"Federally Funded Condoms for Pre-Teens"

(h/t: The Other McCain)

Someone Has Been Hiding in the State Department for Two Years...

It starts.

It's the Spending, Stupid!

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips addresses the elephant in the living room. (h/t: Memeorandum)

I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

There's a word for having to explain something brain-blitheringly obvious to those who refuse to see it:

Alexis McGill Johnson Doesn't Know What Words Mean

Legal Insurrection: (h/t Protein Wisdom)

During a Great American Panel on Hannity tonight John Fund and Hannity were hammering the point that Obama doesn’t know how to negotiate in good faith. One of them mentioned Donald Trump’s criticism that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing because Obama’s never done a “big deal.”

Panelist Alexis McGill Johnson of the American Values Institute responded:

"He got bin Laden."

Leaving aside the rhetorical effectiveness of Obama's manful crowing about "getting" bin Laden, Johnson seems to have been unaware that Trump meant "big deal" in its literal sense: large-scale financial negotiations. Sending Seal Team Six to whack bin Laden has nothing whatever to do with finance or with negotiation, so far as anyone knows.

So either Alexis McGill Johnson lacks the contextual awareness to pick up on the ordinary plain meaning of words, or she's playing a desperate game of distraction on behalf of Emperor Golden Dancer.

Up to you.

Are We Going to Default?

Maybe.

If we do, will that suck?

Assuredley.

Am I panicking over it?

Oddly, I'm not.

There's a kind of cosmic justice to all of this, that our government is so fundamentally divided that it cannot agree on how to undo the mammoth debt we've accrued. America has been a house divided against itself for some time; with progressives hungrily constructing their Leviathan and conservatives desperately trying to find a magic bullet that will kill the beast. Eventually, so powerful a discord creates positions across which no bridge can span. Somebody's going to win; we're all going to lose.

It's a thing called hubris.

Women are Good at Blogging, Bad at Tech Conferences.

A while ago I stumbled upon a blog post by Susannah Breslin, Instapundit's new defaut link, found it reeking with female chauvinism, and took a big steaming dump on it. Of late, I've found her blog at Forbes.com pretty readable, for the opposite reason. She sticks it to the sisterhood, but recognizes that there's a lot more than what she sees. Most of the time, she focuses on writing and blogging and working in the digital age, and that's all to the good. Her How Not to Be Unemployed post is solid stuff.

Today, she writes a post, Why Women Shouldn't Go To Tech Conferences, which turns the post I first didn't like on its head. Which leads me to believe that I was reading that post, and especially the offending paragraph, wrong. Maybe I was confusing a strawman with an argument.

Or maybe I was just looking for something to piss on. In any case, apologies.

Just in Case You Were Wondering Why This Debt Ceiling Debate is Happening...

...this is why:

This is why those radical right-wing teabaggers are so insistent on spending cuts, on not raising taxes. This is why our debt-to-GDP ratio is at 100%. This is why, pretty much everything.

And whatever anyone has to say about what we should do now, anything that fails to address this basic fact is inherently inoperative.

Enjoy the kabuki.

I Can't Quit John Boehner ....

Every time I decide he's gonna sell us down the river, he gives us one of these: (h/t: Drudge)

“As I read the Constitution, the Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign,” Boehner said, recounting what he told the president, according to two sources.

That sounds like a man who's sick of negotiating.

Is Married at Sixteen Really Worse Than Pregnant at 16?

RS McCain has been following Courtney Stodden's (who?) marriage, for reasons that I suspect have something to do with his Rule #5. I find caring about the lives of demi-celebrities (or even the real ones) difficult, because I have a life. But he makes a fine point comparing Stodden's decision with Bristol Palin's:

But let’s ask a hypothetical question: Suppose that your daughter was determined to have sex at age 16. Given the choice, would you rather her first time be . . .
A. Drunk on wine coolers in a pup tent with Levi Johnston, orB. On her wedding night, in a luxury hotel suite, with her movie star husband.

