"Oh, my gosh, I forgot about that,"
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It seems we have been down this "You didn't build that" road before. Like, well over 200 years ago.
Via Ann Althouse:
Lord North: Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by colonists and yeomen who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.
George Washington: Without our consent, we reject your taxes.
Lord North: There are a lot of smart people out there in the New World. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking British subjects of the Crown out there.
Thomas Jefferson: Stop coercing us, Lord North. Your Acts are intolerable.
Lord North: If you yankees were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great King somewhere in your life. Some members of Parliament helped to create this unbelievable Royal Navy system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in French and Indian Wars and the East India Company.
Alexander Hamilton: The King is your king. He is only our king by our agreement.
Lord North: If you've got a medical practice or silver smithery or a cabinetmaking business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The printing press didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the printing press so that all the pamphleteers could make money off the printing press.
Sam Adams: Hey, Lord North, shove your Stamp Act where the sun don't set.
Lord North: All right, all right - everybody just calm down. In politics, we all tolerate a certain amount of spin. I understand these are the games that get played in political campaigns. Although when folks just, like, omit entire sentences of what you said, they start kind of splicing and dicing, you may have gone a little over the edge there, you pesky Americans.
1 In the beginning Govt created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the economy was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the ATMs, and the Spirit of Govt was hovering over the land.
3 And Govt said, “Let there be spending,” and there was spending. 4 Govt saw that the spending was good, and that it separated the light from the darkness. 5 Govt called the spending Investments, and this he did in the first day.
6 Then Govt said, “Let there be roads and bridges across the waters, and let dams divide the waters from the waters.” 7 Thus Govt made the infrastructure and the patronage jobs for eternity under the firmament from the Potomac which was above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And Govt called the firmament Washington. This Govt did on the second day.
9 Then Govt said, “Let the regulations and the guidlines under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the Bureaus appear”; and it was so. 10 And Govt called the Bureaus demigovts, and the gathering together of them He called AFSCME. And Govt saw that it was good.
To say all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state.
Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.
Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.
Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mail. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he conceived and built the Mac and the iPad.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge won't budge: There will be no minute's silence for the Israeli victims of the 1972 Munich massacre at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
Rogge rejected the latest calls Saturday for a special observance to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Games.
"We feel that the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident," Rogge said.
The IOC has come under pressure from politicians in the United States, Israel and Germany to pay tribute to the slain Israelis during Friday's ceremony.
This strikes us as insufficient. Simply as a matter of journalistic craft, the report was appallingly shoddy. Ross pointed the finger at an innocent man based on nothing but the coincidence of a common name and the man's residence in the same city of 325,000 where the crime took place.
Let us amend that. There was one other factor, and this is what makes the ABC error not just amateurish but sinister: the innocent Jim Holmes's involvement with the Tea Party. For more than three years liberal journalists have falsely portrayed the Tea Party as racist and potentially violent. After the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., speculation immediately began that the suspect was a Tea Partier. Even after it was proved that he was not, the New York Times published a despicable editorial blaming conservatives anyway.
Ross and ABC were out on this limb alone. Either other journalists learned their lesson from Tucson, or it didn't occur to them to look for a political motive this time (it was a more plausible hypothesis in a shooting that targeted a politician).
It is reasonable to interpret Ross's hasty unsubstantiated report as an expression of hostility--bigotry--toward the Tea Party and those who share its values, which are traditional American ones. ABC's carelessness here is in sharp contrast with the way the mainstream media treat criminal suspects who are black or Muslim. In those cases they take great pains not to perpetuate stereotypes, sometimes at the cost of withholding or obscuring relevant facts such as the physical description of a suspect who is still at large or the ideological motive for a crime.
Oikophobia is no less invidious than other forms of bigotry. ABC and Ross have apologized for their irresponsible reporting, but they have something more to answer for here. Their careless and inadvertent falsehood was in the service of a big lie.
