The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Senator Cash’n Kerry

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

A commenter on a previous thread pointed out Protein Wisdom quoting TPM:

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said the law has been thoroughly vetted.
“As a senior member of the Finance Committee,” he said, “I can tell you that we had one of the most rigorous and transparent legislative processes that I have witnessed in almost 3 decades here in the Congress. We worked with some of the brightest, most thoughtful and experienced constitutional lawyers in order to make sure that the law was constitutional.”

What does ‘vetted’ mean in Kerry-speak?

In July 2009, industry representatives met with key members of Congress and hashed out critical details of the new Obama bill. As the bill snaked its way through the House and Senate, where Kerry was actively pushing it, the Kerrys began buying stock in the drug maker Teva Pharmaceuticals as the prospects of its passage improved. In November alone they bought close to $750,000 in the company. When the Kerrys first began buying shares, the stock was trading at around $50. After health care reform passed, it surged to $62.

Now, there isn’t any point in attempting to hold Kerry to a standard in a court of law.
However, in the court of public opinion, I think that Kerry may be tantamount to a genteel form of cat burglar, pleasantly pilfering the public pocket.
The bad news about Kerry is that the country is afflicted with this pestilence until 2014.

Silence, peasant scum!

And even then, the States are incentivized to keep him a part of the permanent Ruling Class. Thus, if there is any interest in reform, it must attack directly the rewards system that makes voting against Senator Kerry a slice of the throat for Massachusetts. Even when a reformer like a Joe Miller wins a primary, the power of incumbency is such that a Lisa Murkowski can claw her way back: too many people are making too much money off of the status quo, especially the elected officials.

While Kerry may know how to manage a team of sycophants who can maximize the portfolio value of a piece of legislation, that is not the same thing as, you know, carrying out the oath of a Senator. While I’m not really huge on the idea of term limits, I will allow that Cash’n Kerry is among the stronger arguments in favor of them. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, merits frequent turning.

Update: related, NSFW financial BS flowchart

Category: Democrats

Mandatory Whittle

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

A fine summary of what jackwagons the Democr**ts are in general, and #OccupyResoluteDesk in particular.

Related, via Hot Air:

That #OccupyResoluteDesk sure knows how to score him some consensus, no? NO, indeed. This forms at least a consistent pattern with BHO’s 2011 0-97 ‘hpmuirt’ in the Senate.

I, for one, am glad that BHO spared us the spectacle of an incompetent Republican POTUS. I guess in this context, the Republican would have had to be so bad as to achieve negative votes on budgets, to be counted against the next legislation up for vote.

Update: linked at Nice Deb’s Saturday Matinee.

Update II: linked at American Glob.

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats

Trayvon Martin Rashomon

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 46 Comments

The first time I talked to anyone about the Trayvon Martin case, I cautioned against the urge to jump to conclusions based on media accounts.

Remember, “Send the Body to Glenn Beck“?

That turned out well, didn’t it?

Whatever actually happened in the Martin case — and we still don’t know the whole truth of it — it’s a bad thing for an unarmed kid to get shot.

But the liberals insisted on portraying this incident with a certain slant: Saint Trayvon, innocent martyr to racism, with George Zimmerman portrayed as being incited to violence by right-wing talk radio.

Neither basic element of that narrative was accurate. Trayvon had been suspended from school and accused of criminality. Zimmerman was a registered Democrat. And, while Zimmerman clearly failed to comply with a 911 dispatcher’s advice not to pursue Trayvon, there are witnesses who say that Zimmerman shot Trayvon after an altercation in which Trayvon was the aggressor.

But we don’t know everything yet, and the ongoing effort to try the case in the media or turn this into a political volleyball match has resulted in people making fools of themselves:

The comedian Roseanne Barr last night tweeted the home address of George Zimmerman’s parents to her 110,000-plus Twitter followers, only to delete the posting after “not fully understanding that it was private not public.”

And as if that were not enough:

Friday night, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien leads a special town hall event about the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin that has sparked a national dialogue on race and what it says about America. “Beyond Trayvon: Race and Justice in America.”

My bedtime reading lately has been The Future Once Happened Here, Fred Siegel’s brilliant account of how liberal social policy destroyed America’s cities. Siegel’s book was a major resource for Chapter 8 of Donkey Cons, and is full of insights on the development of our contemporary attitudes about poverty, race and crime. On page 58 of his book, Siegel writes about “a cultural shift” that occurred in the 1960s:

[O]lder ideas about shame were starting to be replaced by a new concern for self-esteem. Christopher Lasch wrote that formerly “shame was the fate of those whose conduct fell short of cherished ideals.” But in the 1960s, the new age of moral deregulation and therapeutic ethics, shame came to refer to whatever prevents us from feeling good about ourselves.