Somewhere along the way, we as a society decided that the worst thing a 16-year-old (or 18-year-old, or 20-year-old) could do was get married and have a baby. Never mind that 16-20-year-old bodies, male and female, are screaming to make babies; it's become the sin by which one falls out of the middle class.

But getting wasted and dumbly engaging in the act that makes babies? Normal Friday night fun, acceptable so long as one pops a pill or convinces the young swain to slap an uncomfortable piece of latex on his John Thomas.

Never made a lick of sense to me. But my mom dropped out of college to marry my dad and have me, and she's having their vacation house renovated as we speak, so it's possible I don't know what I'm talking about.

Christian Fundamentalist Behind Norway Attack

Because nothing is more Christ-like than "I'll Kill You All!"

The Other McCain has the skinny.

91 Dead. Jesus wept.

Is there a Debt-Limit Deal?

No.

There isn't a deal until there's a deal.

Until the President and the Speaker say "We Have a Deal" (Reid and McConnell will do as they're told), we do not have a deal.

And since we do not have one until it exists, its pointless speculating about what's in it. We will not know until we can see for  ourselves who has stood, and who is screwed.

Smitty Fisks E.J. Dionne, So I don't have to...

His Tea Party paranoia grows apace.

Convenient text-table format, too.

Bill Maher Pretends to be Above it All...

For a guy who "doesn't care" about religion, he can't seem to shut up about it.

The worst thing about religious debates is the way people (of whatever camp) act like they know what they're talking about when they don't. The Cosmos is too large to be conntained in anyone's head. This is all conjecture with hand-selected facts. None of us "knows" anything about what drives the universe.

Arguing with people, making claims of knowledge that do not stand up to dispassionate observation, this is all a waste of time. People are not reasoned into faith or apostasy; faith is a gift of the Spirit. We respond to religion on a spiritual level or don't. I did not arrive at the Truth of Catholicism by argument and then drag my heart to church. Rather, my heart from boyhood loved it, and I sought for ways to bring my intellect to line with it.

To atheists, this is the antithesis of reason, "magical thinking" and the like. I submit that they are more subject to it than they know. Did they really abandon God because they examined the evidence dispassionately? Or did they want to abandon Him all along, and jumped at the first boat they thought would carry them?

In any case, we shall one day discover who is lost at sea.

Hey, Rubes!: Republicans for Obama Edition

A bunch of "Republicans" who chose Obama over McCain, because of that dirty Palin woman, are upset that he didn't turn out as he promised.

Pundette invites them all to get stuffed: (h/t Insty)

Cry me a river. They looked at Obama's Harvard law degree and that sharp pant crease and thought he was one of them, or at least more so than that uncredentialed piece of Wasilla trash, with all her vulgar "you betchas" and excessive children, including that embarrassing baby she doted on. And these snobs, instead of apologizing for contributing to the downfall of America, have the nerve to complain about "class warfare."

One has to wonder why these people bother to register as Republicans. Isn't being able to decipher MSM smears and fixes a prerequisite?

Democrat Try to Take Allen West "Into the Woodshed"

Racists (h/t: Instapundit)

This stands as another demonstration of the fact that protected identities are a boon granted only to leftists. No Republican would ever dare suggest that Elijah Cummings or Charlie Rangel needs to be taken to the wooshed, because RAAAAACISM! But Gwen Moore can suggest it of Allen "Uncle Sambo" West, and it's all good in the hood.

Allen West, of course, was a fellow disciplined in Iraq for interrogating a prisoner with a pistol. Somehow, I don't think the Congressional Democratic Caucus scares him.

The Gang of Six Plan is a Joke

Which is why it will probably pass. It does one or two useful things, one or two not useful things, and dicks around with the most needful thing, which is cutting spending and reforming entitlements.

Dan Mitchell has the details. (h/t: Protein Wisdom)

"Forget lifeboats. We need to rearrange these chairs!"

