Time to Pasture-ize John McCain

Good stuff from Michelle Malkin on McCain Regression Syndrome:

With all due respect to McCain’s past noble war service, it’s time to head to the pasture. As the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, he was wrong on the constitutionality of the free-speech-stifling McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations. He was wrong to side with the junk-science global warming activists in pushing onerous carbon caps on America. He was on the wrong side of every Chicken Little-driven bailout. He was wrong in opposing enhanced CIA interrogation methods that have saved countless American lives and averted jihadi plots. And he was spectacularly wrong in teaming with the open-borders lobby to push a dangerous illegal alien amnesty.

Tea Party activists are rightly outraged by Sarah Palin’s decision to campaign for McCain, whose entrenched incumbency and progressive views are anathema to the movement. At least she has an excuse: She’s caught between a loyalty rock and a partisan hard place. The conservative base has no such obligations – and it is imperative that they get in the game (as they did in Massachusetts) before it’s too late. The movement to restore limited government in Washington has come too far, against all odds, to succumb to McCain Regression Syndrome now.

Go here to read the rest.

Remembering Some Who Endorsed Obama in 2008

Just making my list, and checking it often.

Ken Adelman

Wick Allison, former publisher of National Review

Ann Althouse

Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston University

The Daily Bail

David Brooks, The New York Times

Christopher Buckley, National Review

Jimmy Buffett

Governor Arne Carlson

Senator Lincoln Chafee

Ken Duberstein

Julie Nixon Eisenhower

Susan Eisenhower

Charles Fried

Representative Wayne Gilchrist

C.C. Goldwater

Representative Ryan Grim

Merle Haggard

Governor Linwood Holton

Jeffrey Hart, National Review

Representative Joel Haugen

Rita Hauser

Larry Hunter

Douglas Kmiec

Representative Jim Leach

Scott McClellan

Scott McConnell, The American Conservative

Tim McGraw

John Mellencamp

Governor William Milliken

Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

Kathleen Parker

General Colin Powell

Senator Larry Pressler

Ron Reagan

J.K. Rowling

Bill Ruckelshaus

Andrew Tobias

Governor William Weld

"As They Say In The Glacier Business, Ice Work If You Can Get It"

It's only the morning after talking, but Mark Steyn makes us think Elmer Fudd pronounces "WTF" "WWF":

[T]he IPCC['s] Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.

Go here for more.

It All Depends On What The Meaning of "Organized" Is

Hillary Clinton still thinks exactly like Bill Clinton.

At the national prayer breakfast:

"So she went to her church and she prayed for an end to the civil war. And she organized other women at her church, and then at other churches, then at the mosques. Soon thousands of women became a mass movement, rising up and praying for a peace, and working to bring it about that finally, finally ended the conflict."

And then just five paragraphs later, this:

"Yet across the world, we see organized religion standing in the way of faith, perverting love, undermining that message."

I smell a Wonderland called Feminism, Alice.

Nice Going, Governor Granholm: Michigan is Second Worst in the Western World!

(from econompicdata.blogspot.com)

Obama Twice Pronounces the "PS" in "Corpsman"

So far no one has dared to ax the smartest president ever about the mistake.

The Pyramids of John Maynard Keynes

Caroline Baum notices that President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget contains money for everything, it seems, except pyramid building:

No longer will President Barack Obama be content to cite specious numbers about “jobs saved or created” as a result of last year’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus. Now he’s proposing $100 billion of new spending to “jumpstart job creation,” according to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag. It’s part of a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, unveiled Monday, that projects a $1.3 trillion deficit next year, following a $1.6 trillion deficit this year.

Spend money to save money. Spending dressed up as a jump- starter is still spending by another name.

The only thing missing from the energy-cleansing, rural- community-assisting, climate-change-mitigating, health-food- promoting blueprint is money for pyramid building. In Chapter 10, Section VI of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” John Maynard Keynes advocated building pyramids as a cure for unemployment.

In fact, “Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one,” he wrote in his 1936 treatise.

The reason Obama avoids mentioning pyramid building, however, has to do with the fact that Obama has political power, whereas Keynes did not have political power and did not therefore feel constrained.

"What's that?" you say. "What does that have to do with it?"

