Thanks to Don Surber for pointing out that the Boston mascot seems to be enjoying a wee bit of Ye Merry Olde Upskirt:
Perry Is A Bad Man Because He Saw What Happened To Palin And Had A Delay Put On Release Of Travel Vouchers. Bad Man!
by Smitty
What have we learned since 2008, if not that the former courts of justice have been reduced to an ideological battleground? Unexpectedly, Rick Perry, kicking around a Presidential run, wants to express himself politically without having his travel used as a weapon against him.
Many of the trips are unrelated to state business (he’s meeting with party leaders and fundraisers in California this week) and several local media outlets are embroiled in a nasty legal battle to obtain the travel vouchers of Perry’s security detail.
Two lower courts have ruled that the information should be public record and Perry has appealed the decisions to the Texas Supreme Court. In the meantime, the two-term governor had his lawmaker buddies help him out by enacting a measure to keep the information secret until it’s no longer that relevant.
They did it by amending an existing school finance bill that passed in the Texas House and Senate this week. The last-minute addition will keep details of travel vouchers submitted by Perry’s Department of Public Safety security team secret for 18 months after trips are completed. By then Perry could be the nation’s commander-in-chief.
So, there are no actual violations to discuss. The implication of the article is that Perry would unethically have Texans pay for trips while building a donor base, and then give an Alfred E. Neumann salute when the sordid details come out, and Perry is POTUS.
Because Perry is such a Bad Man. His badness, in fact, explains why his state is so successful. Success, too, is bad. Some even say that he shops at [NSFW] BMF Wallets, but that is probably apocryphal.
‘Subversion, Inc.’: Book-Partying in D.C. With Author Matthew Vadum Tonight
The notorious “Beltway cocktail party circuit” is a political cliché, suggestive of effete insiders conspiring over martinis in some sort of Machiavellian power-status cabal. There is some truth to that cliché. Washington, D.C., is very much a town where who you know is more important than what you know, and the most important thing is always what you know about who you know.
People in the nation’s capital really do conduct a lot of business over cocktails (or beer), and so I’m off to D.C. tonight to attend a book-signing party for my buddy Matthew Vadum, whose book Subversion, Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
In addition to being my buddy — which should be recommendation enough — Vadum is the nation’s foremost expert on ACORN’s nefarious activities, having covered them for years as an investigative journalist with the Capital Research Center. And in a Washington Times column he reminds us that (a) ACORN is still in business, contrary to rumors of their demise, and (b) they’ve collected tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding over the years:
America’s long-suffering taxpayers scored a resounding victory as the Supreme Court told one of the nation’s foremost tax-eating groups to take a hike.
The high court denied an appeal last week by the radical left-wing gangster group ACORN, ruling in effect that Congress was entitled to cut off federal taxpayer funding for the group, which routinely perpetrates voter fraud and encourages welfare recipients to buy houses they have no hope of paying for.
ACORN still matters because reports of its demise have been exaggerated. Although the national ACORN organization filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Election Day last year, ACORN is restructuring itself in time to help re-elect its former employee, President Obama, next year. ACORN’s voter-mobilization arm, Project Vote, is conducting business as usual out of ACORN’s D.C. offices.
The ACORN network has taken in an astounding $79 million in federal funding, and those are only the grants I could find in the U.S. government’s antiquated databases. . . .
So I’ll be in D.C. tonight celebrating Vadum’s excellent new book — more than 400 pages, with more than 700 footnotes — and encourage you to buy it now. When you purchase Subversion Inc. through the Amazon Associates link, you get a low price and I get a small commission, and the resulting profit may help convince my wife that hanging around D.C. cocktail receptions is a legitimate journalistic endeavor, rather than just an excuse to party with Vadum.
Why Does Alec Baldwin Fear Women?
Newsbusters calls attention to Alec Baldwin’s Twitter rant against GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann:
Of course, Baldwin boldly defended Anthony Weiner as “the modern, high functioning man.” Richard McEnroe on Twitter reminds us of Baldwin’s infamous phone call to his 12-year-old daughter:
When I previously called attention to Baldwin’s abusive call to his daughter, another writer accused me of siding with “our whole feminist society” — certainly the first time I’ve ever been accused of that.
Let me say this about Alec Baldwin (and perhaps to Alec Baldwin, since I intend to Tweet this post at him): He is not a stupid man nor an ignorant man. Rather, he is one of those celebrities who, as P.J. O’Rourke once said, are not content with wealth and fame, but also crave a reputation for moral altruism.
That’s really all there is to Hollywood liberalism.
Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have labored long and skillfully to portray liberalism as a sort of charitable do-gooder philosophy. The beauty of liberalism is that it doesn’t require that you actually do anything to help the poor and downtrodden. All you have to do is vote Democrat, and you’re automatically entitled to think of yourself as a philanthropist.
