I don't suppose I'd object to simplifying the tax code along the lines of this article in the Fiscal Times.
The beauty of tax reform is that it starts with a belief everyone shares: The current system is horrible. Monstrously complex, unfair and inefficient, the code has fewer friends in Washington than Mahmoud Ahmadinejab, and in principle, throwing it over for something simpler is a sure bipartisan crowd pleaser.
For starters, lowering the top bracket and corporate tax rates is long overdue, if only to bring us in line with other developed nations. And I don't have a problem with closing loopholes, which I see as essentially government manipulation of private behavior via the tax code. Anything to reduce the Byzantine nature of the tax code is a benefit to me.
But I suspect they won't go far enough; won't lower the rates enough, won't remove enough loopholes. Instead of a 60,000 - page tax code, we'll get a 30,000- page one. How long would it take for interest-group pressure and regulatory creep to return us to the same place we are now?
The blogger (who is not the cartoonist) responds to objections thusly:
Now look at the first few comments there. It's people complaining that the cartoon is in bad taste! Good grief, have you people ever actually listened to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage or looked at Sarah Palin's campaign strategy? I say again, madness.
See? All you have to do is look at them, and you know that they are scum who deserve nothing. And are way too angry all the time. It's so frightening!
This article in the WSJ about the superiority of "Chinese mothers" has been making the rounds of late. The debate has been had by people who know far more about raising children than I do. But the reason the debate exists, I think, is right here:
By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.
Without question, this is the blinkered, self-emasculating guilt that the modern Western parent has willingly embraced. For some reason, we have decided that to have a child is a dastardly act, and that a parent must labor for decades, giving up all trace of adult life or personality, in order to atone for it. It's gotten so bad that a complete 180-degree turnaround -- becoming a totalitarian shame-dispenser -- can now be seen as an outre position worthy of a new look.
For myself, Here is what I wrote on the subject in September of 2005:
Our modern child-rearing techniques seem focused on the emotional lives of children. I think this is wrong, because in the grand scheme of things, the emotions of children are transitory and relatively unimportant. Child-rearing should be about not the blooming of the child's life but the coaxing into existence of the adult the child must become. None of the research-approved, peaceable parenting skills that the elite would foist on us are half so valuable as inducing a child to think beyond his immediate wants and desires. And I am unconvinced that this can be done without the use of fear.
Yes, I said fear. It is written that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To this, I add that the fear of parents is the beginning of familial peace. the State of childhood is a state of constant physical and emotional flux. They are long on impulse and short on experience. Catering to that mind-set gives that mind-set power that it neither deserves nor can use justly. To make up for that experience, it is necessary for parents to set boundaries and defend them to the utmost. As the best defense is a good offense, a properly built fear of parental anger keeps boundaries defended, sometimes without the parent even knowing it.
It is not that I love children the less, but that I love adults more.
Apparently if you're not within the actual confines of a court of law, you have no obligation to back your statements up with any kind of connection to fact.
Jeff Danziger, who doodles blurry editorial cartoons for the WaPo and presumably, other places, made his contribution to setting a new tone of calm introspection so needed after the Giffords shooting:
Really?
Ed Frank of Frank Strategies asks him to explain himself. Danziger replies with the usual boilerplate, that the Tea Parties anti-government rhetoric created a mind-controlling memefog that drove Loughner like the talking dog commanded Berkowitz. He does so while demonstrating command of no facts other than his Vietnam war record, which is as impressive as it is irrelevant.
Frank asks for a single piece of solitary evidence to back up his assertion. Danziger replies with the following atom-splitting chunk of Pure Genius:
Ed. We are not in court. I have been watching the development of this combination of loons and opportunists since it started. The Tea Party, the very name is ridiculous. Crazed fat people tortured by their lack of success in life, following the absolute worst of our politicians. Palin, Angel, Quayle’s rotten kid. These people are your choice for anything? The whole thing is based on unreality. Don’t you understand? And Mcveigh was reading that crazy shit from the enbd times or whagtever it is called.
If I was going to make up a stereotypical cornered-nitwit misdirecting non-response, I would not have penned one this utterly bereft of reason. It is adolescent in its mind-set: a set of assumptions based on hearsay and prejudice, into which knowledge of any kind cannot enter. The half-assed typing just seals the deal; I am dissapointed not to find ALLCAPS or a string of exclamation points melting into a string of 1's.
But wait, there's more:
In the end the government has GOT to work. We are in competition with the world. Car companies don’t compete. nation now compete. And these asses want to go back to the 1700′s. I’ve written enough. The whole thing is probably unstoppable except with another dumb war. That’s what usually happens. You can have it.
"Big Brother has to protect us, and if you disagree you're a Luddite, and Good Day, Sir! I'm going to slink off and Profoundly Despair For My Country. [music swells]"
This man believes himself wiser than the rest of us. He really really does. It makes me sad inside.
The Greeks believed in destiny. Unlike Old Testament prophets, Greek oracles weren't interested in changing behavior. If the gods let you know that something was going to happen, then that thing was going to happen. That thing was not going to change, no matter what you did. The message was not "Check yourself," but "Brace yourself."
Oedipus proves this perfectly. His parents, and then he, were told that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. Everything that Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus did to prevent this guarunteed that it would happen. By abandoning baby Oedipus on a hillside, Laius and Jocasta guaruntee that Oedipus grows up not knowing who his real parents are. By getting away from the people he thinks are his parents, Oedipus puts himself into his true parents' path. As Camille Paglia put it in Sexual Personae: "Oedipus, fleeing from his mother, runs right into her arms."
