What's going on with the police?

POLICE: MORE MILITARIZED THAN THE MILITARY? Radley Balko has a letter from a military officer:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they're after is present at the location, and that it's too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they can't use similar methods.

Quite different from using door-busting tactics to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders. Of course, one difference is that we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . . .

another post shamelessly lifted from Instapundit 

Why government should be small....

BUT REMEMBER, THE SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM IS MORE REGULATION: "The federal agency responsible for ensuring that the Deepwater Horizon was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that the rig be inspected at least once per month, an Associated Press investigation shows. In fact, the agency's inspection frequency on the Deepwater Horizon fell dramatically over the past five years, according to federal Minerals Management Service records. . . . In fact, last year MMS awarded the rig an award for its safety history."

from Instapundit 

Global Green Meltdown Gains Momentum

About time. 

We trust the experts less and less, but they keep coming to us for money.

In this atmosphere, the fight for a massive global treaty to fight climate change that involves annual payments of $100 billion and more to (mostly) corrupt and incompetent governments in developing countries that make Greece look as tidy as Sweden has no chance.

see rest here

Why should all of our Supreme Court justices be from two schools?

What's so special about Harvard and Yale?

Seems to fly in the face of anything resembling intellectual diversity ...

Bureaucracy and Tyranny

The Founding Fathers well described "swarms of officers sent hither to harass the people." It is worth pondering how bureaucracy may have inside it a tyranny trying to get out.

read the rest, it's short.

Why aren't Communists more closely associated with Nazis?

"In the world's collective consciousness, the word "Nazi" is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis' ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history."

Read the rest ...
 

The holocaust killed 6 million Jews, and is rightly reviled as one of the most horrifying tragedies in the history of mankind.

Where, then, is the outrage for the 150 million killed by Communists? Why do they get a pass? How is Nazism's racial genocide worse than the ideological genocide of Communists the world over?

We would be wise to remember where Communism tends to end up and to be suspicious of those who look kindly on it.

Afghan opium trade

Just ran across this old article on the opium trade in Afghanistan and was struck by a couple of quotes:

"When I have water and roads provided to me, I will stop growing poppies."

and

"I don't want my children to be in this trade and I hope that some day the world will help us. Only then can we stop the opium trade."

I don't especially care if they grow opium or not, but I love how it's not their fault. If only 'the world' would give them water and roads they'd find a new line of work. Can't decide if they've been coached on those answers or if they were born with the entitlement gene. 

So, do you really have to go to Harvard or Yale to be President?

I'd think most people would respond, "Of course not!" But the numbers are hard to ignore ...

April deficit bigger than expected.

"Bigger than expected" seems to be a theme these days. This time they were off by 30 billion with a B. The actual deficit was nearly 60% higher than analyst estimates. That's a significant amount to be off by. 

Story here.

Just Wrong

Mojave Desert War Memorial stolen.

The new lawless administration, same as (worse than) the last lawless administration

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, we'd get an Attorney General who'd want to curtail Miranda rights. And they were right!

Attorney General Eric Holder said that Congress should "give serious consideration" to updating the Miranda warning which requires law enforcement officials to inform suspects of their rights – including the right to remain silent.

In an interview on "This Week," Holder said that the U.S. needs to exam whether the current rules regarding Miranda warnings give law enforcement agents the "necessary flexibility" when dealing with terrorism cases.

Ah, remember all that talk about the "lawless Bush Administration" trampling civil rights, and the fierce moral urgency of change? Well, if you believed that stuff when they were peddling it. . . hey, rube!

from Instapundit 

Hmm. This explains a lot

a 1999 study by psychologist Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts showed that the most popular kids were also the most effective liars.

and then, I'm guessing,  they went into politics ...

From this article on the Top 10 Secrets of Effective Liars. Arm yourself for tonight's news and the upcoming elections. :-)

Timeline of evolution of life on Earth

Kind of cool.