Because of what Aristotle said:

It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants. The Pyramids of Egypt are a proof of this, and the votive edifices of the Cyposelidse, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, built by the Pisistratidae, and the works of Polycrates at Samos; for all these produced one end, the keeping the people poor.

Obama wouldn't want to put any strange ideas in anyone's mind, now, would he?

The Kind of Regulation We Most Need

". . . Just as the men and women of finance are fallible, so are the men and women who populate Washington. Given the basic truth that private and public error will never be abolished, arguably the best regulation of all is the simplest one: Let them fail."

For more, go here.

Anti-Elitist Joke of the Day

What's the difference between a BMW and a porcupine?

On the porcupine the prick's on the outside.

"THE SINGLE MOST INEPT PRESIDENT...IN ALL OF AMERICAN HISTORY"

Ron Smith of The Baltimore Sun rips the president a new one in "We Do Get It, Mr. President; We Just Don't Like It":

Barack Obama seems to believe he has magical powers of persuasion. If true, how come fewer and fewer are persuaded? Is it that, as much of a smoothie as he is with words, he lacks passion? Perhaps, but the idea that his drooping poll figures and the Republican electoral wins in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey are the result of an epidemic of misunderstanding is ludicrous on its face. We understand what he and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid want, and we're opposed to it. We know the present health care system is heading for a financial crack-up, but we also know that the proposed cure that was cobbled together in an untidy, indecipherable monstrous piece of pork-ridden, bribe-filled legislation would make things worse, not better. We get it. We just don't like it. ...

Earlier in the week, I talked with David Michael Green, a devout "progressive" who teaches political science at Hofstra University in New York. He has written a powerful polemic, "How to Squander the Presidency in One Year," in which he says, "There's only one political party in the entire world that is so inept, cowardly and bungling that it could manage to simultaneously lick the boots of Wall Street bankers and then get blamed by the voters for being flaming revolutionary socialists.

"Barack Obama has now, in just a year's time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime," Mr. Green said, adding that "Never has so much political advantage been [squandered] so rapidly, and what's more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It's astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year."

The parts I left out are pretty good too, at the link.

Our Rights are Presumed, not Granted

If they are the sort of things which can be granted, permitted, dispensed, or won, then they can also be rescinded, forbidden, withheld and lost. But they are, on the contrary, natural and pre-existing, and therefore inalienable, as in "From my cold dead fingers!"

I say popular confusion about this in our time is all Lee Greenwood's fault, at least since 1984:

And I’m proud to be an American,

where at least I know I’m free.

And I wont forget the men who died,

who gave that right to me.

Nobody "gave that right" to freedom, or to anything else, to anyone. Everyone already has "that right." It is granted by God, or Nature's God if you prefer, by virtue of His will that one exists.

On this subject Thomas Mitchell offers "A Few Reminders for the Constitutionally Challenged," which appeared here and which was the original occasion of this post, which is now kind of an irony because Mitchell's post opens with the words of James Madison: "The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right."

Why irony? Because as I edit this post today, July 24, 2010, The Las Vegas Review Journal is in the news at wired.com for hiring a lawyer to go after bloggers like me for copyright infringement for reproducing their articles on their blogs.

While we really like Mitchell's idea that The Bill of Rights should be renamed The Bill of Prohibitions, here's a reminder of a little something that predates the current copyright law, Mr. James Madison and the Bill of Rights:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness.

Try copyrighting that.

CPUSA Openly Aligns Itself With President Obama

President Obama, speaking to the House Republicans, on Friday, January 29, 2010, about the healthcare legislation debate:

"Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that's not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that's how you guys -- (applause) -- that's how you guys presented it."

But the Bolsheviks aren't "plotting." They're openly applauding.

From The American Thinker:

July 20, 2009

Obama and the CPUSA

Randall Hoven

I encourage you to read the latest words from Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party USA. As is the wont of communists, Mr. Webb is rather long-winded; I provide only a few interesting excerpts:

Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation, and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.

In this legislative session, we can envision winning a Medicare-like public option and then going further in the years ahead.

We can visualize passing tough regulatory reforms on the financial industry, which brought the economy to ruin.

In the current political climate, the expansion of union rights becomes a real possibility.

Much the same can be said about winning a second stimulus bill, and we sure need one, given the still-rising rate, and likely long term persistence, of unemployment.

