President Obama reminded his constituents that health care “reform” was a life support system for a number of political constituencies which would otherwise die without it. He reminded Congressional Democrats that their political fates were tied to the health bill and that they could not save themselves by voting against the President. Rep Suzanne Kosmas of Florida typified conflict. The Democrat represents a district whose economy was eviscerated by Obama’s NASA budget cuts. Now she can have some of them back — if she votes for health care “reform. She would only say about her health care discussions with President Obama that “I did have a conversation last week on NASA.” Mike Synan of WDBO says Kosmas insisted the conversations were unrelated.
Last week, President Barack Obama invited Kosmas to the White House for a private chat, while Republicans chartered a plane Tuesday to fly over her hometown with a banner urging beachgoers to call her office and tell her to vote no. …
“I know there are many disappointed people who are counting on her for the final lap of the race,” said Linda Merrell, a self-described “lifelong friend” to Kosmas and a local activist in support of the Democratic health-care plan. …
“Kosmas might as well start planning her retirement if she votes for this thing especially if she votes for [it] as part of some shady side deal,” said Andy Sere, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The NRCC has targeted Kosmas’ March 11 meeting with Obama, calling it a “sunshine sellout” because she frequently pivoted the 20-minute chat to NASA and Kennedy Space Center, which is set to lose up to 9,000 jobs when the space shuttle completes its final four missions scheduled for this year. …
She vehemently denied the insinuation of quid pro quo and said she would make her final decision after taking time to read the bill.
The oxygen most special interests needs to survive is money; and the health care “reform” bill is above all about delivering it to keep the vital signs ticking over. Take the Congressional Hispanics. Paul Kane’s Washington Post blog says that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus announced its unanimous support for his bill, which is remarkable because they were against it. “Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and several other CHC members had been threatening to withhold their support because of provisions the Senate added restricting illegal immigrants from using their own money to access the insurance exchanges that would be established by the proposed legislation.” Something appears to have changed their minds; but then again the therapeutic effect of money is nothing short of miraculous.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth of Real Clear Markets notes the pivotal role that health care “reform” will play in keeping SEIU pensions alive. Without the bill’s passage — by the “deeming” process or otherwise — the union can’t keep expanding membership, which is the key to keep their faltering pension plans going. With health care “reform” it will cling to life a little longer.
More than flexing labor’s political muscles, the overriding reason for SEIU support of health care reform is that it would bring in more members. The percentage of private sector workers belonging to unions has been declining steadily, and reached 7.2% in 2009. Partially offsetting this is the percentage of unionized government workers, 37% last year, up half a percentage point from 2008.
And without more members, the SEIU’s troubled pension funds will continue to fall short of 80% funding, considered by the Labor Department to be acceptable financial coverage.
Even before the stock market crash of 2008-09, the SEIU’s 1199SEIU Greater New York Pension Fund was funded at 58% for 2007. The Service Employees 32BJ North Pension Fund stood at 68%; the Local 32BJ Building Maintenance Contractors Association Pension Plan at 41%; and the 32BJ District Building Operators Pension Trust Fund at 56%. ….
Successful lobbying for health-care reform would expand the health centers available for unionization, driving up costs. The SEIU now represents employees of many providers, including Kaiser Permanente, The League of Voluntary Hospitals and Homes of New York, Tenet Healthcare Corporation, and Dominion Hope. Such providers presumably would expand payroll if 30 million uninsured were covered, with new members required to join the SEIU.
Although the administration is threatening to treat soda and other soft-drinks as “the new tobacco”, in the words of the New York Times, and it has “announced a plan to ban candy and sweetened beverages from schools … [in relation to a] campaign against childhood obesity will be led by the first lady”, health care reform itself is a gigantic sugar fix. It provides one more trillion dollar jolt to keep unsustainable political zombies going for just a little longer. How long dying agencies or unimpeded immigration or bad pension management can keep going is anybody’s guess. How much money do you have?
Fred Barnes at the Wall Street Journal says the battles between the living and the undead — the taxpayers and the spenders — have only just begun. With the passage of health care “reform” they will ravage the American landscape for decades to come. Barnes thinks a battle looms for every dollar that isn’t nailed down to the floor. The President has just given away the contents of half the nation’s wallets by arranging things so that the survival of the other half depend on getting it. Hope and change means that you hope you can grab some change.
If you think the fights over funding of Medicare and Medicaid in recent years have been unpleasant, wait until the funding battles over ObamaCare start. It’s all but inevitable that they would occur every year given the way Mr. Obama has proposed to finance his health-care program.
ObamaCare low-balls its cost and exaggerates the means for paying for it. “Our proposal is paid for,” the president insisted in a speech in Ohio on Monday. It’s not. The financing includes billions that are obligated elsewhere. It claims to cut the budget deficit by $118 billion but achieves this by borrowing hundreds of billions more.
At the same time, Mr. Obama’s plan offers a cornucopia of new benefits: free preventive care, coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, guaranteed issue, no lifetime or annual benefit caps, and subsidies for insuring 30 million people now uninsured.”
The lengths people will go to stay one step ahead of their creditors; to keep the party going one more night; and to keep the music playing for one more track can’t be understood unless you’re on the edge. For those whose lives revolve around it keeping the wheels turning is everything. Ask Bernie Madoff what it means to run out of room to run. The financier who was once regarded as the most trusted man on Wall Street was beaten by an inmate in prison who thought Bernie owed him money. “The 71-year-old suffered a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face in the assault.” In the end it was about money. Maybe it always is. Madoff’s future eventually caught up with him. But SEIU is still one jump ahead and heading out the back for the parking lot even as the knocking on the front door gets more insistent. One more day, one more night for as long as there is other people’s money to spend.
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Thanks, Richard, for the analysis. Amazing how few news stories or commentators follow the money. MSM doesn’t want to show that sordid part of the liberal takeover story. Republicans/conservatives are above that kind of thing (Peggy Noonan, David Brooks)or interested in their own kind of future payoff. SEIU and politicians, on the other hand, follow the money intensely, having great focus on planning for future payouts.
Maybe the monkey trap will catch the Dems hand, and maybe the Dems will manage to get the big payoff out of the coconut before the people catch the monkey. It’s a big payoff, so I can understand why the monkey doesn’t want to let go.
Only the invisible hand, a la Adam Smith, will suffice to ward off the undead hand of the takeover zombies.
“The therapeutic effect of money”. It has remarkable recuperative powers. Maybe the Dems have a chance for another term after all. If only voters would go back to sleep, Zzzzzz. Zzzzzzz . . . . . .
Bart Gordon, a retiring Congressman who had been leaning no, has flipped to yes and many suspect a quid pro quo deal to name him NASA administrator after he retires this fall.
http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=25392
The truly scary part is that they know they’re going to lose Congress this fall and the Presidency in 2012, and they don’t care.
Time to IMPEACH this heinous shakedown criminal zombie president.
Supposedly, the Slaughter “deem” rule is being considered for immigration “reform” as well. It’s not needed for Cap & Trade if the EPA’s “edict” can be allowed to stand. Nor is it needed for restrictions on recreational fishing, since the latest interpretation of the powers of federal agencies is that they can bypass the legislative process at will.
It seems to me that the democrats have “deemed” themselves our fuedal lords and that we are to work the land at thier favor. False. They need a lesson in revolution. Tarleton’s Quarter in November.
It costs $900b.
It saves $100b.
Obama is our first Blondie president – Blondie being famous for coming back from shopping, carrying dozens of boxes, and announcing how much money she had just saved.
The American Revolution is devolving into oligarchy – the type of government against which our Founding Fathers rebelled – self-serving government which is destructive of human equality before law (tax-eating government intellectuals and tax-eating proletariat class are more equal than creative, tax-paying entrepreneurs and laboring, tax-paying middle class) – self-serving government which is destructive of the middle class individual’s sacred rights to liberty and private property (pursuit of happiness). We are devolving not into a Royal Oligarchy but into a semi-royal Marxist Oligarchy – one which uses the evil tool of class struggle.
“Now, in the United States bourgeois society is still far too immature for the class struggle to be made perceptible and comprehensible… I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was… to show… that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;… that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” Karl Marx
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm
Karl Marx wrote these thoughts about class struggle in the United States back in 1852 – that was then – this is now. Marxist class struggle is now occurring in the United States – led by the Democratic Party – with a cowardly Republican Party in tow – a Republican Party so afraid of the Democrat Marxists that they will not defend the American Declaration, Bill of Rights and Constitution. I believe Karl Marx was a liar; he knew that there would be no “Classless Society” or a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Karl Marx knew that Communism (the core political ideology of Socialism) would lead to a Dictatorship of the Marxist Ruling Class. Read Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell.
Our Founding Fathers were anti-Marxists – they must have seen it coming.
“There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; because the very definition of a republic is “an empire of laws, and not of men… a single assembly, possessed of all the powers of government, would make arbitrary laws for their own interest, execute all laws arbitrarily for their own interest, and adjudge all controversies in their own favor.” John Adams
http://www.liberty1.org/thoughts.htm
Morton Doodslag @ 4 said:
“Time to IMPEACH this heinous shakedown criminal zombie president.”
Obviously a bill of impeachment would die instantly in committee as long as the Democrats control both houses of Congress. This brings to mind what the “best” case scenario would be for the Healthcare thing.
It’s clear that the worst case scenario is for the Healthcare Reconciliation bill to pass the House of Representative through an open vote. History has shown that it is very difficult to remove these entitlement things after they’ve been voted into law. The United States is already facing a very uncertain future due to Baby Boomer demographics coupled with Medicare and Social Security costs. Obamacare will only cause the Day of Reckoning to come a few years sooner. In that context, it’s amazing that this healthcare process was even started.
However, what’s the “best case scenario”?
I don’t think having Obamacare rejected in an open vote is the best case scenario. Keep in mind that the objective is to get the socialists out of office. If Pelosi over plays her hand and arranges for Obamacare to pass by unconstitutional means then the electorate will be justifiably enraged. The most likely consequence would be the Democrats losing one or both houses of Congress in November. Unfortunately, the Republicans having simple majorities in Congress would be insufficient to repeal Obamacare because Obama would merely override any repeal bill. However it’s possible and even likely that Obamacare would be found unconstitutional if Pelosi invoked “Deam and Pass” and the electorate were furiously enraged. Then we’d have the happy situation of the socialists no longer controlling Congress, Obama reduced to an ineffectual lame duck and the Healthcare thing struck down by the courts.
There is also the absolute “best” scenario. The economy is hanging on by a thread. The economy should have collapsed last year but was propped up by the Federal Reserve and stock market manipulation by the federal government. Many people believe the Federal Reserve is close to shooting their last bullet at which point the economic collapse will continue where it left off in 2009. This economic collapse will be extremely painful but it will eventually lead to a healing and recovery process for the US economy. If Pelosi does “Deam and Pass” and the economy implodes then the United States will be on the verge of armed revolt. This would set the stage for a sweeping take over by conservatives in November. Conceivably conservatives could achieve a super majority in the Senate. Under that situation, it would be possible to impeach Obama and actually remove him from office (I’m opposed to simply impeaching Obama without actual removal from office). With Obama a fading memory, conservatives in firm control of the Congress and the public very pissed off it might be possible for sweeping economic and political reform, e.g. tort reform, a balanced budget amendment along with some sort of anti-socialism amendment to the US Constitution. This is the best case scenario.
The legacy media isn’t climbing up when you see the results. But you do see the last attempts of academics and the legacy media to give this ‘hill’ one last try.
Just as people stopped receiving newspapers on their driveways, in the morning; so, too, have been the obvious drop offs for the democraps in congress. This is not ending well.
From the history books. Once, when Henry Clay, who headed the WHIGS, tossed Andrew Jackson’s first presidential win, into the House; where he then “took” the secretary of war chair for himself. And, gave the second placed John Quincy Adams the presidential oath, do you know what happened next? The WHIGS died!
pelosi doesn’t get a victory lap. Even if she sees the senate bill “passing” without being “handicapped” by reconcilation … Those in the House will be screaming! The story? It doesn’t die, ahead. It becomes the shot that starts the next civil war.
the administration is threatening to treat soda and other soft-drinks as “the new tobacco”, in the words of the New York Times, and it has “announced a plan to ban candy and sweetened beverages from schools … [in relation to a] campaign against childhood obesity will be led by the first lady”…
Well, well. The new tobacco?? Does that mean they go after some of their biggest donors, like Archer Daniels Midland? Fat (so to speak) chance of that happening. You can be sure there will be villains, but somehow none of their campaign contributors will be on the list.
ADM is way too powerful, even for Washington. Or maybe, especially for Washington. Just google Archer Daniels Midland with the word “evil” or “scandal” to get an idea of the breadth of the problem.
Of course, they’re one of the big sponsors for NPR also, so don’t hold your breath waiting for that particular exposé.
As Wretchard says, “In the end it was about money. Maybe it always is.”
Amen, sir.
“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’” (Dosteovsky’s Grand Inquisitor.)
#6 ashen — Tarleton’s Quarter in November.
Heh. “We get beat, we rise, we get beat again.” General Nathanael Greene, 1781.
I’ve stopped job-hunting in order help unseat my congressman. My family can live on beans and rice until November, even through Eggplant’s “best scenario.”
HUZZAH!
Paul 12,
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” Samuel Adams
I have come to believe that the government needs this bill to create a slush fund of money to cover up the bankruptcy of the Medicare and other programs. They are desperate to paper over their previous boondoggles with the vast sums of money, obfuscation, and bureaucracy that this bill creates. If it does not pass the Great Society will be revealed to be the fiscal failure that it has become. If it passes, then happy days are here again and corruption and mismanagement is here to stay.
This legislation has been crafted as a poison pill.
Found a great quote of some relevance to this thread:
“We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally.” – Nguen Co Thatch, Vietnamese Foreign Minister.
Help us Senator Coburn, you’re our only hope!
http://www.newsok.com/sen.-tom-coburn-vows-to-block-any-last-minute-health-care-deals/article/3447629?custom_click=pod_lead_health
“History has shown that it is very difficult to remove these entitlement things after they’ve been voted into law.”
Not always. The Catastrophic Health Care Law existed for only eighteen months. Like this monstrosity, the costs started immediately, while the benefits were delayed to make the budget numbers look better. But this means that the real “stickiness” doesn’t start for years. If this thing does pass, it becomes an issue that will not go away for years. Repeal will become a campaign war-cry, bedeviling the Democrats until it is torn out, root and branch.
Remember, it’s not just the conservative base of the Republicans fired up here.
Salt Lick @ 13 said:
“I’ve stopped job-hunting in order help unseat my congressman. My family can live on beans and rice until November, even through Eggplant’s “best scenario.””
For what it’s worth, you have my sympathy. I’m still employed but my contract is hanging by a thread.
I grew up hearing horror stories from my grandparents about how they survived the Great Depression. My grandfather always wanted to be a physician (and had the raw ability) but never had the opportunity. At the height of the Great Depression he supported the family by killing and plucking chickens in a slaughter house.
I’ve always dreaded the possibility of someday finding myself standing at an assembly line, plucking chickens like my grandpa.
We’ve moved far beyond “the other hand” and are now “on the gripping hand”.
You have to wonder what Obama’s real plan is. By tacking so far left so quickly, he showed his hand but didn’t care. Why?
In my opinion, this always felt as a race to shore up enough votes, by hook and crook for the next round. It still feels this way even though most of us are in disbelief at his seemingly total disregard for what happens if HC is passed. Many commentators feel that this is suicide for the democratic party.
But Is it?