UPDATE: Ezra Klein tries to spin the thing, and it remains as stationary as a Soviet monument: (h/t: Memeorandum)

Then the Budget Committee is charged with drawing up legislation to extend the caps on discretionary spending — which cover both defense and non-defense, and, if I understand this right, cut more than $1 trillion from projected spending — until 2021, and to draw up an enforcement mechanism that will kick in if deficit reduction isn't on track come 2015. Come 2020, federal health spending is put on a global budget, with growth not to exceed GDP plus 1 percent. Finally, once all that's passed, the Finance Committee is asked to produce legislation making Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and their product is assured certain procedural advantages. There's very little in the way of specifics here, but there's an odd line suggesting that if this effort fails, then the vote on the whole deficit-reduction plan is invalidated.

In other words, most of the big savings come from telling the Senate Finance Committee to find said savings later on, and pinky-swearing that they'll make it easy for them to do so. The $500 billion up-front savings come mostly from some accounting tricks, including a reduction in Social Security's COLA adjustment.


And how is that markedly different from the House GOP's "Cut, Cap, and Balance" plan? A few ways:

1. Raising the Debt Ceiling is contingent on a Balanced-Budget Amendment. The BBA outlaws deficit spending and requires a two-thirds vote for tax increases.
2. The Up-Front Savings come mostly from non-defense discretionary spending. Such spending is reduced to FY2008. The actual number of savings is less, $111 billion to $500 billion, but the savings are more real.
3. This is acknowledged as the beginning of fiscal sanity, not the end of it. Obama has been touting a "big plan" so he can say that he "made hard choices" during next year's campaign. He wants to pretend that our nation's fiscal health can be tied up in a pretty package with the word "DONE" on the label.

In other words, CCB requires making actual spending cuts, while GO6 requires pretending that we have already made them.

JFK was No Arthur...

...and his presidency was no Camelot. (h/t: Other McCain)

This should be read because it punctures the Assassination Conspiracy Myth: that Kennedy was killed because he was going to withdraw our forces from Vietnam. The truth is exactly the opposite: Kennedy wanted Vietnam to be his "splendid little war," an opportunity to show the world American strength and resolve. Had he lived, he almost certainly would have done exactly as Johnson did, and his reputation would today be vastly different.

The Cuban Missile Crisis on Twitter

Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. spares none of the principles.

As a Kennedy hater, it fills my belly with warm, sticky snark.

I am the Wrecking-Ball Right

There's a good line in the movie L.A. Confidential, after the second-plot-point fight between Sgt. Bud White, played by Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce's Lt. Edmund Exley. Exley has discovered that the three black men he arrested for a shooting at the Nite Owl restaurant, in which an ex-cop was killed, were innocent. He recieved a promotion for his work on that case, but now he wants it re-opened.

"The Nite Owl made you," says White. "You want to tear that down?"

"With a wrecking ball," replies Exley. "You want to help me swing it?"

And the enemies become allies.

I've thought of nothing else since I looked at Robert Reich's "The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right". Most of the article is but strawmen assembled by anecdote, but the closing paragraphs sums up the basic meme that many on the left have been and will be adopting this coming election season:

Bachmann is not Palin

Diary of a Wimpy Catholic (great name) explains why (h/t: Insty):

In contrast to Palin’s approach, Bachmann hasn’t swung back or made any serious attempt to rally her troops and keep the story going. When called on her misstatement that the Founding Fathers had “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, she smiled serenely, cited John Quincy Adams who had been “a young boy” during the nation’s foundation years, and who worked to end slavery as an adult. For her, that counted. Knowing he was licked, George Stephanopolous moved on to the next question. Like the kid said in the Connect Four commercial, pretty sneaky, Sis.