A good few wingnuts are up in arms over the fall of Owen Honors, the Captain of the USS Enterprise, who was a bit too Kirk for his own good. Here's Other McCain:
Just to be clear about the rules of the New Navy in the post-DADT era: An admiral can dress in drag and march in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, but any sailor who makes a wisecrack about such behavior will be drummed out of the service.
Honors is being hung out to dry for something that was either fine with his then superiors or which he was duly critiqued for and allowed to move on in his career. Either way, this is ex post facto outrage and the senior leadership of the Navy has simply thrown a dedicated and decorated officer to the wolves.
I respect their point of view, but I'm not sure I share it. There is no line of work in which you can make raunchy videos with your co-workers and subordinates and not get fired for it if it should come to light and embarass the higher-ups. Everybody blows off steam. Bosses are inclined to overlook blowing off steam, up to the point when it causes the public to question the judgement of the organization.
If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party, you might get away with it, depending on how funny everyone thinks it is. If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party and the pictures end up on Facebook, you're going to get fired, no matter how hard the boss laughed at the time.
Unfunded liabilities to state and municipal pensions are over a trillion dollars -- promises unbacked by any real coin -- and both states and municipalities rely on issuing debt to fund their increasingly unsustainable spending. They're approaching junk status now on that front, and will soon approach "joke," so very soon the market is going to impose some extremely serious austerity measures on these bodies, as they simply will no longer be able to borrow at all.
A dire situation, to which CNBC responds in careful, measured tones:
Remember, we are living in the golden era of "Too Big To Fail," a time when Uncle Sam is ready, willing and able to bailout any institution is deems systemically important. If Citigroup is too big to fail, logic would dictate that so too is the State of California.
Moreover, state and local issuers can do something corporations can't: raise your taxes and cut your services, something that is happening right now across the country.
All of this is bullish for the muni market.
Don't worry! The Man's gonna pay for his mismanagement with your money! Buy, people! Please?
Insurance is basically a swindle, a hedged bet. We all buy it because we figure it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. But the insurance industry essentially exists to take your money and then come up with reasons to not give it back to you. No one who has ever dealt with an insurance company can say otherwise.
All of which is fine and good, until the following:
Did you know that the life insurance lobby is actively lobbying to restore the estate tax?
Why would the life insurance industry care about that? It turns out that ten percent of life insurance industry revenue is related to the estate tax. Wealthy people take out life insurance in order to reduce estate taxes because when you die, your life insurance payout doesn't count as part of your estate.
So the estate tax is essentially a benefice distributed to one of America's largest and most rapacious industries.
Other McCain takes a shot at Feministe's opining on Julian Assange's sexual assault charges and ends up making the wrong point:
In an era when some 40% of U.S. births are to unmarried women, in a culture where “Girls Gone Wild” and “hook-ups” are normative, where threesomes, bisexual experimentation and amateur video-porn orgies have become a virtual rite of passage for many young Americans, where chlamydia and herpes are pandemic — in this era of rampant sexual decadence, I say, doesJill Filipovic(J.D., NYU) seriously expect horny strangers to negotiate consent calmly on an act-by-act basis while they’re knocking boots, making the beast with two backs, in flagrante delicto?
Listen up, sweetheart: You buy the ticket, you take the ride.
If you will forgive the puns, I take his thrust, but not his point.
Sex does not submit well to legalese. It is the animal in us, acting on non-rational desire, creating an experience that our bodies ride but do not fully control. Contracts made in such a state lend themselves easily to misunderstanding.
And yes, women would do well not to shag impressive-seeming strangers just because their goddamn names are in the paper. That's stupid, and no one should be subject to a harpy-bomb of dull denunciations ("slut-shaming!") because they point out that it's stupid. Sex should come from a well-ground of mutual respect and commitment. You can't have that with someone you don't know, and it's stupid to assume otherwise, and it's irresponsible to teach young people the contrary.
That said, just because a gentleman is hip-deep into a lady does not prevent her from applying the breaks, however foolish her actions up until that point. I don't accept the idea that once the pants are off, she's obligated to cut him a slice of trim. No man could walk into any court of law and say "Hey, she took my pants off. She owes me at least an old-fashioned." Life just doesn't work that way.
So yes, when she says "STOP," he's obligated to stop.
Whether his failure to do so meets the legal definition of rape is another question. The circumstances would play an enormous role. Say, for example, he doesn't hear her, because he's climaxing, and her protests aren't loud enough. Say she tells him to stop, and she does, because of some sudden thing he did/said that kicked her completely out of mood. But then they talk some more, and he moves in again, and she doesn't say "no"? Tacit consent? Not? Murky?
I don't know, myself. But I suspect that yelling the louder will not illuminate the issue.
Among the more tedious aspects of politics is the rush to pen gleeful post-mortems of the losing party. But two years ago, the GOP was supposed to be doomed, a regional party on its way out like the Federalists of old. Now the Democrats are, in the eyes of the wingnut-sphere, swirling the drain. Here's Roger Simon, prognosticating a nervous breakdown for the donkeys:
the reasons for the Democratic breakdown are infinitely more serious, starting with this little tidbit — Keynesian economics is dead. Giving away money as the route to political success or attempted social justice just isn’t going to work anymore, because there isn’t any money to give away. And it’s only going to get worse as the population ages. The whole justification for the Democratic Party — the welfare state — is one giant Ponzi scheme that makes Madoff seem like a piker. And everybody knows it. All across the world, from Portugal to Japan, the system is in free fall.