Richard Nixon was rightly excoriated for keeping an enemies list. Barack Obama seems to have gone Nixon one better, keeping a kill list, of enemies, some of them U.S. citizens, that he can have whacked. However, because keeping an enemies list is just too much fun, Obama appears to have one of those as well.
Employing Obama's logic, one could argue that nearly everything the president uses in his everyday life exists only because of so-called profit-mongering and selfishness -- most often in spite of government. The Internet languished for years in obscurity because government is rarely sensitive to the needs of consumers. And does anyone believe that individuals working together voluntarily (maybe with the help of some fat cat private equity firms) would not have come up with similar technology -- or that they would be unable to build bridges or roads themselves?
Obama has it all backward. It is the charity of a prosperous free society that allows people to become community organizers or attain "free" health care. Washington rarely helps the free market prosper, but a prosperous private sector is what allows Washington to throw billions of dollars into unproductive but morally pleasing environmental projects and dependency programs favored by the president. Society needs the rule of law to function, not another parent.
Of course, Obama is not the first class warrior in politics. But has there ever been a major presidential campaign focused almost exclusively on ginning up class envy and fear (Teddy Roosevelt's third-party run excluded)? The attack on Romney also, almost exclusively, entails calling out the guy for being rich and then relying on the assumption that you can only get that wealthy by being corrupt.
Officials in China are struggling with allegations that a tainted baby powdered-milk formula is to blame for an alleged outbreak in infant puberty.
If that is true, it's clear that it never effected one particular segment of the population.
... and proving that just because Team USA is out, we still care.
Hey, who's up for another deep socio-political soccer discussion?
Out: Our great French teams are a testament to the diversity of the suburban ghettos.
In: Our crappy French teams area a testament to the diversity of the suburban ghettos.
Criticizing the situation in France's ghettoes is a delicate tap dance, because focusing on the criminal and other negative aspects plaguing those areas inevitably circles back to the people living in the largely immigrant and heavily Muslim areas.
So, intentions aside, the current attacks against the team can "encourage prejudice," and "liberate racist speech," said the general director of the advocacy group SOS Racism, Guillaume Ayne.
Politicians have fervently joined in the harangues, in particular questioning team members' disobedience, and the decision by some on the squad not to sing France's national anthem, "La Marseillaise."
On French radio, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said the players represent the "spirit of the cité," a term used for ghettoized housing projects, which he said are "devouring" French society.
Problems afflicting the projects include high crime, poor education and a failure to integrate immigrant youths into French culture.
Les Bleus are "a terrible mirror" of French society, said Finkielkraut on Europe 1 radio.
"Nobody has said anything openly racist, yet," said sociologist Jacques Tarnero, who studies racism. However, the risk of tipping into xenophobia comes up when the French team is associated with the problems of the French ghettoes. It could confuse the public, he said.
Being the sticklers for detail that we are, the Prez is actually 0-5 as we are counting his failed campaign trip to Copenhagen to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics home to Chicago.
Follower update: DooDoo Economics (tea party gear and apparel must-haves) and Snarky Basterd of the fine blog Feed Your ADHD are now in the house.
We didn’t spend near the time blogging about the 2010 Winter Olympics (in fact, blog post total: zero) as we did the 2008 games because, well, think about it: Friendly, unassuming Canadians vs. authoritarian Chi-comms. It’s a no-brainer.
The next Winter Olympics, however, should provide some good blog fodder as the host nation is Russia and its current leader is none too pleased with his country’s dismal performance in these Olympics and is vowing changes in preparation for the Sochi games in ’14.
“Those who bear the responsibility for Olympic preparations should carry that responsibility. It's totally clear," he (President Dmitry Medvedev)i said. "I think that the individuals responsible, or several of them, who answer for these preparations, should take the courageous decision to hand in their notice. If we don't see such decisiveness, we will help them."
... on the cheap.
Entrance question: Generally speaking, do we have a problem with the President of the United States going overseas to make a pitch for an American Olympic venue/city?
No.