Tea Party vs. Central planning

Here's what the TP itself really fears, in an inchoate way that for most of its members doesn't rise to the level of clear understanding, but is still intuitively very powerful: the US is embracing central planning as a governing theory, as fast as our legislative processes will allow. . . . Central planning has two primary flaws, when compared with economic freedom: it misallocates resources, and it magnifies the impact of corruption. I could write a decent-sized book explaining both of those mechanisms, but because I've never been busier in my life than I have been these past few weeks, I'll cut to the conclusion.

The endpoint of central planning, if not outright failure, is a much deeper and more intractable division of society into haves and have-nots. After promising a better world for everyone, the progressives will end up creating a society that is more polarized than ever. . . . And we're already seeing everywhere, from David Brooks to Noam Chomsky, the signs of how the elites will have to deal with the polarization: by loudly proclaiming in their captive media that the have-nots are stupid and, eventually, evil.

from here, via this. 

Healthcare to look forward to ...

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine 
"Doctors repeatedly mistook a teenage girl's cancer for migraines--spotting three tumours only after her father refused to leave the hospital until she had a CT scan," London's Daily Mail reports:

Danica Maxwell, 14, said she felt like 'a nuisance' and 'just another kid with a migraine who was making a fuss' when she was seen at the West Cumberland Hospital, in Whitehaven, Cumbria.

When she was eventually operated on she was told she would have died had the cancer gone unnoticed any longer.

The tumours removed from her body were deemed so unusual they were sent to America for analysis.

Danica's tumors ended up at Princeton University, where former Enron adviser Paul Krugman produced the following analysis: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."

from here.

Parent of an autistic child treats with medical marijuana

Interesting

Obama now micro-managing hospitals ...

Obama extends hospital visit rights to partners of gays

To be clear - I think a person's life partner should certainly have visitation rights. I just don't think the President of the United States should be making that call. How is it the government's business or responsibility?

I wish I could believe this was actually true

Libertarian sentiment has finally gone mainstream.

A movement that said that people should do whatever they wanted as long as it didn't hurt anyone else couldn't compete during the culture wars that began in the 1960s.

But after two wars, a $12 trillion debt, a financial crisis and the most politically tone-deaf president in modern history, Americans may have finally given up on big government.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Hating-the-government-finally-goes-mainstream-90852389.html#ixzz0lB7bXp8y

Heh

Besides, the notion that an obscure teacher of constitutional law could be catapulted to one of the highest offices in the land is absurd on its face.

What is a libertarian?

See here

 It appears that when government sets out to solve a problem, not only does it violate our freedom, it also accomplishes the opposite of what it set out to do.

In this particular case, the author is discussing the government mission to 'help the poor'. Welfare programs do not help the poor. At least they don't help them to not  be poor anymore. Rather they encourage them to become ever more dependent on the government. 

This is not very helpful to the poor, but it is very helpful to the politicians who continue the programs and expand them to more and more people.

Politics ...

The Purposes of Political Combat -  

How is it that Obama can fail to see that changes of the magnitude he is seeking would compel those who believe that those changes are dangerous—who honestly believe that they are bad for the country and whose belief is grounded in powerful ideas about how society should be ordered—to marshal their forces to do whatever is in their power to prevent them from taking place? And that it would be wise not to dismiss or belittle the energy and resolve of the opposition, but rather to take their full measure and plan accordingly?

This has been frustrating to me as well. I get accused of being contrary and partisan because I disagree fundamentally with the current government's approach to governing. They believe government should be large and have expansive power and responsibility. I believe government should be small with limited power and responsibility. These are fundamentally opposite views. I don't disagree with them because they're Democrats (or Republicans in a lot of cases), I disagree with them because I think they are wrong, whoever they are.

The Aurora Borealis ... from the other side

A picture from a Japanese astronaut on the International Space station. 

NASA climate data not reliable, per NASA

Full article here. 

Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates' arguments that minor flaws in the "Climate-gate" data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion -- that the Earth is getting warmer. But there's a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data. 

"There is far too much overlap among the surface temperature data sets to assert with a straight face that they independently verify each other's results," says James M. Taylor, senior fellow of environment policy at The Heartland Institute.

Media treatment of Tea Party

We Report, You Obey: The MSM's Dirty Tea Party Fetish Angry or furious? Threatening or deeply, deeply sinister? From their angry pickup trucks to their extreme extremities, Mainstream Media News anchor Andrew Klavan delivers a hard-hitting, objective report on America's angry tea party of anger.

