Quickies

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





George Will on the importance of the Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare:

The Obamacare issues of Medicaid coercion and the individual mandate are twins. They confront the court with the same challenge, that of enunciating judicially enforceable limiting principles. If there is no outer limit on Congress’s power to regulate behavior in the name of regulating interstate commerce, then the Framers’ design of a limited federal government is nullified. And if there is no outer limit on the capacity of this government to coerce the states, then federalism, which is integral to the Framers’ design, becomes evanescent.

So, the time the court has allotted for oral argument about Obamacare is proportional to the stakes. This case is the most important in the more than half a century since the Brown v. Board of Education cases because, like those, it concerns the nature of the American regime.

Evanescent. Ahem. vanishing; fading away; fleeting.


Will's right, however, as if the Supremes uphold the mandate, the precedent will have been set that there is effectively nothing Congress cannot compel you to do. Crazy notion but we don't think that's what the Founders had in mind for the federal government.







Sarah over at Lipstick Underground is no fan of Newt Gingrich but appears to dislike his wife even more:

The REAL ick factor in all this is wife #3, Callista Bisek Gingrich, mistress during marriage #2 and potential First Lady of the United States. Just let that sink in for a minute.

I hold women to a higher standard then men. I’m hardly a prude, and stuff happens in marriages that is just between spouses. But the simple truth is, we are the gate keepers to societal standards around here...and I’m not interested in having to call some home wrecking hussy “First Lady.” She’s no lady and I don’t want her in my White House.

We... had not considered that angle before.






Sir Charles at Doo Doo Economics attended the 28th annual San Diego County Economic Roundtable and provides his round-up here ending with this observation:

All the economists and speakers shared one common sentiment. The 2012 election year will decide if small or big government will rule our futures. My take on the situation is that a smaller government role is warranted. Keynesian economics has run its course. Small tweaks to capitalism work but socialist cronyism is not a small tweak. Making poverty and dependence comfortable and allowing the state to pick winners and losers is not wise in any civilization. Only the passion of self interested individuals who believe in their own ideas and benefit from taking risks can create a vibrant economy. No amount of marketing "green" or other state solutions will impassion true believers, investors and customers like an individual with an innovative idea.

Look no further than Europe to see how that statist/entitlement model is working. Yet, the ruling party at the federal level and in many states including our home state of California seem quite content to be just that... content to follow the status quo when the status quo will lead to certain ruin.






So, just how did that "open marriage" request/demand that was to end Newt's candidacy work out?

Gingrich trailed Romney by double digits just days ago. But that changed quickly after Gingrich's performance in Thursday's night CNN Southern Republican debate. The former House speaker was able to turn his biggest liability -- accusations by his second wife, Marianne, that he wanted an "open marriage" -- into an asset, drawing two standing ovations for assailing the media for bringing up the allegations.

If there was going to be a primary out there where allegations of marital infidelity were going to register with the state's social conservative-leaning Republican voters, it would've been South Carolina and yet Newt wins going away. So, what is it?: Newt's skillful debate performance in criticizing the (northeastern) media or a collective electoral shrug of the shoulders seemingly saying, "It's Newt, of course he's going to want to get a little freaky." Next.

Oh, by the way, Newt carried the majority of married women.


Totally related (via Instapundit):

MORE STILL: A female reader writes that Gingrich may not have been so hurt by ex-wife Marianne’s TV interview:

Hate to say this and don’t use my name, but I watched the interview and thought

“You bitch, he cheated on his first wife with you. What the heck did you expect?”

Kinda parallels what Sarah was saying above, don't it?









How's that Arab Spring working out over in Egypt?

Terrific: Egypt Islamists win 70 percent

Islamists won a combined 70 percent of parliamentary seats in the first election after Egypt’s revolution, according to official results Saturday that cemented the victory of rival religious parties belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist Salafists.

More fundamentalist? Again, terrific.

Don't think we're going out on a limb by saying life won't be getting much better for this particular set of protesters.

KT links to a fine piece by Charles Murray on the changing face and increasing isolationism of the elites in our country:

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

It's long but worthwhile and caused us to recall Angelo Codevilla's epic manifesto from the summer of 2010 "America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution"

A sampling:

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

And dig this from Russell K. Nieli:

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."

Exit question: Sorry for going all pitchfork-wielding populist but how have all those Ivy League degrees littered about Wall Street and Washington D.C. been working out for this country, lately?



