From Prop 8 to the Mosque near the WTC, from the disapproval of Congress’s spending to the disapproval of the President’s performance, from the opposition to Obamacare to the support for the Arizona law, a majority of the American people are on the same side of the arguments. And the curious thing is that the media and the incumbent majority politicians insult this large group and call them names — in an election year no less. How that is a winning plan for November is anyone’s guess. As a matter of strategy and tactics it is incomprehensible to us. What’s the secret plan that explains this apparent idiocy? HT: JOM
At the three minute mark of this video by Paddy Hirsch, you will understand how reckless securitizations, bad government policies, and a deeply flawed credit rating system, combined with a party atmosphere on Wall Street and a reckless global investor class to create a good portion of the mess we’re in today.
If the rumors are true, this rather emphatic April 8 posting on the website of Governor Charlie Crist of Florida is about to expire:
as we have said countless times before, Governor Crist is running for the United States Senate as a Republican. He will not run as an Independent or as a No Party Affiliation. The Governor is proud of his conservative credentials and stands firmly behind the principles of limited government and more personal freedom, the bedrock values of the Republican Party. He is proud to be a member of the Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. This should completely and utterly put to rest any of the unfounded rumors coming from the Rubio campaign that Governor Crist would run as anything other than the Republican that he is.
The ads against Crist write themselves. And as Jay Cost noted: “it would be hard to come up with a strategy that goes against the zeitgeist as much as Crist’s plan to run as an Independent.” These are strange times indeed. HT: Ace
A reporter attended a workshop for community organizers. Apparently there are a lot of people with way too much time on their hands and very little contact with the real world:
the other 13 students were earnest, grad-student types in their 20s — too young to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political correctness first took root on college campuses. The jargon I heard at the bookstore took me back to that age — albeit with a few odd variations. “Allyship” has replaced “solidarity” in the anti-racist lexicon, for instance, when speaking about inter-racial activist partnerships. I also heard one student say she rejected the term “gender-neutral” as sexist, and instead preferred “gender-fluid.” One did not “have” a gender or sexual orientation; the operative word is “perform” — as in, “Sally performs her queerness in a very femme way.”
The instructor’s Cold War-era Marxist jargon added to the retro intellectual vibe. Like just about everyone in the class, she took it for granted that racism is an outgrowth of capitalism, and that fighting one necessarily means fighting the other. At one point, she asked us to critique a case study about “Cecilia,” a community activist who spread a message of tolerance and mutual respect in her neighbourhood. Cecilia’s approach was incomplete, the instructor informed us, because she neglected to sound the message that “classism is a form of oppression.” The real problem faced by visible minorities in our capitalist society isn’t a lack of understanding, “it’s the fundamentally inequitable nature of wage labour.”
The central theme of the course was that this twinned combination of capitalism and racism has produced a cult of “white privilege,” which permeates every aspect of our lives. “Canada is a white supremacist country, so I assume that I’m racist,” one of the students said matter-of-factly during our first session. “It’s not about not being racist. Because I know I am. It’s about becoming less racist.” At this, another student told the class: “I hate when people tell me they’re colour-blind. That is the most overt kind of racism. When people say ‘I don’t see your race,’ I know that’s wrong. To ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race. I call it neo-racism.”
Can you imagine what a government would look like if it were run by grad students, left-wing instructors, and community organizers such as these? Of course you can’t.
To the little boy’s mother, it was just a 6-year-old boy playing around. But when Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter. They suspended Mason
Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?
The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review. In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch’s request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws…
President Barack Obama, before he was sworn in, had stated his preference for a playoff system. In 2008, Obama said he was going to “to throw my weight around a little bit” to nudge college football toward a playoff system, a point that Hatch stressed when he urged Obama last fall to ask the department to investigate the BCS…Hatch, a Utah Republican, was steamed that his home state team was deprived of getting a chance to play for the title last year.
“I’m encouraged by the administration’s response,” he said in a statement. “I continue to believe there are antitrust issues the administration should explore, but I’m heartened by its willingness to consider alternative approaches to confront the tremendous inequities in the BCS that favor one set of schools over others. The current system runs counter to basic fairness that every family tries to instill in their children from the day they are born.”
Under the BCS, the champions of six conference have automatic bids to play in top-tier bowl games, while the other conferences don’t. Those six conferences also receive more money than the other conferences, although the BCS announced this week that the ones that don’t have automatic bids will receive a record $24 million from this year’s bowl games.
As a reader put it at Instapundit: “If they try to control how much sugar I drink in sodas and how college football is played, I can’t think of anything they would not try to control. And, Orrin Hatch is equally to blame. His role lends credence to the idea that the ‘old guard’ Republicans are equally unprincipled.” Indeed.
The AP reports on a new deadly threat to mankind, the ancient practice of sitting:
a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly. Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn’t matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs…Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting
And all this time we thought that cow and sheep parping was the deadliest thing going.