:-) - A video report from PJTV

House of Anger? Please.

The original article.

My take below

Unfairly or not, the defining images of opposition to health care reform may end up being those rage-filled partisans with spittle on their lips. Whether the outbursts came from inside Congress — the "baby killer" shout of Rep. Randy Neugebauer, and his colleagues who cheered on hecklers — or outside, where protesters hurled vile names against elected representatives, they are powerful and lasting scenes of a democracy gasping for dignity.

Since the media will largely control the 'defining images', this likely will be true to a great extent. As an adjunct of the Democrat party, most of the media will happily replay the clips that make the oppostion look 'rage-filled' and buffoonish. Similarly rabid protestors of the Iraq war were potrayed as simply exercising their rights in what was obviously a righteous cause.

Most of these vignettes are isolated incidents — a few crazies going off in a vein-popping binge. But the Republican Party now has taken some of the worst elements of Tea Party anger and incorporated them into its own identity. They are ticked off, red-faced, frothing — and these are the men in suits.

The accounts I've read of people who've actually attended Tea Party events describe orderly, polite protests - nothing 'red-faced' or 'frothing' about it. I'm sure there are crazies who show up, as there are crazies on the other side who don't represent most of the left. The tea party's views are mostly libertarian and - from what I've read - they've avoided affiliating with any existing party. They're not happy with pretty much any of the current crop of legislators. Bush was no proponent of smaller, less-intrusive government.
Here's an interesting commentary on an article discussing the supposed threats to Democrat lawmakers.

... as the party of the hissy fit, Republicans are playing with fire.

And Democrats should know as that's more often their role. (Low hanging fruit. Couldn't resist)

On Monday morning, most Americans awoke with some relief that the epic battle was over. Then, they tried to figure out what health care overhaul would mean to them. They found out that insurance companies would no longer be allowed to drop people if they get sick. They saw that older children could stay on their insurance through age 26. And the elderly, the most consistent voting block, discovered that the new law would gradually end a prescription drug donut hole that causes many of them to cut their pills in half to get through a month.

Saul Alinsky wrote a book - Rules for Radicals. Rule number 12:  "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."This administration seems fond of Saul and his rules. In this case the target is insurance companies. The first step to a single payer health system is to get rid of the insurance companies. If insurance companies are required to cover people with existing conditions then why would anyone buy insurance before they became sick? That goes against the whole theory of insurance. Would anyone expect their auto insurance to cover them for an accident they had before they obtained coverage? Doesn't that sound silly?

No death panels. No socialized public option. No forcing people to change doctors or providers. And the most contentious part of the new law — requiring nearly everyone to get health coverage or pay a fine — does not kick in until 2014.

The fine will be pointless unless it is more than the cost of the insurance. I guess we'll see, but I'm guessing that won't be the case. And that 2014 date is interesting - that's when the requirements kick in, but the taxes start right away. That was the only way they could massage the numbers from the CBO to make it look like the plan isn't going to bankrupt the country.

 

But it's always better to be building something than destroying it.

That's just a silly statement.

Having welcomed Tea Party rage into their home, and vowing repeal, the Republicans have made a dangerous bargain. First, they are tying their fate to a fringe, one that includes a small faction of overt racists and unstable people. The Quinnipiac poll this week found only 13 percent of Americans say they are part of the Tea Party movement.

Again with a misportrayal of the Tea Party as being about rage. And here's one thought on the supposed racist faction of the Tea Party movement. There probably are racists among Tea Partiers but there are probably more in the Democrat party - or have we forgotten our President's long-time pastor Reverend Wright.
And let's not be too quick to dismiss that 13 percent who are 'part of the Tea Party movement'. Since this is a movement that's just about a year old, 13 percent doesn't seem too shabby. I'd consider it pretty impressive. I mean I'm not 'part of the Tea Party movement' but I feel a lot more affinity for them than either of the dominant parties.

It was the ancient Greeks who gave us a sense of what Republicans will be living with under this pact with rage. Many people are afraid of the dark, the saying goes. But the real tragedy is those who are afraid of the light.

