Sadly, No!

mrpepper2 (posted 4 months ago)

why can’t we produce our own oil. And bring back good paying jobs and avoid the lead posioning that we are getting from China . And why do we hae to recue every country that cries out for help . We are in a jam and no one comes to help us . I have become disabled and can’t get any one in Washington D.C. to help me get a loan to save my home . But we can help everyone else . When do we stop and say ok we are going to help the average person . We have 175thousand acres that we have in this coutry that are signed for oil drilling . Come on wake up I need help can’t find a single sole in Washington to help because I don’t Qualify because we are so full of red tape we can’t get through it. sincerly
Richard Culpepper
Mahomet Illinois 61853
P.S. Is thier anyone out that cares about the People of this country.

Pardons and Commutations

The 14 people who were pardoned and 2 who had their sentences commuted by President Bush on Monday, as reported by The Associated Press:

Pardoned:

Leslie O. Collier, Charleston, Mo., pleaded guilty to unlawfully killing three bald eagles.

Milton K. Cordes, Rapid City, S.D., convicted of conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which prohibits importation into the country of wildlife taken in violation of conservation laws.

Richard M. Culpepper, Mahomet, Ill., convicted of making false statements to the federal government.

[…]

ABOVE: “OH NOES! Universal Healthcare!!”

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The prospect that the Obama administration will make health insurance available to almost everyone in the United States has the right wing howling in abject terror. It’s not enough that we have health care (they moan). Others must not.

Witness James Pethokoukis over at Useless News & World Distort. He is predicting the end of Western civilization as we know it if one single additional person gets health insurance. Instead of having the decency to die off, as is the moral obligation of the lazy, worthless bums who find themselves at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, these losers will, thanks to health insurance, live to vote again. And who will they vote for? Why, the New Socialist Islamobamic Democratic Party, of course!

Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of “Marxist thought,” puts it: “After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments.”

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: “Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival.

This is perhaps the most odious thing I’ve read since that Malkin wretch went all stalker on the sick kid who dared to speak out in favor of children’s health insurance. What Pethokoukis is saying is that the reason to oppose health care is that people might actually like it and that the future of the GOP depends on making sure that people continue to lack health care insurance. If a few uninsured people have to die to save the GOP, that’s just their patriotic duty. Hopefully, they’ll be black gay abortionists. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

Just to kick up the odiousness of his post a notch or two, Pethokoukis proposes his own ideal health care plan which — surprise, surprise!! — means less health insurance for more people.

John McCain’s healthcare plan was perhaps the most provocative policy proposal of the entire 2008 campaign. Too bad he could neither fully explain how it worked nor persuasively argue why it was better than Barack Obama’s plan. Also too bad since his plan would have smartly reduced healthcare costs by getting companies out of the healthcare benefits business and empowering individuals to buy insurance on their own. This would have helped fix what economist Arnold Kling calls the insurance vs. insulation problem: “Insulation relieves the patient of the stress of making decisions about treatment. The patient also does not have to worry about shopping around for the best price. The problem with insulation is that it is not a sustainable form of healthcare finance.”

In other words, let’s get rid of employer-provided health insurance. Obviously if individuals bought their own health insurance it would be cheaper because they could drive a harder bargain than their employer could buying group insurance. You can’t simply be born this stupid; you have to work at it and acquire it, either by a self-inflicted head wound or a number of overly extended auto-erotic asphyxiation sessions.

Google this

• Condi Rice has failed in her most important job as Secretary of State, which is aggressively defending the torture and indefinite imprisonment of scary-looking Sand People.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Fed Pledges Top $7.4 Trillion to Ease Frozen Credit

O hai! Here’s your US Goverment, Mr. Obama. Sorry we spended it all, hehe.

Above: Jules Crittenden

A Time for Thanksgiving
Obama’s debt of gratitude to George W. Bush.