OK, gang. That's it for now. It's a new week so let's get to it.

Quickies

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




George Will reviews "Burning Down the House".

So, why isn't anyone from Fannie or Freddie behind bars yet? And why, despite being far, far worse, hasn't "Fannie/Freddie" supplanted "Enron" in the cultural lexicon as the term for criminally corrupt mismanagement?



Here's some more of that "new civility" we've been hearing about.




Naturally. Liberals start invoking religion when it comes to raising the debt ceiling.

Veteran Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel made an impassioned plea to religious leaders Friday, calling on them to lobby members of Congress and the Obama administration to remember the "lesser of my brothers and sisters" during this weekend's debt negotiations.

"What would Jesus do this weekend? Or Moses. Or Allah. Or anyone else," the New York congressman said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "I don't want this book (debt negotiations) closed without the clergy having an opportunity to forcefully express themselves as well as I know they can do."

Nice of you to work Allah into the mix, Chuck. Equal opportunity religious/social justice pandering.





Out: double dip

In: muddling

The L.A. Times does its best to put on a sort-of-smiley face.

America is getting good at muddling through.

That was the economy's disheartening growth story in the first half of 2011. Things may not look much different in the second half.

So let's all just get used to it and muddle together.





Observation: It's nearly accepted as an article of faith in conservative circles that this country is a center-right country. Why is that faith tested, however, when we start talking about the brass tacks of reforming our entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which looks to be on particularly precarious ground?

We're gonna have to do it, gang. Math wins. Math always wins.





From JTA:

Israel was included erroneously on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorist watch list, a U.S. official said.

John Morton, the director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the department, said Israel's recent appearance on a list compiled by the department's office of the inspector general was a mistake.

"The addition of Israel in the OIG’s list of ICE's 'Third-Agency Checks' (TAC) was based on inaccurate information provided to the OIG during the course of its audit," Morton said in a statement sent by e-mail to JTA. "The U.S. does not and never has considered Israel to have links to terrorism, but rather they are a partner in our efforts to combat global terrorism. The United States maintains close intelligence-sharing relationships with Israel in order to address security issues within its own borders and in our mutual pursuit of safety and security around the globe."

Uh, right. Of all the countries on this planet they could've mistakenly put on this terrorist watch list from, say, Guatamala to the Czech Republic to Nigera, it just happened to be good ol' Israel. Weird, huh?





And speaking of Israel...

...awww... Islamo-leftist Gaza blockade runners shut down.

Organizers behind the US 'Audacity of Hope' Gaza flotilla ship announced Wednesday they were throwing in the towel and would not be going to Gaza.

"The Greek government’s willingness to serve as the enforcer of Israeli’s naval blockade of Gaza made it impossible for this journey to happen," organizers complained on their website.

"Now our folks are beginning the journey home – some will arrive today, some tomorrow and others in the days ahead," the organizers wrote of the ship's 37 passengers and 4 crew.

The 'Audacity of Hope' was stopped by the Hellenic Coast Guard when it tried to leave port without permission on Friday.

We're missing something. They knew going in that Greece wasn't going to let them sail to Gaza. Why didn't they start out their "humanitarian aid mission" from Egypt?

Further proof of the completetly unserious and grandstanding nature of the world-wide pro-Palestinian useful idiot set. Flo-tards.




From IBD:

The engine of most of our job growth is still suffering two years after the recession supposedly ended. When will the White House and Congress start listening to the problems of small business?

Small businesses were once rightly seen as the entrepreneurial backbone of our nation's economy and way of life. But today they're demonized by the White House as "millionaires and billionaires," and the medicine that's been forced down their throats — $830 billion of stimulus, $1.7 trillion of Fed mad-money, $700 billion of TARP bailouts and $1.75 trillion in yearly regulation costs — has only made them sicker.

Small businesses bear the brunt of this failed experiment in Keynesianism. U.S. Bancorp's 2011 small business survey, just released last month, shows the vast majority of small businesses — 78% to be exact — "think the U.S. economy is currently in recession," despite Obama's whopping stimulus.

Worse, 85% believe things won't get any better next year.

(italics, ours)

This is what is meant by businesses "sitting it out".





Quite possibly the saddest thing we've read in a while.





Bad news: No more drunk puppy buying in New York's Greenwich Village. The potential buyers being drunk, that is, silly.