As mentioned above, if his real prize is turning over 1/6th of the US economy to SEIU, along with GM/Chrysler, and who knows what else, this would not only increase their membership, but bring in vast amounts of revenue for the unions as well, which flows right back to the democrats.
I can’t believe that there are 50 congressmen who would seriously vote for this bill, let alone 216. But, they are close.
Next is the illegal immigrant reform he and Pelosie want to use the Slaughter rule on. How much to their base will this add for the next election?
What other back room strategies has Obama and all of his left wing friends come up with. What is their real roadmap that they wish to implement before the public fully understands what is happening.
They are now beginning to. The question is, is it to late?
Don Rodrigo, 16: “We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally.” – Nguen Co Thatch, Vietnamese Foreign Minister.
The whole Marxist rhetoric of “equality” is a lie. As the above quote illustrates the only equality will be the equalization of the lazy proletariat class and the work-oriented proto-proletariat middle class into equal serfdom – homogenized into a single neo-proletariat class – loomed over by a Marxist ruling class of not-to-be equalized equalizers. George Orwell understood the lies of Marxism all too well.
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” (Communist Manifesto)… meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… In the years following the Revolution it (The Socialist Party of Oceania) was able to step into this commanding position almost un-opposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984
When Obama, after saying we could not afford manned space, came down to Florida and said he would change his position and support it I yelled “Lie!”
And now when I see cars in the Kennedy Space Center parking lots with Obama stickers on them I laugh.
It’s really going to be funny indeed if Kosmas votes for the health care bill and then the utterly predictable happens and Obama discovers a hideous golf shoe shortage in Mongolia or some such and they kill it again.
RWE @ 23 said:
“When Obama, after saying we could not afford manned space, came down to Florida and said he would change his position and support it I yelled “Lie!””
Obama tipped his hand early in the election process when he said that he wanted NASA focused on Earth resource satellites for studying global warming. The nonsense about his supporting the manned space program is such an obvious lie.
RWE @ 23 also said:
“And now when I see cars in the Kennedy Space Center parking lots with Obama stickers on them I laugh.”
It’s possible for very intelligent and highly educated people to be stupid. There seems only a weak correlation between “common sense” and raw brain power. This should not be so and it’s a mystery to me.
The *first* step to surviving a zombie attack is to realize there is a zombie attack! Generally zombie movies start with the protagonist trying to convince various skeptics, who often then become zombies themselves. Right now few see the danger.
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” Samuel Adams
I believe Adams was describing the soon-to-be-Canadians in that quote.
Eggplant 9: “conservatives in firm control of the Congress and the public very pissed off it might be possible for sweeping economic and political reform, e.g. tort reform, a balanced budget amendment along with some sort of anti-socialism amendment to the US Constitution.”
Eggplant is right. Here are my ideas for such an amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
1. The 16th amendment will read:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes up to 10%, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxvi
2. The spending of Federal Government will not exceed its revenues which must only derive through the 16th amendment.
3. Congressional and Supreme Court term limits
4. Congressional 2/3 override over the Supreme Court – just as Congress has 2/3 override over Presidential vetoes
5. Revocation of the 17th amendment
It’s possible for very intelligent and highly educated people to be stupid. There seems only a weak correlation between “common sense” and raw brain power. This should not be so and it’s a mystery to me.
Most of the people I know and love personally chose to do the Useful Idiot two-step on Nov. 4, 2008.
Lets push this all the way to the logical conclusion. ObamaCare means that there will be an explicit spoils process to determine who gets what.
There is a provision in the Senate Bill requiring 40% of all Med Students graduating to be Black. Currently according to the AMA, 4% of all Doctors are Black, about in line with the middle class (40%) proportion of the Black population as a whole (12.5% of the US population). This changes your Doctor from Doctor House to Dr. Dre.
Moreover, someone is going to get jobbed. Robbed. Screwed over. That’s inevitable. In a multi-racial society, the loser will be those of the “wrong race” who don’t have massive political power.
Currently, Whites make up 66% of the population. That is down from 80% in 1960.
Simply put, White voters under ObamaCare cannot afford to have these numbers go lower and MUST vote for people who will in fact INCREASE the White proportion. Because HEALTH CARE DEPENDS ON POLITICAL POWER.
This is the achilles heel of ObamaCare and the Madoff principle. Someone gets screwed right away in the Ponzi scheme.
Obama knows this, and plans to use (Gibbs would not rule this out) the deem and pass route for making all 20 million illegals here now instant citizens and about 20 million more from Mexico. Instant White minority status for those he hates most — Whites!
If you think the battle over Health Care is ended, its just begun. Basically all goodies get handed out by the government, on a racial basis, with Whites soon to be discriminated, permanently disenfranchised minorities in their own country, within fifty years. From Vast majority to despised minority, kept out of power and opportunity.
I don’t see how you take the White Middle/Working class, make them a sudden and despised racial minority, and one that is suddenly poorer and kept out of any opportunity, permanently, along with their kids, and not have a “pre-revolutionary condition” as the Marxists would say.
Nor do I see a return to the status-quo ante.
The “dictatorship of the SWPL Yuppies plus Blacks, Gays, Hispanics, Women etc.” that finds its expression in Tom Friedman’s admiration for the Chinese Communist Central Committee, means the destruction of the political center, most institutions (which have failed to stop it) and any rough cultural/social consensus on many divisive issues.
Mostly good points, Whiskey, but I think you (and others making a similar point) are intentionally misunderstanding Gibb’s comments on “demon pass”. Gibbs got caught by a clever question which he didn’t dare answer either way, which is why he had to squirm out of it. If he had said “yes, deem and pass is fine for these other bills” there would have been an explosion of outrage. If he had said “no, we would never use it” he would be admitting that this was an unprecedented and unwarranted breach to use on any legislation this important. So he hemmed and hawed and tried to move on.
In point of fact, it only can even be suggested when there’s an already passed Senate bill sitting on the table, which cuts out all those other hypotheticals. Sorry to be a wet blanket on an otherwise marvelous threat.
“This is the achilles heel of ObamaCare and the Madoff principle. Someone gets screwed right away in the Ponzi scheme.”
Now here you are *Exactly* right – and the screwing happens so quickly that we never move onto anything else. The passing of this bill will be our political Fort Sumter, right here, right now. What I expect to happen, if it passes, is so much tax noncompliance that the deficit soars, the economy is wrecked by spiking interest rates as the government compensates, and chaos ensues. I don’t think our institutions are strong enough as they are currently constituted to withstand the gales that will begin to blow when that happens.
And when that day comes, the entire worldview that you have been decrying so eloquently will go up in smoke overnight. The women who have convinced themselves they don’t need men are going to have to find a man to take them in and protect them quickly, or face becoming prey for the human jackals and vultures that will come to dominate the landscapes of many of our once great cities.
This isn’t that outrageous of a prediction, by the way – it’s a lesson that’s had to be learned and relearned countless times throughout human history. It’s always those who think they’ve finally got it made who have got the furthest to fall – and who do fall.
The current deliberate distortions of constitutionally-set process by Obama, Pelosi, et al will either drive a stake into the heart of this country, or lodge a permanent wedge between those who produce and serve, and those who consume without paying.
Either is an untenable state for a nation surrounded by hostiles.
This fulfills the phrase popular among radicals in the 1960′s – “heighten the contradictions.” Meaning, force the issues, light the fuse, stop up the vents, plug the valves, gum up the works, flush all the toilets in the city at the same time, set off all the fire alarms simultaneously… force the government and all the contending factions to follow through on their promises and threats, to bring things to a precipitating climax.
Think Cloward-Piven strategy.
Obama and his crowd of pediatric potentates and dunces-in-diapers are tweaking the tail of a titan. They think they will be able to subdue and tame their foe. But history is cluttered with the bones of usurpers who fancied themselves fated to command, and everyone else born with bit in their mouths or a ring in the nose.
They honestly think that if they are the ones who trigger the event, this somehow guarantees they’ll stay in charge as it proceeds. Over the last century of spoils politics, the left have built up unsustainable give-away programs like the century’s worth of accumulated deadwood in Yellowstone back in the 1980’s. After so much meddling with natural processes that should have kept balance between forest and fuel, all it took was for a few small fires to get out of hand, and suddenly there was a conflagration from one horizon to the other.
These idiots don’t have the wit to step out of the growing shadow of a falling boulder, much less govern an erupting forest fire.
Continuing the analogy, there is some comfort in learning that certain pine seeds only germinate after the pinecone has passed through the heat of a forest fire. But the Yellowstone fire was so intense, it consumed a lot of those cones, and sterilized the soil between the charred stumps. Be careful what you wish for.
—————-
p.s. thanks to Wretchard for recent maintenance work.
VDH has some:
March 17, 2010 Reflections on the Revolution in America by Victor Davis Hanson Pajamas Media
I’ve made several trips around the blogs and news sites – left, center and right and the attitudes and words I am seeing are full of fear, dismay and anger.
Not a good thing for or in America. Americans have no taste or stomach for deceit and treachery.
I’m not sure what is going to happen but it is not going to be good. Good for America or good for my grand kids. Or, maybe I’m wrong and it has to come to this for it to be not only stopped but reversed.
God be with us and our Republic.
Papa Ray
More on “Class Struggle” from the prophet himself:
“The proletariat (non-disabled poor and all other minority groups) will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie (middle class), to centralize all instruments of production (middle class business) in the hands of the state (un-Constitutional Federal Government)… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at…. The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the (Classical) liberal movement, became more earnest. By this the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism (Communism) of confronting the (Classical liberal) political movement with the socialistic demands… against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality (equality before law)… There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
They are pounding on this drum already:
PROMISES, PROMISES: Obama in immigration dance
I have read the outline and it is not much different than the last go around we had with immigration. Also I am so sick and tired of seeing the “12 million” number when it comes to illegals in the U.S.
Anybody that lives in the border states knows that it is much, much larger than that number that someone came up with years ago.
Get your thinking up around 20 million and you might just be close.
OH, in case this went under your radar:
Republicans assail IRS provision in health care bill
Papa Ray
Storm Rider:
Obama in his formative years in Chicago hung out with a crowd that railed against “middleclassness,” the post modern term for burgeoise, I guess. “Sophisticated,” lefty black students of the boomer generation used the term “Boojie” to describe those blacks who were interested in material advancement. Obama and his wife are well-schooled in the reflexive disdain of the “bourgeoise.”
Big demographic problem for them in the U.S., though: The “bourgeoise” is the majority. When the earliest, and least funny, Marx Brother was writing his manifesto, the proletriat was the majority.
35 Don
“Obama in his formative years in Chicago hung out with a crowd that railed against “middleclassness,” the post modern term for burgeoise, I guess.”
You need to read the above link to VDH. I think you will appreciate how he puts it.
Papa Ray
The immigration talk is just a feint so that the idiot hispanic caucus members can tell their idiot constituents that “hey, we had a promise immigration was going to get worked on, and those nasty republicans killed it again!
In fact, every one of them already knows it will never get brought up for a vote. It’s just cheap talk that helps them sell their own cheap talk to their home crowd. Everything is a hustle, on down the line.
meanwhile, in honor of the thread title is this news item from the day:
http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/national/cursed_gambler_s_hand_stolen_from_pub_1_364086
“Thieves took an unusual trophy from a Wiltshire pub – a mummified hand amputated from a cheating gambler, it has been revealed.
The macabre relic was held in a locked glass case at the Haunch of Venison in Salisbury. It is believed to have been cut off a gambler caught cheating during a game of whist. It clutches a pack of 18th-century playing cards and is rumoured to be cursed.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA WOOS A RELUCTANT SUZANNE KOSMAS (D-FL)
Mr. President, I do declare
I’d love to vote for your health care
But policy is raising hob
My people’ve lost their NASA job
I feel your pain, Suzanne my dear
But really, you have naught to fear
I know I’m closing NASA down
You sure are pretty when you frown
Now here we are at Air Force One
See how she sparkles in the sun
So come, my dear, and climb right in
We’ll take her for a little spin
That’s right, get comfy in your seat
Now here’s some slippers for your feet
A snack, some food, a little drink?
Ah then where was I, let me think
Ah yes, the coming health care vote
You know we’re in the self same boat
We sink or swim together, dear
We battle stormy weather here
But with your help we’ll pull it through
I know that I can count on you
My private cabin has a lock
When the door’s closed no one will knock
These seats you know go fully back
You think you’re really in the sack
Here let me pull the curtain down
You sure are pretty when you frown
Who put the con in congress? The Democrats.
I’ve heard of using smoke and mirrors to balance a budget but they use smoke and fraud.
So, them Zombies been organized yet? Where’s the SEIU T-shirts?
See my 4-point plan for Comprehensive Health Care Reform video blog here.
video blog here.!
(on my youtube account called “pizzaboyserious”)
1) End the Antri Trust Exemption for Health & Malpractice Insurance
2) End getting Health Insurance through Employer
3) Health Insurance only For Catastrophic Medicine
4) Restore Government to its proper role of Governing and busting Monopolies/Cartels
Seems maybe a third the citizens are approaching the motivation of the same population fraction that supported the founders. What are the rules about a constitutional convention? Something that will fundamentally reshape the polity? Leave the Washington elite in the soup lines crying over a “nuclear option” they couldn’t conceive.
A document and movement that underwrites freedom (with its requisite individual responsibility) and our reliance on mostly local civil society, and leaves us with the world’s best military and an outward facing promise of “no better friend, no worse enemy” – but without the ability to dictate inward to (much smaller) states (smaller because it’s clear New York and California are governance failures, and Texas – with its much more powerful subordinate districts and a legislature that meets infrequently, is a success). Where citizens can vote with their feet among jurisdictions that compete on tax burden, benefits, and regulation.
We’ve had 200 years to observe what we value and don’t in our current form of government, and how and where it goes off the rails. Certainly we can create it again new. Where just the attempt should give some of the current mis-representatives pause, and others will be forced to show their true (coercive) colors.
How do we begin?
Walt Outstanding. I could finish that little ditty but I’m thinking that we need to keep it PG.
hdgreene Where are the SEIU T-shirts?
Right here.
AND…while we are busy with Obamacare…
Obama Administration restores ACORN funding
Got to get them up and going for the coming elections you know.
Papa Ray
Eggplant #19 — I’ve always dreaded the possibility of someday finding myself standing at an assembly line, plucking chickens like my grandpa.
Heh. We’ve got those Depression stories in my family, too, including one where my grandmother wouldn’t let my grandfather in the house with a wheel of cheese he’d gotten from the “gubmint.” Granny made him take it back; she didn’t take what she hadn’t earned.
But with regard to working in this upcoming election… I’ve never understood how champions like Peyton Manning or Drew Brees could say, “Oh, man, right here in the Super Bowl is where I want to be.” Now I understand.
I’ve been a good citizen — voted, served, etc, etc, — but the threat from tyranny has never been so clear and present. Now’s my time to participate in an epic fight for freedom. Now’s my time to do something truly important and unique for my country and liberty. I dropped out when Dubya was elected, but I called my local GOP this afternoon and volunteered to help unseat my congressman.
I am so looking forward to this “game.” We’re going to kick their asses, beat them like a rented mule, and tear out their hearts and show it to them.
3 Minutes to e-mail your Congressperson and 58 Blue Dog Democrats
Can’t hurt.
Salt Lick,
If Granny were still with us, she would become eligible for (mandatory) free psychological counseling under Obamacare!
We had to destroy Healthcare to save it.
Gotta be “comprehensive” or else,
Just like Amnesty.
Ari Tai
How do we begin?