Nancy Pelosi is Incredibly Stupid

In other news, Generalissimo Francisco... you know the rest. (h/t: The Other McCain)



Just for the record, this is what Job suffered:

• Reduction to poverty
• Loss of his workers
• Death of his children
• Boils and Sores
• His wife's nagging

This is what Obama has suffered:

• Having to listen to people who disagree with him
• Having to take seriously the suggestions of people who disagree with him
• Having to meet with people who disagree with them and treat them respectfully

In other words, Barack Obama has had do do things that come with the job description of being President of the United States. What's next? Does Obama get compared to Elijah for taking trips on Air Force One?

Hopefully, it was a snack flight

Most of the Book of Job, in fact, is Job arguing with his three friends about God's justice and mercy. If St. Nancy of the Catholic Cafeteria had actually ever read it, she'd know that comparing someone required by dint of his office to listen to opposing viewpoints with Job is not merely an egregious exaggeration; it's spectacularly inapt.

Meghan McArdle Discovers That Spending Cuts Means Cutting Spending

Actually, she yells that the sky is falling, and blames the Republicans. For wanting to cut spending. (h/t: Memeorandum)

The GOP will have taken a chance at meaningful entitlement reform and a mostly-spending budget deal, and thrown it away for literally no gain.

What chance at meaningful entitlement reform was that? The one where Obama mocked Paul Ryan? The One where Obama offered a budget that the CBO said was ungradeable? The one where the Senate Democrats ignored the budget that the House passed?

Does that mean that I'm shilling for the Democrats and saying you can never cut spending?  Hardly.  But you cannot cut spending by 40% in the middle of a recession.

I'd take a 2% spending cut in real dollar terms. If Obama offered that, instead of magical next-year spending cuts that will never actually cut spending, there'd be no debt-ceiling argument. Eric Cantor suggested that, and Obama stormed out of the room like it was his party and he'd cry if he wanted to.

So yeah, Megan, that makes you a shill for the Democrats who never permits cutting spending. Because as soon as the possibility of actually cutting spending appears, you squeal like the angels are busting open the seals.

And then women will be forced to back-alley abortionists,
human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together...

What Did I Just Do?

I changed the name, the template, and everything else.

Why? A couple of reasons:

1. The old name: The Essayist, reflected a desire to be above the fray of partisan politics, an to blog a weekly column instead of a daily pot-shot. That has not happened.
2. Another gentleman on blogger is using the name.

So now the old blogs I used before walking away from blogging in 2007 (only to return two years later) is gone. It's a bold new world.

So get used to seeing a lot of him.

If You Think Gay Marriage Will License Polygamy, You're Crazy

You're also right.

And all the proggies will not only not prevent it, they will work themselves over to first countenancing, then supporting, then calling you a bigot for disagreeing with it.

And they will have forgotten the fact that anyone ever predicted this chain of events.

It's what they do.

UPDATE: Right now, on Red Eye, Marc Lamont Hill is embracing "live and let live" towards polygamists.

Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. is Pissed

And he has a right to be:

While good people in California were fighting their hearts out to try and stop Janice Hahn (including the former Democrat Zumadogg, who switched parties because of this race!), conservative media was having a party.

They were having a party the whole time.

While people like Stacy McCain, DaTechGuy, Ace Of Spades, Penguin Pundit and others were working their hearts out to shine a light on the corruption of Janice Hahn, these guys barely touched the subject. A tweet from Breitbart, an article on Big Journalism, a couple of retweets from Stephen Kruiser. Meh. I'm grateful for that but. Pretty lackluster, when it wasn't downright zombie-like or just plain treacherous. Fox News? Don't even get me started.

I don't care who you are. There were all sorts of ways to tackle the story, and with a dancing stripper and rappers thrown into the mix, there's just no damned excuse for ignoring it, and everyone knows it.

Some of these people I had drinks with. Some of these people I thought were at least cordial colleagues. Did any of them take a moment to notice the aforementioned death threats? Cyberhacking? Psych-ops? Anything? Buehler? Buehler?

I'm kinda perplexed myself. Why would anybody on the right fail to take this story and broadcast it long and loud? It's the Obama in miniature: feckless professional politician, in bed with unsavories, screwing the people she's supposed to be serving. What's not to trumpet?