Now, I don't think he's wrong on the subject of Keynesian economics. I think it is "dead", inasmuch as the idea that it's reached its practical limits is becoming widely acceptable. But that doesn't mean dismantling the progressive Leviathan will be a task simple or assured. The beast still has many adherents, who will fight for their place at the public teat.
So no, the idea isn't dead, and it isn't pining for the fjords, either. It's just old, and sick, and in need of hip replacements to survive.
Representatives of three liberal advocacy groups on Monday blasted President Obama’s proposed two-year freeze on federal civilian worker pay.
And by "blasted" the gang at The Hill undoubtedly mean "made a series of fatuous and unsurprising comments about. Hey, you try making this shit interesting."
Tom Friedman-bashing being apparently the sport of the day, The Other McCain demonstrates the distinction between himself and a sophist like Freidman:
The unfortunate fact that an argument may be both superficially persuasive and fundamentally wrong constitutes an eternal temptation to the minds of those people who permit their admiration of literary excellence to overcome their common sense.
Go read David Brooks’ infamous 1997 ode to “national greatness” and you will find no shortage of literary skill. Clear away the superficial eloquence, however, and you recognize that Brooks is arguing on behalf of the same sort of big-government, guns-and-butter, welfare/warfare state agenda that led LBJ into the political/policy debacle of the Great Society, the Dien Bien Phu of 20th-century American liberalism.
In Plato's dialogues, Socrates preaches against Gorgias and his ilk for exactly this reason: their ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger (that the Thirty Tyrants handed Socrates his cup of hemlock for a similar charge is a perfectly classical irony). For his part, Gorgias wrote of nothing as consistently as the power of language to distort the mind and enflame the heart. Whenever I read the Sophits, I am struck by how post-modern they sound, how easily their arguments work in an academic format.
The Reason post that McCain hangs his deconstruction on has great fun pointing and laughing at Friedman's endless repetition of himself, especially his current obsession with "nation-building at home" (because we don't have a nation at home now). It's tempting to ascribe this tedium to a) blundering stupidty, or b) sheer laziness. But more likely Friedman knows exactly what he's doing, and knows that if he says "nation-building at home" enough times, people will decide that it means something. And to Aristotle, persuading people to think or do something means the rhetorician has succeeded.
In the end, Park51’s application is likely to be unsuccessful financially while mobilizing a new round of opposition. It’s a lose-lose proposition put forward by a tone-deaf organization that seems determined to alienate allies and embolden opponents.
I think that the true source of the outrage: the complete gob-smacked dumbfoundedness that anyone would be offended. "What, we're just applying for public moneys set aside to aid redevelopment of the lands our co-religionists laid waste to, so we can spread the good word of Islam. What's the big?"
It's like trying to explain table manners to a fifteen-year-old.
I remained stoic when your acolytes spit on my car and called my husband a “baby killer” when I crossed through your phalanx at Walter Reed to take my children for medical care. I refused to respond as you smashed your fists into the hood of my car, destroyed my mirrors with bottles and keyed my doors in California, my children mute and terrified as you screamed your hate and bile.
Just because they've managed to toss all this down the memory hole doesn't mean we have.
My copy of The Communist Manifesto (it is wise to know the ways of one's adversary, tovarisch) has an introduction from a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist from the 1980's or so. The old comrade claims that the "flexible-response" of Western Democracies when confronted with Bolshevism (permitting unions, mandating the eight-hour-work day, the minimum wage) caught the Reds completely by surprise. They didn't expect that the kapitalists had such foresight in them.
It's saying too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I'm sure there are plenty of European politicians who won't survive their next encounter with the voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big. They are about to discover that their public spending, which seemed justified in good economic times, has to be cut. The middle class knows in its heart of hearts that its subsidies, whether for mortgages, university tuition, or even health care, can't last. Some voters even know that their pay-as-you go pension systems aren't sustainable in the long term, either.
Facts are stubborn things, as a certain Founding Father put it. The state can only do so much, should only do so much. We are in the midst of discovering again where that line should be drawn. And our own President seems to be behind this learning curve:
Our recent foray into health care reform took us in the opposite direction from the rest of the developed world, too, not that we were really doing anything so different to start with. As Besharov and Call also note, Americans are wrong to think they currently enjoy "private" or "free-market" medicine. Even when it is not directly state-funded through Medicare or Medicaid, American health care is paid for by employers. And those employers, in turn, get a tax cut for providing health care to employees—in other words, a subsidy.
While I find the conflation of tax cuts and subsidies specious ("Because only taking ten dollars from people instead of fifteen is exactly the same as giving them five bucks. Dumbass." - Vodkapundit), basically, this is right: we don't have a free-market health care system. When Obama and the Democrats claimed that their "reform," far from being a takeover, was but the logical extension of current obligations, they were not lying. They had simply convinced themselves to extinguish a bonfire with gasoline.
Real health-care reform, on the other hand, will involve freeing health labor and capital, instead of funneling it into the insurance and legal industries. If we're not making it easier to build hospitals, we're not doing a thing to make health care more affordable.
If working people are to fend for themselves and support their own families without help, they cannot be under-bid for employment by migrants who, as often as not, have no dependants and no permanent obligations in the host country. The uncontrolled movement of peoples around the globe is problematic for welfare states – which can end up supporting them – but it may present even more dramatic difficulties for a country with a contracting state. The combination of reduced welfare and unlimited migration could produce ugly consequences which no responsible person wants to see.
The premise that immigration should never be limited is relatively modern and backed up by little besides an altruistic frisson. The libertarian responds that labor has the right to move where it wills. And it may indeed. But in a world where the supply of capital outweighs the supply of labor, the free movement of the latter penalizes the workers of nations that develop the former.