• In the last analysis, President Bush saved the world from several invisible giant robot Hitlers, in accordance with everything I have ever said. Alas, Obama will likely get the credit whenever a Hitler robot fails to attack.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

It’s always mildly startling to read a post by Donald Douglas at American Power, and then days or weeks later to notice more posts by him there. It’s like he keeps emitting lint when nobody is paying attention, like the opposite of a Roomba.

Progressivism as the Radical Left

I have long noted that “the progressive netroots,” as our political antagonists on the other side like to call themselves, are today’s radicals, the ideological descendents of the New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s (people like Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground terrorists).

This is interesting, because we have long noted that “conservative bloggers,” as they are known to the police and other authorities, are today’s Jeffrey Dahmers, the whiffy-kitchened child sex cannibals of the 21st Century. By “are” we mean the same as Douglas means above: that the comparison would bother them, therefore we are jauntily asserting it by pretending to be stupid.

Above: Indistinguishable from Matt Yglesias*

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On a related topic, did you know that toilets are the same as sinks because they are both white, concave porcelain devices in the bathroom? No really, I can’t tell. No, look, they both have poop in them, see? Ooh, I am so zooming you.

Today’s progressives have very little in common with the true early-20th progressive reformers, such as Governor Hiram Johnson of California, who brought direct democracy to the state’s voters in 1911.

For instance, they are against the Proposition 8 referendum in California, while Johnson was for referendums. (Opposite.)

I often get smeared as “wingnut” by some reality-challenged bloggers (for example, here and here) for making this argument, because the left today can’t stand being identified for what they truly are.

In the spirit of streamlining, we need someday to draw up a decision tree that starts with “liberals are laughing at me,” and ends in the bottom left and right corners with “they cannot stand the truth” and “I must really be getting under their skin.” In the middle will be no box reading “(Y/N) I am funny like a jester.”

We’ll send out many copies, and Rick Moran will not fail to receive one.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

So it’s with pleasure that I share Michael Lind’s new piece, calling on progressives to end their charade:, “Is it OK to Be Liberal Again, Instead of Progressive?“:

If you were a progressive in the ’60s and ’70s, you were likely to think that Truman and Johnson were warmongering “corporate liberals” under the control of the “military-industrial complex” and that the Democrats and Republicans were indistinguishable. For the moderate and conservative Democrats of the DLC to call themselves the new progressives was the equivalent of moderate, secular Republicans calling themselves the new fundamentalists.

At least the far-left progressives were honest. They genuinely despised the mid-century American liberals, whom they viewed simply as another species of bourgeois imperialists. This is another one of the reasons I dislike the term “progressive” … Why share a label with anyone who romanticized Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro?

Okay, it’s necessary at this point to clarify, first of all, that Douglas didn’t even read this piece, but just made up an argument in his head and attributed it to an imaginary person with the same name as Michael Lind — who is, himself, a writer of known quantity whose November 21 Salon piece, headlined, “Is it OK to be liberal again, instead of progressive?” and subheadlined, “Come out of the closet, liberals. Stop using the fashionable euphemism ‘progressive’ and relaunch the old, tarnished L-word,” was apparently open on Douglas’s computer at the time, vulnerable to control-C.

What the actual, objective-reality Michael Lind is saying is abstracted in the headline. Briefly, it is that conservatives have turned the term ‘liberal’ into an epithet, and the center-left has therefore been calling itself ‘progressive.’ But the catch-all term ‘progressive’ does not fool conservatives, carries both centrist and radical connotations that do not accurately describe liberals, and is generally lame, such that it may be time for liberals to proudly reclaim their identity as ‘liberals.’

It’s also necessary to clarify why we’re picking on Donald Douglas instead of, um, for instance, chronicling the day-by-day mental flux of Cap’n “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” Ed as his tenure as a Malkin stooge enters its high baroque period. Or instead of answering the horrifying backlog of email that we are bad and sorry people for not having already done, because good people must mistakenly think that we’re snubbing them. Also, damn.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once again this year, rather than destroy Christmas in the usual way — by saying ‘happy holidays,’ and sticking people in the butt with giant, sharpened candy canes, and peeing in creches, and saying “Mmm, these Necco wafers are good, do you want some?” and then giving Christians a wax paper roll of communion wafers which they then mistakenly eat to their horror, and by celebrating Hanukkah or Ramadan and so forth — our plan, as liberals, is to work within the system, to send spies into Christmas itself, and to bring this so-called holiday to ruin by the grinding of its own fell cogs.