Isn't it possible in the Obama era to create millions of green jobs in manufacturing and other sectors of the economy in tandem with an attack on global warming?

The new conditions of struggle are possible only - and I want to emphasize only - because we elected President Obama and a Congress with pronounced progressive and center currents.

Yes, socialism is our objective and, according to recent public opinion polls, it is increasingly attractive to the American people. But clearly it is not on the immediate political agenda.

As for our radicalism, we should be as radical as reality itself. And reality strongly suggests that our main task is to bring the weight of the working class and other democratic forces to bear on the reform process with the aim of deepening its anti-corporate content and direction.

Let's be aware that he [Obama] has to keep a coalition together for his long-term as well as immediate legislative agenda. Let's give President Obama some space to change and to respond to pressures from below.

The Right Wing, the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical and insurance companies have drawn a line in the sand on health care.

The core of this struggle, whether we like it or not, turns on the inclusion of a public option in a health care bill.

Months ago it was said that the downturn could be "L-shaped" rather than "V-shaped." In other words, the crisis begins with a steep decline in economic activity followed by long period of economic stagnation.

I suspect that this is what will happen, thus making sustained government and people's intervention an imperative. In my view this should take at least three forms:

First, more economic stimulus: the economy is underperforming and nearly 30 million workers are unemployed or underemployed and that number hasn't peaked yet.

Second, restructuring is imperative. The old economic model that rested on bubble economics, cheap labor, financial manipulation and speculation, deregulation, capital outsourcing, environmental degradation, and so forth, has to be replaced by a new model that expands and restructures the productive base and is "people and nature" friendly.

Finally, the economy has to be democratized. The wizards of Wall Street and inside the Beltway failed miserably, in fact, so miserably those economic decisions that affect the welfare of millions shouldn't rest in their hands.

In the meantime, the struggle for immediate public sector jobs and relief should command our attention.

President Obama ... has expressed a readiness to engage with countries that during the Bush years were considered mortal enemies - Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and others.

In Iraq, the U.S. withdrawal plan is proceeding, with the first stage being withdrawal from Iraqi cities by July. President Obama has reiterated his intention to stick with the pullout deadlines. Even with the caveats about what U.S. forces might remain, this is a major victory for the peace movement.

If not already painfully obvious to you, let me point out a few things:

(1) Obama's policy agenda and that of the CPUSA are in perfect alignment: more stimuli; green jobs; global warming; public sector jobs; more regulation and, in fact, restructuring of the entire economy; eventual single-payer health care, with the public option being critical to any immediate plan; union-friendly legislation; cutting defense spending; engaging and normalizing relations with the US's mortal enemies like Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and the reigning mullahs of Iran; claiming victory in Iraq as their own.

(2) Obama's political approach is also in perfect harmony with that of the CPUSA's. The method is gradualism. Overall, Obama is doing pretty well at achieving CPUSA's goals under the current political circumstances. The Left should not expect immediate and radical changes. And of all things, the Left should not "define the current struggle as one that arrays the people against President Obama. That's not Marxism; it's plain stupid."

(3) Mr. Webb expects a lousy economy to continue. Specifically, he expects the "L-shaped" recovery. But this "long period of economic stagnation" will be an excuse for continued government intervention. As Lenin supposedly said, "the worse the better."

(4) Socialism is the objective.

In my view, this duck has a bill, webbed feet and feathers; quacks, walks, flies and swims; and has DNA that matches that of a duck. I'm willing to call it a duck.

The really striking thing about all this, though, is that the CPUSA can openly align itself with the President of the US, right under our noses, and it will have zero effect on public sentiment because the lapdog media studiously averts its gaze.

The Corpse is Sitting Up

After applying the paddles of $trillions of bailouts, stimulus spending, and backstops, the preliminary report of Q4 GDP comes in at 5.7%, but is already more like 2.3% after deducting 3.39 points for falling inventories. Who knows what the final number will look like after the customary revisions. But one thing is already clear: 2009 overall marked the worst year of economic contraction since 1946. And the doctors, the taxpayers, aren't likely to stay in the ER indefinitely.

The story is from Reuters:

The U.S. economy grew at a faster-than-expected 5.7 percent pace in the fourth quarter, the quickest in more than six years, as businesses made less-aggressive cuts to inventories and stepped up spending.