Hmmm. A 'pact with rage' - really?
And I guess we'll see when and how brightly the light shines on the details of the new healthcare plan. Considering the administrations past aversion to transparency, I'm not expecting much.

Not likely, but makes sense to me ...

From my inbox...

An idea whose time has come 

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they didn't pay into Social Security, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform that is being considered...in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn't seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don't care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop. This is a good way to do that. It is an idea whose time has come.

Have each person contact a minimum of Twenty people on their Address list, in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States."

You are one of my 20.

Things Ann Althouse likes about President Obama

Funny.

From an email forward ...

I'm Sick of "Inherited"

The Washington Post babbled again today about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush, blah blah blah. Amazingly enough, a lot of people swallow this nonsense.

So once more, I'll try a short civics lesson.

Budgets do not get approved by the White House. They are passed only by CONGRESS and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush belatedly got tough on spending increases. For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.



And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009.

Let's remember what the deficits looked like during that period:




If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for those budgets. If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.

In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th.

 

Idaho resident responds to NYT article pimping sad stereotypes

Funny stuff.

This sounds right to me

... all the fraud, critical "lost" data, suppression of criticism and so on doesn't prove that there's no global warming — people can lie about things that, nonetheless, turn out to be true — but it has to induce a certain degree of skepticism. So what should we do?

Nothing. At least, in my opinion, we should continue to try to minimize the use of fossil fuels regardless. Burning coal and oil is filthy, and they're more valuable as chemical feedstocks anyway. We should be building nuclear plants and pursuing efficiencies in the shorter term, while working on better solar (including orbital solar), wind, etc. power supplies for the longer term.

I agree. Cap and trade is a bunch of crap with primarily political goals.

But I'm all for taking care of the environment and burning less oil. I was an early adopter of compact fluorescents - because I believed the hype that they would save me money in the long run. Now I'm switching back to incandescents and waiting for LED lights to get cheaper. The fluorescents never lasted as long as they claimed - some of them I replaced as often as I would have an incandescent and for a lot more money. And now of course we find out they have mercury in them which will now be going into our landfills. 

I'm interested in solar, too, but again mostly I'm waiting for it to get cheaper. 

And of course, I don't think the government needs to be driving this stuff. Let the markets sort it out.

A plague on both your houses

voters not happy with Dems or GOP. 

Sounds about right to me.

Have a little salt with this ...

This was forwarded to me from my friend Craig. I thought it was interesting but kind of long. I definitely agree with it that lawyers are more part of our problems than likely bringers of solutions. I suspect there are plenty of lawyers among Republicans and some non-lawyers among Democrat politicians, but I haven't looked into it.

The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers Party. Barack Obama is a lawyer. Michelle Obama is a lawyer. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. Bill Clinton is a lawyer. John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Harry Reid is a lawyer.. Nancy Pelosi is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush is a businessman. Vice President Cheney is a businessman. The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor. Tom Delay was an exterminator. Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon. Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.

The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America .. And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, grow.

Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.

Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning todo to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

We cannot expect the Lawyers Party to provide real change, realreform or real hope in America Most Americans know that a republic in whichevery major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges isnot what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannotfight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. MostAmericans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore decliningmoral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.

The United States has 5% of the worlds population and 66% of the worlds lawyers! Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association goes to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high!

The system is working as designed.

The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.

from here. 

Apparently we're in Wonderland.

Who knew?

Nothing means anything, anymore. Words truly are "just words," now, and in this Looking-Glass Administration, words mean exactly what Obama says they mean at any given moment. They will mean something else, in five minutes.

Attacks on GOP

How can the Republicans be accused of being the Party of No, if they are in fact voting as their constituents want them to and rejecting the president's agenda? Doesn't that make us the People of No?

Exactly.

I think the President knows this and would much rather tell us to please just get out of his way because he knows better than we do what we need. But he's cunning enough to realize that might be seen as hubris by the little people, so he goes after the opposition party.

If someone is trying to set a bomb to blow up a building (or an economy, or a nation) then obstruction is what's needed. Compromising doesn't really do the job, sometimes.

