the warmists' ends. Not to mention the ruthless lobbying of the enviro-freaks. I'd say these clowns currently have the upper hand over Gore's whipping boys of the day, the energy company lobbyists, who are ultimately on the side of all Americans who want lower-cost domestically produced energy whenever possible, not higher energy prices extorted by unfriendly regimes and speculators.

Not to be deterred, America's Clown Prince of RICO continues:

“There are four anti-climate lobbyists on Capitol Hill in this city for every single member of the House and every single member of the Senate,” Gore said Friday night at the opening of the April 15-18 conference.

“What is the answer for this?" Gore asked. "It has to come from you. It has to come at the grassroots level. It has to come from young people, and I believe that you are up to it and that you can do it.”

Yep, it has to come from young people. Young people who won't be able to get a job or pay back their horrendous student loans, courtesy of Obama, the Democrats, and the environmentaloids, all of whom seek to cut back on human reproduction by making living itself impossibly expensive. Young people who won't see a dime of Medicare or Social Security if the demagoguing of the ~~Socialist~~ Democrat Party continues unanswered and unchallenged.

Gore retreated for awhile after the East Anglia-led global warming ~~fraud~~ hoax was exposed two years ago. I guess he figures the coast is clear now, so it's time to defend his vast "green" investments again. Let's never forget that Gore has staked his entire economic future on money-losing but taxpayer supported boondoggles subsidizing "alternative energy" projects, none of which will ever generate a dime in unsubsidized profits.

I'm amazed that this blustering, self-righteous, idiot still gets any press coverage at all. Then again, I maybe shouldn't be. After all, it's that same "legitimate media" that anointed "The One," whose presidency is already threatening to dethrone the Carter interregnum as the worst presidency ever. Between Gore and Obama, it's a real contest as to which of these super smarmy politicos is actually the most drippingly condescending to and contemptuous of the average American citizen. I hope a few of these citizens at least will regain their equilibrium and common sense before entering the voting booth in November 2012.

As for Gore. It is increasingly possible that we will never again see a bigger, blowsier, more blissfully buffo bloviator in this century.

Cleveland Orchestra's "Don Giovanni"

2011-04-01T15:18:00.000-04:00

Since I'm back in town, I've just now posted my review of the Cleveland Orchestra's marvelous, recently-concluded production of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Check it out here in my column "Curtain Up!" in the Washington Times Communities online.

While your in the neighborhood, check out Politics, another area for which the Washington Times is justly famous. Good stuff here on both sides of the spectrum.

More on Media Matters' Illegal Exploitation of 501(c)(3)

2011-03-28T16:36:00.000-04:00

You heard it here first--there's almost certainly a very good case to be made for revoking Media Matters' 501(c)(3) privileges, i.e., that organization's nonprofit status, with reference to its recently announced plan to destroy Fox News. This Soros-funded hard-left hate site is certainly violating the IRS rules that prohibit such an organization from active partisan politicking which is all it takes for a revocation as we explained in our earlier HazZzMat post here.

Now the Examiner's editorial page is picking up the refrain:

Being a C3 puts MM in the non-profit, non-commercial sector, and it also bars the organzation from participating in partisan political activity. This new, more aggressive stance, however, appears to run directly counter to the government's requirements for maintaining a C3 tax status.

Since Brock classifies Fox News as the "leader" of the Republican Party, by his own description he is involving his organization in a partisan battle. High-priced K Street lawyers can probably find a federal judge or a sympathetic IRS bureaucrat willing to either look the other way or accept some sort of MM rationale such as that it is merely providing educational information about a partisan group.

But in the IRS application for 501(C)(3) tax-exempt educational foundation status, Section VIII, Question I asks the applicant: "Do you support or oppose candidates in political campaigns in any way?" (Emphasis added).

Yup. Wonder if Soros' expensive lawyers or Media Matters' reprehensible David Brock thought of that before they launched this latest Gramsican-Alinskyite attack on free speech. If they look like Stalinists and talk like Stalinists....

Geraldine Ferraro Dead at 75

2011-03-26T17:01:00.001-04:00

Frankly, I rarely share a tear for a Democrat these days, but I was sorry to hear of former 1984 Democrat VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro's passing at the fairly young age of 75. According to Fox News:

Ferraro died at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was being treated for blood cancer, a disease she battled for 12 years, her family said.

Although she lived on the left side of the aisle, I always thought Ferraro conducted herself with class and dignity, particularly during the real estate scandals her husband was involved in--scandals that didn't help when they were uncovered during the 1984 campaign and with which Ferraro was clearly not involved.

After the Reagan victory in 1984, Ferraro mostly retreated from campaign politics, although she briefly tried to run for the Senate in the late 1990s, being bested, alas, by the absolutely dreadful Chuck Schumer who will probably plague us 'til the end of days.

Ferraro was pilloried by the press for her honest observations about the Barack Obama bandwagon in 2008. Unfairly labeled a "racist" for preferring female candidate Hillary Clinton, she backed out of active campaigning for the candidate after the uproar.

Interestingly, the always forthright (and more than equally maligned) Sarah Palin offered a classy valedictory today, lauding the efforts of Ferraro in breaking the political glass ceiling for both Clinton and Palin:

"She broke one huge barrier and then went on to break many more," Palin said in a statement. "The world will miss her. May she rest in peace and may her example of hard work and dedication to America continue to inspire all women."

Right answer. Let's end it there.

Revoke Media Matters' 501(c)(3)

2011-03-26T16:39:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting story today by Brandon Kiser at The Right Sphere via Ed Morrisey at Hot Air:

Media Matters really enjoys branding itself as an arbiter of truth designed to correct lies and misinformation from conservatives that they perceive is occurring in the US media.

Of course, we all know better than that. They’re no more than a Fox News bashing robot – and a bad one at that. Well, today Media Matters admitted to it’s real goal: waging “War on Fox” and the GOP. From Politico:

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.

States Brock:

“Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press,” its memo says. “Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”

Two points, the second one first. Here we see one of the classic, Gramscian tactics the left has used for decades to transform their phony argumentation: the redefinition of terms. To even the relatively uninformed, Fox is indeed a news organization, like it or not. But in one fell swoop, without any supporting facts, Brock now declares that it is NOT a news organization, presumably because it generally (although not nearly always) supports the Republican argument.

Not only absurd on its face, Brock's organization itself, along with the rest of the discredited MSM, defeats his own argument since the MSM, lock, stock, and barrel, is in the tank for the Democrat-left at all times, and unapologetically so. If it's fair game to unilaterally redefine Fox news as the "de facto leader of the GOP," then it's also fair game to redefine the entirety of the MSM as the "de facto leader of the Democrat Party," and wage guerrilla war against them as well. Which, of course, is something Brock will never do, since Media Matters is, was, and always will be an organization by, for, and of the Democrat left.

Which brings us to our A-list argument, suggested here by Kiser but promoted by us for a long, long time:

The cutesy-sounding mission of Media Matters to “correct conservative misinformation” is no longer even remotely appropriate. No, MMFA is a political group with $10 million-plus in annual funding designed to wage war against Fox News, and in their eyes the GOP and conservatives as a whole.

Because of this, Media Matters should reconsider their 501(c)(3) status which is designated for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. MMFA no longer meets any of these qualifiers (it’s arguable they never [sic] did) and under the banner of waging a war against Fox News and the GOP puts them in an entirely different zip code.

Yep. As the anti-Nixonians in the 1970s used to love to say, "Follow the money." The epic scandal over the last 50 or so years has been the long-march of the left through America's key institutions, another key element in the Gramscian strategy to take over the national narrative, or cultural hegemony, in order to divert it toward Gramsci's longed-for new world (Marxist) order. And one of the best ways of controlling the narrative is to make sure only one thread of it--the socialist thread--is heard while all other voices are shut down and shut out. (BTW, Brandon, surely your suggestion that Media Matters "reconsider" their tax status was meant ironically, right?)

In addition to their obvious control of the MSM, however, the left has taken over a key piece of funding machinery via intentionally subverting a key element in the U.S. Tax Code: the 501(c)(3) "charitable" organization. You name it. Organizations from AARP to the Sierra Club, from Greenpeace to the Ford Foundation, once perfectly respectable, tax-exempt organizations have been taken over, one by one. And now, along with the public-employee unions who are desperately trying to overturn the results of the 2010 elections, they're all united in using their tax-favored status to massively fund the final destruction of the USA and its basically two-party structure by eliminating the opposing view.

Such activities are clearly partisan and political and thus openly and notoriously violate the intent of the tax code re: 502(c)(3) organizations, all of which are specifically prohibited from undertaking political activities.

Life, of course, is rarely simple. Any number of 501(c)(3) organizations exploit loopholes in the law allowing them to own certain subsidiaries. And it's via these subsidiaries that the politicking is carried on in at least some of these organizations. All this is another story, probably a lot of other stories.

But the main point here is that Brock has exposed Media Matters for what it was always intended to be--a phony, astroturfing political organization dedicated to smearing and ultimately stamping out any political point of view that bothers Democrats, trade unions, trial lawyers, or the Soros-led (and funded) billionaire leftocracy.

It's time to employ a simple two-step program here: First, work as if your life depended on it to gain Republican (and hopefully Tea Party) control of the Senate and the White House in 2012 while retaining a commanding Republican lead in the House. And second: use that control to defund the left by enacting:

Tort reform to throttle the costly predations of America's Trial Lawyers
Union reform to bar public employee unions at the state and national level
Revoking the 501(c)(3) status of all such organizations that are funding, either openly or covertly (via cleverly interlocking subsidiaries) political activities in violation of this statute. Such revocations would probably have to include some re-writing of the code to close the loopholes, but it needs to be done and done soon.

If we're to retain even a shred of the Founding Fathers' intentions for this great country, we are going to have to make a concerted effort to "follow the (leftists') money." By turning off, one by one, the illegal dollar spigots to these subversive bastards, we can start to bring the political argument back toward right of center where most Americans have always comfortably resided. But we'd better start soon.

A Tribute to Obamanation

2011-03-26T15:39:00.000-04:00

We've been on travel up in Cleveland, and are now returning to blogging back in DC. And what to our wondering eyes just appeared in a recent, scurrilous email? A brand new tribute to President Obama:

Click (or double-click) to enlarge.

Hey, look, it's funny, right? A lot funnier than Bill Maher's by now virally-legendary, way-over-the-top smear of Sarah Palin. Rich lefties and faux-socialists like Maher love to redefine terms. This latest excursion by Maher into the left's spreading tar-pit of exceptionally vile anti-female-Republican misogyny definitively and graphically proves the utter bankruptcy of ideas, ideals, and moral standards on that side of the political aisle. Disgusting.

Obama's Keystone Cops

2011-03-23T11:59:00.002-04:00

Re: Obama's amateurish bungling during the current Libyan affair, heres a wonderful observation today via Instapundit. Follow the link below for more:

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in. Under Bush, we were the world’s policeman. Under Obama, the world’s Keystone Kops.

Obama an expert in Trivial Pursuit?

2011-03-15T23:37:00.001-04:00

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you. Apropos of our observations in our previous entry, check out Keith Kossler's recent observations on the subject at White House Dossier:

The Middle East is afire with rebellion, Japan is imploding from an earthquake, and the battle of the budget is on in the United States, but none of this seems to be deterring President Obama from a heavy schedule of childish distractions.

The newly installed tandem of White House Chief of Staff William Daley and Senior Adviser David Plouffe were supposed to impart a new sense of discipline and purpose to the White House. Instead, they are permitting him to showcase himself as a poorly focused leader who has his priorities backward.

This morning, as Japan’s nuclear crisis enters a potentially catastrophic phase, we are told that Obama is videotaping his NCAA tournament picks and that we’ll be able to tune into ESPN Wednesday to find out who he likes.

Saturday, he made his 61st outing to the golf course as president, and got back to the White House with just enough time for a quick shower before heading out to party with Washington’s elite journalists at the annual Gridiron Dinner.

Apparently--and appallingly--there are no adults left in Washington, DC. Have things really gotten so bad in this country that we're going to have to adopt the Tunisian and Egyptian models if we're to achieve real "hope and change?"

As I move into the autumn of life, I am beginning at last to understand the motives and motivations of Shakespeare's bizarre Timon of Athens.

Ongoing fallout from a stupid presidency; or, Dave Fry for President

2011-03-15T23:08:00.001-04:00

By now, nearly every sentient being in this country knows the world's a mess. Making matters worse, remember that the MSM persuaded us to put a literal moron in the White House in 2008: Barack Obama, our Community Organizer-in-Chief. We're paying an extraordinarily heavy, continuing price for that epic folly.

Making matters still worse, since the Republicans couldn't move the Senate to the right in 2010, the feckless ~~Socialists~~ Democrats are still running the show during Barack Obama's continuing virtual and actual absences from Washington, preferring, by their very inaction, to force the Fed to defensively print money while they continue to spend us into fiscal Armageddon. Why pay for bribes to your constituents when you can simply debase the currency to accomplish the same thing? I think I'm beginning to understand how patriotic Americans must have felt circa 1859-60 as the country slid rapidly into a special hell, courtesy of near-bovine President James Buchanan's stellar ineptitude coupled with an utterly deadlocked and dysfunctional Congress.

Dave Fry, who writes "Dave's Daily"--a technical charting column appearing almost every day on Jim Cramer's financial website, TheStreet--catches us up on the still-evolving nuclear disaster in Japan in his closing remarks, wrapping festivities with the following observations:

The United States has proven its diplomatic and strategic ineptitude along with other Western allies regarding all things MENA [Middle East and North Africa]. We have taken defeat from the jaws of victory and taken Gaddafi from just another tyrant back into an active terrorist.

The Saudis have invaded Bahrain infuriating the Iranians. We knew nothing of this until after the event so poor is our intelligence. All this is why we need a courageous leader to put forth a coherent and effective national energy policy. All we've done is block providers and created a worthless Department of Energy stuffed with bureaucrats and oozing patronage. It's a disgrace!

Game, set, and match. For once, I have absolutely nothing to add. This says it all. Maybe Dave should throw his hat in the ring in 2012.

Grammar and Spelling: The Sorry State of Online Journalism

2011-03-15T16:24:00.002-04:00

Okay, I know, I know. Financial, fiscal, physical, and political disasters abound and I'll get to them. But in reading about them online (and for that matter, offline), I am continually appalled at the pathetic state of writing, editing, and grammatical usage that abounds on the net. Online content is a veritable disaster area of howlers.

Case in point: This afternoon headline on CNBC's "Fast Money" financial news site:

Pros: S&P Resilience Could Signal Rally in Tact

I'm cutting and pasting it here now in the actual hope that someone will catch this and fix it, so if you check the link and it's fixed, great.

But in point of fact, that's the way it is right now. From my standpoint as a working journalist, the only thing that's worse than a good in your article is a goof in the headline. Such an error simply howls IGNORANCE AND CARELESSNESS to an educated reader. But it's de rigeur these days. It's a dirty little fact that most journalists really can't write very well to begin with. In recent years, economy moves have eviscerated not only the editors who used to catch and fix this kind of stuff. But in many places, I'd wager there are no copy editors or fact checkers left in the newsroom at all.

