by Smitty

We’ll have plenty of time to rap with these people in the bread line.

by Smitty

Via Byron York, Marco Rubio’s Jack Kemp Dinner speech.

John Hoge has shared his thoughts on today’s decision in the Virginia case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. When I met Mr. Hoge today for the first time, I told him that his services in documenting the legal proceedings in the case had earned him a special invitation to attend Blog Bash at CPAC. From a National Bloggers Club press release:

“We are profoundly discouraged that Aaron Walker has been denied the opportunity to prove his case,” said Ali A. Akbar, President of the National Bloggers Club and a target of the online harassment himself. “We’ll solicit donations and launch new efforts to protect free speech from thugs like Brett Kimberlin.”
“Stop shining light on Brett Kimberlin’s efforts to suppress free speech? Like hell.”

Read the whole thing.

by Smitty

Even Greater American Depression:

via Nice Deb

by Smitty

Emphasis mine:

C’mon Now, GOP, Don’t Go Wobbly on Us
by Sarah Palin on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 12:10pm
Please read and pass along this article. We send good conservatives to D.C. to fulfill the promises they made to the electorate, and yet when they stay true to their word the permanent political class in their own party punishes them. This won’t be forgotten come 2014. Right now the GOP establishment is more concerned about the opinion of the media and the Georgetown cocktail circuit than they are “we the people” who hired them. For all this new talk of how the GOP needs a “populist movement,” it would do them good to remember they already have one; it’s called the Tea Party movement, and it won for them the majority they now enjoy in the House.

– Sarah Palin

A related Twitter hash.

Just for the sake of argument, let me posit that John Boehner is NOT a sellout, a tool, a double agent, a doddering buffoon, a sad little throne-sniffer, a spineless sycophant, a Ruling Class meat puppet, and an obsequious piece of work.

Instead, let us assert that there is some sort of method to his madness, with some plan forthcoming:

When that fullness

waxeth timely, friend,

why, then, fancy

whispering the formulation?

Update: Belvedere rounds it up nicely, recalling a gag that I omitted from this post earlier. Let this be known as the “Day of the Short Teaspoons”.

by Smitty

No sooner had Glenn Reynolds suggested in his USA Today column:

1. Adopt the Bowles-Simpson Plan. The plan was the product of a bipartisan commission, chaired by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, appointed by President Obama to address America’s ballooning deficits and national debt. Most experts agree that it’s a pretty good plan. President Obama didn’t like it because it shrinks government too much.
Tough. It’s a plan, which is more than President Obama has offered, and from a bipartisan commission he appointed. Can Obama get away with vetoing that? Can Senate Democrats get away with rejecting it and bringing on the automatic cuts and tax increases of the sequester? Doubtful. Plus, though the press tends to cover for Obama and blame Republicans, media types love Bipartisan Commissions.

. . .then they went with it:

In the latest in a tit-for-tat between Capitol Hill and the White House to avert the fiscal cliff, House Republican leaders sent President Barack Obama a $2.2 trillion counteroffer on Monday — but it doesn’t hike tax rates on the wealthy or deal explicitly with tricky issues like the debt ceiling and the sequester.
After days of Democratic criticism that they lacked a plan, the Republican leadership endorsed a framework first outlined last year by Erskine Bowles, a Democrat who led the president’s debt reduction committee.
The proposal, unveiled by senior GOP aides Monday during a briefing in the Capitol, assumes $800 billion in fresh governmental revenue through tax reform, $600 billion in health savings and changes to an inflation formula that determines benefit levels across government programs, including Social Security.
There’s also $600 billion in other savings, split evenly between mandatory and discretionary spending.

Why I’m so flippant about this farce, starting with this post title, is that the actual problem is concentrated power and nothing whatsoever in this farcical kabuki seems to consider that:

he Obama administration’s opening bid on Thursday in negotiations to avert a year-end fiscal crunch included a demand for new stimulus spending and authority to unilaterally raise the U.S. borrowing ceiling, a Republican congressional aide said.
The proposal, made by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to congressional Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, was seen as offering little the Republicans could agree to and was greeted with laughter, the aide said.