But boy, did we qualify the hell out of the beginning of that question. Color us disappointed and the President relieved at news earlier today out of Copenhagen. We’ll have more on why later.
For us, the take-away from this latest episode and the trend that is emerging with this administration is that they can take what should be a seemingly innocuous event and screw it up by epic proportions. Take the talk to the school children earlier this month and the lesson plan that asked the same to write down what it was that they were going to do to “help the president.” In what turned out to be a very cool pep-talk to our nation’s kids was completely overshadowed by not getting out in front of the lesson plan controversy forthwith and doing what needed to be done to mitigate the backlash.
And now we have this Olympics kerkuffle. (Generally speaking…), let’s keep in mind what transpired immediately before and during the president’s speech to the IOC: first, his dithering on Afghanistan and the fact that he had only met once with his top commander, General Stanley McChrystal since appointing him was called out by “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening and which was followed by a 25-minute meeting with McChrystal on Wednesday. Whether or not this meeting was scheduled ahead of time, the damage had been done as it appeared that Obama was shamed into the meeting.
Then, the First Lady felt compelled to remind everybody that a trans-Atlantic jumbo jet ride and two days of hob-nobbing with the global elite was a "sacrifice" she was only too willing to make. And while still in Copenhagen, between President Obama’s speech and the vote tally, the new unemployment numbers came out… 9.8 % and counting. Excellent timing!
And for all that political risk? Booted in the very first round. Ouch. (Word around the campfire is that the IOC, an adjunct arm of the Star Wars cantina scene, felt they were being upstaged by the Obamas).
Look, as hard as it is to believe, we aren’t reveling in the fact that our President was shown up like that on the world stage but this whole thing was entirely of the administration’s doing. (More word, different campfire: after weeks of resisting, the Obamas changed their schedule at the last minute as Mayor Daley was calling in a favor. This is mere speculation but applying Occam’s razor… the most reasonable explanation.)
And we’re not counting on it but if the fallout from this global smackdown effects his legislative agenda here stateside then so much the better. Nothing personal, Sir – we just can’t stand your politics.
Oh, and for our disappointment? 7 years of blog-fodder as Chicago takes center stage as the global village of record and all the deceit, corruption and graft contained therein that would’ve been blown sky-high and writ large in that time is now just a dismal "oh, what could've been?". And that is just the sort of thing the Prez wouldn’t need and why we believe he is secretly relieved Chi-town got bounced.
(UPDATE #1): The Brazilians are having some fun with this, no?
Also, one has to wonder if the recent spate of violence in Chicago's public schools may have had something to do with the dismal showing by Team Chicago. Click here for video (graphic violence warning)
(UPDATE #2):
"The intelligence that we had from the U.S. Olympic Committee and Chicago bid team was that it was very close and therefore well worth our efforts," said Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House advisor. "The message was that . . . a personal appeal from the president would make a huge difference."
In response to Russian armor rolling into the Republic of Georgia, Democracy Now, A.N.S.W.E.R., Code Pink and other left-wing anti-war groups have all sprung into action to protest this naked imperialist aggression that would appear to be largely about oil. Nah, just kidding…. They ain’t doin' jack-squat.
For a nice wrap-up of this 1979 flashback, bop on over to KT’s place here. In summary: Russia has achieved, to date, none of its strategic objectives with the added benefit of pissing-off the rest of the world. Bonus points for doing it during the Olympics. You’re doing a heckava job, Poot.
A few years back when Putin appeared to be returning(?) to the dark side we expressed some disappointment as Putin… like, really seemed to enjoy hanging out at Bush’s ranch in Crawford. As if, rolling in a cowboy hat, clearing brush and eating smoked ribs in West Texas somehow enlightened Putin to the values of classic liberalism.
Occasional commenter and dear friend, “Pablo”, looked at us and said, “Dude, he’s KGB”. As in, present tense. As in, those people don’t change. As in, ever…. Our bad.