The result: the kind of stupidity you see in the example above. Obviously, the moron who wrote the headline thinks that "tact" is a word that's modified by the preposition "in." If indeed he or she knows what a preposition is. Of course, it also goes without saying that the headline writer doesn't have a clue that there is, in the English language, an actual word, "intact," which in this context would mean "the rally is still in existence. It is no longer a former rally."

It is perhaps a small part of our ongoing tragedy that neither companies nor individuals take much pride in how their work comes across anymore, particularly in the writing professions where the bottom line in conjunction with a dysfunctional educational system have taken written communication to an all-time low these days. I have less of a beef with your average blogger who does the best he or she can without a back bench. But there's simply no excuse for an outfit like CNBC which, presumably, operates at the highest level of professionalism.

Yet such a headline as the one above proves that there's little if any QC involved in CNBC's online content. And if a headline (aka "hed" in news speak) is careless, can we have much confident in the quality or veracity of the content it introduces?

I'm done. For now.

New Obama 2012 Campaign Poster

2011-03-14T02:24:00.001-04:00

And it's a good one, obtained via one of today's posts at Power Line:

In the immortal words of a former Alaska Governor, "How's that hope-y, change-y stuff workin' out for ya?"

Messing around with Messiaen (and Radiohead)

2011-03-14T01:36:00.001-04:00

Lots of politics and natural disasters to talk about this week, but I've been busy reviewing music over the last couple of days. Check out my Washington Times Communities review of the National Symphony Orchestra's performance of Olivier Messiaen's amazing Turangalila Symphony as well as my backgrounder on the strange electronic ondes Martenot that's used in this 1949 modernist epic. It's entitled "Where Messiaen and Radiohead converge."

And you thought classical music was stodgy.

Transformational Liberalism?

2011-03-08T23:58:00.000-05:00

Today in Hot Air, Allahpundit discusses Laura Ingraham's woodshed session with NYTimes' faux conservative columnist David Brooks who finds that

The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.

Point one: is Brooks obtusely stupid or is he just kidding about the Pelosi-crats' fitness to govern?? As in bankrupting the USA forever?? To the contrary, I'd say Brooks is unfit to wield a pen. On the other hand, this is the kind of mindless condescension typical of New York Times' writers who never venture beyond Manhattan while voicing expert opinions on the real America they will never know.

Point two: by whose lights is every single thing the Republicans try to do always "scary." (Queue Jim Cramer's "Oooooo" ghost sound.) Either Brooks and everyone else on his NYC cocktail circuit is a wuss. Or they're just doing this as part of their usual elitist preening?

Referring to the video in the Hot Air link, Allahpundit tosses to us the following notion:

You’ll hear [Brooks] say here that he thinks Obama’s not hard left but “a more pragmatic type of liberal.” But in the 2009 column linked above, he acknowledged that moderates were wrong about O and that his “actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice.” Which is it?

Answer: neither. "Transformational liberalism" is yet another fine example of a Marxist weasel word (like "progressive"). Transformational liberalism = communism. Period.

Any other questions? Good. Then let's take back our language and American cultural hegemony along with it by refusing to use phony, misleading, elite terms like "transformational liberalism."

Is the Chevy Volt ReVolting?

2011-03-04T08:35:00.000-05:00

This just in from Ecofreak blog AutoblogGreen:

Peruse Chevrolet's February sales release, and you'll notice one number that's blatantly missing: the number of Chevy Volts sold. The number – a very modest 281 – is available in the company's detailed data (PDF), but it certainly isn't something that GM wants to highlight, apparently. Keeping the number quiet is a bit understandable, since it's lower than the 321 that Chevy sold in January.

Nissan doesn't have anything to brag about here, either (and it didn't avoiding any mention of the Leaf sales in its press release). Why? Well, back in January, the company sold 87 Leafs. In February? Just 67.

Why? I'll tell these boobs why. Because nobody wants these bloody, overpriced things. We're shocked. Shocked.

Whether anyone is aware of it or not--and the MSM is not going to help you here--the Obama Administration is on a stealth mission to price fossil fuel energy into the stratosphere to force you to buy taxpayer-subsidized boondoggles like the Chevy Volt and to encourage you to "go green," whatever the hell that is. It's all part of the left's "global warming" hoax which is all part of the grand socialist scheme to impoverish Americans by redistributing this country's wealth everywhere but here.

But it's ultimately going to fail. Just as folks are waking up to the Democrat campaign fund game that's being disguised as public employee union-busting, so, too, are people beginning to notice that this administration leaves no stone unturned in thwarting American energy company's ability to extract low-cost, domestic oil and gas resourced from the United States itself. This assures our utter dependence on increasingly unreliable--and costly--foreign energy sources, driving our prices up.

The Volt is just one symptom of this--and perhaps the main reason the administration is still controlling the company--to guarantee that we continue to subsidize a low horsepower car that is not practical in most places, is grossly overpriced. And most importantly, that nobody wants for precisely those reasons.

Of course, AutoblogGreen won't be mentioning this. It doesn't go along with The Narrative.

Why I Left Ohio

2011-03-03T14:13:00.001-05:00

"Why, oh why, oh why-oh,
Did I ever leave Ohio?"
--Leonard Bernstein, "Wonderful Town"

This tasty bit of union thuggery via Stacy McCain's The Other McCain:

Ohio’s state Senate yesterday passed S.B. 5, which would limit the power of government employee unions. Among those voting for the measure was state Sen. Frank LaRose, a 31-year-old freshman Republican from Akron. After the passage of S.B. 5, LaRose’s Facebook page filled up with comments, including one from Michael Sarge Piotrowski who — as Melissa Clouthier explains at Red State — is a lawyer representing the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police.

“Funny thing about cops, they hold grudges,” Piotroski wrote on LaRose’s page.

Gee, sounds like a threat to me. But then again, it's probably not since, as we all know, only Sarah Palin and the "teabaggers" threaten anyone with violence. Never those peaceful Democrats. McCain's site posts a screenshot of the Facebook page just in case it gets mysteriously removed.

BTW, note the other good news above, namely that the Ohio Senate has already passed its public employee union limiting bill. The Ohio House is next, then on to Gov. John Kasich for the ol' John Henry.

Wisconsin Democrats-in-hiding take note: the clock is ticking.

BTW 2. The whole sad story playing out in the old Rust Belt is a major reason why I left my original home in Ohio decades ago. No opportunities. None. Businesses have left these states, particularly Ohio and Michigan, in droves. The reason? Unless you play paddycake with public and private union thugs, you simply can't get anything done. By the time everyone's palm gets greased, the money's all gone and improvements never happen. It's as if the Mafia itself has taken over these states. You can't prevail against it. So if you want a life, you leave.

These states have become a national laughingstock, but I'm not laughing. There are good, honest, down-to-earth people living in these states, the greatest and most loyal friends and neighbors in the world. Many vote against their own self-interests by pulling the Democrat lever every four years because it's the only thing they've ever known and there's no one else around to counter the propaganda. But this year, it looks like many of these good people have started to wake up. If Rust Belt state governments can de-unionize to a great degree, they could be very quickly on the way to becoming the leaders of America's 21st century.

(We'll except Illinois, however, still firmly in the grip of the Stalinist state and local government combine that elevated one of its own to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Run, interestingly, by my old Georgetown dorm-mate and now Governor Pat Quinn, this is a state that's rapidly closing in on California and New York for the "let's be the first to default on our debts" sweepstakes.)

Texas Farmers Under Terrorist Attack

2011-03-03T13:51:00.001-05:00

This from a Fox News report headed "America's Third War":

In Texas, nearly 8,200 farms and ranches back up to the Mexican border.

The men and women who live and work on those properties say they’re under attack from the same drug cartels blamed for thousands of murders in Mexico.

“It’s a war, make no mistake about it,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said. “And it’s happening on American soil.”

Need details? Try these:

“Farmers and ranchers are being run off their own property by armed terrorists showing up and telling them they have to leave their land,” Staples said...

... Joe Aguilar, said enough is enough. After walking up on armed gunmen sneaking undocumented immigrants into the United States through his land, Aguilar decided to sell his farm.“It’s really sad to say, you either have to beat ‘em or join ‘em and I decided not to do either,” Aguilar said.

This is another example of some very serious business that isn't being covered at all by the MSM, largely because it doesn't track with "the narrative." It's also largely being ignored by the Obama administration because they figure the land in question should go back to Mexico anyway. You think I'm kidding? Well action--in this case inaction--speaks louder than words.

Doesn't every President take an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the union" of the United States of America? How is this President fulfilling his oath with regard to, say, Arizona and Texas. Rhetorical question, of course. (BTW, except for the now-aborted fence, the Bushies were not a ton better on this.) What the hell is wrong here? Do Texas and Arizona need to deputize vigilante groups to get things done? Or is this administration happy with the drug cartels moving their operations over to this side of the Rio Grande?

HazZzMat has been thumping on this issue--the slow descent of Mexico into failed-nation status and its dire consequences for the U.S. Here's just another example of the issue. Do we have to wait for another 9/11-style calamity in America's southwest region before the Federal government--and this president--wake up and do their jobs? Or is this yet another fine example of how the soft tyranny of incremental Marxism in this country is rotting us from within?

BTW, Fox provides a link to the Texas Border Protection site but it doesn't seem to work. For a more generalized link on the issue, try USBorderWatch.com.

Fire Eric Holder

2011-03-01T22:44:00.000-05:00

According to Politico:

Attorney General Eric Holder finally got fed up Tuesday with claims that the Justice Department went easy in a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party because they are African American.

Holder was being confronted in a hearing on this issue by Rep. John Culbertson (R-TX) who suggested strongly that Holder was refusing to prosecute what appears to be a fairly open-and-shut case of voter intimidation because the intimidators were black. Indeed, it's tough to arrive at any other conclusion. So Holder tried to evade the issue once again and turn the tables on Culbertson:

"Think about that," Holder said. "When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia—which was inappropriate, certainly that…to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people," said Holder, who is black.

In other words, since black voters were intimidated in times gone by, it's perfectly okay if they do the intimidating now. This gives a whole new dimension to the pre-1965 "separate but equal" doctrine. Is this retribution, or what?

Eric Holder has racially polarized the Department of No-Longer Justice to a breathtaking degree. It is astonishing that in 2011, America's chief law enforcement officer has demonstrated, time and again in word and in deed, that the law will be enforced unequally on his watch. If a white attorney general were to play such a game with African-Americans or even hint at it, he'd be toast before the day was out. What makes Holder any different? Rhetorical question of course.

Holder needs to be fired right now. Pronto. There's no place for racism in the Department of Justice. And Eric Holder had ought to know this better than anybody else. But rather than rise above the fray, he's chosen to play the race card in an astonishing manner by institutionalizing reverse discrimination as a key policy of the Obama administrations Department of justice.

2012 can't come fast enough.

Meditations on San Francisco's Commode Kerfuffle

2011-03-01T01:10:00.000-05:00

This shocking story (sourced by us to SFGate) has been gurgling through the Internet for the last 24 hours:

San Francisco's big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink.

Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.

Pretty funny, eh? But wait! There's more:

Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite - better known as bleach - to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city's treated water before it's dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water.

That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year.

Let's see now. We Save the Planet plus "scarce" water resources by getting rid of old toilets and then spending tons of money (via significantly increased sewer tax bills) to get rid of the stink we just caused. And what about the "harm to the environment" that all that bleach is sure to cause? Of course now they're looking into that. But they could've avoided the issue and the expense by keeping all the old toilets.

This is just the latest example of ~~progressive~~ regressive non-reasoning from the political denizens of Amerikkka's Left Bank. You know, the same Idiotarians who are spending time and money on an attempt to ban circumcision. (See our comments on that little brouhaha here.) But these nutty San Franciscans are just the tip of the iceberg, really.

Meditating on SF's commode kerfuffle, I've begun to wonder more and more about exactly when we can expect the S to hit the fan nationwide with regard to the proper disposal of those wretched fluorescent twist-tube light bulbs the Nanny State is forcing us to buy. Right, we are supposed to "dispose of them safely" because they contain mercury. The product boxes all say so. (We apparently also need to call in a hazmat team to decontaminate our homes if we ever break one of these expensive puppies.)

But exactly where do we safely dispose of these bulbs? No one ever says.

I live right in the backyard of Washington DC in Fairfax Country, Virginia. Although it's been tilting Dem for the last few elections, the county is in general fairly well run as far as utilities and basic services go. But even here, I have yet to receive a missive, a political letter, a note in my electric or water/sewer bill--anything--that tells me where I can "safely dispose" of these damn bulbs I never wanted to buy in the first place.

From toilets to stupid light bulbs, ~~progressive~~ regressive Democrats like to force us to buy things that will make us better and safer and more "responsible" for our environment. Or so they say. What they're really trying to do is compel us to do things that will make them feel good about themselves. Like incorrigible adolescents, they never think of the ultimate consequences that stem from those things they're forcing people to do. Those consequences tend to be unavoidably negative if you don't use logic to parse these things out beforehand. Which, of course, they never do.

Anyhow, I've decided I'm going to start counting the days, months, or years it's going to take for San Franciscans to realize they've killed all the fish with bleach while their dysfunctional toilets continue to stink up the joint. And I'm looking forward to witnessing the inevitable movement to ban dangerous fluorescent lightbulbs. It will happen when we wake up one morning to discover that our cities and towns have become toxic waste dumps loaded with mercury brownfields that will take the entire gross national product to clean up.

But don't worry. Without a doubt there will be a fresh batch of incorrigible, perpetually adolescent ~~progressive~~ regressive Democrats just around the corner ready, willing, and fully able to tax the crap out of us to solve the problem that they unthinkingly caused in the frst place.

Tedious.

Washington National Opera's Boffo "Butterfly"

2011-02-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

Awesome performance from our local DC Opera company, which has had its fiscal problems lately. Nonetheless, they can still put on one heck of a performance when they have a mind to, and their current production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly is a case in point.

Read my full review with pix via my column, Curtain Up! And check out other local arts, politics, news, and reviews at the Washington Times Communities.

Democrat Civility in Wisconsin

2011-02-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

From Outside the Beltway, this little anecdote underscoring the considerable progress Wisconsin Democrats are making in the direction of more civil discourse:

Well this isn’t exactly new tone:
Last Friday…. after the Assembly voted to engross the Budget Repair Bill, [Wisconsin State Rep. Gordon] Hintz turned to a female colleague, Rep. Michelle Litjens and said: “You are F***king dead!”
I suppose this is acceptable because he was fighting for “the people,” right?

Hey, who does Hintz think Litjens is, anyway, Sarah Palin? If a Republican had dared to say this, he'd well and truly be F***king dead right now, ya think?

We report, you decide.

Meanwhile, remember Wonker's First Rule of Partisan Politics: Being a Democrat is never having to say you're sorry.

Peter Yarrow is in Wisconsin. Wonder Why?

2011-02-28T01:01:00.000-05:00

Ann Althouse duly notes that once-famous faux singer Peter Yarrow has shown up in Madison to uphold union solidarity as funded via limitless taxpayer impoverishment. In the same piece, she wonders why better leftist entertainers either weren't invited or decided not to come.