Too many promises have been made by altruists, promises based on faith that any good that could be imagined could be done without cost to other goods. Like an overextended credit card, we'll be paying for it for a long time.
Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.
Ultimately, it is the people who are going to have to decide what course we take in these troubled waters. Politicians do well when they give people a choice between competing options rather than obfuscate the differences. The question is, do politicians believe they will be rewarded for this?
One of the main reasons for the Democrats' defeat this year was voters' sense that they wouldn't listen -- that they rammed through a predetermined agenda without paying any attention to voters' misgivings, and that they, in fact, seemed to glory in their lack of accountability. (Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's parade-with-gavel through the throngs of anti-Obamacare protesters?) By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.
They represent us. They ought to give a damn what we think.
I feel like Tommorrow means something, and I feel like it doesn't. It seems to me that we have but one final chance to pull back from the abyss, from the slow strangling descent into a New Class-managed Dark Age. On the other hand, even the forlorn hope of Dem-Plosion will result in nothing but the opportunity to slowly slip the Progressive Leviathan's grip. That crazed radical Paul Ryan, the man who's out of his mind, is planning on taking the next 75 years to restore us to fiscal sanity.
Given the high that the Democrats experienced 2 years ago, I don't know how the GOP can claim a mandate for their more radical (and necessary) plans. It might not at all be possible to forestall the utter and complete collapse of legitimacy.
The people are sick of Democrats. They're sick of Republicans, too. They're sick of "independents". They're bone-weary of Congress, the White House, the lobbyists, the activists, bureaucrats, the media. Everyone but the army can go to hell as far as most voters are concerned.
If that keeps up, then some tommorrow down the road, the other shoe will drop.
It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck — but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart. Or, to use Obama’s favorite analogy, you have a car stuck in ditch, so you call the mechanic, but the only tool he brings with him is a sledgehammer. And then he smashes your car to pieces and charges you $100,000 for his service. Finally, he calls you racist for complaining.
I am told that I live in a deeply blue state. The outward evidence for this abounds: our House of Delegates and State Senate has been dominated by Democrats for a long time, controlling almost 3/4 or the lower house and 2/3 of the Senate.
The Chinese have had this concept called the Dynastic Cycle for some time: a predictable rise and fall based on human nature and the inherent errors of monarchial government. A family rises to power, becomes corrupt, and falls. Time both seals later emperors in tradition and blocks them from the awareness of what they need to be. The result is the belief that they need do very little.
Governments the world over are discovering that the river of money is not endless. That seemingly-inexhaustable mountain of wealth has been turned into an ocean of debt that will take decades to pay off. The spendthrift habits of the Western nations will put burdens on our children, and other generations not yet born, that should outrage us as a people. We are investing in the old rather than the young, and are punishing risk-taking and entrepreneurship rather than rewarding it. Our tax regimes seem to be deliberately crafted to kill innovation and long-term thinking. (What does "legacy" mean if the wealth I have accumulated in my life cannot be passed on to my children or heirs, but is instead eaten by the all-consuming government?) Young people -- young families -- are the foundation upon which Western Civilization is built. Neglect them, overburden them, cheat them, and you are committing societal suicide.
The premise of democracy is that the people, who live in the world and market, are far closer to reality than a prince sealed off by decorum and thick castle walls. That premise is about to be tested.
Liberals love to talk up their abstract obligations to the greater good -- a greater good of undefined, unknown "society at large."
And what happens? Because the are pursuing in their minds some greater good involving the abstract, in the tangible ethical decisions of everyday life, they cheat and behave more selfishly than conservatives -- because they feel they're already doing some moral thing like only buying local produce so that gives them some wiggle room to behave unethically in their personal lives. Papal indulgences again, in other words.
Conservatives believe the opposite. We think we have a high duty to perform ethically in our personal real lives and less of a duty to just generally give money or other support to people we don't know and never could know. We're sort of against alienation of the moral sense from its ultimate object.
Which, as a commenter points out, is pure Screwtape:
Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malic to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real, and the benevolence largely imaginary
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chp. 6
Now, a great many people suffer from hypocrisy. We all, to a degree more or less fail to keep the moral code we espouse (which is a point Lewis makes in Mere Christianity). But one of the peculiar aspects of revolutionary creeds is the way in which sacrificing the good of people around you for an imagined Golden Age becomes almost a moral duty. Progressivism overlows with this. One need not look long to find those on the left who think it absolutely essential to tax gasoline with the deliberate purpose of increasing the suffering of those who use it. This is needed, so that we can "save the Earth."
One of the questions I'd love to ask the greenies who want to rescue us all from the Industrial Revolution is "Who has to die?" Given that the current population of the Earth is 6 billion or so, and given that the pre-industrial earth had a population of about 1 billion or so, we're going to find ourselves in a Malthusian nightmare to get anywhere near a level that Greenpeace would be happy with. I don't suppose any sustainability advocates are going to be volunteering for euthanasia to Save the Earth.
His opponents haven't put forth specifics of their own, nor offered genuine compromise, while the media have allowed the right's activists and gabbers to run wild with criticism without furnishing legitimate alternative solutions.
Right. Because back when the Democrats were running against Bush in 2002, 2004, and 2006, they were stuffed with legitimate alternative solutions. And the media certainly didn't let Democratic activists and gabbers run wild without holding their feet to the fire.
Hey, David. This garden slug I just stepped on called for you. He wants his self-awareness back.
Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah confirmed that the Iranian President will not be throwing rocks at Israel in a speech he gave Saturday. "If President Ahmadinejad asks my opinion, I shall say: 'A stone? You are capable of throwing more than a stone,'" he said.