Alec Baldwin is a liberal because being a liberal makes him feel good about himself, and allows him to bask in the admiration of his fellow liberals, who believe that merely being a liberal makes you the moral equal of Mother Teresa selflessly treating lepers in Calcutta.
And it doesn’t cost him a dime.
Alec Baldwin is neither stupid nor ignorant, but rather is an example of the power of liberalism to delude intelligent and educated people by appealing to their moral vanity.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book about this — The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy — and yet the syndrome Sowell so persuasively described continues to ensnare intelligent people like Alec Baldwin, simply because they can’t be bothered to read the book. And perhaps also because, as a matter of self-interest, they don’t want to lose the professional and social advantages that accrue to liberals in those environments (entertainment, academia, media) where liberalism prevails.
Dear Stacy
by Smitty
Please make sure no one finds out I was born in Oregon. It would be shameful for anyone to know that the state where I was born has been completely sodomized by a crop of un-American degenerates. Yes. California. I blame expat granola-heads for destroying my home state’s moral fiber.
Stacy, I know my little bit of birth trivia is safe with you.
Thanks, man.
Chris
Gloat Zone
“Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said Tuesday that she’s not ready to announce whether she’ll run for president, but did not deny a report that she has made her decision.”
— The Hill, June 28Palin Decision Expected Next Week
— The American Spectator, June 17
So it now appears that what “one Republican source” told me was right on the money: Palin was getting ready to make her decision on 2012. Of cource, nobody knows what the decision is, or when it will be announced. But I’m feeling pretty doggone Undefeated, you might say.
VIDEO: Hey, the Economy Sucks
In this Bloomberg TV interview, Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities, doesn’t really have any good news and says he expects housing prices to decline another 7% in the next year:
By the way, I’m not a big fan of using “consumer confidence” as an economic indicator, as if mere mood were a tangible factor. The underlying economic reality is far more important than how people feel about the economy, yet we often see financial journalists writing articles that suggest recessions are caused by people feeling discouraged or pessimistic.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 145 points Tuesday — good news, right? Yeah, but it closed at 12,188.69. That’s actually below the closing price (12,307.35) on June 13, 2008. So the stock funds in your 401(k) are right back where they were three years ago, and substantially below the DJIA peak of 14,093.08 in October 2007. Meanwhile, home prices are at their lowest point since 2003 and projected to go even lower. And unemployment, of course, has been 9% or higher for 23 of the past 25 months.
Given all these indicator of a bleak economic reality, it is therefore idiotic for financial journalists to pretend that low “consumer confidence” is mysterious or irrational.
‘A More Perfect Union’?
“To attempt to abstract from the Preamble to the Constitution a lever for transforming it into an instrumental document is . . . to invent powers that do not exist. And it is also a transparent attempt to import the second paragraph of the Declaration — as a mandate for national self-creation, refounding — into our fundamental law. A contemporary point of reference for all such nonsense as follows from an activist view of the Preamble and Declaration is Mortimer Adler’s We Hold These Truths, a book ‘about’ the Constitution whose wweaknesses are specificed by its very title. After Adler identifies the Declaration as a ‘preface’ to the Constitution, we know how his argument will tend: that in the end that Declaration will, if allowed, swallow up the Constitution — except for the Preamble, as ideologically construed.”
— M.E. Bradford, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (1993)“We can pat ourselves on the back about the past 223 years, but we cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s moving into the future with a sensible health care system, a globalized economy, an evolving sense of civil and political rights. The Constitution, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his great speech on the Mall, is a promissory note. That note had not been fulfilled for African Americans. But I would say the Constitution remains a promissory note, one in which ‘We the People’ in each generation try to create that more perfect union.”
— Richard Stengel, Time magazine, June 23, 2011
Aaron Worthing identified 13 specific factual errors in Stengel’s article, but it strikes me that Stengel’s biggest mistake is the one which Bradford noted in Adler’s work: Conflating the Declaration and the Constitution in such a way that the Constitution’s limitations on federal authority are effectively voided, so as to make the phrase “a more perfect union” a mandate for endless experimentation in pursuit of egalitarian objectives.
Advocates of unlimited centralized power habitually seek to portray the Constitution as an obsolete remnant of the “horse and buggy” era, a pejorative phrase popularized by liberal proponents of the New Deal, key elements of which were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. By the 1950s, however — after two decades of Democrat presidents — the court’s former conservative majority had been replaced by liberals, and for more than three decades the Supreme Court itself became an instrument for the expansion of federal authority.
Stengel is another one of these modernists, perceiving the Constitution’s limits as a hindrance to progress: “[W]e cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s moving into the future with a sensible health care system,” et cetera.
The Constitution says nothing at all about health care, of course, but Stengel’s enthusiastic phrase “moving into the future” conveys his idea of the past as bad place, where things were not “sensible” because of those silly old-fashioned limits on federal power.
Horse and buggy. Powdered wigs. Private health insurance.
Which of those things doesn’t belong on the list? Continue reading ‘A More Perfect Union’? →