The answer is simple. Yarrow, of "Peter, Paul and Mary" fame is one of the last musical survivors of an era when moderately talented acoustic singers of the Marxist persuasion rebranded themselves as friendly, benign "folk singers," the better to transmit Communist propaganda to a new generation while appearing as friendly grassroots entertainers carrying on "American musical tradition."

Case in point: Mary Travers herself attended New York City's notorious Little Red Schoolhouse, a public school with an essentially socialist curriculum, supported, of course, by the hapless taxpayer. It was a fine launching pad for her later career as a friendly subversive "patriot."

All three singers in the trio are classic examples of how the long march of the tattered Popular Front tradition gradually infiltrated music, the arts, and the entertainment industry to the extent where few in those fields today will admit to anything other than socialist leanings.

But back to Peter. Yarrow has faithfully carried on that Little Red Schoolhouse-style tradition, most recently in 2005 when he traveled to ~~Ho Chi Minh City~~ Saigon to apologize for America's actions in the Vietnam War. What a patriot. Just the guy with enough street cred to support the patriotic Wisconsin Public Employees. (The story was reported, by the way, on the website of the Organic Consumers Association which pretty much telegraphs the real intentions of this particular front group.)

Anyhow, it's small wonder that this knee-jerk old Commie was happy to show up at Marxism's Last Stand in Madison. He has nothing to lose. The other rich lefty entertainers still have careers. They've no doubt determined that an appearance along with Wisconsin's selfish union thugs won't exactly enhance their image or box office magic with the general public. Yarrow could care less. At least he's consistent.

Power to the People, Right On.

Cypress String Quartet Disappoints at Wolf Trap

2011-02-27T15:59:00.000-05:00

Didactic, disappointing performance by the Cypress String Quartet Friday evening at "The Barns," a delightful performing arts facility at Wolf Trap here in northern Virginia, a venue better known for its outdoor Filene Center. The quartet actually accompanied a banal film that softly bashes America, a tired yet continuous meme constantly pushed by the left. For my review of the performance, click here to learn about "The Cypress Quartet's muddled America."

For those who haven't checked my bio sketch lately, I still review music, theater, and the arts for the Washington Times, currently online under their Washington Times Communities tab, subtab "Entertain Us." You can find my reviews in my column "Curtain Up!" I might as well let you know they're there.

Meanwhile, I'll be posting another review either later tonight or early tomorrow on the Washington National Opera's new production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Not to telegraph my opinion, but I'll give you a hint: See if you can get a ticket.

MoveOn, Union Sponsored Rallies Flop, Big Time

2011-02-26T23:12:00.001-05:00

The joint astroturfing endeavors of MoveOn.org and various and sundry public employee unions flopped today, big time, according to RightNetwork, which speculates as to the reason why:

Despite the best efforts of the state-run media and the far left, protesters failed to materialize today at the dozens of rallies in support of government employee unions. Maybe it’s because government employees make twice as much as the private sector?

Want some numbers? Professor William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has some for ya, aside from Madison, Wisconsin's Ground Zero where union thugs continue to be bussed in from God knows where:

In Washington, D.C., only about 500 people showed up (go to link for good photos of crazy signs). (Note, WaPo says 1000.)

In Columbus, OH, where you would expect a big crowd given a similar controversy, only "several thousand" people protested.

Other head counts, based on news reports, include: Boston (1000), Portsmouth, N.H. (few hundred), Augusta, ME (small crowd), New York City ("several thousand"), Chicago (1000), Miami (100), Austin (several hundred), Chicago (1000); Lansing, MI (2000), Nashville (hundreds), Los Angeles (2000), Richmond, VA (300), Denver (1000); Frankfurt, KY (several hundred), Jefferson City, MO (several hundred), Harrisburg, PA (several hundred).

Underwhelming, eh? Don't expect either MoveOn or the union thugs to see the light of day. This is their supreme Seinfeld moment: No hugging. No Learning. Ever. Or, to quote that learned sage, Forrest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does."

Global Warming Continues to Pound US Mainland

2011-02-26T22:54:00.001-05:00

Headline links via Drudge:

Latest Snowfall To Make February Snowiest-Ever In Chicago... SNOW IN SAN FRAN -- FIRST TIME IN 35 YEARS... 33 degrees in San Jose -- lowest since 1897...

Storm Slamming Northeast with Heavy Snow, Flooding...

Obviously, this is all the result of ~~"global warming"~~ "climate change." The Goracle said so. So does everyone else.

(But remember Wonker's Rule: "Everybody" is always wrong.)

New Friends and Enemies

2011-02-26T14:41:00.002-05:00

We've augmented our ever-changing Friends and Enemies lists today, incorporating some new sites that contain reliable--and unreliable--news and information respectively. Inspired by Tricky Dick Nixon's nearly-forgotten nomenclature, our lists are meant not only as handy links for those so inclined to explore. They're also intended as cautionary guideposts. More than ever today, you need to know just who or what it is that you're getting your information--or disinformation--from.

Here goes:

Two new friends from Canada:

SteynOnline--Online presence of conservative writer and sometimes Rush Limbaugh radio sub host Mark Steyn.
Blogging Tories--What it says.

Two new friends from the U.S.:

Planet Gore: Unlikely title, but this is a blog satirizing and debunking all things pertaining to the Goracle, that pusillanimous pugilist of pomposity, courtesy of NRO.
Linkiest: A new discovery for us, at least, this site vaguely looks like Twitter and is a scrolling series of reliably conservative links constantly updated.

Enemies:

Two old, familiar, and once cherished news magazines that went so far off the leftist cliff that you can just about stick a fork in them because they're done:

TIME--The Luce family would turn over in its collective grave. Now thinner than a broadsheet, this dying relic is what's left of a once major journalistic empire--left-wing smears and slander so biased that even the emeritus editors of the old Soviet Pravda would be embarrassed.
Newsweek--Merging with the snarky Daily Beast after being unceremoniously dumped by its owners, the Washington Post, for a buck, this rough beast is slouching away from Bethlehem to be Born Again under the tutelage of that Queen of Buzz and reflexive British leftism, Tina Brown. One of the fun things about being a hard lefty is that you can fail again and again and still come out on top with a great salary. Makes me a little wistful sometimes. Clearly, I've made some bad career choices.

Ventriloquist Journalism: The New Vernacular

2011-02-26T13:15:00.001-05:00

Now here's a useful term I've never run into before: "ventriloquist journalism." Credit goes to new Power Line blogger Steven Hayward via M. Stanton Evans. Let Hayward explain:

Kudos to John for staying after Eric Lipton's fast one, which is a classic in the genre of what I call "ventriloquist journalism"--the highly refined technique by which "news" reporters seek out a source to confirm their preconceived story line with a specific quote. I didn't think of that term myself; I learned it from my first mentor out of college, the great M. Stanton Evans, who was one of the nation's youngest major newspaper editors decades ago at the Indianapolis Star.

Italics mine, carving out the actual definition.

The link in this graf, BTW, is to fellow Power Line-er John Hinderaker's entry earlier entry exposing Eric Lipton's faux journalism at the despicable, rarely fact-checked New York Times. It's a classic anecdote that elegantly defines "ventriloquist journalism" via real world experience.

Hayward elaborates on the topic:

Reporters for mainstream media publications like the Times are extremely skilled at this dark art, and have numerous techniques for getting a source to utter a pre-written quote. Basically they just ask the same question over and over again in different form, and them culminate with, "In other words, would it be fair to say that. . ." until you give in. It takes a lot of patience and determination to resist their well-polished blandishments. The best of them have the whole "good-cop, bad-cop" schtick down cold.

Yup, you see this on TV "ambush journalism" clips all the time, too, usually perpetrated on hapless Republicans by the networks' star socialist reporters, camera man in tow.

The other flavor of this is to reformulate the trick question in ways that disguise its intent, the better to trap the interviewee into an answer that he probably neither wanted nor intended to give.

Ventriloquist journalism a good way to get yourself on the fast track for a Pulitzer, particularly if the tactic makes a George Bush or a Newt Gingrich squirm, grimace, or otherwise look bad. In the end, it's just another example of how so-called journalists crank out propaganda rather than actual news you can use. (It's also the way to win invitations to the very best cocktail parties in the Hamptons.)

BTW2, apropos of today's current state budget battles, here's another pithy Evans observation, obtained from an un-linked piece in the American Spectator:

Tax cuts are like sex; when they are good, they are very, very good. And when they are bad, they are still pretty good.

Did this dude study the comedies of Oscar Wilde?

Washington Post Shows Bias Again

2011-02-25T16:34:00.000-05:00

Washington Post headline from today's online edition:

Democratic governors criticize Wisconsin's Walker

Democrats criticize a Republican governor? One who's trying to take away traditional, involuntary taxpayer funding for Democrats' political campaigns no less? Who knew? This is news?

Non-stories like this are simply editorials thinly disguised as news items, all the better to move editorial page rants into the news hole to make them look substantive. Any wonder why newspaper circulation is going down all across the country. Why pay for propaganda when you can get it free on the web?

Quotes, Scare-quotes, Whatever

2011-02-25T15:06:00.000-05:00

This today from Ann Althouse who cites a passage from left-wing Salon and then offers comment:

Writes Justin Elliott in Salon:

A person at a Tuesday town hall with Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., got up and asked, "Who is going to shoot President Obama?"

The exact wording of the question is not clear because, the Athens Banner-Herald reports, there was a lot of noise at the event.
If you don't know the "exact wording," why do you have some words in quotes? This non-quote has gone viral in the leftosphere, the leftosphere where no one seems to mind all the violent and over-the-top language and imagery at the week-long Wisconsin protests. If you don't have that quote, why are you spewing it out there? Maybe what hasn't changed post-Tucson is you?

Good point. But there's more to this than meets the eye, journalistic, legal, or otherwise.

While she's got a good point here, Ann makes a common observational error that most conservatives are prone to make. Let me explain.

A great many conservatives are conservative precisely because, either accidentally or on purpose, they've somehow managed to obtain a classic liberal arts education. This tends to make them:

Skeptics at the very least
Reasonably well versed in the rubrics of law and journalism (Althouse is, in fact, a law prof.)
Reasonably well versed in the skills of writing and grammar

Any journalist, or lawyer for that matter, knows that if you enclose a person's words in quotes, the convention is that those are the precise, exact words that person said. This is called a direct quote for obvious reasons. It's straight out of the proverbial horse's mouth. It's what a person said, no more and no less. If you didn't quite hear (or record) what a person said, you have to paraphrase and say so in some way, shape, or form.

I'm going to go out on a limb here. But in my recent experience, pretty much anyone who's 40 or under these days has received an "education" only in the sense that he or she has acquired one or more appropriate pieces of paper certifying the given level of "achievement." In other words, such individuals, through no particular fault of their own, are no longer aware of the finer points of language and communication arts.

It is entirely possible that the writer Althouse cites does not have a clue that his use of quotation marks above is, by his very admission, not an exact quote. But he encloses it in quotation marks because it approximates an alleged direct quote and because the individual in question did apparently say something. And because, most importantly, he doesn't have a clue as to correct usage.

I know, I know. Some lefties do, in fact, know the rules, but choose to flout them, the better to obscure the boundaries between truth and fiction and the better to remain in ideological service to the ruling class. But in point of fact, the bulk of errors of this type committed by the left are errors caused by pure ignorance. Since smearing conservatives, libertarians, and tea partiers has been ordered by Party apparatchiks, than the minor details of the smearing are not really relevant to the ideology. The whole idea is to get the smear out there and push it early and often. Further, most of those who are receptive to the smear don't really care about the grammatical, legal, or journalistic details. They just tweet or blog the smear and it goes viral. The hell with the details.

The real story in many of the anecdotes flying about in the wake of the ongoing attempted leftist putsch in the Midwest is one of ignorance. We're dealing with complex issues here which the left is cleverly propagandizing and oversimplifying while also attempting to change the subject. Their attack plan is almost puerile, but it's been effective. The MSM ignoramuses misreport what's going on. The conservative side of the isle is viciously slandered and misrepresented. And the union recipients of the message, by and large, no longer have the educational tools and training to cut through the crap--or you wouldn't see so many demonstrators turning out for these events. They'd already have figured out this Marxist-Leninist violence and obstructionism is actually not serving their own interests in the long run. But, having systematically been denied the tools that used to come standard with a liberal arts education, they just can't see what's really going on.

Fortunately, an emerging majority of Americans are now beginning to see the light, if only instinctively at this point. But we need to recognize that the complexity of the issues involved here make it tough to gain new converts from the middle and the left. Perhaps it's time for conservatives and libertarians to let go of their customary tendency to be reasonable, civilized, and polite--a tendency that allows the violent left to roll all over them and make them look bad every single time. Wiser conservaties are stealing a page out of Alinsky and using the left's same tactics back against them.

Althouse's approach is reasonable here. But we're probably at the point where, if we don't start fighting fire with fire, so to speak, conservatives will politely lose again--at precisely the moment when the hard left--which has been gradually destroying the USA for over 50 years--is ripe for a final, definitive defeat.

BTW: On those quotation marks. You'll note that I myself use them to surround individual words like "education" and "achievement." I'm using them here because I'm using these words in an ironic sense, the same way I write "global warming," which I regard as a farce propagated by the redistributionist left. Quotes in this case are called "scare-quotes." Now, I have no idea why they're called that. Nor do I think this particular usage is described in most old-fashioned grammar books. But this particular usage has nothing to do with the direct quote issue we're dealing with above. Just thought you'd like to know. I do try to stay consistent.

What the Public Employees' Unions Don't Want You to Know

2011-02-24T14:48:00.000-05:00

Here's a great video HazZzMat found via Power Line. Assembled by a group called Minnesota Majority, it sums up, as succinctly and dramatically as I've yet seen, just what's really at stake in the current Texas Cage Match between the American people and the public employee union thugs.

BTW, I like everything about this video except for the Lord of the Rings/Batman style soundtrack. Unintelligible choirs and incessant drumbeats have about run their course, I hope! Oh, well, I supposed you have to get above the cacophony today somehow.

Tabitha Hale Speaks

2011-02-24T13:43:00.001-05:00

If you haven't already seen it, here's a video taken by Madison, Wisconsin FreedomWorks worker Tabitha Hale. Using her iPhone, she was trying to assist a fellow staffer attempting to interview a surly thug who's allegedly a member of the Communications Workers--a union whose members include "reporters" working for the MSM, BTW. The FreedomWorkers were just trying to do a typical man-on-the-street interview; you know, the kind the MSM always tries to do with Tea Party people. Here's the reaction:

Nice, huh? So much for the always non-violent left.

Says Tabitha today, via RedState:

Basically, it’s ridiculous. I’m a 5′1 female in a dress, and he was standing up on a garden wall above me in the courtyard. He hardly felt threatened. I was stunned, because generally protesters are there to, you know, get their message out. They don’t normally shy away from the camera.... I’m very much okay, and very appreciative of the support from my fellow bloggers and activists today. I am, however, shaken up by the level of sheer hatred I experienced today. The look of fury on his face in the close up is appalling....

And now the money quote (my italics):

This just can’t be tolerated anymore. It’s one thing to be called a violent teabagger. It’s another to be called a violent teabagger while you’re being assaulted. They’ve been comparing themselves to the Egyptians ousting Mubarak. Looks like they’re not too far off, given that they share the tendency to assault women with cameras.