UPDATE #1: And for a somewhat contrary opinion, VDH thinks it was a brilliant maneuver… Flex your power, scare your neighbors, watch the West do nothing… Ukraine?
And everyone’s favorite commie, Mikhail Gorbchev chimes-in and blames, yep, the Georgians.
We don’t claim to be experts in anything that goes on in that part of the world but it seems pretty clear to us the Georgian rocket attack on Tskhinvali on August 7 was merely the pretext needed for the Russian military to roll and their apparent defiance of a brokered truce belies any good intentions of coming to the aid of a neighbor and appears to be even a flimsier excuse than the put-down of any incipient Islamo-terrorism in Afghanistan some 29 years ago.
For all the hope that was held in the wake of the fall of the wall 19 years ago, when it appeared that Russia might possibly move their country and political system into that of mainstream Western democracies, it is becoming more and more evident that backward-looking grudge-holding, paranoia and imperialism be they of the Tsarist or Communist variety are hard habits to break.
Possessing the wisdom and foresight we thought was exclusive to U.S. Congress, the citizens of Mexico City voted overwhelmingly to keep the Mexican petroleum industry in a state of ancient technology and stagnating production. A non-binding referendum organized by the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) declared state-owned incompetence to be a matter of national pride and thus preferable to the infusion of state-of-the-art drilling and refining techniques for which privatization and elements thereof, would allow. Mexico: bringing you the finest in socialism and crony capitalism.
No one does the self-gratification quite like ESPN and in the case of honoring, during its ESPYs award show, the once “infamous” now “famous” black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic games, they rose to new heights. We’re not as hard over as Jonah Goldberg is in article here and though we do understand where Smith and Carlos were coming from we believe the act and the context in which it was executed was ill-advised.
Indeed, it can done… Somali immigrants taking the place of Mexican (illegal) immigrants in small-town Iowa. In the final paragraph the article graciously concedes that many of the Somalis are legal immigrants with roots in Minneapolis.
...and finally...12 years, two Presidential administrations and numerous challenges from environmental and, you know, “social justice” groups later, looks like we’re going to complete the border fence down towards Tijuana.
Another bad day for the Olympic torch yesterday as Chinese students clashed with anti-Beijing protesters and where one man, a North Korean defector, attempted to immolate himself as the torch made a stop in Seoul, South Korea.
Story here also prompted the line of the day:
“Today, the Olympic torch begins its first-ever run through North Korea, where the flame was assured a trip free of anti-Chinese protests.”
(ed. note: This line appears in the print version of today’s paper but not in the attached electronic version.)
(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the blog search box above).
The dunder-headed IOC has got your politics, alright.
The U.S. women’s softball team is making a 45-city barnstorming tour throughout the United States currently that is dubbed Bound 4 Beijing and which from account here is part sold-out rock band tour and farewell tour. Farewell tour? What say ye? Apparently, softball is viewed as being to Americanized by the International Olympic Committee as they voted 52-52 (a majority is needed) to drop the sport after the Beijing Games. The American side has won all 3 gold medals since being included as a medal sport in ’96 and most recently outscored its opponents in Athens ’04 by a combined score 51-1.
Of course, this business about the sport being too Americanized or too dominated by Americans is petty, selfish and extremely short-sighted. It was precisely the beat-downs handed out by the American men’s basketball Dream Team in ’92 that kicked what was already a popular international sport into over-drive as the world got an up-close look at the game’s superstars like Michael, Magic and Larry. The image of the Angolan player gleefully showing his Charles Barkley autograph to his teammates and friends after that same Charles Barkley cheap-shotted an elbow into this guy’s chest is the indelible moment of those Games for us.
One can draw a straight downward-trending line from those Olympics to the present as representative of declining American performances and results, and conversely, rising international peformenaces in the Games.
Though we are no means real followers of the sport, we do enjoy the game and will catch what we can when ESPN broadcasts the women’s college world series. Unlike baseball, softball is briskly-paced and one whose participants are very often quite attractive. Sue us!
