Same as it ever was

From the pages of America's paper of record and via W.C. Varones:

Republican insurgents from the far right did well in Tuesday’s primaries. What their campaigns lack in logic, compassion and sensible policy seems to be counterbalanced by a fiercely committed voter base that is nowhere to be seen on the Democratic side.

The "insurgents" of 2010 are simply the "temper tantrum"-throwing two-year olds of 1994 according to the state-run media.

In November of 1994, right after Republicans took control of Congress for the first time since the 1950s, Peter Jennings went on ABC radio and delivered a commentary that tells you everything you need to know about elite, liberal journalism.

“Some thoughts on those angry voters,” Jennings began. “Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week. …Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.”

"The others" of the ruling class don't appreciate disobedience.


As always...

May it be so (UPDATED... again)

(please scroll down for updates)



Our blog buddy W.C. Varones was up in the state capitol yesterday for the 9/12 tea party event. His report is here.



Leslie of Temple of Mut was one of the speakers and she will report out on the event at her site later. We will link to her piece when it comes out.


(UPDATE #1): Nick Gillespie of Reason.tv was on hand for the Washington D.C. event. Here is his take:




Breitbart makes a great point at the end of the clip. This isn't a Republican thing similar to 1994. This is a fiscal conservative/limited government thing where Republican lawmakers will be under the same scrutiny as their Democratic counterparts.


(UPDATE #2): Leslie of Temple of Mut was one of the speakers at the tea party event in Sacto this weekend.



Her written account of the event, including getting to meet one of her heroes, Tammy Bruce and her experiences with the Italian tea party can be found here.

Check out the Italian tea party Facebook page, here.



Editor's note: We implied that Nick Gillespie of Reason.tv was at the Sacramento event when, in reality, he was at the Washington D.C. event. Thought it looked a little too green for Sacto. False assumption has been corrected.

Presidential Handicapping

O.K., I admit it, I can’t predict who is going to win the nominations of the major parties, but I will make some fearless predictions on who won’t.

John McCain. Whenever I listen to John McCain speak, I can’t shake the mental image of Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in the “Caine Mutiny” complete with twin metal marbles, looking for the missing strawberries. No way will the American people trust this guy with the button. You just know this guy is ready to snap.

Barrack Hussein Obama? Are you kidding me? Still too soon after 9/11. Too much unease with his names. (Osama-Obama, did I have to spell it out?) Also, he’s way too nice; his Democrat opponent is Hillary, after all. If things look close, look for the long knives to come out and Mr. Obama to be figuratively in a pool of blood on the floor before he knows what happened.

Ron Paul. I love this guy, even voted for him for President once before, way back in 1988. But there is a reason no other Republican candidate is advocating
immediate withdrawal from Iraq. It is a losing proposition, politically and historically, and the Republican base knows it. But maybe if he can gather enough support, the Republican leadership might remember that advocating and delivering smaller government actually wins elections (I’m thinking Ronald Reagan, I’m thinking, 1994 congressional elections.)

Of course, don't take my handicapping seriously. My long track record of not understanding the voting populous started at an early age. I remember toddling after my Mom as she did volunteer work for the Goldwater campaign. Living in Orange County at the time (it wasn't the O.C. yet and it definitely wasn't cool) I met no one who wasn't voting for Barry. I even remember the AuH2O bumper sticker that appealed to the budding geek in me.Needless to say, I was shocked when Johnson won. "But Mommy," I said, "the Democrats must have cheated. We don’t know anyone who voted for Johnson.” “Not this time,” my Mom patiently replied, “it was a landslide.”To this day, Barry Goldwater is my favorite presidential candidate among those I can actually remember.

So, about that 'critical health priority' setting on your dinner table?...(UPDATED)

(Please scroll to bottom for update. Thanks.)

File this one under: Is there anything in life that these people do not wish to regulate?

The Food and Drug Administration should regulate the amount of salt added to foods to help Americans cut their high sodium intake, which can lead to high blood pressure, kidney failure and strokes, an influential federal panel said on Tuesday.

The Institute of Medicine said this was needed because Americans get most of their salt from processed and restaurant food, and merely telling them to eat less salt has not worked.

Meghan Scott, a spokeswoman for the FDA, which sponsored the IOM report, said the agency has not yet decided whether to regulate salt in U.S. foods. "We are not right now working on regulations," she said, but the agency is considering the panel's recommendations.

(italics, ours)

So when the incessant nagging and caterwauling doesn't work, you break out the big regulatory guns of compulsion.