TNR suggests an electoral strategy for Democrats and a certain species of Republican:
it’s hardly a shock to hear that some Dems would prefer to set aside tackling climate change–especially so soon after a grueling health care fight. “We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,” Indiana Senator Evan Bayh recently groused, “but I think it’s very difficult in the economic circumstances we have right now.”
Difficult, but maybe less so than Bayh thinks. The House has already passed its own climate bill, complete with a cap on heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and, in the Senate, Democrats have begun to get some welcome support from the other side of the aisle. Susan Collins is co-sponsoring a cap-and-dividend bill, which would essentially tax carbon dioxide at the source and refund most of the proceeds to households, while a few Republicans (like Lisa Murkowski) had positive things to say about last month’s Copenhagen accord, which put key developing countries on a path to curtailing their own emissions.
\Interestingly, one of the most forceful advocates for a Senate climate bill in recent weeks has been Republican Lindsey Graham. “All the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day-in and day-out, you’ll never convince me that’s a good thing for your children and the future of the planet,” he told a crowd in South Carolina, the day after being censured by Charleston County’s GOP for working with Democrats on the issue. “Whatever political pushback I get,” he added, “I’m willing to accept, because I know what I’m trying to do makes sense to me.” Lately, he’s been huddling with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman on a “tripartisan” bill to reduce emissions.
Some have argued that Congress would be crazy to take on an issue as divisive as climate change in an election year, but the Senate, with only one-third of its members up for reelection, is less susceptible to that calculus than the House. And election-year timidity may be more an invention of pundits than historical fact.
To us these people seem out of their minds. We’re in a crisis and these bozos are in cloud-cuckoo-land. (a) When 20$ of American men do are not employed, the number 1, number 2, and number 3 issue is jobs, jobs, jobs — good, private sector jobs. Which means government needs to help and get out of the way at the same time. Furthermore, even if we weren’t in a time of pronounced global cooling, why fiddle around with nonsense like this when it is perfectly clear that countries like China and India aren’t going to play along (except to go to conferecnes where they laugh at us behind our backs). Washington: fools and damned fools.
A guidebook from the Bloomberg administration, paid for by New York taxpayers, gives detailed instructions to that sliver of the heroin-injecting community that is (a) able to read English and (b) interested in instructional government guidebooks:
The guidebook, called “Take Charge, Take Care,” has sections on overdosing, testing for HIV and hepatitis — and how to “prepare drugs carefully” and “how to take care of your veins.”…
The Health Department defended its brochure, saying it was helpful and necessary, and has been distributed only to addicts or those at risk of becoming abusers. “Our goal is to promote health and save lives with this information,” said Daliah Heller, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Use Prevention, Care and Treatment.
We noted the bloated payrolls of government in a recent post. If the Bloomberg administration is interested in reducing its deficit, one easy fix (as it were) would be to eliminate every single person who was involved in the guidebook project.
If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?
Answer: Michael Yon and Joan Rivers. (Moral of the story: pass healthcare now, and in secret, because it’s clear that government bureaucrats need even more power over the American people.)
We don’t have much to add to the story of Al Qaeda in Yemen sending over a fellow to blow up a NWA flight approaching Detroit with PETN in his underwear, only to be taken down by a quick-witted Flying Dutchman, except that it provides a lesson as to why the healthcare bill deserves to be deep-sixed.
The US government is inept and lacks common sense. Evidence: (a) this guy’s own father apparently tried to turn him in to US authorities and he still managed to board the plane; (b) as is typical of the politically correct inanity infecting the government in all areas, TSA surveillance of grandma in her wheelchair will now be heightened so as not to offend suspicious looking young men at airports; and (c) the government has now imposed rules outlawing the quick moves made by the Flying Dutchman to save plane and passengers. And you think these guys in Washington deserve even more money and power?
Rajendra K. Pachauri -– the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –- veered into self-parody in the Guardian about the East Anglia scandal and the IPCC (HT: Roger Simon):
“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report…Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”
He also said that people fly on airplanes far too frequently, and he “denounced” the practice of serving ice water to some patrons in restaurants in a different piece in the Guardian:
“Today we have reached the point where consumption and people’s desire to consume has grown out of proportion…The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable.”…”We should make sure there is a huge difference between the cost of flying and taking the train,” he said. Despite the fact that there is often little benefit in time and convenience in short-haul flights, he said people were still making the “irrational” choice to fly…Pachauri also denounced the practice in some restaurants of providing iced water to customers who had not ordered it. “It is just an enormous amount of waste that we don’t even think about”…
The Punchline, via Mark Steyn: “Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles…So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.” God save us from these creatures!
The East Anglia CRU was apparently the epicenter of AGW alarmism. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph recounts the scandal that has almost resulted in the world’s kleptocracies picking the pockets of American taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars:
The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
This is an incredible scandal, and not one red cent of the taxpayers’ money should be spent in furtherance of this hoax. However, since America is currently governed by a clueless college professor (who is apparently entirely untroubled that his enablers are thugs), keep a close eye on your wallet.