That may be the most important question asked in this century.
I’m a doer and fixer and I believe in the six Ps. Prior Planning prevents piss poor performance.
I know that if you get a group of people together trying to come up with ideas, plans and actions…the larger the group, the longer it will take to hack something out.
But I also know that if you gather men of good will, honor and love of country we can make decisions and plans on how to bring our Republic back to what our Founder’s designed and wanted for us.
Unfortunately this time around, the enemies within are disguised and look just like us and have no morals nor love of our Republic, but will lie cheat and steal to deceive us.
Papa Ray
Ari Tai 41,
Well, we can’t start over because our Constitution and Bill of Rights are the greatest documents of representative government and individual human rights ever written – secular law (Constitution) with a sacred mandate (Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights). We just need an amendment. A new constitutional convention might be hijacked by the American Marxists – then we’ll have a constitution similar to that of the Soviet Union – full of Orwellian “Positive Rights” i.e.: reversible government derived privileges in the guise of “human rights” – here today – gone tomorrow. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights are truly exceptional – they are full of unalienable God-given individual human rights which limit the power of Federal Government – what the Marxists call “Negative Rights” – no greater example of Orwellian Newspeak exists – except for the “Living Constitution” – Orwellian Newspeak for “Dead Constitution.”
Here is how we can begin – a Constitutional amendment:
1. The 16th amendment will read:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes up to 10%, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxvi
2. The spending of Federal Government will not exceed its revenues which must only derive through the 16th amendment.
3. Congressional and Supreme Court term limits
4. Congressional 2/3 override over the Supreme Court – just as Congress has 2/3 override over Presidential vetoes
5. Revocation of the 17th amendment
“We the People” must become masters of our own destiny by becoming masters of our law – masters of our Constitution through amending it, and thereby giving it the breath of life. “We the People” will thereby become masters of both Congress and the Supreme Court.
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it… We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
One way to attack Obamacare would be to create a parallel system — based on free market principles and true cost containment (dispute arbitration, deductibles and so on) that the young and healthy can join. give them a tax credit as a rebate on the taxes paid into Obamacare. Let employers use the tax credits to buy group insurance for their workers. There are lots of good ideas.
The Democrats want to sock it to the young and healthy to pay for this entitlement. Remove them, remove the resources. Of course, they would have to vote for Republicans to escape. And it could take effect before Obamacare. But it would give people a choice. The Free enterprise and Free market system? Or the Democrat Con-congress “DC” controlled system?
The Democrats would then have to fight it. But it would give the Republicans a positive message.
Got to go.
Whsikey #29:
“There is a provision in the Senate Bill requiring 40% of all Med Students graduating to be Black.”
Back in the mid-80′s a medical school admitted that a certain white applicant had been rejected nearly 10 years before but would have been accpted had he been balck.
The man was admitted to medical school, 10 years late, and this produced a wave of blacks stomping around outside, carrying signs, protesting the man’s admission to the school.
Since no black person had been denied admission what they really were protesting was was the failure to discriminate against a qualified white applicant. The Civil Rights Movement had turned 180 degress over 20 years, from “Give me my rights.” to “Never mind my rights, deny the other guy his.”
It’s not about Equality, it’s about inflicting pain that minorities find satisfying.
Folks, I think it is a more subtle strategy by President Obama and crew.
They accept and anticipate losing House and Senate control. It’s a good thing for them.
The measures required to deal with the economic devastation foisted by both parties will be most unpleasant. The reformers, replacing the Dems and RINOs, will get the blame for the bad tasting medicine.
Obama and crew will already have their kibble; their cronies get their payoffs. They have the structural changes in place to cement and augment their control.
The ‘adults’ that must try to deal with the aftermath get the blame and aggravation. The current economic levitation act, fueled by debt and mirrors, goes away right after the next November election. The economy will be further talked down, just as in the runup to President Obama’s election.
The corrupt and statist types will snipe and hamstring efforts to effect any meaningful changes in the current structures that hurt the economy and nation.
They’ll plan to ride back in next election cycle after promising a “…easier, softer way.”; consider how President Bush was treated, across 9/11 to the end of his presidency.
This is not a new strategy or differ from the communication and control channels these characters already have used. Just algorithmic for them.
To stymie the exact strategy they used against President Bush, there has to be a consensus – across the American people – on what to do once power is achieved again, but the groundwork to achieve that consensus takes a while.
Just temporarily reducing the number of statist types in government does nothing to reduce the power of the regulatory state, or the parasitic groups that feed on a swollen state.
What’s the ‘Contract with America’ that there’s a broad agreement on, that might start to heal what ails us?
Noting well that there will be massive clouds of smoke and mirrors and attempts to divide to prevent just such a consensus.
That’s the real battle – achieving such a consensus against the noise of the parasites.
Health care “reform” isn’t really about plain old socialism or taking over 1/6 of the economy. It’s about converting 1/6 of the economy into unionized government workers for the SEIU. It’s not about power for an idea (socialism or statism); it’s about Chicago-style power. I’m finally convinced that Pelosi & company don’t care how big the losses are in 2010 or 2012 because they are playing the long game.
There is a provision in the Senate Bill requiring 40% of all Med Students graduating to be Black.
Perfect, if true.
And we are at the point of that movie with Richard Pryor, surgeon, and I don’t give damn what anyone thinks of my statement.
Morons run the roost.
Thank Christ for the Wenaha, where my mind first came to itself, with the sounds of the river running, never to care about anything else.
Bakke – RWE’s case.
PHONE, DON’T MOAN!
– Hewitt
Only costs Caterpillar 100 Million in one year.
Good for business.
rwe @ 48: Back in the mid-80’s a medical school admitted that a certain white applicant had been rejected nearly 10 years before but would have been accpted had he been balck.
That would be Bezerkely. It so happened I was running the computers for a competitive medical school the year the gentleman in question was applying. Er, OK, it wasn’t Bezerkely after all, it was BezDavis, so sue me, do you know how long ago that was? So, everything old is new again. Hoo-f’ing-ray.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke
I read on Drudge that Marie Antoinette Pelosi is praying to St. Joseph. That one slipped by me. When was Stalin canonized? It must have been the Polish pope that did it. Or maybe she’s praying that St. Joseph’s aspirin for children will be covered by the bill. After all they’re “for the children”.
As a committed Christian, I wonder what god this shriveled up, botox addled harpie is praying to.Could it be Baal or Moloch or the Queen of Heaven? I swear if it all wasn’t so frightening; this whole scene would be hilarious. What a crew of flaming morons and carnie barkers people DC.
Here’s a pleasant little tune to counteract the singing of “The Internationale” in DC on Sunday:
Well we worship at the shroud of Elvis
And we’re waiting for that money from Ed McMahon
And we’re drinking from the Perrier fountain of youth
While we follow what the daily horoscopes saying
Taking lethal doses of MTV
Delving into pet psychiatry
Trying to treat cancer with a fruit juice cure
And waiting for the Beatles reunion tour
‘Cuz it’s a great big stupid world
And we’re feeling kinda queasy as it turns around
Great big stupid world
And we’re never really sure if we’re up or down
We’re on a dirt clod out in space
Where it stops nobody knows
If Jesus came back today
They’d try to book him on the Oprah Winfrey show
‘Cuz it’s a great big stupid world
Great big stupid world
Well we’re hot on the trail of Big Foot
And we’re wearing the crystals to feel the power
We’re hoping that the creatures from outer space
Come to set us free in that final hour
Trying to tell the future from the lumps on our heads
Getting melanoma from our tanning beds
Channeling Houdini with Shirley MacLaine
And trying to figure out what the dolphins are saying
Well it’s a Great-Big-Stupid world
Dumb dumb da dumb dumb baby it’s a stupid world
It’s a great big stupid, great big stupid
Great big stupid world
Well we’re studying the National Enquirer
Is it true Sonny Bono is the Anti-Christ
We debate if T.V. wrestling is really a sport
While we’re testing rock ‘n’ roll and it’s effect on mice
Bonding with our little computer screens
Getting anorexic on our Lean Cuisines
Turning plastic surgeons into millionaires
So everybody finally gets to look like Cher
It’s a great big stupid world
And we’re feeling kind of queezy as it turns around
Great big stupid world
And we’re never really sure if we’re up or down
It’s a great… big… stupid world
Dumb dumb da dumb dumb baby it’s a stupid world
-Randy Stonehill
My apologies, it is not a strict 40% quota (that doubtless will come later through administrative rulings by Obama) but in fact, “requirements” written about by Joe Hicks on Pajamas Media here.
As for illegal immigrants, it is probably a trivial matter to get 51 votes through “deem and pass” in the Senate and a bare majority in the House to make all illegals permanent US citizens. Obama can probably add about 40-50 million new votes at a stroke. This is undoubtedly what is being planned. Which is why so many Dems are voting for it.
ObamaCare is a slam dunk. But it makes health care the decision of politically correct, multicultural bureaucrats putting Blacks and Hispanics over every other group. That is a naked spoils fight over “your life” if you are the (current) majority.
Obama is “one man, one vote, one time” like all Islamists, and like Khomeni he has permanently altered the US. Trying to make at one swoop America into a non-White majority nation, ruling over a despised White majority. That has been his aim from the beginning.
But it will not be over with just this vote. Lawsuits, all sorts of things, and the possibility that the unconstitutional means of making non-Citizens instant voters to pack the vote creates open, real conflict can not be discounted.
By that I do not mean Fort Sumter and declarations of secession. Rather, mass campaigns of civil disobediance, not paying taxes, huge marches of the White middle/working class, and “revolutionary moments” when the National Guard or Army refuses to fire on their … parents.
A beleaguered White Majority that is explicitly told it will be made an instant, and discriminated minority, in a deep and permanent recession, by the First Black President, will want him impeached and removed. Moreover such a population is likely to be deeply unsympathetic to charges of “racism” or indeed, any concern not their own ethnic/racial group, and with various degrees of hostility to outside groups.
Right after Health Care passes, La Raza plans for marches of millions of illegal aliens demanding instant citizenship. Obama’s plan is to pass by 51 votes through deem and pass, bypassing the filibuster, this plan in the Senate and then in the House.
Greaaaaat… I got to see zombie buttcrack.
This Kosmas lady is waaay out of her league at this point. She is a socialist but I think in a soft soccer mom way. Now that she sees what it looks like when you get run over in the bigs. She isn’t so much for this game. There were a few protesters at her office in New Smyrna but that was to be expected as the east side of Volusia/Brevard county is really! blue. But there are a TON of geezers living there that have seen their retirement take it in the huevos and nothing fires up a blue hair like cutting into their Wal-Mart budget or their early bird special!
There is a book out there that unfortunately is out of print. But if you can grab a copy it will be very enlightening. It is fiction but has a strong foundation in reality. Unintended Consequences by John Ross.
Papa Ray probably has a couple of copies if you need to borrow one. wink
Jim
@11, If you grew it from your own heirloom seed then it didn’t have ADM’s hand print on it. Otherwise it does EVERYWHERE. They are the food producers for this planet in one way or another.
@15. SPOT ON! It is all about the money. They need those 4 years of tax receipts to keep the SS USA from going on a three hour tour.
@21. EVERYTHING Obama has done domestically since he has taken office can be directly tied to “Reparations to the slaves” in one form or another. He means to see that this country pays for the sins of another even if he has to make a deal with the devil himself or even if it means the destruction of the Republic and the end of the grand experiment.
@27. I wish for no new amendments. As a matter of fact I wish for a reduction in the number we now have! We the Republic do not need more laws. We NEED moral and honorable men of virtue to enforce the laws that were provided when this country was founded. PERIOD. All the laws in the universe cannot make an immoral dishonorable man hold to the path of good and righteousness. One of the founders said as much . I believe it to be Mr. John Adams. “John Adams pointed out why the future of the United States depended upon the level of virtue and morality maintained
among the people. He said: ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to
the government of any other.”
I wish I still had my copy of Unintended Consequences, as it would be worth about $200.00 plus now. It has become a collectors item.
I found the book to be a great treasure trove of gun history and a good look inside the gun culture that I was raised in.
Of course the feds are the enemy in this book and their exploits against gun owners are detailed as they happened in real life, along with fictional ones that will make your hair stand up on your neck.
Yep, it needs to be read by most if your interested in your 2nd Amendment freedoms and I would say other freedoms as well,and as the book describes and like Adams warned, if the authorities and/or the government is corrupt, your freedoms will be the first things you lose.
Papa Ray
Well I am thinking about what you are saying Whiskey, not so much about the girls and the polygamy, but the other stuff, and I have to say, I think you are right on on some of it.
JFSanders031, 57
Well, the Founding Fathers placed an amendment process in our Constitution for a reason – that is how our Constitution has its real breath of life – that is how “We the People” control our government – that is how “We the People” can reverse the un-American situation we now have where government controls us.
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof…” Article V, U.S. Constitution
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlev
In addition to the Founders, Abraham Lincoln understood the value of amending our Constitution when we “grow weary of the existing government.” The American Middle Class will lose the class struggle (culture war) we are now experiencing – the “battle of democracy” as Karl Marx called it in the Communist Manifesto. American Marxists will win this class struggle without an amendment as described above – their final victory will bring to an end their dreaded enemy – the American Revolution. That being said, I agree with you that we need moral and honorable men and women in American Government – at all levels.
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it… We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
The Consumer Metrics Institute constructs a consumption index based on actual data for a range of discretionary purchases such as cars,durable goods and vacations. This index has been a reliable predictor by roughly a quarter ( 3 month time period) since 2006. This “Daily Growth Index” has just crashed from 5%+ growth in the last quarter to negative territory and heading lower. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-consumer-metrics-index-2010-3?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CS_COTD_031110
If this index is correct, we will be back officially in recession by mid summer or early fall; yep, the greatly feared double dip. That will almost surely decisively end “Extend and Pretend” in the financial markets and expose the unbelievable fraud that are the Dem’s, Buraq’s, Timmy’s and Helo Ben’s financial policies with frightening force.
This health care vote is surely the Dem’s last hurrah. I think it will pass because Buraq , Nancy and Rahm will not rest and will use any low down, unconstitutional or not, fraudulent or not, trick necessary until it does. There will be an immediate, hellacious outcry the likes no one alive can remember.
Then we will be hit by the devastating double dip depression, where many of those wheels of economy now so taken for granted, will come violently spinning off. Massive misery ahead people, and many of the clueless will finally start to ask what have Buraq and Nancy been doing all this time during this daunting crisis?
I do not fear the health care bill passing. There are far, far greater problems that America must face and solve right now. Sometimes things have to get very dark before the dawn. Historically in a democracy like ours, a crisis often needs to go to the very brink of destruction before the voting populace gets a clue and throws the rascals out. And we need thousands of politicians, millions of bureaucrats, and millions of other rent seekers to be thrown out into the bitter cold, spat upon, kicked and beaten to a bloody pulp, before things really get better.
Whiskey, I don’t care about the race. Based on my pronounced blue veins, I may be one of blue people.
No allusions to Na’vi whatsoever–just in case someone gets ideas. I hated that flick.
It is a culture. If there is a fella with a different amount of melanin in his skin and is culturally on the same page as me, then he belongs into “ours”.
One thing, you rarely see mentioning of orientals in racial context. They seem to be as “white” as you and me. Why? They simply don’t buy into minority politics. They do preserve their cultural traits as any ethnica, but at the same time they superbly integrate into the mainstream culture of the land. Here in Vancouver, BC (30%), their kids born here are culturally indistinguishable from a Canadian. I know many people that have a “chinese” wife, or vice versa. Saw this young kid in a store, blonde, blue-eyed teenager without the epicanthic fold. Very unusual looking, but I guess he may not be in a decade or so.