And dig this Meghan Scott character: she wants us all to believe that they are merely considering regulation after a study they sponsored recommend that they do so. Don't you think that if you commission a study that concludes the FDA should regulate salt, the FDA will most likely regulate salt? Folks, the FDA is going to regulate salt.

"For 40 years we have known about the relationship between sodium and the development of hypertension and other life threatening diseases, but we have had virtually no success in cutting back the salt in our diets," Jane Henney of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio, who chaired the Institute of Medicine panel, said in a statement.

"The best way to accomplish this is to provide companies the level playing field they need so they are able to work across the board to reduce salt in the food supply."

For those of you scoring at home, "Level playing field" is statist lingo for mandatory rules and regulations

"There is now overwhelming evidence that we must treat sodium reduction as a critical public health priority," said Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard School of Public Health and a member of the Institute of Medicine.

The panel said companies should be allowed to reduce sodium on a step-by-step basis so that they do not lose customers due to sudden changes in flavor, the panel of experts said.

That companies would be graced by this leniency is proof of the ultimate benevolence of this panel. All hail the Institute of Medicine!

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Senator Tom Harkin said on a conference call they would pressure the FDA to regulate salt intake in the U.S. food supply.

"My view of self regulation is that it has not worked in the past," DeLauro said. "We need to move this along."

This quote was given after the article noted that food giants like Pepsico, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and Campbell Soups Inc., all had stated goals to reduce the sodium content in their products across the board.





(UPDATE #1): A funny thing happened on the way to the Institute of Medicine...

High-salt diets may not increase the risk of death, contrary to long-held medical beliefs, according to investigators from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

They reached their conclusion after examining dietary intake among a nationally representative sample of adults in the U.S. The Einstein researchers actually observed a significantly increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) associated with lower sodium diets.

The researchers analyzed data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), which was conducted by the federal government among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. These data were then compared against death records that had been collected by the government through the year 2000. The sample of approximately 8,700 represented American adults who were over 30 years of age at the time of the baseline survey (1988-1994) and were not on a special low-salt diet.

After adjusting for known CVD risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes and blood pressure, the one-fourth of the sample who reported consuming the lowest amount of sodium were found to be 80% more likely to die from CVD compared to the one-fourth of the sample consuming the highest level of sodium. The risk for death from any cause appeared 24% greater for those consuming lower salt, but this latter difference was not quite large enough to dismiss the role of chance.

“Our findings suggest that for the general adult population, higher sodium is very unlikely to be independently associated with higher risk of death from CVD or all other causes of death,” says Dr. Hillel W. Cohen, associate professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein.

(italics, totally ours)

Color us unsurprised. ObamaCare is not about better healthcare and neither is this pending regulation of salt. It's about control. It's about a fundamental distrust of individual freedoms and liberty.

They may try to dress it up in the fineries of doing what's best for the greater good of individuals in society but at the end of the day the compelling logic is that you cannot be trusted to make healthcare decisions or dietary decisions on your own.

Looking at the way Obamacare was fashioned and looking at what is actually in the bill as we have been doing in our Nancy's Nuances: a journey of discovery and now looking at the statements, motives and facts regarding salt regulation, how can it be anything but?

Quickies

A look at some news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye over the past week or so.





Confirmed: Fewer Laws Make Better Beer in Japan

“This vibrant craft brew scene is a recent development—in part because it was actually impossible not long ago. Before 1994, microbreweries were illegal in Japan. Licenses were granted only to brewers producing well over half a million gallons a year. That protected the well-entrenched large brewers from any upstart competition.”

All things being equal, we believe fewer laws would make better beer, wine, spirits everywhere. We saw it here in California in the late 70s when wine makers broke out onto the international scene because they refused to be hemmed-in by strict French regulations and classifications and again in the early 80s in the craft beer scene when the last vestiges of the Volsted Act were wiped off the books.





Profiles in courage: House votes for resolution against our involvement in Libya yet does not pass a bill to defund our military kinesiology there.


Plus this from the NY Times marshalling all their strength to wrist- slap the President. It must have hurt. The Times that is.

Mr. Obama made the wrong choice, trying to evade his responsibility under the 1973 War Powers Act to seek Congressional authorization within 60 days of introducing armed forces into “hostilities” — or terminate the operation. The White House claimed that the Pentagon’s limited operations are not the sort of “hostilities” covered by the act. It is not credible.

Mr. Obama would have done better arguing his case for the Libyan operation. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was playing catch-up on Capitol Hill on Thursday. We are certain if NATO had not intervened, thousands more Libyans would have been slaughtered. We also believe Congress has an important role to play in this debate. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to vote on the Kerry-McCain measure next week. The majority leader, Harry Reid, has said he has the votes in the Senate. Thankfully, some Senate Republicans also seem to understand the importance of the United States following through on its national security commitments.