Touché!

The violence, both physical and verbal, that we're experiencing in what passes for public discourse today is coming almost entirely from America's machine Democrats and left-wing public employee unions. The video above should at least help dispel any notions to the contrary.

Update: When I first relayed this report, I had reason to believe that it came from Madison, Wisconsin. Michelle Malkin has this happening in DC where FreedomWorks is located. I point of fact, although the incident clearly happened, I can't at the moment independently corroborate just exactly which city hosted this violent farce. I can say, however, that, evidenced from Tabitha Hale's own website, Tabitha herself lives in or around DC with some deal of political discomfort. I sympathize, because I live here too.

Public Employee Unions: Democrat Funding Machine

2011-02-23T23:36:00.000-05:00

Following up to our earlier post, Michael Barone describes in detail in today's Washington Examiner why the Dems are pulling out all the stops in the Rust Belt to choke off any attempt by the states to cut off the public employee union feedbag:

In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

Ties in rather nicely with the stories in our earlier HazZzMat post, eh?

There's a lot more coming out on this in the blogosphere. Perhaps at long last the American taxpayer--and the Republican Party--are undertaking in earnest the long and arduous process of de-funding the institutional left that is ruining this country.

Hint: check out the politicized 501 (c) (3) non-profits next. A substantial number of them effectively launder money for Democrat political campaigns by using subsidiary organizations to thwart IRS rules against non-profit funding of political activities. There's plenty of information on this at David Horowitz' Discover the Networks.

Providence Teachers to Bite the Dust

2011-02-23T09:26:00.000-05:00

Don't take it from me. Take it from the online Providence, Rhode Island ProJo:

The school district plans to send out dismissal notices to every one of its 1,926 teachers, an unprecedented move that has union leaders up in arms.

According to the story, this is apparently the mayor's attempt to get at least part of Providence's massive budget deficit under control. It's a complex story, actually, so it's well worth consulting the link.

More to the point, though, is the developing meme here which I think is about to spread like wildfire throughout the net. In Wisconsin, which is getting more publicity right now, pro-union demonstrators are likening Republican budget-cutters to Hitler, fascism, and Hosni Mubarek. In fact, it's the other way around. Public sector unions and their Democrat allies, whose elections the unions fund with taxpayer dollars, have been, like good old-fashioned Communists, "redistributing the wealth."

Like the old Soviet apparatchiks, not to mention Mubarek, Qadaffi, and Iran's "religious" Islamofascists, the union-Democrat combine in the U.S. has slowly been bleeding the present and future dry for the average American. The press won't report this. But here's a trenchant comment from a commentator to the cited ProJo clip from "FORMERTEACHER":

THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG! Folks -- around the country -- are now realizing that for years unions and politicians had essentially an incestuous relationship from a monetary point of view. Politicians would do the bidding (encouraging union membership of government workers) in return for cash dollars for their campaigns, and promises of 'support' from the union.

The person ending up paying for this cozy relationship was YOU -- the TAXPAYER. Now, politicians are at a point where the pond is dry. States are going broke due to all of the promises made in the past. That is why there are BILLIONS in unfunded pensions, not to mention other perks. The politicians also know they cannot tax individuals into oblivion -- especially during dire economic times.

Do the unions care about increasing taxes? OF COURSE NOT. They will continue to get their cut (that you and I underwrite), but even more $$$$$$ if they can 'arm twist' more perks from the politicians...

And then, the money quote:

What are the real issues facing us today in Providence (and other states for that matter)? One word: POWER. Just remember, YOU AND I DID NOT ELECT THE UNION TO REPRESENT OUR INTEREST!

Right answer. And it's echoed today in a totally different place, a "guest advisor" columnist in the publicly available section of my favorite financial technical analysis site, Decisionpoint. (Subscription required for full content.) In his "Market Intelligence Report" for February 22, Dr. Joe Duarte writes:

In the Middle East, ruling families and military governments have been in power for decades, and even centuries. In the U.S., public unions have negotiated lucrative contracts for their workers for decades. And while the situations are different in some ways, they are concretely similar because what's at stake in both places is who will actually foot the bill for the promises that have been made, and how will things look when the redistribution gets made.

This is what the mainstream media is missing. This isn't so much about ideology but about the central tenet in politics, who gets how much of what's available?

Duarte's cautious conclusion:

The situations in Libya and Wisconsin are worlds apart, but share in one characteristic, they are about the distribution of wealth and power. Those who feel left out of the big time are trying to grab some for themselves, while those who have the upper hand are not letting it go.

One or the other side, in both places, will flinch. When that happens, there will be repercussions, in the streets, in the halls of power, and in the markets.

Both commentators are quite clear: This is it, folks, the final frontier. The middle class, which includes yours truly, has taken it in the ear for upwards of at least 50 years from not only the public sector unions and the increasingly socialist Democrat Party, but also from all the Wall Street fat cats who support DEMOCRATS, not Republicans (as the MSM would have you believe), shoveling millions of dollars to the Dems to craft unfair advantages for large businesses over small ones.

If we want to stop this, we may have to start doing something most good, family-oriented people have always flinched from doing. We may need to go out there ourselves and show the public union goons that the people are back in charge and simply aren't going to take it anymore.

Circumcise San Francisco

2011-02-22T17:02:00.000-05:00

The Middle East is in chaos. Oil prices are skyrocketing through the roof. 'Fraidy Cat Democrats have abdicated in Wisconsin and now in Indiana to thwart the voters' clear will. Housing prices are plummeting once again. This nation is in serious trouble. So what's on the minds of San Franciscans today?

Self-described "civil rights advocates" say that a ballot proposition to ban circumcision is on track for gathering signatures, meaning that San Franciscans may vote on the measure this November.

That's right. According to Bay Area, today's hot issue in the People's Republic of San Fran is whether or not foreskins should be removed. Medical arguments pro and con aside, what the hell is the point here? We get the "freedom to choose" when it comes to abortion, but not on whether to retain foreskins? Where's the logic? Where's the common sense? Why now when so many other things are clearly more important, like California's insolvency for example?

This nonsense it typical of the Democrat-riddled nanny-state run truly amok. The individuals and pols pushing this nonsensical ballot provision are trapped in a case of arrested adolescence. They are not functioning as adults. Even more than the public employee union nonsense now being played out in the Rust Belt, such preoccupation with the trivial over the substantial is the hallmark of a failed political and personal philosophy.

BTW, as the former owner of a foreskin myself, I can attest that its absence hasn't made a damn bit of difference in my life, one way or the other.

Grow up, San Francisco. And stay out of people's private business.

Flash: Beavis and Butt-head to return!

2011-02-04T02:06:00.000-05:00

This just in: one of HazZzmat's guilty pleasures in the 1990s was catching the occasional episode of Mike Judge's crude cartoon series, "Beavis and Butt-head" on cable TV.

These two clueless crude, and rude high school losers spent most of their time watching lousy music videos. The show was actually a pretty good satire on brainless teenage slackers who seemed to be taking over the earth (or at least suburbia) at the time. The series ran its course, RIP. But now it looks like the Dynamic Duo will be back, according to this piece in TV Squad:

'Beavis and Butt-head' are making a comeback! MTV announced that the iconic '90s animated series will be returning to MTV with all-new episodes.... MTV hasn't set a premiere date yet, though it did say it would happen this summer.... When the series returns, the two metal-loving slackers will still issue snarky commentary, but instead of watching terrible grunge music videos, Beavis and Butt-head will take on more contemporary acts.

More utterly wasted summer nights dead ahead.

(BTW, if you're really into TV news and trivia, check out Craig Sanger's TV Den.)

More new conservatives at the Washington Times Communities

2011-02-04T00:36:00.000-05:00

The Washington Times Communities area mentioned in our last entry, HazZzMat: Milton Babbitt, conservative iconoclast is home to an increasing number of interesting new conservative writers. Check out college student Gabriella Hoffman's "Being Young, Conservative, and Spicy," and Eric Golub's "The Tygrrrr Express" for starters. Eric is now posting frequenty on the ongoing crisis in Egypt, and his insights make for a good read.

Milton Babbitt, conservative iconoclast

2011-02-04T00:28:00.000-05:00

Beloved teacher and iconoclastic atonal composer Milton Babbitt passed away this weekend in Princeton, NJ at the age of 94. Unbeknownst to many, he was also a political conservative, something rarely if ever talked about in the classical music world where, even today, you need Marxist credentials to get your ticket punched. For an appreciation with links, check out the "Curtain Up!" column at the Washington Times Communities.

Global Warmists Are At It Again

2011-01-31T00:04:00.002-05:00

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water...the ~~global warming~~ climate change hoaxters are at it again, manipulating data when it doesn't suit their phony thesis. (Much like Democrats keep finding votes when their opponent has just won a photo-finish election.) This time, the Brits--lynchpins in the ongoing hoax whose real agenda is income distribution on a massive scale--are in the forefront once again:

Dr Benny Peiser and Dr David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), have written to John Hirst, chief executive of the beleaguered Met Office, asking for an explanation of a press release issued by his organisation on January 20 and headed “2010 – a near record year”. This won headlines by claiming that last year was hotter than any other in the past decade.

When the two men examined the original data from which this claim was derived – compiled by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – it clearly showed 2010 as having been cooler than 2005 (and 1998) and equal to 2003. It emerged that, for the purposes of the press release, the data had been significantly adjusted.

How'd this happen? Simple:

Comparing the actual data for each year, from 2001 to 2010, with that given in the press release shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade.

Power Line, in the meantime, explores the equally nefarious scientific malfeasance--supported by the taxpayers--of the left-wing climate liars who populate NASA and NOAA. They, too, were confronted with data that didn't support their phony thesis. Power Line posts animated before and after charts to show how their manipulation of the urban heat-island effect--an outlier in overall climate data--is used to distort the actual, normalized statistics. Which (unmanipulated) statistics decided do not support the global warming hoax.

These clowns just won't give up, will they? Perhaps this cadre of NASA and NOAA climate propagandists scientists could be another area Republicans might target for some useful budget cuts. Taxpayers would save twice over by eliminating the employees and their rich pensions as well as killing off their endless supply of bad faith data that, daily, along with the predations of EPA, is driving American's gasoline and utility bills ever higher as the use of relatively inexpensive fossil fuel resources is relentlessly choked off, not by shortages but via an extraordinarily vicious and cynical government policy.

Middle Class Ready to Go Galt?

2011-01-30T13:31:00.000-05:00

That's a provocative question, isn't it? For the Ayn Rand-uninitiated, "going Galt" is a phrase derived from Rand's towering, controversial objectivist novel, Atlas Shrugged. To make a very long story short, the novel is about the fiscal and social Armageddon that occurs when an increasingly socialist US government takes things too far by taxing and regulating away any and all rewards for creating products, jobs, profits, and a decent lifestyle. So one by one, the best Americans simply quit, withdraw from society, and join their spriritual leader, John Galt, in his secret hideout to await the cataclysm that will happen when they all stop playing the stupid game. It's a strike of the productive against the drones.

A real-life version of the novel may very well be starting to play itself out today. It's the topic of a really provocative article by Gonzalo Lira entitled: The Coming Middle Class Anarchy. Lira focuses on one retired couple who have their own problems but, nonetheless, continue to play the game, paying, paying, paying even while the bank and the Feds screw with their re-fi request. (Read another, even more poignant story here.)

I've been having my "going Galt" moments over the last two years, sitting here completely out of work and trading my remaining IRA accounts like a fiend in order to come up with enough capital gains to live on in a continually whipsawing market. The rental housing I own no longer gets top dollar, and a couple units have remained unrented for months. Nonetheless, I've never defaulted on anything since I'm not that kind of dude.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to get a lower mortgage rate from a major bank on a morgtage I'm already paying. It's been two months now. Nothing has happened, they keep asking for more info, but fail to see the logic: If I'm successfully paying a mortgage that's nearly 2 points higher than the one I'm trying to get now, where is the difficulty? But the irony is, if I'd screwed this mortgage up, or even walked away from it, I'd probably be in better shape today.

While I twist in the wind on this, Wall Streeters (all of whom support Democrats, BTW) are jacking their "bonuses" up to historical highs, resuming a lavish lifestyle that most Americans have never seen. And at the bottom rungs of society, nothing is spared to send more and more money their way via this or that "entitlement" program. Who supports the fat cats and the grifters? Me. And millions of other middle class suckers like me.

The anger is building. It's what launched the much-maligned Tea Party movements and it's what eviscerated the Socialists Democrats in last fall's election. But if these elections don't produce some swift and telling results, the next chapter won't be pretty. It takes an awful, awful lot to piss off America's middle class. In fact, I'm not sure that's every really happened. But if things don't change for the middle class, and soon, I wouldn't want to work at Goldman Sachs, on Capitol Hill, or be in this country illegally.

Dennis Kucinich Is in the Pits

2011-01-30T12:38:00.001-05:00

If you haven't been following political trivia over the past week or so, you might have missed this newsworthy item: Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is suing the company that runs the House cafeteria for $150,000. The issue: Denny apparently bit into a vegetarian sandwich purchased there and hit an olive pit. This traumatic encounter, we are to believe, not only caused dental damage but ongoing mental anguish. Read more of the ludicrous details--and some pungent commentary--here.

Kucinich has served seemingly forever as the representative of Cleveland's West Side, additionally including some western and southern suburbs. Throughout the course of his service, he's run for President at every opportunity, badmouthed the United States publicly when visiting abroad, and failed to do anything to get a bailout for National City Bank during the financial crisis, causing its forced sale to Pittsburgh-based PNC--with the loss of a significant number of corporate jobs that down-and-out Cleveland could little afford to lose.

For some bizarre reason, Denny's constituents continue to re-elect this national laughingstock. Since I hail from that area originally, I'm told that Denny's "constituent service" is superb. That may be. But I wouldn't define constituent service as trotting around the country and the globe running for President pretty much as a socialist. And I wouldn't define constituent service as not lifting a finger to help out the nation's 10th largest bank, even as fellow Congresspeople (read Barney Frank) shamelessly saved their own hometown institutions.

Which gets us back to the olive pit. With the budget in crisis, with the Middle East falling apart, with millions of Americans still out of work--including a ton of Ohioans, with a looming Obamacare that we can't pay for, and a looming Social Security implosion, why the hell is Denny suing over a olive pit, at least three years after the fact, BTW? Maybe because, in the end, as with a lot of Congressmen, it's all about Denny. It may also say a lot about his personal finances. With his gold-plated Congressional medical and dental benefits (as a good socialist, surely he hasn't opted out), what's the beef here anyway?

Answer: like all Democrats, Denny probably figures that any inconvenience he runs into must therefore be somebody's fault, probably some rich capitalist who made 2 cents' profit off that (allegedly) ill made sandwich. Therefore, income must be redistributed. Denny has always had a problem with father figures and authority figures. His latest antics would seem to be an extension of this lifelong pattern, since there's really no rational reason for his behavior.