Congrats to Leslie of Temple of Mut who won Blog of the Day honors over at Legal Insurrection.

Hey, Leslie, you ought to go on vacation more often, huh?

More nanny state insanity.

Plant a garden in your front yard - go to jail.

Shane Atwell has the details, here. Video included.




And finally...

"That's racist" and NPR's complete inability to grasp a pop culture tag line.



That's probably it for now folks. Thanks for hanging our. We'll see you all tomorrow.

Quickies

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



Good news: waste in government due to agency/bureaucratic overlap and redundancies probably even more than you would expect.

The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development.

These are a few of the findings in a massive study of overlapping and duplicative programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to the Government Accountability Office.

A report from the nonpartisan GAO, to be released Tuesday, compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who pushed for the report, estimated it identifies between $100 billion and $200 billion in duplicative spending. The GAO didn't put a specific figure on the spending overlap.

George Will on Obama and choo-choos:

Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency’s importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind.

Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.” “Access” and “high-speed” to be defined later.

Construction cost overruns and overly optimistic ridership projections are almost assured, so why?


It's simple: it gets you out of your car and the inherent freedom and individuality it contains and into their trip where you're standing on a train platform dancing to their tune.

Totally related: Consumer Reports pans the Chevy Volt:

Consumer Reports offered a harsh initial review of the Chevrolet Volt, questioning whether General Motors Co.'s flagship vehicle makes economic "sense."The extended-range plug-in electric vehicle is on the cover of the April issue — the influential magazine's annual survey of vehicles — but the GM vehicle comes in for criticism.

"When you are looking at purely dollars and cents, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The Volt isn't particularly efficient as an electric vehicle and it's not particularly good as a gas vehicle either in terms of fuel economy," said David Champion, the senior director of Consumer Reports auto testing center at a meeting with reporters here. "This is going to be a tough sell to the average consumer."

And this:

But GM has noted that most Americans can avoid using gasoline for most regular commuting with the Volt, while its gasoline engine can allow the freedom to travel farther, if needed.

Ah, yes... freedom.


Also related: Mickey Kaus on how the GM bailout is coming along:

Q. GM’s recent sales surge–what’s their secret? Great new models? Superior quality? A: Heavy price-cutting to goose sales (at an inevitable cost in profits). … Maybe that’s why GM stock is plunging priced so realistically.

Follow the links at the link.




Awesome: Still some more of that "new civility" we've been hearing about.

Wisconsin Democrat To Republican Colleague: “You Are F***ing Dead

Why just 10 minutes? New study: Staring at breasts is good for your health.

Guys, listen up. A study says it is actually healthy to stare at a woman's breasts.

Five-hundred men participated in the German study. Half were told to refrain from looking at breasts for five years, the other half were told to ogle them daily.

The study found the men who stared at breasts more often showed lower rates of heart problems, a lower resting heart rate and lower blood pressure.

The authors of the study recommend that men stare at breasts for 10 minutes a day.

What a bunch of pseudo-science non-sense.

But why take any chances....

You're welcome. We're givers. That's what we do around here.







Michael Barone on political pundits and why voters don't always vote for their own best interests:

The recoil in 2010 against the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government seems to have a cultural or a moral dimension as well. It was a vote, as my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy P. Carney wrote last week, expressing "anger at those unfairly getting rich -- at the taxpayer's expense."

Those include well-connected Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs that got bailed out and giant corporations like General Electric that shape legislation so they can profit. They include the public employee unions who have bribed politicians to grant them pensions and benefits unavailable to most Americans.

A government intertwined with the private sector inevitably picks winners and losers. It allows well-positioned insiders to game the system for private gain. It bails out the improvident and sticks those who made prudent decisions with the bill.

Modest-income Americans think this is wrong. They want it fixed more than they want a few more bucks in their paychecks.

Picking winners and losers, indeed.


Check out the article at the link and see if you buy Barone's argument that the great freak-out over stagnating middle income wages over the past 30-40 years is somewhat misleading.

H/T: W.C. Varones






Jonah Goldberg on Charlie Sheen:

It’s rare to see someone own his idiocy and self-destruction so completely, never mind so boldly. He makes it hard to look away.

Charlie Sheen's top 15 craziest quotes of the past couple of weeks.

Our faves:

On partying: "I mean, what's not to love? Especially when you see how I party man, it's epic. The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them, just look like droopy-eyed, armless children."