Am I the only one who sees the Trayvon Martin carnival in this context? Liberals have turned the case into a sort of public festival, a self-congratulatory celebration of their own moral superiority. And they have arranged the symbolic elements of the narrative so that to criticize them — the shameless media moralizers — is to become implicated in George Zimmerman’s presumed guilt.

They are using the corpse of Trayvon Martin as a human shield to conceal their ideological agenda and protect themselves against criticism.

 

RECENTLY:

Category: Crime, Florida, Media Bias

Bizarre NFL Sex Scandal

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 40 Comments

Authorities in Kentucky say a teenager has been cruelly victimized by the 26-year-old captain of the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleading squad.

UPDATE: Thanks to Pagan Temple in the comments for calling attention to this potentially relevant angle about the alleged perpetrator:

“Sarah Jones gained national attention in 2009 when she sued online gossip site TheDirty.com and its operator, Nik Richie, after unflattering pictures of her appeared with allegations that she’d had sex with Bengals players and had two sexually transmitted diseases. The photos and comments had been provided anonymously.”

Remember: These are merely allegations. Don’t jump to conclusions. And whatever you do, don’t call her a “slut.”

Category: Crime, Football, Scandal, Sex

In Response To The Recent Unpleasantness

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 38 Comments

by Smitty

The comment threads are getting a bit dodgy on Stacy’s last two posts. Have your opinions, but please don’t soil yourself with ad hominem.

The FedoraCon idea is interesting. “Success is the best revenge,” someone once told me.

The Quotes of the Day post at Hot Air grabs the NYT:

“If the administration loses its argument [on ObamaCare], one early strategy is to run squarely against the Supreme Court. Democrats believe that Mr. Obama could fashion himself as a modern-day Franklin D. Roosevelt, trying to convince voters that a majority of the justices are in the pocket of the Republicans. A Democratic senator on Wednesday referred to that as the ‘martyr strategy.’

One of the crucial lessons we all have to learn about being online is that this exuberantly free speech we enjoy is totally non-binding. I don’t owe you a link, you don’t owe me a link. If I have time to respond to comments, or read your posts, great. It’s all best effort.

Also, I can rail at you all day and night about you not paying attention to my work. Laughing at my jokes. Tweeting my posts. And you really don’t owe me the time of day. If I’m not paying you, I have no real cause for complaint. And if you go on Twitter and call me everything but a white man, what cause have I for complaint? I could say you’re wrecking me professionally, but, over time, the truth will out. If there is no basis for your finger pointing, you look a Charles Johnson.

We could plan do some kind of ‘FedoraCon’, perhaps as an in-joke attached to CPAC, I’m all for it.

Just keep in mind that the ‘martyr strategy’ is not a creative one, and, ultimately, impresses nobody.

Update: linked by The Catholic Bandita!

Category: Uncategorized

John Hinderaker, Optimist

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Let us be aware of the magnitude of the problem, as we look back at the ObamaCare testimony before the SCOTUS:

The more one considers the implications of this week’s arguments, the more likely it appears that the Court’s decision, if it does strike down Obamacare, will be a milestone that sets the United States back on the path to constitutional government.

Progressivism ain’t dead: it’s just restin’. Via Ace, we’re talking about a group of people characterized thusly by Podhoretz:

Thus, the strength of the conservative arguments only came as a surprise to Toobin, Greenhouse and others because they evidently spent two years putting their fingers in their ears and singing, “La la la, I’m not listening” whenever the conservative argument was being advanced.

The Progressives are as convinced that it’s unfair to water to segregate the water to the outside of the hull as the conservatives are that keeping the boat dry on the inside is crucial for buoyancy. Progressivism, like poverty, will always be with us; the crucial task is separating Progressives from the levers of power before they drown us all in idiocy.

And yet, that most Progressive beast, the Federal Reserve, is likely gearing up for more “quantitative easing” (theft). I guess I am moving in the direction of being ashamed of my country; we all see what’s going on, and yet this purportedly exceptional country has precious little political will to affect the outcome. Unexpectedly, the black swan will arrive in the form of a failed bond auction, or whatever, and then we will be collectively shocked, SHOCKED! to discover that giving vast power to un-elected, unaccountable officials was a miscarriage of the spirit of our Constitution.