Ultimately, all politics are local, and this election was lost when Craig Huey decided not to use the ammo that had been offered to him. He didn't have a campaign, he had an After-Party Planning Commitee. But where was the goddamn cavalry?

Consider this.

That ad got more hits from Huffpo than any conservative blog. I got more media interviews from liberal rags like Slate and Salon than any conservative media.

Secession of Southern California

The usual write-up in the LA Times (h/t: Memeorandum):

Accusing Sacramento of pillaging local governments to feed its runaway spending and left-wing policies, a Riverside County politician is proposing a solution: He wants 13 mostly inland, conservative counties to break away to form a separate state of "South California.''

This occasionally happens on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and for much the same reasons.

"Secession proposals are just ways of thinking about California, and are also ways for people who feel neglected get the attention that they deserve," said USC historian Kevin Starr, who has written extensively on California. "It's never passed, and it will never pass. It's been up to bat 220 times and struck out every time.''

Ah, but it only needs to work once.

It's Still 2008.

Over at the City Journal (h/t: Ace), Nicole Gelinas argues that the recession has been prolonged because the cause of it has not been dealth with. To wit: the mortgage-backed toxic assets that 2007's Super SIV (Structured Investment Vehicle) and 2008's TARP are still there, and they're ready to wreak havoc as soon as the Fed tries to do anything with them:
That’s what started to happen just a few weeks ago, when the

Fed gingerly tried to declare victory. Because the central bank figured that markets were returning to health, it decided to sell some of its AIG-related securities. After the Fed made its move, an index that tracks this type of securities plummeted, after having doubled in the previous two years. The Fed panicked and made an unusual announcement that it wouldn’t try for sales again any time soon. The index then rose by double-digit percentage points.
These are not signs of a healthy financial market. Those toxic assets are still there, and they’re spreading their poison into the rest of the economy. Private businesses have no idea what will happen when the Fed pulls away all its support—or what will happen if the Fed doesn’t pull away its support. So companies hoard cash rather than create jobs. People, too, hoard cash. Stuck with the bubble’s hangover of private debt, they have no idea how they’re going to pay for their kids’ education or their own retirements. Even employed people without much debt are terrified that they’ll lose their jobs and won’t get new ones—so they don’t spend money, further depressing consumer spending and killing more jobs.

Obama's trillion-dollar Stimulus is utterly beside the point: it was merely the Illusion of Action, miles away from the actual source of the problem. Which means that he not only doubled-down on Bush's initial mistake, he added a new one. When the market isn't allowed to do its job, the market becomes bloated and stagnant.
Read the whole thing.

The Economy is Hosed.

Just let Vodkapundit tell it:

• 30% — federal debt held by public as percentage of GDP, 2005.
• 60% — federal debt held by public as percentage of GDP, 2010.
• 180% — federal debt held by public as percentage of GDP, CBO estimate, 2035.
• 0% — odds of current path being sustainable.

That's just the last part, so Read the Whole Thing, and when you're done giving Stephen Green a high-five for the obscure-but-amazingly-apt Douglas Adams reference, please remember just which feckless blowhard it was who found our financial house burning down and proceeded to throw napalm on it.

Al Gore Ruins Everything

Even Simcha Fischer's Marriage (h/t Insty):

MY KIDS: Ooh, a lamp! Let’s kick it until it’s dead!
LAMP: Smash.
ME: (lying on the couch dying with morning sickness): . . .I didn’t hear anything. . . [promptly manages to actually forget about everything]
LAMP: I guess I’ll just lie here and bleed poison all over your house, you dirty breeders.
KIDS: Yay, let’s throw stuff around!
HUSBAND: Hi, I’m home! Hey, there’s broken glass all over the room. There’s mercury mixed in with the six bags of winter clothes you were sorting, and it’s all over the portacrib. Okay, well, you lie there, I’ll take care of it.