On his natural high: "I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body."

We forgot where we heard it but someone said of Sheen's recent behavior that he is living out his character from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.



Oh, yeah.

We now await our scolding for devoting so much time to such a cad.

Quickies: the fleebagger edition

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



First, Wisconsin and now in Indiana, Democratic lawmakers are forcing a government shutdown by turning tail and heading out of state rather than, you know, doing the job they have been paid to do by the taxpayers of their state. Elections do have consequenses and for the citizens of Wisconsin and Indiana, these consequenses mean, instead of having to face some legislative unpleasantries, certain lawmakers behave like abject cowards and abdicate their duties and responsibilities to the people they serve.

You don't even have to support Scott Walker or his public employee union reforms to recognize the disgraceful actions of these fleebaggers. This notion of "negotiating" is complete non-sense. The Democrats got their asses handed to them in November, turning over majorities of state legislatures to the Republicans and their response, their big idea, is to get out of Dodge all the while bitching and moaning about "preserving the balance of power". If all this apparently unbearable legislation is indeed so horrible, run on that assumption in 2012 and throw the Republicans out of office and then try to balance the budget.

Ah, that felt good.





Some more of that "new civility" the liberal-Left tells us we all must abide by.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

"Racist!" some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military.

"It doesn't matter how you feel about the war. It doesn't matter how you feel about fighting," said Maschek. "There are bad men out there plotting to kill you."

Several students laughed and jeered the Idaho native, a 10th Mountain Division infantryman who spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington recovering from grievous wounds.

Now that DADT has been repealed what are the Ivys objecting to now as justification for banning ROTC from their campuses? The military ban on transgenders? Oh, for cryin' out loud.

Can we now just cut through all the bullshit and acknowledge that the Ivys simply hate the military? Hey, it's cool.

Incidentally...

Despite Columbia being a private university, we understand they still receive federal funding. How quickly can we put an end to that?





When you lose Evan Thomas:

Only the President, only the President can break the logjam. His State of the Union was a profile in cowardice. His budget is a profile in cowardice. I hope there’s a secret plan he has here to come forward to lead us, but he hasn’t shown it yet.

Secret plan? Uh, yeah. With a Republican-controlled House, the President has a historic Only-Nixon-counld-go-to-China opportunity for entitlement reform and Thomas is hoping for a secret plan. We're in the very best of hands.



George Will On Wisconsin and its two principals.

Obama: Let's drop anymore of that "centrist" talk, shall we?

Scott Walker: If you've been paying attention to this guy's political career, this should come as no big surprise.

Penicillin or leeches?

If multiculturalism is so swell, what ever became of multimedicinalism?

KT has more on the subject, here.




It's not too late. There's still time to repent and reform but the early returns are starting to roll in and it doesn't look promising:

We baby boomers have been called, with good reason, "The Worst Generation."

Our parents survived the Great Depression, then donned uniforms to fight the Good War and save Western Civilization. We call them "The Greatest Generation." We use capital letters to honor their achievements and spirit of uncomplaining self-sacrifice.

But they gave birth to us, the cohort born between 1945 and 1964, and they gave us everything they never had. Since fate has demanded little of us, we spoiled "baby boomers" are, as former Clinton adviser Paul Begala (born 1961) has written, "the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation" in U.S. history.

That epic selfishness is on full display in Wisconsin's budget battle.

Like the rest of the country, Wisconsin's government, unions and schools, led mostly by boomers, are trying to stem a tide of red ink. Unlike the federal government, Wisconsin can't just print more money or borrow from the Chinese.

So the rest of America is closely watching Wisconsin: Will the boomers finally step up, as their parents did, and do what's best for the next generation?

Stay tuned.

Oh, and we know a handful of folks born on the cusp in the late 50s and early 60s, technically boomers, who consider themselves, culturally-speaking, Gen-Xers who want absolutely nothing to do with the boomer generation and stigma for that matter.

Damn hippies.





Shut up, they explained.

Peter Wehner on Wisconsin, Big Media and its double standard when it comes to that whole civility thing.

The game that’s being played is obvious. Civility has no intrinsic worth for these individuals; it is merely another weapon in an endless political battle.

Remember, kids... this civility thing is just the ruling class's polite way of shutting down dissent.




B-Daddy reviews Avery Brewing Salvation Ale. Now, we don't want to give anything away but we wouldn't send you over there if he thought it was a crappy beer, right?