SOTU and SCOTUS

From comments on Ann Althouse's blog (via Instapundit):

As Dennis Miller just said a minute ago on my radio: Obama chose to call out the only 9 guys in the room that did their homework in law school. And the rest who ended up settling for politics stood and cheered it.

man up!

You know, one could argue that President Bush "inherited" Al Qaeda from Bill Clinton, who did little-to-nothing in response to all of Al Qaeda's provocations throughout the 1990's and unto the USS Cole bombing. But never, not once, did Bush ever say, "I inherited this…" It's time for Obama to become a man.

from here

SOTU

I didn't see it - only heard about 5 minutes of it, but saw some commentary to the effect that it sounded like a campaign speech. That doesn't surprise me. He's good at campaigning - really it's the only thing he has experience in ...

perspective

Gerri's friend Joanna has been helping in Haiti since November. She has a blog. Her latest update ended: 

Hope that all of you had a good weekend.  I just noticed that the Vikings lost.  How sad.  I think it is the first glimpse of "news" I have seen in months.

The middle class is filled with people who pay attention to the second page of their paycheck stubs.

It's clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they've all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don't think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains

The middle class is a vast group in a capitalist society, which is one of the things collectivists really hate about capitalism. Its upper reaches include the entrepreneurs and small business owners that bring economic vitality. Virtually every aspect of Obama's agenda is designed to injure or burden small businessmen, and this is no accident. Despite their angry rhetoric about giant corporations, leftists have little trouble controlling them.

it is crucial to understand that it doesn't matter if the people engineering a collectivist state have sinister motives or not. In fact, the belief that their intentions make a difference is incredibly dangerous. It's related to the catechism of the faculty-lounge Marxist, which holds that communism and fascism only failed because bad people were in charge of them.

 
and of the President's statement that he pushed so hard for the health care plan because insurance companies "were doing things that were just plain wrong, and were leaving folks in an extremely vulnerable position."

It doesn't matter if this is his sincere belief, spoken straight from the heart. His health-care plan was still an awful idea that united the country in opposition against the increasingly thuggish and arrogant methods he used to advance it. Those methods are integral to the collectivist enterprise. It will always become thuggish and arrogant, because when all virtue resides in the State, those who oppose the growth of the State become villains by definition.

 (emphasis mine)

from here - It's worth reading the whole piece

True for families, businesses, governmente

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.

Thoughts on the Brown win

 Polls show that most Americans want smaller government, even with fewer "services." Running on a platform that money's better kept in voters' own pockets, rather than handed over to special interest logrolling and vote-buying, will work: If it'll work in Massachusetts, it should work pretty much anywhere.

from Instapundit.

Haiti blogger

One of my wife's friends has been volunteering in Haiti since November. Take a look at her blog for a first hand account.

I'd rather have global warming than

a 20 - 30 year ice age ...

It's not a myth ...

No, they're not camping in the snow. They're fishing. That snow is covering the frozen lake. It's never too cold to fish in Minnesota.

Paging Mr. Brooks

via Instapundit. 

Colorado New Years Trip

no comment

"The lot offers wider parking spaces especially designed for female drivers, who tend to cause twice as many collisions in parking lots than in other places, according to insurance company data," the Global Times says.

from here. 

A death panel by any name would smell as sweet ...

The senate bill includes a provision that the section of the bill that regulates the Independent Medical Advisory Board - the panel of bureaucrats who will be rationing care - can only be repealed or amended by a super-majority of the senate.

In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill's calculations call for a reduction in Medicare's spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

"It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care."

Reducing access to care or diminishing the quality of care. 

I'll take whatever's behind door number three. 

following up

on the previous post on the Copenhagen Dictators Parade from earlier.

Here's Jonah Goldberg from National Review Online:

The historical record is clear: Democratic free-market nations are better at protecting their environments than statist regimes for the simple reason that they can afford to. West Germany's environment was far cleaner than East Germany's. I'd much sooner drink the tap water in South Korea than North Korea.

 

Mugabe rails against capitalism as if he has a better idea of how to run things. That's almost funny given that Mugabe has destroyed what was once a great cause for hope in Africa, in large part by abandoning capitalism and democracy. Zimbabwe now has the highest inflation rate in the world and one of the lowest life expectancies. Let's hope nobody was taking notes when he was giving out advice.