BHO is not a post-racial president, just the opposite, he pushed a reset button. It spells nothing good coming out of that.
“The Dead HAND”
Starring (in no particular order):
Lead female: Nancy Pukey Pelosi as “THE CLAW” crypt-keeper
Lead male: Barry who-in-the-hell-is-he-? Hussein as “The gallows humor Joker”
Supporting cast:
The toe-sucking Blue-Dogs votin’ “YES” along with all of the other Anti-American turd Demonunists.
Jack ‘let ‘em drip-die’ Kevorkian
Every Commie bastid from here to Timbuktu
Extras:
A whole sh*t-load of Angry Americans who are freaking the hell out!
Opening scene:
It was a dark and stormy night…the torches were lit with care, the pitchforks were sharpened, the tar was warmed and the feathers flew about with a flare.
FLAIR not ‘flare’.
15 minutes is too much for me some days and not enough other days apparently.
lol
Random thoughts:
1) How’s come, according to whiskey’s anthropology, men get two psychological categories (alpha and beta), whilst wimmins get only one (ficklefascistabootlickingharemslut)? If this is evolutionary psychology, how did men manage to evolve into 2 types, while wimmins stayed put with 1?
2) If the feds take over student loans, what is the possibility that “national service” of the “civilian security force” type will become the means whereby the yoots can pay back their student loans, a la current military service?
3) My congressman, Jason Altmire (Dem), just announced today he would vote No on the health care bill. Is this to be trusted? Do we have to parse every word of every pronouncement (like, the meaning of “vote” and the meaning of “bill”)? Altmire is not an insane leftie. Can I uncross my fingers now?
4) Am headed to DC tomorrow with a bunch of other Tea Partiers and my Fort Moultrie flag. What I would have done tomorrow, in a non-insane world, was work on my lecture & study video for this week’s film class … but we are living in those proverbial interesting times. Have been sending up many prayers this week. Including prayers that Altmire would vote No.
5) Great friend of 23 years is not going to DC with me because GFO23Y told me today that they “support the health care bill.” This is the same GFO23Y, mind you, that from 2006-2008 called Nancy Pelosi “Bela Lugosi” every time SanFranNan’s name came up. The formerly horrible and completely unworthy of respect congresswoman from the Bay Area is one of the prime architects of the health care bill that GFO23Y supports, yet somehow GF023Y is not bothered by this wee inconsistency nor the “lie down with dogs” adage. GF023Y also used to decry federal deficits and overspending. But currently supports the mother of all unsustainable entitlement programs.
Meanwhile, I will be attending my 4th political protest inside of a year tomorrow. Up until February of last year, I had never been to a political protest, and only one presidential campaign rally back in my wacky, wacky college days. I’m really a slow-burning temperament type, and have never been a bandwagon sort either. So what has changed, that people like me (consistent voters, taxpayers, but never political activists) are now taking to the streets? And my GFO23Y who voted for Bush in 2004 and supported the war in Iraq, voted for Obama in 2008 and *refuses* to criticize him beyond “his biggest problem is, he’s inexperienced.”
I feel like I’ve walked through the looking glass.
65. bogie wheel:
“If this is evolutionary psychology, how did men manage to evolve into 2 types, while wimmins stayed put with 1?”
That’s because us wimmins is the embodiment of alpha and omega and we don’t need no stinkin’ alpha that or masta beta this label/libel. We wimmins give birth to ya and then we make ya wish you were dead already when ya marry us and realize God has a bitin’ sense o’ humor. The beginning and the end! /sarc+giggle
I often wonder what is marriage good for except for procreatin’ if men prefer the company of men and women prefer the company of women? I’ve oft pondered this strange phenomenon. I s’pose I’m one of the few card-carryin’ vagina owners who prefers the company of my man over the company of other wimmins but I have to fight tooth and nail for his attention (even though I’m a comely lass, and at least somewhat artistically/intellectually/geekily gifted by modern standards).
Seriously, my husband has more bromances with other dudes than I care to count. No, he’s not a closet case either btw. lmao
Funny but annoying when you have to live it. pfft
Major constitutional crisis in 2011. Congress with GOP controlled House and impotent Dem majority in Senate, can’t/won’t pass a budget with any $$$ to implement health bill, Senate can’t confirm anyone involved in implementing health stuff or anyone whose vote was bought with a job that requires confirmation. Govt shutdown, Obama moves money around to items not appropriated, has people doing jobs they have not been confirmed for. Meanwhile, Courts dealing with challenges to deem and pass, reconciliation and maybe other aspects of how the thing got passed, maybe dozens of cases. Total gridlock, govt shut-down, House moves to impeach even tho no way Senate will convict.
Then the big one goes up, somewhere. Iran, Israel, Taiwan Straits, E. Europe, Korea, Af-Pak, Saudi, Egypt, Venezuela/Colombia, Falklands, Nicaragua/Honduras/Mexico? who knows? Maybe several at once.
Great.
This is the scouring of the shire.
I hope that doesn’t seem to trivialize the crime going on. It is a vicious spasm of spitting hatred for America and its people.
The Cash for Clunkers program is a perfect metaphor for the entire Obama presidency. Think of it. When we were kids in the 60′s I remember adults repeatedly telling me, “Mend it, care for it, make it last. You may not get another.”
They meant this as loving advice, not just scolding. They had learned at great pain that you do NOT simply waste something because it isn’t as good as it was when brand-new. The standard joke about extreme extravagance was to abandon a new car just because the ash-trays were full.
Now comes Obama, the sun rising in the East, the new prophet of progressivist post-racial bonhomie, man of wisdom, generosity and compassion for the bleeding mother Earth; the man who would bring us together, and make things right.
“Listen up, guys!” He casually hollers from the roof of the White House, “We’re gonna take your vehicles that are a few years old, see? and now that they’re not running so efficiently any more, not getting the mileage they oughtta, We’re gonna give you thousands of dollars credit for your old car toward the purchase of a BRAND NEW vehicle (as long as it’s one of these turkeys that cost thirty THOUSAND bucks!) Then we’re gonna pour sodium silicate into the old engine block, run that sucker till the stuff turns to molten glass and makes the parts seize up forever. Then we slap a whacking great fine on anyone trying to salvage any of the parts! EVERYBODY WINS, don’t you see?”
“You don’t?”
“Well, you’re obviously not smart enough to understand how things work.”
They’re applying this same approach to health care. Wait till you see the new colonoscopy methods.
#68 Fiddler: Cash for Clunkers is a perfect illustration of a huge blind spot of liberals. They do not understand what wealth is, so they unthinkingly destroy it. Automobiles are a form of wealth. Obama talked about “spreading the wealth”, but fails to understand that in a free market, the used car market is how we spread the wealth around. The “wealth” is the capability of autonomous transportation provided by owning a car.
A small number of people buy overpriced new cars, and their $30,000 car becomes a $15,000 trade in. That $15,000 trade in gets used for a few years then sold for $8,000 when the warranty expires. The car gets used again until it starts to rust, then is sold for $3,000. Eventually it barely runs and is sold for $500 to a poor family that drives it until it breaks down and junks it. That car is what allows them to have a job. A $500 car that works is just as valuable to a poor person as a $30,000 car. The more used cars on the market, the more national wealth there is in the form of automotive transportation. Destroying barely-used cars is destroying national wealth!
The only reason that the poorest of Americans can own cars is because other people sold their cars for less money than they bought them from. Cash for Clunkers totally short-circuits this process by taking cars that could be used by poor people for transportation for 10 years or more and destroying them. This will cause a shortage of used cars over the next decade and force people to keep older, less safe, more polluting cars on the road longer because fewer used cars will be available.
This law was thought up by and passed by selfish, rich politicians who were ONLY THINKING ABOUT THEMSELVES. They are the people who buy new cars from the factory and trade in their 1-2 year old cars. It never crosses their mind that after they finish their year or two with their new cars, that there is a 10-15 year life ahead of that car providing transportation for middle and lower income Americans.
Given that blind spot, why not just destroy a perfectly good cars with lower gas mileage if makes you feel good about yourself? The Cash For Clunkers supporters either have no idea what happens to used cars once they trade them in for a new one, or more likely, don’t care.
Cash for Clunkers is a perfect illustration of why we need to replace an out-of-touch Congress.
Twobyfour — you may not care about race, but let me assure you Blacks, Hispanics, and everyone else CARES ABOUT RACE a great deal. In fact, La Raza has said much about how Mexicans are “the cosmic race” of mestizos, superior, in language familiar to Louis Farrakhan, or David Duke come to think of it.
Regardless, RACE will be the means by which health care spoils is divvied up. Pajamas Media has a front page story by Joe Hicks on just such a spoils divvying up in medical school. Your doctor must be Black (or Hispanic) rather than the best. From Dr. House to Dr. Dre, apparently.
Asians have explicit racial feelings. Ask any Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Filipino. They can expand at length on the natural superiority of their race, culture, accomplishments, and the pathetic quality of close by neighbors. China is a seething mass of nationalist resentment, with a complex set of victimology and superiority complex against not just the West but many neighbors outside Japan. In the US Asians are demographically too small to count, the main spoils battle is between Hispanics and Blacks, vs. Whites, with SWPL elites fearing/hating middle and working class Whites.
Asians in the US should you care to look (online, such as for example StuffWhitePeopleLike.com in response to his post “Asian Women”) DO have a seething rage of resentment towards White (men in particular) and Blacks and Hispanics.
As a practical matter, there is no possibility of “getting beyond race” or being post-racial. That is a fantasy akin to men and women being the same, or people not sticking to their own race in preference. The US being multi-racial has generally preferred a smaller, limited government that does not divide the spoils of life into winners and losers.
However Obama and SWPL want an explicit, race-based division of spoils (transfer the Wealth, reparations, ObamaCare, etc.) that cannot be called back. Any more than the bullet can be unfired.
ObamaCare WILL Pass. And every White person must stick together in a racial spoils battle, because RACE will determine: 1. Who gets into Medical School, 2. Who gets what health care, 3. Who gets what student loans (government takeover of student loans means White kids need not apply) and thus College, and so on.
Try getting on a bus in Oakland and see how much race does not matter.
Delia,
… who prefers the company of my man over the company of other wimmins
Oh! Marry me!
but I have to fight tooth and nail for his attention
Request fulfillment unlikely. Your marriage is in a very good shape.
Hello all,
I’ve been trying to find a quote from BC on Google with no success. The post went something like “Don’t think they [lefties] don’t know the truth. If they don’t know it today, they will know it tomorrow.”
Perhaps the author will see this and clue me in…
Boghie Wheel –
The taxonomy is entirely women’s. In other words, women divide men into three parts, much like Caesar’s Gaul. The first is the “Alpha” those men they find sexually attractive and desire. An Alpha can be a broke, drug addicted rock musician, tattooed bicycle messenger, or Master of the Universe Wall Street Honcho. All have a degree of social power, status, arrogance, cockiness, and bad boy “transgression” about them. Think Hugh Grant or Charlie Sheen.
Then there are beta men. These are men women find no sexual desire at all but don’t mind having around as long as they “know their place” and do the grunt/scutwork of daily life, offer support, and don’t express any sexual interest in them at all (which they find revolting).
Finally, the Omega men. The icky, dregs of unattractiveness that women find revolting. Think Sam Kinison, or Dwight from the Office.
This is entirely a female taxonomy, and depends entirely on what men women find sexually attractive. That’s all there is.
A man can be even Omega in attractiveness, but Alpha to other men, i.e. leader, teacher, executive, powerful, often with patronage. Examples would be Mike Holmgren, or John Madden. Neither would excite women but both exhibit leadership/patronage roles among men. Beta-type men to women, such as the late Bill Walsh, can be quite Alpha to men (again, with male leadership/power/patronage). The reverse is also true. John Edwards, or Gavin Newsome, or Mayor Tony Villaraigosa, or Bill Clinton, may posture and preen as the Big Shot and Big Man and be beloved of women, but remain punchlines for Jay Leno.
What men find “Alpha” i.e. top dog is not what women find “Alpha” i.e. the guy they most desire. Guys who bored women to tears had men loyal to their dying day: Grant, Sherman, Walsh, etc.
This is essentially the flip-side of the madonna-whore complex many men carry around. But the political implications are profound. Basically women will cut Obama a lot of slack, because he IS a Big Shot Big Man. With the media, celebrities, and so on endorsing him. He’s JFK returned. This is WHY every Dem candidate always poses around like JFK. Women love that stuff.
BUT … and there is always a but. Even the biggest of Big Men cannot threaten fundamentals for women. Their support is discontinuous. Greatest fears, particularly breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and so on don’t respond to Big Man posturing. White women’s support for Obama will continue. Right until it craters.
[Hotair quotes an anonymous Dem Congressman saying internal polling is very positive on ObamaCare. He's probably right. White Women probably DO support it. HOWEVER ... Reps can now pound away at restrictions on breast/ovarian cancer treatment in ObamaCare, or your Doctor must be Dre, to drive White women right over the discontinuous function.]
America roughly functioned well with huge divisions between race and gender, with government NOT picking all of life’s aspects winning and losing.
NOW we have Government picking if you live/die with health care, and if your kid gets a student loan. Based on race (and probably gender). That’s guaranteed to produce fights just along those lines.
Whiskey, you mean I don’t care about race but race cares about me… I guess.
Orientals–true, Japanese can’t stand Koreans (and vice versa), but that is not racial, they are the same race, cousins in fact. Chinese/Vietnamese … I don’t know about feelings in their own countries. I can only comment on my local observation. Over here, it is somewhat different. There is a bit of contention in the Chinese community here that the girls tend to marry caucasian males. It is not some kind of fashion amongst Chinese girls, but rather a trend that is “pushed” by their parents. Of course, young lads seeing the pool of available ethnic Chinese females diminishing then marry caucasian females.
It is possible that what you describe is valid as Oakland goes. To a degree. La Raza does not represent all the Hispanic community. In fact, only a minority, though very vocal. I know some Hispanics (Mexicans originally) in OK, and they don’t want to have anything to do with La Raza. They consider themselves Americans.
I know my examples are anecdotal, but so are yours. Your brush is wide as always, though. You are like a man living in red lamp quarter that thinks all women are sluts.
Now, you may be right about the trends. Donks do exploit racial divisions for their own ends. It is somewhat discernable that they try even more these days,. They think they are the masters of the game. But it is likely to backfire in ways that would surprise them. The laws of unintended consequences always have the last say.
Speaking of Japan, they seem to have a similar problem as US, in the economy sphere.
Economist Noguchi warns soaring public debt may bankrupt Japan, bring back hyperinflation
2×4@64: It is a culture. If there is a fella with a different amount of melanin in his skin and is culturally on the same page as me, then he belongs into “ours”.
Ref the Bill Cosby brohaha a couple of years ago. Cultural determinism did not govern race relations until recently, but the modern context generated an enduring chorus of Rev Wright litanies and Jesse Jackson opportunism, which amplified and elevated the “issue of race” as a modern conflict that survived longer than necessary outside of the support structure provided by the welfare state. The reality of race relations changed on Main Street, but in Washington not so much, where policy was fully vested in the past.
RE the “blonde, blue-eyed teenager without the epicanthic fold”, I started noticing facial physiognomy maybe about ten years ago. The one I remember most was a beauty pageant contestant who was Philippino, Hispanic, Italian and something else I can’t recall. It wasn’t just that the gal was gorgeous but when she turned her face you could see different facets of her ethnic heritage – at one angle a strong Italian look but with a slight twist, definitely Asiatic. Some of the faces you see in the modern world are simply stunningly evocative – you can actually see dimensionality of ethnic heritage.