(italics, ours)

Perhaps these born-again hawks from the Times can explain to us precisely what those national security interests are because the President sure as hell isn't interested in doing it.


And more from Charles Krauthammer:

But things are not so simple. No president should accept — and no president from Nixon on has accepted — the constitutionality of the WPR, passed unilaterally by Congress over a presidential veto. On the other hand, every president should have the constitutional decency to get some congressional approval when he takes the country to war.

The model for such constitutional restraint is — yes, Sen. Obama — George W. Bush. Not once but twice (Afghanistan and then Iraq) did Bush seek and receive congressional authorization, as his father did for the Persian Gulf War. On Libya, Obama did nothing of the sort. He claimed exemption from the WPR on the grounds that America in Libya is not really engaged in “hostilities.”

To deploy an excuse so transparently ridiculous isn’t just a show of contempt for Congress and for the intelligence of the American people. It manages additionally to undermine the presidency’s own war-making prerogatives by implicitly conceding that if the Libya war really did involve hostilities, the president would indeed be subject to the WPR.

The worst of all possible worlds: Insult Congress, weaken the presidency. A neat trick.

So, we've finally found that one area where the Nobel Peace Prize winner isn't like the cowboy? Good to know.






Terrific: Pam Geller, publisher of Atlas Shrugs comes out in favor of banning the burqa. Is it us or does anyone else see an inherent contradiction in the previous sentence?







There's that word again...

Reuters writing pretty much the same lede they have been for the past two years... as expected.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose last week, suggesting little improvement in the labor market this month after hiring stumbled badly in May.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits climbed by 9,000 to 429,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists had expected claims to come in at 415,000.

(italics, ours in case you missed it)




Rich Lowry on Rick Perry and throwing dirt on the grave of that vile concept, compassionate conservatism.

The Republican noncandidate flavor of the week is Texas governor Rick Perry. If you squint just right, you could mistake him at a podium for his predecessor, George W. Bush. Except for his message.

There might be no more powerful symbol of the death of compassionate conservatism in the Republican party than Bush’s successor and former running mate in Texas stomping all over it with cowboy boots emblazoned with the words “Freedom” and “Liberty.”

We would love to see the Texas governor in the race. Nowhere close to endorsing/supporting anyone yet but it does make the dating pool that much more attractive.





Jonathan V. Last reviews a book that claims that since the late 70s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons.

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

Here's some more of that "new civility" everybody has been talking about.



If you're curious about a double standard here, remember that as per Harry Reid, it would be rather difficult to mock President Obama's dialect.

Besides, we actually like the idea of 3-page bills and wonder just how is it that Jon Stewart sees law-makers not bothering to even read what they want to foist upon us as somehow a "fictional issue".




B-Daddy on gun control and racism

So Garry McCarthy, Chicago Police Superintendent, links federal gun control regulation to racism. Turns out he is right, but not in the sense he means. First, his comments:

“I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of African-American history in this country, and tell me if I’m crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms into our urban centers, across this country, that are killing black and brown children,”

Well, Garry, you are crazy. Keeping guns out of the hands of blacks and Hispanics has been the racist goal of gun control attempts. A review of the historical record reveals that gun control in America has been directed at keeping guns out of the hands of blacks.

We've had a strong notion all along that gun control was all about power, control and social engineering and had, at best, a tenuous relationship with public safety. Read more at the link about the soft bigotry of low expectations that is codified in the liberal-Left mentality.


And finally...
Shane Atwell's weekly regulation watch, here.


We may be back later today with a new post or an update to this one but we'll definetely be back tomorrow.

"I see ass-kickings"... (UPDATED!)

(UPDATE #1):

It wasn't always like this. Certainly, legislators and government officials have always had to deal with the annoyance of obtrusive constituents. But there was always a belief that somehow, between election campaigns, we would muddle along despite the constant threat of voter interference. Those of us who survived the horrors of November 1994 worked hard to design important safety net protections, such as revolving doors, redistricting, earmarks, and franking privileges, in a bipartisan effort to insure "Never Again." And with the inauguration of President Obama in January, there was an optimistic sense that the era of Big Voter was finally over.

More here from the 'Hawk.

(here endeth the update)




Awesomely awesome...

It’s going to be a long hot summer for many members of Congress and members of Obama’s cabinet as they spend millions and millions of tax payer dollars trying to foist health care on an increasingly skeptical public.

Here’s Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Arlen Specter (D-R-D, PA) at a town hall meeting in PA over the weekend.