This is going to be the tip of the iceberg. When the incandescent ban becomes fully felt, ManBearPig is getting the blame. And people will say "Bush did some crazy things, but he didn't fill my house with mercury."

And the 2000 election will finally be over.

Yeah, Marriage isn't Changing At All. Nope. Totally the Same.

Except now it's "nonmonogamous." (h/t: Insty)

But gay marriage totally won't open the door for polygamy. Nope. Preposterous.

Janice Hahn Fails

In case you had forgotten, Janice Hahn is the Democratic Candidate for CA-36 who got called out by Ladd Ehlinger for putting gangsters on the public payroll as part of a bogus gang-pacification campaign.

He did so using a hilarious attack ad that offended all the right people. Hordes of them poured into the comments section of the link waving the bloody shirt of Honky Offendedness:



Everyone told Ladd he was wasting his time. They were wrong. How can you tell that Hahn is now realizing this is a problem?

Her attorneys sent Fox11 a cease and desist letter forbidding them from pursuing this story.

 She may as well have paraded her dog in front of the camera and told everyone she is not a crook.

Tax Rates are Not Lower. Tax Revenues are.

The new meme issuing from the White House is that tax rates are at historically low levels (E.J. Dionne burbled this in his last idiotic column). As the Washington Examiner points out, this is hogwash (h/t: Insty). What's low is tax revenues as a percentage of GDP.

And why?

But the AP went on to report that the recession and tax loopholes, not lower tax rates, were the cause of the revenue drop: “The poor economy is largely to blame, with corporate profits down and unemployment up. But so is a tax code that grows each year with new deductions, credits and exemptions.”

So the Democrats are using the current degraded state of the economy as justification for continued reckless, ineffective spending. And are now prepared to waste the nation's time in a fruitless game of whack-a-loophole instead of reforming the tax code.

Hope. Change.

Alan Dershowitz Explains the Casey Anthony Verdict

He does so rather too well, in my opinion (h/t: Had Enough Therapy?):

Even if it is "likely" or "probable" that a defendant committed the murder, he must be acquitted, because neither likely nor probable satisfies the daunting standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Accordingly, a legally proper result—acquittal in such a case—may not be the same as a morally just result. In such a case, justice has not been done to the victim, but the law has prevailed.

I say "rather too well" because it brings up that yawning need for justice, and then puts it aside. It names "reasonable doubt" to be a daunting standard, and then fails to tell us just what that standard is. It begs the question: what is "reasonable" doubt?

We say we it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to incarcerate one innocent man. But is that what the system does? Or does it let ten guilty men who can afford lawyers go free, and incarcerate ten innocent poor men? And if it does, then whom does the system really serve?

I bet Alan Dershowitz knows, even if he ain't sayin'.

"White Girl Bleeds a Lot"

Over at Other McCain, the blunt truth of "youths" engaging in mob violence yields another:

“Liberals believe ‘racist’ is the antonym of ‘Democrat.’”

Indeed.

EJ Dionne Doesn't Know What the American Revolution Was About...

Because, if he did, he'd know that if we were back in Boston in 1773, he'd be a Tory.

The American Revolution was not merely directed against monarchy. In the 169 years that the Thirteen Colonies existed, not a single monarch ever set foot in any one of them. No monarch ever made himself personally noxious to the American people.

What the American Revolution attacked was arbitrary authority, those "multitudes of new offices" that act beyond the scope of any public consent. That we have an elected Congress does not instantaneously legitimize whatever that Congress may decide to do. That is what the Founders understood, and what the Tea Party understands: that any government becomes illegitimate the instant that the people so decide.

The levels of taxation do not matter if the people no longer wish to pay them. Vague, self-serving remonstrances about measures for "the public good" do not matter if the people consider them contrary to their their own good. Popular rule does not mean merely elections, it means a government in the role of a servant, not a parent. As soon as those in office start believing they know the public good better than the public, then they have exceeded their brief, and it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish said offices.

Because a little Revolution every now and again is a healthy thing.