Personally, I'm suspicious of the fact that the title of the book has not been released. Don't you think if it was a wingnut tome, we'd know it by now?
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sent a letter to the pope thanking him for opposing a Florida pastor’s threat to burn the Quran and calling for cooperation against secularism, the Vatican and the Iranian presidency said Saturday.
Because a Florida pastor was going to burn a Quran out of respect for secularism.
The Vatican said Pope Benedict XVI had received the letter during a brief meeting with one of Iran’s vice presidents at the end of his weekly general audience Wednesday. Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi did not release the contents of the message.
I have nothing to say on the subjet of Meghan McCain, because Meghan McCain is not nearly annoying enough to be interesting. But when SnarkandBoobs rips her into tiny tiny pieces and laughs at the pieces lying on the floor, I respond with lusty huzzahs:
Others may not have had my fortitude, so forgive them if they failed to ask about your fancy-pants Uggs, your inane “big tent” comments, your “crazy-sex” tales, or your tragic over-use of commas. Your book was basically a tale told by a useful idiot. Full of shrieking sound and temper tantrum fury, signifying nothing.
Also, I decide to add her to my linksheet. Because, snark. And boobs.
Downpage in the mostly pedestrian account of the wrangling about continuing the current tax rates ending the Bush Tax Cuts, we have a quotation from the DNC's new fight ad:
“Boehner has a different plan,” the ad states. “Tax cuts for businesses and those that shift jobs and profits overseas. Saving multinational corporations 10 billion.”
Because, you know, if tax rates go up for business that can send jobs overseas, they totally won't do that.
I was perfectly content to believe that Khomeini was simply a Pharisee, a legalist, a Raging Medieval Intolerant. I did not need to know that he raped a 5-year-old girl in order to dislike him. To know that he did, and that he justified it under the flimsiest of pretexts (as though rubbing your penis between someone's thighs is not a sex act), does not augment my dislike, but rather morphs it to a horrified nausea.
Please tell me that isn't the Q'uran that's being quoted. Tell me it's the Haditha. Whatever difference that might make.
Over at The Other McCain, Smitty has a solid post, Dodging Federalism, in which he points out that fiscal conservativism must come before social conservatism:
Social conservatives, and I am one, need to grasp that worrying about private behavior at the Federal level (e.g. variations of marriage) sets the precedent for much evil, like abortions and the Department of Education...
Traditions are organic; politics are plastic. The one can support the other, but cannot substitute for it.
This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.
A good few wingnuts are annoyed that Obama went no further, to admit that Bush was right in 2007 and the Surge worked. Jennifer Rubin, and Jonah Goldberg both make this point, and Stephen Green wrestles it down and holds its nose into the mess it made. Myself, I don't care too too much. Yeah, it would be nice, but politicians don't get paid to admit error.
This is a President who has blamed his predecessor at every turn, who stood in sharp opposition to his predecessor on Iraq from its beginning. Here, without condescension or agression, he speaks of Mr. Bush and Iraq in at least the semblance of a spirit of charity.
The resemblance doesn't mean that Beck wants to take us back to the days of segregation. It means the opposite. Crying "socialism" is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It's a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn't end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That's because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it's a really slow bus.
It's always a good idea when reading the Left to assume projection, or as Breitbart put it, that they accuse others of doing what they do. So when Saletan says "you know, these wingnuts really don't hate on black people," he's the one making the real concession. He's conceding that there's another principle operant in his opponents than bigotry, that opposition to racism is an idea that the Right has fully, finally embraced. And he's admitting that them crazy crackers do this all the time. And if this is true, then what animates the right must be something else.
It's official: the race card is maxed out. The cudgel lacks only a ceremonial bronzing.
It's a strange war that ends this way; but as Clausewitz said, war is the continuation of politics by other means. We're moving from war to a very tense political environment. That's more or less what we should expect. What comes next? Either compromise arises that allows tensions to ramp down, so that the political takes over from the war; or it goes the other way, and war blooms anew from the failure of politics.
Triumphalism would be wrong at this point. The fact is, nothing about this war went according to plan, and if we end up slumping towards defeat in Afghanistan and shrugging our way to a (hopefully) Cold War with Iran, then it might yet prove a Phyrric victory.
But all you folk who said that the war was unwinnable, that staying the course was infinitely stupid, that al-Qaeda was destined to triumph, that civil war was inescapable, that the whole thing was doomed, lock, stock and barrel; YOU WERE WRONG.
Salomatic.com, which bills itself as "the Worlds Most Comprehensive Guide to Mosques and Islamic Schools," refers to the Cordoba House as a mosque. There's even a picture of Friday prayers going on right now.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 15, 2010) — Watching superheroes beat up villains may not be the best image for boys to see if society wants to promote kinder, less stereotypical male behaviors, according to psychologists who spoke Sunday at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.
And how if society would like to keep a bit of stereotypical male behavior around? I mean, just in a glass case, for when terrorists attack and such? Not anyplace where it might get on the new drapes, God forbid.
I have my doubts about whether the builders of Cordoba House -- aka the Ground Zero Mosque -- are really interested in bringing about dialogue between Islam and the West. But if they wanted to prove it too me, there's a simple thing they could do.
I don't care about the First Lady of the United States. It's not a real position; it's a dull euphemism for the President's wife, dating from a time when such politesse obscured the purely romantic role that women played in politics. We have to say something about the woman who sleeps with our Head of State, so we call her that.