Leslie is heading to Arizona and will be phoning in reports.




Hey, wait... here's more of that civility thing we've been hearing about.

Sometimes it's necessary to get out on the streets and "get a little bloody," a Massachusetts Democrat said Tuesday in reference to labor battles in Wisconsin.

Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) fired up a group of union members in Boston with a speech urging them to work down in the trenches to fend off limits to workers' rights like those proposed in Wisconsin.

"I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going," Capuano said, according to the Statehouse News. "Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary."

Political observers have been the lookout for potentially incendiary rhetoric in the wake of January's shooting in Tucson, Ariz., where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) survived an assassination attempt, six were killed, and 12 others were injured.

It's obvious these "political observers" have been doing a piss-poor job of stopping any of it.

With respect to Capuano, at a certain point, these people just become caricatures of themselves.



And finally...

Jonah Goldberg eulogizes his brother.

When Josh was at his best, he was simply the best person I knew. The Joys of Yiddish says that a mensch is “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being ‘a real mensch’ is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, [and] decorous.”

How cool is that? Is there an equivalent term for us goys?

Blessings: take them where you can find them

There are writers out there like Victor Davis Hanson or George Will whom we greatly admire and then there are writers that we also admire and where we think... damn, wish we had thought of that. David Harsanyi of the Denver Post is becoming one of those writers.

Given that there remains overwhelming opposition to the ground zero mosque, this viewpoint would mean that 70 percent of Americans are impulsively hostile to freedom of religion and irrationally narrow-minded.

Could be. Or, maybe a few of these folks believe the First Amendment features more than one clause. Even a newfound reverence for religious liberty on the left does not negate our right to protest and criticize the philosophical disposition of others. And applying public pressure in an effort to shut down a project is as American as protesting the arrival of a new Wal-Mart. Religious institutions, as far as I can tell, are not exempted from these disputes.

In 2008, thousands of gay-rights activists protested the Mormon temple in Westwood, Calif., for its role in passing Proposition 8 — the ban on same-sex marriage. This grew into a national protest to undermine the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — even though not every Mormon was involved.

I don't recall anti-Mormon protesters being referred to as bigots for targeting religion; it appeared to be just the opposite, in fact. And if I am offended by aspects of Mormon theology, why not voice those concerns? Put it this way: If Mormons proposed the erection of a 13-story community center in West Hollywood or the West Village, I would be happy to join the outcry of protest.

The left wanted a scrap with this whole Ground Zero mosque debate and they have so screwed the pooch with respect to the narrative, they have been reduced to calling for investigations of those opposed to the mosque and, wait for it... pining for the wisdom and understanding that George W. Bush would have for this situation.

No, seriously... it's that bad: The brush-clearing, war-mongering, neo-con would handle this cultural dirty bomb better than our cool, calm and collected, closet Muslim.

That old Chinese blessing of wishing someone to live in un-interesting times is definitely not being observed of late.

Quote of the day

"You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."

Awesome but not nearly as awesome had Bibi chosen one of the more malleable words in the English language for the verb in the second sentence.

Now us? Boy, this thing is really catching.

The best thing you'll read this week (UPDATED...again)

(please scroll to bottom for update)


We feel duty-bound to draw your attention to a fantastic piece written by Angelo M. Codevilla for the The American Spectator titled, "America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution".

We've written before in these pages that in our lifetime, there has not been a greater rift between the ruling class and the rest of us which Codevilla terms "the country class" as there is at this very momemt. Codevilla takes his time in explaining why and how it is we got to this point and what is to come.

It's a tremedously well-written essay that brought to mind some of our favorite contemporary writers as it contained the sage probity of Victor Davis Hanson, the historical context of George Will, the humorous contempt of P.J. O'Rourke and the unshakeable faith in American exceptionalism of Tom Wolfe.

It's a long read but well worth the time. As such, we're debating excerpting portions of it but one thing did catch our eye as it related to another item we saw over the weekend.


From Codevilla's pseudo-manifesto:

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

And this from Russell K. Nieli:

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."

Exit question: How are all those Ivy League educations littered throughout Wall Street, Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. working out for America?


(UPDATE #1): Codevilla's essay is absolutely blowing up around the internet and on the airwaves. Wanted to link you to The Liberator Today and B-Daddy's thoughts here as well as Left Coast Rebel who has the entire essay posted at his site (that's totally cheating, Tim ;)).