 

Moreover, capitalism, and the wealth it creates, is the best means of bending down the population curve. Don't take my word for it. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges that "affluence is correlated with long life and small families" and that growing prosperity will cause world population to decline even further.

 

Want to know the best way to heal the planet? Create more rich countries. Want to know the best way to hurt the planet? Throw a wet blanket on economic growth.

"Chavez, Morales, Mugabe lash out at Copenhagen"

yeah, that's definitely who we should be taking advice from.

"I don't think Obama is here yet," said Mr Chavez.

"He got the Nobel Peace Prize almost the same day as he sent 30,000 soldiers to kill innocent people in Afghanistan."

That's gotta hurt. 

 And from Mr. Mugabe - ranked the 7th worst dictator of all time according to a 2007 Parade Magazine article - we get this lovely analogy

"Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing threat of climate change?" he said.

"Where are its sanctions for eco-offenders? When a country spits on the Kyoto Protocol by seeking to shrink from its diktats, or by simply refusing to accede to it, is it not violating the global rule of law," he added in reference to the core emissions treaty which the US has refused to sign.

Senator, you can't HANDLE the truth

Kind of cheezy, but it made me grin.

Political truth-o-meter

Interesting web site that investigates political sound-bites and rates them for accuracy. Seems pretty bipartisan. They're also keeping track of President Obama's various promises and how they're holding up.

UN's armed response to questions about ClimateGate

sigh.

What's up with our 'safe schools czar'?

An administration department of education appointee - the apparently ironically titled "safe schools czar" - was the executive director of an organization that presented seminars billed as promoting tolerance for homosexuals, but which were essentially sexual how-to classes for students at least as young as 14. 

This hasn't been widely covered in the media - at least I haven't seen it. The first references I saw to it - which I didn't understand, lacking the context - were in the Day by Day cartoons online.

Here's a treatment from the Washington Times. 

And here's a more graphic piece that includes some video and a poor quality image of one of the organisation's pamphlets. As well as a clip of the classic Monty Python skit on the same topic. It was funny because it was so outrageous. Or so they thought...

All we are saying ... is

everyone involved needs to embrace the idea that all scientists are skeptics; that all scientific theories are open to doubt; and in particular that future projections of climate change are subject to considerable uncertainty. Furthermore, the economic and environmental impacts of warming are also uncertain, as are the costs of CO2 mitigation.

From the Earth Institute at Columbia U. 

We need honest open discussion about the research and the options. There's no such thing as "settled science".

Love this title ...

How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History

And the Amazon reviews should be entertaining, too.

Friday Fun

A site dedicated to ... shoelaces. More specifically different ways to tie and lace shoes. 

The New Socialism

Politically it's an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man's guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt.

The Green movement is the new plan for transferring wealth from the developed world through the UN to (the dictators in) the Third World.

Read the rest here.

ClimateGate as the tip of the iceburg

Most of the participants in Copenhagen seem intent on rushing headlong into a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But it would seem more fruitful at this point to redouble our efforts to figure out what we do and don't know about the climate's past, present and future. That includes casting some much-needed sunshine on the data on which so much importance is being placed, but which so far has remained shielded from public view.

from the WSJ 

The first sign of corruption

 in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. – Georges Bernanos

At this scale of government, corruption is endemic. It doesn't make that much of a difference which party sits on top of that much power. With the rare exception prosecuted by law enforcement, there is little immediate risk of penalty for dirty politicians. It takes years to get them voted out of office, and their local electorate might not be eager to displace a powerful, long-term incumbent with a new representative… especially if the incumbent has brought a lot of money home to the district, in addition to lining his own pockets. Big Government even corrupts thevoters.

The larger government becomes, the more its arrogant ruling class believe themselves worthy of royal treatment… and the more justified they feel about lying to the public for their own good. That is why the climate change elite gathered in Copenhagen this week is outraged that anyone would dare question their right to save a foolish world from itself, by lying through its teeth in a bid to seize power.

Read the rest. 