So when Michelle Obama emits some gaffe, like never being proud of her country, I ignore it, because I refuse to pay any credence to her importance, ceremonial or otherwise. I don't care about her.
But even I find it hard to disagree that eight -- eight -- vacations betrays a certain apres moi le deluge mentality. Or, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it, suggests
that her prior angst arose not because millions were not able to share the lifestyles of the elite but that she herself had not yet quite partaken in the sort of life she felt she deserved — which she is now apparently enjoying to the fullest. The fact that her Costa del Sol trip coincides with hard times back in the states, comes on the heels of the Kerry yacht and the Clinton wedding, and clashes with her husband’s anti-wealthy rhetoric (e.g., “at some point you’ve made enough money”) makes it all the more weird, both for her adminstration’s equality-of-result politics and for the larger liberal narrative of talking truth to power.
It's one thing to be wealthy and powerful in a time when others struggle. It's another to be so after explicitly casting your lot with the struggling and against the grandees. It may be less tone-deafness than hypocrisy, but
I cannot help but wonder why one's forgiveness of such ostentatious displays is the more forgivable if one mouths the right platitudes.
It occurs to me that I have been blogging about the grim subject of race more than any other subject, since The Essayist was re-booted. Indeed, it was the very subject that prompted its re-boot. So today, I lingered at The Root far more than I normally would at so leftyish a web site, and was treated to their Would a Black Person Get Away With This? feature.
The continuing irony of race relations in America is the degree to which people of different races don't hear each other making the same arguments. There isn't a white person in America who doesn't think that there are things you can get away with when you're black that you can't when you're white, and so it's nothing short of amusing to note blacks feeling the reverse is true.
The president's remarks were directed at the roots of all Americans. The definition of mongrel as an adjective is defined as "of mixed breed, nature, or origin," according to dictionary.com.
I have no difficulty believing that. I'm fine with the word "mongrel" and have no objection to the way the President used it. But imagine, just for a second, these same words, with this exact same intent, coming out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, and then imagine someone on the left saying "that's fine".
The story of Shirley Sherrod begins when she was 17 years old, when a white man murdered her father and got away with it. I'm going to repeat that. When Shirley Sherrod was 17 years old, a white man murdered her father and got away with it, because the elder Sherrod was black, and if you were a white man in Georgia in 1965, you could kill a black man and get away with it.
So yeah, she doesn't particularly like white people, and the speech which led to her resignation was mostly a description of how she came to move beyond that. When the edited snipped first appeared on Big Government I could tell immediately that she'd been cut off in the middle of a thought. I wondered if that thought was going to lead someplace into the light. The Anchoress, ever the voice of reason, thought so, too. And, well...
Why yes, I will be using it every time...
And yes, Andrew Breitbart would have done well to wait for the full footage before he released what he had. And yes, Barack Obama would have done well to demonstrate the stiffness of spine that the good Lord gave a flatworm and await events before demanding her head (unless of course, he really did leave the decision to Vilsack, which doesn't reflect very much better on him). Last night, Left and Right were as one in saying that the raw deal was Sherrod's.
Given American history, I am the sort of fellow who considers it perfectly understandable for African-Americans of a certain age to distrust and dislike white people. Shirely Sherrod most certainly possesses that age and experience. But to forgive her resentment does not oblige me to call it something else. For a woman of her education to publicly call out Andrew Breitbart as nothing more than the ghost of Jefferson Davis not only gives the lie to her supposed conversion, but bespeaks a shocking ignorance of the rhetorical situation, an ignorance that strikes at the heart of what Breitbart was getting at.
African-American activists like to pretend that the souls of white folk are theirs for the reading, that they know our deepest motivations better than we do ourselves. They've made mountains of racism out of molehills of speech for a long few decades. That they should feel the need to do this, after the horrible experiences of African-Americans, should surprise no one. But the expectation that I or Andrew Breitbart or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else should be bound to it, that raises an eyebrow.
It may take another hundred years before African-Americans have fully achieved what their ancestors labored so cruelly, suffered so miserably, to attain. Halley's Comet may return before the ancestral memories of fear, mistrust, and righteous anger become just memories. Charity and forgiveness alone may accelerate this process.
In the meantime, expect many people of many colors to vomit up the words that others attempt to put in their mouths.
Rachel Maddow always sounds as though she's telling a joke and has forgotten the punch line.
For some reason, Sean Hannity is less irritating on television than on radio.
Listening to Chris Matthews speak is like watching a dog dance on its hind legs. You're kind of impressed that he does it at all, and when he falls flat on his face, you're not suprised.
Cynthia Tucker has an almost Brezhnevian talent for making propaganda like "right-wing noise machine" sound like an insurance seminar. At least Michelle Malkin manages to put some punch into "thug-in-chief."
After half an hour of Hannity, you begin to remember the positive charms of Bill O'Reilly. Matthews, on the other hand, does not make one wish Maddow was back, nor look forward to Olbermann.
Stewart and Colbert only think that they're mocking this script rather than joining in it.
“What are you kids doing down there,” ask the voters, who’ve noticed some banging and crashing in the basement. “Are you kids writing a Carbon Tax?”
The greens check quickly with the focus groups and pollsters before shouting back up, “No, Mommy, of course not. We aren’t playing Carbon Tax. We’re playing Cap and Trade.”
Over at the Patheos blog, Theodore Dalrymple explains why the Left returned to their "Teabaggers = RACIST!" meme as soon as the leak in the Gulf got plugged. He chalks it up to the Theory of the Missing Motive:
Unable to see a rational and noble motive at the center of the Tea Party movement, liberals supply a darker and more convenient motive instead. Just as ancient cartographers wrote "there be dragons here" beyond the bounds of the world they knew, so liberals write "there be racism here" because the mind of the Tea Partier is undiscovered country in their map of the world. The Tea Party cannot be rationally and nobly motivated, the liberal believes, because the Tea Partiers are not rational and noble.