This is just the beginning of the absurd spectacle of the 9-11 terrorists putting the United States on trial a few blocks from the World Trade Center. WSJ:
Military lawyers for Ramzi Binalshibh, an accused organizer of the 9/11 plot, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the conspiracy’s alleged paymaster, say their clients have mental disorders that make them unfit for trial, likely caused or exacerbated by years of harsh confinement in Central Intelligence Agency custody.
No good can come of the farce that will be made of the KSM trial, unless it is that the American people decide once and for all that such witless self-abasement must cease. HT: American Thinker
Apparently there’s no recession in the UK since government bureaucrats and others have plenty of time to fool with nonsense like this. London Times:
Among the everyday sayings that have been quietly dropped in a bid to stamp out racism and sexism are “whiter than white”, “gentleman’s agreement”, “black mark” and “right-hand man”…The National Gallery in London believes that the phrase “gentleman’s agreement” is potentially offensive to women and suggests that staff should replace it with “unwritten agreement” or “an agreement based on trust” instead. The term “right-hand man” is also considered taboo by the gallery, with “second in command” being deemed more suitable.
Many institutions have urged their workforce to be mindful of “gender bias” in language. The Learning and Skills Council wants staff to “perfect” their brief rather than “master” it, while the Newcastle University has singled out the phrase “master bedroom” as being problematic…“Terms such as ‘black sheep of the family’…serve to reinforce a negative view of all things black”…
Words like “black sheep” and “right-hand man” are now considered a threat? Who knows what lies ahead? After all, this is the same mentality that told us: “The livestock sector presents the greatest threat to the planet.”
Many articles that have been written about the urgent need to reform the US healthcare system cite a WHO study that claims America ranks 37th out of 191 countries in the quality of its healthcare. Here are the top ten countries on that list:
1. France
2. Italy
3. San Marino
4. Andorra
5. Malta
6. Singapore
7. Spain
8. Oman
9. Austria
10. Japan
Leaving aside the question of whether you’d go to any of these countries for an operation, could you even find Oman, Andorra, Malta or San Marino on a map if you needed to? San Marino is kind of cool since it has a population of 30,000 and nonetheless is said to be a real country with membership in the Council of Europe and all. Andorra, another completely landlocked micro-state where people live to ripe old ages, has a population of 84,000.
So two of the top ten countries are quite a bit smaller than the 217th largest US city, Rochester, Minnesota (population 100,000), home to the Mayo Clinic. Question: if the town of Rochester, Minnesota seceded from the union and became a country, would it become #1 on the WHO’s list?
And speaking of #8 ranked Oman, how would you like to flag down a cab to go to a hospital in Muscat for an emergency appendectomy — a city where taxis have no meters and you’d have to negotiate your fare with the driver? That could be an interesting negotiation indeed. So you can believe the WHO study (which also ranks Chile, Colombia and Greece ahead of the US) or you can use your head. Your choice.
“To prevent the deficiencies in the main reserve currency, there’s a need to create a new currency that’s delinked from the economies of the issuers,” the People’s Bank of China, or PBOC, said. China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion in April.
You can’t look at the chart above without thinking that America has lost its mind. The intergenerational theft from our children and grandchildren is evidence of insanity or idiocy. James Lewis in The American Thinker makes some points that have appeared here as well:
As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean?…
Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They’ve been there, done that, seen the suffering…
No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner’s stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words…
On the last point, health care, it is very hard to believe that Americans are that stupid or gullible. There are fewer than 800,000 doctors in the US. The Obama plan intends to provide insurance to 47 million additional people. So there is a 15% increase in potential demand from physicians, and a 0% increase in supply. Whether you support Obama or not, increasing demand while supply remains constant raises prices, the opposite of what Obama claims. It’s just not possible to do what he says he wants — price control regimes always result in rationing, lower quality, and black markets — but no one seems to care (at least so far).
Here’s the thing, perhaps: The young are disconnected from the past, and live in a world of digital utopian images. They don’t remember a hard past. So they are in the process of creating a hard future. This seems to us one of the greatest avoidable tragedies in history. Sigh.
More on the folly that is called cap and trade from Bloomberg:
America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.
“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity.
The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…One in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group known as API. Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline
So what? Who cares anymore in the ridiculous TV show that is called America? Who cares if cap and trade won’t even address any real problems, and creates incentives that are precisely the opposite of its stated goals? Don’t bother us. We’re America and we’re sleeping.
The AP reports uncritically, indeed excitedly, on the latest fantasy of the administration:
Obama wants increased fuel efficiency, less smog — President Barack Obama outlined Tuesday the nation’s first comprehensive effort to curb vehicle emissions while cutting dependence on imported oil, calling the plan an historic turning point toward a “clean-energy economy.”…
“As a result of this agreement,” Obama said, “we will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years. And at a time of historic crisis in our auto industry, this rule provides the clear certainty that will allow these companies to plan for a future in which they are building the cars of the 21st century.”
The fact that this massive government program will only produce 50 days of oil supply in ten years — while the US continues to remain dangerously 70% dependent on oil imports — is apparently beside the point to the Obama administration.