Fortunately for all Ohioans and all Americans, it looks like the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Kasich will remedy the Kucinich problem shortly. Under ruinous Democrat control for ages, cities like Cleveland and Toledo have been hemorrhaging jobs and population since the 1960s. As a result, Ohio has been gradually losing U.S. Representatives after each census. They've lost another seat this year. Buzz is that Denny's district will simply be drawn right out of the map, with adjacent re-gerrymandered districts gobbling it up. Sadly, what the voters wouldn't do for themselves, Columbus will now have to accomplish.

Meanwhile, Denny will have to leave the limelight, go back to Cleveland, and find someone else to sue. How pathetic can you get?

WTF = WIN?

2011-01-29T17:16:00.000-05:00

The Obama crew tried to add some pizazz to the President's State of the Union address earlier this week by coming up with what they'd hoped would be an inspiring new slogan, "Winning the Future." The acronym for this faux-brilliant ideal is WTF, of course, and you web fanatics know what that stands for. It's kind of funny that, even in Washington's alphabet-mad environment, Obama's back-bench of policymakers and speechwriters didn't head this colossal goof off at the pass.

When you leave yourself as wide open as they did, you can always expect your opponent to drive a truck through the opening. And Sarah Palin, bless her little much-maligned heart, was the first to pounce. Her reaction demonstrated not only her communications savvy. It also turned the Democrats' constant ridicule of herself, her intelligence, and her family right back on them, making the administration and the media look like a bunch of fools. (Story, video, and lotsa comments on Hot Air right here.)

It's interesting to think back to another political alpha-slogan that was strangled in its crib. That was back in 1974 during the Presidency of Gerald Ford. Beset by a rampant inflation, Ford was under pressure to do something, anything. So his administration conceived of a lame, ill-defined program to "Whip Inflation Now." It was nothing more than a slogan really, but hey, you got a swell "WIN" button if you joined the party.

Alas, the party was short-lived. Media, politicians, academics, everyone trashed this silliness, the President's own party included. WIN died a quick, nearly painless death. (Bet one of those buttons would fetch a few $$ today.)

Obama's ill-conceived and insincere promise to seriously cut the Federal budget--all the while promising even more programs--was nuts to start out with as his earlier economic efforts have been. Palin's wit and timing quickly put an end to it by obliterating its slogan.

While I still think the media has bloodied Palin too badly for her to run a credible campaign in 2012, you have to give this energetic woman a lot of credit here. Her political instincts are swift and sure. She spotted the opportunity and wasted no time going for the political jugular. It's clear her old school teammates didn't call her Sarah Barracuda for nothing, no matter how the media loves to sneer and smear.

Trashing Michelle Bachmann: Journolistas at Large?

2011-01-29T16:43:00.000-05:00

Interesting sequences of events unfold in the MSM underground if you're patient enough to look for patterns. Which you have to do, since, as good Marxists, they always help each other cover their collective tracks.

In last weekend's Washington Post--increasingly as strident and hard left as the New York Times as both struggle for relevancy--idiotarian columnist Dana Milbank, with his usual self-important pomposity, swore off trashing Sarah Palin for an entire month:

I have written about her in 42 columns since Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. I've mentioned her in dozens more blog posts, Web chats, and TV and radio appearances. I feel powerless to control my obsession, even though it cheapens and demeans me.... But today is the first day of the rest of my life. And so, I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month....

First, February isn't even 30 days, so Milbank chose the easiest month in which to try to break his "addiction." Second, note his invitation to others in the MSM to join him in his, er, "pledge." Even though it's not yet Feb. 1, I've combed most major outlets online and guess what? Mirabile dictu, the Palin trashtalking is indeed almost entirely gone, vanishing seemingly overnight.

In its place, however, is...gasp...Michelle Bachmann trash talking! The MSM has been tearing the conservative Minnesota lawmaker limb from limb this week for her show of audacity and independence in making her own video State-of-the-Union rebuttal. (Transcript here.)

Reaction from Marxists and bloggers posing as journalists and commentators was swift and savage. (Example here.) From site to site and blog to blog, these hypocrites have been tearing out a new one for Bachmann, who's apparently committing the same sins Palin did: She's bright (very bright), attractive (very attractive), conservative (very conservative). But worst of all, she's female, and only left-wing women are allowed to be powerful and have aspirations. (And if the truth were told, largely male MSM clubbers, misogynists to the core, are uncomfortable even with this.)

Funny how this headlong attack formation showed up right after Milbank's grandstanding in the Post. Could it be that the original Journo-list, now purged of turncoats and buried somewhere underground in a new, secret discussion group, is already auditioning its collective Alinsky-style tactics in preparation for the 2012 primary season, the better to kill potentially attractive Republican presidential candidates before they're even declared and out of the gate? I.e. :

Pick the target [in this case Bachmann], freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

This certainly seems likely. After all, Milbank's fellow Postie, the despicable (and astonishingly ignorant) Ezra Klein, headed up the original Journo-list. (Klein's the clown, BTW, who thinks the Constitution is so old ["written over 100 years ago (sic)"] that it's not a binding document.)

It's not implausible to imagine that these two amigos decided to put the already badly-damaged Palin aside for a bit to concentrate their trashery on an arguably more dangerous Michelle Bachmann--already a proven legislator and campaigner who's beaten back left-wing hate campaigns in Minnesota twice before.

Let's keep our eyes open and see how February unfolds. You've read my theory, so now let's look for more evidence to accrue. Meanwhile, note to Millbank and Klein: you're being watched.

Unions Weasel Out of Obamacare En Masse

2011-01-29T15:38:00.000-05:00

Wanna keep your money and escape Obamacare entirely? Just join a union. This fun fact via Weasel Zippers:

... there are 166 union benefits funds now exempted from this requirement, which account for about 40 percent of the exempted workers. This means that although there are only 14.6 million unionized employees in the United States, and 860,000 of them are already exempted from this provision of Obamacare.

Best union recruiting tool yet, I'd say.

How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for ya?

Keith Olbermann Job Bank

2011-01-29T15:33:00.000-05:00

American Glob has posted its "Top Ten" helpful hints for the now-unemployed left-wing hatemonger news commentator Keith Olbermann. My personal fave:

5. Paint a sign that says “Will Teabag for Food.”

Read the rest via the link above.

Gee, when I lost my last full time gig in 2008, no one ever stepped up to help me like this.

Hypocrite Leland Lee Tries to Silence Limbaugh (Yawn)

2011-01-29T15:25:00.000-05:00

This from AP:

Rush Limbaugh's imitation of the Chinese language during a recent speech made by Chinese President Hu Jintao has stirred a backlash among Asian-American lawmakers in California and nationally.

California state Sen. Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco, is leading a fight in demanding an apology from the radio talk show host for what he and others view as racist and derogatory remarks against the Chinese people...."The comments that he made - the mimicking of the Chinese language - harkens back to when I was a little boy growing up in San Francisco and those were hard days, rather insensitive days," Yee said in an interview Thursday.

Cry me a river. I sometimes hearken back to the days when I was a little Polish-American boy growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland and listening to Polack jokes every day. BFD, you whiner. Grow up.

Limbaugh, in fact, was lampooning the Chinese Communist president's "discussion" on camera with President Obama which was only minimally translated on TV. So Limbaugh essentially mimicked what he got out of this dangling conversation, essentially a Chinese version of "Blah, blah, blah." So what? Since when do we need to stick up for Communist Chinese dictators anyway? Perhaps Lee, who like Hu seems intent on silencing dissidents, senses a kindred spirit.

Limbaugh later replied to this latest bit of nonsense from the overly-sensitive left--confirmed idiotarians who are still struggling to keep pushing on the phony "Republicans as hatemongers" meme they've been peddling since the massacre in Tucson. Said El Rushbo:

"Back in the old days, Sid Caesar, for those of you old enough to remember, was called a comic genius for impersonating foreign languages that he couldn't speak," Limbaugh said. "But today the left says that was racism; it was bigotry; it was insulting. And it wasn't. It was a service."

Again, for those too young to remember, Caesar (b. 1922) is a venerable Jewish TV comic who's 1950s variety show, named "Your Show of Shows," frequently lampooned German and Yiddish speakers via silly, faux German dialogue. It was regarded as wildly funny back then and nobody got touchy about it.

In any event, Lee also accused "pro-Limbaugh" listeners of sending him hate-mail faxes. Of course as is always the case with the left, there's never any evidence as to exactly who did send the faxes or if they were even authentic faxes at all. Nonetheless, the media has trumpeted Lee's allegations as the truth. As of this morning, it's absolutely impossible to find any fact-checking on this at all via Google and other search engines which do carry page after page of lefty articles hawking this meme, proving at the very least that these clowns really know how to use keywords.

Comments Lucianne.com rather pungently:

Blame, blame, blame! When are people going to start taking responsibility for their own actions? The only one who made this idiot send this racist fax is the idiot himself.

It's been noted here and there that Lee is considering a run for San Francisco mayor, so this little allegation--trumped up and probably phony--not only fits in with the left's anti-conservative Tucson meme, but also gins up publicity for Lee's possible mayoral bid. Apparently, he pulled the same thing prior to a previous election cycle, ginning up an anti-Palin scandal and additional suspiciously convenient anti-Lee hate faxes.

Which is duly noted by Lucianne commentator Gumbino who draws a couple of wry conclusions:

Yee also received a similar fax last April after he demanded to know the pay Sarah Palin received for speaking at a public university.

Ah. So it isn't just right-wingers sending Yee these faxes.

Also we have now learned that it is "racist" to imitate an accent or a language.

So we should soon hear Leftists clamoring for Tina Fey to stop mocking Sarah Palin's accent.

And for liberal radio show host Lionel to stop making fun of Swedes. "Ohhhh ... Inga! Hu tu hu tu hu!"

Heh.

Jim Moran (D-VA): American Voters Are Racists

2011-01-28T23:41:00.000-05:00

This astonishing story just in from fair and balanced Fox News:

Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran is blaming his party's losses last November in large part on voters who "don't want to be governed by an African-American."

Who knew? But wait...there's more:

"It happened ... for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States," Moran said, "Southern states, particularly the slaveholding states, didn't want to see a president who was opposed to slavery.

"In this case a lot of people in this country, it's my belief, don't want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is inclusive, who is liberal, who wants to spend money on everyone and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society..."

Yo, Jim. Did it ever occur to you that the majority of voters who oppose Obama do so because he's a socialist? No, of course not, because that's against the left-liberal ~~party line~~ narrative which dictates that everyone who opposes the President is, ipso facto, a racist. (And we won't even bother asking whose pockets will be picked to find the money Obama wants to spend "on everyone.")

I find this kind of casual smear on average, patriotic Americans particularly repulsive because Moran (D-VA) happens to be my representative, courtesy of the gerrymandered, incument-protecting Northern Virginia district I happen to live in--a problem shared by a lot of right-minded American across the country these days.

Making things even more disgusting is the fact that Moran can rarely help himself from making outrageous anti-Semitic statements seemingly at random, offending Jews of all stripes right here in his own district. (Check out this story to see what we mean.) Now that's racism to me, right?

One of the characteristics of Democrats these days is that they are comfortable smearing innocent American voters by blaming them (without fact or merit) for the kind of behaviors Democrats themselves routinely employ to destroy their opponents. Jim Moran is a case in point.

Paul Mirengoff Departs Power Line

2011-01-28T23:13:00.000-05:00

One of Power Line's three founding amigos, Paul Mirengoff, briefly and without explanation has ceased to blog at this widely respected and largely conservative news & views site. His brief farewell is here.

Why bring this up when the Middle East (and my stock portfolio) appear to be falling apart? Simple. Without being snarky, I'm glad that Mirengoff is gone. His snide, condescending, and nearly continuous picking at Sarah Palin were typical of the so-called Washington cognoscenti (he lives in Bethesda, a near suburb of Washington DC). Who needs more of this, particularly in what generally is friendly territory?

In recent months, Mirengoff seemed more interested in keeping Palin from serious presidential contention than in skewering the current administration. In turn, Obamanation, almost with impunity, continues to gravely endanger us all with its manifest incompetence, Marxist ideology, and firm grasp of nothing, ranging from the economy to international relations. Mirengoff's attitude has simply played into the lefty ground game of discrediting, without merit or cessation, each and every attractive and viable Republican candidate that might arguably confront and defeat President Obama in the crucial 2012 elections.

Palin, in point of fact, may already have been too gravely wounded by the 24/7 lefty media attack machine to mount a credible campaign in 2012. There are simply too many Americans these days who've permanently and unshakably bought into the smears and slanders not to cause a Palin Presidential campaign grave if not terminal trouble, with the potential, tragic result of a second Obama administration. In any event, even at this point as an unannounced candidate, she doesn't need the kind of Ivy League, country club style conservative sniping that Mirengoff was wont to pile on.

Whether you support Palin, Romney, Ryan, or any of a host of other perfectly viable Republican hopefuls at this point is immaterial to me as a libertarian-conservative. But please, whatever your enthusiasms, don't add your voice, for whatever reason, to those who routinely use media-hyped lies, smears, and slanders as a way of driving out the good and leaving the worst possible candidate to run against state socialism in 2012. Just listen--carefully--to what each candidate says, make up your own mind. Above all, don't help the left out any more than writers like Mirengoff have already.

Bye-bye, Keith Olbermann

2011-01-22T14:01:00.000-05:00

Numerous sources have confirmed the news: MSNBC's odious hatemonger, Keith Olbermann, has gotten the boot, almost simultaneously with the news that Comcast has swallowed NBC-Universal, the former GE unit that owned TV's most pathetic cable network.

For those not into media history: MSNBC was retooled a number of years ago into a pure-play, left wing propaganda arm, sort of like its defunct radio fellow traveller, Air America. And for many years, Olbermann was the network's "star," spewing out predictable leftist rants and smears regardless of the facts. Lefties smacked their collective lips as they devoured this political red meat (even though many of them were and are confirmed vegans).

Meanwhile, MSNBC's primary emphasis on feeding the left's collective BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) seamlessly morphed over the last couple of years into PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome). But nothing really distinguished the joint, whose gutter-level, unsupported-by-the-facts vitriol toward all things non-"progressive"--i.e., socialist--continued unabated, whatever its current target.

AP profiles Olbermann's unceremonious axing in an obsequious article extolling his popularity among viewers--never mentioning the fact that neither his nor MSNBC's viewership has ever even come close to matching that of the much-reviled Fox cable news channel.

Lacking details, I'd have to assume that MSNBC is in for some kind of retooling, and Olbermann's head is the first to roll. Comcast, like all good megacapitalist entities, is going to want to start showing profits at its newly-purchased properties, and MSNBC's ratings, regardless of your political point of view, were and are consistently at the bottom of the tank--hardly a way to make money. Perhaps their solution to this problem is similar to the one hit upon by the character Cher Horowitz in the film "Clueless": "Makeover!" And Olbie was sure a good place to start, sending what would appear to be a very distinct message.

In point of fact, in a media world still almost entirely dominated by left-liberal pundits, writers, commentators, editorialists, and other assorted fellow travelers, MSNBC ultimately has fallen into the same trap as Air America--they had nothing really new to offer the general public, besides, perhaps, an elevated level of vitriol and hatred for anyone not associated with their elitist clique of wealthy faux socialists. So even the left (save for the aforementioned metaphorical meat-eaters) generally didn't bother with them. (And don't tell me I'm wrong, because the inconvenient truth is in the the network's cellar-dweller Neilsens.)