In other words, the problem is not that liberals dislike the principles promoted at Tea Party rallies. Most do not understand those principles. The problem is that liberals dislike the kind of people who go to Tea Party rallies.
There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.
In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous
From 2005 to now, despite a slew of victories, the Progressives have not changed.
[The following was originally posted at my livejournal last October. It is the Definition of "Overtaken by Events". Polanski has skated away scot free again, and while Vick has once more, albiet briefly, become a "person of interest". Nevertheless, in the light of Whoopi Goldberg once more rising to the defense of her fellow entertainers, it needs to be said again.]
An alien or archaelogist from the future, seeking to re-create what early-21stcentury humans meant by “controversy” could do worse that to make the Polanski case his study. All the elements abound: famous men, young girls, taboo sex and quaint drugs, rumours of judicial malfeasance, the drama of exile, competition for the status of victim, etc. If I cared, I would be enthralled.
But I do not care, and indeed plan to explain my not-caring in some detail. This being the case, one may fairly ask why I bother to put fingers to keyboard to pontificate on the subject. And I will fairly answer that my lack of caring is a feature, not a bug. It grants that most precious of journalistic bona fides, objectivity. So before I make comparison between Michael Vick and Roman Polanski, bear with me through the following Declaration of Disinterest:
Slipping the phrase "Obama's Katrina" into Google yields about 1.8 million results. Such ought not surprise; if every President runs against his predecessor, the latter's follies serve to flail the former. But in Obama's case, the nature of the problem strikes at the heart of his presidency.
When Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans, we wingnuts were quick to draw distinctions between acts of Nature and acts of Bush. I myself, at this very blog, put it thusly:
I'm not of the species that seems to want to blame the New Orleans Water Park on FEMA. I've yet to see anything from a source I trust that indicates that FEMA did anything different in regards to Katrina than they did with regard to any other natural disaster in living memory, and I'm pretty well convinced that the caterwauling to that end is a cynical manipulation by a bored press and a frustrated opposition upon discovering that the Cindy Sheehan and Hokum and Wailing Circus wasn't going to be the spark that lit the Bonfire of Bush's Vanities.
Conservatives do not believe that government exists to prevent bad things from happening, and they certainly don't expect the federal government to fill roles that belong to state and local governments. So we defended Bush during Katrina, because we were not surprised.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, came to the White House preaching the virtues of government as an agency of righteousness, a means for the general will to achieve its ends. His supporters likewise desire a government that acts, instantaneously, to do Good Things. And with every day that the crude continues flooding into the gulf, that vision becomes the weaker. Lo and behold, the President cannot fly below the surface of the earth and plug the leak with his eye-beams. He cannot, by virtue of his sonorous voice, make BP work any faster to plug the leak than they already are (you do realize that every drop of oil that ends up not in BP's tankers is lost money to them, right?). He's just a president; the waves do not, in fact, obey him.
And while this King-Canute moment is satisfying to conservatives, like Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer, it is gall and wormwood to progressives, who find themselves with nothing to do or say than "why can't somebody do something?" They do not appreciate being made to feel this way by a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress. They may not revenge themselves upon him for this, but their anger is palpable, and their hearts may not be his much longer.
An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
-Henry Clay
Every revolution contains within it something of evil.
-Edmund Burke
With which of these two elegant quotations would the average person agree? The difficulty of the question becomes more apparent the longer it is considered. In the West, where the American and the French Revolutions constitute the birth-cries of the modern age, we feel an obligation to assent to the former. Yet any serious study of the French, Russian, or even the American Revolutions will compel us to give at least credence to the latter. We may shrug it off by retorting that revolutions are not made with rose-water, but this is the more persuasive with the understanding that whatever revolution we live under need not be repeated and will not be undone. In other words, we may ignore the blood of our birth so long as we need not be born again.
But is revolution permanence? Have we established political structures so rooted in truth as to be past changing? To an extent, democracy is justified on answering, “yes” to this question: when the people rule, they need not revolt. But it is hardly a novelty to point out that majority rule can be tyrannical; James Madison pointed this out repeatedly. And if a majoritarian tyranny comes into existence, a revolution could surely be justified in destroying that democracy. Couldn’t it?
Or could it?
This essay will argue that every political system exists not for its own sake, but to protect a certain value that its framers held as essential to justice and order. This may seem obvious, but consider again its implications with regard to our current and beloved political ideal: democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to protect society. If it fails in that end, it may be reformed, altered, or even destroyed. No system of government is absolute; every state has an escape clause.
So Iran has banned Music, and Jay Nordlinger of NRO draws a parallel to Lenin, who apparently never touched the stuff, for fear that it would awaken human feeling, which was anathema to his work. He also makes mention of the oft-quoted fact that the Nazis were great lovers of art and music. How do this circle be squared?
For me, it bespeaks a difference between a totalitarianism of asceticism, and a totalitarianism of passion. Communism would be the paramount example of ascetic totalitarianism; one characterized by purification of the human spirit. The true Communist suffered for his ideology, was nailed to it like a cross, and was supposed to bear his ills with a martyr's patience. This may be one of the reasons why we tolerate Communists more than other shades of tyrant: Trotsky, Lenin, and Che were perfectly willing to share the misery they imposed on others.
