Category: Uncategorized

by Smitty

While I liked Mitch Daniel’s SOTU response, I fall off the wagon here, via Ron Radosh, emphasis mine:

The truth, as Daniels went on, is that Republicans “alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements, and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down time and time again by the President and his Democratic Senate allies.” He and we stand for a pro-jobs, pro-growth economic policy, the kind that the blue-collar working-class (that the Democrats have abandoned) understand and will support. If we fail to do this, he concludes accurately, “there will never be enough public revenue to pay for our safety net, national security, or whatever size government we decide to have.”

Look, the simple fact that ‘there will never be enough public revenue to pay for our safety net’ is the only real point here.

Sure, you can’t just throw everyone relying upon entitlements under the bus either. I get that. But Daniels, and the Ryan plan, seem about as easy-cheesy as anything Bernanke is up to. These entitlements are non-hunting dogs, my fellow Americans. How about some bold leadership that, you know, briefly admits that these entitlements are not federal tasks, not affordable, and doomed to perpetual crisis. After such a moment of clarity, how about some ideas to re-distribute the power to manage destiny back to the citizens, over time, so as not to seem quite as radical.

Truth telling is a radical proposition, I know, but, if America is exceptional, it should act that way.

via Insty

by Smitty

via Althouse

Angry over the Obama administration’s siding against SOPA and PIPA, [Former Senator Chris] Dodd says openly that the money the Democratic party regularly counts on Hollywood for might not be there this election cycle. One view is that Hollywood considers that it bought something very specific with it’s money, and it’s angry it’s not getting it. Should Obama be worried about this? Perhaps not. The guys from Freakanomics say that our assumption that money is the most important factor in deciding elections is a fallacy.

I’ll join the schadenfreude chorus on this one. It’s really hard to tell which has more static head: the Democrat party, or Hollywood.

Of course, if history rhymes, the second Obama administration will nationalize Hollywood. So that we can not drive to the movies in cars we’ve bought but don’t receive. There, we can buy tickets to movies we’ve already paid for that elaborate upon our stupidity.

by Smitty

Insty’s link on Iowa banning traffic cameras leads to a subversive thought serious question: why do we have unmarked police cars? In military terms, the idea of having the authorities pose as civilians is a matter of OPDEC. Going undercover makes sense when, say, infiltrating criminal organizations.

Is that an example of overkill, in the common case of the work commute? Or are traffic tickets really part of the business model for police departments?

When elected Benevolent Dictator for Life, I promise to snuff both traffic cameras and unmarked police cars. Put the police bill right out front and center where it should be.

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Last night when we left the Pro-Life Presidential Forum in Greenville, the windshields of most of the cars in the parking lot were festooned with pink flyers attacking Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen. This propaganda was attributed to a self-proclaimed pro-life activist who signed herself “Elizabeth Reichert, Parker, S.C.”

As soon as I got online, I Googled the name and the only mention of this person I could find was at Will Folks’s “FITS News” blog.

This, I suggest, is mighty damned suspicious. Remember that Folks is the slimeball who claimed to have had an affair with Gov. Nikki Haley. How was it that Folks got the “news” of this flyer online — the full text of a two-sided flyer — so shortly after the flyers were (anonymously) distributed at this pro-life event?

And who is Elizabeth Reichert? If she was a well-known pro-life activist, don’t you think there would have been some reference to her online beyond the Folks instant transcription of her flyer? But either there is no such person, or else this phenomenally Web-savvy pro-life activist — who managed to search out the cheap smear on Karen Santorum — has left no trace of her existence online.

Strangely enough, Rick Santorum responded to a BuzzFeed reporter’s question about the flyer. But when I saw Santorum’s communications director Hogan Gidley the other day, Hogan refused to comment. So you see how this alleged “Elizabeth Reichert” and her flyer, publicized by the slimeball Will Folks, managed to make the attack on Santorum’s wife a sufficiently legitimate story that the candidate felt the need to respond to it.

by Smitty

This is the Information Age. We’re using technology to streamline enterprises and improve profitability. Except in government. Technology, should, for a quick guess, be a liberating force. The laws, theoretically, ought to need less people to administer over time, no? Ha ha, quite the opposite: that word processer churns out even more laws, requiring even more clowns to pretend to administer.

I don’t agree with the title of the graph: this problem is not an Obama-centric one. It has everything to do with the nature of bureaucracy. While amputating Obama from the body politic and cauterizing the wound remains our first priority, in the longer run, asking ourselves who these civil servants are and are they really needed is a job that Has. Got. To. Be. Done.

via Protein Wisdom

by Smitty

Gerard has a great point about circling the wagons here. Read and heed.

If true conservatives want to have a truly conservative candidate in a truly conservative party they will have to commit to the long march. You know, “the long march” like the one the left took through out political, academic, religious, and media institutions. The one they spent decades on. The long hard road to political supremacy. The one that takes work and money.
That’s the one thing I don’t see erstwhile conservatives actually doing from election to election. Instead they run their lives and their businesses off on the side and they show up every three years or so to watch the little red hens of politics take the nomination away from their conservative flavor of the week.
The way the Republican party is set up in the primary system means that to even have a shot at winning it you have to be running for it years and years and years before the actual elections. That’s what Romney’s been doing. That’s the game and he’s got the pieces in place to win it. You may not like it, but, hey, change it or play it.

I agree. Romney has done the homework, and will have my full support, after the convention in August.

But, as Daily Pundit links, the Federal Reserve is getting ready to hoist a middle finger at Einstein again, easing us quantitatively, with insane hopes that, somehow, this time the economy will recover.

I haven’t heard a flipping thing from Romney that gives me shred #1 of confidence that, if elected, he’ll do much in the way of reforming. Long march, indeed. The good news about low expectations for Mitt is that he pretty much has to avoid being #OccupyResoluteDesk to succeed.

Update: linked at The Rio Norte Line.