At the 1:40 mark the place comes absolutely unglued when Specter says that because of the volume of bills whisking their way merrily through the sausage grinder, “...we have to make judgements very fast.”



Not what the townies came to here, Arlen. Nope. Not at all what they wanted to hear.

H/T: Instaglen

P.S. Special shout-out to Scott who has cast fortune to the wind and has decided to jump onboard as a follower of BwD. Thanks, Scott! Check out his Anglo-American politics and foreign policy blog, here.

Smackdown... Again

B-Daddy here. In an opinion that received only moderate coverage, the Supreme Court has delivered another well deserved smackdown to the Bush administration, this time on an issue of international law. The case itself is fairly straightforward, Jose Ernesto Medellín was sentenced to death in October 1994 after providing a written confession to the rape and murder of two teenage girls in June 1993 as part of a gang initiation. After exhausting most of his appeals, his lawyers brought up the fact that since he was a Mexican national, the Mexican consulate should have been notified, as provided for by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled against the United States in its Avena decision, stating in part:

“(a) The United States of America shall take all measures necessary to ensure that Mr. César Roberto Fierro Reyna, Mr. Roberto Moreno Ramos and Mr. Osvaldo Torres Aguilera are not executed pending final judgment in these proceedings;
(b) The Government of the United States of America shall inform the Court of all measures taken in implementation of this Order.'

Subsequently, the administration withdrew from that particular protocol of the treaty. But that didn't stop the administration from directing the state of Texas to retry the Medellín case. The Supremes said not so fast, under what legal basis do you the executive branch presume to direct the operations of the state criminal justice system. Further, what constitutional right or federal statutory right was Medellín denied that he should even appear as a petitioner before the Supreme Court? The key issue is that even though the United States may sign a treaty, if specific provisions for its enforcement are not codified into law, then courts are enjoined from inventing judicial remedy. We should be very happy about that outcome, because many international treaties tend to infringe on state sovereignty and individual rights. Preventing the courts from inventing remedies prevents future mischief. What if the Senate ratifies the Cybercrime Treaty and it is interpreted by the ICJ that rules that pointing out the Koran directs its followers to make war on infidels is a hate crime. If U.S. courts could then invent remedies, we might as well take a magic marker to the first amendment of the constitution.

BTW, I oppose the death penalty, but am unwilling to subvert our constitutional form of government just to reduce the number of executions.

This legal matter also exposes the President's flagrant disregard for the rule of law, again, by directing state courts to give regard to a treaty from which the administration itself had withdrawn. I happen to agree with DailyKos that this kind of behavior is the most troubling aspect of the Bush presidency. Think about the precedents Bush has tried to set in the hands of Hillary Clinton. Some more bullet points:

• Bush is no conservative, not respecting the rule of law.
• Bush is no federalist, not respecting state judicial processes.

However, of all the candidates currently still in the race, I think that Clinton has shown herself to be the most capable of continuing these shenanigans.

H/T: National Review

Quickies

A round-up of news articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.




Uh-oh. We're being lectured again. First Newsweek, then Katie Couric and the Washington Post and now, Vanity Fair... Vanity Fair! infers just what is proper thought for polite company.

Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks. She is the only one who has been able to significantly change the course of debate on a major national issue (health-care reform) with a single Facebook posting (in which she accused the Obama administration, falsely, of wanting to set up a “death panel”).

(emphasis, ours... just in case you were not getting the message that Vanity Fair was telegraphing, you worthless wingnuts)




Again, Democrats are about to have their hats handed to them in November so the only reasonable explanation for this is that it's the result of a temper tantrum.

1994... and now, ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Robinson:

According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an "electoral wave," it's a temper tantrum.

To Robinson's credit, he does make a good point about our collective unwillingness to confront our entitlement programs which are completely unsustainable and apart from current run-away spending have the single-handed ability to break us.





Rich Lowry writing for NRO on the bourgeois revolution:

The much-analyzed speeches at the Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally weren’t as notable as what the estimated 300,000 attendees did: follow instructions, listen quietly to hours of speeches, and throw out their trash.

Just as stunning as the tableaux of the massive throngs lining the reflecting pool were the images of the spotless grounds afterward. If someone had told attendees they were expected to mow the grass before they left, surely some of them would have hitched flatbed trailers to their vehicles for the trip to Washington and gladly brought mowers along with them.

This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society. The spark that lit the tea-party movement was the rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who inveighed in early 2009 against an Obama-administration program to subsidize “the losers’ mortgages.” He was speaking for people who hadn’t borrowed beyond their means or tried to get rich quick by flipping houses, for the people who, in their thrift and enterprise, “carry the water instead of drink the water.”