Hitler, on the other hand, had no truck with self-denial. His Nietzsche-derived creed demanded just the opposite, that the desires of the self were holy, and to feast upon the weak was glorious and right. Hence, the Nazis devoured all that was good in every land they conquered, and took the pleasure of this enjoyment as proof of its truth.
Iran strikes me as being more in the ascetic vein, as Khomeni's condemnation of America as the Great Satan is of a kind with the denunciations of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. With all that in mind, the only question becomes "What took them so long?"
How did a civil rights principle meant to aid African Americans and others who suffered grievous discrimination for generations come to protect the “right” of Neo-Nazis to parade their Nazi wardrobes in a privately owned restaurant against the wishes of management? The short answer is that legislation and its interpretation doesn’t develop from a coherent set of moral principles, but instead based on who is able to persuade the legislatures and the courts to adopt the principles they prefer. The principle involved in Alpine Village case appears to be hostility to the rights of private property owners, not “civil rights.”
...to describe the Health Insurance Care Bill. For one, it relies on form of nomenclature leagues away from being as witty as it's supporters believe it, while being fully as tiresome as its opponents lament. For another, Obama didn't write the damn thing; Pelosi, Reid, and their infinite crew of Democratic Congressmen did. Since they're the ones up for election this November, I think the hate should be properly focused.
Now that Jon Stewart et al, are calling it "offensive," however? I won't call it anything else.
The Notion, which was my first blog, died, and has been a music blog since December, does not exist anymore. The Music blog has been renamed Genre Confusion, and all the old Notion posts that were about the same stuff that I write about here have been imported and labelled. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Now they must eat the fruit of their own way, and with their own devices be glutted. -Proverbs 1:31
That explains why socialism is miserable. It turns feral because it always makes promises it cannot keep, and the primary skill of a successful politician is the ability to avoid responsibility. As of this writing, it remains the official position of the Democrat Party that not a single one of its members bears any responsibility for the subprime mortgage crisis. Dodd, Frank, and Obama swam in millions of dollars of campaign donations and graft. They blocked audits of Fannie Mae, and gave speeches assuring the country that it was completely solvent. They greeted any suggestion of reform or oversight with furious accusations of greed and racism. None of them have been punished. In fact, they all enjoy more power than ever today, although Dodd’s time is running out.
To look at Greece is to look at the future. I think one good shock to the system will finally convince a majority of voters that the game cannot go on, that the stark choice is ahead of us. The structure for a revolt is already in the works.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were specifically enacted with the purpose of eradicating slavery and duly -- constitutionally -- empowered Congress to pass legislation in furtherance of this purpose. To say such laws are "unconstitutional" is simply in error -- previous to the lawful and constitutional passage of those amendments, such laws would have indeed have been unconstitutional and an unlawful overreach of granted Congressional power. After their lawful passage, however, Congress did have that authority.
And the reason that Congress decided that it need that authority was because certain states were violating the rights of their citizens, of failing to do the thing governments are created to do. The Constitution thus comes more fully in line with the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
Peasants in feudal society weren't technically slaves, but they were peons, persons with sharply-curtailed rights and certain obligations (including deference) to their social betters/masters. I think a fair reading of "slavery" includes the idea of "peonage," too. Unless there is some critical constitutional point here to be vindicated, I do not see any defensible purpose in arguing these amendments outlawed slavery but gave full constitutional blessing to regime of enforced peonage.
Precisely. Slavery and peonage are offenses against liberty, that can only be maintained by the use of force. As Governments exist to secure liberties, our government should be willing and able to act against one person's attempt to destroy the liberty of another. Hence, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a necessary and constitutional redress against 400 years of slavery and peonage.
Would it have been better if it was not necessary? Assuredley. Are there things about the way the Civil Rights Act as been used that I consider wrong, and offenses to liberty? Without doubt. But the law, as intended, has no legal or ethical flaw.
But under Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, officers in one of the nation's most violent cities are no longer being told to beef up arrest statistics. The number of arrests has declined the past two years. Yet homicides and shootings are down, too - to totals not seen since the late 1980s.
In other words, they're "shifting priorities" to violence intead of drug abuse.
"I'm not trying to win the drug war," Bealefeld said. "I'm out to win the war on violence and deal effectively with violence."
Which is why the California ballot initiative to legalize pot this November is so important. If it wins, it's going to be a lot harder for local PD's to say that they have a priority in punishing drugs instead of disorder. A corner will finally have been turned.
If I may address the elephant in the living room, the only reason people think that Elena Kagan is a lesbian is because she looks like a common stereotype of one. That doesn't mean she is one, and frankly, I'm not interested. We shouldn't pry into her love life, unless we have reason to believe her love life has affected her job performance.
Frankly, I'm wondering if we aren't just being treated to a smokescreen for Kagan's minimal credential for the job.
An Ann Arbor elementary school principal used a letter home to parents tonight to defend a field trip for black students as part of his school’s efforts to close the achievement gap between white and black students.
Dicken Elementary School Principal Mike Madison wrote the letter to parents following several days of controversy at the school after a field trip last week in which black students got to hear a rocket scientist.
I know there's an obvious reason that keeping white students away makes it more likely that black students will be inspired to achieve, but I'm apparently too stuffed with white privilege to see it.
Bush understood this idea, and so, by some appearances, does Obama. But he has not been permitted to admit his understanding by his base. In the New York Post, Robert Turner of the Center for National Security Law lets the cat out of the bag:
Actually, that isn't true. The Government, like any good Mafia Don, just wants to put his hands in your pocket as often as he possibly can. It's just easier for him to do this by taxing saving and investment rather than consumption.