On the subject of health care, I’ve made this point before, but the Republicans had ample opportunity to address this issue, an opportunity which they snorted up their collective noses in the form of earmarks. Kudlow reported tonight that insurance premiums have actually declined over the last two years, in rebuttal to the administration’s charge of unrestrained cost escalation. In the past few weeks it was reported (as noted on Kudlow as well) that insurance companies in Oregon were “exploring” ways of cutting costs. Well, jeepers, what do you suppose happened in the last two years to cause that?
I have no idea any more what’s contained in the now 2700 page bill. That is a critical statement. But I wouldn’t be surprised if insurance premiums started to stabilize while the lawyers figure it all out, regardless of what happens this weekend.
But then again, I have to qualify that – fear has a very short half life.
Geeze Louise/76
There is this anthropologist dude (forgotten his name) who also is involved in genetics and microbio. He set up to map the dispersion of humans (presumably from Africa). He collected blood samples all over the world, piecing together paternal descent based on Y chromosome.
The apparently oldest group he could find were Bushmen. It does not mean the were the ancestors, and that the dispersion was from Africa, but Bushmen had the oldest preserved genome.
The non-African population that split at some point from the common ancestor for Busmen and the n-As migrated from somewhere in NA Africa/Mediterranean ME. First eastward and then branching south in India area (Indonesia and Australia). Another branch migrated northward and settled east of Caspian Sea. Later this branch split several times, one migrating towards Caucasus and then Europe, another north and another east and north east.
He found a guy in Kazakhstan (?) that seemed to have most archaic genome outside Africa. So he paid a visit. This guy had what you call dimensionality of heritage, but racial in his case. You could see all the modern racial types reflected in his features, depending on the angle and illumination.
This guy is a proof that there is only one race, the human race. Whatever is described as race is in essence a culture.
Contrary to liberal ideological sacred cows, though, all cultures are not equal.
bogie @65,
The book “The woman that never evolved” by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy deals with the question you asked.
twobyfour @77,
There is also the possibility (probability according to Wilson and Lumsden’s 1000-year rule) that some cultural tendencies can be genetically based and therefore evolved to fit the environment and other cultural tendencies. Maybe that is why culture is hard to change. I’ve got advanced degrees, was a professor, was raised by Christian parents, but my deepest feelings seem to be those of the North British borderer. Where does that come from if not from hundreds of years of strife imprinted in my (75% Ulsterman) DNA?
ridgerunner, I hear ya. The genetics (DNA) is one side of a coin. The other side is that the RNA markers that binds (or tangle, depends on POV) DNA in places provide another information layer and the markers are inheritable.
So, something to it.
But riddle me this. My parents both came from one South Moravian village and as far as there was a genealogic trace done, their trees were in the area for centuries, except for 30-years war in 17th century which brought a Swedish import.
Yet, as a li’l kido, I always had an affinity to anglosphere. Though I learned the language really when I was 30 when I got into the niveau (North America), I felt at home. It is complicated by the fact that I have an identical twin that still lives in Southern Moravia and feels at home there.
Beats me.
My sister emigrated to USA shortly before me saying bye to Urop. (I had no idea she had that in her until she was gone). Of course when I say emigrated I really mean escaped. Both of us. But she goes back every 2 years or so. I, not so. Except my family, there is nothing there for me.
That Swedish import… my uncle emigrated in late 60′s to… Sweden. That’s one for your theory.
Whiskey, it just doesn’t compute with me.
Papa said, get one you can talk to. And if she’s got some money, that doesn’t hurt.
She had no money, but sure can talk, for thirty years.
Things are more complex than that big man deal. And three cstegories.
And Greek letters.
My experience tells me so.
And I had no money either, in the beginning, but we knew how to talk with one another, which is the secret of marital success.
“Lock and Load” & “Saddle Up” America.
We’re going to Washington DC!
twobyfour,
Interesting personal history. I guess if you have a detailed genealogy then you can discount the following, but there were lots of Scottish mercenaries in Central Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. That poor, rocky land producing little but malcontents.
That’s all there is.
Whiskey
o– b.s.
There’s talk talk, for those who know what they are talking about.
“The truly scary part is that they know they’re going to lose Congress this fall and the Presidency in 2012, and they don’t care.”
Why should they? Conservatives will conserve whatever bill is passed. I can’t think of single important “innovation” that Republicans, Conservatives, whatever have undone: welfare state, great society, NATO, UN membership, department of education, IRS… once in place, they’re place forever. Conservatives conserve. That’s what they’re for.
“Fred Barnes at the Wall Street Journal says the battles between the living and the undead — the taxpayers and the spenders — have only just begun”
What an ***. The battle began in 1932 and was lost by 1964. The only fix is abolition of entire departments of the government; repeal of the income tax; withdrawal from almost all international organization & etc. None of it will happen. Not today. Not over the next year. Not over the next century. Not by words and votes.
Whiskey 73: “NOW we have Government picking if you live/die with health care, and if your kid gets a student loan. Based on race (and probably gender). That’s guaranteed to produce fights just along those lines.”
That should read: “Now we have un-Constitutional government picking…”
Our Constitution enumerates no power for Federal Government to divide the American People into classes by ethnic background, race, skin color, sex, economic status, etc.; and then to immorally choose its favored groups, i.e.: Marxist class struggle. Marxist class struggle twice violates our highest un-amendable moral law: 1. “All men (individuals) are created equal (before the law). 2. “They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are… the pursuit of happiness (private property earned through creative labor).”
Marxist class struggle is un-Declarational and un-Constitutional.
On the matter of geneology, its worth noting that in Europe the practice of keeping records of births deaths & marriages was only done for the nobility up until the reformation. One of the consequences of the reformation was that church records included birth death and marriage records for anyone who could get to church — which included the poor and the growing middle class.
The Real Deficit Effect of the Health Bill
Deficit increase of $582 billion over first ten years.
Deficit increase of $1.6 trillion over second ten years.
What do Democrats say about the Senate-passed health bill that the House is about to vote on? They say that, according to CBO, their bill reduces the deficit by $118 billion in the first ten years.
For example, CBO indicates that $53 billion of the $118 billion “lower” deficit over the next 10 years comes from Social Security payroll tax revenues that result from the increase in wages that employers will offer employees instead of health insurance.
But when Social Security revenues increase, it is only because future Social Security benefits are also going to increase.
Social Security is already promising to pay benefits that the program cannot afford – there is a large unfunded liability. So the increased Social Security revenues resulting from this bill are already spoken for – they will be collected to pay for increased future benefits. They cannot be available for both paying for the related future increases in Social Security benefits and for offsetting the increases in health spending in this bill.
Therefore, we should not count $53 billion of the “lower” deficit that comes from increased Social Security payroll tax revenues.
A similar situation applies in the case of the new voluntary federal program of long-term care insurance – the CLASS Act. Because it would work like an insurance program – premiums would…
” If this is evolutionary psychology, how did men manage to evolve into 2 types, while wimmins stayed put with 1? “
Because if you ask a woman she will tell you they got it right the first time and didn’t need a do over… See Delia. Just kidding Madame.
” And my GFO23Y who voted for Bush in 2004 and supported the war in Iraq, voted for Obama in 2008 and *refuses* to criticize him beyond “his biggest problem is, he’s inexperienced.”
Sorry, but your friend is mentally unstable and has cracked from the pressure. Just like an abused wife. Best to take it easy on him from now on or he may just break down altogether. Read Eric Hoffer’s book on group think and the need of some to belong no matter the consequences.
What the Democrats are doing is not Health Care. It is Vivisection.
Scratch a Russian, and you get a descendant of Ghenghis Khan.
“RE the “blonde, blue-eyed teenager without the epicanthic fold”, I started noticing facial physiognomy maybe about ten years ago. The one I remember most was a beauty pageant contestant who was Philippino, Hispanic, Italian and something else I can’t recall. It wasn’t just that the gal was gorgeous but when she turned her face you could see different facets of her ethnic heritage – at one angle a strong Italian look but with a slight twist, definitely Asiatic. Some of the faces you see in the modern world are simply stunningly evocative – you can actually see dimensionality of ethnic heritage.”
I must say that your definition of alpha, gamma, or betta don’t fit in our society, strong women would indifferently marry “strong” men or those you would consider “metro sexuals”, depends on their characters, you may have the appearence of a strong man, but your character is weak, and you may also have the appearence of a “metro-sexual” and have a strong personality. We rely more on feeling and “smells” (yeah, each skin has its own fragrance), or on what in the animals race is called pheromones, it is why we say of someone that we can’t bear, “I can’t smell him/her”.
Now I watched a TV report on women in surgery courses 2 days ago. Apparently girls who want to become surgeons are becoming more numerous than their male partners, and some women surgeons are big boths of a surgery speciality such as neurology, or heart reparation.
The funny thing is that the elder surgeon women look like their male elder counterparts, as responsabilities forged their character and appearence, but you still know that they are women because of their voice, smaller size…
Also, we have many women that have become jet-fighters pilots (also civil aviation pilots too), one is actually captain of the “la patrouille de France” which is considered as the most difficult level for such pilots.
We have not such fights about who is superior in the gender race.
Actually men like to be more under the spot lights as being the leaders, but they can make it because their wives are helping and supporting them behind the curtains. It was difficult to make our women becoming politicians, they din’t care that much of higher positions until the last decades. So far, they preferred the position of “egery” , sometimes on the pillows !
2be4,
I have read that the basque DNA was the most shared in caucasian populations, and somehow the oldest too, as so their language, that up to now none could trace into the different tribes invasions. Or maybe one was traced into Hokkaido island, where a tribe language had similarities with basque language, unfortunately the last member who could still spoke the Hokkaido dialect died a few years ago.
Stupak Abortion Language to Be Substituted for Senate Language in Deal to Secure Health Care Votes
In order for this to work Pelosi has to be telling the pro abortion people that the senate will never allow the change of language that stupak is trying to insert.
She wants to have it both ways.
The important message to be got out is that either Stupak’s people are being lied to or the pro abortion people are being lied to. So they’re both chumps for trusting pelosi
Whoops this is timed 10:58 today. Looks like a stupak deal is off.
Stupak is ‘Finished with Pelosi’
OK so John Boehner (R) gives the Republican speech of the week. But the words are rational, and the tone of his voice – happy, comfortable, friendly, and a bit sing-song, like your local burgher running for president of the local country club. Can’t these guys take a few public speaking lessons? Can’t they write and sound engaged, upset? Amazing any of these guys get elected at all. Good grief.
http://johnboehner.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=177292
OK, maybe what they need are acting lessons.
But he GOT ONE THING RIGHT! He said, quietly, almost in passing, “COMPARE OUR (REPUBLICAN) PLAN THAT GETS THINGS RIGHT, SEE HEALTHCARE.GOP.GOV” Finally! But come on, John boy, thump that tub! Get out some old vids of Ted Kennedy speechifying to the crowd, that’s how you do it, son.
Meanwhile, Obambus is on his victory tour already. He hasn’t the foggiest idea what is in the bill, and he couldn’t add numbers to a trillion if everyone in the country took off their shoes and he counted their toes a thousand times. But he’s got SOMETHING. He’s talking about SOMETHING. And the Republicans “party of ‘no’” loses to SOMETHING. Even the Republicans “part of start over” probably loses to SOMETHING, even if SOMETHING reeks. That’s politics.
If this turd passes tomorrow, if this mountain of insufficiently aged and stinking cow manure is dumped upon us, it’s for one reason and one reason only:
you can’t beat something with nothing.
w@73: He’s JFK returned. This is WHY every Dem candidate always poses around like JFK. Women love that stuff.
They used to. So did the men. JFK was the epitome of Rat Pack cool.
But I’m thinking maybe that explains the John Edwards phenomenon more than Obama. According to Heilemann and Helperin in their new book “Game Change”, Washington insiders were never fooled by Edwards. For a candidate of so little personal, let alone presidential, substance to consume so much public attention was always a mystery to me, outside of the context that all politicians are sorry caricatures of humanity. I will project my views and claim that most of the America I know was mildly amused by his candidacy – more anecdotal evidence of an out of touch political class. The JFK evocation is as good a reason as any to explain his starkly misguided importance on the public stage.
But, to get to the righteous rebuttal of “women love that stuff,” by which you mean the polish, the poise, and the smooth banter.** SO do men. In spades. I assume you’ve sat in a corporate boardroom. Without it, you go nowhere. It also explains why Hollywood is constantly being mined for political candidates. Whispering fingers point to Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, even Angelina Jolie.
**I highly recommend watching Squawk Box on CNBC which airs a profile spoof of Joe Kernen doing his imitation of the Dos Equis “stay thirsty” commercial as the “most interesting man in the world.” I can’t begin to describe how funny it is and I wouldn’t even try but it does seem to capture an element of the sexual dynamic more in tune with modern female sensibilities. But then, I’m just one data point.
2×4@77: Contrary to liberal ideological sacred cows, though, all cultures are not equal.
No. They. Are. Not.
(I guess that’s blogging format for emphatic agreement.) That will have to change if humanity is to survive.
mc@94: Here we say doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m guessing that’s where the phrase originated or perhaps branched into American idiom. Huh!
Boehner should have looked at the camera and said, “Don’t do this damn fool thing and if you do don’t do it this damn fool way.”
James Madison
Federalist Papers via Yale Law School
Concerned with legislative usurpation in 1788.
“In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people…; it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions….”
#68 Mad Fiddler: They’re applying this same approach to health care. Wait till you see the new colonoscopy methods.
Yeah, first rule will probably be: 40% of new colonoscopy doctors must be minority and have the name Digger!
Whiskey, I have to take issue with your examples of ‘Alpha’ males. Hugh Grant??? Hardly. Russell Crowe would be more like it.
While some women seem to prefer Beta males it’s because they are too chicken to go for an Alpha so they ascribe the Alpha taxonomy (ie Big Shot) to a Beta (ie Obama)out of wishful thinking.
Remember the old ‘real men don’t eat quiche” book? I know a few men who do eat quiche but will knock some jerk’s teeth down his thoat when necessary. For me that is a real Alpha male.
I saw right thru Obama’s big shot veneer right from the get go and do not love or fall for the posing with JFK thing. My health is probably more in danger from mysoginist mulsims hanging out at my local post office than from breast/cervical cancer. If some women think Alpha males are not sympathetic to issues like women’s cancer, they are not only fools but are blind as well. So, this is one WASP you can scratch off that list of white women you mentioned.
My apologies for the diversion…
The post was by Tamquam
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/10/05/paying-for-the-black-helmet/#comment-101
It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.
LOTM @ 100: Boehner should have looked at the camera and said, “Don’t do this damn fool thing and if you do don’t do it this damn fool way.”
There are lots of ways to go about it, but the one you named is *also* negative.
He could have said something like, “If you do this damn fool thing, who are you going to blame, when you find your taxes raised and your health care costing more? Do you blame Obama? The Democrats? Or yourself? When the Fed starts printing money to cover the trillion dollars in deficits, and inflation makes your salary worthless, will you think then, ‘Hey, if I had only read this thing first, I would have demanded someone sensible fix it first?’ Ladies and germs, if your representatives vote for this lunacy, if they vote for a bill that makes no sense, please, for your love of America, vote Republican this fall!”
OK, the voters aren’t voting this thing, the Congress is, but whatever.