Anyway, it is hoped the IOC can pull its head out of its rear end long enough to realize that women like Lisa Fernandez and Jennie Finch (pictured) aren’t just heroes to young women here but represent democratizing and gender-equalizing influences around the globe and re-instate softball as an Olympic sport.
(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the blog search box above).
Its official….. What was once bubbling under the surface on human rights groups websites is now out in the open and is being spoken as a viable course of action. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been the highest profile figure to date to make public mention of a “boycott” of the Beijing Games.
There have been two major boycotts of the Games: in 1980 the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Games in protest of the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan the previous year and in ’84, the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern Bloc returned the favor by sitting out the L.A. Games. Ironically, the rest of the world responded with the largest collective shrug in recorded history as those Games turned out to be the Olympics that saved the Olympics after successively, the financial disaster of the ’76 Montreal Games and those ’80 Moscow Games that nobody watched.
In what was probably the only major decision Carter made that we agreed with, Carter’s decision to have the U.S. sit out the Games was the right thing to do. As the leader of the free world it would have been unthinkable, in our minds, to send our athletes over to Moscow to play happy-face with our Cold War adversary in the wake of their naked act of aggression.
But athletes shouldn’t be made pawns in a political game? Please. When NBC and the newspapers stop running countries’ medal counts we’ll stop believing that the Olympic Games have always been, in large part, a contest of what country’s socio-political system produces the best 4x100 relay team.
So, where do we stand with respect to boycotting these Games? We’re leaning towards going and not boycotting the Games. Article here from the U-T lays out a good case for sending our athletes precisely because of the awareness and thus pressure that can be exerted on the Chi-comms particularly in the wake of this recent crackdown in Tibet. If we don’t go, then we aren’t watching and if we aren’t watching then the Tibetans, Buddhists, Christians, Falun-gongers and all the other dissidents and good ol’ fashioned agitators are denied their world-wide stage.
And how will NBC will cover these “Human Rights Olympics”? Will they seize this opportunity to expose what has been going on over there for years or will they play the servile guests and just mouth the Chi-comm party line? Were not certain but we will just say this: thank g#d, the Cuddly One is a religiously-neutral Buddhist instead of a Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist.
(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the blog search box above).
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Taiwan is petitioning the U.N. for membership. Now why Taiwan would want membership in this foul body is anyone’s guess but that’s not up for discussion at this point because what struck us is that our own country is balking at the idea.
OK. Let’s see if we can keep this straight. We trip all over ourselves in recognizing a predominantly Muslim break-away republic in the Balkans, an act by which may lead to war in the region, if not, beyond. However, we have yet to officially recognize Taiwan, a democracy in decent standing and a break-away republic of their own from the Chi-coms.
The march of the nations at the Olympic games is always a good time. And while we are keenly interested in how the steppe betties from Romania and the Czech Republic are showing, we will be glued to the tube to see what transpires when “Chinese Taipei” rolls in.
(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the blog search box above).
Yao Ming, Chinese national and Houston Rocket will miss the rest of the season and the playoffs with a stress fracture in his left foot. He’s taking a bit of grief in the media for saying he is disappointed most with the fact that he won’t be able to play for his country in this summer’s Olympics. The implied inference is that he is somewhat less disappointed that he won’t be able to win an NBA championship for his primary employer, the Houston Rockets.
We’re with Yao on this one. He is easily the most visible Chinese athlete on the planet and with all that is riding on these Olympics for his native country, Yao was going to be the Chi-com’s point-man in their P.R. campaign to make the world somewhat more sympathetic to the fact they are devouring the planet’s resources, polluting the land and sea in epic fashion and are intolerant of political and religious dissidents.
Yao has done an admirable job shouldering all the expectations burdened upon him since he came to the NBA 5 years ago so we can understand his emotion that this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase his talents for his country, on his home turf, in front of the entire world has suddenly gone by the boards.
He will be in a Houston Rocket uniform next season, never again though in a Chinese uniform in Beijing in the Olympics.
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