When All Is Said and Done....

... I gotta hand it to Brietbart. The guy's made himself an empire, whilst being completely unafraid and unapologetic. So if the title of his new book sounds a little precious, so be it.

For the Love of God, Obama...

Why are you stupid?

The Russians specifically are seeking a defense technology cooperation deal with the Pentagon that will permit them to gain access to U.S. hit-to-kill missile defense know-how, the key technology for the most current strategic long-range and tactical short-range defenses that were developed at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars over the past two decades.The reason, the officials said, is that Moscow knows it can offer very little in the way of cooperative missile defense with the U.S. The current strategic anti-missile interceptors around Moscow are armed with nuclear warheads — tactical weapons that Moscow is not expected to use against an Iranian missile attack.

That's because the Russians don't expect to be receiving any Iranian missile attacks. Hell, they'll probably sell the tech to Tehran the first chance they get.

And yes, Ace, the appeal of not voting for Romney (or even Palin) diminishes when confronted with this basic fecklessness in the one area the President has total control.

"Kinetic Military Action"

The Examiner:

Now, White House officials are referring to the war in Libya not as a war but as a "kinetic military action." As common as "kinetic" might be among those in government, it still seems likely to strike members of the public as a euphemism that allows the Obama administration to describe a war as something other than a war.

Polysyllabics are like passive voice: they obscure. Passive voice obscures who's acting; pollysyllabics obscure the action itself.

Is it Really Aggression if You're Fighting a Rebellion?

Look, I'm sure that Muammar Kahadaffy (or however his name is spelled) deserves every salty ounce of the rage that the Libyan rebels have for him. But Mickey Kaus has a point:

It’s one thing for a supra-national authority–the U.N.–to authorize a war against someone who has committed cross-border aggression, or who has repeatedly violated earlier U.N. resolutions left over from a previous war. That was the case with Saddam in 2002–in theory.*It’s another to let the U.N. authorize a war on what Obama calls ”humanitarian grounds”–whether it’s to stop actual killings or some less severe variety of  “human rights violation.”  These are concepts that are easily watered down to justify intervention–indeed, as Massimo Calabresi makes clear, they seem to have been watered down in this very case, where Gaddafi’s pending atrocities are hardly Rwanda-sized...

And yes, that's a mighty flimsy defense. But legal authorization carries with it the threat of precedent. Are all rebels to demand UN-guarunteed Marquess of Queensbury rules?

Getting rid of Gaddafi is an easy call on national-interest grounds: he's a slime. He has the blood of Americans on his hands. His people, carried up in the winds of the Arab Spring, want him gone, and it behooves us to make nice with them. Done and done. But jumping in with a vague constructions about atrocities that may not have happened, in an internal revolt that touches no other nation, this may lead we know not where.

It's Not Just Me...

Word Around the Net:

Months before the actual invasion of Iraq began, President Bush brought his argument to the American people, using speeches, interviews, and his administration writing editorials for various news sources. President Bush tried to convince the American people of the necessity of his plan and why.
By contrast, President Obama went to the UN and started taking action. He did not seek to convince anyone in the public of what he was doing, nor gain public support.

Obama seems not to remember what country he Presides over. After all, there's oceans to stop...

Fukushima Demonstrates That Nuclear Power Works

George "Moonbat" Monbiot (h/t Insty):

[T]he average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Read the whole thing, in which he points out that renewable energy carries it's own costs. Basically, Fukushima got hit with a perfect storm of disasters, and to date, no one is going to die.

Being President is Hard.

It's been fun the last day or two, watching proggies of various stripes get themselves all worked up over the Bombing of Libya. Glenn Reynolds is having a grand time granting Andrew Sullivan the title he has so eminently deserved. But the outraged proggies may have a point.

Does anyone have any notion of what it is we're DOING in Libya? Are we merely levelliing the playing field? Or are we ousting Khadaffi? To what end? By what means?

Say what you will about Bush, but he made it plenty clear in the build-up to Afghanistan and Iraq what we were doing and why. He made it clear to Congress, and he made it clear to the American people. For that matter, when Reagan bombed Libya back in '86, he went on television and told us why.

Obama has done none of that. So I don't blame the proggies for being bent out of shape, even if I do wonder why they expected a one-term junior senator with no executive experience to handle the Presidency better.

It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid.

Listen up, proggies.

Death threats are bad. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to say so.

Civility is good. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to speak up for the civil against the uncivil.

You aren't supposed to excuse the uncivil when they happen to sit on your side of the aisle. You're supposed to keep them under control, or at the very least, not encourage or defend them.

So when unsubtle threats and extortion demands get sent to those who dissent from the Proggie sense of entitlement vision, everyone is supposed to call those people what they are: vain, ridiculous petty tyrants with the manners of Vandals and the morals of pimps.

You're supposed to call it out, in the interests of a better, more civil society for all of us, not just the people who agree with you.

And if you can't or won't do that, then don't be surprised when your caterwauling about how awful and scary the people who disagree with you are falls on deaf ears and rolled eyes.

Ball's in your court.

There's Another Solution....

A crusading Clerk of the Circuit Court (Frank Conaway, who's running for mayor) stands up for a man who's been fighting for 12 years to keep his house from a variety of lawyers who have purchased the tax lien on his house, charged him rent, and filed duplicitous records.