OT
Assuming the WP has it’s facts and story correct:
House leaders plan separate health vote, rejecting ‘deem and pass’
Snip…
“But the real developments were taking place behind closed doors, as Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders tried a new tack in their effort to secure the votes of Democrats who fear that the Senate health bill will allow federal funding of abortions. The details of the proposed executive order remain unclear, but leaders and senior party aides confirmed that it was now the most viable solution to breaking the impasse over abortion funding.
The turn in the negotiations came after Pelosi rejected a proposal from Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), the leader of the antiabortion bloc among House Democrats, to change the health measure’s abortion language via a separate vote.
Pelosi told reporters there would be no such separate vote, “not on abortion, not on public option, not on single payer, not on anything.” she said, later adding: “The bill is the bill.”
Stupak’s office said the lawmaker “remains open” to reaching an agreement with Democratic leaders. Key members of the House’s pro-abortion rights coalition also suggested Saturday they were amenable to the possibility of an executive order on abortion. “
So…will they have the votes?
That seems to be the question of the century.
Papa Ray
GL@98: I highly recommend watching Squawk Box on CNBC which airs a profile spoof of Joe Kernen doing his imitation of the Dos Equis “stay thirsty” commercial as the “most interesting man in the world.”
Ahem. Dumb sh^t stepped right into one of Whisker’s traps and has to make amends so those of you with weak stomachs know what to do.
First, the Dos Equis commercial in question is one of my favorites – the voice, the eye twinkle, the sub-text message and hot hot hot messenger. The real deal. True dynamite.
Moving on to Joe Kernen and it gets more complicated (scroll scroll scroll). I’ve been watching Squawk since 2008 for obvious reasons. Kernen is interesting. He has unusual speech rhythms and equally let’s say unpredictable content. When he interviews, he often starts with a word salad that abruptly segues into a sharp and pointed question – like revving up a motorcycle.
Funny, smart, and entertaining, which I expect is at least part of his job description. He also leans decidedly to the right which becomes integral to just about any interview – even long-term bond auctions. Who can politicize that? Kernen can. To the sometimes patient, sometimes exasperated tolerance of his co-hosts (Karl Quintenilla and that Quick person.)
So to wrap up this mea culpa, when I first viewed the Kernen spoof, I would have spilled coffee if I had been awake long enough. But as it was the sudden transition from quarterly performance reports to Kernen doing his Daniel Craig routine was just flat out funny.
There. I hope I fixed that.
TwobyFour — Why would racial divisions backfire? Let me assure you that living in California, ground zero for La Raza, the state has gone from White Majority to White Minority in twenty years. Power rests with La Raza. With the legalization and instant citizenship of millions of Mexican voters, Whites will be the permanent minority and piggy bank for wealth transfer. This is the Democrats aim no less than it is Labor’s in the UK, and the Left in Europe generally (import Muslims to be the new majority, make the White native working/middle class the minority paying for everyone and discriminated against).
Whites cannot organize, because that would be “racist.” The media (playing to women’s views and fears) has called for “the end to Whiteness” (ala Harold Myerson).
As a practical matter, if government runs health care, I will lose being White and Male, and Mexican and Black people will win. Because health care resources will be divided by race. Unless a cultural revolution occurs in this nation whereby Whites are no longer ashamed of being White, and play by the same rules as Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Wright and Barack Obama and Tony Villaraigosa and Linda Sanchez.
I am sure you can find exceptions to rules, but mass behavior by race and sex is very predictable. Give me no information about a man or woman other than they are Black, and I can predict 98% of the time they voted for Obama, given that he received 98% of the Black vote, up from historical Democratic averages of 95%. To a lesser extent, the same holds true for White women. In political preferences. Yao Ming may be an NBA player, but this massive outlier does not describe most Chinese, nor does Verne Troyer describe most American men.
The reality is, there is only so much money government can divvy out. Therefore there MUST BE racial winners and losers, and gender winners and losers secondarily.
Men don’t like the Big Shot unless he produces (wins, patronage, etc.) Women love that, and you see that in say, gender breakdowns on who voted for Mcain/Obama. White men favored McCain, and White women favored Obama. Single women voted 70-29 for Obama. JFK was on the cover of every magazine, and promoted as the American Royal Prince. The way Obama is now, on the cover of everything and worshiped by the media and celebrities. Men don’t like that for obvious reasons. Having sat in board meetings, I can tell you who dominates: guys with results and a plan. Someone who has not met his numbers just dies, no matter how cool he is.
All cultures changing to be equal if Humanity is to survive?
Why? Why should the West adopt Islam and its attitudes, or China’s, or SE Asia’s? Explain that one to me. In fact, we are likely to see with a rendezvous with scarcity (tm Ed Driscoll) a resurgence of nationalism and dislike to intolerance of other cultures, races, religions, and so on. Because the only glue that has been proven is one of nationalism and race. Monoethnic nationalism.
w@110: All cultures changing to be equal if Humanity is to survive?
To construct a more clear formulation of my original statement, my intended meaning was that the concept of *multicultural tolerance* based on the presumption of equivalence would have to change, particularly as it serves as a policy driver in Washington for issues both foreign and domestic.
The survival comment was directed at the Muslim jihad against the west – a “cultural difference” dedicated to destruction of a defined demographic group – the one that contains me. If I am to survive, the culture of jihad must change.
I assume your point is that h^ll will freeze over first. That might well be. In which case, lock and load. Habu’s point, I believe.
Mark Steyn knows what is about to happen and wants to make sure you do too.
snip…
“Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they’ll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don’t have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you’re entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can’t. There isn’t enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you’d be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.”
Will they re-institute the “poor houses” of old or just depend on your descendants to walk from their cardboard shanties to the soup kitchen’s on their own?
More likely it will be company towns, company houses, company store where you will never ever pay them off.
Just like it used to be, except now the “company” will be the government.
Papa Ray
Another from him:Your ‘downturn,’ their ‘upturn’
Whiskey,
I should be working, but…
Why? Why should the West adopt Islam and its attitudes
What on urdth? I propose no such a thing! I say kill islam.
or China’s, or SE Asia’s? Explain that one to me.
Simple. What I see is the Chinese here adapting the western culture, not the other way around. Your mileage may vary in Californica, though, it is a f****d up state and the identity politics fouled up the cultural environment.
By western culture… I mean classical music, not rap. It is a simplification, but fits the shoe and it’s telling. Most of the Chinese settling here are Christian. Would that be OAPP (Oriental Anglo-Phile Protestants)? Their kids are westernized throughout.
A while ago, the Chinese government funded a study which purpose was to figure out why the western culture was so successful through centuries. The emphasis on was. The conclusion was that the reason was Christianity (Judeo-Christian cultural subtext). The rejection of its own heritage is the reason for its present decline. It is not a coincidence that Chinese government started quietly supporting expansion of protestant churches in China during last decade. While suppressing movements like Falun Gong, which is what they deem a backward trend towards what they see as a dead alley. Yea, may be a bit heavy-handed approach, maybe in time they realize that cross-pollination (taking from other cultures what was considered useful) was a part and parcel of western culture success.
I don’t care if the western cultural heritage is propagated by someone missing an epicanthic fold and enjoying Dim Sum, as long as it is propagated, since a sizable portion of original bearers are apparently into a cultural suicide.
Am I a culturalist? Yewbetcha!
Now, now Josh, just hang on a few more years until Obamacare gets cranked up and you can go to the company doctor and get all of the tranquilizers and antidepressants you want…for free. That is if you just hand over a few extra thousand to them a year.
Don’t think about not paying. The IRS has ordered thousands of new shotguns for their enforcement division and,
More Ammo.
Papa Ray
Latest from left leaning firedoglake.com
Favor-204
Lean Favor-0
Oppose-205
Lean Oppose-10
Hence, 204 Yes votes vs 215 No/Leaning No Votes with 9 Unknown
No story, but it was updated at 3:44 pm ET, 3/20/09
Josh, yea, it is so inane. Perhaps the obamistas think the general populace is that stupid. Or they need to tell themselves a lie they can believe in but genuflexing the concept. I dunno, but yea, it is a pinnacle of liberal cognitively dissonant thought. Err, pattern, there is no thinking involved, actually.
Mr.X
Scratch a Russian, and you get a descendant of Ghenghis Khan.
Golden Horde perhaps. A different ethnic, turkic-ugric. But you scratch deeper enough and you’ll find Vikings.
Speaking of Russians… something is brewing inside Russia, there are anti-Pooty demos all over the place.
I find Whiskey persuasive in his take on women, except that the non-Whiskey women form a pretty big contingent, larger than he seems to think. But in the centers of urban decadence, and in the Halls of Persuasion (media, advertising, journalism, education, etc.) Whiskey Girls and their lap dog men are overwhelming the system. Even in areas such a high-tech companies they have a significant mental footprint.
Anyway, I want to posit a brief proof point to this comment from Whiskey:
BUT … and there is always a but. Even the biggest of Big Men cannot threaten fundamentals for women. Their support is discontinuous. Greatest fears, particularly breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and so on don’t respond to Big Man posturing. White women’s support for Obama will continue. Right until it craters.
Agreed, that once their safety is threatened, tastes will change. This reminds me of immediate post-9/11 New York, when a straping fireman or cop became the female fashion accessory. It didn’t last, and they quickly reverted to being figures of contempt in wimmin’s eyes, perhaps good for a tumble but not worthy of their worship — my god, they probably even vote Republican, the worst of all sins. But when butts were on the line and more attacks seemed inevitable, every SWPL woman in New York wanted one on her hip.
If you want an interesting insight into the SWPL woman, go to the dating website Fastcupid, and look up some New York women. Read their profiles. It is amazing how often they will specifically state that they won’t date Republicans, Bush voters, or similarly worded comments. Politics absolutely informs their romantic choices.
2×4/117
Golden Horde perhaps. A different ethnic, turkic-ugric. But you scratch deeper enough and you’ll find Vikings.
Yes you will. My ancestors founded the trading cities of Kiev and Moscow, and the beautiful blonde women of Russia are legendary.
Walt Erickson
# 118 twobyfour
Interesting. I had been paying attention to domestic matters. Apparently 70 were arrested for chanting, “Freedom”. That is a different turn from the economic protests before. I assume that Vladimir Vladimirovich will not let mere bourgeois sentimentality stay his hand when he decides to deal with this. I further expect Buraq Hussein to be taking copious notes.
#119 peterike
It is amazing how often they will specifically state that they won’t date Republicans, Bush voters, or similarly worded comments. Politics absolutely informs their romantic choices.
Not surprising, and I definitely could see how either of their “deal breakers” would not want to date them either.
Now,I have been happily married for just shy of 29 years, so I have not been paying any real attention to “the Great Chase” except as a distant observer of what my kids are doing [and gratefully so; it looks downright scary out there]. But may I theorize that throughout our society we have become so polarized with drasticly different and conflicting Weltanschaungen to the point that we are in fact two different peoples who no longer think the same way?
Attraction is as much or more in the mind as in the gonads, at least if you are more than a few years past puberty. I have seen numerous “stars” who were admittedly not very hard on the eyes at all. Then they opened their mouths and spouted some bit of non compos mentis [in the strict legal sense]Leftist Dreck that was not based in either logic or reality, and they became actively repulsive to me. I assume if some Leftist woman could [and we are in the realm of hypotheticals verging on fantasy here] overlook my age, gray hairs, and expanding waistline; once they found out that I had been a Peace Officer, I actually had some knowledge of history, a great love of the Constitution, and that I did not actively hate Jews or Christians even though I am neither … would run from me gagging and retching all the way and calling on Mother Gaia to preserve her from the horrible “Conservative”.
Events of the last few decades indicate that we are not really one nation anymore, but rather two hostile nations occupying a single land. When looking for a mate, most people, consciously or otherwise, seek someone with a degree of commonality in cultural and societal reference points. For many of the occupants of this land, as far as the “other” is concerned, there is no congruence.
And it will be thus until one or the other side triumphs over the other.
Subotai Bahadur
I heard something interesting today, that if all this health care crapola passes and is signed into law immediately, then in six months policies will have to allow in preexisting conditions. Six months, that is just before the election! Everyone’s rates will go up 30% or more (or alternately, new policies will go up about 200%, or NO NEW POLICIES WILL BE OFFERED).
Can you hear the screaming?
Can you envision the immediate repeal?
And just before the election?
I’m sure that even the Dems must see this, and be shaking in their birkenstocks. Except for Pelosi who is all botoxed up, Cthulu only knows what keeps her animated. Maybe it’s all for the best, bring it on.
That, or they will delay the signing until the new rates are post-November, but even the announcement of the new rates will come sooner, so … I cannot see this thing passing, but if it does, we are in for some interesting times.
…. or else, just before the election, in reaction to no new private policies being available, Congress will rush to offer a “public option”, doubling down on the idiocy? Naw. Pass the bottle, please.
“It is amazing how often they will specifically state that they won’t date Republicans, Bush voters, or similarly worded comments.”
I know these women, amazing how they don’t to seem to ever been shown a good time.
Don’t waste your time, boys, they aren’t any fun, don’t like to have fun, are “competing” in a game with no rules/winmners, would never go to the shooting range, four wheeling, Saturday night cruisin’, steakhouse with you, instead want to go to some f-cked up movie nobody ever saw, and when you do bed them down, it’s a waste of time.
Appropos of the mingled cultures and DNA theme, some years ago I “discovered” my affinity for all things Celtic. Thistle & Shamrock broadcasts featuring the lilt of hostess Fiona Ritchie and many hundreds of musicians from such diverse centers of Celtic culture as Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Nova Scotia, Vancouver, and Chicago… pierced the soul of this fiddling fool.
Many lively “chewns” have I learned from studying those broadcasts, as well as recordings of Silly Wizard, Dougie Maclean, Johnnie and Phil Cunningham, Kevin Burke, Christiane LeMaitre, and Martin Hayes.
Sometimes, just hearing the skirl of the bagpipes in the distance was enough to catch the breath and make the heart race.
I’d a friend who’d recently visited Scotland, and claimed to have seen landscapes where she KNEW what scene of croft and kine would greet her as she trundled over each new rise… Well, she was also one of those who claimed to have had her nether regions probed by aliens…
So, being in a fey mood, and wondering if in some earlier incarnation I’d wielded a claymore in raids against the Sassenach, or maybe just munched haggis and sipped whiskey from a stone bowl, I went to the county library and looked up a bunch of picture books about Scotland.
Not a single scene was familiar. Didn’t recognize a damn thing.
But I do get excited at the aroma of lanolin.
So I figured I must have been a blind shepherd.
(tee hee.)
Will Durant, “When liberty is license, dictatorship is near.”
Josh,
I should have taken the time to get my quote right and source it.
From Yes Minister:
Sir Humphrey: May I say just one more thing?
Jim: Only if it’s in plain English.
Sir Humphrey: Very well Minister. If you are going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it in this damn silly way.
- The Writing on the Wall
English when used correctly can be a weapon of devastating precision and Germanic vigor.
Mad Fiddler
Alan Stivell(French origin) is quite a star in celtish world (Britttany, Wales, Ireland), I used to listen to these titles when sailing from La Rochelle to Tenerife with a catamaran,(especialy from Madere to Tenerife) surfing at 14 to 15 knots on waves, this was quite a lively accompaniment with the speed when we had to past our hours of guarding at night.
the first title is more some kind of seemen melody
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z593IhlhR4s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2lpaG4bMtk
If the United States is going to socially engineer the medical profession, why even pay lip service to meritocracy? If medical schools are going to use racial quotas, why bother using grades or standardized tests to pick medical students at all? Why not just pick students by lottery and make it completely random? Why not pick student names out of a hat? Or out of a set of labeled hats?
