by Smitty

The Instapundit in USAToday:

There are two possible ways to address this problem. One is to elect people that everyone trusts. The problem with that is that there aren’t any politicians that everyone trusts — and, alas, if there were, the odds are good that such trust would turn out to be misplaced.
The other option is to place less power within the political sphere. The less power the government has, the less incentive for corruption, and the less that can go wrong when the government misbehaves. The problem with this approach is that the political class likes a powerful government — it’s one of the reasons that the Washington, DC, area, where much of the political class lives, is beginning to resemble the Capital City in The Hunger Games, prospering while the rest of the country suffers.

Maybe it’s a variation on the second option, but I predict that the 22^nd Amendment is expanded upon to cover Congress, and perhaps even the SCOTUS, in the next couple of decades. As Director Blue pointed out a couple of years ago, incumbency has bred a Ruling Class, and substantially corrupted the Founder’s idea of self-rule. This is disastrous on at least two fronts:

1. There is no way, given a 300 million+ population, that the number fit to hold office is that small. We can’t be that hurting for talent.
2. There is no excuse for our system of government to overgrow itself to the point that it takes a professional cadre with a lifetime of knowing where the bodies are buried in order to operate the thing. No. We keep it simple, and we swap out the people in charge at a reasonable frequency so that the playing field stays level.

The bad news is that the voters chose to run us hard aground last November. The good news is that the goal for what to do, restore our Constitution to a representative state, is a straightforward. The exact path we take to get there, whether through or around the GOP, remains to be seen.

Update: linked by Jackie Wellfonder.

Update II: linked by Bob Belvedere.

by Smitty

Hector Timerman has refused to meet representatives of the Falkland Islands government, which Argentina does not recognise as legitimate.
The islanders were expected to tell Mr Timerman that Buenos Aires should respect islanders’ rights and leave them in peace.

Fortunately for Argentina, #OccupyResoluteDesk doesn’t care about Malvinas, Melvins or the Maldives. Endives aren’t looking good, either. Are the British going to do a thing if there is another flare-up? Doubt it. The last Falklands War, back in the Thatcher era, was right at the edge the Royal Navy’s capabilities. The best the Brits can hope from from the Anglosphere is an Obama speech wherein he decries violence, regrets the mess Bush made of international relations, uses a lot of personal pronouns, and hopes the Brits don’t forget to thank him for being wonderful.

via Drudge

by Smitty

Logophile bonus: about halfway through, he uses ‘peregrination‘, which is not what you get from the Governor of Texas when he hears a joke.

via Daniel Hannan’s blog

by Smitty

Did not know this:

The name of Claude Nobs will be forever enshrined in Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, the song with perhaps the most famous riff in rock history. Nobs was a co-founder of the Montreaux Jazz Festival, which by the early 1970s had grown to embrace rock artists such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. In 1971, the Montreaux casino caught fire during a performance by Frank Zappa after an audience member fired a flare gun at the ceiling. Nobs dragged a number of concert goers to safety earning himself the title Funky Claude in Deep Purple’s song.

Related lyric:

They burned down the gambling house,
It died with an awful sound.
(Uh) Funky Claude was running in and out,
Pulling kids out the ground.
When it all was over,
We had to find another place.
But Swiss time was running out,
It seemed that we would lose the race.
Smoke on the water and fire in the sky.
Smoke on the water…

Rest in peace, Funky Claude.

via Dan Collins

by Smitty

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

$20 large is rather dear for “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” isn’t it? Especially at an outfit with such an illustrious history.

A credible political platform could be built upon the idea of taking a wrecking ball to the tax code and just letting it go. And ObamaCare with it.

by Smitty

“Americans shocked to learn that there isn’t actually a Social Security crisis” I guess we can view this assertion as somehow valid to the extent that, say, Terri Shiavo was arguably not in a crisis, either. But truly:

Despite the staggering popularity and undeniable success of Social Security, a lot of political figures are obsessed with killing it. Some people want Social Security ended for honest ideological reasons, but most of the loudest voices in favor of “reforming” the program wish to do so because it would make them or their friends a lot of money by effectively forcing all Americans to gamble their retirements on the fluctuations of the giant Wall Street casino.

I don’t know who these ‘most’ are, but this may explain why Bush was thrashed after the 2004 election for trying to do something, anything about Social Security. The reform could very well have been an attempt to place too much power in the hands of just a few people.

“An economic Hindenberg,” said not Ben Bernanke

The deficit fear-mongering succeeded in getting 57 percent of survey respondents to believe that Social Security is a “crisis or significant problem,” until they learned that minor tax increases would make it totally sustainable for 75 years, at which point 74 percent of Americans were like “Oh, really? Then it seems fine, why don’t they ever put it like that on the news.” (That is not an exact quote from the survey.)

“Oh, sir, it’s only a tiny little thin one,” protested Mr. Creosote’s waiter.

Who could object to a minor tax?

Over at Heritage, they don’t do the preening Pareene Polyanna about the situation:

Congress could have fixed Social Security several years ago but delayed because it feared making the difficult decisions. A further delay in addressing Social Security’s financial problems will only make the situation even worse. The new trustees report is not based on conjecture; it is based on a firm understanding of the economy and the U.S. population. Almost every new taxpayer who will begin a career before 2033 is living today and can be counted. Similarly, all the people who will face approximately 25 percent across-the-board benefit cuts starting in the year 2033 if Congress does nothing to fix the program are alive now, and most of them are paying taxes.

The New York Times:

Edward I. Koch, the master showman of City Hall, who parlayed shrewd political instincts and plenty of chutzpah into three tumultuous terms as mayor of New York with all the tenacity, zest and combativeness that personified his city of golden dreams, died Friday morning at age 88.

More reaction at Memeorandum.

UPDATE: Koch is being remembered fondly, even though his tenure as mayor coincided with some of the worst years in New York’s history. What enhanced Koch’s reputation? The unmitigated disaster of the Dinkins era, which made the failures of liberalism so abundantly clear that New Yorkers voted for Rudy Giuliani.

by Smitty

Senator Coburn states flatly that the debt ceiling hike is coming, unstoppably, describes the impending debt spiral. He the ventures into the output of the Department of Superfluous Redundancy Department.

I think Senator Coburn refers to the report linked here. What Senator Coburn doesn’t seem to understand is that homo bureaucratus is achieving its prime goal of bribing the people with their own money.

via One Bad Goatee