In other words, the property owners rack up hefty interest charges on the debt, while the lawyer who bought it can then bill them for essentially selling the obligation back to them, with some legal fees tacked on. In the end the owner ends up paying thousands of dollars in legal fees and interest for what amounts to a dollar-value several times the original debt.

However wretched this kind of tax-farming is, whatever court case and whatever new ordnance Conaway has in mind, there are a couple of ways this could be prevented:

1. Create a settlement system that allows the city to collect tax liens in a timely manner, as by monthly payments.
2. Charge less in property taxes.

Is the government so incompetent that it can't even collect its own taxes?

Lileks Sticks it to the Man

That is, the Woman, in the person of 1945 Poet Laureate Louise Brogan:

There was no glory in the smart circles to finding the poetry in the lives of Nice People. No, the souls that had been damaged by banging their heads against the stone walls of this prison culture, and had naturally sought refuge in brain-scrambling chemicals until they soiled themselves and stood in the park yelling for EZRA POUND TO COME OUT FROM BEHIND THAT TREE I SEE YOU AND YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE – these were the vanguard, the mystics, the seers, and everyone else seemed a whiskered Victorian by comparison, harumphing behind opera glasses as they beheld the truth of Life, man, life.

 Poor fellows going under the novocaine today. Read the whole thing.

Preach, Brother

Pezman Yousefzadeh:

I long for the day when arguments in favor of farm subsidies will be viewed with the same disdain as are arguments that the sun revolves around the earth.

Geocentrism, as Ptolemy designed it, was far more sophisticated. No special pleading required.

The Generation Pay Gap

Over at Ace, Gabriel Malor speaks truth to power:

[T]he Baby Boomers and their predecessors wanted it this way and, as a result of the way they wanted it, the whole scheme is crashing down. That's on them.
It's not like the Social Security funding crisis just materialized yesterday. This has been on the radar for decades. This structural flaw -- and it is a structural flaw, integral to the whole scheme -- has been evident for a very long time. It didn't just happen, as if it were an uncontrollable, unpredictable, and unfathomable Act of God. You did this; you were there and have been in the best position to do something about it for decades. But the only question was how far you thought you could kick that can down the road. And the Usual Answer was: who the fuck cares, as long as it's until after I'm dead.

Social Security has turned the aged into the nations most powerfull lobby. No one denies this. But if in the New Broke Normal, we're prepared to tell public sector unions that they need to sacrifice along with the rest of us, then it's time to consider telling rich old farts that they too are fellow citizens with obligations and responsibilities to the rest of us. That they may have to delay their long-promised suckling at the federal teat.

I'm utterly bereft of sympathy on this point. They've been telling me for a decace plus that they might not be able to fully fund my retirement pay back the money they've been grifting from my paycheck. Maybe I'll get 75% back. And if they're saying that now, what are they going to start saying when I'm actually ready to retire?

Por espanol, marque el "Dos"...

Hey, My Scrotum's Right Where I Left It!

Holy shneikes, even Adam Corolla's chiming in.

You don’t want us to fight. You don’t want us to pay the bills. You don’t want us to open the car door and pull out the chairs. So guess what? We’re going to play Nintendo and watch our YouPorn. We can hop on the computer and stay busy for the next several years.

Millions of versions of this have hit teh intertubes since Kay Hymowitz put out the first male-bashing book that tenatively suggested that women might do that too much. And it's not as though I disagree with it. But sitting on our fat asses collecting pizza weight and spyware actually is a problem. And complaining that women are just too damn mean and scary actually isn't the solution.

If we think that our society needs some manliness, we need to sack up and pay the cost of being men. Of earning it. Of looking at our lives and ourselves with the flinty eye that our grandfathers employed as a matter of course. And of telling our girlfriends and wives that what we are and what we do matter, and we'll take our share of respect for it, thank you very much.

Otherwise, why shouldn't the ovarians win?

If You Can Find the King, You Can See Him...

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert just spent eight months trying to get the Depatment of Health and Human Services to let him take the State's Medicaid paperwork online. He finally had to appeal to President Obama.

"We tried for eight months to get the waiver," says Herbert. HHS delayed and delayed and delayed -- and then finally said no. "The denial we got back from the secretary of HHS was by e-mail, of all things," Herbert says, pausing a second for the listener to take it in. "The irony is rich."

To his credit, Obama immediately saw the worth of the idea and got the desk jockeys to okay it. But the whole episode displays everything the Right hates about Big Government: the delays, the inadequate responses, the self-serving hypocrisy. What the Left fails to understand is that these things are natural, and unavoidable parts of any bureaucratic process.

Bureaucracies exist to enforce, not to innovate. Office-holders are not empowered to make decisions, but rewarded for complying with them. HHS could not - literally could not - make the change Herbert asked for, because no one of sufficient authority told them that they could. It doesn't matter if they're officially allowed to make such decisions; in practice they will make the decisions that will create the minimum of ripples.

It reminds one of a French peasant hiking his way to Versailles and getting permission from the guards to enter, finding the King, and asking his permission to build a bridge over his stream, because the local Count wouldn't let him and the Bishop was indifferent.

America isn't supposed to work this way. We aren't supposed to be bowing in tender supplication to the arbitrary whims of our emperor and his eunuchs. We're supposed to be a free people. But freedom is messy; and our aspiring eunuch class likes things neat and tidy.