This year our spies on the inside have provided us with a special Amazon toy registry so that Sadlynauts can buy toys for homeless, non-productive children — thus “spreading around” i.e. “redistributing” wealth, in accordance with the wishes of President Hussein X.

The toys ship from Amazon to Christmas in the City, a 100% volunteer organization that mentors and supports homeless families in Boston. More than 2,000 children attended last year’s gigantic annual Christmas party, and many more children who couldn’t come to the party were hooked up with presents. The toys need to arrive by December 19th to be put into wheeled canvas mail bins and rolled out into a screaming crowd of joyful kids.

Anyone who would like to see a toy added to the wishlist can post a link in comments, and the Doctor Missus will add it, as long as it’s appropriate (please, no Mark Steyn with Kung Fu Grip or Chatty Pammy dolls) and seems likely to match up to a child’s wishlist.

Updates to come, as well as. . .did I post party pictures last time? Here’s the secret toy room, last year, a little while before the deluge.

As in Star Trek, everyone wears color-coded shirts according to their function. Above you can see some red-shirts (who, as in Star Trek, are mostly interchangeable and tend to be the first disintegrated by aliens or renegade space probes). Irony and her good friend Jonah Goldberg may be pleased to learn that the Doctor Missus and myself are security — i.e., blackshirts.

It wouldn’t be fair to leave it unremarked that Bob “Confederate Yankee” Owens — fact-checkerer, debunker and rebunker, and scourge of the liberal MSM — has written what appears to be a post calling for the investigation of official misconduct not allegedly committed by a political enemy, i.e. a ‘liberal,’ a set of ‘liberals,’ or ‘liberalism.’

That is, even amidst this recent crime wave of liberals liberalling and unrepentant terrorists being elected to the White House, not to mention the impending dawn of the Glorious Socialist Revolution and all the statues of Mumia that are slated to be cast out of melted gunmetal and multi-cartridge rifle magazines,* he seems in this case to be applying universal standards to things. Because no, check this out:

Friendly Fire Coverup Comes to Light

Read this article and watch the 12 minutes of edited video. There is some circumstantial evidence here that two U.S. soldiers in an apparent overwatch position were mistaken for insurgents in Ramadi in 2006, and were then killed by a single shot from the main gun of a U.S Abrams tank. Audio in the clip also seems to indicate that the coaxial 7.62 machine gun on the tank also opened up on the position following the discharge of the main gun.

Friendly fire occurs in every war, even though our soldiers try very hard to minimize the risk.

Here, though, it seems that a coverup began to form within 30 minutes of the incident, before the second soldier who died was even evacuated. As his sergeant blamed the incoming fire on a tank in a radio call, he was immediately told by a superior who was not on the scene that the deaths were the result of enemy mortar fire.

That someone then ordered the rushed shredding all documentation related to the men further reeks of a coverup. I suspect we have some Captains, Majors, and perhaps even a Colonel or higher who are involved.

The Army needs to get to the bottom of this, and fast.

A new leaf? If so, this new suspicion toward the military comes at a fortunate time. As it happens, today would have brought embarrassment like no other day (which is to say, at least more than none) to our tireless identifier of AP ‘fauxtography,’ our critic of alleged Associated Press photos of so-called ‘dead’ Middle Eastern alleged children, who can not be independently proven to have been killed exactly as shown, and are therefore, like Schroedinger’s cat, neither dead nor alive, forever.

Yes, we wandered those shores with him, but today we find that he must walk alone.

* Should the US government ever confiscate guns for the purpose of statuary production, we believe the statue should be a monumental rendering of Cold Dead Hands.

Well here’s a new one.