Nope, nothing new to see here. Same old, same old, albeit with slightly more colorful packaging. That market has been saturated for decades, so who needs more? Most particularly, who needs more red ink in a still-wretched economy? Not Comcast, that's for sure.

Top 2010 MSM Lies

2010-12-31T22:11:00.000-05:00

Pajamas Media's Tom Blumer does a phenomenally thorough job listing the Lamestream Media's top 10 ~~lies~~ stories for 2010. Among them:

Phony "channel stuffing" at GM just before its fall "IPO," to pump up the apparent sales numbers.
Hidden marriage disincentives in the Obamacare legislation. (Genuinely unsure if these were intentional or oversights by lefty Dems who couldn't be bothered to read the legislation.)
Never telling the full story about how even some "global warming" scientists ideologues admitted to lying about their faux science, the better to redistribute income to the "third world," the primary motive behind "global warming" all along.
The completely un-reported fact that Shirley Sherrod--fired from a Federal government position after her racist rant before the NAACP--had received a 13 million dollar "settlement" in the recently-settled black farmer lawsuit.

Follow the link above to Blumer's piece for more incidents and more details on all of them. Crucial news continues to be suppressed in this country. Blumer correctly includes that only bloggers on a gatekeeper-free internet can bypass this kind of underground censorship. So let's watch out for more of that "net neutrality" crap in 2011.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all. Personally, I can't wait for 2010 to conclude its journey. What a regrettable way to end a decade! Hopefully, 2011 will be much better.

A Digital Nativity Story

2010-12-31T13:54:00.000-05:00

Luther sent me a copy of the following YouTube video a couple of days ago, and it's so good I've decided to share it. (I'm a few days late since I've been on the road.) It's a genuinely good-natured re-imagining of the Christmas Story as it might have occurred in our own Digital Age. Since the Magi don't show up on the liturgical calendar until January 6, it's still more than timely and a great way to start closing out the chaotic 2010. For a fuller-sized version of the video, which enables you to see even more details, check out the original link here.

Rendell: A Nation of Wussies

2010-12-27T22:33:00.002-05:00

We never thought we'd see the day when we agreed with an observation made by Pennsylvania's outgoing Dem Governor Ed Rendell. But then again, sometimes strange things happen. When queried on the NFL's wimpy postponing of yesterday's Philadelphia Eagle's game to Tuesday due to this weekend's heavy but not particularly spectacular snow event, Rendell ranted away according to ESPN:

Rendell viewed the NFL's decision as a referendum on the toughness, or lack thereof, of the United States.

"My biggest beef is that this is part of what's happened in this country," Rendell said. "I think we've become wussies."

"We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything," Rendell added. "If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

As one of my old merchant marine buddies once said: "Truer words was never spoke." I agree. Wanna switch parties, Ed?

Light Holiday Blogging

2010-12-23T00:44:00.000-05:00

As you've probably already figured out, Mr. and Mrs. Wonker are on vacation, up in good old Cleveland, Ohio--a state that woke up this week to the fact that it's declining, grossly overtaxed populace is now so reduced that they're losing two Congressional seats to redistricting in 2012. (So's New York--imagine that?)

Unlike New York, however, Ohioans are gradually waking up to the severe damage that big city Democrat machines and public employee unions have been wreaking on them for decades. Only took the Great Recession to do that, but better late than never.

We actually like the folks up here. After all, it's our home state. And we have at least modest hopes that in 2011, the now all-Republican legislature and state house will be able to continue the long slog of removing corruption and reducing the taxes that have reduced this once great state--and most particularly its decaying northern industrial cities--to a mere husk of the dynamo it once was.

Rhode Island: Nanny State Takes Away Christmas Toy Guns

2010-12-23T00:38:00.000-05:00

This from today's Boston Globe online:

Dominic joined dozens of children yesterday at the annual Toy Gun Bash in the gymnasium of Pleasant View Elementary School. There, they lined up to toss their toy guns, from dainty purple water guns to camouflage-painted pistols, inside the Bash-O-Matic, a large black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.

Prodded by Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, who wore a fuzzy Santa hat, the children stared curiously as the Bash-O-Matic mashed up their guns and digested them into a plastic bin near its tail.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the initial link. (Lotsa interesting stuff on this topic is there as well.)

Rhode Island, like most other states, is burdened with debt and beset by criminals. And THIS is how the attorney general spends his time on stuff like this?? What a smarmy, crappy, demoralizing Christmastime story. Not only are our lefty pols a batch of condescending, controlling nannies. They're secularist sadists as well, pulling this kind of nonsense on the eve of the Christmas holidays--where every self-respecting little boy looks forward to a toy gun, a ray gun, a light-sword, you name it--the better to protect those he cares about from the bad guys. My God, what is wrong with these morons?

Wake up, people. It's not surprising that this is yet another one of the reasons why true Blue states are losing population and representatives which will be reflected in Congressional district allocations in the 2012 elections. (The other one is the looming, gathering scandal of out-of-control public employee salaries, benefits, and pensions.) People don't need Idiotarian pols telling them how to raise their families, let alone approving of it.

Meanwhile, Earth to Patrick C. Lynch: get back to work, you idiot, and quit wasting time trying to run other people's children and their lives.

Disgusting.

111th Congress Adjourns. Merry Christmas!

2010-12-23T00:23:00.000-05:00

We just got our best-ever Christmas present. The disgusting entity known as the 111th Congress has now adjourned. Permanently. Here's hoping the new year will bring us, in the 112th Congress, a batch of Representatives, at least, who'll acknowledge that they're the employees of the U.S. taxpayer, not the other way around.

And perhaps in 2011 as well we'll stop hearing tireless drivel about how this tax cut and that tax cut "costs" the Federal government money. Wrong answer. The Federal government costs US--you and me--money. Let's not forget where the funding--and the deficit service comes from.

The Surber Challenge to Warren Buffett

2010-12-03T14:46:00.000-05:00

It was just a few blog entries ago that I fulminated about the idiotic proposal advanced by Warren Buffett--and other filthy rich Democrats for that matter--for the Federal government to raise taxes on the super-wealthy such as he. Of course, he was supporting the Democrats' desire NOT to extend the Bush tax cuts for the "rich"--i.e., couples who make $250K or more per annum. The sage of Omaha thus proved himself to be a senseless, hopelessly out-of-touch dope, having no clue that even $250K ain't "rich" anymore in this country, particularly if you live in a large urban area with catastrophic real estate taxes. Wealthy morons like Buffett and others (i.e., Nancy Pelosi) don't even remember what it was like to live on real-life salaries anymore. So what business do they have telling us what we should pay, eh?

Well, now, here comes Don Surber with a modest proposal of his own. Since he knows that Warren, Bill, and others are full of hot air and know they'll never have to pay more taxes than they want, due to the kinds of intricate (and legal) tax sheltering they use, he calls them on it, challenging them to write a check and send it in to the Treasury themselves rather than waiting for their fellow rich socialists in Congress to act.

And to make his challenge stick, Surber is sending in a check to the Treasury for $10. As Surber himself says:

The beauty of this is the next time some lib lips off about Republicans and tax cuts for the rich (which Democrats did not rescind upon assuming control of Washington) I can say, pay up — I did.

Nice touch, Don. You need something to stop left-wing stupidity in its tracks and get them off their always-ready, memorized talking points. BTW, Surber challenges the rest of us right-thinkers to do the same. I'm thinking about it. But to be honest, given my two years of technical unemployment already, I think I need the $10 more than the Feds.

(BTW#2: Surber duly notes that your check to the Treasury is NOT tax-deductible. Oh, the humanity....)

Independent Collegian Gets F in Economics

2010-11-30T09:31:00.000-05:00

Randomly surfing, I spotted the following headline in a recent issue of The Independent Collegian:

Kasich plans to scrap Strickland’s 3C rail program and send 16,000 jobs elsewhere

John Kasich, of course, is Ohio's Republican Governor-elect, and the Collegian is the campus newsrag of the University of Toledo. So right away, we can parse the headline and what is to follow. Kasich, being a Republican, must necessarily be reviled by an Ohio college student newspaper which, of course, encourages only budding leftist journos (are there any other kind?) to write for them.

But what's more interesting in this hit-piece is how ideology trumps any knowledge of economics or politics. Kasich plans to reject Federal funding to set up an allegedly high-speed all-Ohio rail service from Cleveland to Cincinnati via Columbus. The Collegian sees this as robbing Ohio of "16,000 jobs" and views it as hypocrisy on the part of Kasich who (correctly) tarred current Governor Ted "Tax 'Em High" Strickland as having lost 400,000 jobs on his brief watch.

Well, dudes, check again. The way you create REAL jobs is to encourage the private sector to do it. Ohio's now blessedly-terminated rail line would be funded by the Feds, sure. I.e., by hapless taxpayers from Ohio and other states. Once built, it would, like Amtrak and all other publicly-funded US rail services, lose money by the bucketload. Which would be made even worse by the ridiculously high union-led salaries that would be paid to the railway's staffers, all of whom, surprise, would be paid for by out-of-work Ohio taxpayers--presumably.

The problem with Federally funded or Federally assisted programs like the one Kasich intends to terminate is that once the initial $$ have been spent, the boondoggle entity gets turned over to state and local jurisdictions which then must, ta-da, raise taxes on a consistent basis to fund a money-losing operation and cave in to extortionate public employee union salary demands. It's precisely this kind of thing that's brought Rust Belt states like Ohio and Michigan to their knees.

By rejecting this boondoggle, Kasich will save individual Ohioans and Ohio-based businesses billions of dollars going forward. This is a small step in the direction of real business stimulus which will create real employment, not more taxpayer-funded union jobs, the kind that are bankrupting state after state.

Kasich's action is similar to the recent rejection by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie of a massive second-tunnel project from New Jersey to Manhattan. The Feds were to pony up a good chunk of the money, New Jersey and the Port Authority were to pony up the rest. And if there were cost overruns (which, given union featherbedding, there will be--and how!) New Jersey alone would have to pick up the bill.

Christie rightly torpedoed the whole project, saving his state from a major--and perpetual--financial catastrophe. On a lesser scale, Kasich proposes to do the same thing.

So, Collegians. Watch and learn. 16,000 more Ohioans on the public dole payroll will only serve to increase Ohio's systemic unemployment which is mainly due to the state's ridiculously high, business-deterring taxes. If you want to pay for 16,000 more public employees for the rest of your lives, why don't you do it? And in the meantime, why don't you stop writing stupid, ill-informed editorials and leave Kasich alone to clean up Strickland's sorry mess?

Removing Don Luskin link

2010-11-28T15:19:00.000-05:00

Every once in awhile I go through our "Good Guys" list to make sure links are still working and appropriate. I've noticed that my link to Don Luskin, which used to offer nonstop and quite useful critiques of Idiotarian faux economist Paul Krugman, has morphed into a more specific financial site--Trend Macro--whose up-to-date content now requires a subscription. Luskin's thoughts and observations on the economy are actually quite astute--a fact you can grasp during his occasional appearances on Larry Kudlow's CNBC TV show.

But for our readers, this site's evolution (and the fact it's now behind a pay window) makes it less useful for reference, so we're removing it as a link--even though we still consider Don one of the "Good Guys."

Republicat vs. Democat

2010-11-28T15:09:00.000-05:00

Hilarious video here, portraying, in highly dramatic fashion, a battle between two cats--aided and abetted by a pair of funloving birds. The soundtrack is a stroke of genius. But I wonder if there's also a political metaphor here.

This starts out as a fair fight between evenly matched cats. But when the birds start distracting and intervening to the detriment of the multi-colored cat, he quickly loses ground to his opponent and eventually is forced to flee the field of battle. If the multi-colored cat is the Republicat and the black cat is the Democat, one can imagine the birds to symbolize the MSM and academic intellectualoids. Three against one, and you can guess who gets to lose. Hey, I thought it was a good metaphor, really, giving us a pretty good notion of Democat's idea of a "fair" fight, eh?

On the other hand, if you're into cats, just sit back and enjoy a really extensive catfight.

Hat tips to Breitbart TV and Polipundit for providing the clip.

Clarice's Pieces: Interesting thoughts on Thanksgiving just past

2010-11-28T14:53:00.000-05:00

Clarice Feldman offers some interesting insights, looking forward and looking back, on Thanksgiving 2010. She opens with the following observation:

Community organizers, like most Democrat candidates, gain power by dividing people and by emphasizing what distinguishes groups (sex, age, religion, race, ethnic background). They promise that they will "fight for you" -- that is, fight for spoils for the group from whom they are seeking support or votes. Thus, if, for example, you can be made to believe that all Democrat candidates are better for women, blacks, and Hispanics and you are a member of one or more of these groups, then you act in your own best interests only when you vote for Democrats. If there are any Republican women, blacks, or Hispanics running as Republicans, they must be treated especially harshly, as they are clearly traitors to your cause. Little effort is made to enunciate the candidate's policy notions or on the part of the media to examine in depth his views or qualifications for elective position.

Clarice takes this blunt and factual observation into some interesting places. Read the rest here.

This piece appears on the American Thinker blogsite, which we're adding today to our "Good Guys" list in honor of their consistently clear and fact-based insights on the meaning of democracy.

Progressives = Regressives

2010-11-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

As readers of this blog know, I detest the use of the phony term "progressives" to describe--antiseptically--proponents of state-sanctioned Marxism/Socialism. It's quite simply a trick of language, the quite-successful use of a positive sounding word to describe an approach to government that has always turned out quite badly. Apparently, I'm finally getting some company. This from Samizdata:

...the word "progressive" is just as wrong as the word "liberal". The statists who argue for the destruction of the dollar and for bank bail-outs (again) and for nationalised derangement of medical care and for green-inspired economic sabotage aren't "liberals". They do not believe in liberty; they believe in curtailing liberty. But neither do they believe in anything which it makes sense to anybody except them to call "progress". Progress is the exact thing these statists are now trying and have always tried to destroy, and just lately have been doing a pretty damn good job of destroying. Progress means things getting better. These self styled "progressives" are only making things worse.

But wait! There's more:

Underneath these unsatisfactory labels, which the statist (a better word for these people in my opinion) enemies of liberty and progress have chosen for themselves and have been using for decades, is an assumption, both by the statists and by those who really do believe in liberty and in progress, that the statists are the people who will inevitably continue to decide about such labels....comments to the effect that there are much better words than "statist" out there, just waiting to step up or which already have stepped up to verbal stardom, so to speak, which I hadn't thought of or which I have temporarily forgotten about, would be very welcome. Dirigiste? Centralist? Governmentalist? Despotist?

Why make it difficult dude? The right answer: REGRESSIVES.

These people are actually the ultimate Conservatives. They want every bit of today's state-sponsored socialism and more. And they want to run it all the time. They are not "progressives." They are "regressives." They want less freedom, not more.

You heard it first here on HaZzZmat.

David Broder Flunks Math

2010-11-21T19:53:00.000-05:00

It has only taken two weeks or thereabouts from the date of the Democrats' overwhelming defeat in 2010's off-year elections for their flacks and toadies in the MSM to start reconstructing The Narrative.