Affirmative action was created as a patch on meritocracy to combat perceptions that the measurement of merit was racially biased. Instead, affirmative action has reinforced a nasty racial expectations game used to make so-called “underrepresented minorities” feel they cannot accomplish great things. Affirmative action is psychological warfare designed to make so-called “underrepresented minorities” feel inferior.
Again, if the government really wants racial quotas, then perhaps we should rip off the mask of meritocracy worn by elitist colleges and universities and call them what they really are – overpriced dating services for the ruling class. If the content of one’s character means nothing to those in power, why bother with the charade of merit?
Why can’t we organize as Americans? Why can’t we organize against traitors in our midst who would balkanize our nation and turn it into racial satrapies?
We need not turn America into a reflection of the California prison system. We need not turn America into a reflection of the Texas prison system. We can say NO to the politics of the prison gang and manifest our loyalty to the Constitution.
We can say NO to racists of all stripes. We can do it on April 1 and turn La Raza, David Duke, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright into April fools. We can write in “American” on our Census forms. In protesting those in our present government who would turn Americans against one another, we strike a blow for liberty.
Ah, Mad Fiddler, I love to listen to the Thistle and Shamrock, too! I have a hard time finding it on the radio, so I go to their website where you can always stream the last 3 broadcasts.
I don’t know if I would recognize any landscape or not, but if I did I wonder if it would be in the border regions, around the ruins of the Hermitage Castle which an ancestor is supposed to have held several hundred years ago. Tough neighborhood – this is the borderlands, where the reivers held sway for 300 years.
The castle itself has as long and bloody a history as any:
http://www.phouka.com/travel/castles/hermitage/hermitage.html
a present day shot:
http://www.leighbale.com/europe/bigs/hermtge.jpg
A@128: Affirmative action was created as a patch on meritocracy to combat perceptions that the measurement of merit was racially biased.
It was more than that. Equality of opportunity was compromised by racially defined constraints on competition for merit-based objectives, which was true for the post Civil War generations as well as the post MLK Jr generations. AA had a place and a time, both of which have expired. AA needs to be retired, but not condemned.
Subotai,
Moonbatus Liberalis mating habits aside, one thing is clear–they don’t reproduce, much. So simply based on demographics, they may be found at the turn of the century only in zoos.
But, there’s another thing… my crystal ball sez that there will be a civil war (separation would be nice, but you know lefties, they simply hafta meddle and that is their purpose of life. So, they can’t let go. They also need their sustenance (sucking everyone dry), so that is another … [can't use "reason" in good conscience]
There would be some shifts before war globally (shitty economics tend to do that) and the non-moonbat areas will gain some unexpected allies. The moonbat areas will take an umbrage and will try to punish the non-moonbat allies. The allies won’t take it kindly and introduce some large scale glass making techniques into moonbat held areas.
Implausible? A lot of things can happen in 4 years. So, after all said and done, there may not be enough for a zoo.
Geeze Louise,
AA needs to be retired, but not condemned
Affirmative Action was always a fraud because it was based on the assumption that discrimination against a particular minority (Blacks) was manifested by a qualified member of that group being unable to obtain entrance into an elite educational institution or find suitable employment. Two generations earlier discrimination against Jews and Blacks had those effects but when AA policies were developed in the 1970s that was not true for Jews, although it has since become more likely to impact them, and was of little impact on Blacks. In fact qualified Blacks are in a Sellers Market where they get to choose among competing institutions to the disadvantage of other groups.
The real impact of discrimination on the Black community was that to few members of the group were qualified to compete for entry into elite institutions and the job market those institutions serve as gate keepers for. The main reasons for that are the poor and discriminatory public educational system that Blacks were and still are subjected to coupled with the debilitating effects of the Welfare State. These are not examples of traditional racism but rather the result of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The new discrimination is a liberal disease but like the old reactionary discrimination it is chiefly the result of policies advocated for by the Democratic Party.
Affirmative Action has served to cover up the incompetence of the public urban education system and the effects of the breakdown of the family. It has done this by ensuring that unqualified applicants will find places created for them in second or third tier schools and that jobs will be provided in expanding government programs and corporate divisions that do not contribute to the bottom line, except in the negative sense of avoiding government intrusion for violating EEO policy.
The jobs provided in the public schools and expanded post secondary system, which had been threatened by declining enrollments once the Baby Boom bulge passed, helped build support for the project among the White Middle Class, even as the standards in those institutions declined.
To be blogged under the title “On Affirmative Action.”
Brace Yourself For Health Care Passing.
don’t get too down or upset about this. it will probably pass by hook or crook. i’m trying to stay upbeat myself and not let this get to me.
we are here for the long haul, we are the american people, we are strong, we will deal with these problems.
we’ve had bad presidents and bad things to deal with in the past.
we’re not gonna let them win, ultimately.
they are a band of criminal gangsters and truth is on our side.
the blissninnies and their idiotic plans always fail. we can rest assured in that truth!
there is no way that this bill or plan can ever work and even if it passes it is doomed to fail. but the failure of it is a good thing. while its unfortunate to see this happen its not irreversible. nothing is. at a certain point the obvious failure of these tyrannical and bliss ninny programs becomes too much to ignore and endure. that’s when real hope and change happens. the leftist tyrants are going to act as leftist tyrants do. think of it this way, it took this empty racist leftist muslim bliss ninny illegal alien tyrant to become president to show how insane the left is in this country. this is their hero on display. this is the best they’ve got to offer. laughing out loud.
# 132 twobyfour
I grant that the species Chiroptera Lunaris Metrosexus does not breed true. Or for that matter it does not do anything true. Not can I dispute your fortune-telling. One way or another, perhaps the last specimen will be mounted next to a Ectopistes migratorius named Martha.
Deo volente
Subotai Bahadur
President Obama’s Nowruz Message
In this video, President Obama sends an important message to those celebrating the Persian holiday of Nowruz, and in particular to the people and government of Iran.
The GOVERNMENT OF IRAN!
whitehouse.gov
L@133: Affirmative Action has served to cover up the incompetence of the public urban education system and the effects of the breakdown of the family.
AA served as a bridge to short circuit the generational disadvantages hard wired into the institutional systems that line the boardwalk of professional advancement.
I appreciate the rebuttal argument, but I consider it theoretical nit-picking. Wrongs are committed. And mitigated by government decree. Such was AA. That is our government, love it or leave it. That’s how we do things.
AA may have been a “patch” but it sent a message. One that was received and processed. End transmission.
Ain’t democracy grand???
[I know Habu, "constitutional republic".]
Marie, I just love the way you mangle our language!
Subotai & twobyfour
Moonbats don’t need to sexually reproduce since they are made by our education and cultural institutions. Leftist control of these institutions has been a constant thorn in the side of our nation for at least a century and such control has been extremely blatant in the last few decades. I can recall thinking as a small boy in the sixties what a shame it was that nice man Adlai Stevenson didn’t become president.
Needless to say, I think differently now.
the first title is more some kind of seemen melody And I like song.
Geeze Louise,
AA served as a bridge to short circuit the generational disadvantages
But it didn’t, that is my point. By allowing the competition for qualified candidates among elites to be labeled as AA, which it is not, and by taking the pressure off of the causes of the disadvantage among the average member of the minority community, the majority of the minority so to speak, AA enabled the continuation of discrimination without serving as a real remedy to a real problem.
The real solution to the problems besetting the Black community would include many things but Vouchers would be at the head of the list. Any government policy that worked to weaken the nuclear family would be changed if the best interests of the minorities was most important. As whiskey could explain at length that would threaten policies, such as abortion, that are dear to the hearts of wealthy White women. An expanded military that offers training and opportunity based solely on merit would also be part of a program to really improve the lot of minorities.
I know Habu, “constitutional republic”.
Habu and I have agreed I believe to disagree about this point of solipsism. I call the system a Democratic, as opposed to Oligarchic, Republic.
Live updates from Capitol Hill in the race to reform
By Jon Ward – The Daily Caller 03/20/10
UPDATE 10:40 P.M. – So here’s where we stand on the votes, from my best attempt at a count. There are 16 undecided votes still out there, all of them Democrats. I’ve listed them below.
It looks like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is at 210 and needs six out of 16 votes to get to 216.
Here are her targets. The dozen previous yes votes are all pro-lifers.
PREVIOUS NO VOTES
BRIAN BAIRD (WA), RICK BOUCHER (VA), LINCOLN DAVIS (TENN), JOHN TANNER (TENN)
PREVIOUS YES VOTES
JERRY COSTELLO (IL), KATHLEEN DAHLKEMPER (PA), JOE DONNELLY (IND), STEVE DRIEHAUS (OHIO), PAUL KANJORSKI (PA), MARCY KAPTUR (OHIO), DANIEL LIPINSKI (IL), ALLAN MOLLOHAN (WV), EARL POMEROY (ND), NICK RAHALL (WV), BART STUPAK (MI)
LOTM:
I think affirmative action has not only served to keep eyes away from the abominable school systems that poor people throughout America must endure, not to mention racial expectations games enforced by racist school teachers, but also to solidify the distinctions that old-fashioned segregationists want kept.
Affirmative action creates an illusion of integration when little if any integration actually occurs. It isn’t integration when you have a high school with one long table for black people and another long table for white people. And there’s no nice way to say this, but black racists are no less interested than white racists in enforcing the color bar.
In Germany, school classrooms are segregated by religion. Protestants go to one classroom and Catholics go to another classroom within the same school, principally because they take separate state-sponsored religion classes. (Unlike American high schools where the students move from class to class while the teachers stay in the same place, German high schools have teachers move from class to class and the students stay in the same place.) This form of segregation would not be tolerated in American public schools.
In contrast to Germany’s historic focus upon religion, the American government is focused upon race. I dare say the federal government is fixated upon race. I remember hearing from a refugee from Yugoslavia that the government fixation upon racial identity in the United States is much stronger than happened with ethnic categories in Communist Yugoslavia. Think about it. If the United States is not careful, we could follow the lead of Yugoslavia. Far from undermining racial identity, affirmative action reinforces the very racial identities that old-fashioned segregationists want reinforced.
Multiculturalism is anything but cosmopolitan. Instead, it is a coalition of fascist organizations within a multifascist coalition. Multifascism’s most obvious example was the SDS-SDA-HDZ alliance of Serb nationalists, Croat nationalists, and Islamists in late antebellum Bosnia-Herzegovina. Chicago is another. Just like old-fashioned segregation, affirmative action under the banner of “multiculturalism” significantly raises the cost of interracial dating by giving state sanction to racial difference.
State sanctioned differences are a means for older generations to enforce their ideals of identity upon younger generations that might have other ideas on who they want to be. It hardly matters what the state-sanctioned difference is. It could be nose size, earlobe length, hair color, eye color, religion, skin color, race, ethnicity, penis size, foot size, height (as in Hutu vs. Tutsi), weight, breast size, city of origin, home state, et cetera. The point is that when elders want to enforce an identity, they find ways to do it.
Think about it. Imagine if every adult man were required to have his penis size measured, were segregated on that basis, and then a “penis size” spoils system would be set up so that men with small penis size would have a proportionate number of school slots available in comparison to men with medium penis size or men with large penis size. For that matter, there may be an “Animal House” style affirmative action “set aside” for any man with a spotted dong.
Sound ridiculous or even crude? Of course, but my point is made. The whole notion that Americans should be asked to identify themselves by skin color is no less ridiculous than insisting upon classifying men by penis size or women by breast size. Affirmative action reinforces the very identities that old-fashioned segregationists want kept.
In the old Yugoslavia, a minority of people put down Yugoslavian in their census. Their call for keeping Yugoslavia together was drowned out by first a multifascist coalition and then by each monolithic fascism once the daggers were drawn among them. It is my hope that significantly more people in the United States will not only see ourselves as American but also tell people in the halls of power that we are one nation.
Marie Claude,
Alan Stivell is definitely another musician who can arouse a crowd and recall the power of ancient days. The second of the two videos you link reminds me of “La Corneuse” a tune from the self-titled premiere album by the band Patrick Street and the tunes played by Christiane LeMaitre in his performances with the Celtic Fiddle Festival in the early 1990′s.
The lyrics of Mr. Stivell are utterly opaque to me, and don’t seem at all standard French –
Here are some lines from Tri Martolod:
“…
E-kichen maen ar veilh (tra la la, la di ga dra)
E-kichen maen ar veilh o deus mouilhet o eorioù
O deus mouilhet o eorioù ge, o deus mouilhet o eorioù
Hag e-barzh ar veilh-se (tra la la, la di ga dra)
Hag e-barzh ar veilh-se e oa ur servijourez
E oa ur servijourez ge, e oa ur servijourez
Hag e c’houlenn ganin (tra la la, la di ga dra)
Hag e c’houlenn ganin pelec’h ‘n eus graet konesañs
Pelec’h ‘n eus graet konesañs ge, pelec’h ‘n eus graet konesañs…”
Would this be a Celtic dialect from Bretagne?
You mention sailing a catamaran from La Rochelle to Tenerife.
Is that starting from near the Quai Georges Semenon?
Good Grief! That’s over 1500 miles of open ocean!
The word that comes leaping to mind for such feats – “formidable!”
C’est presque au delà de la croyance!
And a whole lot of time to consider the talents of m’sieur Stivell.
== == == == == == == == ==
Subotai,
Deo Volente, Dies Irae
Here’s the text of the Nowruz greeting to the Iranian Government and People by our giant-brained, super-diplomatic, corrector-of-all-errors pResident:
(in the public domain, posted at whitehouse.gov)
“THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_________________________________________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 20, 2009
VIDEOTAPED REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT IN CELEBRATION OF NOWRUZ
THE PRESIDENT: Today I want to extend my very best wishes to all who are celebrating Nowruz around the world.
This holiday is both an ancient ritual and a moment of renewal, and I hope that you enjoy this special time of year with friends and family.
In particular, I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nowruz is just one part of your great and celebrated culture. Over many centuries your art, your music, literature and innovation have made the world a better and more beautiful place.
Here in the United States our own communities have been enhanced by the contributions of Iranian Americans. We know that you are a great civilization, and your accomplishments have earned the respect of the United States and the world.
For nearly three decades relations between our nations have been strained. But at this holiday we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together. Indeed, you will be celebrating your New Year in much the same way that we Americans mark our holidays — by gathering with friends and family, exchanging gifts and stories, and looking to the future with a renewed sense of hope.
Within these celebrations lies the promise of a new day, the promise of opportunity for our children, security for our families, progress for our communities, and peace between nations. Those are shared hopes, those are common dreams.
So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran’s leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.
You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.
So on the occasion of your New Year, I want you, the people and leaders of Iran, to understand the future that we seek. It’s a future with renewed exchanges among our people, and greater opportunities for partnership and commerce. It’s a future where the old divisions are overcome, where you and all of your neighbors and the wider world can live in greater security and greater peace.
I know that this won’t be reached easily. There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago: “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.”
With the coming of a new season, we’re reminded of this precious humanity that we all share. And we can once again call upon this spirit as we seek the promise of a new beginning.
Thank you, and Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak.*
END”
– — – — – — – — – — – –
* The genius is again demonstrated by his massive multilinguality. But you too can be multi-lingual and multicultural. Just visit this site that carries hundreds of electronic greeting cards.
Sure hope the pRez is not using AA criteria in selecting his translating staff. Remember 1977 when mr. james earl carter he visited the un-free bits of the eastern bloc and through his free-lance interpreter told Poland he wanted to have the sex with it.