(UPDATE #2): The conservative equivalent of the cover of The Rolling Stone chimes in on Codevilla's essay here describing the situation as due to what we like to refer to as the West Potomac virus.

Stating the obvious

The best column you'll read this week.

No one has a firmer grasp of events of this nation's past and how they effect subsequent events than George Will. Of course, you would expect that from a baseball man.

Will used his weekly column as a book review of sorts for Daniel Okrent's "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" which is a recounting of how we abolished a private right in order to make America a better place. Aside from a highly dubious federal incursion into personal lifestyle decisions, Will uses the column as a warning for the unintended consequences that will result from the current efforts to make America a better place. A few pull-a-graphs from the column:

Although whiskey often was a safer drink than water, Americans, particularly men, drank too much. Women's Prohibition sentiments fueled the movement for women's rights — rights to hold property independent of drunken husbands; to divorce those husbands; to vote for politicians who would close saloons. So the United States Brewers' Association officially opposed women's suffrage.

Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right — the “right to be let alone” — that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did

.

And this:

Exemptions from Prohibition for church wine and medicinal alcohol became ludicrously large — and lucrative — loopholes.

After 13 years, Prohibition, by then reduced to an alliance between evangelical Christians and criminals, was washed away by “social nullification” — a tide of alcohol — and by the exertions of wealthy people like Pierre du Pont who hoped that the return of liquor taxes would be accompanied by lower income taxes.

(They were.)
Ex-bootleggers found new business opportunities in the southern Nevada desert. And in the Second World War, draft boards exempted brewery workers as essential to the war effort.

The many lessons of Okrent's story include: In the fight between law and appetite, bet on appetite. And: Americans then were, and let us hope still are, magnificently ungovernable by elected nuisances.

Recall the whining we heard earlier this year prior to the passage of Obamacare that with Democrats controlling the Oval Office and both the Senate and the House, America had become "ungovernable".

Hoist a pint this evening and drink a toast to an American exceptionalism that is distrustful of centralized power, cherishes liberty and is, yes, ungovernable.

Quote of the day

There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of today's liberalism: the American people are such dopes they can't be counted upon to buy their own insurance.

That from George Will in response to Robert Reich’s claim that nationalized healthcare is needed in order to set minimum standards so the American public won’t be “taken”.

This exchange ocurred over the weekend during the Roundtable segment of “This Week”.

Will’s exactly right as the statist agenda depends upon the notion that the American public is like a lamb led to slaughter, or at least would be led to slaughter were it not for the munificence and wisdom of their benefactors in the government who are uniquely positioned to make better healthcare decisions for individuals than those individuals themselves.

In the same program, Will also blew up the perception that the health insurance providers were swimming in ill-begotten cash, i.e., the suddenly toxic term “profits” (try telling that to their shareholders).

The health care insurance industry, in 2008, experienced profits of 2.2% ranking them 35th in all of American industries right ahead of Petroleum refining at 2.1%.

Word of the day

Tincture: (from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition) 1. to tint or stain with a color. 2. to infuse or instill with a property or entity

As in: “It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.”

Read more here.

We’ll have more later on just what it is that’s been bothering us, lately

Tales from Bailout Nation

So what’s it called when lending institutions make loans to people without the necessary collateral or cash flow to pay off the loan? Of course, we all know that this is called a “sub-prime loan”.

So what has GMAC, the “financing affiliate” of General Motors (which received money from the federal government so it could qualify as a bank holding company so it could in turn…. receive more money from the federal government via the TARP program to the tune of $6 billion) done with all that just-referenced jack the feds have thrown at them:

The New York Times reports that GMAC has begun making loans to borrowers with credit scores as low as 621, a significant relaxation of the 700 minimum score the company adopted just three months ago as it struggled to survive. America's median credit score is 723. GMAC's lowered standards will increase the number of people eligible for its loans by an estimated 50 million.

You just can’t make this sort of stuff up in the Bizarro World of Bailout Nation. You read that correctly. The very lending practices that have buried us under the mess in which we currently reside is being repeated… with a vengeance… but this time as underwritten and tacitly encouraged by the federal government.

And this mere single star among a constellation jaw-dropping you-won’t-believe-this bailout stories, illustrates perfectly the increase in malfeasance, incompetence and all-around bad acting when the government becomes more involved in the private sector rather than less involved.