Usual suspect David Broder, still writing columns for the Washington Post but no longer on staff, tries to frighten the bejeebers out of everyone today in a feeble, laughable piece entitled "The GOP's lame-duck hardball." Broder somehow arrives at the conclusion that the Republicans already possess omnipotence in the Senate without even having achieved a majority in the recent election--and without their new members capable of constitutionally assuming power until just after the first of the new year, 2011.

Broder is not just calendar-challenged, though. He's math challenged as well. Bemoaning the terrible fate of the country, Broder wrings his hands over the fact that "the rich" might even get their Bush-era tax cuts extended beyond 2010. And then he tosses in this whopper:

On the face of things, Democrats hold the high ground rhetorically. When it comes to taxes, Obama is calling for extending the Bush cuts for every family making below $250,000 a year, which he says will take care of 98 percent of the population. Only Republicans are holding out for the millionaires to be included.

Let's give Broder a pass for his initial, silly, faux-observation that Democrats "hold the high ground morally." Is that sort of like, "The Washington Redskins lost by a score of 50-2, but they played a very physical game"? But now comes the fun part.

Obamanation wants to generously extend the Bush tax cuts for those making up to $250K a year which is apparently the Democrats' cut point for being "rich." (Which the Prez didn't intend to at all prior to the Dems' shellacking at the polls.) But those rotten Republicans are holding out for "millionaires" to be included in this largesse, right? Well, no, they're holding out for the individuals, families, and small businesses pulling in $250,001 and higher to be included. And, unless my mathematical skills fail me here, the band between $250,001 and $999,999 doesn't include one single millionaire. Which makes this observation inoperable.

Well, don't blame me--read Broder's logical leap again. Either the guy needs an editor, or he assumes we're too dumb to see how his already feeble reasoning is smithereened by a mathematical leap of faith that conveniently omits a significant batch of non-millionaires.

You can see how trial balloons begin here. New Jerseyites earlier were told that a proposed "millionaire's tax" would salvage the bloated state budget. But it turned out that an awful lot of those "millionaires" were actually in the income bracket we just described above. I.e., they're NOT millionaires, but let's use that term anyway, shall we, just to fudge the issue a bit. It's a standard leftist tactic. Yell something loud enough and long enough, and even if it's not exactly the truth, everyone will think that it is.

Both the Jersey Democrats AND Broder know full well that their pitifully weak arguments in favor of creeping socialism aren't working any more either on their merits or lack thereof. So the next refuge of these scoundrels is in, ah, achieving the "rhetorical high ground" by shouting "millionaire, millionaire" over and over again until somehow, "millionaires" encompass a sizeable demographic that earns a pretty good living but isn't close to achieving a million dollars of annual gross income let alone a million dollars' net worth.

Voters have wised up to these sallies into the land of rhetorical high ground highjinks, and they don't work anymore, Tom. Pity an editor didn't catch your gaff today. (If you even have one.)

Your column today, Tom, demonstrates to your few remaining readers, if they don't already know, that you were, are, will be, and always have been in the tank for the Democrats and are more than happy to spend the twilight of your career flacking for a party of scoundrels. And sowing fears about those terrible Republicans who don't run the Senate now and who won't run the Senate in 2011 either. Why don't you just retire to your swell vacation paradise on Beaver Island, dude, and spare us the hyper-partisan drivel and scare tactics? Geez.

Liberal Condensation Alert!

2010-11-21T16:24:00.000-05:00

All three of our regular readers know that above and beyond this blog's concern with creeping socialism and willful ignorance, we also get bugged by the improper and/or gauche use of language on both sides of the political aisle. Here's a great example.

In a delightful Hot Air post, starring (who else) New Jersey's Governor Awesome, Chris Christie, we discovered an embedded video of the gov relating a visit made to his office by the head of the New Jersey teacher's union.

By all means you should view the video. But in this and other posts, never miss looking at some of the comments, either. In this particular case, we note some pro and con comments discussing whether Christie is or is not a RHINO (Republican In Name Only). But the best one, so far, is this one from MSGTAS:

Here comes the straight talk express, and those on the Left have no idea how to handle the ‘truth’. The tactic is to use it at the right time.

The right time is the moment they open their mouth and begin showing any level condensation toward you.

Erm, don't we mean "CONDESCENSION," MSGTAS? This is one of the funniest malapropisms I've seen in awhile, folks, although it distresses me that it comes from the right, which is collectively more articulate, grammatically at least, than Blue State flamers. CONDESCENSION irritates me, too, dude. So why don't we attract laserlike focus on the issue by spelling it correctly?

Warren Buffett: Simpleton

2010-11-21T15:55:00.000-05:00

This today from the Sage of Omaha:

Billionaire Warren Buffett said that rich people should pay more in taxes and that Bush-era tax cuts for top earners should be allowed to expire at the end of December.

“If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further,” Buffett said in an interview with ABC’s “This Week With Christiane Amanpour” that is scheduled to air on Nov. 28. “But I think that people at the high end -- people like myself -- should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.”

You know, I've about had it up to here with the MSM worship of Warren Buffett. With all due respect to an arch-capitalist who's made a considerable pile with his investment philosophy, Buffett is yet another lifelong Democrat who blindly supports creeping socialism without a clue as to how destructive it is. He's sort of like George Soros in sheep's clothing.

Buffett in this case either conveniently or obtusely ignores the fact that the Obama Administration's definition of "the rich" includes "millionaires" who make over $250,000. Excuse me? In what mathematical system does $250,000 = $1,000,000?

Second, why SHOULD people like you pay more taxes, Warren? You already pay plenty of taxes anyway. Could it be that you want the Federal government to squander even more taxpayer money than they're squandering now? And what will we be getting for that money? Right, precisely nothing.

Buffett has for decades been lauded for buying value investments/companies and having the patience to let the scenario pay out. Does he consider the Federal government on a par with a value investment or company? Seriously?

Look, Warren. You go pay the extra taxes for the rest of us if you feel guilty, particularly over that great deal you cut with Goldman Sachs. Me, I'd rather keep what little money I have left in this economy. If you're feeling guilty for being rich beyond avarice, that's not my problem.

As movie stars, sports "heroes" and now, Warren Buffett all prove, great wealth in no way correlates with rational or political maturity.

Boycott the GM Offering

2010-11-18T09:15:00.000-05:00

To those familiar with the long, sordid tale of GM's bankruptcy and apparent re-emergence today as an exchange-traded issue, our headline here might be something of a mystery. How can you boycott the hot new IPO of brand new, never-tainted GM stock if you can't get any?

Precisely.

The taxpayers bailed GM out. The previous stockholders were left holding worthless paper. The bondholders got shut out (illegally, BTW) by the Feds in order for the current administration to pay off the unions that helped destroy the company. And now all the fat cats get dibs on the new stock which is virtually guaranteed to jump to the upside ("pop" in Wall Street parlance), thus guaranteeing them milliions of dollars in profits while Katie Couric's "great unwashed" sit out in the hinterlands still waiting for all those jobs Washington promised.

To be sure, indirectly, some individual investors will be getting some new GM stock via mutual funds in which they invest. A few others will get small allocations from full service brokerage firms--usually the bigger investors who are given the shares as "rewards" for keeping their lucrative business with company X.

But you 'n me? Forget it. So my advice is to boycott the IPO in this sense--if you're interested in the stock anyway, don't just go in and rush it as it bounces (or soars) above the IPO price which the lucky rich dudes get without commission, BTW. The rich guys will only be too happy to "flip" the stock to you for a quick, tasty profit and leave you holding the bag when the stock inevitably settles down--lower than the price you bought it at. You get left holding the bag.

So don't help the fat cats out. Just sit there. Should the stock drop down somewhere near the offer (dubious but possible, at least in the next couple of weeks or months), then by all means, pick some up if you insist. But in the long run, I'm not sure GM--or its unions--have learned anything, and we might get a repeat performance of what happened last time: bankruptcy, worthless stock, and ruined bondholders.

Olbermann Bites (the dust)

2010-11-06T03:14:00.002-04:00

We rarely mention MSNBC's poster boy of the left, the sneering, condescending, hatemongering Keith Olbermann. We've never wanted to encourage him with our criticism. Well, surprise--looks like Keith has been "suspended"--perhaps permanently--from his MSNBC hatefest for violating the network's regulations (they had 'em) prohibiting "newscasters" making donations to political candidates. Keith apparently violated his "neutrality" by doing so in the recent election cycle, so now he's been "suspended."

Hugh Hewitt, with whose observations we generally concur, surprised us a bit by speaking out in Olbermann's favor:

NBC is making itself look more ridiculous than NPR or any MSNBC host ever has with its suspension of Keith Olbermann.

With all the credibility that a two-time "worst person-in-the-world" winner can muster, let me join the chorus of Kos Kids in demanding the return of Keith. The idea of the "ethics" of the network being imperiled by a campaign contribution is absurd.

Transparency by lefties is much to be preferred than sanctimonious posing by lefties. Olbermann is nothing if not transparent. The whining of washed-up "journalists" and professors of journalism about "journalistic standards" are the most hilarious of the reactions...

Read the rest via the link in my text above.

I appreciate Hugh's fairly libertarian attitude on this, but I'm wondering if Hugh and others have been had, missing, perhaps, another reason for the suspension and possible firing. Viz., the idiotarian Olbermann's cable ratings have been so abysmal that I suspect MSNBC, if they have any business sense at all, has been looking for a pretext to salvage his coveted primetime timeslot from the tank.

Whatever the case, Power Line's Scott Johnson sums up this latest MSNBC kerfuffle most elegantly:

What is to be said? The Olbermann case features a joke pundit working for a joke network. It is impossible to take seriously.

Brownsville, TX Annexed by Mexico?

2010-11-06T03:01:00.000-04:00

Here's a disturbing little announcement from the University of Texas at Brownsville, the southernmost city in Texas, bordering on Mexico:

UTB/TSC Emergency Warning #5
The campus is closed and evening classes have been canceled today and Saturday, Nov. 6 because of gunfire taking place across the Rio Grande. Anyone who needs to come to campus or has questions about events can call Campus Police at 882-8232 or 882-8233. Homecoming activities for Saturday, Nov. 6 have been affected. Coffee with the President has been canceled...

Read the rest via the link above.

Now refer back to our earlier posts on the undeclared war in Arizona by drug cartels who apparently feel free to shoot at citizens and cars on I-8; and concerning Mexican pirates apparently murdering an American boating on the Rio Grande. Are we detecting a pattern here? One that reflects current Mexican criminal attitudes towards American sovereignty and our willingness to protect our borders, i.e., their utter contempt for both.

This is the third time I've mentioned it. Living in the DC Metro area, albeit outside the Beltway somewhat, I can't know everything that goes on in that part of the US. But if these incidents somehow slipped into the media, where I unearthed them, I'm wondering how many, many more we're not hearing about. What's it going to take, besides this past Tuesday's midterm elections, to get our government to pay more attention to foreign criminal predation against American citizens. Currently, it seems the Feds are more interested in quashing Arizona's brave attempt to get control of this situation since the Feds are clearly not very interested.

Return of the Washington Times

2010-11-02T23:46:00.000-04:00

Interesting news this evening confirming rumors that started back in late August. To make a very Byzantine story short, an entity run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon has purchased back the nearly bankrupt Washington Times for $1 and an agreement to assume all the paper's extensive debts. Plan is to ramp what's left of the Times back up into being a respectable newspaper once again, apparently re-incorporating local coverage, the much-mourned sports section, and at least some entertainment coverage. Which former editors will be rehired, if any, remain to be seen.

I got a tip on this earlier in the evening. But the story is now running on Bloomberg and elsewhere. Here's the Times' own take on recent events. No details yet as to when and how the ramp up will occur.

Hope and Change: Part II

2010-11-02T08:34:00.000-04:00

Polls are opening across the country along with the time zones, and tonight will be interesting for sure. Repubs should sweep the bulk of governorships along with the House. A Senate Republican majority will need an act of God to happen, although Dems won't be anywhere near in firm control by the end of the count whenever that might be.

Anticipating a big, pre-work rush to the polls this morning here in Reston, Mrs. W and I will wait until the commute ends before heading up to vote. (We still do it the old-fashioned way.)

Meanwhile, here are some short(ish), informative links to ponder during your morning coffee. I'll blog as possible today, but given my time factors, I'll leave things up to folks like Fox News and RedState to do the heavy lifting this evening and perhaps into the night.

Links to various:

Mickey Kaus: Countdown to Demageddon. Great title Mickey. For those unfamiliar, he's a (pretty much) lib who's moved to the otherwise reprehensible shell that's left of Newsweek. But he's worth reading since he still engages his brain.

The Fix: WaPo's Chris Cillizza has already begun the post-election spin, predicting that the Repubs won't take the Senate and leading with that in his list of predictions, all the better to spin this as "Republicans really don't have a mandate." Watch for various flavors of this spin as the night progresses. (You know, it's fun to harass these people online. No wonder the Dems want to re-impose the "fairness doctrine.")

Accuracy in Media: In case you missed it, a post-mortem on this weekend's risable Jon Stewart rally on the DC Mall. Attendees were pretty much all Democrats. Shocking. But what neither accuracy nor anyone else dared to report? We'll whisper it here (shhh, be vewwy, vewwy quiet): attendees were predominately white.

Daily Telegraph: It's all about jobs. Good assessment from a reliable source across the pond.

FIRE: University of Virginia removes all speech codes. Great news from the ol' home state. Finally, someone sends those academic PC Brownshirts packing. No doubt the result of some prodding from our currently Republican attorney general Ken Cuccinelli. PS, the media is already after him, prepping perhaps to smear him if he runs for gov.

Fox News: Preventing voter fraud. Ya think? Seriously, the problem with modern elections is that in certain states, the Democrats in control are so thoroughly corrupt that they can easily game any close election by selective recounts. Having tried and failed to do this to Bush in Florida in 2000, they pulled it off in Minnesota by playing the ground game for the detestable Al Franken who actually lost. Be on the lookout, particularly if things are close in Illinois and Nevada.

Sissy Willis is up and at 'em this morning preparing for a bit of tasteful schadenfreude and offering some interesting observations on the coming spin cycle.

Lefty Buckeye State Blog links to a third-party smear of Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich from an alleged "right winger" who's obviously a lefty. Since lefties routinely avoid even talking to those on the right, I guess we can't expect them to know a real one when they see one. Or maybe lefties just routinely lie.

RightMichigan provides a last-minute pitch for the UP's Dan Benishek, the Repubs' best hope for picking up the sniveling Bart Stupak's seat.

That's it for now. Back later.

Another Shovel-Ready Project

2010-11-01T20:02:00.001-04:00

Here's the best answer I've yet seen for those who like to chant the "Bush Did It" litany/meme:

Hat tip to The Interface for finding this one!

Postscript to ObamaFlop

2010-11-01T19:53:00.000-04:00

We duly noted earlier that President Obama couldn't even fill a downtown Cleveland auditorium for another of his patented pep talks this weekend. According to Right Ohio, which carried the earlier report, the Dem "excuse" was that things like Halloween and football were a deterrent, not the lack of that old Obama magic. But, there's just one problem with that says Right Ohio blogger Matt:

Liberals typically aren’t interested in real, manly sports like football… because if they did, they would have known yesterday was a bye week for the Cleveland Browns...