That stranglehold on our economic vitality is precisely why ObamaCare stands a good chance of rising, zombie-like, from the ashes of whatever the SCOTUS has to say. The entitlement mentality has been bred. People demand health care from the government. The 57 states, unable to steal the way the Federal Reserve can, are not likely to fund the desired programs. Thus, the system fails upward. Progressives, who really want the Logan’s Run level of control present in Single Payer, are not unhappy about that result. It’s worth throwing a Solicitor General or two under the SCOTUS bus to get to Single Payer. A cost of doing business. It’s all for the cause, man: Holy Progress.

Short of major reform of the Federal Reserve, all the talk of returning to  constitutional government is just so much Tea Party dreaming. It’s ultimately about the frogskins ($).

The other point here is that the SCOTUS, in the case of rejection, probably would want to exercise enough restraint to halt ObamaCare while not jeopardizing any of the rest of the Progressive project. As a conservative, I think it’s all false, and the entitlement sophistries should be clubbed down in the baby seal fashion. By which I really mean we should have the shortest politically feasible transition plan off of the dependent mindset.

Update: the silly WR Meade:

But even if the Supreme Court doesn’t pull the trigger and kill the law in June, the darn thing won’t fly. The public hates it, and the longer it’s on the books the less popular it gets. This isn’t like Social Security, a program the public fell in love with early on and still cherishes today.

Cherish? My dad, just in zone, says “Well, if they had just run it the way it was originally intended. . .” When, ever, has that occurred?
Our Federal Constitution was enacted to tackle multi-state and international challenges. If DC ever knows about any individuals that are not employees, it has over-achieved.

Update: linked at Dyspepsia Generation

Category: Uncategorized

LIVE AT FIVE (CDT) – 03.30.12

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Live at Five will return Wednesday, April 3.


Thread is open for comments. Behave yourselves.

Category: Live at Five

I Write for Money

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | 89 Comments

When I quit the blog Thursday morning, some people attempted to persuade me to reconsider — and I resented their efforts.

If I am not a fit judge of whether this enterprise has succeeded or failed, I am a fool. Why would anyone want to read a man who is both a fool, and an acknowledged failure? To ask me to continue my ritual ordeal of public humiliation by the Friends of Tabitha Club was to impugn my judgment that I had already suffered more than anyone should be expected to tolerate.

So my friend Dan Collins just pissed me off by arguing for my return.

What no one can seem to understand is that the value of this blog as a commerical enterprise was damaged by Tabitha’s decision in 2010 that the author of “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year” had nothing to say about blogging that anyone might want to hear.

Someone today suggested that I should be sensitive to Tabitha’s feelings. While she is attempting to put me out of business? Seeking to impair my livelihood and destroy my professional career?

When, in September 2010, I wrote “Where All the Important Bloggers Will Be,” Tabitha was put on notice that I resented my exclusion. Despite her public advertisement of my unworthiness, I was persuaded by my friend Chris Renner to attend the inaugural BlogCon. I suppose that this seeming acceptance of my initial humiliation was what emboldened Tabitha to insult me again in October 2011 (“Major National Gathering of Conservative Bloggers Will Include Everyone But Me“), and I resolved then not to attend an event where I was obviously so unwelcome.

So when the Friends of Tabitha Club announced its 2012 agenda, and my various friends began celebrating their acceptance into the club, it did not particularly improve my mood, already darkened by the evident popularity of the “Roll Over for Romney” movement.

Am I the only one who perceives that my lack of influence — my inability to persuade others to resist Romney — might be correlated to my persona non grata status with FreedomWorks and the Franklin Center?

This is what is being missed by those who have interpreted this as a mere personal spat: Tabitha Hale acts under authority of major conservative non-profit organizations, so that the donors, executives and board members of those organizations are all united in officially endorsing Tabitha’s judgment that I am unworthy of notice. It is they who have assigned her to mock me:

Am I to be publicly insulted, and take no notice of it? Is this how the Franklin Center expects Tabitha Hale to promote “citizen journalism”?

If I am a person of such trivial insignificance in the political blogosphere that not once in the past three years have I done anything to merit inclusion in the BlogCon agenda, why should anyone pay attention to what I have written about the 2012 presidential campaign — or anything else, for that matter?

Such are the thoughts that have troubled me.

Nevertheless, as I have always proudly proclaimed, I write for money, and you may thank two readers (one in Elmhurst, Illinois, and another in El Cerrito, California) for hitting the tip jar, burdening me with the sense that further services are due.

This is not my choice, and I continue under protest that nothing good is likely to come of it, yet continue I will.





Category: Blogging
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