EPA to declare Carbon Dioxide a pollutant

"An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery."

Never mind that we're finding out that there has been a conspiracy among top global warming scientists to manipulate data models and to squash any dissenting research.  

How long can the blame game go on ...

From Victor Davis Hanson: 

Barack Obama, nearly a year into his term, is still talking about Bush culpability for everything from unemployment to Afghanistan.  At what year will it ever stop?

Bush inherited a nuclear Pakistan, a firewall between the CIA and FBI in matters of counter-terrorism, an appeased and ascendant Osama bin Laden, unsustainable no-fly zones over Iraq (the French had already bailed), al-Qaeda with a safe zone in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and an intifada-prone Mideast—in other words, no more than the regular stuff. But I don't remember Bush talking of the creepy Clinton pardons—Eric Holder  being at their epicenter—after a year in office.

When Clinton arrived in January 1993, the Balkans were a mess, and no one knew what to do about Milosevic. Eastern Europe and the former republics had been promised varying degrees of NATO membership. And we were running staggering trade deficits, and in a recession. But even Clinton got over blaming Bush soon enough.

Bush I had to deal with an invigorated Saddam Hussein, the Kuwait mess, a Noriega who was out of control, easing the Soviets out of eastern Europe, a divided Berlin reuniting—and, again, the usual stuff.

Reagan inherited a demoralized military, an insane regime in Khomeini's Iran, a bellicose and appeased Soviet Union, and communist expansion in Central America.

In other words, nothing Obama has seen overseas is, by past standards, all that unusual. Iraq was mostly quiet when he assumed office. We had not been hit again since 9/11. The Patriot Act and anti-terrorism protocols were in play and working. The fact that he has not yet closed Guantanamo and kept Predators, tribunals, renditions, etc. apparently means he finds them useful—despite the reset rhetoric.

Steyn on global warming

"If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you're stuck living in." 

In response to that, the shrieking pansies of the eco-left had a fit. The general tenor of my mail was summed up by one correspondent: "How can you live with your lies, dumb f–k?" George Soros's stenographers at Media Matters confidently pronounced it a "false claim." Well, take it up with Phil Jones. He agrees with me. The only difference is he won't say so in public.

Which is a bit odd, don't you think?

From here. 

What he believes ...

Thomas Friedman's opinion piece in the NY Times. 

He makes some good arguments. This in particular seems worth keeping in mind:

 Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.

We may not like being the sole super power in the world today. And people elsewhere may not like us in that role either. But as our power decreases, the relative influence of other nations becomes greater. Raise your hands who wants to live in a world where China or Russia is the dominant power in the world.

Personally, on the Afghanistan situation I'm undecided. I agree with him that nation building there is not the same as in Iraq. It's a different mix of cultures with fewer people spread over a larger area. That said, whatever we decide I hope we back our decision appropriately. If we're in it, we need to be in it to win it.

jon stewart

on Climategate. Funny stuff.

Hear, hear!

Congressfolks introduce bill to set IRS penalties at level paid by Treasury Secretary Geithner - $0.

One (some) of the problems with

government.

Imagine ...

If these were internal Exxon-Mobil e-mails, the trial lawyers would be racing out the door with only one pants-leg filled and every Green press flack would be demanding this lead the evening news and front every newspaper above the fold. If similar e-mails came from the RNC showing racism or homophobia, the New York Times would not demur in the name of privacy, it would call for the GOP to go into federal receivership.

Seriously, this is a really big deal but it's not likely to be treated like it by the news megaliths because it doesn't fit the narrative.
But there's no media bias.
Never mind that the science that is the basis for the entire Global Warming panic that we are completely restructuring our economy over is now suspect and the most respected authorities on the subject have proven that they have been manipulating their findings and squashing results that don't agree with their own.

No argument here...

 A rule under which only politicians have guns strikes me as the worst of all possible worlds

What you won't see in the AP story on the health care bill ...

the inconvenient facts.

The long awaited correlation between politics and food preferences

This is kind of fun.