The tea party’s detractors want to paint it as radical, when at bottom it represents the self-reliant, industrious heart of American life. New York Times columnist David Brooks compares the tea partiers to the New Left. But there weren’t any orgiastic displays at the Beck rally, nor any attempts to levitate the Lincoln Memorial — just speeches on God and country. It was as radical as a Lee Greenwood song.

We're hesitant to conflate the tea party with the folks attending the Restoring Faith rally but at the end of the day... there is heavy overlap. Heavy.







Jessie Jackson's hoopdie gets boosted in the Motor City?

Following the embarrassing news that Mayor Dave Bing’s GMC Yukon was hijacked by criminals this week, Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend with the UAW’s militant President Bob King leading the “Jobs, Justice, and Peace” march promoting government-funded green jobs.

Read that again: Jackson’s Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.

Or just consider it an involuntary act of eco-obedience. Afterall, in Al Gore's world this was merely a servant of Gaia sent to reduce Jessie Jackson's carbon footprint. Rejoice!




And speaking of the Big Three and Big Labor...prospects for Government Motors going public?

The U.S. government is likely to take a loss on General Motors Co [GM.UL] in the first offering of the automaker's stock, six people familiar with preparations for the landmark IPO said.

The U.S. Government? We're looking at you, tax payers.

B-Daddy has more, here.




And finally:

Barack, can we, uh, talk for a few minutes?

Oh, nothing. It's just that it just seems we haven't had a chance to talk for a while. I mean, I know we've both been busy for the past year or so. You with your fundraisers and golfing and stuff, and me with all those appointments at the unemployment office. But you know I think it's important in a relationship like ours to keep the lines of communication open.

So anyway, I've been think that... look, this is really hard. God. Do you remember when we met at that big party in Denver back in 08? I mean when I saw you across that crowded convention floor, it was like, Oh My God. I don't think I ever saw anything like you before. I was on the rebound from a bad relationship and you were so tall and articulate and, well hot. And then I couldn't believe that of all the democracies in the room you picked me out!

Yeah I know my some of my friends warned me you were trouble, and that it was the alcohol talking. But I knew that if we gave it a chance we could make it work. You and me, together. And after you moved in, I really think we did for a while. I mean, you've really helped me get over my inhibitions and hangups, and I like to think I've really helped you grow and discover yourself. Like last year when I lent you $800 billion to pay for your demo tape and new rims for the Cadillac.

No worries. Paul Krugman says he's good for it. More here from Iowahawk

Significant of Nothing

Contract requirements allowed a maximum completion time of 140 calendar days with a penalty for late completion of $205,000 per calendar day and an incentive of $200,000 per day for early completion. Contract time commenced on Saturday, the 5th of February, with materials and equipment moving to the jobsite that day and through the weekend. Even though the final construction plans were not available until February 26th, C.C. Myers, Inc. immediately went to work on a 24-hour-day, 7 days-per-week schedule with up to 400 workmen on the job, while maintaining a safety record that even surpassed C.C. Myers, Inc.'s AGC award-winning program.

That summarizes the Herculean task undertaken and achieved by the construction company C.C. Myers in opening the world’s busiest road, the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles that had been destroyed by the Northridge quake in 1994. Work was completed in 66 days…. 74 days ahead of schedule!

And the dirty little secret that no one ever wants to talk about is that this was accomplished, or rather expedited because then-Governor Pete Wilson relaxed the normal procurement and permitting regulations and waived environmental impact reports while implementing a bidding procedure and incentive system that tied potential profits to a successful on-time/ahead-of-time completion of the freeway.



In other news yesterday, Nancy Pelosi unveiled the House’s own version of the Great Stumble Sideways or This Old House (still haven’t settled on one yet) and not to be outdone by Obama, it comes with a price tag of $825 billion, a cool 50 bil over Obama’s projected stimulus plan cost.

We bring up the former as an example of quick, hard-hitting and smart decision-making and management practices as a juxtaposition to the opposite that this stimulus plan will be.

Is it really possible that a Congressionally-conceived and administered jobs program will waive environmental impact reports? Can you imagine Democrats signing off on relaxing overtime restrictions above union objection or establishing work-arounds for long and laborious open-bidding processes?

As President-elect Obama is soon to find out, there are a few specific reasons why nothing ever actually gets built here in California anymore and with Big Labor and Big Green both wanting to take responsibility for Democratic gains over the last couple of years, there are a few constituencies that will be looking for a little payback.

Then again, when actually building something is not really the end but rather the means to a 2, 3, 4 million man and woman jobs program, work for work's sake if you will, who the hell cares?