The Commerce Department said on Friday its first estimate put fourth-quarter gross domestic product growth at its fastest pace since the third quarter of 2003. The economy expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter. . . .

Business inventories fell only $33.5 billion in fourth quarter after dropping $139.2 billion in the July-September period. The change in inventories alone added 3.39 percentage points to GDP in the last quarter. This was the biggest percentage contribution since the fourth quarter of 1987.

For the whole of 2009, the economy contracted 2.4 percent, the biggest decline since 1946, the first year after the end of World War II.

Go here for the whole thing.

Of Politicians and Potato Chips

George Will spanks some babies while discussing the recent Supreme Court activism in defense of The Bill of Rights:

Even if it were Congress' business to decide that there is "too much" money in politics, that decision would be odd: In the 2007-08 election cycle, spending in all campaigns, for city council members up to the presidency, was $8.6 billion, about what Americans spend annually on potato chips.

Read more here.

2010 = 1994

First healthcare reform, now gays in the military.

Talk about leading with your chin, just like Bill Clinton in 1993. Amateurs.

These people can't help themselves.

Of Course Obama Was For The Public Option

Lanny Davis was interviewed on the Laura Ingraham Show this morning, denying Obama ever ran on the public option, in response to Howard Dean's recent assertion that the people of Massachusetts voted for Republican Scott Brown to send a message to Obama for backtracking on it.

Lanny obviously got the talking points memo: "deny we ever ran on the public option."

As for Howard Dean, Scott Brown ran promising three things: to be the 41st vote against healthcare in the Senate, to treat terrorists like enemy combatants instead of criminals, and to cut spending and taxes. This enraged Bay State liberals so much they ran right out and voted for it.

Do we really need to review the evidence on the public option? For video go here. But remember: "JUST WORDS!"

A Countryman Speaks Out About Spending

In "Federal Spending for Dummies" by Tom Quiner for The Des Moines Register, the author lays out the historical record for out of control government spending (is there any other kind?) and concludes that it has grown per citizen by about 80% since 1980.

Believing that this growth in spending is unsustainable, he suggests that a new era of restraint is in order and must begin now before it is too late.

In this he is most certainly correct.

Read his argument by following the link above.

Libertarianism Has No Moral Compass

Do you think it is ethically permissible to call a senator and urge him or her to vote against Ben Bernanke or to vote against healthcare and to lie about being a resident of their state? I don't, but the libertarian's remarks appearing below advocate just that.

Think about this the next time someone asks you to contribute to a political campaign outside of your congressional district, or in another state. How would you feel if someone else's money gave you representation which turned out not to represent you?

The rot which runs through American politics is not restricted to the politicians or "the system." It runs through every human heart, which is why the Founders frequently resorted to the principle of the separation of powers, to put checks and balances on the evil they knew was in every man. And it is also why they spoke favorably of the role played by religion, because they knew it was an indispensable support for the morality without which even simple honesty would not be possible.

Conservatism in a nutshell.

How You Can Help!

Whether they are in your state or not, please call all 5 undecided senators.

Concentrate on the senate. The house has no say on this.

What To Say: Make it simple so as to not tie up the lines ... "I am opposed to the reappointment of Bernanke [give your personal reason] and I think we should start all over on health care [or whatever you think about that issue]."

Be prepared to name your city and give a zipcode. Here is the Zip-Code Database.

Next call your senators with the same message.

Look up the phone numbers in the Online Directory For The 111th Congress .

Send A Message

Remember it takes 60 votes for confirmation. All it takes to send Bernanke flying is a change in a handful of undecided senators!

Call Now!

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

1962: The Year Everything in the American Political System Changed

Dan Henninger describes the origin, rise and tyranny of the new managerial revolution, the public employee unions:

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.

This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.

They broke the public's bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

Read more here.

Risk-Taking in Capital Markets is Incompatible with a Taxpayer Guarantee

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on Obama's idea for banking reform:

Phony populism aside, yesterday Mr. Obama introduced his first serious idea into the debate on reforming the financial system. In calling for an end to proprietary trading at firms with a federal safety net, the President showed that he now understands an important principle: Risk-taking in the capital markets is incompatible with a taxpayer guarantee.

To read more, go here.