Gun control: using two hands instead of one

FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE 1. "Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not."~Thomas Jefferson 2. "Those who trade liberty for security have neither." ~ John Adams 3. Free men do not ask permission to bear arms. 4. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject. 5. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them. 6. Gun control is not about guns; it's about control. 7. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for. 8. Know guns, know peace, know safety.     No guns, no peace, no safety. 9. You don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive. 10. Assault is a behavior, not a device. 11. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday. 12. The United States Constitution (c) 1791. All Rights Reserved. 13. The Second Amendment is in place in case the politicians ignore the others. 14. What part of 'shall not be infringed' do you NOT understand? 15. Guns have only two enemies; rust and politicians. 16. When you remove the people's right to bear arms, you create slaves. 17. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control. IF YOU AGREE, PASS THIS 'REFRESHER' ON TO TEN FREE CITIZENS.

 

--
tom

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
 - Thomas Jefferson

Global cost of corruption: $1,600,000,000,000

... that's $1.6 trillion with a T - every year. That's an estimate, of course, since it's kind of hard to get a handle on that kind of transaction. Much of it, unfortunately, is stolen from the world's poorest nations. This only makes it harder to fix global hunger and poverty.

"This money is significantly greater than the value of all foreign development aid. It is more than the ten year cost of the health care bill that just passed the House. It would be enough to fund a worldwide basic health system and provide basic primary education to every child on earth. Over the next fifty years it will cost the world much more than climate change."

Are free markets trying to make a comeback in the U.S.?

The old is new again. Sign me up.

Worldwide resurgence in czars experiences setback

as the UK Drug Tsar gets fired for not perpetuating myths about drugs.

Cautionary note about Facebook games

Watch for scams in Farmville, Mafia Wars, and the rest of the FB games.

Boys club, White House style

from Prof. Althouse, via Prof. Reynolds.

Day by Day

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up ...

So's how's Healthcare reform working for Massachusetts

Short answer - not good.

Long answer.

A few highlights - but read the whole thing:

 Massachusetts has all the goodies in the Baucus bill:  subsidies, guaranteed issue, community rating, an individual mandate, and employer penalties.  Indeed, the Massachusetts program is probably to the left of where we're going to end up, on things like empowering the exchanges to negotiate with insurance companies and the size of the penalties for failing to procure insurance, two measures which are supposed to be critical for holding costs down.

and

And health-care costs have continued to grow rapidly. According to a Rand Corporation study this year, the growth now exceeds state GDP by 8%. The Boston Globe recently reported that state health-insurance commissioners are now worried that medical spending could push both employers and patients into bankruptcy, and may even threaten the system's continued existence. 

But why can't we be like Europe?

It's no good saying that well, we should try to be more like the Netherlands--you can't build a system on the assumption that you will, suddenly and for no apparent reason, be able to import someone else's political culture. 

and finally:

Progressives are watching the whole health care legislative process with utter dismay as it produces a monster of a bill that not even its mother could love--and trying to love it anyway, on the grounds that it's a start.  But this ridiculous hodgepodge, this hypertrophied Rube Goldberg apparatus, is not some startling aberration of the political process, induced by some Republican dark magic.  This is the kind of thing the American political system produces.  This is why all of our programs have a substantial element of the inexplicable and bizarre. 

Hard to argue with this

this

We've got the worst political class in American history, and its rottenness is pretty thoroughly bipartisan.

Why aren't we researching ways to remove excess CO2?

That makes more sense to me than trying to reconfigure the entire world energy structure ...

Governments are doing practically nothing to study the removal of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, but this technology could be a much cheaper form of climate protection than photovoltaic cells and other approaches getting lavish support, according to an article published today in Science.

ACORN and Obama

With ACORN in the news for at least three separate instances of supporting child prostitution it's a good time to remember that one of our president's early jobs was as a community organizer with ACORN. And that ACORN was in line for $4 billion in stimulus money right after the president's inauguration even while they were under investigation for voter registration fraud.

I think if this was a Republican president, we'd be hearing a LOT more about this ...

legalize, regulate, treat, tax

From New Scientist: 

Better world: Legalise drugs

Far from protecting us and our children, the war on drugs is making the world a much more dangerous place.

ACORN back in the news

... well should be at least.

Sheesh.

You'd think an organization like this would be a black mark on a resume ...