Touchdown!

Heh.

MSM: Corrupt Bastards

2010-11-01T16:23:00.000-04:00

Leave it to Mama Grizzly to lay it on the line:

As one of my shipmates back in my merchant marine days once said: "Truer words was never spoke!"

Take That, David Brock

2010-10-31T22:13:00.000-04:00

You remember David Brock, right? The guy who used to work for the right side of the aisle until he chickened out under social pressure and switched to the hard left. Well, he's at it again, once again for the other side, and once again up to their sleazy tactics via the dreadful "Media Matters" lie shop he's currently running with Soros money.

This time, sleazemaster Brock's trying to smear Sarah Palin for defending Alaska Senate Candidate Joe Miller against a planned smear against him by Alaska CBS media elites. They, in turn, got caught red-handed via a mis-transmitted phonemail message. Ooops. Another black mark for the Journolista types. Typically, Brock demands "evidence" he knows simply doesn't exist, creating a phony "scandal" in the process.

But Professor William Jacobson calls him on this, and then goes Brock one better, issuing him a challenge of his own:

"Legal Insurrection Blog challenges David Brock to refuse to accept donations to Media Matters from currency manipulators and speculators who want to undermine our national sovereignty."

Heh.

Let's put Jacobson's blog on our "Good Guys" list right now.

Washington's Arena Stage Returns

2010-10-31T21:15:00.000-04:00

Leaving politics for a moment, Washington's venerable Arena Stage, dark for over 30 months due to a massive renovation, has reopened as the magnificant new Mead Center for the Performing Arts. Still at its old locale in the little-known SW quadrant of the nation's capital, this is one magnificent new facility whose structure actually contains within it Arena's original pair of theaters along with a third performance space.

Check out my article describing the new space in my home away from the Washington Times, DC Theatrescene. Here's a photo of the Center (credit: Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects), Washington's newest monument and certainly its most visually interesting.

Mad Dem Dash to Steal Ohio Election

2010-10-31T21:06:00.000-04:00

Just incredible what lefties and their minions are up to in their last-minute attempt to thwart the Republican-leaning landslide in my old home state of Ohio. Right Ohio has all the details.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, President Obama, on the final lap of his Ohio Losers' Tour, can't even fill a Cleveland auditorium during a personal appearance. Click here for details. If you read this link to the now-desperate New York Times, the fun part is in the comments section, where left-leaning Democrat lefties try to make excuses for themselves and for The One's pitiful showings, claiming that the media is in the bag for the Repubs due to "bad reporting." You gotta laugh. I guess "good reporting" is the kind that trashes Bush. These are some of the most puerile observations I've ever had the misfortune to read.

Less than 48 hours to go. Time to be on alert for massive, last-ditch voter fraud by the leftists, all of whom believe in free speech, of course. For themselves alone.

SEIU in violation of RICO statute?

2010-10-27T20:23:00.000-04:00

Answer: of course. These union thugs have been violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute for years. Whenever this topic comes up, I wonder aloud why these clowns haven't been prosecuted yet (a rhetorical question) for their consistent history of voter fraud and intimidation efforts, always on the part of far-left Democrats. I usually get a shrug, even from Republicans--one of the reason that ingrained corruption is so difficult to root out.

Now we get a coredump of specific info via a post on RedState. Here are just a few tidbits:

In Milwaukee, a SEIU lobbyist brags about a hatchet job the union is planning on Republican Scott Walker on behalf of Democrat Tom Barrett, with media cooperation.
In Washington state, an SEIU member was arrested for allegedly forging signatures on petitions
In Harris County, TX a group run by a former SEIU staffer allegedly turned in over 23,000 fraudulent voter registrations [Video of said former SEIU staffer here.]
- Note: The situation seems to have deteriorated further as actual voting has begun.

Maybe if the Repubs take the House next week, we'll start getting some hearings on the malign influence of the astoundingly corrupt SEIU.

Shout-out to the Great Unwashed

2010-10-27T19:54:00.000-04:00

The Great Unwashed. That's what Amerikkka's favorite pixie newscaster, Katie Couric thinks of you, according to this report from Howard Kurtz (who recently left the Washington Post for The Daily Beast):

....Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.

Yeah, that's you, dear reader, if you just happen to live somewhere in America that's between slightly west of the DC Beltway and slightly Ease of Nancy Pelosi's safely-gerrymandered Congressional district in the People's Republic of San Francisco. It's amazing that we used this very phrase in a recent HazZzmat post--in a satirical way, of course, describing exactly what the media elite thinks of you and me. Now, amazingly, Couric actually deploys the phrase in the elitist's casual, comfortable, offhandedly contemptuous manner.

This clip created a lot of buzz this morning when Drudge linked to it. Oddly, when I first accessed it, the page was there but the post was missing--just a lot of white space. As of this writing, the post is back with all the appearances of having been quickly ~~redacted~~ edited, although the damning phrase is still there.

The most interesting thing about the Obama Years to date is that after the 2008 election, the Democrat party nationwide dropped all pretense that they were not a pack of Marxists bent on ignoring the will of the people. This simple fact is what is really ignited the Tea Party as well as next week's promising electoral tsunami. Yet most Dems still don't have a clue.

But Couric's casual gesture of contempt for Middle America--the real America--tells us, quite eloquently, all we need to know. The clearly intentional disenfranchising of the military vote in New York and Chicago is yet another.

Election Break: So you want to be an English professor, eh?

2010-10-27T19:29:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd take a break from the politics of meaning and re-post here a most amusing video cartoon that pretty much says it all when it comes to aspiring to a teaching career as a professor in the humanities--specifically in English. That's where I started out years ago. Needless to say, I ain't there now, nor have I been for a long, long time. Just run the video and you'll hear what I wish I'd heard, more decades ago than I'd care to admit. (BTW, audio is a pretty good flavor of "robo-talk.")

Hat tip, Instapundit. Enjoy.

Palin stupidity on Tea Party date--NOT!

2010-10-20T02:44:00.000-04:00

As we promised you in our previous entry, here's another swell example of the alleged intelletual prowess of the coastal elites via the excellent NewsBusters:

Sarah Palin at Monday's Tea Party rally in Reno, Nevada, told attendees, "Don't be thinking that we've got victory for America in the bag yet...We can't party like it's 1773."

Clearly not understanding that was the year of the famed Boston Tea Party, history challenged media members, including PBS's Gwen Ifill and Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas, mocked Palin via their twitter accounts (screencaps follow with video of Palin's remarks courtesy Right Scoop, h/t Perfunction).

But wait--there's more:

Maybe even more humorous, the Huffington Post actually reprinted Moulitsas's tweet as "News Broken on Twitter."

Of course, all these geniuses needed to do was a simple Google search of "historical events of 1773." The first response would have helped them identify that the Boston Tea Party happened on December 16th of that year.

Links above will get you more details, but be sure you read NewsBusters' whole story.

Over many years now, I've never quite been able to determine what bugs me about these clowns more: their their socialism, their sheer ignorance and lack of any discernible intellectual heft, or their superciliousness and condescension towards the Great Unwashed (i.e., you and me).

Buy a Gadsden Flag

2010-10-20T02:26:00.001-04:00

Down here in Virginia, home to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, George Mason, and God knows how many other patriots, most of us (except for inside the Beltway) are in a Tea Party mood this month. Even though we know the actual Tea Party was held in Boston in 1773. (See our next post on this item.)

After we put the Tea Party's official unofficial emblem--the Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flag--up on our website in solidarity with right thinkers everywhere, we began to wonder. Is there a place where you can find these things. And if so, can you buy one?

In the words of our current President, YES WE CAN!

The Gadsden and Culpeper American Heritage Shoppe Ltd. website is right here, and I'm about to pull out my credit card. The yellow flag will look swell flying outside of my house on November 2. How about yours? Extra added bonus: the top of the line flags, at least, are made right here in the USA, not in the People's Republic like everything else. Double bonus. This place is in the state of New York. How counter-intuitively subversive is that?

There's no time like the present for the Silent Majority to make its presence known. Let's party on November 2. (And let's also not forget to go to the polls first.)

Moving Day for a "Good Guy"

2010-10-19T21:41:00.002-04:00

Longtime readers are aware of our "Good Guys" and our "Enemies List," both of which appear in the right column in our new design right after current news links. Nomenclature is obvious. The Good Guys are bloggers who use their noggins and aren't deterred by leftist doublespeak and bafflegab. The Enemies List (with a hat tip to Tricky Dick) are the far left pond scum who collectively observe the diktat that the "truth" is whatever the Party says it is.

We try to keep this list and the links up to date. For example, we removed the once-admired "Little Green Footballs" from the Good Guy list once it was obvious that the writer had degenerated into a strangely garbled lefty incoherence. Links change, sites come and go, so we do check once in awhile.

But we missed a recent change. I've just been informed by "The Interface" himself (a veteran Good Guy) that his blog has relocated to a new site. Link's been corrected accordingly. If you're not familiar with the site, check out what's currently the latest entry (October 8) here. It's on one of our favorite topix: ~~"global warming"~~ climate change.

PS: FYI, we've also added Sissy Willis to the Good Guys list even though she's a Good Gal. (I'm from Ohio where both genders are guys anyway.) I discovered Sissy's blog through Instapundit and she's quite insightful and interesting. And also the only one besides moi in the blogosphere, apparently, who recognizes Antonio Gramsci's controlling interest in the great Alinsky-Obama food chain of World Socialism.

Austan Goolsbee. Who is this idiot?

2010-10-19T21:16:00.000-04:00

From CNN online:

Americans can help the recovery along by saving more than in the past, but also by spending responsibly in proportion to income, one of President Obama's top economic advisers said Tuesday.

In a wide-ranging interview based on questions from CNNMoney.com readers, Council of Economic Advisers chairman Austan Goolsbee said the nation can't simply spend its way out of this economic downturn, adding "we need a different style of recovery."

How do these people get jobs in Washington? Americans can "help the recovery" by "spending responsibly in proportion to income"? Are you kidding me? Two questions:

What recovery?
Should we spend in proportion to our income the way the Federal government does under this administration?

Herein, we observe the primary problem with both this administration and the current Congress: neither has a clue as to how things work or as to how a BUDGET works for the average American. Why bother with a budget when you can just steal money from the taxpayers and then claim it as an "accomplishment" for your constituents? In fact, that's probably why the current Congress didn't bother to pass an FY 2011 budget before adjourning. They wouldn't have adhered a budget anyway, so there wasn't really a need to have one.

The problem is that most current legislators and administration figures are either failed lawyers or lousy academics, most of whom have neither held a real job nor run a real company. I am wondering here if Goolsbee actually comprehends the unintentional irony in his ridiculous statements. Well, wait a minute. No, I'm not wondering. Here are three of the concluding grafs of the CNN piece with my comments interspersed as bullet items:

[Goolsbee] disagreed that the president focused so much on health care reform in late 2009 instead of on policies that would have spurred more job growth.

What a whopper!

"The president has been absolutely non-stop focused on creating jobs," Goolsbee said. "But that doesn't mean that should be to the exclusion of everything else."
The first sentence is a lie. The second sentence is an absolute falsehood.
"I disagree with the premise that (the president) prioritized health care above jobs," Goolsbee said.
You can disagree all you want, Austan. But that's precisely what your Fearless leader did. It's not a "premise." It's a verifiable fact.

Goolsbee and his pals are the ~~Marxists~~ people who are currently running the country into the ground. Remember this on the first Tuesday of November. And once again in November 2012.

HazZzMat

The Mandate of Clear Thinking: Real Issues (continued)

The Mandate of Clear Thinking: Real Issues (continued)

The Mandate of Clear Thinking: Real Issues

The Mandate of Hell, Pachyderm 3, The Burning Witch

The Mandate of Hell, Pachyderm 2, The Housing Disaster Nobody Was Responsible For

The Mandate of Hell, Pachyderm 1, Unacknowledged Roots

The Mandate of Hell

More Content Moving to the Washington Times Communities

Obama Fakeout Obscures High Oil Price Policy

New "Prudent Man" Post Up at Washington Times Communities

The Meaning of Liberty

Prudent Man: New Column in Washington Times Communities

Memorial Day: Remembering Iraq War Vets

Obamanomics vs. Boeing; or, The Incredible Vanishing Workforce

Patriots celebrate Bin Laden death outside White House

Bin Laden Death Confirmed by Obama

Bin Laden Is Dead. Really.

Wolf Trap Premieres 'The Inspector'

Slaughter in Syria

The Return of Sarah Barracuda

Al Gore: Warmist Jackass

Cleveland Orchestra's "Don Giovanni"

More on Media Matters' Illegal Exploitation of 501(c)(3)

Geraldine Ferraro Dead at 75

Revoke Media Matters' 501(c)(3)

A Tribute to Obamanation

Obama's Keystone Cops

Obama an expert in Trivial Pursuit?

Ongoing fallout from a stupid presidency; or, Dave Fry for President

Grammar and Spelling: The Sorry State of Online Journalism

Pros: S&P Resilience Could Signal Rally in Tact

New Obama 2012 Campaign Poster

Messing around with Messiaen (and Radiohead)

Transformational Liberalism?

Is the Chevy Volt ReVolting?

Why I Left Ohio

Texas Farmers Under Terrorist Attack

Fire Eric Holder

Meditations on San Francisco's Commode Kerfuffle

Washington National Opera's Boffo "Butterfly"

Democrat Civility in Wisconsin

Peter Yarrow is in Wisconsin. Wonder Why?

Cypress String Quartet Disappoints at Wolf Trap

MoveOn, Union Sponsored Rallies Flop, Big Time

Global Warming Continues to Pound US Mainland

New Friends and Enemies

Ventriloquist Journalism: The New Vernacular

Washington Post Shows Bias Again

Democratic governors criticize Wisconsin's Walker

Quotes, Scare-quotes, Whatever

What the Public Employees' Unions Don't Want You to Know

Tabitha Hale Speaks

Public Employee Unions: Democrat Funding Machine

Providence Teachers to Bite the Dust

Circumcise San Francisco

Flash: Beavis and Butt-head to return!

More new conservatives at the Washington Times Communities

Milton Babbitt, conservative iconoclast

Global Warmists Are At It Again

Middle Class Ready to Go Galt?

Dennis Kucinich Is in the Pits

WTF = WIN?

Trashing Michelle Bachmann: Journolistas at Large?

Unions Weasel Out of Obamacare En Masse

Keith Olbermann Job Bank

Hypocrite Leland Lee Tries to Silence Limbaugh (Yawn)

Jim Moran (D-VA): American Voters Are Racists

Paul Mirengoff Departs Power Line

Bye-bye, Keith Olbermann

Top 2010 MSM Lies

A Digital Nativity Story

Rendell: A Nation of Wussies

Light Holiday Blogging

Rhode Island: Nanny State Takes Away Christmas Toy Guns

111th Congress Adjourns. Merry Christmas!

The Surber Challenge to Warren Buffett

Independent Collegian Gets F in Economics

Kasich plans to scrap Strickland’s 3C rail program and send 16,000 jobs elsewhere

Removing Don Luskin link