President Obama’s Nowruz Message
Nowruz Transcript
Thank you, and Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak.
The End
Alexis,
Think about it. Imagine if every adult man were required to have his penis size measured, were segregated on that basis, and then a “penis size” spoils system would be set up so that men with small penis size would have a proportionate number of school slots available
You did not mean “school sluts” perchance? That would make a better sense.
Anyhoo… The leftie concept of AA and multicult is rather simple. Divide and conquer. Same ol’, same ol’.
Of course, once the conquer part is accomplished, then “There can be only one!” (and heads will roll if not!)
He’s a real Nowruz man,
Sitting in his Nowruz Land,
Making all his Nowruz plans
for nobody.
Doesn’t have a point of view,
Knows not where he’s going to,
Isn’t he a bit over his head.
Nowruz Man please listen,
You don’t know what you’re missing,
Nowruz Man, the world says ‘Talk to the Hand’!
(lead guitar)
He’s as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowruz Man can you see the USA at all?
Nowruz Man, don’t worry,
Take your time, don’t hurry,
Leave it all till somebody else
lends you a clue!
Doesn’t have a point of view,
Knows not where he’s going to,
Isn’t he big selling out the Jews.
Nowruz Man please listen,
you don’t know what you’re missing
Nowruz Man, the world says ‘Talk to the Hand’!
He’s a real Nowruz Man,
Sitting in his Nowruz Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody!
… good nite, ladies and germs.
71. twobyfour:
“Oh! Marry me!”
23 years of marriage and I’m still gettin’ proposals? You frontin’, homes? Maybe I outta rethink these last 23 years of lonliness in marital stagnation whilst my Gluteus maximus is still fairly minimus.
[I keed, I keed]!
91. JFSanders031,
I din’t sez nuffin’ that weren’t da troof!
Mad Fiddler
yes, this is a dialect from Brittany, as you know, there were as many dialects as there were villages/cities with churches, though the common factor of these dialects were mainly articulated around the Leon region, and the Quimper region. Almost all forgotten, or transcripted into a university soup one.
Here you have a typical singer of Brittany melancoly melodies, Denez Prigent, but not in that piece, where he sings for a movie sound track:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJ0McwKCwQ
my trip started from La Rochelle new port of the Minimes until Santa Cruz of Tenerife, with stops in Portugal, Peniche, and in Madere
and this open ocean was dangerous at night, cuz it’s kind of motorway for all sorts of big ships and tankers, this is why we had to guard and survey the radar
wrong link, here is the right one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XrW2t02GYE
Delia/149
Did’ya? Did’ya!?
Well, I am prolly not qualified to offer an advice. My two marriages (12 years each) would not qualify as a pinnacle of success. Though, I am on good terms with both X’s, so in that regard I feel lucky, most marriages end in a Local Thermonuclear War these days. A hint, I am purdy sure he feels very secure about you. Maybe applying a pinch of Heisenberg* spice won’t hurt.
[*Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle]
2×4:
In some places, the school is the slut. You know, the kind of place where administrators care only about its own egos, faculty are bad tempered ideologues, honors students are rich cheaters, student politics is run by coalitions of fascists, escort services use the student newspaper to recruit their staff, rich alumni care only about their pet gladiators, the food service makes people sick, the campus is less safe than some active war zones, and the only people worth talking to are the janitors. The powers that be want a prestige factory, the welfare of the students be damned. The campus brochures refer to students as investments, not people. It’s a special piece of Hell designed to break one’s spirit, sell one’s soul to the highest bidder, and make Faust look like a saint.
Alexis,
I framed a photocopy of my last paycheck from the University. Now I’ll print your slightly extreme characterization and get a larger frame so it can be displayed with the check. Thanks for a fine summary of why I’m no longer professing.
I knew I had to get out when the VP for Academic Affairs called a faculty convocation to explain to us that we should not expect students to be interested in what we were teaching because they had too many other, entirely social and economic, interests to attend to, and that we, the faculty, should accede to that reality by watering down our presentations. That was in an institution routinely referred to as “a great university” by its ego-maniacal administrators.
Actually the janitors weren’t worth talking to. During the early days, they did however treat the faculty to a Mardi Gras gumbo, but that was a payoff for them not being expected to do any cleaning.
My wife didn’t feel so disappointed about the ethics of our common employer because she was in a Department (Computer Science) that held students to an extremely high standard such that they could actually get good jobs after graduation. The last bastion of integrity has to be what is depended upon to actually function.
In Germany, school classrooms are segregated by religion.
I don’t agree with that.
Catholics go to the catholic instructor and protestants go to the protestant instructor. Students do change rooms for certain electives, e.g.gym as an obvious example.
In smaller systems there may not even be enough students to split the track into different classes. My son is currently in such a school.
Religion is a double period one day a week for him.
When I was in high school in the US I had the same thing.
Well pass or not, the Obamacare bill is just one battle. The left will keep on attacking the US and setting the country up for disasters on all fronts.
They believe their own crap and have no idea how close to violence the things are getting. It is not hunting season and gun sales have increased if anything.
Get ready for a long fight.
http://thirdwavedave.blogspot.com/2010/03/stockdale-paradox-approach-to-survival.html
“I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
”
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
***********
“Understand this as well: We will not be winning back America in November 2010; deal with it!
Taking back America will be a long process, and it won’t be pretty, either. November’s election is a good start, a beginning point. But we won’t win that election unless we’re engaged this second, this minute, this hour, this day.
Deal with it! “
L@141: AA enabled the continuation of discrimination without serving as a real remedy to a real problem.
First part true. Second part only partially.
The real solution to the problems besetting the Black community would include…
You’ve been truly polite in tolerating my defense of AA and I appreciate that. It is not so much AA that I am defending as it is the intractability of certain problems that beset the human condition. “Better” solutions are almost never implemented. After 2008 I lost faith in the concept. The Revelations of misconduct and nonconduct (I think that’s a word) changed my thinking forever. And I got tired of the sound of my voice spitting and sputtering in disbelief. Yes things can and will get better (I think?) but not tomorrow or even next year. And yes programs such as AA did perpetuate the divisions they were designed to eliminate. But some blacks got out. That is all good. The unwinding of the program will require some payback, but so what? Sometimes the theoretical argument is the back story. Until we can collectively implement those “better” ways we are stuck with the not so good ways unless we choose the null set and do nothing.
So yes our common ground is that I agree it needs to go away. But I don’t lose my hair over the fact of it.
#123 AWM
You do not take into account one of the core beliefs of the left, which is that people whose politics are left of center have more sex and better sex, and are inherently better at sex, than people whose politics are center/right.
Untrue, of course, but it is deeply imbedded in their precious narrative.
Alexis/154
Almost sounds like you describe some place real where all the listed is included. I object your use of “slut” in the context, sluts are far more honorable than the presented laundry list.
Re increasing the number of doctors who have a noticeable aboriginal African heritage:
A woman with such heritage who is a good friend of my family will not use any physician of her own background. She says that they are unlikely to be as competent as Caucasian doctors. Perhaps the Democrats will have more trouble from the public with this AA mandate than they expect. Everyone wants a competent physician, even Dr. Dre.
I agree with her on likelihood, but I feel that caution rather than her boycott is the way to choose a doctor. I go to one African-American physician and he is apparently worthy of my trust.
“You do not take into account one of the core beliefs of the left, which is that people whose politics are left of center have more sex and better sex, and are inherently better at sex, than people whose politics are center/right”
Obviously untrue, as with that group it’s “all about me, all about me, all about me, all about me, all about me, all about me!”
They have limited ability to “share” pleasure and it’s rewards, and practice “self deception” (the better sex proves the point) at levels I can’t comprehend.
Not to mention the homosexual component.
Truly disgusting, nature certainly thinks so.
And the minority docs, well they will just be prescribing Ritalin/Adderal/Metadate to some crackwhore’s kids, so they (the doc, mom, and school) can get a bigger/another check. No medical training required here! Disability papers already filed, at age 4!
Bill Bennett’s AM show was good the other morning, talked about how teachers are seeing 1st graders with the “victim” mentality already firmly entrenched.
Those poor kids, they will never see a dime, the system will never last that long (thank god!).
Of course they wouldn’t see a dime anyway as young adults, except for what their “family” gives them, since they are so “disabled” their mother has to handle their finances (read cash their check). No woder we see these crimes of teenagers against their mothers, “she wouldn’t give me another twenty for a rock”.
154:
Lest I serve as a bad example, it should be “their own egos”, not “its own egos”.
Marie Claude,
Thank you for the link to the music. I’m glad there was no seemen on stage, though. I was wondering about the “fleur de lis” and stripes on the flag people were waving? Is that the flag of Brittany?
On closer inspection the symbol on the flag looks more like a bell or the silhouette of a dancing peasant maiden.
Ah, Black Hawk Down is the movie.
So I’m back from yesterday’s DC Tea Party protest at the Capitol. My souvenir is a slight sunburn on my right arm. (Why the right arm? I guess it was because it was the flag-holding arm?)
It was a big crowd, guesstimates somewhere between 30,000-40,000, assembled on the West Lawn and vicinity. There were speakers, including Congressmen Mike Pence, Steve King, Tom Price (I think), and Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, and “Tito the Builder” from last year’s Tea Party protests. Tito is a good, dynamic speaker, BTW. The speakers portion of the program went from noon till about 1:30/2:00, then everyone split up & headed for the offices of individual Congress members in the House.
I went around shooting video & talking to a bunch of people.
Late in the afternoon, around 3:30/4:00PM, I was at the back of a crowd outside the Rayburn Building who were alternating chants (“Kill the Bill,” “Just Say No,” “We Are the People,” “Can You Hear Us Now?”), when a couple of people started running through the crowd yelling, “Obama’s in the Capitol meeting with Representatives!”
At which point the funniest (to me, anyway) episode of the day occurred, completely spontaneously. The whole crowd, in successive waves, turned & dashed back across the street towards the Capitol lawn. “Obama’s in the Capitol! Get himmmmmm!” people shouted … LAUGHING as they said it, running full tilt with their signs, flags, backpacks, cameras, baby strollers & dogs on leashes.
“I just broke the law a little bit,” said this one older guy, a bit sheepishly, realizing he’d just run across Independence Avenue without obeying the Capitol police who were a little further up the street trying to coordinate traffic & protestors.
Whereupon the crowd reassembled at the base of the Capitol steps & resumed chanting, bell-ringing & bullhorning. Then when word came by that House members were meeting in offices/rooms on the South end of the building, we walked around to that end of the building, reassembled again & took up the chants yet again. I heard some new ones at this location: A sing-song “Nanceeeeee!” … “In November, we’ll remember!” … “Vote them out!” … the Nah Nah Hey Hey Goodbye song … and “Hey hey, ho ho, Obamacare has got to go!”
The late-afternoon crowd was rowdy as hell, impertinent, and utterly indefatigable.
What struck me was when several members of Congress came out on the balcony of the south side of the building to look at the goings on. There they were, way up there in the palace, and here we were, way down on the lawn.
I turned to another protestor and said, “What’s wrong with this picture? The employers are standing down here on the lawn in our jeans & shorts & tee shirts, shouting up at the employees in their thousand-dollar suits on the balcony, and the employees are doing their damndest to ignore the employers.”
The sheer upside-downness of it all, the complete inversion of the citizen-government relationship, was outrageous and sickening, in the midst of all the fun rowdiness of the occasion. How can anyone honestly say that THIS was the system the Founders wanted us to have??
At least a couple times yesterday afternoon, I found myself looking around at those die-hard rowdy Americans and thinking, “God bless these people.”
One young guy and his wife were toting signs yesterday that read, in big block letters, “Keep pushing us — watch what happens.”
Obama & Co. are determined to keep pushing … of that I have no doubt.
hdgreene,
yes it’s the Brittany flag, some explanations here :
http://www.crwflags.com/FOTW/FLAGS/fr-bz.html
We have a such a sticker on our car, useful when we have to cross the Basque country, (or Corsica), Basques don’t like the spanish, but they also don’t like us, so you’d better not leave your car alone when you have to stop there for lunch, cuz when you come back to your car, tires are cut ! With the Brittany flag, they don’t mind, it’s another country that wants its independance back (well, not anymore, modern life made it)
bogie wheel My personal thanks and admiration for your attendance at the rally and for your excellent commentary on it here.
I understand your dismay and sadness as I have it myself and have witnessed it in my friends.
Along with a building anger.
Thank You.
Papa Ray
P.S. I wish you would post your comment in the current thread as it will be missed here.
Some damage, like you get from cigarette smoking, is only seen over the long haul. With many people who smoke still surprised when they’re first diagnosed with lung cancer.
In a sense, politics is like cigarette smoking. In the short hall the politicians do just what they want. And, they consider constituents, as a class, nincompoops.
But there are no erasers. With this health care bill both passing, and wending … since a portion needs to go back to the senate … It’s anyone’s guess if it’s resolved. Or if it leads to demands for a Constitutional Amendment.
To say nothing of the indstry that blossoms, ahead. With all sorts of books getting to opinionate.
What it won’t opininate away, however, are the results of repeatedly “smoking.” Or repeatedly feeling you can massage your message so that when you’re losing and bluffing, the other side just stops playing.
Stupak has caved, what a surprise, so it looks Obamacare is a done deal. Stupak caved by agreeing to a (promised) executive order that changes the law, too, and for those of you who may not be familiar with American laws let me tell you that’s just a sham. Executive orders are issued by the President to his agencies regarding how things are conducted; they are not law; they do not change law; they are trumped by the law; law is made in the Congress, that’s the legislative body. Presidents may revoke executive orders at any time without warning, and they can be challenged in court where they will be shot down if they are seen to be in contradiction with actual law. So, Stupak’s signed off for a promise he must know will not be kept. Even if it’s kept — it won’t be kept.
Obamacare seeks to change the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways. Health care entitlements strengthen the political hands of statists, and are difficult to undo. Opposition to statists is pulverized, too, over time. When it becomes the modus operandi of a society to look for big government solutions such as this to every social ill then the argument tends to devolve to adebates about implementations and reforms. Correspondingly, in this framework the only “reforms” that tend to emerge are ones that give increasing control to the government. It’s a one-way street, described brilliantly by Hayek in his book, The Road To Serfdom.
They’ve enacted this albatross around the neck of the American people at the worst possible time. We are awash in a sea of red ink at every level, local, state and federal, as our economy continues to list. What’s really strange, too, is that they have really botched the introduction of this bill. The monstrosity calls for higher taxes and some regulatory adjustments in the medical industry immediately. These taxes and the cost of this regulation are not insignificant. In fact, according the Congressional Budget Office this bill represents the largest single tax increase in American history. Meanwhile, benefits are not scheduled to be paid out for four more years. (What is happening with the money during this interval? Be cynical and guess, you’ll be right).
All this is going to be instantly unpopular. Only a fool would raise taxes during a serious recession, right? Isn’t that what they taught you about Hoover? Well, look at them go …
This is looking real grim. It’s grim for America’s economic health short term, her fiscal health long term, and for her political health long term. That’s a lot of ill-health for a health care bill, an irony.
But, there it is.
30.WWS said:”It’s always those who think they’ve finally got it made who have got the furthest to fall – and who do fall.”
Wow! That’s the most perceptive statement I’ve read in a long time. A lot of people are in for a very big surprise, actually, a lot of surprises, that will just keep on coming. I cannot even begin to imagine where all this will lead, when people in this country get hit hard by reality.