In a more perfect world, an institution that is this reckless with its own money would be allowed to fail. In Bailout Nation, however, not only is reckless behavior forgiven, it is rewarded and then doubled-down with your tax dollars as a certainty that the sinking ship of GMAC won’t be allowed go under.

A vicious cycle with no end in sight.

H/T: George Will

You want breathless Hyperbole...? You got it.

The only thing we can surmise about the coverage the press has been giving the “recession” and the “housing crisis” is that we must be living in the most fantastically prosperous period in the history of human civilization.

George Will chimes in on the “housing crisis”, here asking the question, “Do young couples struggling to purchase their first homes concur with the sudden consensus that the decline in prices is a national misfortune?”

And quoting The Economist: "Monthly payments on a typical house with a 30-year mortgage and 20 percent downpayment were 18.5 percent of the median family's income in February, down from almost 26 percent at the peak -- and close to the historical average."

Its all fun and games until someone loses their Irony

We’re clearly late to the whole Obama “Bittergate” episode so any opinion we may have has probably been vented a dozen times over on radio, TV and internet, so... what’s a slacking little blog like ours to do except react to the reaction.

But first, in case any of you have been comatose for the past few days, here are the words spoken by Obama at a San Fran fundraiser that have got him into so much trouble:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them (editor: go cry that tune to the buggy whip manufacturers, pal). And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

A look at the Bittergate dust-up here by George Will who claims “Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism”. With assistance from the indespensible pollster/demographer Michael Barone, Will traces a line from what we’ll call bread’n’butter FDR liberalism through the smug Adlai Stevenson to today’s Obamamania whose campaign’s spritual overtones combined with his desire for governmental hyper-activity recalls the quote from Socialist/Communist pioneer Moses Hess: “The Christian… imagines the better future of the human species…in the image of heavenly joy… We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth”.

And here is an interesting and ultimately bizarre piece from WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne. Dionne takes Obama to task for his choice of words but not necessarily its intent or purpose. He then goes after Clinton for parroting Republican talking points about Al Gore, John Kerry and Obama not really respecting values/faith voters. But then in the last few lines, he completely loses it:

“It has been sickening over the years to watch Republicans, who always rally to the aid of the country's wealthiest citizens, successfully cast themselves as pork-rind-eating, NASCAR-watching, gun-toting populists. To have the current White House occupant (Yale, Harvard Business School, son of a president) run as a good old boy should have been the final straw. But here are the two remaining Democratic candidates, Obama by speaking carelessly and Clinton by piling on shamelessly, doing all they can to make it easy for Republicans to pretend one more time that they are the salt of the earth.”

Look. In a two party system there is naturally going to be that inherent “big tent” membership whereby each party will attract people across the economic spectrum so to start claiming which party is for the big guy/little guy will start looking like an endless tennis volley. We do have our thoughts on the matter but its beside the point of this post.

And by no means is this meant to be any cheerleading for the Republican Party as their collective behavior over the past few years has us feeling like, ironically enough, RINOs ourselves... but how does Dionne square his disgust with reality?

This reality, of course, is a Party whose leadership has consistently fought tooth and nail against any sensible restrictions on abortion (parental notification and the gruesome practice of late-term abortion), has consistently voted against tax cuts, has consistently campaigned for more gun control laws, has consistently been in silent consent with those who want to wipe religion from the public square, has consistently opposed school choice/voucher programs, has consistently offered, at best, tepid support for the military when not deriding it obliquely or directly…. Issues all that could by varying degrees be considered under the big tent of “traditional values” for rank and file Democrats and Republicans, alike.

And Dionne has the unmitigated gall to feel disgusted and sickened that despite all the above, those wascalwy Wepublicans have somehow slithered their way to the mantle of Party of the common man?

Dionne is either being intellectually dishonest with his readers or he’s been asleep at the wheel for the last 30-40 years. Policy, planks, positions… throw’em all out the window. Dionne’s attitude is perfectly exemplary of the biggest electoral problem Democrats have had since the late 60s and why it is they are setting themselves up for their 8th presidential election defeat in the last 11: condescension.

In that statement and by conveniently neglecting the choices and the battles Democratic Party leadership has fought in charting a course for the Party, Dionne exhibits the EXACT same condescension he takes Obama to task for in his choice of words and the poor dolt, most likely, doesn’t even realize it.

They still don’t get it. Its amazing. You just can’t make up this stuff.