I’m not ready to quit yet, but I do grow to understand those who’ve just punted, given up, and said “Up this noise.”

GOP: we’re on a suicidal course. Articulate an alternative, federalist, Constitutional course. What part of “the course we’ve steered the last century has Got. To. Go.” eludes you?

James Pethokoukis at AEI has more.

by Smitty

Via the never boring Sully,

The occasionally great @skippystalin says something important, not cloaked in his dreary libertarianism skippy-posts.blogspot.ca/2012/12/a-new-… READ IT

— Ms. Navillus (@SalaciousSully) December 2, 2012

 

I read the post, based upon this photo:

Emphasis mine:

I’m not going to discount entirely the possibility that I’m just a hyper-conservative whackjob and genetically wrong about everything, but it seems to me that the socialization process regarding sexual assault should start a lot earlier than when you’re eligible for our first federal student loan. Again, I could be way off about this. I just don’t think I am.
Look, I get that statements like this make everybody feel good, but I reckon that it’s well past time that we recognize that things that make you feel good are often pretty stupid. Take cocaine as just one example. It makes you feel awesome, but it’s a really poorly considered lifestyle choice unless, of course, you’re me. Always remember that these are professional tricks, performed by a professional and not intended for home use.
The basic premise of this message is silly for practical reasons, as well. For those of you who spent too much time in school, I think it’s necessary to point out that feminism is a philosophy. It might well be that it is among the finest philosophies ever devised, but that misses an essential point. So far as I’m aware, no philosophy is going to overwhelm a violent oaf with a hard cock that outweighs you by as much as 80 pounds. I have yet to see that in a mixed martial arts class. There comes a point when things like reason are pretty much useless.

“Socialization process”. That’s Progress for ya! The notions of “parenting” and “growing up” are macerated, puréed, atomized, and turned into a “socialization process”. Up that noise.

How about we scuttle this negative “Don’t Rape” thought, and, instead of a specific negative rule, offer a positive guideline: “Be A Man.” BAM!  We’ve been going through Stu Weber’s Tender Warrior at my Friday morning Breakfast Club (as men do), and it’s about the umpteen thousandth variation on the theme of Traditional Manhood.

Cultural restoration comes when we reject pretty much everything that has occurred since the Summer of Love (i.e. my whole lifespan) and realize that the classics are classic because, unlike the Postmodern, anti-Enlightenment piffle currently polluting our Precious Bodily Fluids, the classics are lasting.

Hold a door for a lady. Call her ‘lady’. Under-react when she tells you treating her chivalrously is a veiled form of sexism. It’s all good. Her personality is her reward.

Truly, “Don’t Rape” is a waste of time. It invites the misuse of God-given creativity to rationalize sinful behavior: “She asked for it.” Yes, you can “rational lies” it every way under the sun; if she wasn’t your wife, you had no business going there. Even where consensual (Petraeus).

BAM! Being a man ties the man to the principle of manhood. You can’t outrun that. The more you try to rationalize, the more you realize that you’re (a) wrong, and (b) need to man up.

Being a man isn’t always easy, granted. But neither is it complicated.

Update: great follow-up at Andrew J. Patrick’s blog.

Update II: another apropos piece by the fabulous Gabriella.

Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher has reportedly murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide. More details at Buzzfeed Sports.

While the motive for this murder-suicide is yet unknown, whenever I see something like this in the news — professional athletes engaged in extreme violence — I automatically suspect it may be a side-effect of steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs.

This suspicion may be misguided: Romantic relationships between ordinary people turn violent all the time without any parties to the crime being under the influence of Dynabol, etc. Still, whenever the crime involves one of these musclebound behemoths, I always think, “Roid rage.”

UPDATE: Kate at Victory Girls reports that Belcher’s slain girlfriend was named Kassandra Perkins, and the couple had a 2-month-old baby.