Pope Spoke About Imminent Market Collapse Back in 1985

Pope Benedict XVI predicted a global market crisis back in a paper he wrote in 1985. Bloomberg reported:

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system, a “prophecy” dating to a paper he wrote when he was a cardinal, Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said.

“The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found” in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became pope in April 2005, Tremonti said yesterday at Milan’s Cattolica University.

German-born Ratzinger in 1985 presented a paper entitled “Market Economy and Ethics” at a Rome event dedicated to the Church and the economy. The future pope said a decline in ethics “can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.”

Pope Benedict in an Oct. 7 speech reflected on crashing markets and concluded that “money vanishes, it is nothing” and warned that “the only solid reality is the word of God.”

Here is the full text of Pope (then Cardinal) Benedict’s essay on a free market economy and ethics from 1985.
Although, it is not so clear that this was an actual “prediction,” this section of the essay sticks out on the dependence of a free market economy and a definitive ethical system:

It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group — indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state — but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength. The political formation of a will that employs the inherent economic laws towards this goal appears, in spite of all humanitarian protestations, almost impossible today. It can only be realized if new ethical powers are completely set free.

Right, okay. And then if you actually look at Cardinal Ratzinger’s paper, you see that he kept using the words ‘Marx’ and ‘Marxism’ as though he were somehow aware that this idea — the idea that unregulated markets will tend to cycle into periodic collapse — comes directly from Karl Marx. Indeed, it seems that the Cardinal miraculously predicted that this very idea has long been considered common sense throughout Europe and pretty much the entire world, especially in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But then, ‘pretty much the entire world’ leaves out certain enclaves of fundamentalist free-market purism, of what used to be a sky-hooting, pie-eyed, right-wing cult sainted by weirdos such as Hayek, Rand, and Von Mises, but is now — after decades of argument, propaganda, argument, people talking and talking on television and radio, and hundreds of millions of dollars of generous contributions by wealthy business interests — known to many Americans, including Gateway Pundit, by the shorthand term of ‘the laws of economics.’

In this milieu, Das Kapital is assumed by people who haven’t read it — because why would anyone ever want to read it? — to be a book like Mein Kampf, describing Marx’s evil plot to enslave Russia and the world. Chillingly, Cardinal Ratzinger seems to favor certain features of Marxism against the free-market orthodoxy he criticizes in the paper, suggesting that the Pope is literally a murderous Stalinist made of Hitlers, i.e. is associated with terrorists.

But hey, if Gateway Pundit wants to launder commonplace Marxian insights through miraculous Papal utterances from the 1980s, at least that’s better than the post directly underneath, as in right under, as in the exact previous post from less than an hour earlier:

“Obama Factor” Weighs Heavy in Market Crash

The stock market continued its horrible post-election crash Thursday:

The Dow is down nearly 20% since Barack Obama won the presidential election. This is the largest post election stock market sell off in history.

Doug Ross tracked the Obama factor in the current market slide in this very interesting blog post–

“Barack Obama and the Wisdom of Crowds”

If we zoom into the September-to-November timeframe, we’ll see something very enlightening. By late September it was increasingly clear to Intrade.com bettors that Obama was going to win the election. From 9/28 to 9/29 Obama’s Intrade price went from 57 to 61, which represented a huge jump… Around September 29th the market began its collapse.

Call it a crisis of confidence. Call it a Fannie-inspired meltdown. Call it what you will, but the markets appear to have reacted to Obama’s promises of economic “fairness”, “spreading the wealth” and raising taxes on the job creators of society.

Read the whole thing here.

For more fanny-inspired meltdowns, watch the constantly evolving, self-contradictory, heat-seeking blame-missiles of rationalization accumulating in teetering stockpiles at sites such as Gateway Pundit (traffic: 25,000 souls daily). Message: Everything is all your fault in a way that we will soon figure out.

The National Book Awards 2008

• Although I have not read any of the books nominated for this year’s Book Awards, I am certain that they pale in comparison to the intellectual dynamo that is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, not to mention the fine efforts by such first-rate minds as Andy McCarthy and Douglas Feith.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™